Sienna Reads: Muscle March

An individual of my acquaintance has commenced reading ESRB game rating statements in a phone-sex-line voice, and YouTubing the results. That's a resounding WTF right there but its application to homoerotic Wii posing game Muscle March takes the above and bonds it unwholesomely to a double-digit exponential. Damn exponentials. Sitting there in their superscript. Mocking me. Their day will come.

Pull My Finger

This year's crop of April Fool's jokes are incredibly, incredibly lame. Shame on you, internet. Shame. You've managed to make my information feed useless for 24 hours without compensating with entertainment.

As a side note, April Fool's certainly brings into contrast the inherent strangeness of the game industry. I can't even tell if this is a joke or not.

Wonderella

So today I was going to talk about hidden object games and their ominous rise to success but instead of that I'm going to instead travel back in time to 2006 so that Wonderella is new and fresh and I can recommend it to you before you discover it for yourself.

Seriously, it is worth reading. You will find The Non-Adventures of Wonderella both compelling and hilarious. True story. I have obligingly linked you to the first comic so you can follow the funny in sequential order. It is the comedy of the human condition. Haven't we all been tricked by leprechauns that one time?

I finish this post on-topic with the following statement-slash-rhetorical-question: Halo Wars - you promised so much but delivered so little - what is up with that?

Simple English

I used to be in favour of writing in Simple English. I rarely achieved it - I lean heavily towards verbosity - but it seemed to be a goal worth aspiring to.

Today's xkcd directed me to the Simple English Wikipedia. A cursory inspection has reminded me that Simple English is disturbingly close to Newspeak, which I note with amusement is a concept that doesn't have a page in the Simple English Wiki. Fifteen things described as "good" and "very good" in under a minute was enough to scare me off the whole Simple English movement. We have a complex language so that we can express complex thoughts; sometimes simpler really is dumber.

I'll probably swing back to simplicity eventually but in the mean time I really want to revel in the fact that I have a whole rainbow of words for expressing approval above and beyond "good".

Trailers From Hell

I haven't had time for a full post today, but I do have time to direct you to Trailers From Hell, which is very excellent.

The site is all about film industry notables providing spoken commentary on trailers for films both well-known and obscure. It's got a great mix of humour and genuine insight and almost every trailer makes for top-notch watching.

Those involved in the project include big-screen directors Eli Roth (Hostel), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and John Landis (The Blues Brothers), TV directors Jesus Trevino (Babylon 5), Alan Arkush (Heroes), and Michael Lehmann (The West Wing), and a smattering of scriptwriters such as Chris Wilkinson (Nixon) thrown in for good measure.

(Visit Trailers From Hell)

Credit goes to the incomparably sexy Dalekboy for pointing the site out to me.

Kotaku Sells Out

As I write this, Kotaku Australia is running some horrible full-page branding for the movie Valkyrie. It looks terrible, it's not on-topic for the site, and it actually interferes with reading the articles.

Add to that their interminable off-topic blogvertisements for TV show The Phone, which are presented in exactly the same fashion as their regular posts but marked with the word "advertisement" in small print above the post title, and you'd be right to be suspicious of exactly how much of what's on Kotaku these days is a genuine attempt at enthusiast journalism.

This is exactly the sort of sell-out crap that started up on Gamespot before they took their big plunge into the mediocrity pool; here's hoping Kotaku makes an about-face before it's too late.

PoupeeGirl - Made Of Meat

If you're lucky, you've not heard of PoupeeGirl, the strange Japanese community founded on vicious consumerism and virtual paper dolls. It's like Facebook, except everyone's a 14-year-old Japanese girl or a 20-something-otaku.

The goal of PoupeeGirl is simple - show off your expensive-label fashion collection via unique photos, and thereby win the internet. Posting photos, and commenting on photos of others, gets you the game's virtual currency, which can be spent on questionable clothing for your virtual avatar.

The discussion here isn't very deep - comment threads can run to 10+ pages of "Cute!!!" and "Super-cute!!!" - which might have something to do with the gestapo-like thought police who rule this virtual nation from on high.

Led by authoritarian community manager Katharine, the jackbooted minions of PoupeeGirl's management will be quick to strip you of your photographs, your clothes, and your virtual currency for the slightest infraction of the PoupeeGirl rules. Such infractions include posting a non-unique photograph, depicting someone's face in a photograph, or mislabelling a scarf as a stole.

Spurred on by a certain PoupeeGirl player of my acquaintance (who shall not be named for fear of reprisals), I today entered this community for the purpose of what are commonly referred to as "the lolz". Soon my blonde-banged avatar "OuchMyFace" was installed in a brand new Poupee Room and ready to get fashionable.


I've always believed it's important to get ahead of the trend, and if you've been around the traps you'll probably be aware that the next wave in fashion is meat. Lots and lots of meat. So I quickly uploaded some "choice cuts" from my closet for the approval of the masses. Above you'll see my "meatbag". Other selections included a range of "phone dangles" that looked surprisingly like shavings of roast beef, a "hat" that bore a certain resemblance to a decapitated pig's head, and the home-made costume I wore to Halloween last year where I went dressed as an entire pork roast still on the spit.

Step two was to make some friends. I got busy! I whipped up a collection of effervescent teen-girl-style compliments, added a reference to meat to each one, and then parsed them through Google Translator into Japanese and back. Instant teenspeak! The garbled grammar made up for my suspicious insistence on capital letters and punctuation.

For perfume:
It captures the essence of meat in a brave waft of madness. Don't you think it is an INFUSION? A pork infusion. The smell of cooking meat makes me think of eternity. I rate you two pigs out of a possible three.

For Hello Kitty earrings:
Hello Kitty's cute - she is made of raw meat cat! This is all her life! It is the best - and now you can hang from her ears! Babe!

For pyjama pants:
Since wearing the pants, it is important today. Practically anyone, do not have the pants are fine and eating a hamburger meat. And both my feet, please refer to the trend of the development potential and the lamb chops! Fashion victory!

I was an instant success, garnering friends, comments, accolades, and attention on the LiveJournal Community.


But all good things must come to an end, and less than six hours after I created her, OuchMyFace discovered that her ability to post images had been revoked. The fuzz had found her, and now she was going down Rodney King-style. It seems that the bleeding edge of tomorrow's fashion was just a little too bloody for the powers that be at PoupeeGirl, and the humourless killbots that inhabit those dreary domains had begun spamming the "exile" button.

The account still technically exists - feel free to friend it and examine such meaty offerings as it still has attached to it. But the fire has gone out of OuchMyFace's meaty heart, and she will post her pork-clothes no more.

Rest in peace, OuchMyFace. We'll miss you.

Wikimedia Funding Rebuttal

In quick response to yesterday's post:

Regardless of exactly how it gets spent, Wikipedia runs on less than six million dollars. The remake of the The Day The Earth Stood Still was shot on a budget of eighty million. Which would we rather have in the world?

Wikipedia could probably be done for a lot cheaper, and as a not-for-profit organisation it does deserve a hefty chunk of public scrutiny, but in the bigger scheme of things we're getting an absolute bargain.

Wikimedia Funding

If you visit Wikipedia today you'll be treated to a "personal appeal" from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. This replaces the donation drive image that's been up at the top of each page for the last few months.

After reading the appeal, you may be left thinking that Wikipedia is struggling for funds. After all, its budget is in the realm of "less than six million dollars a year". That's a lot of cash.

Hang on, though. The Wikimedia Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation which employs a total staff of 23 people. Six million dollars? Is that really what it costs to run servers for the world's fifth-most-popular web service?

Let's check out the Wikimedia 07/08 Annual Report. And we'll be glad we did. It turns out that the Wikimedia budget is less than six million dollars - a lot less. Expenditure in 07/08 was only three and a half million dollars, which includes $140,000 for the Wikimania convention and $309,000 in salaries for Executive Director Sue Gardner and Deputy Director Erik Moller.

That's against income of a little over seven million in the same calendar year; in effect, Wikimedia picked up a year's forward operating costs.

Let's look at that in a historical context. At the start of 2006 Wikimedia's net assets totalled $270,000. I'm not missing a zero there. Over that year they raked in one and a half million and shelled out $790,000. By 2007 their net assets were at $1.7 million.

So they want six million in donations for this financial year. What are they going to do with it? Let's look at the annual report again.

1) They're pruning back Wikimania by about 40K. That's probably to do with reduced costs due to the next convention being in Buenos Aires but it's still a reduction in community expenditure.

2) They're expecting no significant increase in legal costs. I'm not sure that that's realistic - as Wikipedia expands you'd think that risk of legal action would rise exponentially, but whatever.

3) Gardner and Moller are getting a combined total increase in salaries of about $170,000.

4) The Wikimedia Board (including founder Jimmy Wales) are having their funding (including salaries) doubled.

5) Administration and technical costs increase by millions of dollars.

The total anticipated budget for next year sits at a little under six million dollars. Income remains stable at seven and a half million, based on an estimated community contribution of not the asked-for six million dollars, but just three million.

I, honestly, have no idea whether $2.7 million in technical expenses is a reasonable figure in order to provide something like Wikipedia. In the absence of expertise I'm going to assume it is. But this doesn't appear to be an organisation that's in shallow financial waters. It's an organisation that's doubling its executive salaries during a global recession.

This is, mind you, just a casual glance over the most shallow of financial documents. I'd assume that no one would take it as gospel, and I invite both educated lectures about Wikimedia financing and barely literate flames. If you think Wikimedia is in more need of money than I'm making out, feel free to start the debate in the comments below.

Kirby/Snoop Dogg - Drop It Like It's Hot

Apologies to those who have seen it before.

Apologies to those seeing it for the first time.

Communicating With Government Online: How To

Just a little addendum to my last post. Let's say, for example, that you, like most right-minded Australians, see the idea of a national net filter as not only fundamentally misconceived but also ineffective in achieving the goal it aims for. Let's also say you would like to communicate this in writing - let's say by means of a Federal Government consultative blog. (And I'll note that they haven't asked you for your opinion on that, which may mean they aren't interested in hearing it.)

Here are some things to try and include in your written communication.

- Correct spelling and grammar. These will make it look like your opinion has been thought about for longer than it takes to press the spellcheck button, and will also give the impression that you paid attention in school long enough to learn how to use a dictionary, and therefore possibly learned some other things as well.

- Formal English. Net slang is awesome, and there are a whole bunch of places where you can legitimately use it in a hilarious and attention-grabbing fashion. Formal government consultation is not one of them. It's not a matter of whether they "get it" (they might surprise you) - it's that, much in the same way as you wear your best suit to a job interview, you should wear your best English when you're genuinely trying to persuade someone of something. Avoid jargon and pop-culture references.

- Politeness. Even people who are wrong deserve your politeness. Assume good faith. Assume these are people who would honestly like to improve the lot of Australians. At the very least, assume that they are not particularly interested in reading past your insults in case you mixed some good advice in with your name-calling.

- Reasoned argument. "Net filter = fail" may be a pithy reference to modern forum culture but it is unlikely to cause anyone to have a sudden moment of enlightenment and convert to your point of view. Back up your opinions with reasons and examples, and if possible facts, statistics, and references.

- Constructiveness. For each thing that you say is a bad idea, try and include a good idea that could be tried instead. Also note that good ideas are received better when they are expressed without sarcasm.

- Conciseness. This is my weakness, don't let it be yours. The government does not have time to read everything you have to say, particularly in an online forum. Limit yourself to three key points, make your points in three sentences each, and make these the first three paragraphs of your text (with possibly a one-line summary/introduction at the top and a one line summary at the bottom). Even that's really longer than is ideal in a comment section.

- A forward outlook. Focus on the future. Focus on what can be done now, and done tomorrow, not what was or was not done in the past. The government is looking for ideas for future policy, not ideas for things to apologise about.

I hope this helps. I for one am already sick of reading comments consisting of "GG government better luck next election QQ epic net fail lolz you no can haz digital economy cheezburger", and I'm pretty sure the government is too.

Thursday Browser Games

See how I put "Thursday" in the title there, as though I've done this in the past or will ever do this again in the future? It's a tradition that starts and ends today; you can consider this post endorsed by the weight of a mythical history of repetition.

Anyway, a few browser games to entertain you which you may or may not have encountered before.

Hedgehog Launch is a neat little thing which challenges you to fling a hedgehog into space, using a combination of elastic bands and jet engines. Your first few attempts will be pitiful, but over consecutive days you accumulate cash with which to upgrade your elastic and/or engines. Surprisingly fun.

Splitter is a physics based game which presents the classic challenge of moving a ball into a hole. The catch is, the only way you can interact with your environment is by cutting things in two, and you only have a limited amount of cuts. Very neat.

Finally, Shore Siege is a defence-style game where you play a crew of shipwrecked pirates struggling to repair their vessel while being attacked by waves of enemies. In addition to deploying snipers and turrets, you take an active part by using a pin to pop balloons, a fire to burn marshmallow-enemies, water to douse fireballs, et cetera. Addictive.

All of the above links point to Kongregate, which is my way of attempting to get sweet, sweet referral points for that site, but I should mention that Shore Siege and Hedgehog Launch are the work of Armor Games and if you particularly like them you might want to visit their site directly.

World's Oldest Lolcat

ICanHasCheezburger claims to have found the world's oldest lolcat, being a captioned photograph of a kitten dating back to 1905. The black and white image depicts a cat on a stool, with the text, "WHAT'S DELAYING MY DINNER?"

Answer: Japanese imperialist aggression and Russian civil unrest! 1905 was a bad year for kittens, apparently!

SHIFT

Another browser game for today. This one's called SHIFT and it's actually quite unique. Like every second casual game these days it rampantly burglarises a lot of its cool from Portal but it's all justified in the context of an absolute gem of a central game mechanic and some extremely solid level design.

Unfortunately explaining the core concept ruins one of the early moments in the game, so I'm going to let you discover it for yourself. However, I can say that it's a platformer (my arch-nemesis) and yet I loved it to pieces.

You should go investigate for yourself. It's really very clever.

Hanna In A Choppa

Helicopter physics games have been around for millennia. Primitive cave paintings show neanderthal man struggling with the vagaries of WASD control configurations and floaty flying avatars.

Actually I might just be getting confused with 1992 shareware title Ugh!, possibly the best game about flying caveman taxidrivers ever made. That thing was where it was at. In fact, while we're taking a leisurely stroll down Nostalgia Avenue, why don't you go download Ugh! for free and get your cro-magnon on old-school style.

But that's not what I'm posting about today. For those of you for whom 16-bits is just not enough bits, there's a fancy-pancy modern browser-based helicopter game which I just now this minute discovered. It is called Hanna In A Choppa and it is, in the vernacular, "rather good". The frustration of this type of game has always come from when you inevitably ram into things, avoiding which tends to be the point of the game. Hanna has a nice balance, failing you for only the most spectacular crashes, but rewarding you with shiny achievements if you go the extra yard for a perfect flight. It's also got a wide variety of missions, starting with predictable "navigate this tight corridor" levels but working up to rescue-at-sea scenarios and the provision of monster-sized hairdressing.

Hanna In A Choppa is available through Kongregate, and probably some other casual gaming portals. Y'all should go play it some. I'm not kidding. It's delicious.

Penny Arcade Episode 2

Regular readers will recall my review of the first installment of Penny Arcade Adventures was mixed; although the game was generally funny, the user interface was godawful and some bass-ackwards achievement implementation made finishing the game a tedious chore.

Penny Arcade Episode 2 fixes pretty much all of those problems, leaving the competent and genuinely entertaining core of the game to shine through.

First up, Penny Arcade is about murdering things. Last time around it was mimes and hoboes; in Episode 2 you'll get to go at it with crazy people and the obscenely wealthy. You wander from place to place and proceed to get your murder on with pretty much everyone you come across; in between all the good-times-killin' you can go searching for funny in the nearby scenery, and have hilarious dialogues with those few NPCs you come across who are non-murderable.

Being, theoretically, an RPG, levelling up is an important part of the mixture. If you've played Episode 1 you can import your level 15 character from that game, or if you're a newbie you can start afresh with a two-level penalty. Episode 2 takes you through to level 30, and replaces your boring old Episode 1 weapons with a new set of slaughtering tools, which are again fully upgradeable.

Surprisingly, the story actually begins to gather some steam in this episode. Two of the major villains are tied quite personally to your party members. This simple bit of character development does a lot to make things more immediate and relevant, and gives you a good reason to want to come back for the next round of goon-murdering.

Penny Arcade's real-time combat system is its biggest (read: only) innovation, and it's also its biggest problem. Once combat begins, it continues non-stop; while you're searching item menus for healing goodies, the bad guys are stabbing you. Minimising damage, and for that matter not getting killed by even the wimpiest of villains, requires blocking, which is done via button presses timed to your enemies' attacks. Your attacks also activate reaction-based minigames for maximising your kidney-punching. All that reactioneering makes combat stressful, attention-demanding, and occasionally frustrating. It's probably for the best, though, as without this gimmick it would be painfully dull.

The battling is better in Episode 2 than it was before, though. You now get an on-screen indication of when you'll need to block. Your attack minigames are more entertaining as well. There's adjustable difficulty settings; "normal" difficulty seemed to me a little more forgiving than last time around, as I was able to make it from start to finish without seeing any of my characters knocked out.

Episode 2 is a lot more colourful than last time around. And I mean that as a metaphor for "foul-mouthed". The language in Episode 1 may have been reasonably restrained, but the dialogue here goes off the hook, starting with your basic healing item, which "fucks pain up the ass", and continuing uphill. This is a great thing as it makes the proceedings feel a lot more like genuine Penny Arcade but if you're of a sensitive disposition you should probably avert your eyes for the entire length of the game.

For XBox 360 owners, the gamerpoint system is much better. Last time around the achievements asked you to play the game against the grain and do things contrary to the way they were intended. That's all out the door this time, and instead the achievements encourage you to build skill and finesse, with focus on things such as timing perfect blocks. It's fairly easy to pick up all 12 in a single playthrough. This is a great example of using achievements to enrich the core gaming experience.

The weakest point of this episode is the final boss battle; in the grand tradition of other really bad boss battles over time, developer Hothead has opted for a final fight which features unique and poorly-explained game mechanics. This was the only point in the game where I had to go looking for hints, and it was exactly the point where I least wanted the game flow to be broken. Once again, developers, unique mechanics on the last level is a stupid idea.

All told, Episode 2 is a vast improvement over Episode 1. If you tried the first offering and were undecided, Episode 2 offers a great reason to come back for a second taste. However, there's nothing here that makes the series more accessible than it was before, so if you're not a Penny Arcade fan or you really hated the Episode 1 then this is still not the game the for you.

Amorphous +

Can I direct your attention to a little something I've been enjoying lately? And I'll warn you in advance that being free, flash-driven and browser-based it strays dangerously close to the dark provinces of the casual game.

It's Amorphous +; I'm playing the thing through Kongregate but you can probably find it on any number of game portals.

Basically, you're a little dude with a sword so ridiculously large it puts the cast of Final Fantasy to shame. Your job is to swing the sword, and splat jelly-like blobs before they splat you. It sounds simple enough, but the real skill is in earning combos by splatting multiple blobs in a single swing. That gets complex as the different blobs have interesting interactions - Glooples can merge to become a significantly more dangerous larger species, Inkies leave blinding ink that Toasties can set on fire, and Melties leave a pool of acid on death which kills anything that crosses it.

All these shenannigans should be run of the mill but somehow they're fantastically entertaining. Plus there's a whole mess of awards to get for doing any number of crazy things, which makes the whole thing start to get deeply addictive.

There's a good couple of hours of gameplay in this thing. And it's free. I highly recommend it. Go play it now.

Disco Stick

"Let's have some fun, this beat is sick. I wanna take a ride on your disco stick."

Worst. Song. Ever.

I blame Laura for this. Also for this, which is the reason that we should all look at ball-jointed dolls as if they are odd.

Real post to follow shortly.

Real-Time Censorship

Disturbing news, everybody!

Microsoft have patented a technology for real-time audio censorship. The technology analyses recorded or live transmitted speech to look for "undesirable" words or phrases and render them inaudible. Which means you can swear all you want, and the person on the other end of the line will just wonder why you've suddenly gone quiet.

Microsoft obviously intends to turn the thing loose on XBox Live, so that young babies and suchlike will be protected from the ravages of the 14-year-old vocabulary, and as a togglable option that's probably something that everyone on that community can benefit from.

It's one of those technologies, though, that could have a lot of horrible, horrible applications in the wrong hands. Can you picture the thing being applied wholesale to our phone system? To our television networks? Ars Technica have already seen the problem in their article, and they draw our attention to the love that regimes like that in China would have for this process. Picture a world where the word "election" simply can't be communicated over a telephone line.

YouTube already uses something similar for automatically detecting copyrighted material in uploaded videos, whereby videos that the algorithm thinks contains visual or audio information belonging to another party are flagged, and the onus is on the video uploader to prove that their work is original. The algorithm is, of course, secret, so the precise method by which it brands you a criminal is neither known nor open to criticism.

Naturally, you can't put the genie back in the box, and the development of something like this was more or less a cultural inevitability. Ultimately the only way that we, as a society, can see that this benefits us more than it harms us is by strong privacy laws, a free and intelligent ongoing political debate on the issue, and through the vigilance of each individual citizen.

Tower Defence

I was chatting to someone yesterday who, it turned out, had never heard of tower defence games. Admittedly it's a strange little subgenre. What's most strange about it is that despite being one of the more OCD elements of the real-time-strategy milieu it seems to have become largely the province of "casual gamers".

The premise is that a bunch of enemies will troop across a screen from point A to point B, and it's your job to install a bunch of automatically firing turrets along the way to wipe out the nasties before they reach their destination. Typically the enemies will come in waves; you'll have limited resources to build your towers, but every enemy killed or wave cleared will grant bonus cash.

As far as I can tell the first instance of tower defence gameplay appears in Atari's classic Warlords (1980), although it's more properly inspired by Westwood's Dune II (1992), where correct alignment of your turrets and tanks was key to success.

Anyway, to educate the uninformed I thought I'd trot out three of my favourite browser-based tower defence games, and let the gameplay therein say more than the written word ever could.

Desktop Tower Defence 1.5: The undisputed king of browser-based tower defence. Clean, engaging graphics, a good mixture of depth and intuitiveness, and a wide range of modes to try.

Vector TD 2: Deeper than Desktop, with more turret options, and with more freedom to set your own pace. Simple vector graphics emphasise the tactical element of the game.

Bloons TD 2: Monkey versus balloons in a kid-friendly grudge match. Turrets here don't snap to a grid, which can throw off those who like an orderly turret layout, but a lot of charm and a wealth of turret options compensate.

Try them out, but be warned - these are very addictive games!