Delusions of Immortality

"Robert Foster is an innocent outsider stranded in a vast city where oppressed civilians live and work in soaring tower blocks... while the corrupt, covetous and rich lie underground, shielded from all pollution. Alone, save for a robot circuit board, Foster must fight for survival... and discover the sinister truth behind his abduction..."

I felt a little taken aback reading that- but it turns out I'm the star of a 14 year-old PC game and never realised it. As 'Beneath a Steel Sky' is now available for free from the excellent Good Old Games, I can't help feeling a sense of duty to give it a try. As is par-for-the course in Point 'n' Click games, I'll almost certainly get stuck after less than thirty minutes on the first semi-obscure puzzle I come across, but if I'm really scraping the barrel for things to write about over the next couple of months, I may even review it.

Your chance to experience a day in the life of Robert Foster

On an entirely unrelated note, you should probably expect this place to go quiet for the next week or so, as I'll be trying to write articles for Savy Gamer and the Worship St Irregulars. I've been procrastinating over both for far too long, and as I set this blog up to help rather than hinder my attempts at writing, it seems slightly crazy to be posting Youtube videos or writing about ancient videogames here, when I could be busy producing something a little longer and more interesting, for sites that occasionally manage to get more than ten unique visitors per day.

Gulp, that was a comma-tastic long sentence. Sorry. I'm just getting it out of my system before trying to remember how to write properly.

See you in February.

"You ain't heard it played like that before..."

This is the first in a new feature I hope to run more-or-less every month, where I'll try to bring you a popular song covered in an unusual way, by a relatively obscure band. The inspiration came from hearing 6ix Toys' version of Voodoo People on Craig Charles' radio show last Saturday, and I dare you not to enjoy it:



Here's the Prodigy original (along with its brilliantly disturbing video) for the sake of comparison:

An English Gentleman's Guide to the bars and clubs of Cervino

Skiing holidays are sick, really. And I don't mean "sick" in the (snow-boarding?) sense of "radical" or "gnarly" or "good". I mean: disgusting, indulgent, bourgeois, environmentally unfriendly and terrifyingly expensive. But just in case you're as despicable as me and decide one day to go to Cervino in Italy for a skiing holiday, here's a woefully researched guide to help you decide where to spend your evenings.

The Matterhorn, a fairly famous mountain that can be seen from Cervino

The Dragon & Thistles: An English theme pub. Do you want to fly hundreds of miles for a Guiness that costs 7 Euros? Or for a ropey Italian covers band that plays trite English songs badly? Or maybe you're nostalgic for stingy 25ml spirit measures? Assuming you're sensible enough to answer 'no' to all those questions, this place ought to be avoided.


Gasoline: Arguably has the most beautiful barmaid in town, but there's little else to recommend it. Bland, big-beat, Euro-pop, synth-nonsense is played too loudly; it's all a bit cramped; and the beer is priced at a fairly average but still expensive 5 Euros. We never had the desire to stay past midnight, and it could be the sort of place that comes alive later at night, but I saw nothing to suggest it was worth hanging around.


Le Bistot de L'Abbe: Restaurant and Wine bar. We only stopped in for a quick beer, but I'd happily recommend it to anyone wanting to escape the bustle and noise of the other places on this list. A fine selection of wines and tastefully decorated, it's an excellent place for quieter, more intimate conversation.


White Rabbit: The place to go when 2 AM is too early for bedtime. A Jack Daniels with Coke costs 9 Euros, so you'll want to make sure you've done your drinking before you arrive, but the music is at least tolerable, occasionally "oh my god we have to dance"-able, and on one night they had a surprisingly convincing covers band playing a wide range of indie hits. Perhaps it's all a bit too obviously aimed at young English tourists, but when you're too drunk to talk and want to go somewhere to stumble around on a dancefloor, you probably won't find much better.


Yeti: A cosy, relaxed bar, attended by a reassuring number of locals, and on balance, probably the best drinking establishment in Cervino. The slightly hypnotic, over-sized screens that play a mix of American, English and Italian pop music videos can disrupt conversation, but tasty and (relatively) cheap beer go a long way toward making up for that. The staff were unfailingly friendly, gave out free nuts and crisps with every round bought, and they even had facilities for using the Internet (which I had the resolve not to test).


There was another place we went to on the main thoroughfare through town, but despite walking past it several times subsequently, I could never see that it had a name. Nonetheless, it can be easily identified by the sign flashing "LAPDANCE" outside. I was horribly drunk when we went in around 2 in the morning, and my memories of the place are incredibly hazy, but I found the following scribbled in my notepad the next day:

"Our first night in Italy and we're in a 'strip-club' that is not overtly, but almost certainly, a brothel. I buy a scantily-clad woman a drink for 15 Euros, and she talks with me while keeping her hand on my knee for around fifteen minutes. When our time is up she whispers in my ear that I might want to accompany her to the toilets; but drunk as I am, I'm not quite willing to pay for a sexual favour- despite that she's given every indication that she may be the first woman I've met who knows how to give good head."

That more-or-less says it all, except that you'll also be charged 15 Euros just to get in (although that includes a free drink), and none of the girls danced. They just loitered around the bar asking to be bought drinks. On a holiday that already cost a fairly astronomical amount, spending money on this sort of gentle titillation is something I came to regret; but I've included it here for the sake of completeness, and to assist any sex-tourists passing through this blog.

DISCLAIMER: My opinion of all the places mentioned here is based on incredibly limited experience. I reserve the right for my judgement to be proven horribly wrong.

The Internet might yet Survive without me

I've so far slightly surprised myself with the regularity (although sadly not the quality) of the posts on this blog . For the next week I will be some way up a mountain in Italy, so I expect/hope not to be spending too much time online. I hope my single-figure readership will be be able to console themselves with the thought of all the thrilling stories I'll undoubtedly have to tell upon my return, and with a whole week to think about what to say, there's even a slim chance it won't be completely half-baked.

If my understanding of the Internet is sound, using this illustration guarantees that my readership will have at least quadrupled when I return to England

Left 4 Dead

This game is superb. The versus mode especially is a thing of wonder; or at least it is until the team playing as the zombies does something like this:

"LOLZ!! PWNED!!!!!!! NOOBS!!11!!1!"

Those playing on the zombie team are able to move objects like the trailer that's blocking the door in the picture above. Those playing as the humans can't. In this screenshot the humans are in a lift, with an unmovable object blocking their only exit. There is no way to crawl under or jump over it, nor can you change floors. The only way to get past is to hope that someone on your opponent's team acknowledges what a cheap and pathetic tactic this is, and knocks the object out the way for you. Generally they won't, and very slowly but quite surely the survivors' health will be ebbed away by the unlimited respawns of their opponents.

This is one of those annoying built-into-the-game sort of exploits that spread like wildfire in a competitive online game. From my limited research, it seems the possibility of doing this was only discovered a little over a month ago, but now features in the majority of games I play against strangers on Xbox live.

The most annoying thing is that Valve patched the game just yesterday, but without fixing this. Bad Valve. I'll only be playing the unbroken 'Blood Harvest' campaign until they do.

“Excuse me, would you mind turning that down?”

It’s the first day of the first working week of 2009. It’s snowed overnight and the trains are, with depressing reliability, being delayed and cancelled. The queue at the ticket office stretches out onto the road. I’ve overslept, and had time for neither my first cigarette nor my first coffee of the day. When a train finally arrives, it’s groaning under the weight of too many passengers.

My sole asylum on a nightmare morning commute is music. Even when your face is being pushed ever closer to the armpit of the fattest man in the carriage, a good tune can win the battle against rising waves of nausea. It drowns out the woman on the phone who’s desperate to bore everyone around her with the sordid details of “how mashed” she got last night. You can shut your eyes and become oblivious to the young loved-up couple who have obviously just spent the night together and are now whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. The spoilt, shrieking, attention-seeking child who’s desperate for just one more Chocolate Button might as well not exist.

Except it seems the laws of rail carriage etiquette won’t allow me any sanctuary. To have your music player at a volume that successfully drowns out the rabble will always draw at least a couple of disapproving glances, and as often as not, some self-righteous busy-body will tap you on the shoulder and ask, “can you please turn that down?”

I realise that being forced to listen to the tinny beats blurting out from the headphones of someone nearby on a train can be a little irritating, and I’m entirely in favour of ‘quiet carriages’ on public transport to help those with zero tolerance of personal stereos and mobile phones. But when I’m NOT on a quiet carriage, why is it that Mr Self-Righteous is so willing to ask me to turn down it down, but doesn’t tell the much noisier and more annoying Miss Gossip sitting opposite to shut up? After all, it’s not me who’s making the Chocolate-Button-obsessed kid cry with the graphic and terrifying details of my sex life.

a picture of some poor quality earphones

Admittedly, some of this stems from the cheap, noise-leaking earphones that Apple give away as standard with their ipods. Mr Self-Righteous no doubt tells himself that he’s doing me a favour by getting me to turn my music down, as he’ll be saving me from tinnitus in middle-age. But the truth is that even with the best hearing in the world, you often need an ipod turned up to near maximum to hear anything over the rumbling of a tube train, so useless is the noise-proofing in their earphones.

Okay, I could just buy better earphones, but that’s not really the point. The quiet ‘bum-bum-tish’ of my music gets treated like it’s the sole cause of all Monday morning commuter misery, when really it should rate pretty low on the bothersome-ness scale. And if I could, I’d happily read a newspaper in absolute silence, except that cramped conditions and an inability to fully open my eyes for the first hour after waking make it impossible. So can’t we learn to live and let live? If I can resist telling Mr Self-Righteous that his smug, self-satisfied face is a massive nuisance to my eyes, won’t he learn to tolerate the mild irritation I’m causing to his ears?

The Guild

Videogame based humour has a pretty bad track record. Even the mostly entertaining Yahtzee, who many would consider a beacon of genuinely amusing videogame commentary, is starting to show signs that his recent success has clouded his judgement.

It's not surprising really, because as we all know, the kind of people who bother to play videogames in the first place are unfunny, anti-social freaks who have retreated to fantasy videogame worlds to escape the shame and humiliation of interacting in the real world and telling jokes that people don't laugh at. Aren't they?

The Guild, a sit-com based around six players of an unnamed online Role Playing Game, suggests that even though game-playing nerds may themselves struggle to be funny (and I include myself in that group), there's a large reserve of previously untapped comedy potential in the stereotype that surrounds them. The first series, which is freely available on Youtube, is astutely observed and ought to ring true for anyone who's ever found themself becoming obsessive about a videogame.

Honestly, it's better than this picture might suggest

That first series was so popular that now Microsoft have started throwing money at it, and as a result the second series is a lot more polished. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is debatable, as I'd say both the dialogue and the acting feel more self-concious than when the show relied solely on paypal donations for funding. But it's still blazing a trail by demonstrating how 'videogame culture' can hope to drag itself out of the gutter, and there remains some hope that the remaining episodes in the series will build to a satisfying climax that will justify some of the unfunnier moments in the opening episodes.

Minor personal loss > Major international tragedy

On the eve of 2008 (i.e. 369 days ago), our family dog paid his last ever trip to the vet. He’d been in steady decline for the previous year and putting him down was undoubtedly the kindest thing to do, but it was nonetheless a very sad occasion. The women were weeping, the men’s stiff upper lips were quivering, and more than once it was remarked that, “this truly feels like a death in the family”.

Around three years earlier, on Boxing Day in 2004, a major tsunami hit the South Pacific. Several thousand people died, whole communities were wiped out, and families were left in pieces. It was arguably the most devastating natural disaster since the Tangshan earthquake of 1979, and a humanitarian crisis was left in its wake.

My brother, during one of those drunken existential conversations that seem somehow unavoidable during the festive period, recently pointed to these two events and declared that because he was more upset by the death of an elderly dog than the deaths of thousands of fit and healthy human beings, the human race must be shallow and self-interested by nature. He’d had personal experience of the dog, so he would dearly miss him; by contrast, although he could recognise the inherent tragedy of the tsunami, he felt little or no emotional response to it. Those deaths would have little or no impact on his life, so just like every other callous and selfish human would, he quickly forgot about it.

Now, it should go without saying that we simply wouldn’t be able to function if we were too good at empathising with our fellow man, and it’s both healthy and necessary to be able to maintain some emotional distance from the world around you . If you’ve just become the sole surviving member of your family it’s understandable that you might spend a number of weeks or months grieving; but to do so after watching the ten o’clock news would make you utterly dysfunctional.

In fact, it's possible that some super-empathetic variant of Homo sapiens did once or might one day exist. The trouble is that they’d be utterly doomed as a species from wasting their energy crying or rejoicing over events that didn’t affect them. The process of natural selection that has (arguably) made the human mind what it is today, has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘selfish’ or ‘selfless’. It is simply that which works that survives and thrives.

Those who are particularly lacking in empathy we generally call sociopaths or psychopaths. It’s been argued by some that these marginalised individuals are in fact incredibly well adapted for the current evolutionary scene. By not wasting energy on the problems of others, and not feeling at all guilty about exploiting other people, they’re often incredibly successful resource gatherers (i.e. businessmen). Similarly, although in most societies it's fairly taboo for men to indulge in one-night stands, impregnate women, and then leave them to bring up a child alone, this is the sociopath’s preferred method of operating. By ignoring the stigma that usually surrounds fathering many children by many different mothers (especially without providing any financial support), the sociopath can potentially enjoy the kind of ‘reproductive success’ that would put Genghis Khan to shame.

Of course, the success of the psychopath's adaptation depends entirely on there being a large majority of those who play by the rules. If everyone was out for themselves and was happy to exploit or manipulate at every opportunity without remorse, we (as a species) wouldn't be able to do all the useful things that come about through mutually beneficial cooperation.

Oops. What's happened? Where did all this sketchy evolutionary psychology come from? And what have psychopaths got to do with anything? Oh yes! I was trying to show what amounts to an "appropriate" level of empathy. And I was saying in the most long-winded way possible that we should aim to be somewhere between psychopaths and the kind of gibbering wreck that cries when watching the news. And that that's nothing to be ashamed of. And...

...maybe I'll stick to posting Youtube videos.

Funnier than I could hope to be

A couple of old Youtube clips is not the most auspicious way for this fledgling blog to start the new year, but I'm too hungover from the nerd-tastic New Year's Eve party I was at last night to write much more than this slightly too-long sentence. Even if you've never seen Richard & Judy's Channel 4 evening time TV show, the following by Adam Buxton is really quite brilliant.



His alternate Obama victory speech is well worth a look too: