It’s all kinds of awesome. Yum.

I was going to write an interesting, witty and enjoyable post this afternoon, but unfortunately some psycho went postal in Sainsburys and smashed up the salad counter with an iron bar, meaning that I couldn’t buy the loaf of bread I wanted. So, instead of entertaining you lot, I’m going to be baking bread.

EDIT

It comes to my attention that this is entry number 666, which may or may not be the Number Of The Beast, depending on who you believe.

So, a couple of days ago, I suddenly find I can’t download my Google Mail via POP3 any more, and I can’t sign into Google Talk using anything other than the Windows client. All of this was working perfectly the previous day, so I figure something must be up.

After hunting around their support site for half an hour, I finally locate the big form you fill in to tell them that something’s wrong with GMail. I fill it in, answering the questions in excruciating detail, telling them clearly that my POP3 access that was working fine the previous day was suddenly no longer working, and that there seemed to be a problem at their end.

Seconds later, I receive a reply. “Wow!”, I think, “That’s good customer service! Assuming they haven’t just ignored everything I’ve just typed in and sent me a stupid fucking autoresponder form answer telling me how to reconfigure my web browser… Oh.”

This email contains another detailed set of questions – the wrong ones, naturally, as this email is from the autoresponder that greps queries for the word “login” and sends them instructions on how to use the webmail login. So, I answer them, as best I can, pointing out that these questions are in fact irrelevant, and detailing my actual problem once again.

And then it all falls silent.

A day passes.

And another day.

Until today, I finally get a response: “You can help us diagnose the problem by providing screenshots of your email client’s POP and SMTP settings.” followed by instructions of how to take a screenshot (in Windows, despite the fact I’d already said I was using Linux) and paste it into a Word document (no, really) and email it to them. Tempted as I was to take a screenshot of a terminal running pine, save it as an XPM, import it into an AbiWord document, save that, gzip it up, MIME encode the result, stuff the whole lot into a RISC OS SparkPlug archive and then attach that to an email using uuencode, I decided to be mature and simply point out how utterly irrelevant the questions they were asking were to my situation.

Fortunately for the poor support moron dealing with my query, the problem seems to have magically fixed itself without their intervention, but I’m still riled. Why? Several things.

First, they utterly ignored my original problem report. Yep, that’s how important my problem was to them. They threw away all the detailed information I’d given them and sent me a form autoresponse that had nothing to do with the problem I was detailing. Great. Way to make me feel like I matter to you.

Secondly, they insulted me by making the implicit assumption that the problem was caused by something I’d done and that either I was unable to realise that this was the case, or that I was lying to them. I don’t appreciate this insinuation. It is insulting and belittling.

Now, I understand that there are an awful lot of retards out there using computers, and sometimes these people do change things either without realising or out of sheer curiosity/stupidity/whatever, and that mostly these problems will be fixable by walking them through a standard, prewritten procedure. I understand this. Fair enough.

But sometimes – just sometimes – somebody will submit a problem that doesn’t fit within this pattern, and that person may have already tried all the standard fixes and maybe actually has half a clue about what he’s talking about and it would be nice, just for once, to have the problem addressed in a manner which reflected this and dealt with in a way that didn’t mean the customer felt insulted, frustrated, belittled and deceived as a result.

Don’t apologise to me when you step out in front of my bike without looking. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me when I run into you, and trust me, given the choice between swerving into oncoming traffic and running into you, you are the much softer option.

Thank you.

Some days, you get out of bed and feel like you really don’t want to go to work. This feeling is only compounded when you spend all day working on a problem only to discover, at ten minutes to leaving, that the documentation was lying. Or at least, wasn’t telling the whole truth. And so you spend a further hour working on the problem, only to drive yourself further down the road of broken code and hopeless frustration.

I hate computers. I’m going to go and buy a farm and breed chickens.

The Insufficiency of Scripture – why the Bible isn’t about engineering, or nursing, or parenting, or legislating, or pretty much anything else other than Just Being A Christian.

I’ve been looking forward to Fahrenheit ever since I first heard about it: Quantic Dream’s last game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul was a hugely ambitious – but flawed – action/adventure title which blended genres and brought a bunch of whole new gameplay ideas to the table; it also focussed heavily on having cinematic quality graphics, production, direction and plotting – and by and large, it pulled it off. Sadly, it proved almost too ambitious, and what should have been one of the most important games ever ended up getting mediocre 70%-odd reviews and disappearing into obscurity.

Fahrenheit is a hugely ambitions, but flawed, adventure game which – stop me if you’ve heard this before – focuses heavily on a cinematic gameplay experience, using movie-style direction and production. Okay, there’s less genre-blending this time, and it’s a much more constrained experience than Omikron was, but the common ideas are still very much in evidence. David Cage, the writer and director, is clearly a man of great vision; he, and his team, need first and foremost to be applauded for pulling off something really damned impressive; rhis is a gaming diamond – but sadly, a rough one.

The game opens with a scene showing the central protagonist, Lucas Kane, emerging from a toilet stall in a New York diner and stabbing another man to death. The trouble is, Lucas has no idea why he’s just done this and, in fact, no memory of doing so. So, the point of the game is to find out just what the hell is going on. During the course of the game, you play not only as Lucas, but as both of the police officers investigating the case, and you’ll discover dark secrets about humanity, get involved in a power struggle over the future of the world, and see some naked ladies – well, in the European release, anyway.

The actual gameplay is a curious mix of fairly standard adventuring – albeit with some nice twists to make it more “open-ended” – and cutscenes from the Shenmue Quick-time Event school of gaming – sort of like a rhythm-action game, without music. During the adventure sections, you’ll often find yourself in situations with a very limited amount of time to make a decision and no way to go back on that decision. Decisions that kill you play out pretty quickly, so there’s no danger of taking the wrong path and only finding out hours later; but the point is to make the game flow better and put more emphasis on the story and immersion – and it works.

Ultimately, for all the open-ended appearance of the game, the story itself is still very linear (although there are several possible endings, these only depend on a decision you make just before the end of the game). You do influence details of the story – for example, whether you pick up the knife you used to kill the guy or not will affect how the investigation plays out later on – but ultimately the plot itself remains intact with just the odd scene here and there changing.

Technically, the game is a massive achievement – once completed, you can unlock various “Making of…” movies, which give some idea of just how much work has gone into it; the motion-capture videos are particularly impressive. Visually, it’s stunning, and Angelo Baddelamenti’s score provides a haunting backdrop to the game.

However. It’s not perfect: the plot is cliched – sure, by gaming standards, it’s excellent, but in terms of originality it’s up there with your no-brainer summer blockbusters – and the script is, in places, somewhat cringeworthy, which isn’t helped by the often heavy-handed cuts during dialogue. A somewhat bigger problem, though, is in the action sequences – you spend so much time concentrating on the little Simon-style rings of light in the middle of the screen that you can easily miss what’s playing out in the action behind them; fortunately, you can replay these without the rings of light once you’ve completed the game, but it does mean that things aren’t always completely clear.

And speaking of things that aren’t completely clear, part of the way through, the plot sort of lurches in a new and unexpected direction without much in the way of immediate explanation, instead saving the revelation for the end of the game. Now, whilst this trick works in the cinema, I’m not so sure that it’s so good for games – it leaves the player wondering exactly what’s going on and what they’re supposed to be doing for a couple of hours, and disengages you from the action for a while.

But anyway, I’ve got to be careful because I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy it, which isn’t true. I did; it was massive fun and it’s a brilliant game. The trouble is that when you make a game which promises so much and asks to be held up and considered against cinematic standards (which it does) you have to hold it to those much higher standards and inevitably, brilliant though it is, it just doesn’t quite make good on everything it claims to be. However. In spite of this, it’s still absolutely a game that you should play, and it’s set to become an important piece of gaming history. The developers need to be applauded for what they’ve achieved, and encouraged to improve on it for their next project – whatever that may be.

I can’t be bothered being cynical again this year. Talk like a pirate day has rolled around again and I shall be drinking grog and counting my pieces of eight and looting and pillaging and having my wicked way with the buxom wenches like a good’un.

(well, actually, I’m sitting on work IRC saying Yarrr! a lot, and will probably go to the pub and drink some rum later, but close enough)

I seems that Trebbers has been informed of PenguinTracker so I can link to it here now.

My brother just found this in his back garden. Apparently, it was about 8-10cm long. Suddenly, I’m an awful lot less keen to go and live in Japan.