Your browser will make everything obsolete

That box in your living room that overheats, using the cheapest possible components to make the most impressive graphics it can: it's a dinosaur. The original Quake can be played here in your browser. Even more convincingly, Quake III arena (or Quake Live as it's now called) runs a brilliant deathmatch here. You're paying absolutely nothing, either in terms of hardware or software, for something that not much more than five years ago you'd have needed a state-of-the-art PC for and a willingness to splurge £30-40.

 This game remains great

 "Free" is the future. It's happening in the East already, and reflects broader trends in terms of what "consumers" are willing to spend their money on when it comes to entertainment. For better or worse, piracy is rife, and a significant minority don't see much wrong with picking up games they want to play without paying for them. The best, or indeed, only way for publishers to combat this is to create a more effective business model. Free at the point of entry, with incentives to start spending money once you know you like the game, should make sense for everyone involved. It demands greater quality control from publishers, and moves the incredibly fickle games industry closer to the "long tail" business model that could make videogame culture less disposable and more sustainable.

Says I. At 1am. After a few beers.

More later.

Seizuredome

For the past couple of days I've been mostly playing games by Cactus Software. Jonathan Söderström is the brains of the operation, and what's interesting about his games is that they're nearly all made in less than the space of a week, while often doing something a bit subversive (or at least unusual) conceptually. They're also all free to play.

I've still scarcely scratched the surface, and hope to write something a little more substantial once I've been able to spend a bit more time with them all. Yet Seizuredome, pictured below, is a fast and breezy 'point, shoot and dodge' kind of shooter, that gives a gentle introduction to the mad charm of his work. Coming in at less than 6MB, it shouldn't take you long to download either...

A pathetic high score

Ongoing Fire Action

Or is it Fire Alert? I'm not quite sure. But the exciting band I'm in are starting to do some things that sound quite good. Perhaps. I think. It's hard to tell when you're so close to it all. But at the very least I think we're getting near something that exceeds the phenomenal debut song we "released" a few months ago. Yeah, it's all very exciting, so this is a space you should watch.

Whoever this is has bad technique

In the meantime, here's a sweet, pretty work in progress I'm being naïve enough to believe might keep someone's interest in the meantime.

The Golden Age of Video

by Ricardo Autobahn

This is what the Internet's best at: beautiful, ridiculous, novelty nonsense.

Tom Farrer & the Pharaohs @ the Half Moon

16th November 2009

Never betray your reader. That's the first rule of criticism. Don't let your friendships, fancies or politicking get in the way of truth-telling, because integrity is mighty hard to earn and all too easy to squander.

These thoughts weighed heavily on my mind as I headed to Tom Farrer & the Pharaoh's EP Launch Party last night. I'm friendly, though hardly friends, with everyone in the band, and although determined to come away able to write some sensible words about the evening, I knew my objectivity was always going to be in doubt.

So screw objectivity: it's a naïve and futile thing to aim for anyway. Those professional reviewers of “important” gigs at big venues don't begin their articles with a disclaimer that explains that they got in free, had all their drinks bought for them by a sexy girl working in PR, and that they were lucky enough to be invited back-stage to a showbiz, coke-fuelled after-party at the end of it all. Perhaps they should but they clearly don't. I guess their readers are supposed to figure these things out for themselves.

Let the record show I paid my £2.50

"I like girls... but now, it's about Justice"

This "Top 50 Worst Videogame Voice Acting" is quite chucklesome, although it's disappointing that they've re-used some games more than once. There are also a few where I'd say the script is more at fault than the voice-acting, such as the brilliant line from Castle Shikigami 2 that makes up the title of this post.

The Path

"I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it."

Another review for SavyGamer. I like it a little more than the last one.

Drunken Rambling

So I heard about this place, where people go to read their short stories to one another, and where a couple of published authors are on hand to give feedback. You read your four minute story, and then they either say luke-warm polite things if they hate it, or ridiculously over-encouraging things if they think it's okay.

I'm pretty shy at the best of times when it comes to letting people see my writing, so I struggle to imagine myself ever going along to read my work aloud in the near future. But as I sat bored on the train home from the pub last night, I began to write as though I had just that half-hour journey to prepare for it.

I didn't quite finish, it starts slowly, and there's no clear link between the start and the end; but in a desperate effort to keep churning out "content" for this place, I spent a little time this evening interpretting my scarcely legible scrawl. This blog has always had a fairly liberal attitude to quality control, so I couldn't see a good reason not to post it:

A similar notebook to the one I carry, but with better, smaller handwriting