#oneaday Day 580: It’s 3AM, Of Course I’m Phoning It In

I’m back from Gamescom, highlighting the marvel that is the modern public transport system. This morning I was at Cologne Hansaring station, now I am in Cambridgeshire, UK, almost entirely thanks to public transport, which only let me down at the very last step of the journey as the supposedly 24/7 taxi firm was noticeably absent. (Thanks for the lift, Dad.)

German trains run impressively like clockwork. They’re regular and always on time, and once you figure out the confusing map of Cologne’s rail network (and the various variants of train available) you’ll find you can get pretty much anywhere in the city pretty easily. So long as you have a ticket and/or some change, of course.

Talking of change, I would like to take a moment to call out the Euro as one of the most irritating currencies I’ve ever handled. The notes are fine — the different colours make the different denominations easy to spot. But the coins are like well stupid innit.

The thing I like about English coins is that you can immediately tell how much money you’ve got from the colour and weight of your coins. Copper coins = rubbish. Silver coins = potentially OK, particularly if you have the big or oddly-shaped ones. Gold coins = sorted. The Euro, conversely, ditches the concept of silver coins in favour of its 10, 20 and 50 cent pieces looking almost identical (and gold) with such minuscule difference in size that you have to actively squint at them to work out whether you’re giving the impatient Currywurst salesman the right money. So the Euro can go do one, so far as I’m concerned. I guess you get used to it.

Now it is time to sleep. Back to “normal” work tomorrow, then signing the contract on new house this week, then moving all my crap very soon! That probably means I have to drive a van. I don’t really like driving vans. I’ve only done it twice in my life and it was unpleasant and a bit scary both times. But needs must and all that.

Ich gehe ins Bett. Guten Nacht.

#oneaday Day 579: The Littlest Hobo Journalist

I’m writing this sitting on a hard concrete floor outside a café because I’m using their Wi-Fi but I’m not confident enough in my German to go in and order something.

The fact that you can do this is pretty impressive, though. Laptops have been around for donkey’s years, but the ability to sit in another country, outside, on the floor, getting pins and needles in your legs, and access the Internet is pretty remarkable when you think about it. It’s certainly changed the way a lot of people can do their jobs. Journalists used to sit in offices, now they sit on the floor of German streets like netbook-wielding tramps. (Given the wild growth of my facial hair during my trip, that might not be an altogether inappropriate comparison. I’d shave, but I can’t be arsed at the moment.)

Gamescom is coming to a close, with today being the first of two days that are only for the public. The “entertainment halls”, as the public section is called, are markedly different from the relative peace and organization of the business area. Where the business area is clean, bright, not crowded and with no crap all over the floor, the entertainment area is the exact opposite in every sense. It’s dirty, dark, crowded and the floor is carpeted with discarded leaflets from a thousand different vendors trying to promote their products.

It’s interesting to see, though — having only really been to PAX and Eurogamer, there’s a marked difference in the way the public presentations are handled. For starters, rather than holding behind closed doors panel discussions like at PAX, game developers and publishers get up on stage and put on a show for the audiences right there in the show hall. There’s a lot of shouting, a lot of “call and response” audience interaction, and a lot of scantily-clad women flinging T-shirts into the crowd. I haven’t caught a T-shirt yet, but I did take advantage of the English language Guild Wars 2 presentation to sneak a go on NCSoft’s new WildStar MMO today — it’s really rather good and I suggest you check it out if you get the chance.

I never thought I’d say this, but I am tiring of sausage. Currywurst is awesome, and I really wish we had that curry ketchup easily available in the UK, but when sausage is the only kind of food that’s within easy reach (as appears to be the case once you’re inside Koelnmesse — easier said than done with the German security guards today bringing a whole new dimension of Jobsworthness to their interactions with the public) you start to tire of it surprisingly quickly, particularly when it appears to be a staple at breakfast time, too — honestly, I saw a guy yesterday having a plate piled high with nothing but about ten sausages. The guy obviously needed his protein.

I fly back tomorrow evening and I feel like I’m ready to. Cologne is nice and all, but I’m tired of being self-conscious about my German and the fact I don’t appear to know any nouns. It will be nice to have a rest in my own bed — but not for long, as very shortly I’ll be moving house, which is exciting and awesome.

For now, though, it’s time to go and find some food that isn’t sausage for dinner.

#oneaday Day 578: Booth Babe

Gamescom has been great fun so far and I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff, though it really drives home quite how sexist a lot of the industry still is, despite many positive steps having been taken and a lot of prominent females with important creative and business roles.

But still we’re cursed with the booth babe. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against looking at a pretty lady in tight form-fitting clothing in an appropriate context (if there is such a thing), but seeing girls in hotpants and thigh-high boots promoting Kaspersky antivirus solutions just seems a bit weird, and seeing World of Tanks with a bevy of scantily-clad beauties outside compelling people to come and play just highlighted the fact that some aspects of the industry are still firmly entrenched in the mind of a 12 year old boy.

This even extended behind closed doors in the business area — I won’t name specific names (largely because it happened a lot) but many booths had attractive women in short skirts staffing their front desks, and it was clear in many cases that said women weren’t part of the software company’s regular staff — particularly when you got inside the booth and saw the actual female members of staff dressed, for want of a better word, “normally”.

I’m sure there’s a reason for the fact that this still goes on — perhaps there’s some deep-seated psychological reason that people will respond better to attractive women — but we’ve seen plenty of evidence, particularly in the last 5-10 years, that gaming is not a male pastime at all. It’s not a female pastime, either. It’s just a pastime, a hobby, something to do for both genders — and the way a lot of people, both male and female, make their living. So for the industry to exploit women — real women, not rendered, polygonal women — in this way leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.

However, while features like The Top 10 Sexiest Booth Babes In The Universe remain traffic magnets for sites, the situation’s likely to continue. I know very well that if I spend tomorrow walking around the show floor taking photos of booth babes and then uploading them into a picture-heavy, word-light piece, I’ll likely create a day of spectacular traffic. But I find myself torn a bit between my own integrity and what makes, for want of a better term, “good business sense.” It’s all very well feeling like you’re taking a stand, but unless everyone does it it’s a largely meaningless gesture.

Maybe I’ll just hunt sexy cosplayers instead.

#oneaday Day 577: Einen, Eine, Ein

German (I wish my iPhone would stop autocorrecting that to “Herman”) is a funny language. I kind of like it, though as is often said, it’s not a very romantic language. You can’t whisper sweet nothings in German very well (though everything you say sounds like you’re talking dirty) and it’s full of harsh sounds.

My knowledge of the language is fairly limited, though I could probably get by if the average German didn’t already speak English as well as their own language. There is, however, one small problem, and that is the rather important matter of nouns.

It’s all very well being able to say “Excuse me please, I would like…” but what good is that phrase if you don’t have a word to put on the end of it? German is quite a literal language in many senses, in that a lot of nouns describe the thing they are quite well — the word for “nurse”, for example, is “Krankenschwester”, which literally means “ill sister”. The words for “entrance” and “exit” make it clear if they’re for walking or driving — “Eingang” and “Ausgang” versus “Einfahrt” and “Ausfahrt”. The German word for diarrhoea — “Durchfall” — literally means “fall through”, and the word for constipation — “Verstopfung” — seems very apt.

But it’s little things that are easy to forget. Desire a can of Coke rather than a bottle and how do you indicate that without pointing and grunting? (hint: with the word “Dose”, as I suddenly remembered out of nowhere today) How do you ask for your Currywurst (which, incidentally, are delicious) to be provided “to go” rather than to eat in? How do you indicate that you’d prefer a T-shirt to a hoody?

That’s what they need to put in travellers’ guides: a big list of handy nouns. Then even the most inept linguist would be able to get by just by bellowing “Schweinfleisch! Soße! Erdbeer! Rückgeld!” at members of the service industry. Though exactly what they’d end up with after asking for that particular combination of things is anyone’s guess.

#oneaday Day 576: Still Tiredscom

I’m afraid you’re only going to be getting half-hearted (but still daily) updates out of me for the next few days, largely ’cause I’m spending my days at the Gamescom expo over at the amusingly-named Koelnmesse, then spending my evenings writing everything up. I’d write more stuff up in the daytime but 1) I don’t have time and 2) Wi-Fi access as Koelnmesse costs 25 Euros per day. You’d think during a trade show they’d organise something for attendees.

I’ve spotted a weird thing since being in Germany — my thoughts have a German accent. When I speak German, a German can immediately tell I’m English — they have a strange sixth sense for that sort of thing — but in my mind, the things I think have a perfect German accent and, in some cases, German words too. Occasionally they’re the wrong German words because I just end up thinking of amusing words or phrases (“Ich besuche mein Grossmutter” always makes me titter, even though what it actually means is rather mundane) but they’re there, nonetheless.

Wandering around a country that doesn’t have English as its first language is akin to playing an MMO with no keyboard. You might be able to make yourself understood with basic gestures, but after a while you’re going to have to immerse yourself a bit and figure things out for yourself. I’ve now just about deciphered the confusing public transport system (though since arriving here, not one person has checked my ticket, making me regret the 7 Euros I paid on the first day) and can sort of recognise what certain shops and things are.

However much I know that “Notausgang” means “Emergency Exit”, though, I still can’t not read it as “Not an exit”.

Feurwehr!

#oneaday Day 575: Tiredscom

Well, I’ve been up since before 4am this morning UK time and am just now settling down into bed. I think it’s pretty fair to say that I have had A Long Day and am perfectly justified in feeling as exhausted as I am right now.

I wouldn’t change it for a thing, though — this kind of tired is satisfied tired, the satisfaction you get from knowing that you’ve done something that you enjoy, and that your efforts go appreciated. Compare and contrast with teaching for example, where your efforts frequently went without notice. Eventually as the profession drove me closer and closer to the brink of insanity I just stopped putting in that extra effort because it really wasn’t worth it. It didn’t benefit the kids, who were as irritating as ever; it didn’t benefit my colleagues, who were as stressed out as ever; and it sure as hell didn’t benefit me.

But we’re not talking about that today. We’re talking about the satisfaction and reward that comes with doing something that you enjoy. That reward isn’t necessarily monetary in nature (though it’s nice when it is) — it could be the simple sense of pleasure that comes from seeing your name in “lights”, from a kind word or from the knowledge that you’re building a good reputation.

Whatever it is, I encourage you to pursue it. Life’s too short to spend your time trapped in something you hate, however “practical” it might be. Follow your dreams and however tough the road might be, you never know where you might end up.

On that note, I’m absolutely knackered so the only road I’m following now is the one that leads to the bed. Night night.

#oneaday Day 574: Flugplatz

Well, here I am at Gatwick airport ready to bed down for the night in anticipation of getting up at some ungodly hour in the morning to get on a plane for Germany.

Yes, it’s Gamescom time and I’m approaching the impending event with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I haven’t been to many of this kind of big event, and the few I have I’ve mostly been in attendance as a consumer rather than a member of the press.

This time, though, I have a jam-packed schedule of fun and it’s going to be hard work, but hopefully a good time — and satisfying too. I covered E3 on the home front for the second time this year and that was fun, so I can only imagine what it’s like actually being there. Gamescom, while arguably not treated with quite the same level of “importance” as E3 is, is still a pretty big event and hopefully there’ll be plenty of cool stuff to see.

Quite when I’ll have time to 1) eat 2) sleep 3) write and 4) go to the toilet is anyone’s guess, however. I may have to do several at the same time.

As for tonight, my home for a matter of hours is the Gatwick Central Travelodge, which is currently undergoing refurbishment but manages to look surprisingly impressive for a Travelodge. The room is massive, for one thing — in fact it looks a little too big, as there’s a huge space in one corner filled with only a crap wooden chair — and it has air conditioning, which is nice. In terms of floor space and facilities it’s surprisingly on a par with several genuinely nice hotels I’ve stayed at that cost a hell of a lot more than £25 a night. It has scratchy toilet paper and crap bedsheets though — but given I will be beneath them (or more likely atop them — it’s boiling) for approximately four hours, if that, I’m not going to complain. I needed a bed for the night, and I have one.

And on that note, it’s good night from me. See you in Deutschland.

#oneaday Day 573: The Completely Subjective Guide to the Current State of G+ Games

So you’re on Google+ and you’ve seen with some trepidation that social games have come to the platform. Firstly, fear not, because all the game posts are confined to their own stream that is separate from the day to day social interactions. Said game stream needs some work — you can’t filter it in any way at the moment, for example — but at least it means your conversations aren’t continually interrupted with “HEY! I NEED SOME PAINTBRUSHES! CLICK HERE AND GET FREE GIFTS!” as they are on Facebook. The lack of the “Wall” as a concept on G+ also helps with this — interactions take place in a timeline, like Twitter, but with comments, like Facebook. It’s a good system.

But you want to know about these games, right? Millions of people play Facebook/social games every day and you’ve never dared take the plunge. So here’s a brief look at each of them, gleaned from myself taking a brief look at each of them so you don’t have to. I’m not pretending these are in-depth or even fair reviews, just first impressions from the amount of time an average user might take to decide whether or not to pursue playing a game further.

Angry Birds

You probably know by now whether or not you love or hate Angry Birds and its unpredictable physics model. This is no different from the norm. Well, there is one slight difference: the “teamwork” levels. Don’t get too excited by the prospect of multiplayer action, though — all the “teamwork” aspect is is all your friends’ stars being added together in an attempt to unlock further levels.

Bejeweled Blitz

It’s Bejeweled Blitz, the one-minute twist on traditional Bejeweled play. It features a tournament system and doesn’t hassle you every two minutes to share everything you’ve done. It does feature a completely unnecessary experience point system, however.

Bubble Island

It’s Bust A Move, demonstrating ably the first refuge of an unfortunately large number of unscrupulous social game developers: ripping off someone else’s game and reskinning it. It’s not a bad version of Bust A Move, but the fact it’s a shameless clone is a little grating.

City of Wonder

Clearly trying to be Civilization, right down to ripping off the things the advisors say when they’re suggesting what to research next, this doesn’t have the depth of Meier’s game. If you enjoy building cities without having to worry about pesky geographical principles or simulation elements, then you might like this, otherwise it’s one to give a miss. Weird art style, too.

Crime City

Absolute garbage. A game about crime should be about the thrill and the tension of potentially getting caught; here, it’s about clicking on things and watching progress bars. In essence, it’s Farmville, only with guns. This might sound great, but it’s actually awful. A waste of a potentially rich theme; avoid.

Diamond Dash

A reasonable puzzle game with a simple premise — click groups of 3 or more gems that touch orthogonally to make them disappear. Repeat for one minute. It’s sort of like Bejeweled Blitz but with a different mechanic. There’s a weekly tournament option like PopCap’s classic, but you have to unlock it by levelling up to level 3. Players who play this game more have an unfair advantage by getting automatic score boosts depending on their “experience” level.

Dragon Age Legends

Probably the best of the bunch in that it demands some degree of interaction on the player, and makes use of your friends in an excellent way. Dragon Age Legends is a combat-focused RPG where they player moves from battle to battle, engaging increasingly tough hordes of enemies in turn-based combat with up to two companions initially. The social twist is that these companions are your friends who are also playing the game, complete with the equipment and skills they’ve chosen to outfit them with — essentially a form of asynchronous cooperative multiplayer. For those with no friends, the game also provides a selection of virtual friends for you, too.

While not as deep as a “real” RPG, Dragon Age Legends goes some way to showing that traditional game mechanics don’t necessarily have to be sacrificed for the sake of making the game friendly to the social network audience.

Dragons of Atlantis

This is by “hardcore social games” specialist Kabam, and is one of the most tedious games I’ve ever played, not helped by the fact that the tutorial (disguised as a list of “quests”, as usual) goes on for approximately fifteen bajillion years and steps you through EVERY SINGLE STEP YOU MIGHT HAVE ACTUALLY WANTED TO MAKE YOURSELF ANYWAY with “rewards” along the way. The game is about building your city state and then kicking the shit out of other players, but it will take you a good few hours to get to a stage where you’re able to attack another player — and you may well have been bored shitless prior to that due to the fact that some buildings take 30-60 minutes of real time to build.

Dragons of Atlantis is mildly unusual among social games in that it features a real-time chat interface, though. The community doesn’t know the words “you’re” and “they’re” exist, and there seems to be an awful lot of people trolling for cybersex. There are probably better places to do this than in a public chat window that is two lines of text high in a tedious game about running a city that’s supposedly in Atlantis (I thought Atlantis was a city?). Also there are dragons, apparently.

Edge World

Also from Kabam, this game gets going a bit quicker than Dragons of Atlantis but is fundamentally pretty much the same game, only with a sci-fi skin. It looks like StarCraft but it really isn’t — you have no direct strategic control over your troops when attacking a base, for example.

Wild Ones

It’s Worms, basically, though victory is determined by how much total damage you do, not by who is eliminated first. You have a significantly more limited arsenal than in Team 17’s classic, though.

Unusually for a social game, it offers simultaneous online play. Most of the community appear to have never played Worms before, meaning you can assure victory for yourself by having a slight understanding of physics.

Zynga Poker

A decent implementation of online poker. Not much more to say about that really! As the reviewing cliché goes, if you like poker, you’ll like this.

#oneaday Day 572: Book ‘Em, T and the MGs… No Wait, That’s Wrong

I read a book over the course of the last couple of days. I like reading a lot, though I haven’t made a lot of time for it recently — it’s something you very much have to be in the right mood for, especially given the length of a lot of modern novels.

I’m glad that I’ve got back into it, though, and I have technology to thank for it — I have now officially read a whole eBook (or iBook if you want to be pedantic about it) on a portable device (my iPhone) and discovered that it’s a not altogether unpleasant experience. In fact, it’s actually rather convenient — it’s a lot easier to get comfortable when reading in bed holding a phone whose pages won’t flop all over the place or fall out if you lie in a weird position, lighting isn’t a problem with a backlit screen (unless you’re in the bright sunshine, but I generally prefer to read indoors) and, crucially, you don’t have to remember where you put the book down in order to carry on reading because you probably have your phone with you anyway. (It’s also nice to be able to see how many pages are left in a chapter without having to do that “flicking forward while carefully trying not to look at any of the words on the page in case there are OMG SPOILARZ on them” thing.)

The book I read was called Pandora’s Box by an author called Giselle Green. It was apparently the debut of this author, who has since been referred to as “the British Jodi Picoult”. I’ve heard Picoult’s name before but am not familiar with her work, so I was coming into this pretty blind, but the concept sounded intriguing, so I downloaded the sample (which turned out to be substantial enough to get me hooked, and then the full book was only 99p anyway) and got reading.

The story resolves around 40something mother Rachel and her 14 year old daughter Shelley. Rachel’s life is a bit of a mess — her husband’s left her, she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life and, most importantly, her daughter has a debilitating (and conveniently non-specific) disease that may or may not be something to do with MS. Despite this, she manages to remain upbeat and strong even in the most adverse conditions — her wheelchair-bound daughter, meanwhile, is mature, headstrong and stubborn.

Unfolding from the perspectives of both Rachel and Shelley, the story tells the tale of the days leading up to Shelley’s fifteenth birthday — the day Shelley has decided that she is going to take her own life in order to be free from the pain and suffering she witnessed a friend with the same condition go through a year earlier. It’s a tale based largely around characters, and Green creates some distinct, memorable personas to take us through the narrative. Rachel and Shelley themselves both have their own private issues which they let the reader — and sometimes no-one else — in on. But the supporting cast are strong too — Rachel’s obnoxious ex-husband being a particularly prominent example, being a character you really want to take a swing at at the first available opportunity.

It’s a real page-turner — the story unfolds at a good pace throughout, and each chapter is short enough to make you think “well, maybe I’ll just read on a bit…” before noticing that you’re actually halfway through the whole thing. It’s not perfect, of course; remaining spoiler-free, I’ll simply say that the ending is a little contrived, being made up of a series of events that are all a little too convenient given the realistic nature of the rest of the book. And the supposedly central theme — that of the titular “Pandora’s Box” (in this case being a box of knick-knacks and memories from Rachel’s eloping mother) and the Miseries within — is perhaps a little underused, or perhaps even inappropriate. Rachel is forced to come to terms with some past “evils” which had been left buried for many years, and Shelley is the catalyst for her eventual revelations, but the theme seems a little “forced” and I feel the story would have been better without this particular angle.

Minor gripes aside, the book was immensely enjoyable and I’m keen to have a look at Green’s other work — if this was her debut novel, perhaps she hones her craft to a finer point in her later titles. We shall see!

#oneaday Day 571: An August Sort of Gentleman

I hate August. It’s one of the biggest pain in the arse months there is. It’s partly through my own doing that it’s a pain in the arse, of course, but it’s also an unfortunate combination of things that it’s not particularly easy to do anything about.

The reason it’s a pain in the arse is that it’s always expensive. During the month of August, I have to pay my car tax, renew my car insurance, and get my car serviced and MOTed. When I lived away from home (which quite soon I will be again, yay!) August was also the month to renew the TV license and, if I was moving again (which I did every year for quite some time) find some way of scrabbling together a deposit on a new place to live.

This year is going to be no exception. Tomorrow it’s the annual “cross your fingers and hope the car survives” experience of getting it serviced and MOTed, and inevitably there’ll be SOMETHING wrong with it that needs fixing, which costs more money and time. While people are hitting it with hammers, or whatever it is mechanics do while they’re servicing your car, I’m also going to go and get my car tax done which, given the “Do It Online!” system that the government was so excited about when they introduced, should be an easy process, but unfortunately isn’t, largely because of the combination of other factors that August throws your way.

Boring factoid: you can’t renew your car tax online if your car insurance is about to expire, even if you’ve already had the renewal paperwork through. This completely negates the convenience aspect of being able to do your car tax online because you then have to go to the post office and queue for hours and ARGH.

I am going to beat the system this year though by only renewing my car tax for six months while renewing my insurance for a whole year. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, August!

Breaking up the month is next week’s trip to Gamescom in Germany, when I’ll be far to busy to worry about mundane things like tax, deposits and all that sort of thing. It’s fairly unlikely I’ll have any time to socialise (sorry, “network”) let alone think about things which aren’t happening RIGHT NOW in Cologne.

Following that, I’ll be moving house. This will involve handing over a large wad of cash to an estate agent (or possibly handing over a debit card and closing my eyes) but at the end of the process there’ll be a new place to live available to me. Which will be nice. But then I have to move all my stuff there. Which will not be nice. Moving house is stressful, but fortunately there are no time pressures this time around, which means I can take my time over bringing stuff in gradually rather than having to get everything done in one night.

(Incidentally, there are those who say that moving house is as/more stressful than the breakdown of a marriage/divorce. Having been through both I can say with some confidence that the latter is infinitely more upsetting and stressful than having to carry a lot of boxes and furniture into a van, sometimes throughout the whole night. The former may well do your back in and cause you to be completely knackered, but the latter does unpleasant things to your emotions and brainy parts, as my blogs from last year will attest. Just in case you were wondering.)

I’ll be happy when September arrives. When I was a schoolkid and later a teacher, September was a stressful time — time to go back to school. But as a “normal” person now with a regular job that doesn’t take six weeks off in the summer, it’s just another month — and more significantly, it’s the month after the pain in the arse that is August.

So sod off, August. You’re a pain in the arse.