As any of you serious gamers (or nerdy reporter types) will know, E3 has begun: the big gaming convention in Los Angeles where half-nekkid dancing girls promote high-budget video games that will flop horribly because they're unplayable. Cynical, me?

Anyhow, the convention opened with a 'state of the industry' address by Doug Lowenstein - he's the President of the Entertainment Software Association, so he's pretty much the big cheese of the industry in the U.S.

I'm a die-hard geek gamer, of course, so I take affront at the way the industry is treated like 'just another cash cow' (cf. television or Wal-Mart), even by those working within its borders. Still, I can understand his points about expanding the market and so on, even if I like to think of game designers being long-haired gurus who do it for love, not money!

However, one part of his address stood out as a little odd - the part about woman gamers. I quote:

Last February, a woman gamer writing under the name Fizgig on the site womengamers.com asked, "Why do my mom and I lower our voices when she wants to tell me about the new level she just finished with her Amazon in Diablo II? Why don’t I tell people at the university where I work that I play videogames?" The reason, she posited, is that women like her have a sense of "gamer shame." "Gamer shame," she wrote, "is a powerful social convention and the gaming industry really isn’t doing a very good job of combating it."

Why do I find this odd? Simple. It's odd because I still have "gamer shame". Geeks who were in their teens back in the 1980s are very used to feeling ashamed at admitting they play games. It wasn't until WarGames and Tron were such a big hit at the cinema that we could finally, tentatively admit to having a computer, knowing the difference between RAM and ROM, being nerds and - yes - playing games. We've been living with it for decades.

Many folks seem to forget that computers are only recently 'cool'. Back when many of us who are now adults were still slapping on acne cream and worrying whether it was the 'in thing' to be a New Romantic or a Goth (when the latter of those still meant something, thank you very much), a computer was a blazing icon of geekiness. We could be stoned for admitting to liking Lode Runner. Sporty, cool kids would ridicule us for spending four hours copying code from a magazine onto the screen (then debugging it). We were outcasts. We were undesirables. The salaries of programmers in the late 80s changed that.

What Fizgig complains about is simply the same thing in modern times: it applies to female gamers because it's suddenly become 'cool' for guys to play games. No other reason.

And it's only a problem because we're all so worried about being politically correct and egalitarian that no one is willing to wait a little while until the situation takes its natural course... and sorts itself out.

So announce yourselves, girl gamers. Be proud to be geeky, damn it. Join us on the dark side. The light sabers come in better colours.

You shouldn't be thinking that, sicko.

Last night, I reached the point in Evil Genius where, on the second island, I have started constructing my Doomsday Device. I had to go to bed afterwards, as it was getting pretty darned late (it's so addictive, that game), but I've converted the middle of the second island into a sort of warehouse thingy for launching rockets, like in all the good Bond movies.

I've also finally managed to build a base that deals almost automatically with any intruders below the veteran soldier or super agent level, which saves me all that manual surveillance work and tagging to keep them out. Half a dozen camouflaged security guns help, as do the four overly powerful henchmen standing in the entrance corridor! I think I only have a couple of traps set up, too, since I don't need them.

All I need to do now is kill the super agents, research everything so I can play with all the funky traps... and build my Doomsday Device, of course! I'll be sad when I finish this game: it's loads of fun. Then again, I can play it through on 'Hard' afterwards and see how different it is and I still have the Rome: Total War Total Realism mod to check out!

Today's Spam Count: 122
Running Spam Total: 3391

As you are all undoubtedly painfully unaware, I have been playing The Sims 2 a lot recently. It's a terribly good piece of development: doesn't crash, looks gorgeous, plays smoothly, is addictive and so on. However, it's also one of those games that - especially since the first one was so innocent - has a surprising parental advisory attached. It's considered a 'Teen' game now, because it has rude humour and people WooHooing (that'd be fumbling under the bedclothes together, for the uninitiated).

Just the other day, on an email list of which I am a member, one chap remarked that he'd been surprised by his ten-year-old niece's calm acceptance of a good WooHoo because (as she put it) "It's alright. Making babies is another option."

I just thought I'd mention it in case any parent happens to see this post and has been thinking of buying the game for their kiddies. There are some troubling real life undercurrents in it, such as the 'romance' aspiration which has bonus points for sleeping with ten different people in the same day or having sex with multiple people in the changing rooms of the clothing stores... think carefully before your children assume this is normal behaviour for adults.

Ah, the complexity of computer gaming: so many different genres, so many comparisons, so much prior knowledge assumed. Years of sitting in dark rooms, tweaking DOS and Windows configurations can lead those of us who've been wasting our lives on virtual worlds to forget that there's a lot of people out there who don't have a clue what Elite is, who Microprose were or even what makes Sid Meier so important. Time to redress the balance a bit.

These days, there's a lot of different genres and cross-genre games. The basics include sims, RTS, FPS, tactical, god-games and RPGs. Sims are, of course, simulation games - flight sims, space sims, life sims and so on. RTS is real-time strategy, generally accepted these days as a derivative of (or at least similar to) StarCraft, Age of Empires and so on. FPS is the first-person shooter: Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Wolfenstein. RPGs are role-playing games, such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and suchlike. Tactical games are the more 'grognard' ones, realistic wargames and so on. God-games are those where the player has a role as a god or general who oversees everything in the virtual world: Tropico, Populous, Civilization (in a way). Those are my definitions, anyway.

In-genre titles also exist, such as Hidden & Dangerous, which is an FPS but is also a 'sneaker': not based on running, bunny-hopping and rocket-jumping, but on stealth and tactics. Splinter Cell falls into this category as well. MMORPGs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies extend the RPG genre. Games like Privateer and X extend the space sim genre, reaching into character development.

Evil Genius falls fairly neatly into the RTS genre (mixed with god-games): as an overseer, the world is viewed from a fairly distant perspective. The player is concerned with building the base, resource management and their strategy for outside operations. They do not partake of the world form a first-person standpoint. More thought is required, to plan ahead and deal not only with attacks from agents, but also monetary matters and resource designation to different tasks.

In short... no, Jafer, I don't think it's your sort of thing, unfortunately.

One of the few games that I am really looking forward to is about to be released. It's called Evil Genius and is on my "absolutely must buy right now, this instant" list, so on 28 September when it hits the shops, I shall be there.

An absolutely brilliant idea, it's similar in style to Dungeon Keeper, but in this case players take the role of an evil super-villain. The base must be built, minions must be hired and trained, henchmen sent off to cause terror and wreak havoc across the globe... and super-agents captured and ridiculed.

The demo was excellent, although I can see several things that could become annoying, much as DK did after a while. It has that "constant arrival of small numbers of enemies" thing going on that most RTS games have, which is stupid in this case. Still, it'll be bought, installed and played to death!

"So, Mr. Bond, you thought you could stop my evil plan? Little did you suspect that my minions would capture you! You will never escape! There'll be no one to stop me this time! Mwuhahahahahahaha!"

Can't wait.

Whilst perusing the forums at my secondary workplace, I came across a discussion of 'Nation States', so I asked about it and was given the link.

This free online 'game' looks like lots of fun. Each player creates their nation state, then addresses issues once per day (or more) to decide the future of the country. Of course, it has all the associated forum banter and so on, but also provides a description of how the country works. The Community of The Lobsters now exists (in the Pacific) as a Liberal Democratic Socialist country. We'll have to see how it comes out, although I suspect that my people will eject me from rule within a week.

It's an old game, but Scary Ross has been playing and chatting to him piqued my interest enough to reinstall it: Peter Molyneux's Black & White. Since the second one should be coming out soon (relatively speaking, of course) and since I never finished it first time round, it seemed like a good idea.

The game's one of those oddities in that it doesn't really fit into a category very well. It sold mainly on the fact that there's a learning AI built in. To explain: the player is god and has a floaty hand that can interact with the world. However, there's also a huge animal that is the player's 'creature' and a sort of physical avatar in the game world. He or she starts out small and stupid, but the player can actually teach the creature to be nice, to be mean, to play, to eat certain things, to pick up villagers and move them to the other side of the island... pretty much whatever they like. The creature grows and learns to be neutral, good or evil, depending on what the player teaches it. It's an astounding concept that works incredibly well, but for the somewhat lacking story and/or gameplay.

Then again, Peter Molyneux is famous for that. He has these genius ideas but has trouble with the implementation. Personally, I loved this one when it was released, but it ran really slow on my PC at the time and crashed a bit too often. Since I now have a new machine (relative to back then), it runs smoothly and is gorgeous.

So, since I'm a benevolent god, I spent my week convincing a giant tiger to be kind and gentle to my villagers. I've trained him to heal workers, deliver food and wood to their store, dance with them, put out fires with miracle showers and even to poop in the forest instead of on their homes. He doesn't eat the children, throw rocks at buildings or cast fireball spells just to see people burn. What a nice tiger.

He does, however, have some habits I can't seem to break: the main one is his being annoyed when he awakens. Every time he gets up and leaves his temple sleeping ground, he stops by the first house and kicks the crap out of it! Poor little inhabitants never know what's hit them.

Ah, well. One day he'll learn.

Just had this little gem sent to me by Tankman: Driver's Ed. The control system sucks, but it's amusing.

I also noticed my last two posts were published at the same time, one day apart. How odd. Must be an after-lunch thing!

Bah, humbug. Spoke too soon: the PC is still crashing regularly and it definitely seems to be the fault of DirectX 9b. What can I say? I've tried the PC with DX8.1 and no updated drivers, with updated drivers, with DX9b and no drivers, with every combination I can think of. I've tinkered in the BIOS, I've updated everything possible.

Basically, I no longer have a gaming PC. That sucks, especially at the weekend.

After several (nay, many!) hours of troubleshooting and fiddle-faddling around with DirectX 9b, nVidia drivers, reinstalls, formats, motherboard nForce drivers and goodness knows what else, I have finally found out why my PC was rebooting whenever I played Direct3D games.

It's not the graphics card.

As it turns out, the anti-virus was not helping, but it wasn't the main problem. This was causing a 'PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA' error after some time and in some games - the solution to which was found on Microsoft's TechNet, scarily enough! Disabling the automatic protection while playing games stops this error occuring, which is good news.

The real problem was, and still is, the sound card! It shares an IRQ with the network card, so I disabled the net connection. Unfortunately, it still crashes. So I tried disabling the sound card itself (a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! Value) and everything runs smoothly.

However, I also learnt that sound card now have hardware acceleration: having never had a problem with one before, I was unaware of this. Unfortunately, reducing the acceleration does not help. Games still crash after a short time. Switching off acceleration stops most of them from loading in the first place.

So now I have a choice: play games with no sound - which is terribly boring - or not play them at all. Looks like it's time to consider a new sound card, perhaps. More research first, I think!

Pah. I spent last night reinstalling everything again on my main PC, since it's still freaking out and won't let me play games. I seem to have narrowed the problem down to "something wrong" which occurs "when the power's switched on".

More precisely, I don't have a clue. The graphics card seems OK from DirectX tests and it's causing problems even with acceleration turned down to the minimum. It's starting to look like either a Direct3D problem or something more hardware-based. Either way, I'm screwed, since it'll be trial-and-error to figure it out and correct it.

Bummer.

The last two days have flown by. I think it must be because last week was such a nightmare of stress, decisions, new projects and new managers, but I feel like I've slept four hours since Friday night. The days have whizzed past in a blur of continued anguish and failed attempts at relaxation. The fact that the company bonus hasn't appeared at the bank yet doesn't help (apparently it goes in with the monthly salary, which means I have to maintain food payments for a few more days on the pitiful dregs of cash that remain). Most annoying.

On the up-side, I spent the last two days playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy [web site Flash animations warning!] from Lucasarts and must say it's excellent. It's rather short in some ways, admittedly (I finished it last night), but I've not had that much fun with a PC game for ages. The variety of silly things to do, the beautiful animation and an excellent story all make up for great gameplay.

The best things are the slo-mo kills when you slice someone up with the light saber, charging at Jedi speed into a room full of a dozen Stormtroopers and hacking them all up, armed only with twin sabers and my personal favourite: using the Force to choke a Dark Jedi, lifting him off the ground, then chucking him off the top of a building to hear him fall, screaming, into the lava pit below.

OK, so I'm twisted and evil. At least I'm enjoying myself.

Would someone be kind enough to explain to me why this damned thing won't work? It looks perfectly logical to me, I can assure you.

void main()
{
object oPC = GetNearestCreature(CREATURE_TYPE_PLAYER_CHAR,PLAYER_CHAR_IS_PC);
effect eSlapdown = EffectKnockdown();
effect eSeestars = EffectDazed();
effect eKapow = EffectLinkEffects(eSlapdown, eSeestars);

ActionSpeakString("..slap..", TALKVOLUME_TALK);
ApplyEffectToObject(DURATION_TYPE_TEMPORARY,eKapow,oPC);
DelayCommand(0.8, ActionSpeakString("Let that be a lesson to you!", TALKVOLUME_TALK));
}

Sometimes, I really hate coding stuff. I'm not even a programmer by trade: I gave all that stuff up years ago, having become disillusioned with spending my days fighting computers to get them to do what I wanted. Still, I'm glad I used to program - the concepts of a bunch of pretty much defunct languages (I learnt PASCAL, LISP, APL, FORTRAN and PROLOG at University...) have saved me learning the basics of a plethora of new things I have had to pick up since being out in the real world.

I just wish OO scripting was as easy as riding a bike. At least then I could look sporty and wear one of those funky helmets and some really tight cycling shorts. Or maybe not. Civilisation can probably do without that kind of a shock.

Phonetically speaking, this is one of the best computer games I have ever played, despite it being quite old for a game now. For the linguistically and game challenged, I'll help you out here: NWN is the abbreviation for Neverwinter Nights, the superb creation from BioWare. Based upon the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset (third edition, I believe), the game implements everything accurately and controllably: one can set a difficulty slider which goes from effectively turning the game into a dungeon hack (à la Dungeon Siege) or into an incredibly difficult role-playing system (with all rules fully implemented and NPCs doing 200% damage!).

However, what's even better is that the game is gorgeous. It was built by the same folks who did Baldur's Gate, so everything is rendered with proper lighting effects, characters move well, have physical expression and so on.

What's even better is that the game comes with a complete toolset: scenario/campaign builders can actually create entire worlds, with complex story development, proper quest journals and character development.

What's even better is that the toolset includes an entire scripting language, so builders can have NPCs react, respond, act independantly, follow waypoints, change their behaviour depending on the class, race or even appearance of the player character, have the sky change at night, have lights switch on and off, have NPCs retire to their homes and lock the doors, set the nightwatchman on patrol, build encounters that are scripted or random, alter entire areas in response to the player character killing something, owning an item, accepting a job... the list is pretty much endless.

What's even better, is that the game comes with a Dungeon Master module, allowing players not only the ability to play the full campaign and to play multiplayer online, but to run their own game on their own server... while players are in it! Finally, a working gamesmastering system that is flexible and complete. I've even seen add-on modules created by players that allow the DM to create and alter areas of the world without having to restart their server: you need a bar for the characters while they're in town? Create one on the spot! Want to run a persistent world? No problem! Spawning scripts handle monsters, trash collection scripts handle dropped items, area management scripts clean up CPU-cycle-hogging NPCs left ignored by the players... this thing is a work of genius.

So now I'm building my own little scenario and loving it... 'nuff said!

It's that time of year again, when all the big games companies head off to E3 - the biggest convention for video games in the world. It's one big collection of media hysteria, booth babes, gaming icons and some very, very expensive marketing campaigns. Of course, all the gaming magazines head there as well, in a desperate bid to be the first to reveal upcoming games, get exclusive interviews with designers no one has ever heard of and so on.

Personally, all I'm hoping for out of the massive influx of news is some detail on the release dates for Thief 3, Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest 2. The rest of it is all just banter, buzzwords and BS. It's been way too long since anyone did anything new and innovative in the gaming industry (last things I can think of are EverQuest getting MMORPG gaming right, Black & White having astounding AI and Battlefield 1942 upping the bar in the FPS genre).

Since Doom 3 and a bunch of other 'long awaited' titles are showing, there could be some good news. I'm a cynic, though, and suspect it will all be "wow, look how pretty the graphics are!" rather than checking whether the games are playable or not. We'll see.

OK, so I was wandering around aimlessly and came across this one over at jozjozjoz's site. She's a funny girl, incidentally...

Top of my gaming list at the moment is Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. The first title in the series, as well as the Paradise Island add-on, were excellent. So what's it all about?

Well, the original Tropico placed the player in the role of El Presidente, newly elected ruler of a small island. One built buildings, encouraged farming or industry, exported goods and tried to keep the population happy - pretty much a standard God-sim, as they call them. However, what set it apart was two things: firstly, the humour in the simulation was very tongue-in-cheek, with excellent jokes and comments (both written and audible) to keep the player chuckling throughout. Secondly, the AI of the game was quite remarkable: individuals would walk around the island living their daily lives, regardless of what the player did. They would get up, go to work, come home, go out to the pub or restaurant - all of which was governed by their personal desires and preferences. A superb (aside: why do so many people misspell that "supherb"?) piece of programming which produced a top-class game that's still installed on my PC despite my purchasing it as soon as it was released (in March 2001!). If you want more info on that one, drop in and read Mike Dorn's review at The Wargamer.

So what's the new title? Well, Frog City have developed (along with, I believe, PopTop Software, who built the original) a new Tropico, based on 17th Century pirates! With an economy fuelled pretty much entirely by plunder and capturing prisoners (for ransom or as slaves, presumably), the focus will have changed dramatically from the first title. The game still maintains a sixty-year spread of play (something that seemed silly to me in the first one, unfortunately - why can't my first-born child take over once I'm too old, eh? Europa 1400: The Guild let me do that...) and, I trust, the same sense of humour and fun that was in the first.

However, one additional thing really annoys me about this game. Several months ago, I proposed an interview with the development team for the site I write for sometimes. They agreed and I came up with a bunch of questions for them: things I really wanted to know because I loved the first title so much. They never answered the questions. Poopy-pants to them!

News: PromoGuy has a report on a NINE DVD set of the Alien films to be released at the end of the year - check out the "Loving the Alien(s)" blog for more info. This one goes in at number 2 on my must-buy list!!

(I also updated the '100 Things About Me' again today, with two dozen more things!)

So I'm in EverQuest and I'm bumming around in the Western Plains of Karana, grinding through level 49 by killing corrupt guards and handing in their bracers to the guard Captain (which, incidentally, is horribly long and boring to do, but gives great experience for a solo player). I drop in at Qeynos to pick up some malachite for pet summoning and bump into the alternate character of an in-game friend whose low-level druid I helped out recently.

The character's name is Konnichiwa, so I pop a note over saying "So you speak Japanese?". The reply? "I am Japanese." I love the internet. Where else could I have a chat in the middle of a game, with someone on the other side of the world?

Man, I love this game. I play it in co-op with Scary Ross. We are just so bad at it, it's hilarious. NMM Weapons mod, or the British Marines Commando mod if we're going in hard and fast (and getting killed quicker).

Oops, must run... here come the bad guys! Pow! Blam! Kaplowey!