TF2: User-Created Classes!

Another article up at Lowpings, on User-Created Classes in TF2!

BONUS: Those into meta-humour should check out the action at the gaming.reddit link, where the exact assholes I'm talking about come in to vote the piece down and write essays about how awesome they are!

Martial Arts Safety Guidelines

House Of The Dead: OVERKILL

I am ridiculously biased in favor of House of the Dead. "Presiding in the case of Mr Smith versus That Guilty Bastard, The Honorable Judge Smith"-biased. "Not only bought but finished Typing of the Dead"-biased, which is a little more biased than sane people are actually capable of. I lost one of my first jobs because of an HotD cabinet not quite close enough to get there and back in a lunch hour, and one of my finest gaming memories is emptying a machine gun clip with one hand and a beer with the other, simultaneously tackling my two nemeses (the undead and the undrunk).

Design-wise, House of the Dead: Overkill might as well have been House of the Dead: Luke edition. They said "Let's make it louder, stupider, make fun of the stupid plots and add a level where you kill clowns" - it's like they stole my subconscious for planning meetings, and if this is what it's doing now they can keep it. My dreams aren't this good.

But I only enjoy it this much because I knew it wouldn't be a light gun game before I started. I love the Wii, god bless it's cute little market dominance, but it just doesn't have light gun games - it has interactive coloring books. Move the marker over the right area and if it's the correct color, press. The Wiimote simply isn't sensitive enough for light gunning and until the Wii Motionplus arrives (and either lives up to the hype or is burned at the stake) it never will be. It's not a precision tool, it's a flailometer, which is why every Wii "gun" game has the crosshair on by default with the "no sights" switch hidden deep in the setup menus, right beside Rock and Roll Racing's "Music Off" and Mortal Kombat's "No gore, I'm here for the finely balanced gameplay" option.

This wouldn't be so bad but for the combo system - keep shooting accurately and you get told you're awesome, basically, and if that doesn't sound like much then thanks for reading despite never playing gun games.

The combo bare takes up quarter of the HUD and will drive players absolutely insane, because you cannot shoot accurately. Here's a hint, SEGA: when it's physically impossible to shoot straight on the console, don't design the game to draw constant attention to the fact! It's like a Jaguar game where you lose points for seeing polygons, or a Sega CD titled "FMV Is Actually Crap, Isn't It?" The only way to rack up combos is to shoot slowly and carefully, and if you're doing anything House-of-the-Dead-y slowly or carefully, get the hell off and let someone play it properly.

There's a problem for non-score-obsessives too. Here's how the Wii Zapper works:

And here's how the Overkill designer uses it:

And you can't redefine that - motion sensors and accelerometers, but you can't redefine the "actual but-tons", like you could on everything back to the MSX. I'm all for "Gunning down mutated horrors" gameplay, but not when I'm roleplaying the programmer's self-hatred over how his power was too stupid for Professor X.

Again, none of this would be so bad but for SEGA taking the piss: they know how to make games that don't need fine aim - it was called House of the Dead 3, fully 25% of the entire series had shotguns with such a spread you could fire it in a barn and not be sure which wall you'd hit. They know how to reload too - for 4 they built special hardware into the guns to reload when you shake them. DOES THIS SOUND IN ANY WAY FAMILIAR? The ONE chance any designer, ever, had to put a "shake to do something" feature into the Wii and it wouldn't be stupid pandering, and they fucked it up. And fucked up your finger joints with it.

But like I say, I'm biased as hell. I'd pay full price for the cut scenes alone. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go put ten years worth of arthritis into my wrists, and kill Papa Caesar while saying "Fuck" a hilariously record-setting number of times.

Phone Fuckups

Ah, the mobile phone. Not just for idiots in the cinema anymore, with people declaring "My McNuggets are an emergency", "This text message will surely kill us all!", and "What if we sold the stupidest phones in the world?"

Yes, you do have to click to read the originals. BONUSES FOR PEOPLE WHO CLICK: The Cell-Mate facephone, and a hot Japanese girl trying to sell you a miniature air-raid siren!

Drinking Dispatches

Four new FoodConnects in the last fortnight, aka "I drank and got paid for it", aka² "I was a saint in a past life, thanks miserable-living mug because this is awesome."



You can actually see me learning how to photograph drinks over the last three. One of the few drinking skills left to master, mastered!

Disast-vertising: Race To Witch Mountain

A good movie poster tells you everything you need to know about the movie without giving anything critical away. On that basis, allow me to present the greatest movie poster of all time:



This tells me everything I need to know (that I am never, ever going to see this) without giving up single scrap of coherent plot. In fact, it's such a nonsensical smashing together of pieces I know less about the universe than before I saw it, and the word "plot" itself has been weakened. Four more posters like this and the dictionaries will read "plot: (n), vague excuse for explosions and giving celebrities money."

We've got a speeding car, mountain, aliens, helicopters, poster children for the Aryan People's Front, and The Rock. In fact, the only thing that isn't on that poster is a goddamn witch. I'm picturing four writers, fired from Scary Movie for eating the crayons instead of scribbling dick jokes with them, getting together for a "Vodka Shots and Shitty Scripts" party. One guy throws up a Smirnoff/Crayola cocktail all over the table, and rather than wasting a whole five minutes recreating what they lost, they just pick out the pages with the least puke and make a movie.

They also misprinted "The Rock" as "Dwayne Johnson", a worrying sign that he's thinking of himself as an ar-teeste instead of self-propelled prop. I'm sorry, "The", but you don't get into movies based on an ability to bodyslam people paid to let you do so and then declare you're an actor. That's like jumping through the window of a stockholders meeting, brushing glass off your t-shirt, and telling security that you're CEO.

Conclusion: I was accidentally exposed to the trailer while looking for the above image, and it achieves the impossible. It's actually stupider. Unless you're being hunted by a rogue future-bot sent back in time to kill anyone with your IQ or above, you have no reason to endure this movie.

Luke Online: Week Ending March 12

Where has Luke been online this week? Oh, only a little place called
My excellent amigo Evil Dave did a few fun calculations on the recent nuclear sub collision. If you don't know what I'm talking about, jesus, pal, whatever you're reading online are the wrong pages. He basically showed that even if the sub drivers were drunk, bored, steering at random and refusing to avoid anything smaller than a continent, they still wouldn't have collided anywhere near as fast as they did.

I helped out with the numbers because, honestly, simulating nuclear-equipped war vehicles as randomly moving pinballs is the kind of sentence I live just to be able to say. The results were picked up by The Numbers Guy of the Wall Street Journal.

Other stuff:

We've always assumed the inevitable robot attacks would be due to high digital-dickness quotient. It turns out that the electronic extermination of "the ones who rub each other for fun" will be revenge over our building robots specifically to torture them.
Exhibit A:

Exhibit B: Your nightmares tonight.

I also had a little bit of fun with Garry's DOOM, a mod which loads the very latest physics-simulating Source engine with all the original DOOM weapons. Did I have fun?

I describe this as fun, and people are too smart to disagree.

Yes. Yes, I did.

Plenty of fun over at the Daily Galaxy, including (but not limited to) liquid batteries, Cannibal Planets, Moonbase Building Robots, Antarctic Based Robots (so there is literally nowhere to go), and a new probe expected to find hundreds of Earth-a-likes. You know, moderately interesting stuff.

Finally, FoodConnect asked me to write about drinking on the run up to St Patrick's day. Finally, the job I was born for. My advice can be summed up as
though I did go into a few more words about it - alas, FoodConnect is family-friendly, so not enough of them were swearing to truly get across my feelings. For those who just have to have emerald alcohol on the day, I point out a couple of acceptable cocktails: the Heavenly and party-fuel Greenhouse Gas.