—

I’m a big fan of the first and third Mission: Impossible movies. As David Bordwell explained in detail in this excellent essay, the pace and rhythm of M:I-3‘s story beats is such that the movie provides the perfect example of the archetypal template of the modern action movies’ narrative structure. Fortunately, within that outline the specifics were tweaked in numerous flashy and memorable ways (opening the film with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tense 1-to-10/gunshot-to-the-head count; keeping the true nature of the “Rabbit’s Foot” MacGuffin unexplained; coming into the Shanghai escape halfway though), and the whole thing was generally executed very well (that bridge action sequence is superb). It had its flaws, but M:I-3 is still one of my favourite action movies of the last few years.

The fourth entry in the series is directed by Brad Bird, and, like The Dark Knight, it sounds like native IMAX filming was a central enough element of its production that it’ll be worth paying the premium to see at an IMAX cinema.

The two IMAX films I’ve seen so far are The Dark Knight and Inception, both of which I saw at the IMAX screen at Birmingham’s Thinktank Science Museum. So today I visited their website to check their M:I-4 showing times and prices.

To my surprise, I learned that they’ve recently renamed the venue “The Giant Screen” and changed the screen’s format from IMAX film to a 4K digital format by a company called Barco. This raised alarm bells, because I’ve previously read comments and articles online warning that some screens marketed as IMAX Digital (or other non IMAX large-screen formats) are smaller than and inferior to true IMAX.

The cinema’s FAQ says:

Q) Do you still have a giant screen?

A) Yes. The new giant screen is the same width as before. The new screen and new projection system will mean that the projected image will better fit the screen. The cinema is still classified as a Giant Screen Cinema.

Now that sounded a bit evasive to me… they might emphasise that the screen is horizontally identical, but what about its height?

The science museum also has a separate technology website, where there’s a page all about the new screen’s equipment. (The video at the top of that page is worth a watch for the shots of the old IMAX projector in the process of being dismantled and removed.) In that page’s comments section, one of the venue’s staff helpfully provides this comment:

Our new screen is as wide as ever. However, due to the lack of film content produced in the previous 4:3 ratio (only a few IMAX documentaries and a percentage of scenes in a few feature films), we are moving to the feature resolution of 1.85:1. For all future feature presentations, the size of the projected image will be no smaller on our new screen than on the old IMAX screen. We are still classified as a Giant Screen Cinema.

As I understand it, that should probably read: “For all future presentations of features that were shot throughout with normal cameras in 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, the size of the projected image will be no smaller on our new screen than on the old IMAX screen – but for things natively shot with IMAX cameras, the screen won’t extend vertically enough to display them properly.“

So, it sounds like any sequences that were shot with IMAX cameras on 70mm film won’t appear at their full, spectacular height in their native 4:3 aspect ratio. Presumably they’ll either be cropped to the same 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 ratio that is used for their releases in normal cinemas and on DVD; or the 4:3 ratio will be retained by pillarboxing it so the full screen width isn’t used. Either way, it’s a little disappointing to learn that the IMAX sections of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol that were shot natively in IMAX won’t be as spectacular as when I saw The Dark Knight in that auditorium.

Now, I understand that the cinema had to change its screen format in order to be profitable. And although it’s become Fake IMAX, it does sound like it’ll be better in some ways: supposedly the screen’s brighter, that “luxury seating” sounds nice, and they can use the screen to show live events like sports and concerts (not that that’ll be relevant to me). And of course, it’s certainly still much more preferable than the alternative of seeing it at a normal Cineworld or Odeon multiplex: the incredible sound alone will ensure that.

But it’s not true IMAX, and that’s a bit of a shame.

Here’s an interview about the production of the instrument peripherals, together with a video:

There’s also this more general video about the games’ development:

“Well, you have to call them something, so why not call them something amusing?”

- Frank Zappa, 1993

Frank Zappa is a musician with one of the most daunting discographies in rock music: sixty-two albums during his lifetime by this count, plus a steady stream of posthumous releases.

I haven’t yet made much headway through that list. So far I’ve only heard: Hot Rats (excellent – “the Frank Zappa album for people who don’t like Frank Zappa!”), his 1966 debut double-album Freak Out! (very good), Apostrophe(‘) (okay), and Joe’s Garage Acts I-III (the title track and “Watermelon in Easter Hay” are great, but I’m less keen on the rest); plus the compilation albums The Best of Frank Zappa and Cheap Thrills. Recently I added another two to that tally.

Lumpy Gravy (1968)

A mixture of musical snippets, conversation fragments and sound effects loops: a little bit like a highly extended, slower-paced, less dense, less unsettling “Revolution 9″.

There are some interesting and pleasant pieces of music, but you can be certain that just as you’re getting into one, it’ll be interrupted by a contextless, not very funny spoken-word bit.

Zoot Allures (1976)

I’m in two minds about this one. On the one hand, the playing throughout the album is fantastic, and so is the production (love that guitar tone). “Black Napkins” shows how you do a four minute piece of virtuoso fret-wanker-noodle-ry and keep it interesting:

I also really like the other two instrumentals, and the solo on opening track “Wind Up Workin’ in A Gas Station” (although the rest of that song is rather spoilt by irritating chipmunk vocals).

But unfortunately, the album features some of the most tedious, toilet-humour-heavy lyrics of any Zappa album I’ve heard so far, and that’s saying something. The opening words on the album are “This here song might offend you some/If it does, it’s because you’re dumb”, which gives you adequate warning of how it’s going to proceed.

Now, Zappa could be funny: as the quote at the start of this post illustrates, I very much agree with his approach to song-entitling; his delivery of “dried muffin remnants” in the intro to “Muffin Man” is hilarious; and there’s something irresistibly silly about “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” (especially the cry of “Great googly moogly!”). The toilet humour shouldn’t be a problem either – even songs like “Bobby Brown Goes Down” and “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” are fun due to the sheer audacity of how OTT they go (and it helps that they’re set to good tunes).

So yes, humour does belong in music. The problem is that the dick jokes on this album are mostly lazy and not very funny:

“Ms. Pinky“:

Her eyes is all shut in an ecstasy face
You can cram it down her throat, people, any old place
Throw the little switch on her battery pack
You can poot it, you can shoot it till your wife gets back

…

I got a girl with a little rubber head
Rinse her out every night just before I go to bed
She never talk back like a lady might do
An’ she looks like she loves it every time I get through

“Wonderful Wino“:

I went to the country
And while I was gone
I lost control of my body functions
On a roller-headed lady’s front lawn
I’m so ashamed, but I’m a wino man
I can’t help myself

“Disco Boy“:

“You never go doody!” (That’s what you think)
“You never go doody!” (That’s what you think)
“You never go doody!” (That’s what you think)

Doody
Ah, go doody
Doody
You never go doody

…

But thank THE LORD
That you still got hands
To help you do that jerkin’ that’ll
Blot out yer Disco Sorrow!

Etc, etc…

As far as wank jokes go, it’s not exactly the surprising, character-based £20 note scene from Peep Show, is it?

But as I said, the musicianship is pretty consistently excellent throughout; it’s just a shame it’s in service of such unfortunate songs. For the most part, though, I think the playing makes up for the words – hence my four-star rating.

I really like Frank’s sleazy vocals on “The Torture Never Stops“, but the female shrieks mean I wouldn’t want to play it loud! I prefer the live version on the Cheap Thrills compilation, which has Captain Beefheart singing, a different guitar riff throughout, and lacks the screams. Not sure either version really deserves to be nine minutes, though:

The Uplift Mofo Party Plan was one of the first RHCP albums I ever heard. I’m still rather fond of it.

I originally posted this review at Rate Your Music.

The 2003 remastered edition:

If you intend to listen to this album, I urge you to seek out the original CD release rather than the 2003 24-bit digitally remastered version, because in my opinion the re-release is down there with the Chili Peppers’ own Californication as one of the worst victims of the Loudness War I have ever heard. I’m no audiophile (I wish I could afford to be one…) but it’s clear that the 2003 edition suffers from an absurd degree of compression, clipping and lack of dynamic range that makes it extremely fatiguing to the ears.

The 1987 version was perfectly adequately punchy as it was, so get that. True, by buying the older version you’ll miss out on the 2003 edition’s two bonus tracks and the liner notes booklet featuring numerous images and retrospective comments from Flea – but at least the thing will be listenable for more than two minutes at a time!

There are other differences too: for example, on the original release the final guitar lick of “Fight Like A Brave” fades out so that it’s barely audible; on the 2003 remastered version the whole riff is heard, but it concludes by cutting off very abruptly. For someone familiar with the original version, it’s a disconcerting alteration.*

The music:

Enough about the remastering; what of the music itself? It’s a decent little album, and probably the best of the Chili Peppers’ pre-Blood Sugar Sex Magik work. It suffers from dated shouted choruses, but the production is a big step up from RHCP’s first two albums, and there’s some great guitar playing from Hillel Slovak, who died shortly after the album’s release.

The two absolute highlights are “Fight Like A Brave” and “Me and My Friends”; the latter has a great guitar solo. (It’s nice to learn that “Me and My Friends” has apparently made a return to the Chili Peppers’ live repertoire in their recent I’m With You album tour.)

“Behind the Sun” is a lovely lazy summer song and one of the most melodic things the band did in the ’80s. “Skinny Sweaty Man” is fun comedy number in which Anthony Kiedis does his best Mel Blanc Looney Tunes voices. “Organic Anti-Beat Box Band” is an energetic party track, and there’s a Bob Dylan cover which is OK (but not as good as the band’s later covers of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”).

Alas, “Party on Your Pussy” (which was listed as “Special Secret Song Inside” on the 1987 release, for obvious reasons) and “Love Trilogy” represent the Chili Peppers’ unfortunate tendency toward the childish and crude at its worst. The later “Sir Psycho Sexy” on Blood Sugar Sex Magik was just as vulgar, but funnier and set to much better music.

If you’re a fan of later RHCP albums looking to investigate their earlier work, I would recommend getting the What Hits!? compilation before you delve into this album. That compilation contains this LP’s highlights “Fight Like A Brave” and “Me and My Friends”, plus two other decent songs from it (“Backwoods” and “Behind the Sun”), as well as most of the worthwhile songs from the Chili Peppers’ other early releases.

* The music video uses the original outro:

Here’s the other highlight:

 01. Fight Like a Brave (3:54)
 02. Funky Crime (3:00)
 03. Me and My Friends (3:09)
 04. Backwoods (3:08)
 05. Skinny Sweaty Man (1:16)
 06. Behind the Sun (4:41)
 07. Subterranean Homesick Blues (2:33)
 08. Party on Your Pussy/Special Secret Song Inside (3:16)
 09. No Chump Love Sucker (2:42)
 10. Walkin' on Down the Road (3:49)
 11. Love Trilogy (2:41)
 12. Organic Anti-Beat Box Band (4:03)

2003 EDITION BONUS TRACKS:
 13. Behind the Sun (instrumental demo) (2:55)
 14. Me and My Friends (instrumental demo) (1:54)

This provides a great excuse for me to air my pet prediction regarding his next movie!

I can see one of two things happening with The Avengers:

A) The film makes an obscene amount of money eclipsing Titanic, Avatar, and all the Harry Potter and Bond movies put together. Studios fall over themselves to let Whedon make whatever he wants, which happens to be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Then — while finding time to do some part-time script-doctoring on a couple of Pixar films, because they’ve really missed his help since the original Toy Story — he goes to HBO and makes more episodes of Firefly, which runs for ten seasons, three feature films and a spin-off animated series, is universally adored, and ushers in a new utopia of world peace and prosperity, Wyld Stallions-style.

OR…

B) Coming fourteen years after Blade, twelve years after X-Men and ten years after Spider-Men, it has the misfortune to be released just after the end of the superhero movie boom and flops miserably.

But a couple of days before all that, I had finished reading Iain M. Banks’ Culture novel Excession for the first time. It’s the fourth of his novels I’ve read (after Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons — all “M. Banks” genre fiction), and it was blummin’ brilliant.

[Some spoilers below]

I think my first encounter with this novel came while browsing through a copy of The Complete Polysyllabic Spree in a bookshop, a collection of Nick Hornby’s book reviews. Excession was the only sci-fi or fantasy novel reviewed in there. Hornby didn’t make it far into the book, explaining that it was representative of all the reasons he Doesn’t Read Sci-Fi. (“Nothing in the twenty-odd pages I managed of Excession was in any way bad; it’s just that I didn’t understand a word. I didn’t even understand the blurb on the back of the book.”) From the sound of it, it struck me that having Excession as one’s first one’s point of contact with science fiction seemed a bit of a jump straight into the deep end. A bit like someone who’s never played a videogame in their life asking whether Ninja Gaiden Black would be a good one to start with — brilliant, but just a little bit daunting for a newbie! (Or, to use a musical analogy: “I’ve never heard any music from the 1960s — that Trout Mask Replica‘s supposed to be good, isn’t it?”)

For me, Excession is representative of all the reasons I do like sci-fi. A.I. entities that occupy extended computer networks rather than humanoid robot bodies are among my favourite concepts in science fiction: characters like Halo‘s Cortana, Red Dwarf‘s Holly, Ender’s Game‘s Jane, Portal‘s GLaDOS, and I’d probably add System Shock‘s SHODAN to that list if I was brave enough to play it. The Minds had been some of my favourite elements of the earlier Culture novels I’d read, so I’d been looking forward to reading Excession ever since I heard about how much it focussed on them — beings so smart that they like to spend their leisure CPU cycles simulating entire alternate universes with different physical properties. (They have funny names too.)

BAM! Early on, we jump straight into an action sequence showing a drone escaping from a ship whose Mind is being taken over by some sort of hostile intelligence. Said ship is putting obstacles in its way — minor little hazards, such as detonating the air in the corridors it’s flying through. All the while, the drone is moving bits of its personality into various backup subsystems, producing fields of various shapes to bank round corners, and remotely activating displacement devices to teleport it the hell out of there. It’s doing all this while travelling at supersonic speeds.

Then later: “It had been drifting totally unconscious for nearly half a second. Scary.”

Hell yeah! This is my sort of SF!

I’m not normally a fan of drastically non-humanoid alien races in science fiction, but there are exceptions. The Pierson’s Puppeteers of Larry Niven’s Ringworld were one; the Affronters of Excession another. Fivetide and the others of his species were great fun throughout. Not exactly pleasant sort of people for the characters (and small cuddly animals) in the book, but very entertaining for the reader! Likewise the gelsuit introduced early on: in the fact that it’s sentient, with a personality that irritates its human companion while being immensely entertaining for the reader, it reminds me of not just the drones featured in previous Culture novels, but also Douglas Adams’ doors that insist on wishing you a good day as they open for you. The gelsuit’s a cool bit of sci-fi tech, if not quite as cool as those suits in Revelation Space that made Iron Man’s armour look like a Victorian diving outfit.

The Mind-to-Mind conversations lived up to the hype: the first one, the one that caused Nick Hornby to break down in tears, may look daunting, but Banks quickly tones down the density of email header technobabble like “[stuttered tight point M32 @n4.28.855.0065+]“. After a couple of such transmissions, you’ve figured out what “x” and “o” and the indentations mean and from then on you can pretty much follow them like a normal conversation, the only challenging part being keeping track of the large number of names involved.

Those Mind conversations are the home of some of the book’s funniest and most memorable moments, such as the the appearance of the line “Group initially comprises all previously mentioned craft except Wisdom Like Silence.” (Er, trust me, it’s hilarious in context.)

As are the following two paragraphs:

The Appeal To Reason’s drone was duly launched; a small, fragile-looking, gaily adorned thing, its extremities sporting rib­bons, flowers and little ornaments and its casing covered with drawings, cartoons and well-wishing messages scrawled by the crew. It puttered hesitantly towards the Excession, chirpily beam­ing signals of innocent goodwill.

If the Fate Amenable To Change had been a human, at this point it would have looked down, put one hand over its eyes, and shaken its head.

Facepalm LOL

On the downside, compared to the Minds, the drones are a little short-changed in this book: one called Churt Lyne is introduced promisingly, but later on doesn’t do a great deal. (Although it does get another of the book’s best gags: “Armed, it can fuck solar systems.”)  In general I didn’t find the human-scale story as compelling as those of any of the previous Culture novels I’d read — though I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the book would have been better if Banks had gone the whole hog writing a book all about the Minds, omitting the tale of Dajeil and Genar-Hofoen entirely.

I’m not sure if Excession was quite as good as The Player of Games. The latter had that wonderfully-written passage towards the end of the final Azad match: the description of the game as a dance and the perfect way of debating the Culture and Azadians’ respective philosophies.

***

This seems a good place to quote an amusing post by “K” in Rllmukforum’s Iain M. Banks thread, written shortly after he’d posted some negative comments about Banks’ most recent book Transition:

Given Banks’ deep understanding of modern geopolitics and clear struggles in coming up with new storylines, I’ve done one for him here. A hundred years ago, there was a Contact mission to a desert planet called Qira, led by Ynto Brail and a humorously defective drone called Shbu, looking for the lost WMD-class ship called the Definitely Not In My Name, Pal. After they fail to discover it and the dark secret it contains, Brail and Shbu go apeshit and slaughter every native on the planet with a proscribed Blackwater-class combat meme, before covering the whole thing up and going on the run.

Only two people can arrest them and bring them to the Guahe – the space war crime court that orbits a black hole inside another larger black hole. One is sexy woman assassin SC asset Maon Skychomp, whose interests include planned economies, having sex with other lefties, and hang-gliding through the photospheres of red giant stars. Following her unauthorised assassination of a fascist dictator, by way of posing as a concentration camp victim delivered to his private sex prison, paralysing him with nano-toxins secreted in her fanny batter and then cutting off his nuts with a monofilament wire disguised as her hair, Skychomp has gone off to a picturesque planet to moon about for a bit and meditate over the ethics of killing evil bastards in various theatrical and contrived ways.

The other is ace liberal bearded playboy Ni Aim Sknab, ten-times winner of the best shag in the galaxy award in both the male and female categories. He is also a world-class poet and political commenter, and author of the smash hit pamphlets Why Socialism is The Best Form of Government Provided You Create A Load of Hyperintelligent AIs Who Can Do Literally Anything And Let Them Run The Show, and Whisky, Cars, and This Thing My Mate Said Once. Recruited by SC, he must travel across about five planets and about four hundred pages of travelogue, and then convince her to kill Brail and Shbu by shagging her a few times.

***

Banks’ next book Surface Detail, due out in October 2010,  sounds great. Lives taking place in the digital world — Banks goes cyberpunk perhaps? The talk of a “deranged warship” conjures thoughts of the ROU Killing Time‘s standout scene in Excession. And “Lededje Y’breq” — what a name!

The same goes for this one!

November 2011 update: I eventually bought an Xbox 360 and the XBLA Perfect Dark a few months after first publishing this post. The game turned out to be superb; it was wonderful being able to play it at a decent framerate. Unfortunately analogue movement didn’t really suit time attacking the game: judging the narrow stick angle required to speed-strafe was much less consistent than simply pressing [C-Up]+[C-left] on the N64! I always intended to thoroughly update this post, using my own copy of the game to go into more detail confirming or debunking each claimed alteration, but unfortunately I never got round to doing it.

The Xbox Live Arcade version of Perfect Dark was released a few days ago. I thought someone ought to try and compile a list of everything that’s changed from the original. I decided I might as well do it myself!

Unfortunately, this process is complicated by the fact that, er, I don’t actually have the new XBLA game. (Or an Xbox 360, for that matter… is it sad that this new version of a ten year old game is one of the main reasons I want one?) So I’m basing this list on second-hand information: things discussed in forum threads on Rllmukforum, on the GE/PD speedrunning community at the-elite.net (in both this thread and this thread), and on GameFAQs (I asked numerous questions in this thread I started). Also, the Youtube channel of the Elite’s Takahiro Arai contains a complete set of slow, methodical Perfect Agent walkthroughs of every level in the XBLA version.

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything or there’s anything in this list that’s incorrect and I’ll change it.

1. The cool new stuff!

• Online play! Time and score based Leaderboards! Achievements and Crowns!

2. Graphics/sound

• 60fps (mostly…). All textures/skyboxes replaced. Weapons appearances changed. Explosion effects changed. Shigeru Miyamoto head replaced with that of Peter Molyneux. Lots of other heads replaced. Lots of other changes…
• Less compressed sound.
• Theres a new echoing effect on gunfire and other sound effects.
• The skybox graphical effects when using the Perfect Darkness cheat have changed.

3. Gameplay and controls

• The XBLA version seems to be based on the NTSC N64 version, rather than the PAL N64 version. So lifts move fast, like on NTSC, and the Deep Sea Farsight trick can’t be done.
• Control schemes: Obviously, big changes here. Both “Classic” and “Duty Calls” have WASD movement on left stick, aiming on right. But:
  • Classic: manual/zoom aiming – L trigger + left stick. Leaning/zoom adjusting on right stick
  • Duty Calls: manual/zoom aiming – L trigger + right stick. Leaning/zoom adjusting on left stick

  There’s no option for Southpaw controls, much to some people’s dismay.

• Secondary functions: There is now a dedicated button for toggling between first and secondary function. The switch happens instantly, unlike when holding down the action button in the original.
  • However, in the original, a weapon would stay on its secondary function for as long as your playing session lasted. In the XBLA version, it resets to its primary function at the start of each level or upon restarting.
• Speed strafing is a lot harder – you have to get the diagonal angle EXACTLY correct…
  • … But in addition, there’s now some sort of “super speed-strafe” sprinting that activates when you’ve been running for a few seconds!
• Aiming sensitivity: You can now individually customise the sensitivity of the x and y axes’ aiming. But these sensitivity settings don’t affect the manual/zoom aiming mode, which is apparently a lot more twitchy than on the N64 analogue stick.
• Crouching levels: You now have to cycle through crouching levels: standing -> mid crouch -> prone crouch -> standing
  • I remember reading that you can still “close your eyes” in Combat Sim to stop other players watching your screen. Not sure of the button combination, though.
• Combat Boosts behave completely differently. When activated in the original, everything would slow down (enemy movement, your movement, your aiming, the timer). But in the XBLA version they behave more like the Slow Animation cheat from GoldenEye, slowing down enemies’ animation (and the timer), but not your movement and aiming.
  • Fortunately, apparently the Slow Motion cheat still behaves the same way as before: slowing down the whole game.
• Combat Simulator dizziness resets when you die, rather than carrying over to your next life
• Laser barriers (Investigation/G5/Air Base) are more damaging, according to this post.
• Laptop gun sentry turrets are nerfed, so that instead of being able to shoot all the ammo they take away from you, they will only shoot one magazine’s worth.

4. Presentation

• Perfect Menu/Combat Sim menu layouts: Judging by videos I’ve seen, a lot of these have changed. Most of the same options are still there, though…
• Total playtime stats:
  • Your save file’s Solo/Co-Op/Counter-Op playtime is no longer displayed when you begin the game. I don’t think it even keeps track of it at all!
  • However, AFAIK Combat Sim stats tracking still works the same.
• Story/Background/character information: All of this is available on the CI computers from the start, rather than being unlocked as you progress.
• Precision of record times: When you abort, die or complete a level, the time is displayed to 1/100 of a second, and this precision is also used on the leaderboards. However, on the mission select screen, records are still only displayed rounded down to the second (in a process described in detail here).
• Combat Sim character customisation: Bodies and heads can’t be mixed and matched to the same extent they previously were; they’re grouped together in certain ways, so you can’t put a male heads on a famale body, or a Maian head on a male body… I’ve also heard that dataDyne Shock Troops are in a group of their own?
  • Fortunately, there is a workaround that involves holding a bumper button as you select the head or body. But this only works when selecting your player character; you can’t do it for Sims.
• Cheat unlocking via Transfer Pack/Perfect Dark Zero: In the N64 version you could link up the Game Boy Colour version of Perfect Dark in order to unlock certain cheats. The XBLA equivalent is to look for a Perfect Dark Zero save game, and if you have one, you will be awarded with Hurricane Fists, Cloaking Device, R Tracker/Cache Locations, and All Guns in Solo. The detection of said PDZ save game seems to be quite unreliable, though.
• Crackdown 2 interactivity? Before release, a big set of screenshots was leaked. One of them displayed this debug menu, which in addition to an option for testing the PD Zero interactivity, also contains the option “Fake the Crackdown 2 save presence”. Hmm, Crackdown 2 isn’t out till the summer… not that this is any guarantee that PDXBLA will interact with that game or any other, but it’s intriguing nonetheless…

A screenshot of the developers' debug menu in Perfect Dark XBLA, showing the option "fake the Crackdown 2 save presence"

• Player handicaps in the Combat Simulator can no longer be set.
• Combat Sim automatic team rebalancing: You can’t set up Combat Simulator games — online or offline — which favour your team. If you do so, the Sims’ team arrangements will be auto-balanced. I haven’t yet heard the process behind this explained in more detail than that, though, so I’m not sure of the exact conditions under which Sims are rearranged. Is it a simple comparison of the number of Sims + players on each team? Or is it affected by the Sims on your team being more powerful – if you make a game with [You + two HardSims] vs [four MeatSims], will that be automatically rearranged?
• Viewing Challenge settings: If you select a Combat Sim challenge, you can no longer go to Advanced settings in order to see what the conditions are (kill limits, Sim difficulty etc), because doing so will reset all Combat Sim settings. (However, someone else said: “You actually can, as long as you don’t accept the advanced mode and press b to get out of it. Though the chance of being able to do this is rare as it happens randomly.”)

5. Bugs, glitches, Easter eggs, weird idiosyncrasies, and other misc stuff

• Defection glitch: Yep, the dataDyne building still suffers from an architectural flaw that lets you fall from the top to the bottom in a few seconds! But there’s a difference – Defection A can now be done in 5 seconds, not 6!
• CI Defense safe devastation: You can no longer destroy the safe with the Devastator before Carrington announces the objective. But once he has done so, you can still use either the Devastator or the laser, as before.
• Speech skipping doesn’t work (or is a lot harder?)
• Challenge completion: The infamous bug that let you complete challenges by using two controllers and altering their settings doesn’t work. Thankfully.
• Felicity infinite exploding mines bug: Yes, you can still exploit this in order to stat boost. But the Combat Sim auto-team rearrangement described above makes it harder to set up.
• The Firing Range bug that let you complete challenges with the Laptop gun turret still works!
• CI Defense lift skipping via Combat Boost warping (as used on the-elite.net’s time attacks) doesn’t work. Until PDXBLA was announced, I hadn’t really paid attention to what had been going on in the GE/PD speedrunning community for a long time, so I missed whenever this trick was discovered, and how exactly it’s done. But this point in this CI Defense speedrun video shows what happens. I don’t know the exact technique, but it seems to have something to do with using hi-res mode (which obviously can’t apply to the XBLA version) and your Combat Boost running out at the right time (and as described above, Combat Boosts behave differently now). So it’s obviously something that can’t be done in the XBLA version… unless someone figures out an entirely new way to do it!
• Blocking the Firing Range door: Yay, you can still use the crate to block the door so you can embed darts and throwing knives in Foster!

6. Questions

• I’ve heard that Combat Sim stats saving is rather unreliable… how prevalent is this problem?
• What exactly are the Combat Sim conditions which activate Sim auto-team-balancing of Simulants, as mentioned above? Is it a simple comparison of the number of Sims + players on each team? Or is it affected by the Sims on your team being more powerful – if you make a game with [You + two HardSims] vs [four MeatSims], will that be automatically rearranged?
• Related to the above point, are the following Combat Sim settings under Advanced Settings > Teams > Auto Team still there?
  • Two teams
  • Three teams
  • Four teams
  • Maximum teams
  • Humans vs Simulants
  • Human-Simulant pairs
• Can you still “juggle” Combat Sim ammo crates so that if you collect one when it’s in midair, that’s where it’ll continue to spawn from then on?

Probably the best Internet animation I’ve seen since Saturday Morning Watchmen a year ago.

Some very cartoony animation too… John K would approve! (Well, maybe. But come to think of it, probably not.)

• The House Next Door blog (now part of Slant Magazine) has an excellent article analysing the first four seasons’ credit sequences. The producer Karen Thorson replies in the comments section (and so does David Simon!) confirming just how much thought went into them.
• On the same subject, another site has edited video essays on all five seasons’ credits sequences. There are transcripts, but I recommend you watch the videos!
• NJ.com’s lengthy David Simon Q&A.
• Vice magazine’s David Simon interview
• Nick Hornby interviews David Simon.
• An essay on Herc: The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop
• Simon’s introduction to the book The Wire: Truth Be Told
• The architecture of Baltimore
• Some reviews of the final episode: Slant/The House Next Door and NJ.com
• The origin of “sheee-it”.

Plus these two videos:

In the Vice magazine interview I mentioned above, I liked this section:

Now, the thing that has been exalted and the thing that American entertainment is consumed with is the individual being bigger than the institution. How many frickin’ times are we gonna watch a story where somebody—

Rises up against the odds?
“You can’t do that.” “Yes, I can.” “No, you can’t.” “I’ll show you, see?” And in the end he’s recognized as just a goodhearted rebel with right on his side, and eventually the town realizes that dancing’s not so bad. I can make up a million of ’em. That’s the story we want to be told over and over again. And you know why? Because in our heart of hearts what we know about the 21st century is that every day we’re going to be worth less and less, not more and more.

Worth less and less as people, you mean?
As human beings. Some of us are going to get more money and be worth more. There are some people who are destined for celebrity or wealth or power, but by and large, the average American, the average person in the world on planet earth, is worth less and less. That’s the triumph of capital, and that is the problem. You look at that, and you think that’s what we’ve come to and that’s where we’re going and it’s like, “Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?”

“Tell me again about that boxer who came out of the ghetto and became the champ.”
“And what about that musician whose genius was never recognized? What about him? And, oh yeah, somebody else overcame addiction. That’s great. Tell me that one again.” Listen, I don’t mind a victory if it’s earned. But if all you do is victory, if that’s your whole dramatic construct and that’s 90 percent of American television—

It goes back to how you didn’t want to put characters like McNulty and Kima through the same framework again and again. But that’s what this big tradition of storytelling is nowadays. It’s just a tired retread. I found it kind of ironic that in season 5 there are a few really great scenes where you’re mocking the editors of newspapers who are asking for a Dickensian vibe, and then a lot of critics and writers compared The Wire to Dickens.
It was fun goofing on the Dickens comparison because I understood what they meant by Dickensian when they said it. You get this sort of scope of society through the classes, the way Dickens would play with that in his novels. But that’s true of Tolstoy’s Moscow. That’s true of Balzac’s Paris. It’s been done a lot in a lot of different places by a lot of writers. And I’m not the one doing the comparing. I’m just saying if you use those tropes you can go to a lot of places other than Dickens. The thing that made me laugh about it with Dickens was that Dickens is famous for being passionate about showing you the fault lines of industrial England and where money and power route themselves away from the poor. He would make the case for a much better social compact than existed in Victorian England, but then his verdict would always be, “But thank God a nice old uncle or this heroic lawyer is going to make things better.” In the end, the guy would punk out.

Now that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great writer and they’re not great stories. They are. But The Wire was actually making a different argument than Dickens, and the comparison, while flattering, sort of fell badly on us.

Sure.
So there was a little bit of tongue-in-cheek satire on the show directed at people who were using Dickens to praise us.

“Games that put select where you expect cancel or that offer 16 useless presets are shooting themselves in the foot. Or, more precisely, games that don’t give the choice of whether or not to invert are most likely shooting players in their own foot.”

- Edge‘s Ten Commandments, issue #128 (Oct 2003, their tenth anniversary issue)

I had a pretty roundabout path through console FPS control schemes. Excluding my early experiences with Zero Tolerance and Corporation on the Mega Drive (they don’t really count here), it went something like this:

1. When I first played GoldenEye in 1998, I started off with the default 1.1 “Honey” settings (forward motion/rotation on stick, sidestepping/vertical aiming on C-buttons), inverted aiming. The post-Halo term for this on twin-stick pads is “Legacy” controls. I also used this in the Dreamcast versions of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament.
2. In late 2003, after owning my own copies of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark for about a year, I switched to 1.2 “Solitaire” (known as “Turok settings” in the days of the N64), where the C-buttons control WASD movement and the stick rotates and aims vertically. This is partly because it wears out the analogue stick slower, and also because having fully digital movement is faster for speedrunning.
3. I think the first dual-stick FPSs I played were the NGC version of TimeSplitters 2 and Red Faction on the PS2. I had no problem starting off with the default controls (left stick WASD movement, right stick aiming), inverted aiming.
4. Even though inverted aiming had always seemed to be the most intuitive setting for me, I’d never really been able to do circular/spiral aiming motions very accurately. Even with diagonals, working out that moving the targeting reticle north-northeast meant pressing the stick south-southest meant a nanosecond of hesitation, which would clearly be a massive disadvantage whenever I get round to buying an Xbox 360 and going online.
   So in 2008 I decided to see if I could adapt to non-inverted aiming. I began not with an FPS but with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, because I’d sometimes used non-inverted aiming for certain games’ third-person cameras. Did a level or two, practising zooming in to take shots. Then I began a new save file in Halo – started off on “Pillar of Autumn” on Easy, upped the challenge a bit for “Halo”, and by the time I was on “Truth and Reconciliation” I’d pretty much got the hang of it. Before long, I was using upright aiming to about the same standard I had been inverted.
5. However, upon returning to those two N64 FPSs, I found I still had to use inverted aiming!
6. That didn’t last long, though. With all the hype around the XBLA version of Perfect Dark, I returned to the original N64 version a few days ago, and started new Solo and Combat Sim files with upright aiming. After maybe five hours of play, I was completely used to it. You might say… I have succeeded in rewiring my brain.

I’ve never quite seen why people who use Southpaw controls (right stick WASD movement, left stick aiming) say that they do so because it’s the closest to the 1.2 controls they used to use in N64 FPSs. True, in both 1.2 and Southpaw, movement is controlled with the right thumb. But pressing face buttons is a completely different sensation from flicking an analogue stick! As noted above, I had no problem making the transition from 1.2 in GE and PD to the twin-stick defaults TimeSplitters 2.

So, those people who say they’re stuck with Southpaw controls because that’s what they’ve always used? Pah, with the amount of time I’ve spent playing GE, PD, TS and Halo, if I can switch from inverted to upright aiming, you can adapt to anything!

As for my experiences returning to GoldenEye and Perfect Dark for the first time in a couple of years? After playing both of them FAR TOO MUCH over the last week or so, I can confirm that they’re both still utterly brilliant: I’m no more bothered by the framerate issues and blocky characters than I ever was. GoldenEye‘s generous-auto-aiming-overriden-by-R-trigger-precision-aiming is still possibly my favourite way of handling FPS aiming, on either console or PC. The weapons are still wonderfully satisfying (PD features one of the all-time great gaming shotguns, and unlike HL2′s Overwatch Pulse Rifle, the K7 Avenger is actually as effective as its sound effect implies). PD’s Sims still represent the high watermark for range of multiplayer options, and few non-racing games have got time attacking as right as they did (the TimeSplitters games were a big step backwards for both bots and time attack record presentation).

Perfect Dark still holds a prominent place in my all-time top 10, and GoldenEye… yep, still #1.

I think the trend began in 2005 with the museum advert for Criterion’s Black:

Then we had:

• Gears of War‘s take on “Mad World” (plus its Battlefield: Bad Company parody)
• Bioshock‘s “Beyond the Sea“
• Mercenaries 2‘s “Oh No You Didn’t!“
• Fallout 3‘s use of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire“
• The Killzone 2 ballet of death, set to “The Flower Duet” (the British Airways music)
• And to a much lesser extent, I suppose that Bayonetta‘s “In for the Kill” might also qualify, at a stretch.

Methinks these advertising agencies have been watching Face/Off a little too much…

They’ll do to pass the time while Adam & Joe’s Song Wars is away.

Recently I decided to replay it. Sadly I had no luck getting my PC copy working again on either WinXP or the Win7RC. It would install fine, but then get stuck on the splash screen with no error message. So a few days ago, I bought a copy of the Xbox version. (GameStation Birmingham have massively expanded their Xbox range recently… presumably numerous other branches in the region have transferred their stock there?)

The level design is still fantastic — the puzzles are pretty straightforward, but the design takes you on some wonderful routes through each area, your paths round the big rooms making the most of each space, looping around on themselves and involving lots of vertical movement. The torture chamber section is one such sequence, first making you work your way down to the bottom, and then gradually back up to the top, your path crossing over itself all the time. The Hall of Learning is another highlight — I’m always a sucker for light beam/mirror puzzles in games! Although I did get stuck in exactly the same place in that room as I did five years ago…

I thoroughly enjoyed returning to it, but the game as a whole has definitely lost some of its sheen since my original playthrough. One reason is that I’ve since played Ico, which preceded Sands of Time by a couple of years and shares its beautiful castle and desolate atmosphere, but had more interesting puzzles and did a better job of the whole arriving-at-a-landmark-you-first-saw-ages-ago/looking-back-on-how-far-you’ve-come thing. (Normally I like my games split into discrete levels for easier time- and score-attack replayability, but that ability to look back on a continuous path through a full game is a great way of adding a wonderful sense of epic scale to even a sub-10-hour game. The Half-Life series also does it very well.)

The combat system is another element of Prince of Persia which impressed me at the time (thanks to its fluidity and spectacle) but has now been surpassed by something I played recently. The Xbox’s Ninja Gaiden^[1] was released around the same time as Sands of Time, and I remember Edge commenting these two games both, in quick succession, marked steps forward in making the simple act of moving around in-game a flashy and fun experience. I finally played it last year (in its Ninja Gaiden Black revision) and fell in love with the depth and intensity of its combat — very Halo-like in the way it made me want to master its challenges, and in the way success in combat is reliant on balancing controlled bursts of aggression and defensive movement into space, in response to almost-subconscious cues.

There’s no contest between a system like that and POP”s combat, which basically amounts to keeping track of how long it’s been since each enemy last attacked you, and blocking or dodging when you estimate one’s about to do so again. The only real variation between foes is that you can’t vault over some of them. Not that its combat rhythms and solid animation don’t still have their appeal — as that Time Extend article notes, a pure focus on doing a simple thing very well can have its virtues. I was just disappointed to find that the fighting is not as interesting as I remembered it, only a few steps above Fable (another original Xbox game I only played recently) in complexity.

Ninja Gaiden also takes wallrunning a step further — POP just lets you run in smooth arcs along one wall at a time, but Gaiden has that bit where you use a long succession of wall-runs between perpendicular walls to spiral upwards and out of a deep shaft. Nothing wrong with POP‘s approach; it suits its puzzle system just fine. But again, it’s just not quite as spectacular as it seemed five years ago.

And to make one final comparison: both games have horribly annoying bat enemies — POP”s more so, because you have to wait for them to flock around you. Plus they don’t even give you sand, but NG‘s do give out Essence. So again, no contest!

Speaking of annoying flying enemies, I don’t know who thought fighting those buzzards would be fun…

Prince of Persia‘s camera can be really awkward in places – worst of all in the Observatory late in the game. But save point placement is generally pretty sensible: usually they’re spaced only about five minutes apart, plus there are extra restart points outside those save points (usually after you enter a big room and the camera zooms through the scene). And there are few unskippable cutscenes – I think the only ones are those that rely on Farrah moving to a certain place before you can regain control.

As for The Sands of Time‘s one notorious difficulty spike, this time I completed the elevator fight towards the end first time. WHOO YEAH! But that probably had less to do with my experiences completing the notoriously unforgiving Ninja Gaiden Black (on Normal; go me), and more to do with the fact I gave myself a head start by beginning the fight with the Mega Freeze move…

I wanna play more Prince of Persia now! If I can get past the infamous changes in art/voice/music style, I might give Warrior “YOU BITCH” Within and Two Thrones a try…

^[1] I’d like to throw in a mention of the Master System version of Ninja Gaiden here, partly because it was brilliant, but also to do my bit to counterbalance that annoying assumption on the Internet that any mention of an 8-bit console game means it must refer to the NES.