A cornucopia of distractions for Friday

Guns, maps and goo

Back in pre-histoy, when men rode dinosaurs to work and Simon Cowell was still a teenager, this blog was born. I often wrote about games and games culture, particularly around the birth of the Wii – when the possibilities afforded by waggling a thingy in the air (fnar) seemed endlessly exciting.

These days, however, I’m struggling to care about my consoles. I spend a lot of time on Rock Band and Guitar Hero – but they’re just another way of listening to music (even if some of that music is by Tool).

Then there are those “open world sandbox games” that promise a million solutions to each task. They always sound promising, but they can’t hide the fact that the task in question is, without fail, killing someone. Your choices ultimately boil down to this question: “Which noun would you like to use in committing a brutal murder?” As someone whose favourite game moments came in the cartoony, imaginative brain-teasers of the Super Mario and Banjo Kazooie series, the endless parade of headshots and body armour and healthpacks and “melee assaults” is horribly uninspiring.

Furthermore, thanks to Grand Theft Auto, every game now seems to be set in the middle a huge, sprawling city. Even Burnout has adopted this format – leading to the ridiculous situation of a racing game where you can take a wrong turn. Do you remember the last time you went the wrong way in your car? Was your reaction either (a) to say “hey, this is a really exciting, unpredictable driving experience” or (b) to bite a huge chunk out of your steering wheel and shout “you fucking imbecile” into the rearview mirror? If you answered (a) then congratulations, you have won a job at Microsoft Games Studios.

The obvious conclusion is this: Games need rules. It’s as true of Monopoly as it is of kiss chase. I’d rather that designers concentrated on giving me focussed, structured gameplay than sending me on aimless quests around endless maps telling me I should enjoy the freedom. Wandering around unsure of what you’re supposed to be doing is what you do when you’ve got Alzheimer’s or a seat in the European Parliament. If it not fun, it’s not a game.

But enough grumbling, let me tell you about the best game I’ve played this year. It’s called World Of Goo and it’s a taut little puzzler, full of charm and character. All you have to do is stack little blobs of gloop together to reach a big pipe in the sky – but the designers have taken the care to create a quirky, satirical story around the tiny goo-balls’ predicament. It’s utterly compelling, and frequently hilarious.

This weekend, you can get it for the bargain price of $0.01 (or whatever sum you decide to pay, Radiohead-style). I heartily recommend that you do.

In the meantime, here’s a lovely little video from Adam and Joe’s Radio 6 show that perfectly encapsulates my formative gameplaying experiences.

Rock Band: Radiohead

A note for the gullible: This is a sketch from MTV’s new animated show, Popzilla, and not a real advertisement

Excitingly, got to play the new Beatles: Rock Band game today. I would write a review but all I saw was a stream of dots racing towards me in quick succession, just like in the previous iterations of the game. The visuals in the background could have been a new high watermark for computer graphics in the 21st Century, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Someone swore they saw a giant spunking donkey cock up on the flatscreen at one point, but that was probably just a glitch.

Anyway… I don’t want to boast (I do) but I scored 99% playing the drums on my very first go, which finally proves I’m as good as Ringo Starr and could have replaced him in the Beatles if I had a time machine and a pudding bowl haircut.

Yes, I realise Ringo Starr was an actual genius who had to invent those drum patterns from scratch, but creative thinking is completely overrated these days. I am his equal, and nobody can prove otherwise without arranging a live drum-off at the Royal Albert Hall.

Go on, I dare you.

The music will never die…

…It even survives this:

Cha’mon.

The music will never die…

…It even survives this:

Cha’mon.

A mixed bag of internet goodies

Goodies from the internet cookie jar

Today, we bring you links to external websites to create the impression we’re working when, in fact, we’re reading external websites. Duplication is keeping this blog alive, folks…

:: Katy Perry is all tucked up in a cosy duvet.

:: Following the much-emailed literal interpretation of A-ha’s Take On Me video, and the not-nearly-as-funny version of Tears For Fears’ Head Over Heels, comedy gold is mined once again in the series’ third instalment.

:: Credit card warning. Don’t do what this guy did.

:: Isla Fisher looks truly scrumptious in this photoshoot for Allure magazine.

:: Lily Allen is streaming her new album on MySpace. I can’t be bothered to listen to it – can someone else pass it through their auditory system and let me know if it’s worth buying? Thanks.

:: We all suspected Christian Bale had a bit of a temper, but here’s confirmation – an extraordinary two minute, expletive-filled rant on the set of Terminator: Salvation. Disgraceful. Update: Here’s the inevitable dance remix.

:: Following SingStar Abba’s success, we’re promised Singstar Queen later this year. I don’t care what Sony says, however, I’m not buying a PS3 until we get Singstar Girls Aloud. And the price drops by £100. And pigs fly.

:: President Obama reads Bush’s handover letter live from the Oval Office

:: A trainspotter-esque, but nonetheless fascinating, Wikipedia page on unusual types of gramophone records.

:: Whatever happened to TV’s Blossom? “I was too ‘ethnic’ or ‘quirky’,” she tells The Onion.

:: Here’s what Guitar Hero would have looked like in 1982 [via b3ta]

Does Guitar Hero discriminate against drummers?

I got my first drum kit aged 8 and, over the next 15 years, played it to the extent where I destroyed my ears, my parents’ relationship with their neighbours, and my cat’s nerves.

But since I moved to London in 1997, there hasn’t been space for a drum kit in the series of poky little rooms I’ve called home. So, it was with great excitement that I purchased Guitar Hero: World Tour – a video game music simulator which comes with a six-piece set you can fold away and store in a cupboard.

The trailer for the game promised it would have “the most realistic drums” of any game on the current generation of games consoles. Not actually realistic, of course, but as close as you’d get. There are touch sensitive pads, so you can play a gentle shuffle or thump the living daylights out of the tom toms, depending on your mood. And, unlike rival game Rock Band, you get a pair of cymbals to smash.

It arrived at Discopop Towers on Saturday and, after a few days experimentation, I have discovered the awful truth: I am too good for this game.

Now, I’m not saying I’m a modern-day John Bonham or Cozy Powell, but every ounce of skill and instinct I’ve picked up over the last 30 years actually counts against me.

Take the opening song – Survivor’s Eye Of The Tiger. Except on the puny easy setting (which recreates precisely the experience of banging sticks on a wooden block at nursery school) I invariably failed within ten seconds of the beat kicking in.

In exasperation, I turned to the game’s practice mode and played the intro over and over again – to no avail. “There must be a bug,” I decided after an hour of mounting frustration, during which my success rate never peaked higher than 60%.

After another thirty minutes, I was sadly convinced that all those years of flailing around garages with a pair of drumsticks had amounted to nothing. When set to a click track, I couldn’t keep time to save my life.

Eventually, my wife asked to watch me playing to see if she could work out what I was doing wrong.

She got it in about five seconds. There is a subtle swing to the hi-hat pattern on Eye Of The Tiger, which I was playing instinctively. But the game wanted a strict 4/4 rhythm.

Once the error had been pointed out to me, I was easily able complete the song on the game’s hardest setting, expert mode. But it was still a struggle – the drum pattern just felt wrong (it doesn’t help that, when you hit the pads in the ‘correct’ sequence, the game plays back the drum track from the original recording – including that lilting hi-hat). As a result, I kept slipping back into the swing beat.

Understandably, the game has to be calibrated to make it playable for non-percussionists – but I wonder whether they will struggle with it, too? Neurologist Oliver Sacks (whose fascinating book, Musicophilia, looks at the effects of music on the brain) believes rhythm is an innate skill for humans. “We respond to rhythm by keeping in time, by moving our heads,” he told science website Universe last year.

“One cannot not respond to music: even if you don’t make any external movement, the motor parts of the brain respond to rhythm. This appears spontaneously in every child – but you cannot train a chimpanzee, or a bird, or a whale, or an elephant, to keep synchronized time to a rhythm.”

Of course, anyone who’s seen their dad dance at a wedding will realise that rhythmical ability varies from person to person. So maybe the syncopation issue will only affect people like me, who’ve “fine-tuned” their rhythmical abilities.

I got some consolation from rock legend Slash – who was interviewed for Guitar Hero’s last iteration (in which he made a cameo appearance). In the video, the Velvet Revolver / GnR guitarist spoke of similar frustrations with the guitar mode:

“Guitar Hero is harder as a guitar player than if I’d never touched a guitar and all I knew I had to do was touch all these different colours on the neck,” he said.

So, has anyone else experienced this exasperation with the Guitar Hero / Rock Band series? I’d be interested to know…

Katy Perry in a computer game

Like Natasha Bedingfield and Lily Allen before her, Katy Perry has recorded a “simlish” version of her new single for hit PC game The Sims 2.

If you ask me, the nonsense lyrics are an improvement.

Katy Perry – Hot N’ Cold (simlish)

Alicia wants us to tap her Keys

When you think of Alicia Keys what three words come into your head? For me it’s probably piano, slightly, and dull.

But not the people who run the soul star’s website, oh no. They have squeezed their brain cells very, very hard and come up with the words: tetris, Tetris, TETRIS!

Yes, you can play the famed 1980s rotating blocks puzzle game on Alicia’s website while being brainwashed seduced by her mum-friendly music (although surely they’ve missed a trick by using No-one instead of Falling?)

Why they’ve decided to offer this “feature” is a complete mystery. Unless they’re trying to subtly reinforce the link between listening to Alicia Keys and boring, reptitive tasks.

PS: Here is Alicia’s new video, for the literally quite-good-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing Teenage Love Affair. The storyline combines the perfectly-matched topics of a college campus relationship and African Aids orphans. Tasteful!

Alicia Keys New – Teenage Love Affair