More Hard-Hitting Current Affairs

// Filed under: Life, Verbiage, IZ on Tuesday July 15th 2008, 3:52 pm

So, Interzone had a formal day the other day. Many photos were taken, not least of them this one, of the Interzone GUI Team:

As this image was passed around the office, it was remarked that it looked remarkably like a cast-shot from a hardcore Australian legal drama. “GUI Legal!” Ellen shrieked, demanding that character roles be written immediately. “Legal drama! Hah!” I snorted, raising my fingers to the keyboard. “More like a low-budget inner-city cop show. More like…”

Interzone City. It’s a tough place. Hell, it’s a shit-hole. And to police a tough place, you need the toughest. You need the roughest. You need GUI Metro.

Detective Darren “Motherfucker” Yeow: Trained from an early age in the ways of drinking, smoking, and drinking while smoking, Darren worked his quickly through the ranks. His unprecedented combination of bribery and violence became the first of many multitasking skills that would later turn him into one of Interzone City’s finest. When the chips are down, Darren shoots first, shoots some more and never stops to ask any motherfucking questions because if anybody in this stinkhole of a city knows where the bodies are kept it’s him, and that’s probably because he left them there. Darren’s noble heart hangs heavy with justice, and even heavier with cigarette tar.

Constable Tone “Rookie” Prior: Fresh-faced recruit from the Academy, Tone showed up on the doorstep with a bag full of optimism and a bullneck that resisted even the best efforts of a enraged “Choker” Hawkins. His sunny disposition has crowbarred open the corpse-piled windows of the GUI Metro offices, with his Fresh Fruit Fridays and Tuesday Book Clubs earning him drunken abuse, if not outright approval. On the job Tone is alert and inquisitive, always ready to hand out a pamphlet or offer advice on removing a stubborn bloodstain.

Senior-Sergeant Andy “Choker” Hawkins: Nobody knows how long the hard-bitten Hawkins has been slugging it out in the trenches of Interzone City, but everyone in GUI Metro knows that when the shit hits the fan, they can always rely on Andy to choke until he can’t choke no more. When he’s not on duty, Andy stalks the dirty city streets, chewing on handfuls of bullets and muttering quietly to himself until the dawn breaks through the smog, glinting off of his bristling stubble. Then it’s time to head back to the office, rip a half-empty whisky bottle out of Darren’s slumbering grasp and count the minutes until he can once more clamp his iron grip around the soft, pasty-white neck of crime.

Constable Richard “Grinner” Kong: Quick with a smile and even quicker with a switchblade, Grinner hides his mysterious past behind an unflappable set of perfectly polished teeth. Supposedly expelled from the Academy, he was saved at the last minute by Darren “Motherfucker” Yeow, who took him under his cigarette-stained wing and made him his constant, smiling shadow. Nobody knows what possessed Darren to put his neck out, and Richard isn’t talking – except with his knife.

Doctor Cameron “Cameron” Royal: The youngest graduate in history from the Bonesaw Institute of Medical Adequacy, “Cameron” is a reclusive genius who claims the morgue as his own. Able to dissect a frog at fifty paces, Cameron’s medical discoveries have saved the detectives at GUI Metro hours of painful criminal beatings, and saved a comatose Darren from alcohol poisoning on more than one occasion. Rumour has it he sleeps in a body bag, though the last person to try to check on a slumbering Cameron quickly found themselves on the receiving end of experimental neck-reduction surgery. If Cameron isn’t at work – he’s probably dead.

Lieutenant Benjamin “Kneecaps” Hammersley: With his no-nonsense haircut and quiet economy of movement, you’d often be forgiven for thinking “Kneecaps” Hammersley was more interested in sipping his bubble tea than ramming a screwdriver clean through the soft knee cartilage of crime. There are lines that even the hard-drinking men and women at GUI Metro can’t bring themselves to cross. But sometimes, crime needs to pay. Sometimes, crime needs to learn a lesson. Sometimes, crime needs to be crippled and paralysed, lying whimpering in an alleyway as it is brutally beaten with a tyre iron, and then fed alive to squealing bloodthirsty pigs. And when that time is now, Benjamin is the man you turn to.

GUI Metro. Tough cops for a tough town.

9:30 Thursdays.

// 5 Comments

Let Sleeping Blogs Lie

// Filed under: Random on Friday February 01st 2008, 9:24 pm

Complacency steals over me, a soft blanket made entirely of the dust of good intentions. I sleep under its warming cover, happy in my filth, and enjoying the quiet satisfaction of my own fulfillment. And why shouldn’t I? As I move in with a beautiful woman, as I work hard at my new job - what would I have to talk about? What would I even say? I smack my lips unconsciously and roll over, for my sleep is long and deep and happy. There’s nothing to vent about anymore - no ire to bestow, no bellyfire to awaken the fingers and entangle the keyboard.

And yet - something stirs.

Someone approaches. Someone… someone calls.

Subject: CAD
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:29:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Ian Moldovan [vampdow@yahoo.com]
To: Tim Colwill [tim@timtekindustries.com]

I just stumbled upon a page of yours where you talk about Tim Buckley’s Ctrl-Alt-Del and calling it sexist and insulting. I just want to say that you could not be more wrong. If you actually knew what Lucas was thinking at that time, then you would understand why he was saying the things he was saying. And I agree with many of the things he said there, and I am a complete and utter feminist. So please, in the future, do a little research and get a brain before doing this sort of thing.

Twitch.

Twitch.

Subject: RE: CAD
Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:25:52 +0900
From: Tim Colwill [tim@timtekindustries.com]
To: Ian Moldovan [vampdow@yahoo.com]

Dear Ian,

Thank you for your prompt response to my comic posted on the internet ten months ago. I am writing to you today to humbly beg your personal forgiveness.

When I placed that comic onto the internet, I was not aware that you were in close direct and personal contact with the fictional character of Lucas Davidowicz. I had no way of knowing that somewhere out there was a person who actually knew what Mr. Davidowicz was thinking better than I did. I deeply and sincerely apologise for misinterpreting Mr. Davidowicz’s actions and motivations. I hope that in the future I will not be so arrogant as to presume that I am able to comprehend the thoughts of a fictional character on a deeper level than another reader.

I know now that because my opinion and interpretation is different from yours, that I must have been wrong. I accept that, and I have taken it to heart. I would count it as a personal favour if you would continue to email me with your turgid and ill-thought out opinions, that I may take them on board and call them my own. It would be a huge honour to receive this level of moral guidance from you, sir.

It is my deepest hope and wish that in the future I will be able to understand gender issues and relationships on the deep and complex level that you clearly do. Your agreement and support of an idea is the most important thing to me, and I promise to you now that I will spend the rest of my days in ceaseless pursuit of your approval. It is clear to me that because you agree with something, it must be right, and any thoughts to the contrary are deviant and inexcusable. I accept this, and I hope that with your help I can work to become a better person, and a better feminist.

I also promise to you now that I will endeavour to research issues more thoroughly before commenting on them. My comic, which expressed my thoughts in detail and with illustrated examples, was clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I accept that the fact that I have been closely following CAD for several years means nothing to you, and I am working to change that. In the future I will prepare several chapters worth of background material and submit it to you in triplicate with a standard lead time of fourteen (14) working days for your vetting.

I hope that you will forgive me, and work with me in the future to help me improve. Perhaps with time, I too can reach the staggering levels of ignorance, arrogance and terrifying naiveté that you display.

Your fan,
Tim Colwill

Oh, internet.

Ohhhhhhh, internet.

I am risen.

// 5 Comments

A Review Four Years Too Late

// Filed under: Video Games on Friday October 05th 2007, 9:16 pm

A month or so ago, I had a series of interviews with Interzone Games for the position of World Designer. I didn’t get the job, unfortunately - but during the course of the interviews, I was asked to write up my thoughts on the early game experiences of some MMO’s that I had played. Only really having any substantial experience in City of Villains, and having played enough (read: ten minutes) of Ultima Online to establish that doing something so crazy as walking outside of town was a medically bad idea, I figured I may as well get the fuck over myself and sink my teeth into a trial edition of World of Warcraft. So I teamed up with the beautiful and delightful Jess, to explore the lands of Kalimdor and/or Lordaeron for the princely number of 14 days. And here is the result.

World of Warcraft is a ridiculously well-crafted game, and this much is evident right off the bat. The opening cinematic for each class is so over-the-top and clichéd that it made me choke on my tea - but I must say that I absolutely love the fact that they did it in real-time, in-engine flythroughs. I’m not usually a big fan of game introduction movies taking place in-engine, but since they already took the time to blow us away with the initial CG movie I’ll allow it. Even if that CG movie was ridiculously heavy on the hated, hated Night Elves.

I took instantly to the fantastically intuitive question and exclamation mark system. Even if you haven’t played Diablo II, which is basically where it’s lifted from, it’s a pretty universal understanding of attention and makes it very easy to see who you need to be talking to. I also really like that silver marks appear over the heads of people who have a quest for you that you’re not capable of doing yet - it’s a bit hand-holding to be sure, but that’s just what newbies need at this early game.

What is particularly annoying however is the slowly scrolling quest-text that the NPC’s dump on you - I’m a particularly fast reader in any case, but it was just agonising waiting to see what I was actually required to do. Once my friend told me about the option to turn the scrolling off, I set that straight away. I was very surprised I couldn’t just click the text to bypass the scrolling in any case, even without changing the options - it’s the logical thing to do when presenting players with a lot of unfolding information.

I also love being able to see clearly what rewards a quest offers. That’s very neat, especially being able to see when a quest’s reward is clearly not worth your time. The clear expectation and reward system is very friendly but the geographical directions could use a bit of work. There were more than a few occasions where the unclear directions and incredible sameness of the tileset confused me - and when your character is wandering on foot all the time through wilderness where impossibly unrealistic amounts of wandering cougars want to kill you, this can get pretty annoying. I’m a much bigger fan of the City of Villains approach of highlighting exactly where you need to go and telling you exactly how far away from it you are.

On the subject of exploring, I love that it rewards you with experience for travelling places and discovering things. It was a genuine pleasure in many cases to open up new areas and the incentive of bonus XP, however meagre, is very nice. I found the notion of exploring new areas much more appealing than actually taking quests in many cases, though I noticed that other people seemed to spend a much longer time grinding on mobs before moving on than I did, which seemed odd. I surmised that this may be why I was having slight amounts of difficulty taking some of the later mobs - my skipping of the exceedingly repetitive quests was coming back to haunt me.

When it comes to the subject of the quests themselves, this is where I have the most issue with the game structure. All of the early quests - and my friends tell me, most of the later quests - are basically unsubtle, blatant timesinks with little to no variation, following a very clear standard template. Some of them are really fun to do but after starting five different characters and working them to level ten or so it becomes horrendously tedious - not to mention the long periods of walking between all quests at a very, very slow pace.

Some of the class-specific quests are really excellent. I got to take part in two Shaman spirit quests and the concept and execution are really neat. It’s this sort of race/class depth that allows World of Warcraft to flex its quest muscles and do some really interesting things, and I wish they were more common instead of being forced to slaughter more respawning wildlife than the local ecosystem could possible support.

On that subject, the looting system is outrageously illogical - I need to bring someone back some boar meat and yet only one in every ten boars I casually slaughter has meat. The other nine boars are obviously made of fucking tofu or something. And especially irritating is that when you’re partying up with someone else, there’s always one of you who gets the quest items first and is then forced to follow the other one around helping them out - which is horrendously boring for all concerned. If you could share the requirements for these quests in the same way that all of you can contribute towards the X amount of Enemies killed quests, that would be fantastic. Instead you have to kill about 15 times more enemies than items you need and just hope that this tiger will actually have fur on it once it’s finally dead.

I really like the way you can share quests with others, so that they don’t have to go and pick it up from the NPC yourself. This is actually really convenient and saves a lot of time. I was slightly disappointed to note that you can’t actually complete a quest for someone else as well - this seems to me to be the logical extension of this mechanic, even if the concept is slightly abstract it would save another lot of time. Especially in partying situations where one of you needs to remain out in the wilderness because they haven’t managed to find any boars that actually had meat on them once they were dead.

I’ve noticed a lot of incongruity between the starting zones for the different races, to the extent where some of them have been really enjoyable and some of them have caused me teeth-pulling frustration. The Tauren starting zone, for example, consists of ridiculously huge expanses of plains that you need to walk across to get to your quests. This walking, which isn’t exactly helped by the horribly vague quest directions, means you’ll waste at least five minutes on every trip and end up getting attacked by every single critter that crosses your path. And the cities themselves are all up on immense, towering bluffs, which means you need to run a huge distance around them if you want to get somewhere on the other side. It’s just a huge, frustratingly designed zone and you can literally feel the hours slipping by as you plod slowly, Tauren-esquely to your destination.

On the other hand, the Troll and Orc starting zone is a positive delight. The quests themselves are slightly more varied, and much closer nearby than in the other zones. The landscape lends itself to the different quests being clumped nicely together, meaning a lot more can be accomplished in a shorter time, and the distances between places of interest are short enough to make walking between them a pleasant distraction rather than the chore it is in other zones. And pleasingly, there is a nice flow to the landscape meaning the eye is drawn to the paths you need to take, unlike the Dwarf zone for example where the incredible sameness of the snow-covered terrain led to Jess and I getting lost on a number of occasions.

Another thing that I found particularly frustrating was the lack of directions inside of the major cities. It was impossible to discover quickly where you need to be if it is your first time there because there is absolutely no direction. Want to find a shaman trainer in Orgrimmar? Why not wander from area to area, each filled with dozens of buildings and NPCs until you chance across the right one? I guess you could always ask somebody but the chat window is filled with hundreds of screeching morons hocking their wares. It’s simply frustrating and coming from a City of Villains system where all I have to do is open up the map, click on the NPC I want and then quickly fly over there, it was terribly frustrating for me.

What I took away most from my two-week World of Warcraft experience was a sensation of being stuck in a well-crafted, well-designed and beautifully detailed timesink. I found a lot to like about the game and the world, and I can very much see the appeal in playing with a large group of friends, but the phenomenal patience required to grind your way through the unsubtle repetition of it all, even at introductory levels, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was a pleasingly easy game to get to grips with and has taught me a lot about the nature of the early game hook – but it was a hook that in this instance I found all too easy to avoid. Everything I tried seemed like aesthetic variations on a theme, and though that is true to say of most other MMO’s I have played as well, the mechanics of that variation were just not enough to keep me interested.

// 5 Comments

Now With More Fried

// Filed under: Refried on Thursday October 04th 2007, 10:25 pm

Hello lovelies. I’ve just whacked together a new layout for Refried. I’d love to know what you all think, as the previous layout I basically threw together in five minutes. Blindfolded.

While being attacked by bears.

Anyway, take a look.

// No Comments

How I Stopped Fighting And Learned To Love City Hall

// Filed under: Life on Friday September 28th 2007, 11:36 pm

Back in 2005, when I was working at Coles Express, it was required that I wore a badge. But not just for identification purposes, no. Coles Express takes the wonderful opportunity to use my name as a ledge for the purposes of which to hang advertising. Fuel discounts, Fly Buys specials, there is nothing which the Company feels is too ostentatious to decorate your body with. But I had enough. I fought back. I wore this:

As you can imagine, the Company found this distasteful in the extreme. Not so the Customers, who laughed uproariously and thanked me for bringing joy to their small, insignificant and carbon-based lives. But alas, the Company was Always Right, and the badge was removed. Fast forward to 2007, and anybody fortunate enough to receive an email from one Tim Colwill could expect to find the following buried at the end of their email in tiny, tiny text:

Unencrypted electronic mail may not be secure and may not be authentic. This is the sum of most large tracts of small text that follow most business-related emails. As such, this large tract of small text is not likely to be read by most users and will be skipped over for a belief that it contains no new or relevant information. If you have received this email in error, please inform me by return email with the subject line “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”. A man will contact you by the usual method and provide you with further instructions. After these instructions have been carried out, destroy your computer by ejecting it from a fourth-storey window onto a large pile of unstable explosives. Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.

Alas, despite receiving several blank emails subjected “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”, and sending not one, but two, academics on a fruitless search for a man in a bowler hat at Berlin Central train station, this happy state of events could not be allowed to continue. The email signature was forcibly removed, leaving it empty, amputated and floundering in a sea of whitespace.

That is not to say that I do not understand the Company’s Position; I understand the Position with great clarity. I just long for a world in which everyone can tell the difference between bringing a bit of fun to a dreary commercial world, and sustaining punishing body blows to the reputation of the Body Corporate. Perhaps the Sparrow does still chirp at Midnight, somewhere out there in the tempting wilderness, where the long arm of I Don’t Think That’s Quite Appropriate Do You has no grasp.

To work; perchance to dream…

// 2 Comments

« previous entries

© 2007 Tim Colwill. All rights reserved. More information. Valid XHTML/CSS.