#oneaday Day 548: Capcommotion

I'm a bit surprised by the way Capcom have been acting recently. I always used to figure them for a company that had their collective heads screwed on pretty well, and with their Capcom Unity (geddit?) site showing a much greater effort than many publishers to engage with fans, it looked like they were getting 21st century marketing right.

Then came the Mega Man Legends 3 project, where the community would be able to play an active role in the making of the game. The Capcom Dev Room page allowed users to submit ideas — many of which would end up in the final game — as well as see how the development of a game progressed from start to finish, complete with all the trials and tribulations it faced along the way.

The other day, the project got cancelled on the grounds that its transparency was proving to be "quite concerning" for the rest of the company. This, to me, is somewhat worrying, and suggests that Capcom has something to hide. It could be something as simple as the fact that they actually haven't done any real work on Mega Man Legends 3 since Keiji Inafune left last year, or it could be something altogether more sinister along the lines of the Team Bondi fiasco.

This isn't the only mis-step Capcom have made recently, either. The Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D save game issue stank from start to finish. To say that it's "not possible" to erase a save file on a 3DS game card is absolute nonsense — erasing a file involves writing to the card, and in order for the save to be on there in the first place the card must be written to. So there is absolutely no way that it would not be possible to reset the save data, yet Capcom persisted in perpetuating a lie to the community.

And today we learn that there's an "Ultimate" edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the way, featuring 12 new characters, 8 new stages and a spectator mode. But existing DLC characters aren't included in the package, naturally. And the "Ultimate" edition is a standalone retail product for $40, not a DLC expansion, which it really should be. I should be excited by the fact that Capcom have finally added Phoenix Wright to the game after a considerable amount of fan requesting, but instead I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to them re-releasing a slightly-enhanced version of a game which only came out in February.

Sadly, this practice is becoming more and more common with this generation of consoles. And while I perhaps wouldn't go quite as far as my friend Mr Peter Skerritt in saying that this generation "sucks" — there's a lot to like, after all — I do believe that the obnoxious business practices that more and more publishers are starting to adopt are going to come back and bite both game companies and consumers in the ass at some point in the very near future.

I mentioned something along these lines on Twitter the other day in reference to Rockstar's comments that L.A. Noire still isn't finished despite having released its "final" piece of DLC. The response I got was surprising; the practice was defended on the grounds of it making good business sense. If we're at this stage already where blatant money-grabbing and the cutting of content from games in order to hold it back for subsequent DLC or new retail editions is defended by the community because it makes good business sense, it's a sad situation indeed. We gamers are supposed to be giving money to the software companies we want to support because we like their products, not bending over and asking in what ways they can violate us next. I'm quite happy to buy a game and never resort to piracy, but with more and more early adopters being punished by having to pay full whack for a product and then being stung for DLC down the line, it's understandable if people feel disillusioned by the whole thing.

That said, not all hope is lost — since picking up a gaming PC I've been using the consoles far less. And while there is DLC for PC titles, many PC gamers are a lot less patient with this sort of bullshit — largely because there's an enormous and active modding community out there more than willing to provide content of a higher quality than Activision's $15 map packs for free. And there aren't many PC games I've played recently where there's a big hole for some DLC — I intend on going back through Mass Effect 2 at some point, so I may feel differently after that, though.

The most frustrating thing I find is that people don't seem to realise or care that they are being taken advantage of. We can complain all we like about Capcom releasing the same game twice in the space of nine months, but we all know that there are enough people out there who will happily part with their cash and give Capcom the sales figures they need to justify rolling out this obnoxious business practice again and again. We can bitch all we like about paying $15 for Call of Duty map packs, but people pay it, again showing Activision that it's Okay to Do This. And we can point our fingers and say L.A. Noire's add-on cases should have been in the game in the first place, but I bet most players picked them all up just out of curiosity if anything, giving Rockstar the green light to do more in the future.

It's refreshing to see that not all of the industry is operating in this way, though. Indie developers are flourishing — and the community is taking to them. Indie RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World along with awesome roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor topped the Steam sales charts on their day of release, and in less than a week on sale BoD/CStW has equalled its sales from a year and a half on Xbox Live Indie Games. Minecraft continues to go from strength to strength. And Frozen Synapse proves more popular than its developers could have ever dreamed.

Right now, I'm thankful that the indies exist, because with every day that passes, each new "teaser reveal", each new embargo, I'm losing more and more respect for the big publishers.

#oneaday Day 547: Bully Boy

After the recent Steam sale, I've started playing Bully again. Or specifically, I'm playing the PC version of the Scholarship Edition for the first time — I originally played the game on PS2.

Bully remains my favourite Rockstar game. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that I like things that are set in schools. I'm not sure why this is, but so far as settings go, high schools are one of my favourites. It's why I enjoy Persona, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and any number of terrible teen coming of age movies. (Mean Girls represent.)

But there's plenty of other reasons to like Bully, too, chief among which for me is the fact that there are no guns anywhere to be seen. The Grand Theft Auto series is great, for sure, but we all get tired of guns once in a while. Bully's arsenal — made as it is of boxes of eggs, firecrackers, stink bombs and a slingshot — captures the slightly absurd nature of high school conflicts and pranks nicely while still fulfilling the necessary "weaponry" function in the game.

Then there's the fact that amidst all the drama and silliness of the storyline, you're still a schoolkid and are expected to not get into trouble and to attend class. You can break both of those rules, of course — this is a Rockstar game, after all — but it's actually to your advantage to attend the classes in the school, as they unlock various special abilities through fun little mini-games. They also provide a means to get to know the characters of the teachers, who actually play a relatively minor role in the story but are still there in the background — discovering the art teacher's insistence on painting her in increasingly slutty poses, for example, is an entertaining moment.

My absolute favourite thing about Bully, though, is the scale of it. It's not that it's huge — it really isn't. It's probably smaller than Grand Theft Auto III. But in that scaling down, you get a lot more density. There's a lot more to do in a much smaller area, meaning you're rarely left wandering aimlessly in the desert like in Red Dead Redemption (a game which really didn't resonate with me for some reason — perhaps I'll give it another shot if it ever gets a PC release) unless you specifically choose to wander aimlessly in pursuit of the inevitable hidden goodies.

Bully found itself on the receiving end of controversy from People Who Didn't Understand It when it was originally released. Such was the fuss kicked up by people judging it purely by its name that the UK version ended up being renamed Canis Canem Edit ("Dog Eat Dog") — later, thankfully, renamed back to Bully for the Scholarship Edition. Yes, it's quite violent considering schoolkids are involved — but there are consequences for your actions, even if it's just "you have to run away and hide in a bin for a bit." And you're punished more severely for hitting little kids or girls — not to mention the fact that indulging in acts of random violence really doesn't achieve anything, unlike in Grand Theft Auto, where it can sometimes net you cash or other goodies. There's no blood in Bully, either — all combat is of the "playground brawl" variety, usually ending with one party or the other suffering a wedgie or a palmful of spit to the face rather than, you know, death. Really, there's nothing in the game that you wouldn't see if you dared to walk through the gates of any comprehensive school in the UK.

Having only intended to boot it up to see what the Scholarship Edition was all about, I find myself wanting to replay the whole thing in depth. So I'm going to do just that, and I'm off to do so right now.

#oneaday Day 546: Spot the Music

Hi, Americans. I hope you're enjoying Spotify. As you may be aware, we lucky Brits have had it for some time and have been enjoying its considerable charms. It's great to see you lot get the chance now, too.

Of course, you've had plenty of services like that already available, such as Grooveshark and RDIO. You also get to play with Turntable.fm while we don't, which is a bit of a shame. As such, though, this means that Spotify is having to work a bit harder to impress you — it's working in some cases, others not.

I have a Spotify Premium account — £10 a month for ad-free unlimited playback plus the ability to use the mobile app to stream over 3G (risky given the patchy coverage in most of the UK) and/or download playlists directly to the app for offline listening (much better). Since signing up for it, I don't think I've bought a single thing from iTunes. I haven't needed to. Most of the stuff I'd want to listen to — and plenty I don't — is freely available for me to grab, stick in playlists and listen to at my leisure. There's plenty of music to keep a continuous soundtrack spinning while I do my day's work, and more than enough to set up some decent driving playlists for long journeys.

The service and its software isn't without one or two flaws, of course — you can't search playlists on the mobile apps and the interface is inexplicably the opposite way around to the native iPod app on iOS, meaning you'll find yourself bringing up track information a lot when you actually mean to just close the player screen and get back to the menus. The desktop client's habit of just disappearing and updating itself without telling you it's updating is a little unnerving, too, but at least it keeps itself up to date. (I say that — it's currently attempting to download the latest updater manually and claims that a 5MB file is going to take 16 hours to download.)

But all that aside, what Spotify provides for me has many benefits. Firstly, it's a means of listening to music that I know and love without having to root through iTunes libraries or — in many cases — stacks of CDs that are buried in a cardboard box somewhere. Secondly, it's a means of discovering new music — having listened to an album I like, taking a journey through the "Similar Artists" links is often quite eye-opening. Thirdly, and I can't emphasise how nice this is, it makes having to manually sync an iOS device almost unnecessary, software updates notwithstanding. iOS syncs have a habit of taking at least three times as long as you think they will, particularly if you really need to be somewhere and you suddenly realise you don't have any music on your iPod/have the "wrong" music on your iPod. Spotify's offline sync system isn't the quickest in the world, admittedly, but at least you can do it wirelessly without having to faff around with cables and USB ports and computers. Which is nice.

Spotify, then, is very much a Good Thing. And I'm delighted that I can now share links to tracks and albums with my friends in the US, as well as allow people to subscribe to my playlists. I already noticed that my "dungeon crawling" playlist where I just dumped a whole bunch of metal without really paying much attention to what it is has picked up a subscriber in the form of the fine Chris Whittington — guess I better be careful about what I publish from now on if people are watching! (Damn, no more Lazy Town?)

#oneaday Day 545: Tempting Fate

I don't believe in any particular religion, as I believe most of them are, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard says, philosophies with some good ideas and some fucking batshit crazy ones. As such, I have no interest in some omnipresent, omniscient god figure knowing when I'm sleeping and when I'm awake (unless he's Santa Claus, in which case he should come on down and bring presents) — but I do have an idle belief in the concept of Fate. That is, the idea that certain things happen for a "reason", whatever that might be. Said reason might not be anything big or huge — or it may not become clear until much, much later — but there's usually a reason for the seemingly random shit that goes on.

At least, it's nice to believe that when everything goes wrong. As I've repeatedly mentioned, last year was Bad. Thinking that everything going disastrously wrong and me hitting rock bottom had some sort of Grand Purpose made it mildly easier to deal with.

That said, I'm not sure I believe in Fate quite so much as to think that you can tempt it. Consequently, I present to you a probably-not-comprehensive list of Bad Things That Have Never Happened To Me, and I shall report back next week if any of them Do Happen To Me. (If they don't, I'll probably forget this post ever existed.)

I have never had an illness so serious it required hospitalisation.
Or an operation.
I've never broken a limb, either. (Though I did sprain my ankle once. That fucking hurt.)
As a result, I've never been under the influence of anaesthetic, local or general. (Unless I just don't remember.)
I've never been in a fight. (Obviously I'm counting from my adult life here, otherwise we'd have to take the time I punched one of the school bullies in the face right in front of the headmaster into account, and as awesome as that was, it clearly doesn't count.)
I've never shat myself. (Ditto, only without the bit about the school bully.)
Or pissed myself. (As above.)
Or been sick into/onto somewhere/someone that it is not appropriate to be sick into/onto. (Dustbins totally count as appropriate vomit receptacles, incidentally.)
I've never been fired. (I quit the job in which I was suffering workplace bullying before that would have become a possibility.)
I've never been in a car accident. (There was one time I was in my mum's car and we bumped into another car head-on (it was their fault, nested brackets ftw) at approximately 15mph, but like the school bully incident, this doesn't count.)
I've never been in any kind of transport accident.
I've never seen a horrifically injured or disfigured person.
Or a dead body.
I've never been injured by another person, deliberately or accidentally.
Or killed.
And I've never killed or injured anyone either, apart from one time I whacked someone in the balls not very hard with a LARPing sword, but he was kind of asking for it, and it was an accident anyway.
I've never had anything stuck up my arse that wasn't supposed to be there.
I've never had a sexual-related injury…
…or disease.
I've never run over a wild animal or bird.
Or a child.
Or a fully-grown person.
I've never been a victim of a crime. (I may have had my wallet stolen once, or I may have just left it on the bus. Either way, First Southampton couldn't find it.)
I have never dropped my phone down a toilet. (I dropped a pen down there once, and a flannel, but nothing else.)
I have never been abducted by aliens.
I have never witnessed a zombie apocalypse.
I have never witnessed the end of the world.
I have never been struck down by an angry god who is furious at my lack of belief in Him yet strong belief in a concept as amorphous as "Fate".
Okay, we're getting silly now. Enough. If I'm dead next week, please read out this post at my funeral and add the line "He went up against Fate, and lost," or something similar. Or just make up something cool and say I said it.

#oneaday Day 544: Om Nom Nom

After a delicious meal at sort-of Japanese restaurant chain Wagamama, I find myself inspired to write about food. Food is delicious and, after all, essential to survival, so you may as well enjoy what you eat.

I'm not a fantastic cook, really, despite having spent a memorable period working alongside my friend from university and beyond Mike Porter in a pub kitchen. We made a mean prawn cocktail and only occasionally accidentally deep-fried an Ultimate Combo when no-one had ordered one in order to have something delicious to munch on ourselves. (There was also the memorable time that a bunch of food was being thrown out and Mike ended up with a ridiculous number of rib-eye steaks, finding himself eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for some time. And the time we had an apple sauce fight that culminated with the pouring of apple sauce into each others' chefs hats and a strong temptation to pour it down the hairy and perpetually-visible bumcrack of our (female) companion in the kitchen.)

My one redeeming trait in cooking is the fact that I'm willing to experiment and improvise. I've made some delicious spaghetti sauces, curries and chilli con carnes using said talent, and they're never quite the same as each other.

All those foods are staples, of course, and pretty much anyone who's been away to university knows how to prepare all of the above as a means of dining reasonably nutritionally well on a teeny-tiny budget. But over the years, it's become clear that the interpretation of each recipe varies enormously according to each person. I, for example, never put onion in anything because onions are actually little Satan poos, and no-one wants to eat Satan's poo. I may have made that up, but onions still taste like shit (not actual shit) and make me retch if I can taste them, so I avoid them at every opportunity.

I was quite happy with my simple chilli recipe, too — tin of tomatoes, packet of mince, tin of kidney beans, bit of chilli powder — until I went over to a friend's house one evening and he made a chilli that was somehow infinitely, indescribably more delicious than any I'd ever made. His secret? Using twice as many tins of tomatoes as you "need" and then allowing them to reduce over a much longer cooking period. Also, adding bacon and/or chorizo.

Even within relatively simple foods, then, there is a huge amount of variation. This goes right down to the simplest of the simple dishes. Take two people who enjoy Bovril on toast, for example — one may put a thin film of the beefy, yeasty black stuff on top while the other may enjoy the curious enamel-stripping mouth-burning sensation inflicted by putting slightly too much Bovril on a piece of toast. (Incidentally, try Bovril on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. It's amazeballs. Assuming Bovril doesn't make you gag.)

I'd like to cook better, and once I get back into my own place again I have every intention of exploring and trying things out. Cooking can be a pain in the arse, but it's also immensely satisfying when it goes right — to look at, to hear bubbling away in the pot and, eventually, to taste. And if you fuck up, well, you've learned from the experience — plus hey, the Chinese takeaway is only just down the road if the worst comes to the worst.

"Healthy" food can eat a dick, though. At least the interpretation from a lot of people, which is either "undressed, extremely dull garden salad" or "fat free, flavour free bullshit". I'm fully aware that it is, in fact, possible to make delicious and healthy foods — the BBC Good Food magazine have a range of low-cost books with some excellent recipes designed around this very principle for example. But with healthy eating it's all too easy to fall into a bland, boring trap of flavour free nonsense and forget how amazing it is to eat something with a bit of sugar or salt in it.

Food, then? Delicious when prepared correctly, enough to make you wonder if it was worth bothering with if prepared incorrectly. This has been a message from the Ministry of Stating the Obvious.

#oneaday, Day 543: Farewell for Now, Mac

Soooo… I may have killed my Mac. To be fair, it asked for it. It had been grinding to a halt to the degree of unusability to some weeks, necessitating a restart approximately every half an hour. And yes, I'd done all the usual repairing permissions and letting it to its overnight UNIX cleanup routines to no avail.

So today I decided that enough was enough and I was going to reinstall the bastard. This would have been a straightforward process were it not for the fact that my DVD drive had failed a month or two back, getting firstly to the stage where the only means of getting a disc out of the slot was to use gravity, and finally to the point where if a disc went in, it sure as hell wasn't coming out again. I nearly lost my Deathsmiles soundtrack CD to that — fortunately, the nice people at the Apple Store helped me retrieve it.

This is the third major fault my iMac's had in the space of about four years. My hard drive failed once, my graphics card failed once, and now my DVD drive along with whatever was causing it to be incredibly slow.

Have you ever attempted to reinstall a DVD-based operating system onto a computer with no optical drive? I don't recommend it, because it, well, doesn't work. I tried every possible approach to it — I tried Apple's own Remote Install software which it turns out only works on certain models of Mac, mine not being one of them, apparently. I tried cloning the OSX install DVD on to a USB flash drive, but that also didn't work, failing at the verification stage and thereby failing to create a bootable flash drive. I tried installing with my iMac in target disk mode, and that went well for a while until the Mac that was running the installer decided that in order to finish the installation it needed to restart, failing to take into account the fact that it wasn't actually installing OSX onto itself. Then I tried installing with the other Mac in target disk mode in order to use it as an external DVD drive. This worked for a little while, too, until the dummy Mac decided that it didn't feel like doing work any more and ejected the DVD in the middle of the install process, causing the whole thing to fail. (You'd think there'd be some sort of failsafe in there for if something like that happened, really. But no.)

So I'm now left with an iMac that won't boot that I can't install OSX onto without lugging it to my nearest Apple Store (12 miles away) and forking over at least £100 then waiting however long it takes them to replace the SuperDrive.

Looks like I'm going to be a Windows user for a while — I have my gaming PC and my netbook for now, so they're going to have to do. This is also the reason for the recent lack of comics, incidentally — the software was just so excruciatingly slow on the Mac that I really couldn't be arsed to faff around with it.

Oh well. If I've learned one thing from this whole experience it's that everything I learned during training for my job at the Apple Store (Macs don't break! Macs don't slow down like PCs do! Even if there is a problem, it can be resolved easily! I like to touch Steve Jobs on his gnarled old willy! Forget that last one.) was, in fact, as I suspected slightly at the time, complete and utter bollocks.

I'm not too pissed though — as I say, I've still got two other computers that I can use for now, and if and when I do get the SuperDrive fixed the Mac, when it's working, does make for an excellent workhorse. Another example of Apple's advertising being bollocks, though — remember the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" adverts that implied Macs were more fun while PCs did all the boring office shit? Yeah, I totally do all my work on Mac then play on the PC. Nice one.

Ah well. Have a rest, Mac. Lord knows you've earned it. I'll help you get better soon.

#oneaday Day 542: Irritating Creatures

Everyone has some kind of flying, buzzing, biting, stinging thing that they find particularly annoying. In fact, most flying, buzzing, biting, stinging things are particularly annoying. Spiders skitter around and hide, jumping out when you're in the middle of something and causing you to spill staining drinks all over the place. Wasps buzz around your face repeatedly, muttering "shall I sting you, shall I sting you, shall I sting you?" and then fuck off out of the window. And mosquitoes are completely invisible but you can always hear them.

There are two creatures, though, that are so immensely pointless that their already annoying natures are amplified a billion bajillionfold. They have elements in common, but they're also quite different. They fly, they don't bite or sting and they don't really make much of a noise. But they're infuriating.

I am, of course, talking about the daddy long-legs and the moth. Both follow the immensely annoying pattern of "Ooh! Light! I must fly towards this! Ouch, shit, it's hot! Ooh, light! Ouch! I'm on fire a bit. Maybe I should fly around and bump into things some more. Hey, a TV! That's a light. Maybe I'll sit on it. No, I think I'll fly around and bump into things a bit more."

I mean come on. Seriously. It doesn't help that having a daddy long-legs or a moth fly into your ear when all the lights are off and you're not expecting it is one of the most terrifying things in the world — good luck sleeping after that happens — but really, what is the point of these creatures? Daddy long-legses (well, you tell me a better plural) supposedly possess an incredibly lethal venom but have absolutely no means of administering said venom, making them absolutely completely and utterly pointless. (My evidence for this factoid is, I admit, a Ricky Gervais stand-up show, so I do take this supposed knowledge with something of a pinch of salt. But still.) Unless their big purpose in life is just to repeatedly headbutt television sets and fly into people's ears. If that's not an argument strongly against the concept of intelligent design, I don't know what is.

Now, I'm sure there's a reason for them existing in the whole food chain and whatnot. But if that's the case, can't they please just for one night not fly in through my window and be irritating? That'd be just lovely. I'm pretty sure that the whole food web that Nature has worked out involving these creatures doesn't involve a Hoover as the primary predator.

Or perhaps it does. That'd be weird.

#oneaday Day 541: Kombo Broken

It's a sad day today as I hear from my good buddy Ryan Olsen that Kombo.com is no more, with the URL now simply redirecting to GameZone.com, who purchased the site a while back.

Kombo.com holds some particular personal significance for me, as it does for many of the great friends I made while working for the site. Compared to many of the grizzled old veterans who had been working on the site since 2005, I was a relative newbie, only joining the team last year.

As most of you probably know by now, last year was Not a Good Year. Having been forced out of a job I genuinely loved by bullying management at the end of the previous year, finding employment in a primary school 40 miles away from where I lived, discovering that yes, Aldershot is indeed a shithole, even when dealing with 8 year olds, I quit my job in March of 2010 to attend PAX East (to this day quite possibly the best few days of my life EVAR) and around a similar time I started contributing to Kombo.com as a news editor. A short while after PAX East, my wife and I separated and I found myself alone in a flat I couldn't afford with no job and seemingly no prospects of finding one that wasn't supply teaching — a career path which would have likely ended rather abruptly with me flinging myself off the nearby Itchen Bridge had I pursued it.

As time went on and my finances dwindled, writing for Kombo every day — even if it was at US-friendly, UK-antisocial hours — gave me something stable to cling on to. This was something I desperately needed during those difficult months. There were many days when I found it very difficult to function as a normal human being, so badly was I hurting. But when it came to time to sit down and work my shift at the virtual news desk, that all went away for a few hours. It was just me, GamesPress, a lot of Chrome tabs and the Worst CMS In The World.

One of my favourite things about working for Kombo, though, was the people I had the good fortune to meet as a result, all of whom I'm happy to count among my friends today. All of them have gone their separate ways since September of last year, when most of us departed from the site due to its heading in a direction that wasn't for us (with some of us forming our anarchic rainbow unicorn collective The Big Pixels, still ably maintained by Geoff Calver). But we all still talk to each other daily — through email, through Twitter, through Facebook, through G+. It's great to see that Kombo, despite being a relatively small site compared to the giants out there, managed to give a lot of people the foot in the door they needed to pursue a career in various parts of the games industry. Some went into PR. Some went into development. Some still write on a hobbyist basis while pursuing other careers, and I write professionally.

It's also been nice to see that diverse members of my groups of friends online knew the name Kombo — even people that I wouldn't necessarily have expected to. The site will be missed, and not just by those of us who wrote for it. It's the end of an era and — sadly — the end of some people's portfolios (archive.org notwithstanding) as the old content seems to have vanished altogether.

Kombo.com gave me a leg-up into the industry and it's part of the reason I write about games as my full time job now. I'll miss it, and I invite you to doff your caps and raise a glass as its flame goes out for the last time.

#oneaday Day 540: Googlopoly

It's strange how the dominance of some companies (Facebook, Activision and, occasionally, Apple) is seen as a negative influence, yet in other cases (Google, Valve and, occasionally, Apple) their prevalence is seen as very much a Good Thing. This is particularly apparent when it comes to looking at Google and what it offers to the denizens of the Web.

Up until a while back, I'd flitted between various email addresses on a semi-regular basis thanks to moving house a lot and getting a new broadband connection in every house. New connection from whichever company had the best deal at the time meant new email address, and it became a running joke between my brother and I that I would eventually get to the point where I'd have an email address for every day of the week.

Fortunately, I managed to nip that in the bud, first with a Yahoo account and then with a MobileMe (formerly .mac) account which, I hasten to add, I got for free during the time I worked at Apple (and a little while afterwards due to them apparently not figuring out I didn't work for them any more until almost a year later — wish they'd carried on paying me, too, that would have been nice). Anyway. I ditched the Yahoo account because of the ridiculous amount of spam it attracted, and Yahoo's spam filters are beyond awful. I used MobileMe and was quite happy with it for a while, as I hadn't used an IMAP account before and it proved to be very useful, particularly when the iPhone came along.

But then I discovered GMail, and since then, I find it very difficult to understand a couple of things: firstly, why people are resistant to Google when it offers a usability experience of such an order of magnitude better than everything else on the market; and secondly, why more people haven't just ripped off Google's ideas wholesale.

Take something as simple as the way you manage your inbox. It's very easy for one's inbox to become completely flooded with bullshit, with unread counts tumbling (err, upwards) into the thousands, particularly if you're subscribed to any mailing lists or get sent endless press releases. It's tempting to select all and delete everything, but you just know that if you do that, you'll really need one of those emails at some point in the near future. You could file it, too, but then you run into the problem of getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about your filing systems, wondering if a "Friends" folder is good enough or whether you'd rather subdivide it into individual friends… and so on. But no — in GMail, we have the wonder that is the Archive button, which makes the email go away but doesn't delete it. That way, you can find it by searching, but it doesn't clutter up your inbox any more. Genius.

And talking of searching, the most frustrating thing about MobileMe Mail's otherwise pretty good web interface is the fact that you can only search one folder at a time. This is absolutely useless if you want to use it for the purpose of finding out which fucking folder you put that really important email in. In GMail, it's a snap.

You can download all attachments at once. You can preview files in your web browser. You can set up your browser to redirect mailto: links to GMail rather than your soon-to-be-defunct mail client. And the fact it's web-based means that you can get at it from anywhere.

And this, of course, is just GMail. I have to confess that I haven't used some of Google's other services such as Google Calendar a great deal, but I have been spending some time with both Google+ and Google Docs, and frankly we're at a stage now where, for the average user, standalone productivity software is nigh-on irrelevant. Assuming you have an Internet connection — and with broadband and 3G adapters so affordable now, chances are you do — then you have access to all your stuff from anywhere.

The downside, of course, is if your Internet connection fails, or if Google's servers fall over (like they did the other night when they ran out of disk space on the server which stored G+ notification emails) then you could have a problem. But in my time using Google's various services so far, I've never had a problem so serious it compromised my productivity — and most of the time, it's fixed within a matter of minutes or even seconds at times.

Most importantly, though, I don't feel like Google wants to be my sole window onto the Web, which is where I think it differs from Facebook in quite a key way. Zuckerberg's Facebook wants to be the only destination that people will ever need on the Web — hence all the apps, brand pages, games and other bollocks that clutters up the once-clean and simple service. Google, on the other hand, wants to help me out with things I need to do, and then set me loose on the rest of the Web — perhaps sharing some of the cool things I find via G+. It facilitates rather than dictates, and for that reason, barring them doing something really, really stupid I predict that Google services will be a big part of my online life for some time to come.

#oneaday Day 539: Rogue Agent

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd started playing Alpha Protocol, one of a number of low-cost acquisitions from the recent Steam Sale, now sadly (or perhaps not so sadly — everyone's credit cards likely want a bit of a rest) over. I've spent a bit more time with it now, so I'd like to share some further thoughts on it.

Roundly panned on its release for its dodgy AI, "crap" combat, bugs and gameplay flaws, Alpha Protocol is a game that many people passed by — and unfortunately, due to its mediocre review scores and poor sales that resulted from said review scores, it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel. And that's a real shame, as look past the few flaws there are and there's actually a very good game.

Things start well, with a sequence that introduces you to the main game mechanics, including shooting, sneaking, gadgets and conversation. It's pretty early on that you're faced with the game's distinctive conversation system, somewhere between Mass Effect and Fahrenheit in its execution. Possible approaches or "moods" of conversation fill a Mass Effect-style wheel in the middle of the screen, so you're not quite sure exactly what protagonist Michael Thorton is going to say, but you have an idea of the general gist. The twist is that there's a pretty tight time limit to decide what to say next, cutting out any of the usual agonising over decision-making in morality-driven RPGs — here you have to think on your feet, take what you feel is the most appropriate approach and then deal with the consequences, which could range from someone liking you a bit more to subsequent missions being markedly different.

There's a pleasing variety of ways through missions, too, with experimentation being rewarded with Achievement-like Perks which bestow specific bonuses on Thorton throughout the game. In some cases it's possible to talk your way around a firefight, even getting potential enemies on your side as allies at times. In others, it's possible to create noisy distractions and then use the ensuing chaos to sneak round. And it's also possible to go in guns blazing if that's your approach too.

The combat may not be the best in the world — the sticky cover system is a bit cumbersome when enemies move into close-quarters range, for example — but it's certainly not as bad as some reviews I've seen have made out. The problem, I think, is in people assuming it's a third-person shooter when in fact it's executed like an action RPG. In many ways, as it happens, it reminds me of titles such as Deus Ex and even older late-90s titles such as Mission: Impossible on the N64.

In fact, the whole game has the feeling of a late-90s stealth-action-adventure game, albeit one with Unreal Engine 3-powered graphimications. This isn't a bad thing, as I'm of the firm belief that gaming — particularly PC gaming — in the late 90s and very early 20th century — was my favourite era of games. And to play something that seems to capture the feel of those games while bringing the visuals and cinematic presentation up to date? Well, that's pretty much all I can ask for from a game.

I realise, of course, that the reasons I like Alpha Protocol may, in fact, be the same reasons why some hate it. Some may say gameplay mechanics should move on and learn from games that do the whole shooter-RPG combo "correctly", like Mass Effect 2. And they're probably right — Mass Effect 2 is, after all, excellent. But I've beaten Mass Effect 2 before, and I've never beaten Alpha Protocol — never played it before this last week, in fact. And while it lasts, I'm enjoying it a great deal.

So there.