Finish your games

I’ve been playing a new game for the past two days, a PC/Xbox title called Section 8. It’s basically a variant on the old Tribes/Battlefield notion of a mostly multiplayer game with big teams, big maps and big guns to aim at folks you dislike. The main idea is that it delivers stripped-down, fun and brutal action of a not-exactly-class-based kind with pretty much bleeding edge graphics and blah blah.

The problem is, it looks like somebody has been rushing things at Timegate because while the game works fairly well (apart from some odd quirks) the multiplayer backend is as ropey as I’ve seen in a while. The cardinal bug is that after a 32-player match ends everybody gets disconnected from the server almost every time (it happens on official servers too, so it’s certainly Timegate’s problem). This means that for a small community with rarely more than 100 uk players online at any given point, it’s pretty hard to get a good, balanced game going – for more than one round at any rate. So the community gets booted from one server to the next, over and over and over.

Then there’s the server browser and our old friend Games For Windows Live. The server browser is poor (dear Christ all they had to do was realise that they’d have it right if they just COPIED WHAT STEAM DOES?) and the overall transparency of the system is negligible. You can’t see your ping ingame. You can’t see your server history. And then there are the swathes of people who couldn’t even get the game started, apparently due to the pisspoor proprietary nightmare that is GFWL.

The moral of this story – if there is one – is that developers shouldn’t rush into a release date. And they shouldn’t put any faith in Games For Windows Live, which seems to be a crushingly unreliable way to play games online. More on that one later, perhaps.

Shazam!

A short note on some good things: my first full collection of poems, Moonrise, has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and my short book of poems about Norwich, Strangers’ Hall, has been shortlisted for the EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards. Which is nice.

All things in their proper place, it seems. And back-to-back ceremonies in October to wet my whistle at too.

A short note on Relic’s RTS empire

Since I’ve been waiting around for estate agents and whatnot this week, and one of my regular gaming partners has been having a lot of time off work, I have discovered something interesting about two Relic games, and that is: Company of Heroes is actually better in multiplayer than its successor, Dawn of War 2. How this came about I don’t know, but after a series of blistering 1v1s on CoH the DoW2 multiplayer just didn’t seem to make as much sense.

Why? Probably because the CoH gameplay is based around real things – real combat dynamics and plausible weaponry – whereas DoW2 is based around things that don’t actually exist. This might also explain why the DoW2 campaign is brilliant – being based on a ridiculous fiction – and the CoH ones are generally a bit limp by comparison. Mind you, if Relic had built an rpg-lite co-op campaign into CoH I might have found it a bit more entertaining. Maybe.

Well, that’s sorted then

People of Earth! You will be completely unimpressed with the fact that I am moving to Norwich in a few weeks. But I am! I will be starting a PhD in Creative writing, with the financial backing for such shenanigans coming right from the mouth of UEA itself – for which, by the way, I’m pretty grateful. I shall be departing dear, mentalist Cardiff for the forseeable future in a little over a week. Which is a shame, because Cardiff is a nice place where you can get Welsh books in the bookstores, and is called home by a number of splendid people, very few of whom I actually know but whatever.

Just so you know.

Britain’s new title

I’m rather lucky to be able to listen, on occasion, to my father talking about railways. He knows quite a lot about them, and has been a pleasant counterbalance to the gushing headlines in the Guardian regarding spurious rail projects set out by the government as firebreaks in their forest of public relations shittiness. I’m sure they hardly thought about the schemes, any more than I thought about the previous metaphor. Could you even start a fire in a forest of poo? Would it burn in any kind of interesting way? Anyhow.

It’s time people stopped thinking of Britain as the country that invented railways and started to get the horrible crapness of the ones they have driven into their conciousness with a kind of cultural bedsore or something. I suggest changing the name of the country to the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Shite Railways. Stamp that on everyone’s passport so that French people will sneer at us (more) when we visit the continent. So that the Germans will look at us pityingly, and the Italians will push up the service charges for us in their restaurants. That’ll get people going alright. And then we can vow never to change the name of the place back until we get something really awesome and rail-related to expunge the stain on our railway honour.  Like a train that cures cancer. Yeah.

That ought to do it.

Say no to the Wii

Having spent a bit of time dicking about at somebody’s house, I have decided that the Wii is a bit of a joke as a console. The wiimote system is actually quite erratic in its interpretation of movement, making it a big pile of suck for anything other than the most basic of casual gaming. Or, if you prefer: Wii Sports is actually pushing the envelope of what can be effectively achieved with the wiimote.

That’s right. Wii sports. Pushing the envelope. Now go home and think about that for an oxymoron-cockslap, Nintendo. And come back with a console I can pretend to take seriously next time.

And the best thing on television is…

Subject of many jokes as it usually is, the coverage of yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru was by far and away the best thing on television this weekend. Given a choice of 4 terrestrial channels, it seems that for once S4C is in the lead with the following features:

1. Happy people, who are apparently happy to be on camera

2. Genuine displays of talent. Tudur Phillips in the Dawns Werin, clog-dancing with a hammer was particularly awesome

3. Entertainment. As opposed to moody people, crap drama, shit reality shows and re-runs.

4. Welsh people. Having low-budget, apparently quite unabashed fun.

Lucky for you people in Wales, it’s on all week. Os nad ydych yn deall cymraeg – dim problem! Mae llawer o pobl doniol i gael o flaen a ty hwnt i’r gamera…

Writers in Schools – why has everybody missed the issue?

Once again the debate rages over the proposed certification of everybody who does anything in a school – apart from possibly the pupils – with the focus resting on the writing community. The world of children’s authors seems to be split, with Philip Pullman making the most high-profile protest, followed closely by Anne Fine. The other camp seems to boast the current Children’s Laureate and Gillian Cross.

To be quite frank, although Pullman’s reaction seems a little strong, it’s a matter of far deeper principle than the scheme’s apologists suggest. It is not ‘Orwellian’, nor is it terribly sinister, but the scheme is so impossibly wrong-headed that only in the modern media climate could it be credible. It’s not that the scheme to certify everybody who goes into a school is in itself morally wrong, it’s that it attempts to paper over the real issue. How, exactly, does a certificate prevent child abuse? Certificates do not intercede between children and those who would abuse them. Instead of placing an emphasis on intelligent, responsible supervision of the children in our schools, the certificate attempts to reassure us that everyone who has been ‘certified’ is ‘safe’.

It is very, very worrying just how many people have casually accepted this notion. The cases reported in the news have shown, time and time again, that it is only through involved, competent social care that we reduce the real risk to those most vulnerable in society. Instead of investing stupid amounts of money in a bureaucratic nicety which tells us that everything is safe, we should be investing it in support of the people who are actually responsible for children’s safety. I mean teachers, social workers, perhaps even the police. But that doesn’t make a Sun headline now, does it?

One more thing: by continually undermining the truly responsible people in society, such monolithic papering-over-the-cracks projects only serve to cheapen their roles. The ASBO and the stop-and-search power destroys the credibility of the policeman on his beat, just as the Vetting and Barring scheme implies that the people we employ as teachers can’t be trusted, or indeed held responsible. It solves nothing. It helps nobody. And it puts up another barrier between sections of our already divisive and ill-managed society. The fact that it keeps much-loved children’s authors out of our schools should be the least of our worries.

Who is Charlie Keeper: the original hatchet job

I’ve been reviewing a new YA fantasy title, Who is Charlie Keeper? which was frankly so terrible I had real difficulty giving it a serious review. I did manage to write one in the end, but my first attempt was much more funny and accurate. I reproduce it below:

Ever since the ubiquitous Ms. Rowling turned the ‘young adult’ fantasy market into an alarming cash-cow, one that made the publishing houses of the world quake every time it mooed, there’s been no shortage of hangers-on hoping to scoop up the sales from people who have a weakness for hobgoblins and people shouting ‘shazam’ on a regular basis. If you’ve finished all forty exhausting volumes of the Potter umpteenlogy and can’t bring yourself to go through it again, you might even be thinking about buying Who is Charlie Keeper? to fill that tombstone-sized space you keep reserved for the escapist book in your life. My advice is: don’t.

The Book Quiz sucks. Balls.

Well, I tried to watch some of the BBC’s ‘literature’ programming and boy did it not work out. You see, I was trying to catch up on George Szirtes’ stint on the ‘special poetry edition’ of The Book Quiz in the hope that I would (a) catch some of that Transylvanian magic and (b) be somewhat entertained. I did indeed catch (a) but I think I’d be more likely to rise up on invisible stilts using only the power of my brain than get (b) from TBQ. It didn’t help that I was fresh from chuckling at ‘Have I Got News For You’ on iPlayer, but when the presenter for TBQ (Kirsty Wark? So say the credits but who she?) opened with a long, tepid spiel and a desultory joke that died on its mouldy buttocks I began to wonder if there wasn’t some means of hiring poltergeists to haunt the BBC until they officially apologised for producing such tepid bilge.

Then we met the teams. I knew who the poets were and didn’t much care who the non-poets were, so by the time that everybody had been compere-ed to death by Ms. Wark, who read off everyone’s accomplishments as though she was supposed to care, but didn’t – I was bored. And then the questions started. I can recall Andrew Motion being applauded for a cripplingly dull non-sequiteur on the subject of Robert Frost and Edward Thomas and then I think I blacked out.

It seems like somebody (everybody? Surely not?) at the BBC has no twerping idea how to make literature, and poetry in particular, into television. It’s not just the dearth of regular programmes with a literary focus, it’s that you get moments like TBQ which are so evidently uncaring that you have to wonder if there’s anybody out there who has any idea – any – about how contemporary literature and television could ever be brought together. The poetry season at the BBC is a breath of fresh air that’s now blowing to a close and so it’s back to the wilderness for us poor rhymers, and even BBC4 won’t have room for us. I get the feeling that given a camera, a car and a corner of Powys I could’ve done better, and that’s a frightening thing indeed.