A conversation about naming a production company

J: thinking of registering a new business name and domain name
Magnetic Paradox
a Magnetic Paradox film
B: i'd call my company "fried on the cross"
you wanted me to google magnetic paradoxes didn't you
J: like Colonel Jesus Home Fried Chicken
B: im just full o' catholick lurv today
bouncing off thick necked pilgrims like a ball in a pachinko machine
J: not really
i guess i should check it out
oh man
it's a real phenomena
i guess i have to read up on it now
sheesh
thanks a lot
cunty
B: isn't it something like the magnetic behaviour of water molecules?
J: i don't know
i was trying to describe the paradoxical nature of reality like tai chi and wu chi. tai chi or yin yang being the polar opposites of the magnet and wu chi being the fact that the universe is one, whole complete and connected. the paradox being that while these perspectives are seemingly contradictory, both actually are tru at the same time.
i started with magnetic unity
but doesn't sound as good
so i changed it to magnetic paradox
coz it sounds better
the other option is...
One Big Magnet
a One Big Magnet film
B: or, Axis: Bold as love
DUN DUN DUUN DUN DUN DUUN FOXY!
J: Bord as Rub
B: [grin]
J: xD
B: ive got it! Magnet II: Electric Boogaloo
or the possibly over wordy: when two tribes go to war, they have a stalemate and discover themselves spiritually
J: Magnet IV: The Reckoning
B: Magnet Balboa
J: Liquid Hot Magma
on yo momma's back
B: Magnet: Dragnet
J:Debbie Does Magnet
B: Magnet Redux
Magnet Boxset
J: oooh i like that
good band name
B: Ah! I've got it!
Lost in lamagnet
J: almost as good as MoFaux
B: how's that for meta
J: Lost in LaMagnet
wow, that's profound
B: or coming back around to the start: Eastern bloc G-spots: The space between two poles
"Hitler? Meh" when Poles become neutral
Warsaw moresore
sigh
J: ha ha ha ha ha hahahaha

Guitar Hero: On Tour DS

The good:
Extremely cheap way to play Guitar Hero
Duel mode extends play
Expert level remains a complete bastard

The bad:
Peripheral falls out: Restart
Hand cramps
Not realistically playable in public

7/10

At first, a portable version of the Guitar Hero series seems a far more legitimate way for Activision to bang out more SKUs than its cash-in “Rocks the 80s” and “Aerosmith” titles. Just imagine, rocking out on a train full of grey-faced commuters, shining brightly from your cramped little corner with the flaming glow of rock!

However, the grim reality is that playing this game in close quarters with strangers is beyond the confidence of most. In fact I’d even call it freakish. Plain embarrassing. It’s not just the handicam-like “Guitar Grip,” the loud tapping of your pick-stylus or even the cumbersome wrist angles that make the game so embarrassing. It’s the fact that even a handheld Guitar Hero has the ability to make you head bang and foot stomp like a club punter. There’s a good reason Activision didn’t include a proper guitar controller. You’d back-hand some old lady in the face pulling windmills.

It’s true: activating star power is something that should only be done in shelter of one’s own home, where any company is familiar and hopefully dosed with social venom. So it follows that the only types of people who should feel the need to take Guitar Hero around with them are those who have no console of their own, or those who are in fact children. What’s more, I’m yet to encounter an adult who, when publicly reaching an unskippable portion of their DS game that requires speaking, blowing or clapping into the mic, doesn’t simply close the lid and stare shamefully out the window. Whereas kids can run around shopping malls with their willies out and a face full of ice cream.

Anyway, let’s hope that this game was designed for kids, because for anyone with decent sized hands, Guitar Hero: On Tour will cause some serious cramps. And I don’t mean a mildly uncomfortable burn that can be relieved with a quick shake of the wrists. After a decent session, you’ll feel like you’ve done 200 reps on one of those grip-trainer devices that metal-heads keep in their bedside drawer next to their skull rings and string lubricant. I’ve read various remedies for the cramping, like lying down with the DS on your chest. My personal solution is to cradle the DS partly with your picking hand, but I digress. Advice like this shouldn’t really need to be given.



Also, maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, the “Guitar Grip” only costs a $15-$20 premium on your average DS game. The pack includes an adjustable grip, a pick stylus and a game case. It even includes those cute little stickers for customising the faceplate, as well as an extender to make the peripheral fit better into the DS Phat.

Sadly Activision have chose to omit one essential accessory: a folded up blue post-it note, much like the one I have shoved into my DS’s GBA slot to stop the stupid thing falling out at the slightest touch.

I’m not exaggerating to say that the pressure required to depress a piano key will dislodge this thing from its slot. Even worse, when this happens it’s not a simple matter of pushing the grip back in and continuing to rock. No, it’s a power-off and restart situation that will no doubt have the more excitable fake-guitarists amongst us throwing emo-wobblies. To be fair, the DS Phat attachment fits nice and snugly, so there’s one more thing the original design does better besides scratching easier and looking crappier.

Wow, all that and I haven’t mentioned the gameplay itself. Well, it’s pretty much Guitar Hero with four buttons. That may sound like it makes things easier, and you’d be right in thinking so: I got through Hard mode from start to finish without failing, cramps and all. But anyone that says that Expert mode is too easy is a liar and probably cruel to animals. It’s a jarring jump in difficulty.

The major differences in the play mechanics are all touch screen based. To play notes, you now strum an on-screen guitar with the pick stylus. The whammy bar is activated by holding down the stylus and moving it on the screen, while star power can be activated by blowing on the mic or pushing any face button. I also happily discovered that during faster passages it’s possible to simply scratch the stylus up and down without lifting to simulate tremolo picking. It’s definitely easier on the hands.

The 28 songs will certainly seem limited to those used to downloadable content, but obviously we’re dealing with issues of cartridge space here. Signs of space saving abound, from the compression of the songs themselves to the fact your fictional band has become a three piece with a singing bass player. They’ve also taken a poppier edge, choosing to pepper their set with tracks by Maroon 5 and Smashmouth. But stay your misguided accusations of selling out, friends: the vast majority of tracks are the same fret-abuse you’ve become accustomed to.

Activision also managed fit in a guitar duel mode, which most Guitar III players will be familiar with. The big additions for the handheld come in the form of mini-game “attacks” which can be earned by playing sequences of notes. When performed, sometimes your hapless opponent won’t be able to see their guitar until they sign a teeshirt, blow out a fire, or repair a string. It can be more annoying than fun, but at least it earns the game another play through.

Further extending the life of the game are of course the practice modes, which again include guitar and bass, as well as multiplayer, which lets you play face-off, co-op and the aforementioned guitar duel.

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t a startlingly complete package for the price. If you’re under 14, or some unfortunate pituitary disorder has rendered your hands miniscule, you can’t really go wrong with Guitar Hero: On Tour. Just make sure that when you’re touring, it’s somewhere devoid of other people and their pitiless, judging eyes.

Universe at War: Earth Assault Xbox 360

4/10

The good:
Aliens as main characters
Three distinctive campaigns
Overly large walking robots

The bad:
Clearly ported to console for scale rather than demand
No pinpoint control
Terrible menus and displays
Flatlining live community


Just think about it for a second: the number of person-hours that Petroglyph must have put in to make a tightly controlled RTS for the console world. Crucial hours, for a company that is still a mere shadow of the all Command-and-Conquering Westwood that birthed it. All that belly aching over the replacement of hot keys, unit selection, map movement. Optimising engines, streaming off disk. Integration into Xbox Live. When it comes to playing the console port of Universe at War, two things come to mind: how well those controls work, and what a colossal waste of time it is.

It’s been said many times before, and probably far more eloquently, but PC gamers are just different to console gamers. It’s perfectly normal to be into both, but trying to breed the two together is plain bonkers.

My personal theory on why it will never work is this: PC gamers like to see themselves as a little bit like God. They also tend towards a little idiosyncrasy we like to call “being a control freak.”

After all, what other disorder could force a mind to eschew the time honoured system of one player controls one character, and instead opt for controlling thirty or forty players at the same time, plus all the factories that pump them out. Then, instead of enjoying the thrill of combat, life, death and overly complicated combos, make the gameplay about the management of said units. Then give these units budgets, deadlines, acquisition goals and pastel pink neckties. Your average console gamer is thinking at this point: “Why not brief them on bloody Powerpoint then make them file a report at the end, for Christ’s sake?”

But all you need to do is observe PC gamers, constantly rearranging their RAID arrays, overclocking their graphics cards, bloating their system with more RAM than a Himalayan goat herder, and the truth becomes clear: It’s not that PC gamers don’t like gaming, it’s just that, where possible, PC gamers like their games to be just a little bit more like work.

To be fair, most PC owners see console gamers as a bunch of guffawing thigh slappers but that’s besides the point. Regardless of intelligence, the average console gamer is going to liken the Universe at War experience to playing an FPS via email.

There’s several reasons why: The commands, though neatly shoehorned into the XBox controller through a series of rotating menus, need to be effectively learned by heart to be used quickly. Making this extra difficult is the fact that each command description takes a few seconds to appear. When it does, it’s in text that makes the menus in Dead Rising look like twenty foot billboards. So for most of the game you’re going to be choosing commands using icons that resemble their function about as accurately as a wavy line represents the Pacific ocean.

Other hot key replacement devices include the ability to access your building queues, construction and research trees without selecting a unit, which work well and expand depending on what units you’ve built.

Navigation is equal parts joy and misery. There’s a speedy expandable mini map that will scroll your view in real time using the right stick, but there’s also a jump to hotspots button that becomes less than useless during multiple skirmishes. When the crap hits the fan, as it invariably does, you’ll be rocketing around the map, trying to select five grey ant men who are several counties apart, all the while wishing for just half a keyboard and a zoom function that could move somewhere beyond, “really really close,” and, “really close.”


“Forget all that, tell me how Petroglyph has managed to once again assemble three unique and astoundingly balanced classes, but this time in an entirely fresh and creative intellectual property,” I hear you demand. Well, they have done that, but why should it be applauded? Reviewers have laid games like Tomb Raider onto the rack and pulled its arms off like a trapped spider for adding three new features to the same game six times. RTS developers do it and we weep with joy like they’ve resurrected Jesus from fossilised DNA.

Universe at War makes no attempts to move away from the old RTS three balanced army approach. In Command and Conquer: Generals you had the Americans, the Chinese and the GLA. This time, you’ve got Novus, the Hierarchy and the Masari. The Novus have the swarming abilities of the Chinese and the “tunnelling” (except this time it’s teleporting) abilities of the GLA. The Hierarchy have the big eff-off Walkers that are in all the marketing and the other large but powerful units like the USA. Ok, the Masari have an interesting Light-mode for defense and Dark-mode for offence thing going on, which is certainly new outside of shooters.



Of course, RTS stalwarts all know that defence mode is just shorthand for, “getting annihilated, but slower” and will discover that this fact is no less true when playing as the Masari. I’m in no way saying that any race kicks more or less arse than the other, but applauding an RTS developer for making its races balanced is like applauding a seagull for stealing chips. It’s just what they do.

It would be great to be able to talk about the multiplayer at this point, as there is a cool looking “Conquer the World” mode where you can challenge for different territories, as well as traditional skirmish matches. But the fact is, your average console gamer could curse their way through eight games of COD 4 by the time your first match is ready to begin. We’re already a few weeks into general release and no one’s out there, folks, which is a pretty good indicator of how it’s going to be in future.

The only thing that’s left to describe is the story, which is the usual hammy mix of war and sci fi movie references pushing along an admittedly interesting and novel plot. The Masari certainly suffer from a bit of underdevelopment, but the forgiving learning curve and relatively short campaigns mean that things rarely get boring.

So here’s the rub: If you are a PC gamer who opted to drop your tax rebate on a console instead of upgrading for the umpteenth time, there’s enough to like here. It’s another predictable RTS from a likeable bunch who do this stuff pretty well. If you’re a console gamer, however, you probably stopped reading after the first paragraph anyway.

Viking: Battle for Asgard Xbox 360

The good:
Huge battles
Dragons
Copious gore
Visible entrails

The bad
Sound clearly done by interns
Shallow combat

5/10

Someone needs to start knocking a few points off those God of War scores. Not because they’re bad games. They’re awesome; the flying entrails, the huge baddies, the interactive boobs… But by succeeding with such a simple formula, now everyone is coming along to take a piece of the tripey pie. Take Viking: Battle for Asgard.

Sega clearly decided that first quarter 2008 was some sort of gore porn sweet spot and pushed Viking out the door just a couple of months after Nihilistic’s Conan, like an embarrassing kid brother. But when Viking inevitably runs home in tears, you’ll wish it had stayed indoors until it was less of a girly spazz. After all, we’re in the limb hacking brute category here folks. Things can be tough.

Your overactive pituitary monster of choice is named Skarin, who you’ll be pleased as punch to know is once again a shirtless tattooed hulk with a penchant for torso deconstruction and timed button pushes. He has a Link-like disdain for vocalising anything more sophisticated than grunts, but actually goes one better than Link in this respect by also refusing to concern himself with any weapons that couldn’t be repurposed to chop firewood.

When we meet Skarin, he’s done himself a mischief and is bleeding to death in a field. Luckily, a goddess named Freya happens to be in the neighbourhood and decides to recruit Skarin to build an army against this monstrous horde of undead that have been giving her no end of grief. There wouldn’t be much of a game if Skarin didn’t then set off to build said army.

Speaking of Armies, surely there isn’t a gamer among us who didn’t watch one of the battles in Lord of the Rings and think: “Man it would be freaking sweet if there were video games like this.” And shut up, I know they churned out two of those special feature bloated buggers, which even featured tens, yes TENS of characters on screen at a time.

What developers Creative Assembly have done with Viking, is take those tens of onscreen characters, and multiplied them by as much as TEN. This means that, screen size allowing, all you’ll see of Skarin is a bobbing ponytail and a little blue x icon indicating that someone is at the front of the appendage removal queue. Everything else is a sea of blue skinned undead and rather similar looking soldiers. Plus maybe some smoke and fences.

So, Viking is built around these massive onscreen battles, with the screaming and the swords and those massive horns that sound like God’s own flatulence. Who isn’t beating their own battle drum by now? But before you go lacing up your volleys and scootering off to Big W to slap down four twenties, a ten and two fives, there’s one thing I should tell you: The big battles are only about 10% of the actual gameplay time. Or even 9% if you don’t count the slowdown.



Most of the time, you’ll be watching Skarin gambol happily across the countryside like Julie Andrews on horse pills, occasionally stopping to cleave off a head or bodily tear open the door off a ribcage shaped prison until the rain stops and the birds can sing again. No, really.

Still, why can’t this be fun too? Getting around the impressively sized maps is easy using numerous “leystones,” which transport you to your desired location without a loading screen in sight. Most of what you’re fetching only amounts to keys, troops and gold, but there is a definite sense of progress as you turn your two button combos into threes and fours.

The stealth parts of the gameplay are also well handled, at least in terms of gameplay. Sure, on the surface it seems ridiculous: Skarin unsheathes his sword and axe about as quietly as a box of cymbals being kicked down a flight of stairs and carries a glowing amulet that might as well be a big blue searchlight, but the first time you charge five metres and subdivide an enemy hornblower, you’ll be grinning like the sick puppy you are, guaranteed.

There are more of those grins: when you first cast some magic in a large battle and notice it affects all your allies. When your armies square up and the camera sweeps across the battlefield, allied dragons circling slowly overhead. When you power up your lightning all the way and zap a giant.

But then, probably about mid way through the second map, you’ll be fighting off about five shielded zombies and think, “Dude, this is more like battle of Ass-guard, am I right?” You’ll realise that for all the gore, the combat is just plain unsophisticated. When you’re squaring off against multiple foes, it’s just quick attack forward, block, quick attack back. Repeat. Hell, Mark of Kri did this sort of thing a hundred times better, and that game is six years old now.

Then you’ll really start to notice just how god awful the sound is. The complete lack of ambient town noise. Or soldier chatter. You’ll barely hear celebrations, or cries, or even murmers above the scripted voices. The raging sea has three metre swell but is practically silent. Your parries sound damn near to placeholders. Then sometimes, you’ll kick open a door and there will be no sound at all.

What it all amounts to is the very definition of a rental. You’ll have seen all the good bits by the second map, and the final battle isn’t even worth the slog to reach it. The central idea of a beat em up in which you build up an army for a huge battle is worth a look to just about anyone, but don’t bother staying past the main act. There aren’t even any boobs.