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.

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.

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.

While being attacked by bears.

Anyway, take a look.

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…

Man, blogging! Who does that these days? It’s so passe. Anyway.

A little while back now, the Chaser team mixed a little fake motorcade together with some terribly, terribly fake security passes and a third pair of testicles, stuck a little Canadian flag on top and drove the whole crazy cake through the supposedly impenetrable $160 million security surrounding the 2007 Sydney APEC Summit. Understandably, this upset a few people - not to mention the boys themselves, who never expected to get past the gates.

After all, they were wearing Insecurity Passes with the word “JOKE” written on them in giant letters, and they were up against the biggest lockdown the nation’s most populous city had ever experienced. A lockdown that apparently equates a motorcade of black SUV’s with importance, but that’s neither here nor there. No, my friends, the real outrage facing the nation today, the real scandal here is not that $160 million dollars of taxpayer-funded extraordinary, draconian security measures failed to stop a team of 11 comedians - one of whom was dressed as Osama bin Laden - the real scandal is that these filthy, disgusting, and above all leftist fucks are laughing at terrorism, spitting on the grave of everyone who’s ever lost their life in a terrorist attack, and they’re doing it on my goddamn taxpayer money.

Or so Gerard Henderson tells me.

Gerard’s article is a real scroll-wheel turner, and basically only because it’s the most delightfully biased piece of opinionated trash I’ve heard since the last time I recorded myself trying to quantify the exact level of shit present in a single Ctrl+Alt+Del comic. Gerard’s main point is this little gem: It is not okay to make fun of terrorism because people have died from terrorism - a wonderful line right up there with other clinically small-minded arguments like “Burning the flag should be outlawed because good people fought and died for that flag”.

But not only is Gerard taking the time to come down from Moral Heights Luxury Apartment Blocks to tell us what is and isn’t an appropriate subject for humour, he’s also prepared a wonderful dissertation for us on how doing so was an abhorrent waste of taxpayer’s money. Thanks Gerard! He is obviously the most qualified to know - as the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute and former Chief-of-Staff to John Howard, he knows only too well the peculiar tang of wasted taxpayer money hanging heavy in the acrid Sydney air.

Oh, Gerard! Your enlightening opinion pieces speak to me in the illuminating manner of a shaft of light from a musty tomb; the lid on the sarcophagus cracking to reveal the screeching generational values of a thousand years past. I can actually see the paper on which ink was wasted printing your article aging before my very eyes, crumbling into dust almost as fast as support for the Liberal party plummets in the opinion polls (See what I did there?).

“THIS IS NOT FUNNY, TERRORISM IS SERIOUS!” you wail, spewing your Chardonnay out onto your copy of The Financial Review as you prepare to host one of your high-powered lunches for the Prime Minister in your exclusive Sydney estates, with their high walls and their electronic security. How convenient that all those Algerians were able to die to remind you that terrorism is a real threat, and that we can never be too secure. And how convenient that you, a man who doubtless earned more writing that single piece of morally fossilised diatribe than I’ve earned in the past two months of working full time, has taken the time out to tell me how the average man should feel.

I tip my budget can of soft drink at you sir, from my worn hand-me-down chair in the splendour of this semi-rural unfashionable suburb - I can now vote for the Liberal government with complete peace of mind, knowing that this team of arrogant comedians has got the tongue-lashing they deserve. Having the temerity to tell others what is and is not funny, having the insufferable hubris to treat authority with anything but grave respect, these are the hallmarks of the subversive and the radical, my friends. We need to watch out for this sort of free thinking and crush it remorselessly under our boot-heels, lest the terrorists win and we become one of those horrible backward little Eastern countries I can’t pronounce. With their highly religious governments, their crushing of free speech, their outrageously brutal anti-sedition laws, and their security measures which allow people to be held for obscenely long periods without trial for the most minor of offences.

That would be bad.

I go to bed late, sleep on a borrowed pillow made entirely of rocks and broken glass, get up a mere five hours later, pig the fuck out on junkfood and chocolate cake, and then wonder why I didn’t realise I’d feel like utter shit after the party-adrenaline wears off.

I guess this is pretty much as close as I’ll ever come to having a proper hangover.

Christ, I’m such a nerd.

That sounds retarded I know, but I played it for maybe a mere half an hour at Felix’s going-away party and am absolutely entranced. The ridiculously intuitive gameplay grabbed me by the metaphorical testicles from the first minute, and with only the most basic knowledge of the controls I was able to pass, charge and tackle like a maniac.

Even a half an hour in, I could easily pick out the levels of gameplay and tactics that were shining through, and the merits of team selection and captaincy. It was such a beautiful thing. Everything about the game has a tangible impact. Even the most basic tackle, the simplest steal, shakes the screen with a grinding, slow-motion impact that makes you want to do it again and again and again. When you make a particularly great tackle, or you fire off a beautifully charged shot that the game thinks will probably cannon into the back of the net - the game time slows to a crawl, the interface vanishes and you get to see your play happen in deliciously slow motion, successful or not.

You can feel the crunch as Wario puts his boot into the face of an unsuspecting Shy Guy. You can hold your breath as your shot careens towards the goal at crawl speed, and the whole room can groan in frustration as the goalie picks it effortlessly out of the air. Then it’s game time again, and you’re passing the ball around like a maniac and shooting and screaming and sighing and it’s so freaking seamless that it feels like every pass, every shot, every tackle is a part of your motherfucking soul.

I’m not kidding. This game has crawled beneath my goddamn skin in less than half an hour. I don’t know what it is, but I am more excited about this game than I have been about any Wii game so far. It could be the thing - the thing other than sweet, sweet Super Smash Bros. Brawl - that actually rekindles my long-flagging interest in this console. I can’t wait to get a copy of my own and experiment with team selection, power-ups and special moves. I can’t wait to play the free online mode against my friends.

I can’t wait for Simon to finish his motherfucking exams so we can beat the unholy shit out of this game without it distracting him. Study, you bastard. I know you’re reading this.

Speaking of untidy segues, talking with Ross in the car on the way home from the Perthcomics meet last night really made me miss the days of the old RIFTS and Palladium games. Ross has just been hired to re-write Cyberpunk - not the genre, the actual game - had his own system published (the Awesome system), and is basically living the beautiful dream of the writer.

Damn you, Ross. You and your stories, they make me miss the good days. The days when I would craft what were probably terrible stories, put on terrible Dwarven accents, and let Jimi critical-hit a motherfucking baelrog for ((6D6+8)*2)*2 motherfucking damage direct to its hit points* because goddamn that shit is just cool. I’d love to GM again. I love telling stories. I’m probably rusty as fuck now, but hey.

I guess it’s just another thing to stack on top of the already overloaded pile of things-I-wish-I-had-the-goddamn-time-for. Sigh.

*This actually happened.

This begins when my mother remarks that she read in a report recently that the nutritional value of a carrot substantially improved after boiling. Simon pounces. “Ridiculous!” he cries, stabbing his index finger into the sky. “How can mere water add anything to a carrot that wasn’t already there! I spurn your voodoo magicks and all who swear fealty to their cause!” It’s all I can do to restrain him as he sprays bile into my face and gnashes his angry, aspiring-biologist-teeth in my mother’s general direction.

“Fie!” I hiss in his throbbing ears. “What evidence do you have to support this claim! Our mother cites a publication of repute! You cite merely your own unsubstantiated judgements!” He tears free of my grasp, wielding a teatowel as lesser men wield broadswords or battle-axes. “It’s common sense, you unwashed jackanapes! I don’t need to prove it! I know I am right.”

“But,” I say, “how can you know that you are right, if you have no proof or evidence with which to back up your spurious claims?”

“Tim, you are a small-minded nitwit, and therefore much of what I say will be lost on you,” he begins, his muttonchops dancing in the soft breeze of the kitchen. “It is a held tenet of Glorious Science that nothing can ever, truly, be known. To know something, one must be able to prove something to be right, and nothing can ever be proven absolutely right - only absolutely wrong.”

“So basically, dear brother - what you are saying to me in effect is that the only thing you can be certain of, is that you can never be certain?”

“Correct.”

“And yet you know - you are certain - without any proof or evidence to back you up, that a carrot, once boiled, could not possibly have increased in nutritional content?”

“Right.”

Wrong.

Oh, and the council wants to demolish our house. But more on that later.