Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Music: This Is Music


Jules’ Latest Tune

Jules has been hard at work on the iPad, playing about with Electrify.

This track seems to be mainly inspired by computer games.

[soundcloud params=”auto_play=false&show_comments=true”]http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/36599820[/soundcloud]

 


Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Games: LA Noire


I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up
in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement.
I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames.
And when it was all over I said to myself, “Is that all there is to a fire?”
Peggy Lee

I’ve just done playing LA Noire, Rockstar’s latest all-embracing trip into the world of Los Angeles in the golden years between WWII and Elvis. I’ve solved crimes, caught and killed the kind of serial killers who only exist in books. I’ve brought down the evil, the ugly and the corrupt. I have done the whole town and when I was done, I got up and did it again and all I can think is, ‘Is that all that there is to a firefight?’

'The name's Head, Dick Head' - LA Noire's Cole Phelps plays it for yucks and falls down flat. Not even his partner thinks he's funny.

LA Noire has a hell of a lot to live up to. Not least Rockstar’s previous high points of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, but also a plethora of books and movies, from James Ellroy’s LA Confidential trilogy to every bloody movie that Bogey was Bogey in. It has to match the expansive, open world gameplay of Red Dead’s wild west, the sexy criminality of GTA and the moody, nefarious atmosphere of the whole post-war era. Ideally you feel it should be in a vague monochrome, with every moment punctuated with cigarette smoke and lipstick clad dames giving you the come on.

And sure LA Noire is a visual treat. But honey, this ain’t no Bogey flick, this ain’t no rollercoaster ride, this ain’t the dark heart of LA triple filtered through the dark, dark prose of Marlowe. This ain’t even Grand Theft Auto knocked back a few years with a different set of immigrants and a few less mean streets. And even if it were, the vision and sounds of this game ain’t going to save it. Because sugar, this games is savagely underwhelming.

And ultimately, when all’s said and done, I’m just bored by it in a way that I was never bored by Red Dead or GTA or Assassins Creed. It may be beautiful, it may have a lovely soundtrack, it may have possibly the most enticing setting you can imagine, I mean who wouldn’t want to be a classic gumshoe, but it is essentially a soulless, dull, little game.

For starters, it’s not nearly as open a game as you’d like. The plot is as linear and unforgiving as that of James Bond: Blood Stone and, at times, every bit as tedious. LA might be massive, but there’s little point in exploring it. There seems to be no benefit to finding the 100 or so different cars, all of which look staggeringly similar to my untuned eye, or locating the myriad of landmarks, which don’t reward you in the way those in Assassins Creed do. As for the film canisters, they were never even on my radar.

[pullshow]So you’re essentially forced into a tight, linear game where each segment is broadly similar. You visit the scene of a crime, search the area looking for clues (which is kind of fun) and ultimately latch on to one or two bad guys and the occasional bad girl. Once you’ve tracked them down it’s time for an interrogation. And it’s here that LA Noire falls down big time. Because, despite using revolutionary face melding techniques, you’re still left confused by the options available – you basically have to read your interviewee’s face and decide whether they are telling the truth, being a bit misleading, or lying through their teeth. And despite the looks on people’s faces, they were either too easy or impossible to read.

Your lead guy, Cole Phelps, doesn’t help. Not least because he is a total grade A arsehole. He is thoroughly unlikeable, a total tightwad, and a pretty shitty detective. Hardly the character you want to be playing as. [pullthis]It’s as if you were playing some kind of a Role Playing Game and had lucked out by scoring 1s in every category and thus created the most completely stupid, untalented midget warrior that had ever rolled his sorry arse out of Narnia[/pullthis]. The kind of character you’d only play to see how badly they’d do in the rest of the game. Take it from me, there are corrupt, venal, idiotboy policemen who would be more fun to play that Phelps. Even his name stinks.

And he’s no detective. His questioning, which is essentially your questioning, is unbelievably random. You’ll interview some bartender, who’ll tell you that your suspect came in all depressed and said they were going to kill someone, then when you’re questioning them this information will be completely unavailable. Phelps will often veer off at completely bizarre tangents, leaping from topic to topic like a monkey swinging through a particularly dense forest. Master of the interrogation he is not. And therefore neither are you.

In between interrogations Phelps has some driving to do and some shooting sequences, but these are strangely tedious and irritating rather than any kind of enjoyable. Like GTA, the driving is somewhat flawed, your control of the car is a bit crap and it really isn’t much fun driving round LA. Certainly in comparison with galloping around the Western Border States of Red Dead or the Rome of Assassins Creed it is just plain dull. Thankfully you can get your partner to do most of the driving, and after about the second case you’ll be doing that pretty much all of the time as there just isn’t any benefit in you doing it yourself.

Finally, the story is underwhelming to say the least. You’re thinking a true noir story would have lots of twists to it, a couple of dead ends and a trick ending. This doesn’t so much end as wimp out. You end up feeling like Miles Archer in the Maltese Falcon, as if you’d been killed in the first reel and the movie had just carried on without you. Bang, bang, you’re dead. And that’s all that there is to this firefight.

[review pros="Some vaguely interesting cases. Faces and expressions are great" cons="Bored. Bored, bored bored. Terrifyingly dull, very linear storyline with no satisfying payoff. Oh and bored." score=55]


Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Danish Murder Is Killing Me


20110317-075326.jpg

Suited up with a fine collection of knitwear it's the Danish Sweeny

 

Bloody Danes. Just when you think you’ve run out of series to view and you’ll be forced to watch repeats of The Wire or The West Wing, along comes a new series from right out of left field. I mean I never expected to be spending late nights struggling to read 10 episodes-worth of subtitles as I rushed through the entire first half of top Danish crime show The Killing. But I did.

Like The Wire this is a superb slow burn, with both the crime and the lives of the various individuals involved unfolding languidly before your eyes. As you discover more about the crime your suspicions are pulled first one way then another. Small malfeasances are magnified out of all proportion before being instantly forgotten is they’re proved to have little or no connection to the crime. I mean where is the ex-crim poster van driver now eh?

And it has its own Bosche-like descent into madness as lead cop Sarah Lund follows McNulty down the rabbithole of obsession. You watch her home life disintegrate as first her son, then her boyfriend, then her mother are driven out of her house. Not bad considering it’s mum’s house she’s living in. Her life is so dominated by the case that even Meyer, the cop who has been brought in to replace her and who patently finds her irritating as hell, begs her to take a break “as your friend”.

The great thing about The Killing is that Lund’s obsession becomes our obsession. As we trawl deeper and deeper through the lives of the various individuals who’ve been dragged into the the gravity pull of the case, we too become caught. Who will win the increasingly corrupted council election? Is Copenhagen Mayor Poul Bremer really as bad and bent as Clay Davies? Will Theis and Pernille ever move into their new house? And who the hell did the killing anyway?


Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Great Trailer: Battle LA


If Music Be The Food Of Love…

There are some trailers that simple tell the entire story in all of 2 or so minutes, some that just rely on the deep, ‘Barry White on gravel’ tones of Mr Trailer, and then there are some that are just beautiful. Usually this is because they understand the trailer medium perfectly, if often failing to actually fulfil their remit of putting bums on seats.

In particular it’s the inventive use of music in trailers that elevates a potentially ordinary set of movieclips into something truly special, often by replacing the simple ‘trailer as exposition’ with a sense of mood. As an example, the Watchmen trailer‘s use of Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning‘ transformed a ton of special effects into a eulogy to an alternate 1970’s where superheroes actually existed.

Battle LA, which looks to be a vaguely interesting melange of  Cloverfield, Independence Day and War Of The Worlds, has the most evocative trailer I’ve seen for ages, combining a sensible amount of plot come on with a beautiful musical counterpoint to the Michael Bay-like scenes of destruction. The track, by the way is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘The Sun’s Gone Dim And The Sky’s Turned Black‘, and is well worth purchasing.

 


Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Games: 8 Cars That Really Should Be In Gran Turismo


Can’t Believe They Missed Out On These

Given the Gran Turismo team have spent upwards of 5 years digitising cars in hideous detail and that they seem to have extended the remit of the game from the racetrack to all aspects of driving, it’s strange that they haven’t been a bit more ambitious in terms of the cars they’ve chosen. Here are some cars I’d like to see in any impending update.

African Technical ‘War Wagon’

Generic African Technical. Not sure how the suspension would deal with recoil at 100mph plus

Recipe. Take one flat bed truck of some sort, favourite brand usually some kind of Isuzu, and add an unusually powerful anti-aircraft or anti-personnel ordnance. Garnish with a host of extraneous militiamen casually draped off the sides and drive at indiscreet speed all over the place.

It seems to me that the GT boys have missed a trick in failing to include any vehicles with offensive capability. It would certainly add spice to those awkward dodgem-like starts where autonomous cars attempt to run you off the track. Imagine running around one of the banked oval tracks blowing holes in the opposition.

German WW2 Half Track

Easy commuting for the German soldier. Notice the lame attempt at camouflage. Or maybe they're Xmas decorations.

Having spent many hours building Tamiya models, I am intimately familiar with the German half track or SD.KFZ.251/1. Given the team has already included the Kubelwagon typ 82 and Schwimmwagon typ 166, it seems obvious to extend the range of their WW2 offerings. Should add interest to the dirt and snow track racing. All in all it’s a bit like sprinkling Gran Turismo with a little bit of Call Of Duty‘s guns and ammo stardust.

American DUKW

Half Car, Half Boat. All I want for Christmas is the DUKW-la Prague Away Kit.

Continuing the WW2 theme, I’ve always liked the amphibious DUKW, which is surely one of the most unlikely cars around, kind of like the Duck-billed Platypus. This would add a whole new dimension to the GT world, allowing a range of steeplechase-like races with additional water features. Watch out for the hidden underwater mines.

Big, Big Monster Trucks

If you're going to have trucks, make mine a monster

Given the hell I had actually finding any kind of truck in the 1,000 plus used car lot, it seems obvious that what Gran Turismo is really missing is trucks, right proper monster trucks. The bigger and more monstrous they are, the better. Ideally we should have super armoured, grotesquely over-accessorised behemoths that we can run at one another in some kind of pit-like racing circuit. Forget laptimes and concentrate on ramming your truck into all the others like a bunch of demented Walruses on heat.

And While We’re On The Subject

If you're going to go down the idiot boy truck route...

If we’re going to be all macho American idiot boy about the whole truck thing, then we might as well have the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill. Imagine roaring around the online tracks armed only with this, most moronic of vehicles.

Being Serious For A Moment

Classic Grand Prix cars. Those were the days eh?

I always loved the classic Grand Prix of the 1960’s, with the cars shaped like crude guided missiles with go-kart wheels. These were epitomised by the movie Grand Prix starring James Garner of Rockford Files fame. The Gran Turismo team should extend its remit to the classic racing cars of these days. Almost like the reverse of the success CoD had in updating their WW2 setting. Kind of like a Grand Prix regression kit.

And Naturally There’s Bond

No well-dressed Englishman should be without one

Surely what GT5 is really missing is a whole pile of Bond related cars, some of the most recognisable on the planet. Take the Aston Martin from Goldfinger, with all the trimmings naturally. The oil-squirting defensive weapons would cause chaos behind you, while the ramming units mounted in the bumpers would add a certain je ne sais quoi to the AI’s bumpercar mentality.

And Bond

Dirt racing would never be the same again.

Or how about the moon buggy from Diamonds Are Forever? That would be class. Obviously it has a top speed of about 5mph, which isn’t that great, but the funky arms would be useful for taking out any of the opposition.


Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Games: Gran Turismo 5


I Am A Leaf On The Wind – Watch Me Soar

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeow! My supercool stealth car takes to the air.

And I am flying. No Really. I know how Gran Turismo is the ultimate driving machine only in a box and not on the road and all that, and I know that driving is usually undertaken while firmly on the ground, but I am bloody flying. Because this road has little hills on it and I have just hit one at apparently nearly 200 mph and that’s enough to take all four wheels off the tarmac and there we go, that’s called flying. And once you take all four wheels off the road you’ve totally lost control of that car and you’re basically in charge of a pre-aimed ballistic object and you’d better just hang on and hope.

But everything’s alright if only because at this moment I am in the lead and all the rest of the cars, all of those 1,000+ lovingly crafted cars are behind me. And that’s all that matters. That and the small matter of radically reducing my speed as soon as those tyres hit the ground and I get round to regaining some small semblance of control. And after that it’s on for another five whole laps and eventual victory.

Yes. Racing in Gran Turismo 5 is a blast.

It feels significantly more like really driving (only about 5 times as fast and often in supercool cars) than even Gran Turismo 5 Prologue does. Here you can actually begin to feel the camber on corners, so your car has a sense of momentum and weight rather than just velocity, so it continues round corners when you take your ‘foot’ off the ‘gas’. The right racing line feels immeasurably better and more satisfying than anything else. Different surfaces and tyres affect your car’s behaviour, while each car has its own particular foibles and handling.

I Am A Rock, I Am An Island

But like any new flash car GT5 has its running in issues. For Gran Turismo 5 is an outstanding driving simulator entombed in a chaotic mishmash of gameplay and interface elements. Despite having taken over five years to develop, it seems that for every moment spent on lovingly detailing the cars, tracks and weather systems that comprise the actual driving bit, another moment has been stolen from the development of either the gameplay or the interface.

Gran Turismo 5 is so stuffed full of different elements that it seems no one has any idea of where they should all go or how they should fit together, either practically or visually. Which makes some necessary activities simply vaguely inconvenient, but others insanely irritating. And while they in no way detract from the core element of GT5, namely the actual on-track driving, they can make the process of actually getting to the grid fantastically annoying.

Initially it seems simple, once you decide to dump the ghastly intro movie, which merely reinforces the uncomfortable sense of underlying self-congratulation that lingers around GT5 like an unwelcome stench. You’ve got the traditional Gran Turismo modes, the career game GT Mode, the ‘just go racing’ Arcade Mode, and a basic Track Generator. And while the latter two are pretty self-explanatory, it’s only when you jump into the GT Mode that the problems start to occur.

GT Mode, quite simply, is a mess. It looks like a hyper-excited five year-old’s idea of what they want for Christmas. It’s got everything and it’s all just flung in there with no thought for which bits are the most important or how the various elements should fit together. And there’s this bit,and that bit, and another bit, and it’s all presented in the same breathless, unpunctuated tones your five year-old uses when describing the story behind a movie.

There’s the main racing game, some inexplicable GT Manager type game for budding race team bosses like Red Bull’s Christian Horner, Sébastien Loeb’s Rally School, Jeff Somebody’s NASCAR space, a bit of dirt racing, some karting, the practice area (basically Arcade mode within GT mode), a photo area, the car dealer section, the used car dealer section, and two separate car tuning and performance areas. Going through the mechanics of actually playing the game, as opposed to just jumping in and racing as you do in Arcade Mode, is unbelievably painful. Things that should be easy to do take masses of button clicks and screen changes. Things that should be inextricably linked are connected by the longest, most spurious journeys. And things that seem blatantly obvious just don’t happen. Add to this interface elements that don’t behave consistently and some simply baffling choices about car availability and you’ve got a game that makes it significantly more difficult to actually play than it should be.

Hate That Homescreen

Now I’ve played Gran Turismo 5 Prologue for a while, and various previous incarnations of Gran Turismo, so I know what I expect. And what I don’t. And what I don’t expect is an orgy of bloatware. It seems that where earlier editions of Gran Turismo set the agenda for driving games, GT5 is much more reactive, as aware of what the competition is doing as of the scale of its own ambitions. For instance, is the Rally racing element really an integral part of the game or a terrified reaction to the emergence of Rally Driving games like Dirt? Certainly if you compare the graphics and quality of the Rally section with, say, the Tuscan Night Drive, the former appears thrown together, far less well thought out, with poorer graphics and cars. Could it be that in the five years of self-obsessed perfection seeking development undertaken by the Gran Turismo team fear and panic became the dominant driving forces?

Could it be that after nearly half a decade of poncing around fondling cars and generally back-patting themselves, the development team suddenly realised that they really needed to deliver something and right now? And cut corners, and just stuffed everything into the game and slapped on the first crappy interface they found in a dumpster somewhere. Because that’s exactly what it feels like.

So What’s The Beef?

 

Gran Turismo 5 GT mode home screen

Garbacious interface. Have a guess how to start the game from here.

It’s tempting to say, where to start? If only because if I wanted to create an effective interface to the many, many features that comprise the GT Mode, I wouldn’t start from here. I’d start somewhere else. Anywhere else. Because this doesn’t work on either a visual or a practical level.

Simply put there’s no hierarchy here, no sense of clarity or importance. You’ve got three distinct levels of navigation and they don’t play well together. As the Prince says to Mozart in Amadeus, “too many notes”. Too much information. Overwhelming choice.

You’ve got Open Lobby the online mode, which is supposed to be the game changing element of GT5, buried next to the main Class A game (where you get to drive the cars) and the Class B game (where you don’t).

You’ve got all the special sections (karting, rallying, race school, NASCAR and the utterly painful Top Gear section) lumped into one area and then almost hidden next to the licences. You’ve got the utterly pointless GT Auto section, which opens up into an area that looks like a badly designed photo booth website, overshadowing the far more useful Tuning Shop, which leads you into the hardcore car customisation system. Meanwhile, elsewhere, there’s my garage full of cars.

Now all this would be vaguely acceptable if only the areas were integrated properly. So I could, for instance, easily reach the Tuning Shop from within the Class A section, allowing me to customise my chosen car without having to undergo an orgy of button mashing after discovering I need a little more tuning to get by in a particular race. Or get to the Dealer or Used Car areas so I can purchase the right car for a particular constrained race. But no, no thought seems to have been given to the mechanics of actually playing the game (as opposed to the mechanics of driving). It’s annoying to have to continually trawl your way through the Used Car area every 10 minutes hoping against hope that some kind of truck will turn up so that you can participate in one particular level 5 event.

Winning an event gets you credits and experience points which enable you to buy better cars and enter more events. It also gives you new cars as prizes. But even this has evolved from the streamlined experience of previous games into a convoluted multi-button mash irritation of a process. Instead of simply showing you the new car and then automatically putting it in your garage the process has ‘evolved’. Now a tiny numerical indicator appears beside the useless Car Delivery icon. Clicking on this reveals a ‘ticket’ for a new car, which looks like a metro ticket with the minimum amount of detail. You click on this and a dialogue box asks you whether you want to ‘use this item’. This doesn’t mean ‘would you like to get in this car and drive it’, but ‘ would you like to redeem this ticket and get a new car delivered to your garage’. So you click ‘yes’ and then, and only then, do you get the cutscene showing you the new car. So a previously simply system is replaced by one that requires three additional button clicks and gives you no discernible benefits. You can only imagine what was going on in the mind of the idiot who dreamt that up. And after winning two or three events and undergoing the torturous process of getting two or three new cars you wish nothing but badness on them.

And then there’s the Circle control. Sometimes it works as you imagine, cancelling an action or taking you back one screen. Sometimes it doesn’t. And you’ll never know which is which. And it will infuriate you. Beyond imagining.

And Yet . . . And Yet

All of this pales into insignificance once you start driving. It’s fantastic. Far more visceral and real than previous versions. And it’s competitive. You begin to have some inkling of what it’s like on the grid of a real, quality car race. I love the karting, the way the handling is completely different from that of the cars. I love the way you finally get a sense of the incline and camber of the hills and corners.

Sure you’ve still got the same crappy AI driving the opposing cars, making some driving more like playing dodgems than anything else. This makes starts something of a lottery and it’s still annoying to make an audacious start, avoiding crashing into the cars beside you, only to have some mindless car slam you off the circuit as it plows its way automatically around the circuit. But ultimately it doesn’t detract from the glorious joy of the driving. Of racing. It’s exciting, exhilarating and fantastically rewarding. I’ve been playing it for hours and hours.

And I’m flying.

[review pros="Outstanding driving simulator, Great racing" cons="Clumsy interface, Irritating processes, Bad IA and bad AI" score=80]