Craig Ferguson speaks eloquently and passionately about his past struggles with alcoholism live on his CBS talk/ comedy show, The Late Late Show. The overarching point of his preach is justification as to why he’s choosing not to ridicule, parody or send-up Britney Spears following her very recent entry into drug rehabilitation.
It’s rare and compelling viewing.
A follow up interview about the broadcast in which, if anything, Ferguson talks even more robustly, can be seen here.
Did you know Tom Chick was in The West Wing? I guess it’s not that unusual to hear that a videogames writer actually has another useful skill but it’s usually, y’know, writing comics or chip music or other nerdish creative subsets – not acting in serious, bona fide, internationally-acclaimed, award-winning dramas.
Tom writes reviews for Yahoo games and other mainstream sites but it’s the handful of columns that he wrote for his own personal site, Quarter-to-Three, a few years ago that really shine. The series, entitled Shoot Club, is fairly well known on the New Games Journalism circuit but don’t let that put you off. They’re just cute little stories with truth and insight presented in an interesting, readable way – pretty much my criteria for whether something’s worth reading all the way through or not.
Yesterday I read Shoot Club: The Doom 3 review, a story that’s not nearly as tedious as it sounds. In it Tom describes how he queued with his excitable, Doom-fanatic friend Trevor for a midnight store release of the last Doom 3 game. The way he describes how Trevor’s initially blinkered adoration of the game turns to indifference in a tale of geek heartbreak is brilliant and a scenario anybody who has loved and lost a videogame in the course of moving from pre-release thrill to weary, disappointed consummation can relate to.
I love how Tom gently and kindly supports his friend’s enthusiasm (presuming that the story is at least partially based on reality) despite knowing, from having had pre-release code to review, that it’s not all it was cracked up to be. Read the piece and if you enjoy it then read all the others – especially the most recent one (Sanity Check) which has a stream of rueful melancholy running beneath its more obviously visible wit and cheerful drama.
So, anyway, re-reading the Doom 3 column yesterday made me wish I was a better writer – or at least a different kind of writer – which is always a good thing. I googled his name to find out a bit more and that’s when I found this Wiki page and read about Tom’s acting successes. It’s surprising not just because people are rarely that good or successful at two very different disciplines but also because he doesn’t look like I – nor you – were probably expecting. Videogame players still enjoy huge stigma even amongst those of us who know that the truth that those who enjoy them are often far from the stereotypes. Anyway, no great point to make – just that I just found my surprise interesting.
I’m yet to arrive at the West Wing season he features in but it’s something to look forward to. In the meantime, here’s to getting better at the things we do.
Edit: it just occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the Wiki article is inaccurate and that, as the world’s leading repository of things teenagers know, one of the teenagers confused two people for one. If that’s the case : oops and here’s to checking one’s sources.
Friend of Chewing Pixels, James Underwood, who long time readers might remember for his guest mix earlier last year, has just returned from touring as Jóhann Jóhannson’s violinist.
Jóhann’s album IBM 1401, a User´s Manual was one of Chewing Pixels’ favourite things last year and the final track on the album, The Sun’s Gone Dim And The Sky’s Turned Black, even featured in the site’s Top 10 Songs of 2006 mix recently.
James runs the Iskra String Quartet and has provided backing to some pretty sweet artists in the last couple of years – which is brilliant as we’ve been friends for years and I’ve been with him through all those darker times of relentless teaching and playing for Ronan Keating and stuff. Jóhann actually approached Iskra via their myspace page which shows that not everything you read in the papers about musicians making it via social networking sites is a lie. Anyway, it’s good when a plan comes together and your heroes come looking for you so congratulations James.
A couple of years ago Iskra released their debut album – a mix of classical standards and some new material, one track of which we collaborated on. This basically means that Chewing Pixels is now in Jóhann’s band and if you want anything signed you’ll have to get to the back of the queue.
An astonishing, extraordinary ‘article’ from The Daily Mail that clearly and helpfully alphabetises their ignorance and intolerance.
The way that the posture of the Right (and, remember not all on the Right would associate themselves with this paper) is expressed here is just so overwhelmingly devoid of any reason or worth that it’s easy to dismiss everybody who shares like views on some of these issues.
But, in the West Wing, for example, it’s always enjoyable and helpful when Sorkin writes in a scene where he uses an intelligent, reasonable and eloquent Conservative/ Republican to point out holes and inconsistencies in his own beliefs as presented via the Bartlet Democratic administration. That’s a good and interesting thing and helps refine and define more clearly the balance of issues. Conversely this hyperbole is worthless propaganda that helps silence any serious and appropriate points people of a similar political persuasion might be trying to make. And if, by chance, it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, then that only makes it worse.
Another new thing to talk about in Keith Stuart‘s new PSP .pdf magazine. I’ve written the Pirates cover piece and a review of the new Dungeon Siege title but, more importantly, it’s free, good to look at, has one-time Edge feature editor Mark Walbank writing for it, and presents at least one face of the future of magazine publishing with embedded flash movies and roll-over box-outs.
Here’s a direct link to the .pdf file but you should also go here and sign up to receive alerts to all the mags as it’s pretty good stuff.
This laser tagging video is brilliant. The project designers, the Graffiti Research Lab, have even provided a sweet little how to for any budding light vandals (from BB).
Back from a much-needed week’s holiday and I’m fighting fit again. I wrote this before I left, tired and spent and, coming back to see it published last night, I wish I’d read through it a couple more times before submitting. It’s a little patchy, preachy, one-sided and it doesn’t point out enough of the faults in the later titles in the series. Nevertheless it’s mostly right and, while Ignition should be strung up for their handling of the Anthology’s front end, the games inside mostly play and run brilliantly. While away I’ve been trying to finish (!) the new release of Final Fantasy VI on GBA ahead of an EG review next week. It’s been more fun than expected racing to finish a big RPG you first played and loved as a relative youngster before writing the review but I suspect that’s mainly because the game in question is so enjoyable. Anyway, onwards!
Forget Alan Wake, Metal Slug Anthology showcases the best graphics ever seen in a videogame.
One day soon, people will realise that there are only so many virtual suns reflecting on the surface of virtual lakes that one can go ‘wow‘ at. Yes, sunsets are pretty to look at and yes, it’s terribly impressive how life-like the metal on this AK-47 looks when viewed through that particle effect, but surely we play games to visit new worlds: not marvel at slightly more rubbish versions of the current one?
Excuse the antagonism but, for fans of 2D pixel art, the decade-old Metal Slug series has never really been bettered for intricacy, personality, character and colour. Indeed, it’s thanks to this series that there are those of us for whom the prettiest face of videogames lies not in the future but in the past. Sure, the latest 2D Street Fighter or Guilty Gear may have pin sharper characters and backgrounds but this isn’t a stationary beat ‘em up. Rather, SNK’s side-scrolling, run-and-gun war parody, takes in a hundred different locales, from the deepest jungle to the deepest sea, each bristling with an individuality and style that a Tom Clancy cast would, er, kill for.
The gameplay couldn’t be simpler: make your way from left to right shooting enemy soldiers and vehicles before they shoot you. There’s no life bar: it’s one shot one kill. Your basic pistol has unlimited shots. You have a fire button, a jump button and a bomb button and, should you find any vacant vehicles or willing animals along the way, feel free to appropriate them to the cause. And that, in sixty-nine words, is how the seven Metal Slug games, each brilliantly emulated here on the PSP, function.
“McKeith’s stock in trade is abuse, on a scale that would have any doctor struck off: making people cry for the television cameras, I assume deliberately, and using fear and bullying to get them to change their lifestyles. As a posture it is seductive, it has a sense of generating movement, but if you drag yourself away from the theatricality of souped-up recipe and lifestyle shows on telly, the evidence shows that scare campaigns tend not to get people changing their behaviour in the long term.
Trying to decide which paragraph to pull out from this extraordinarily brilliant bad science piece from today’s Guardian was tricky. It begins as a systematic debunking of the recently demoted ‘Doctor’ Gillian McKeith, before seguing into a deeper and more complex discussion of how these programmes miss the real point/ complexity of the issues.
It’s a brilliant mixture of fact, opinion and wisdom and you must read it now.
For a new and unknown universe populated by foreign characters and unfamiliar places, Rogue Galaxy has enjoyed a rare weight of anticipation. Likely one of the last major JRPGs to be released for a system that has celebrated the genre in the West more than any other, it’s natural for players to hope somebody thought to save the best until last. That the game follows in the glorious slipstream of developer Level 5′s previous RPG triumph, Dragon Quest VIII, has only added to the burden of expectation placed upon these newly birthed shoulders.
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The points of interest don’t end there either: for the setting the makers have opted neither for the medieval knights and castles of yore nor the steam punk post-apocalyptic desolation of more recent fashion. Rather, interplanetary space piracy with one keen eyeball on Star Wars and the other on Jack Sparrow aims to fill the galaxy-backdropped niche recently vacated by the Xenosaga series. And, finally, the game has the unenviable distinction of being the PS2 RPG that came out after Final Fantasy XII, and as such it’s likely many players (even subconsciously) will be expecting that game’s new lessons in design to have been absorbed and even evolved here.
It’s one of those ideas that just works: pick a film, any film. Now condense its plot into a three panel comic strip using Paint or an equivalent art package. Use stick-men or photographs or screen captures or paintbrushes but, whatever you use, try to communicate something witty, profound or pithy about a 90 minute film in a 5 second comic.
Finally upload the strip for others to see, critique and vote on. Tell your friends and repeat until all films have been covered.
The site (only two days or so old) has all the right ingredients in just the right quantities to make an Internet niche blockbuster: Almost anybody can join in; films can be neatly filtered alphabetically, by user or by peer voted score and, moreover, it’s just a really good idea. You’re only limited by your imagination, ideas and, obviously, three small, blank squares.
Visit the site here have a giggle and then try some of your own out. I’ve been doing about one a day and, as well as being a serious mind-space squatter, it’s also really a lot of fun. You’ll probably think so too.
Did you know Tom Chick was in The West Wing? I guess it’s not that unusual to hear that a videogames writer actually has another useful skill but it’s usually, y’know, writing comics or chip music or other nerdish creative subsets – not acting in serious, bona fide, internationally-acclaimed, award-winning dramas. 
Friend of Chewing Pixels, James Underwood, who long time readers might remember for his 
An astonishing, extraordinary 
Forget Alan Wake, Metal Slug Anthology showcases the best graphics ever seen in a videogame. 
“McKeith’s stock in trade is abuse, on a scale that would have any doctor struck off: making people cry for the television cameras, I assume deliberately, and using fear and bullying to get them to change their lifestyles. As a posture it is seductive, it has a sense of generating movement, but if you drag yourself away from the theatricality of souped-up recipe and lifestyle shows on telly, the evidence shows that scare campaigns tend not to get people changing their behaviour in the long term.
