Perhaps I read the wrong sorts of blogs but I haven’t seen this 3D Flash demo picked up anywhere yet.

The makers of the ‘Alternavita’ platform have managed to create a large scale 3D environment for use in browser windows that’s somewhere in between PSOne and PlayStation 2 texture quality and polygon count.

It’s incredible. If you’re running Flash Player 9 then head over here and, if you’re running Flash Player 10 beta then head over here (if you’re not sure which one you’ve got then you almost certainly aren’t running 10 yet).

Both versions add a kiloton of weight to the argument that, while PC gaming might be curling up in a quiet corner in the traditional sense, browser-based gaming is a solidifying future of gaming.

Jim Rossignol wrote a fantastic piece on RPS this week about what some time spent away from the Internet taught him about the way its embedded itself in his life.

He’s talking almost exclusively about information here but, using the reasons he identifies for why the web has become something of a prosthetic brain, it’s easy to see how having the internet as the future’s consolidated gaming platform makes complete sense.

If Xbox Live and PSN are mutant microcosms of the Internet, at least in terms of connectivity, integration and persistence (i.e. the services are always on) then, once Flash starts to match the technical oomph of the current crop of home consoles, the case for moving over to a single, virtual software platform becomes irrefutable.

Of course, we might need to wait till Flash Player 12 before we get anywhere near the graphical showboating in this sort of thing, but as Alternavita’s tech demos demonstrate, every month the gap is closing.

Yesterday’s link to the Hay festival Q&As reminded me of this incredible exchange between novelist and journalist Will Self and the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn on Radio 5 Live’s Nicky Campbell show.

The starting point of the conversation is where both men are given the opportunity to critique the other’s recently published novel, Self’s ‘How the Dead Live’ and Littlejohn’s ‘To Hell in a Handcart’.

I was going to give a general overview of the participants’ political outlooks for readers unfamiliar with either man but, actually, I think it’s more fun if you go into the piece not knowing.

Needless to say it’s one of the great exchanges in recent live broadcasting.

A favourite extract:

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven’t read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

Read the full transcript of the conversation here.

At this week’s Hay Festival of Literature , every luminary attendee was given the opportunity to ask another luminary attendee a question of their choosing.

All the questions and answers are cute, good or interesting but this one leapt out at me, even if she was only repeating someone else’s thought:

Dom Joly, comedian asks Sandi Toksvig, broadcaster:

Q. Sandi, I’ve always wanted to ask you: how would we solve the Israel/Palestine situation?

A. Do you know, the answer that I like best – and I don’t know whose answer it is – is that we should get one side to divide the country and decide where the border is going to go, and then the other half get to choose which side they want. Isn’t that a brilliant idea? It’s so simple. Maybe in his simplicity, Blair found that too simple. Perhaps I could be an undersecretary of something?

So awesome. Read some of the others here.

Judgments cast before they’d been adequately weighed; words sold before they’d been properly valued; shallow opinions that should have been presented as the first word in a conversation but were dropped with the clacking gavel pound of a conclusion. Yeah, every writer has regrets.

Four weeks ago in this publication I referred to Grand Theft Auto IV’s depiction of immigrants as being more nuanced and sympathetic than that demonstrated by the exquisite Baltimore-set television drama, The Wire.

The exact words were: “[Niko Bellic’s] portrayal should do more to warm viewers to illegal immigrants than any of the (nevertheless awesome) characters in, say, the culturally-acclaimed TV series, The Wire.”

While it seems like a harmless enough statement it was an idiotic comparison considering the heavyweight dramatic nature of the television series and the shits-and-giggles, tongue-in-cheek parody of the videogame.

But what’s really nagged and irritated over the following weeks is that, with a little distance and perspective, the bold proclamation was so obviously made, like so many from within our industry, with the aim of elevating videogames to the respectability of more established (read: accepted) media via bald association.

The opinion piece was written following a short weekend’s playing of the game just prior to its release and, as I’ve played on through the rest of the story, the fault lines in that specific claim have become ever more apparent. While I adore the slow pacing of the first few hours, the way Nico starts off on the straight and narrow and is dragged into the shadows of the American Dream by forces of poverty and necessity, the game soon enough swings into full adolescent-posing-as-adult narrative fizz.

There’s nothing particularly unusual or wrong with that, especially when sat alongside Hollywood’s output, but claiming it has anything particularly meaningful to say about the immigration issue is stretching the game beyond its purpose.

More interesting than this whiny narcissism are the forces that brought about my (and ten thousand other professional) snap judgments of the game.

In the weeks prior to GTA IV’s release, Rockstar made promises that print and online publications would receive early review code so that they might fully ingest and digest Liberty City in order to deliver mature and balanced opinions on its day of launch.

In reality, this was not the case, with precious few publications getting to spend prolonged time with the game ahead of release. The first review of the game came from the UK’s Official Xbox magazine bearing the worrying caveat “based on unfinished code”.

Eurogamer, wise to the fact promises of AAA title retail code ‘a week before release’ are rarely upheld, arranged to play through the game over a period of days in Rockstar’s offices instead (along with a couple of other UK publications). From speaking to other editors and (some of high profile titles) this was not an opportunity offered to all and, when review code failed to turn up the week before release, many were left panicking about how they were going to serve their readers in a timely manner with any integrity.

The reason for the withholding of review code was, according to Rockstar, a result to the game’s leaking onto the internet seven days before its release. Speaking to the company at the time it was claimed that this leak came from an unscrupulous journalist.

As a result there was a lock down on all review code: everybody would get their copy just one day before the game’s release, and, despite the wonky logic (after all the game had already leaked to those with the capability to play it so why punish the many for the indiscretion of the few) there were to be “no exceptions, no arguments”.

At best then, by the time the game had been played, copy written and subbed ready for the Tuesday morning, most journalists (both in the UK and the US) had played for only a few hours, experiencing just a fraction of the game’s content, a situation testified to by various admissions in professional reviews.

Time Magazine dubbed their piece Grand Theft Auto IV: The 6.24% Review while the Associated Press reviewer, Lou Kesten, admitted to having spent only spent eight hours with the game.

Slate Magazine’s excellent Chris Baker admitted he only had chance to ‘scratch the surface of the game’ going on to say in a comment on N’Gai Croal’s Level Up blog: “I couldn’t even attempt to be definitive…it was kinda liberating”.

The BBC noted the phenomenon saying: “Most reviewers were not sent advance copies of the game, and instead had to attend Rockstar offices or sit in booked hotel rooms to play the game,” where Rockstar could keep an eye and some pressure on them. While these few admitted the partial and necessarily subjective nature of their reviews, how many passed off their impressions as being definitive of the whole?

Rockstar aren’t the first ones to handle big title reviews in this way. Nintendo’s recent ploy, in the UK at least, is to require reviewers to visit the ‘Nintendo Flat’ in London, a place where one can book slots to review titles for a period of time (depending on what slots are left over from the prioritised lifestyle mags and newspapers) from the comfort of one of the company’s armchairs.

For the reviewer it’s an inconvenience at best, at worst a pernicious and blatant attempt to colour their opinion in as short an amount of time as possible. Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii: all big name titles (in both size and stature) only supplied to many games reviewers a few days before their release.

But what’s the benefit to a PR or publisher in holding back code from non-exclusive reviewers till the eleventh hour, especially if the game is hotly anticipated and good? In part the practise has been fuelled by the internet, where there are simply too many websites about videogames. The competition to be first to ‘print’ with a review, while always a consideration in magazine publishing, is exacerbated through the global competitive nature of the net. In this environment many gaming website publishers are willing to publish a final review even if it’s only based on very tentative impressions of a small portion of the game.

After all, the effectiveness of a ‘buyer’s guide’ review is reduced the closer its publication gets to the game’s release. Any reviews appearing a few days and weeks after a game’s release is almost completely superfluous, thanks to the industry and its consumer’s obsession with the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.

By withholding code until a late stage then (be it through design or ineptitude), a PR can force a journalist to rely on marketing hype and information to fill the gaps in their knowledge of the game when writing copy. In this way, control of the critical reaction is shifted back to the PR in a subtle and (arguably) legitimate way.

Add into this the journalist’s natural inclination to want to say something, anything, that will distinguish his/ her copy and opinion from everybody else and you start to get bold proclamations being made and unlikely comparisons being drawn. The pressure to say something, anything serious and unique to distinguish your piece from ten thousand others that litter the Internet is heavy. There are too many games journalists tussling over too few opinions with too little time to make them and the PRs have learnt to turn that to their advantage.

What’s interesting is the recent rise in a different approach to reviews, one that isn’t dependent on their being published on the day of a game’s launch and that doesn’t doesn’t come with a score attached. The staggering popularity of Ben ‘Yathzee’ Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation videos (which, according to Alexa.com have booted host site The Escapist’s profile up several internet leagues), are almost always focused on games that the viewers have already experienced first hand post-release.

Of course, its popularity has been driven by excellent knob gags but behind the stickman puerile humour there is something more serious and profound going on. People might come for the cock jokes but they stay for the critical chutzpah that props them up (lol). It mightn’t look like it in the classical sense, but Zero Punctuation is one of the first pieces of games criticism (as oppose to reviewing) to hit the mainstream.

A more serious example is Edge magazine’s excellent monthly ‘Time Extend’ feature, which attempts a more orthodox approach to criticism, placing a game in its wider context, drawing out it’s long terms achievements, identifying its aims and its various success and failures in those goals (disclosure: I’m a long time Edge contributor who has penned numerous Time Extends).

Perhaps it’s time for the industry to treat reviews as snapshot buying guides, inconclusive first words in the conversation, and to nurture the more fertile and under-populated ground of for more helpful and insightful long-view criticism in the weeks and month’s following a game’s release.

This column first appeared here over at Game Set Watch, Gamasutra’s sister site where I write a regular column named after this blog.

“Well, some people do die and some people don’t die. Mummy, are we dying? Everybody dies, don’t they?”

How do you answer something like that?

How do you answer something like that when the speaker is your two (going on three) year-old daughter?

She’s right on one thing, of course: death is life’s only certainty. But she’s so very young and everything in me wants to protect her from the painful reality of our finitude.

The way we cling to life is, in a sense strange: before we were born there was nothing, or, at least nothing we can remember. After we are dead there is something, perhaps but even if there isn’t, this chance we have to participate writing a chapter of history is an extraordinary and wonderful one. Perhaps it’s the fear that we’ll have left no mark on its pages when we leave that makes us cling on so hard.

I spent some time with a Jewish rabbi a few weeks ago and, as one of the things that fascinates me is the Jewish understanding of afterlife, I asked him about his belief on the subject. As far as I know, it wasn’t until quite late into Jewish history that an understanding of an afterlife emerged (that of Sheol, around 2nd Century B.C.).

I’m interested in what Jesus’ understanding of heaven and hell might have been (particularly as most of the time he used the word ‘hell’ he was referring to an actual place – a rubbish tip on the outskirts of Jerusalem) as a result of his Jewish upbringing.

The Rabbi answered simply that the afterlife is beyond human understanding; it is unknowable, unfathomable, inscrutable and that is that. Strange that so much Christian theology obsesses with the idea of a better place when we die when its founder spent so little (if any) time on the subject in his teaching and example.

‘We believe in life before death’ is the slogan of the charity Christian Aid. If the Church only grabbed hold of this truth I think the world would be far closer to its founder’s vision than it is now.

I think the measure of someone’s faith, whatever faith that might be, is whether they’d be willing to pursue it even if there was no promise of a posthumous prize at the end of it. If, after you die, your existence is as it was before you lived, is your faith still worth living out? If the answer to that question is yes, then it’s surely a worthy pursuit.

Some other things on the subject to tell you about.

I realise this link is an old one, but please head over here to see a series of photographs by German photographer, Walter Schels, and his partner Beate Lakotta of portraits of people both before and after death. The couple were, reportedly, terrified of dying before the project but, in facing death in this way, their perspective was dramatically changed.

Then there’s After Life (aka ‘Wonderful Life’ in Japanese), a beautiful and emotive 1999 film in which the recently deceased are asked to choose just one memory from this life to take with them into the next one. I saw it because it’s a Halliwell’s Four Star title and fell in love with it immediately. Order it here.

Finally, Last Word on Radio 4 features extended obituaries on recently deceased luminaries. Last week’s programme presented an interview with the late Nuala O’Faolain, in which she talked about coming to terms with her impending death.

Her transparent frankness made me cry when I listened in the car on the way home from ATP this week. Listen again here.

Wait. Is it…mopping its brow?

Still, he looks like a prototype so probably still needs some owner mowderation…

Ten past six on Friday, ten minutes into Mono’s set, and I’m running through the rain, huffing and sweating because if I miss this, the disappointment will run for months.

Maybe it was because the All Tomorrow’s Parties organisers figured Japan’s best/only post-rock band are obscure enough to place this early into the festival, when people are still unpacking and nobody really cares yet.

Into the Skyline pavilion and the queue for Centre Stage, the venue in which they’re playing, stretches almost as long as my frustration. Organisers figured wrong then.

By the time I get in, Mono has four songs left to play, each as dramatic and important as the previous. If their perfect collaboration with World’s End Girlfriend, Palmless Prayer, is the soundtrack to the apocalypse, then this set was the tuning up.

I’m standing at the back – because pushing to the front of a crowd when you arrive late is, as proven a thousand times over the weekend, only for dicks – and everyone about is talking.

“Did you see Peep Show last week?”, “Yes! My favourite is the one where he pretends to take ecstasy”,” “Did you see how much cheddar Joanna brought for the weekend?! We’ll never get through all that!”

And as I close my eyes, and bury their voices with concentration, I realise this yapping, while rude and inappropriate, fits the analogy: sad and profound music billowing all around, humanity oblivious, absorbed in television, fascinated by cheese.

Saturday was probably the best day of music I’ve lived through: ‘World’s End Girlfriend’ (like Mono but with more strings and crazy); ‘Saul Williams’* (exquisite when rapping, tiresome when hacking through Trent Reznor bluster rock); ‘Ghostface Killer’ (tiresome when rapping, exquisite when inviting indie girls with low self-esteem to dance with his crew on stage. Seriously: floral skirts, black rim glasses and Beyoncé ass-jiggling: an image to scrub from the mind if ever there was one).

Then ‘And You Will Know Us By Our Trail of Dead’ (just incredible.) and ‘The National’ (whose album The Boxer is one of my favourites of the past year, but whose audience, delicate guitar lines and obvious stadium-esque popularity at ATP placed them a little too close to Coldplay for comfort).

All of these played back-to-back on one stage or another so that, by the end, my legs were aching enough to realise that yes, my twenties really are nearly over. A

Other than those name checked above I also saw, over the course of the weekend, ‘Dinosaur Jr’, ‘Silver Jews’ (did you know they control the festival but shh), ‘Polvo’ (tight and impressive but also a little boring), ‘Jens Lekmann’ and ‘Four Tet’ (nothing off Rounds, boo) and missed, with a little regret ‘Battles’, ‘De La Soul’ and ‘Broken Social Scene’. Also, on Saturday, I missed ‘Stars of the Lid’ because there’s only so much wonder you can take in one day.

All Tomorrow’s Parties continues to be the best music event in the UK (and, now, New York too). As all of the bands/ artists at the event are chosen by one curating act (in this case, Explosions in the Sky) there’s a sense that everyone’s a guest, here as a privilege rather than a right. As a result it’s almost all about the music, artists mingling un-apprehended by dew-eyed fans around the site; egos, if not discarded, then at least suppressed for a little while.

We hung out with ‘Western Keys’ for some of the weekend and had fun referring to them as The Hold Steady at every opportunity, which is a joke that only really works if you know what both bands look like, and even then, only a little. I think they found it funny, a bit. Anyway, ATP: forever may it continue.

Pop over to The Triforce in the next day or two for Ste Curran’s inevitable denouement of the social side to the weekend, which I’ve left out of here for reasons too numerous to mention and too terrible to recount.

*The contrast between Saul Williams’ set and that of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface that immediately followed it was a perfect articulation of the former’s thoughts on the difference between the poet and the rapper. Read through this previous post if you’re interested. I just read what he wrote there again and it’s incredible.

“It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.”

G. K. Chesterton pooh-poohs Conservative MP David Ruffley’s claims that video games are contributing to a surge in juvenile crime in the UK, particularly among girls.

Although, come to think of it, locking up the Women in Games conference delegates as a precaution mightn’t be such a bad idea.

Like WarioWare before it, Bangai-O Spirits is an exercise in reducing videogaming’s first principles to a torrent of micro-levels. But where the games differ is in the execution and challenge of their myriad tasks.

If WarioWare is an introduction to mainstream videogame convention then Bangai-O Spirits, as you might expect from developer Treasure, is a masterclass in twitch extremism: 160 short, sharp levels based upon the engine, rules and assets of the Dreamcast and N64 classic, Bangai-O, see the company’s previous output ingeniously stripped down to its constituent parts.

Throughout, you pilot a mech that’s but ten pixels tall, the size of a mouse pointer. You’ve a choice of two main weapons from a bank of seven and the two trigger buttons release Bangai-O’s famous bombardment of up to 100 missiles, their size and ferocity increasing the closer an enemy bullet is to hitting you at the point of deployment.

These fundamentals are then spun out into a wide variety of play styles and challenges. Sometimes a puzzle game, sometimes a fighting game, always a shooting game, the range and subtlety of the game’s colorful and busy stages astonishes.

This review appears in this month’s edition of Edge magazine. You can read the rest over at Next-Gen.biz here.

Charlie was a gamer who decided he would write
(not fair: Charlie was a writer who chose games for his insight)
Calloused thumbs
Filled with twitch
Muscle memory
Now to earn a living from his (2nd) favourite teenage hobby.
A critic,
A reviewer
This is how he’d spend his days;
Ten hours, then a judgment, then the promo to ebay.
First came his blog,
Then their website,
Then his words in national print.
Then reactions, reader comments
Critic critics?! Narcissist.

Charlie was quite brilliant
His prose tight and rare
His words perspicacious
His final judgments fair.

But Charlie was a drop in a tidal wave of choices
His commentary discarded
For more forgiving voices.
Still, he reasoned in his head, with marked maturity:
“I’ll reduce game writing’s volume but raise its fidelity”

He learned the PR names and faces
And they flew him to exotic places
And when it came to score their games
He softened words and heightened praise
(Not beyond reasonability,
And not so much to kill integrity
But just enough to keep them sweet
And secure the next first class Boeing seat).

- For by this time Charlie knew
The scores were mostly useless
And the readers mostly clueless
Drunk
On the half-truths of marketing
Whose debunking
They absolutely didn’t want to read.
For games are dreams of better places
(Doubly so when they’ve familiar faces)
And expectations must be met:
To play the game, game writers learn
The scores are quite preset.

For a while
It worked out
Till he married and chose to breed:
Ten pence a word a family will not feed.

So he worked
Ten times harder,
So he aged
Ten times faster
And sooner or later the games bored him:
Ten a week, not one would floor or awe him

Every one seemed quite the same
Shades of principles arcane:

For every one that mattered some
A hundred thousand mattered none

And Charlie learned the final lesson
In his hackery descension
The more you cover and the less you play,
The more you earn and the less you pay

So it was that Charlie joined
Ever growing company;
Those whose seeds of talent and ability
Were choked by cloying weeds
Of grim,
Necessity.

This column first appeared here over at Game Set Watch, Gamasutra’s sister site where I write a regular column named after this blog.

…………………………………………………….

My second column for GSW and I thought I’d try something a bit different already: a cynical poem about how freelance games writing is a way of life that’s almost impossible to maintain as you grow older, marry and try to support a family. Unless, that is, you’re willing to compromise your integrity in one way or another. All done in the style of Joseph Moncure March poem…

John Walker chided me last night for ‘suggesting that we’re all corrupt, or on the path to corruption’ and being generally ‘hopeless’.

But, well, I do think it’s almost hopeless. I managed to just about exist for three years solely as a games freelancer but nowadays, with a wife, family and mortgage, there’s no way I could make it work – and bear in mind that I’m more active and committed in games writing now than I’ve ever been and, as far as I can tell, I do just about as much weekly freelance games writing as anyone else I know in the UK.

This isn’t a situation common to all writing jobs either. Most writing careers based on reviewing are much better paid for the amount of hours you have to put in to review the subject. Time playing games is time unpaid and games take a really long time to play. When publishers are still paying the same rates they have for nearly ten years, the raw economics of the job become near unworkable for anyone outside of their early twenties.

I want to do right by the developers whose games I cover (often moreso than the readers whose expectations are, as the poem said, already preset) and I’ll certainly try to finish each game I’m given, but sometimes, in real life, that just doesn’t work out.

Discussion of the poem spilled onto Tom Chick‘s Quarter to Three forum (a haunt of many US games writers) where I was so bold as to ask what proportion of Tom’s income comes from games writing.

He (quite rightly) opted not to get into that on the internet but did admit that: ‘if the question is whether I could support myself solely as a freelance games writer, the answer is ‘no’.’

This is no industry for old men.

I noticed this thing the other day on Digg.com, the site that aggregates interesting news and pages on the Internet and lets the wisdom of crowds push the best ones to the front of the site. All news ever, like, everything that comes into Digg, is classified into eight categories. One of thee categories is, extraordinarily, videogames.

Can you imagine that happening in the real world? In Internet world games are one of the eight core categories of all important news and information. In this climate (to a young western audience at least) being a games writer is like pretty much the best job there is, a totally aspirational vocation.

But even those who make manage to fill those few jobs there are in the field find it near impossible to scratch a living from it. As I said to John yesterday, I’m not sure what my point is here, but I’m definitely pregnant with a point…