One night in Paris

I was in Paris on Thursday. Flew out at 6.20 from Newcastle, meetings in Paris all day with Ubisoft people, straight to a party, sleep, up again at 6.45 on Friday morning to catch a plane back and then return to the office. Interesting from a work point of view but not exactly any time to enjoy Paris. These are the sights I saw while there:

Game noir

Finally, somebody is being brave enough to attempt a game inspired by film noir. Tim Schafer did it rather well in Grim Fandango but I can't think of any other successful examples. While I was at Codemasters (I would guess it was 1997) I evaluated as a possible acquisition a black-and-white, point-and-click adventure called Noir, which was not yet great but showed promise. I don't think it ever got published by anybody.

Now Rockstar, one of the bravest publishers, is having a go at cracking the genre. I hope L.A. Noire turns out well. My main concern is that it is the brainchild of the guy what invented the risible Getaway series for Sony.

Apple hates podcasts

Some people may remember my anti-podcast rant from earlier in the year. I draw your attention to this part in particular:

3) The very name implies Apple iPod...

Now it seems even Apple don't like that. They've set their lawyers onto the issue.

Are they totally deranged? Isn't the emergence of the word "pod" as a synonym for "digital audio" a good thing for them and their market dominance? Abuse of a brand name didn't do Hoover or Sony's Walkman any harm.

Nintendo drop the ball again

Nintendo's ability to be successful despite themselves seems to know no bounds. On the one hand they make great hardware and great games. On the other, their attitudes to their customers is terrible. The latest example is that despite having said earlier that Wii would be region-free we now find that was a mistake and it is not region-free. Of course, this fits in with their policy of screwing certain parts of the world. How could they exploit Britain, which is the most expensive country in the world to buy a Wii, if they then set the console up so we could import everything?

I'm sure they'll also be crap about releasing European versions of the games as well, just to make sure they really hack us off.

Models looking stupid playing with Wii

I don't know how many Wii game trailers you've seen but nearly all of them seem to show a model playing the game to impress upon you the nature of Wii's unique control system. Am I the only person who thinks every single one of them looks stupid? Take this latest trailer for Ubisoft's game, Red Steel, for example. How daft does the guy look?

If you can't see the video then there are plenty of stills you can look at to get the idea.

It seems the games can't stand on their own, they need prancing people. I worry.

Taxation enters the modern age

As a socialist I accept that taxes are necessary but that doesn't mean I would normally celebrate paying them. However, I've just paid my road tax online! It worked beautifully. Apparently the disc will arrive in the post within 5 days. We'll see how well that part of it works.

It's just so lovely not to have to stand in a queue in an over-crowded Post Office.

Cart before horse

Is anybody old enough to remember when politics was about having policies that each party honestly believed were the best for the country and then the electorate voted for whichever party they agreed with? Maybe that's never happened but I'm sure that's how it is supposed to work. Now it seems that parties decide on their policies according to what will get them elected, without allowing silly things like beliefs or values to get in the way.

Even if this has always gone on then surely the evolution of "New Labour" has been the greatest example of it. The Blairites refuse to use the name "Labour Party" and always say "New Labour" instead.

The main purpose of New Labour was to abandon traditional labour values in the interests of getting elected. The idea of this is supposed to be that unless you are in power you can't do anything useful anyway, so you might as well do whatever it takes.

This belief-killing disease seems to be spreading. Since Labour moved on to Tory ground in order to win power, the Tories have probably stayed pretty true to themselves, spending their time trying to find an area just to the right of New Labour in an attempt to recapture their voters from Blair.

Of course, being in power gives the Blairites a few extra tricks up their sleeves. I'm no Tory fan but I'm cynical enough to believe their assertions that government officials are even planning which hospitals to hit with cutbacks to ensure they look better than their Tory counterparts. I certainly agree that most government consultations are a sham, just going through the motions with their minds already made up. That whole article disgusts me.

Everywhere you look these days you find politicians abandoning their beliefs to increase their grip on power. Now even the Lib Dems' leadership is trying to convince their party that they must forget their long-held proposal of a 50p top rate for income tax because it makes them unelectable. Doesn't it matter that it is the right thing to do?

It seems that the only people who stick to their principles these days are the nutters. The UK Independence Party have a new leader and he criticised the Tories for moving away from their traditional position. He's exaggerated it a bit - he obviously thinks that being Tory equates to near-fascism and isolationism - but his point is somewhat valid. He's not doing whatever it takes to get elected. He's a genuine nutter appealing to other nutters. Equally in the Labour Party, the only people who have stayed true are the Dennis Skinners of this world.

With politicians tripping over each other to abandon their principles and only the nutters sticking to their guns, is it any wonder that people are losing interest in politics?

Best advert ever

Combining two of my favourite things, this advert for the Honda Jazz and its amazingly trick boot is pure genius:

Honda Tetris mash-up

The best on the best

I started writing my game reviews some time after I played Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube. If I had reviewed I'd probably have given it a 10 (if I was being picky then maybe only a 9, but that seems harsh) and said it was one of the best games I've ever played. I originally bought it second-hand, making me feel a bit dirty (retailers are powerful enough without making even more profit from selling the same game to two different people). Therefore, when it was released on PlayStation 2 with some lovely bonus content I thought I'd buy it properly and show my appreciation for Capcom's great efforts.

Since then I've not actually got round to playing it through again but hopefully I will rectify that in the not-too-distant future. One thing I have always wanted to do though was to compare the two versions side-by-side. There has been much debate over which version is superior and logic has always told me it must be the GameCube version - it's the more powerful console and the platform the game was designed for. However, the PS2 version has true anamorphic widescreen in place of the GameCube's letterboxed format - meaning it draws 484 horizontal lines for NTSC and 576 lines for PAL, compared to the GameCube version's 362 and 430 lines respectively.

I wanted to check it out for myself so tonight I finally tried to get an answer. Here are a couple of screenshots I took with my digital camera, PS2 first and then GameCube:



A number of things struck me when I studied them. The GC version has more trees and the trees are complex. They're slightly different colours, with the GameCube version having a subtler and more varied palette. The GameCube version has superior lighting, with Leon (the main character) looking much more part of the scene than he does in the PS2 version. The GameCube version has more detailed textures. Finally, I really couldn't see the benefit of those extra horizontal lines in the PS2 version.

Having done my own analysis I looked around on the Internet for other people's. I found that people who hadn't looked closely couldn't tell the difference but people who had agreed with my findings.

So what's the point of all this? Well, there are two main points. First, it is to remind us that the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 is a true and wonderful masterpiece. Second, it is to pay tribute to the wonderful GameCube as it passes on into console heaven and we wait for both Sony and Nintendo to launch their next round of hardware. I know which one my money will be on.

Amazing game videos

Since I have recently got into the business of posting game videos on YouTube I thought I'd link to some more impressive examples.

1. Super Mario 64 being completed on the DS in 20 minutes with only 16 stars, exploiting a number of bugs along the way. Quite incredible skill and memory demonstrated in this.

2. A rather silly dance sequence by two players controlling Voldo in Soul Calibur. Like most things that involve Voldo, it's slightly homo-erotic.

3. Pop'n Music played by a super-human. Wikipedia can explain the game to you if you haven't seen it.

4. There are a lot of examples of awesome Dance Dance Revolution players. This one is probably my favourite, as it's just some kid in an arcade (many are from professional competitions).

5. I might have linked to this Ikaruga video before, where one person completes the last level's two-player mode by himself. Even more impressive is this video of the last level of DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, whose author's memory for bullet patterns and pixel-perfect precision will become the stuff of legend. Both of these games are examples of the so-called 'bullet hell' subgenre of shoot-em-ups, meaning they have fixed (usually very dense) bullet patterns that players can learn with enough practice. And they often have great music too.

6. Finally, something I've linked to before. The most amazing Street Fighter victory ever recorded. It's worth linking to again because it is totally amazing.

Thanks to Eurogamer for all the links.