Killed in a smiling accident.

Van Hemlock’s podcast question of the week on Twitter a while back was “[Podcast Q] Fed up with the usual Tank, Healer, DPS and Crowd Control. What new class or role shall we make a requirement for group work?”, and I suggested “Accountant, Lawyer and/or Clerk. The paperwork of most groups is frankly shoddy, auditors wouldn’t be at all impressed.”

Unbeknownst to me Anarchy Online actually had a Bureaucrat class that they mentioned on the podcast, which sounded quite fun. Still quite combat oriented, though, rather than focusing on the form-filling, so perhaps a missed opportunity, as what games really need is some decent paperwork (a field in which they’ve been lacking for quite a while).

Most MMOGs have some form of economy, from a simple auction house or crafting and sales mechanism to the pan-galactic complexity of EVE, but none of them offer true challenge or enjoyment to real cognoscenti. Take Warhammer Online, for example; it has a guild tax mechanism, where guild leaders can set a tax rate such that a percentage of a guild member’s cash loot is automatically siphoned off to the guild vault. What sort of nonsense is that? Do Magic Tax Pixies oversee all looting, and instantaneously teleport the precise tax amount to the vault? It’s utterly immersion breaking. What should happen is that, once a year, players assess their overall income of the previous tax year, including cash directly pilfered from the pockets of dead opponents, the sale of items to vendors, the sale of items to other players, the cash value of magical weapons and armour (factoring in depreciation), with deductions allowed for work-related items (not applied to cosmetic clothing) and complete schedules B-H (excepting D) of Form 20381 (revision ii) (unless self-employed, in which case schedules A-K apply twice, and schedules D-Q once, or a contractor, in which case Form 2038i (revision 11) applies), and submit those to the Guild Treasurer along with a cheque or postal order of the amount owed. Doesn’t that sound *much* more exciting? Then there are the flat fees applied to auction house sales, when clearly a superior option would be a multi-tiered set of taxation rates including Value Added Tax that would apply to chocolate covered rations but not conjured rations or beverages, leading to hotly disputed court cases over whether a chocolate covered beverage should be zero-rated or not.

Then there’s housing in EverQuest 2. A flat fee to buy and fixed weekly rent? Where’s the thrill of deciding between a variable rate offset or a fixed rate endowment or capped rate repayment mortgage? The option of becoming a landlord, and renting out shoddy properties to other players at exorbitant rent? Surely it can’t just be me who sees the appeal of a Not Very Independent Financial Advisor class, nefariously steering clients towards inappropriate products that offer large commissions while avoiding ombudsman investigation.

Finally, World of Warcraft recently announced they would be allowing players to change faction. Bravo, I say, about time! I do worry, though, that they’ll implement this through some half-arsed “give us a few quid and pow!, faction changed” mechanism, I’m desperately hoping they take the opportunity to present players with an all-action immigration process, where initially there’d be a complex scoring system, assessing the desirability of a player to their prospective new faction, considering factors such as age, class, equipment and ability to correctly use punctuation. Should the required criteria be met a series of interviews with low level functionaries at the consulate would follow, each requiring identical forms to be filled out (in triplicate) and stamped by at least four other departments. Successful presentation of correctly completed and stamped forms at a desk, only open between 9am and 10.17am on two randomly selected days of the week, appointments not possible so you have to stand in the queue, would give a 17% chance of acquiring a visa allowing travel to your new faction. Once there, an epic quest chain would become available with a residency permit being the ultimate reward, though with only a month to achieve it you’d better get a move on, or face deportation back to your old faction. I’d definitely resubscribe for that.

I started reading William Gibson in the late 90s, by which time Neuromancer was a strange mix of past, present and future; possibly as a result I preferred his Bridge trilogy. When Pattern Recognition came out I didn’t pick it up; I’m not really sure why, possibly from a snap first impression that it was something to do with advertising. Spook Country, on the other hand, sounded much more like it; espionage fiction had been a bit quiet since the end of the Cold War.

Typically for Gibson, Spook Country kicks off in median res, the first few chapters being slightly hard work as you assimilate the main characters, then it’s off on the trail of a container via virtual locative art, medieval history filtered through tranquillizers and the orishas of Santeria, ending with almost as many questions as you started (albeit different ones). Gibson’s prose is as vivid as ever, and on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed Spook Country, though the “lead singer of a cult indie band” background of the lead character jarred slightly.

For a slightly more acerbic (but obviously spoilertastic) take, it’s also the feature of one of The Guardian’s rather excellent Digested Reads.

In a shocking turn of events, the European release of Wii Rock Band 2 has been put back again. Current estimate from game.co.uk is 31st July; a Harmonix developer has posted “… we ran into several technical issues that required attention before the game could be finalized”, which I believe may be a code for “we sent a second raft to try and find the first, and located it beached upon the shore of the lost island of Atlantis. Namor the Sub-Mariner is looking a bit miffed about the whole business.”

Still, not to worry, I’ve still got the latter half of the Guitar Hero: Metallica setlist to conquer (quite chuffed about passing One the other day), and Guitar Hero Greatest Hits has just turned up in the post too. Known as Guitar Hero Smash Hits in the US, presumably renamed to avoid the kids/teen pop magazine connotations of the name in the UK, Greatest Hits follows hot on the heels of Metallica, but with less Metallica, and… er… more Hits. That are Great. With 48 songs taken from previous Guitar Hero games, Greatest Hits is probably one to avoid if you’re only interested in playing the plastic guitar and have played the other games extensively. If, on the other hand, you only came into the series with Guitar Hero World Tour, it’s a good way of getting a bunch of rather excellent songs, and with full band support.

Greatest Hits has all the good stuff of World Tour like customisable characters and instruments, and keeps the Metallica approach to the career in which you need to achieve a certain number of stars over all songs in a tier to progress, rather than having to play through absolutely everything, which works rather well. There seems to be some sort of plot involving the classic Guitar Hero characters being summoned to rock out across the world, or something, but plot in a Guitar Hero game is about as relevant as plot in a porn movie, something to rapidly skip through to get to the strumming.

All in all, probably not a mandatory purchase at full price unless you’re desperate for something new, but well worth picking up when they knock a few quid off.

Steinbeck lured me back in for one last mission. I was tempted, blast it, damn tempted by the offer he put on the table, and I couldn’t say no. It went pretty well at first, we cleared the beach without too much trouble, accomplished the initial tasks, but when I reported in to Secondary Terkenil Niba’Xi like they told me, and he wanted yet another ten Haoaerans taken out, something snapped. I threw Mak`tu’s Mending Staff down on his desk and told him it was his own damn soufflé, he could use his own damn eggwhisk. It was over. Finished. Done with. Over and finished. Done over and finished with. Over. You understand? Finished over with. Done. I’m out. Finished out and overdone.

I can’t say I won’t miss anything from the old days: creating a new identity, the camaraderie, the Tesco clubcard points, but you can’t eat camaraderie and clubcard points when you’re stuck on a beach in Chrykori and Tykor Gi’Lok is busting your arse to take down a patrol of Haoaerans and haul a bunch of gravel around the place. Unless you cashed in the clubcard points for some groceries.

So. Yes. Steam suggestively waggled its cheap EverQuest 2 at me and I couldn’t resist, but playing up to level ten or so has confirmed I’m burnt out on MMOGs for a while. It’s not you, EQ2, it’s me; character creation offered a wealth of options, albeit something of a curate’s egg (excellent in parts), the starter zone introduces everything nicely, there’s much to look forward to, but… it’s an MMOG. There’s a red bar, and a blue bar, and skills and abilities that cause or heal damage, and I can’t muster much enthusiasm for killing ten bird-things or collecting five bits of rock or reporting to some NPC somewhere. I haven’t logged into Warhammer Online for any of the Land of the Dead stuff, or City of Heroes for even longer than that, so I guess it’s time for the annual MMOG break. On with the most excellent Empire: Total War, where Britannia are (in some regions) ruling the waves, and I’m hoping the delicate network of protectorates and trade agreements in Central Europe will hold while I continue taking more territory in the Americas.

October 1993. Military forces stormed the Russian parliament, Benazir Bhutto was elected in Pakistan, and I’d bought an issue of Computer Shopper. For £1.49 it had a hefty 582 pages, much of it advertising in the era of catalogue adverts, companies like Software Warehouse and Computers by Post taking ten to fifteen pages to showcase their wares. Inside the front cover fold-out was the familiar Dell logo; their Dimension range started with a 25Mhz 486SX with 4MBb RAM, an 80Mb hard drive and SVGA for £859, and went up to a 66Mhz 486DX with 8Mb RAM and 230Mb hard drive for £1,819. Anyone who’d bought the “Pentium ready” machine from August ‘92 must have been a bit miffed; still no sign of Intel’s latest uberchip, and Dan were selling a 64 bit “dantium” system, just poised to upgrade to a FULL BLOWN PENTIUM(tm) via a CPU card as soon as it became available, at £2848 for the 486DX2/66 model with 1.05GB hard drive. Amstrad were still going, with their 7486SLC coming it at a fairly reasonable £699; rather more intriguing was their “MEGA PC”, a curious hybrid of a 386SX PC and a Sega Mega Drive. I remember someone at school talking of this mythical beast, a PC that transformed at the slide of a panel into a console, and I thought it was their fevered imagination, but no, such a thing actually existed; this very advert was on page 511. Notebook PCs with beefy processors and colour VGA screens offered power on the move, but at a price; £2699 for a 486/33 from Mitac. More compact than that, Time were offering a Sharp Palmtop PC (though you’d need pretty big palms) weighing a mere 1lb, toting DOS 3.3, a CGA LCD screen and 1Mb RAM for £239. Alternatively, if you wanted to eschew the keyboard, Amstrad were branching out with the PenPad PDA600 for £229: “with the latest in technology Amstrad bring you the PenPad PDA600; a comprehensive Personal Digital Assistant which is as natural to use as a traditional organiser. Just pick up the pen and write on the screen!”

As part of a fairly thorough buying guide, the PriceTrack feature tracked average prices of some sample systems over the course of the past six months; as would be expected, desktop PC prices had been fairly steadily falling, but the column advised buying sooner rather than later, or holding off for a while, as an explosion at a Japanese epoxy resin plant caused a worldwide Ram shortage. Notebook PCs also fell in price over the six months, albeit by a smaller percentage, while printers had held steady, indeed the average 24 pin dot matrix had slightly increased in price.

After 276 pages of almost solid adverts, the news pages started. Microsoft were beta testing the final upgrade for Windows 3, codenamed “Snowball”, a stepping stone towards the 32-bit “Chicago”, at that point due to appear the next year as Windows 4.0, while Windows NT has finally arrived in the UK after many delays. IBM had announced a record quarterly loss of $8 billion, but hoped the latest round of cuts would return it to profitability. Apple had just unveiled the Newton MessagePad, the £599 price tag doubtless contributing to its subsequent lack of success. Colour LCD displays were taking off, Compaq being unable to clear an order backlog for its TFT-equipped laptops, prompting Philips to invest in a TFT LCD screen factory. Microsoft and Borland were duking it out in the 32-bit development space with Visual C++ for Windows NT and Borland’s C++ for OS/2; the caption of “yes, honestly, a third-party product for OS/2″ suggests how well IBM’s operating system was doing.

With the introduction of Apple’s Newton, the Analysis section looked at the new buzzword in town: Stici. Pronounced “sticky” (apparently), it stood for “Self-teaching interpretive communicating interface”, the successor to the GUI. US analyst BIS Strategic Decisions predicted this would be the next big thing, with 60.4% of the US installed base of PCs and PDAs using a “Stici” interface by 1998. Maybe not, eh?

Group reviews included a bumper roundup of 21 386s, with machines from Acer, Brother and Watford getting the Best Buy nod, and budget databases, rounding up a number of packages under £100.

The “Using MSDOS” column in this issue was on creating multiple configurations in the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files, extremely useful for gamers when you had to juggle expanded, extended and high memory, along with assorted drivers for mice, soundcards and other gubbins, depending on the game. DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM i=e000-efff x=A000-c7ff x=DC00-DFFF 1024, eh? Those were the days… Other columns covered Windows, programming, and, being a multi-format magazine, the Amiga, Atari and Mac. Although 99% of the advertising was IBM-compatible focused, it was often interesting to see what was going on with other systems, and this month’s Amiga column included news of the CD32 Amiga Console launch from July at the Science Museum that involved “drinking champagne and being sprayed with a water pistol by Chris ‘Big Breakfast’ Evans if we weren’t paying attention”. The basic machine cost £299.99, with a full-motion video (FMV) cartridge add-on for another £200. Phil South wasn’t impressed, though, having several problems with the name (”CD32 is a crap name with as much charisma as a boiled egg”), the case (”the CD32 is charcoal grey and all sharp edges like a cheap stereo out of a home shopping catalogue”), and the idea of the idea of music CDs also containing an FMV video. His suggestion: “follow the advice of a firm that Commodore consulted early on in the life of the CD32: make some really good soft-porn FMVs to pull in the adults, and have some really gory games to pull in the teenagers. Get some of the software banned and you won’t be able to shift the machines fast enough.” Wonder if that consultant was Jack Thompson?

Presumably some old charter or something compelled all PC magazines to have a section called “After Hours”, Computer Shopper being no exception. A whole two pages, this month saw reviews of Beauty and the Beast, a tie-in for the Disney film, Patience Games, 15 solo card games for DOS, and DesignaKnit. Not really the cutting edge of PC gaming, but no matter; though no one would have believed, in the last months of the the twentieth century (give or take seven years) PC gaming was being reported upon elsewhere in the timeless worlds of publishing…

I’ve been cruising towards an MMOG break for a while now. Although the server move in Warhammer Online seems to have perked things up greatly on the RvR front I’ve scarcely logged in the last few weeks, and the prospect of the Land of the Dead doesn’t excite me greatly, though I should probably give it a try before dismissing it entirely. It’s been a good run, though. After getting a bit sick of it all almost exactly a year ago I wasn’t sure if I’d stick with another MMOG for more than a month, but I’ve been fairly active in WAR for six months or so, popped in and out for another three, and managed my first level capped character since hitting level 70 in The Burning Crusade. Time for a bit of a break, then, to recharge the massively multiplayer online batteries for Champions Online, or APB, or The Agency, or whatever next catches the eye.

Away from MMOGs, Grand Theft Auto IV is still fun to pop into now and again for a few missions, or a race, or just to cruise around the city looking for shiny cars to purloin. Empire: Total War is also excellent, I’ve been paying more attention to the naval battles which are quite manageable with a fleet of up to four ships (more than that and I find it tricky to micromanage them for optimal broadside-delivery). I’ve got half the setlist to go in Guitar Hero: Metallica, getting the hang of heavy strumming (Shortest Straw and Disposable Heroes passed), but the longer solos still need work. I’ve finally got around to playing Left 4 Dead’s Survival Mode with a few friends, and would like to try some more. For quick pick-up-and-play fun there’s Plants vs Zombies (I say “quick”, inevitably a five minute game somehow stretches out to a couple of hours…) Summer is traditionally a quiet time for game releases, which is good, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with. I really don’t need any new games.

Naturally, then, I’ve been buying stuff from Steam. First, it popped up the news that the two Freedom Force games were available for a fiver, just as I’d been reminiscing a bit during a podcast invasion, so I stuck the double pack in the shopping cart (after all, if you get one you might as well get the other… even though the boxed game of Freedom Force vs the Third Reich was sitting on a shelf not four feet away). And seeing as I was in the Steam store, sorting the options in ascending price order to see what else could be had for under a fiver… While doing my series of articles looking back at old PC magazines and thinking back to early gaming I’d remembered how much I’d enjoyed the original Civilisation but totally neglected the rest of the series, and the complete Civ III was on Steam for about £3.99. Two Freedom Force games and a boatload of Civilisation for less than a tenner, lovely! About the same price as a cinema ticket, and many more hours of fun.

To digress for a moment, when did a cinema ticket become the benchmark for hobby cost/time ratio, why not something else? Say, books? A shiny new hardback can run to somewhere around £20, you might finish it in three or four hours if you’re a fast reader… comparable to the cinema ticket, I guess, maybe slightly better value. You’d probably get it at a discount from Amazon or somewhere, though, or maybe in a three for the price of two deal, and you could always sell the book after you finish it, or keep it to re-read, and who only gets brand new hardbacks anyway? Poke around the charity shops and jumble sales, you can pick up plenty of stuff for 50p or less, radically reducing the cost per hour. Why spend money at all, in fact, a bracing walk around our delightful countryside is entirely free (as in beer, not necessarily as in speech, depending on the right to roam etc.) Let’s not get the ramblers involved, though, and lack of cost plays havoc with divide by zero errors in the spreadsheet. Tell you what, Sherbet Dip Dabs. 39p (in the shop at the end of the road, at least), and, providing you don’t go crazy and start chewing the lolly straight away, you can get ten minutes out of a packet, giving £2.34 as an hourly cost benchmark. That’ll do.

So, two Freedom Force games and a boatload of Civilisation for the price of three and a half hours of Sherbet Dip Dabs, and they won’t make you sick if you play the whole lot at once. The money isn’t really an issue, though, that entire previous paragraph was just an excuse to crowbar Sherbet Dip Dabs into the post in a desperate attempt to secure some kind of sherbet-based sponsorship for the blog (not Sherbet Fountains, though; liquorice, eugh!). I’m hardly lighting cigars with twenty pound notes, but then I’m not so boracic^[1] that buying a few games here and there means I need to forego other luxuries like food or rent in a month.

Except money *is* the issue, if the Steam update had popped up and said “Buy either Freedom Force game for £19.99, or £34.95 for the two!” I’m reasonably sure I wouldn’t have bothered. Civilisation IV was available, presumably a better game than III, but for the massive sum of about £12.99 instead of less than a fiver. To the immortal question of Mrs Non-Gorilla, “What d’you buy that for?”, I can but plead “Oooh! It was a bargain”, and I’m hardly alone. As the figures put out by Steam show, major price drops result in kersquillions percent sales increases, particularly when they’re for a limited time.

Anyway. The result of all that was more games than I could possibly play plus three extra, but that was it. Whatever the siren call of the Steam bargain of the week, I’d plug my ears with cheese and lash myself to the mast, even if it’s Cheap MMOG Weekend. What’s that you say, Narrative Inevitability? It’s Cheap MMOG Weekend on Steam? Well, it’s a good job I’m taking an MMOG break not about to go and buy something just ‘cos it’s cheap.

So. Yeah. I’ve got a level seven Inquisitor in EverQuest 2. Oh come on, it was a bargain!

[1] Fun fact, etymology fans: I’d assumed the word was ‘brassic’, and somehow related to cabbages, perhaps being so poor they were all you could afford to eat; it actually seems to be rhyming slang, ‘boracic lint’ for ’skint’.

A few years back there was a wave of interest in card counting, specifically the antics of the MIT blackjack team, largely sparked by the book Bringing Down the House, later made into the film 21.

Though based on fact, Bringing Down the House and thus 21 employ a substantial amount of artistic license, so while the methods of card counting get an airing they’re really something of a MacGuffin for the Pygmalion-esque transformation of Jim Sturgess’ character from broke MIT geek to Vegas high roller. It’s a lightweight frothy romantic-comedy-thriller-heist-type film, the young leads are charismatic enough, especially with the more heavyweight backup of Kevin Spacey and Larry Fishburne; nobody really needs to get out of first gear with pretty one dimensional characters. There’s a bit of a twist to give our requisite happy ending, but it’s somewhat Ocean’s Eleven-Lite (when it’s not as if Ocean’s Eleven is that heavy in the first place).

Fun enough for a throwaway film, but if you have more of an interest in the mechanics of card counting then the Horizon documentary Making Millions the Easy Way is worth a look.

Host:This week, teams, news of an online money-laundering operation. According to The Guardian, a gang are “alleged to have made several songs which they gave to an online US company, which then uploaded them to be sold on iTunes and Amazon. Over five months they bought the songs thousands of times, spending around $750,000 (£468,750) on 1,500 stolen US and UK credit cards”, claiming the royalties as “clean” money

Zoso: Police are also investigating allegations that a gang known as ‘Blizzard’ set up a similar operation, with a rudimentary online game just realistic enough to fool a casual observer, but were quite surprised when millions of actual customers started subscribing in addition to other gang members.

Melmoth: A temporal rift was quickly closed by local enforcement agents after another criminal gang tried to commit fraud by selling game time using game time cards that had been purchased with in-game currency that had been purchased with stolen game time cards that had been purchased with ISK that had been stolen from an illegal duping operation.

Zoso: Police are also investigating allegations that a gang known as ‘Aventurine’ set up a similar operation, with a rudimentary online game just realistic enough to fool a casual observer, but were quite surprised when hundreds of actual customers started subscribing in addition to other gang members.

Melmoth: Didn’t you already do that gag with ‘Blizzard’?

Zoso: Just covering all the bases.

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Guitar Hero - Metallica is… Metallica-y. This isn’t terribly surprising, what with it having “Metallica” in the title and everything; 28 of the 49 songs in the game are by Metallica, you play them as motion-captured Metallica, the rest of the tracks can be played as one of Metallica, on signature Metallica guitars, if you buy/unlock them as a character, and there are lashings of Metallica extras on the disc.

If you’re unsure whether you should get the game or not, here’s a detailed in-depth questionnaire to help you decide:

1) Do you like Guitar Hero?
a) Oh yes! It’s a work of plastic instrumental genius!
b) It’s OK I guess.
c) No, it’s a stupid waste of time, learn to play a real guitar.

2) Do you like Metallica?
a) Oh yes! Who doesn’t like the genre-defining multi-Grammy winning fourth highest-selling music artist since 1991?
b) They’re OK I guess.
c) No, I hate them and everything they stand for.

If you answered:
Mostly (a): buy the game right now
Mostly (b): maybe rent the game, see how you like it
Mostly (c): don’t buy the game

Hope that helped.

You may be experiencing a strange sense of deja vu around now, as Guitar Hero: Metallica is a very similar idea to Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, taking a core engine (Guitar Hero III for Aerosmith, World Tour for Metallica) and building a band-centric game around it.

I have most of Metallica’s albums and saw them live a while back, so the Metallica-y-ness a major selling point for me compared to Aerosmith, whose songs never really gripped me even after a few playthroughs of their game. The non-Metallica tracks are a slightly mixed bag, some strong stuff from bands like Slayer, Motorhead, Queen and the copper-bottomed Thin Lizzy classic The Boys Are Back In Town, but generally the Metallica tracks are the highlight, as it should be (my favourite tracks from GH: Aerosmith remain the Kinks and Mott The Hoople covers from the first couple of tiers). Being based on World Tour it’s also full plastic band game, which may or may not be a major factor depending on whether you stick resolutely to pretending to play the guitar, or are more of a living room skinsman.

By crikey, though, it’s a bit tricky. I (just about) managed all except the final tiers of Guitar Hero III and World Tour on Expert, but I’ve started running into difficulty about halfway through the Metallica setlist, mostly thanks to Kirk Hammett solos. If you’re not familiar with the oeuvre these contain, on average, seven hundred and sixty two notes every second, and are often long enough to outlast any star power you might have saved up to assist your desperate flailings. I haven’t made a serious attempt at drums, bass or vocals yet, but being the drums have the extra-bass-pedalling Expert Plus difficulty, I can’t imagine they’re going to be proverbial strolls in the fake plastic park. Still, that’s what multiple difficulty levels are for; I imagine I’ll switch down to Hard to try and complete the guitar career (hopefully I won’t have to resort to Medium), and it’s good to have something to aim towards. Overall, seven thumbs up out of two with an extra “OH YEAH!” and some toast.

For those of you who are not monitoring our podcast RSS feed or stalking us on the Twitterverse, brace your main hats and hang on to your sails, because we’re pleased to announce that it’s time for Kiasacast episode 4: E3 special!

This episode of the podcast includes:

- An admission

- E3, including:

     - Beatles rock

     - Alan Wake plans

     - Project Natal hurts

     - Sony Wands massage

     - Molyneux hypes

     - Barnett entertains

     - APB impresses

     - The Old Republic juices

     - Jumpgate delays

- Search term of the period of time since the last podcast

- MUSIC BLAAAAST FROM THE GAMING PAAAAAST!

     - Can you identify the music from the end of this episode’s show?
        Answers on an aldis lamp, and then email an MPEG of the lamp to us.

     - Last episode’s tune: Magic Pockets, intro from the Amiga version,
        outro Betty Boo - Doin’ the Do

Download Kiasacast Episode Four