Doom Revisited

I recently found the shareware version of Doom as a flash app. This in itself is mind boggling as I’m old enough to remember when Doom was “it” and required a decent computer and all that jazz, hells I remember playing the SNES version and being slightly disgusted by how pared back it had to be. Now I can have it in a window while running something else, a fabulous modern age indeed.

Anyway, in its day Doom was groundbreaking which is odd, it wasn’t the first FPS, it had no look up or down and only managed a true 3D environment (compared to Wolfenstein’s flat rooms) in a graphics trick (It looked like there was an up and down but the effect was purely visual compared with later games such as Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. What Doom had was atmosphere, first the setting, initially a rather standard “Abandoned base” SF setting slowly descends into a full on gothic hell. However this was only part of the atmosphere. Doom used darkness and light to great effect. Areas would be in near total darkness, or with flickering lights and often enemies would appear seemingly out of nowhere as the lights flicker on for a brief moment. This was helped by the extra trick of hiding enemies in secret rooms, often triggered by certain switches or passing over a specific area of floor, this meant that an area previously cleared may still be dangerous later on. Finally doom would also on occasion jump you with a small onslaught of enemies which gave a nice balance between a near survival horror experience of the one enemy in the dark and the full forces of the unread walking into your chain gun.

It’s odd to think, but Doom even had an effect on FPS weapons, it was one of the first to include the shotgun, groundbreaking at the time, hard to imagine these days not switching between machine gun and shotgun depending on the closeness of combat.

Doom was a massive success, which is odd. Not because it wasn’t that good, it was excellent, but because I never knew anyone who had bought a copy of Doom, Seriously pirate copies were swapped in every school playground but I never saw, heard of or even heard a rumour about anyone who actually purchased a copy. It must of happened, where did all the pirate versions come from, but I can’t fathom how it managed to be such a success with this level of illegal redistribution (Unless piracy isn’t as bad a thing as the companies selling games would have you believe eh?)

Now, this is the modern age, games are undoubtedly better looking, more cinematic and more complex, so how well does an old warhorse like doom fare in this age of motion captured 3D and near photo-realistic graphics. It fares very well, even in a small window you quickly get sucked in and soon forget that the foes on your screen are dumb (oh, very dumb, no intelligence at all) 2D sprites occupying a 3D world, no soon you are jumping as one of these sprites appears from the dark. Yes, you don’t need the spiffy graphics with a game as atmospheric as doom; in fact I think this is where many modern games are going wrong. Many games seem to lead with spiffy visuals and often gameplay suffers, developers may want to consider if the game would still be fun if it looked like Doom.

So, this has wetted my appetite for more old FPSs. Once I have my games out of boxes I may well look to playing Duke Nukem or Dark Forces under emulation, as well as hunting down Doom, hell I may even pay for it this time.

Rage Against Cowell

Well, we did it, Xmas no1 of 1009 was “Killing in the Name of” by Rage against the machine and not “the Climb” by…. Come on, what’s his name, you know, hingmy off of that thing.

That is a little cruel, but hells, we’ve earned it. Year after year of dreary X-Factor winners, or pop idol etc, and finally, a good song. I’m tempted to get all choked up and start talking us all up, how we did the impossible and that makes us mighty, or indeed point out that governments should take heed, because there are more bright independent people out there, we just rarely move like a herd, but I’ll leave it for the moment.

Naturally, there have been naysayers, smart alecs talking about how its funny that a whole load of people bought a song with the chorus “I won’t do what you tell me” because they were told to, and of course that both songs are on labels owned by Sony, so whatever wins Sony makes a big heap of money (And some said by that reasoning Cowell)

To address the second first, yes, it may well have been a marketing stunt by Sony, possibly off the back of cowell’s clever move last year of releasing a weak and lifeless cover of “Hallelujah” prompting online campaigns to get one of several alternative versions to No1, the advantage, he has a stake in the rights to Hallelujah so probably got a fair chunk of money from that. However someone likened him getting money from RATM sales to JD sports getting money from M&S sales because they share the same shopping centre.

The First, well, I’d disagree, yes we all bought the song on a specific week for the purpose of getting it to No1, but I’m betting if you asked 50 people you’d get at least 20 different reasons. Me, I like the song and don’t own it, plus I really liked the idea of every pointless light pop TV and radio station having to play Killing in the name of, and indeed have enjoyed seeing the gritted teeth approach most of them have to playing a storming rebellious hit. In fact one criticism is that many pop stations have since carried on regardless, in a review of 2009 one station played an excerpt from Killing, only to play the whole of the climb. Great, so here’s a clip of the winner, and here’s the whole of No2.

My other reason is a stupid one. See, I have a small confession, up until my late teens, music didn’t really interest me. In fact most of my CD collection was film soundtracks. Thing is I blame a lot of that on opportunity. When I was younger most of the people I hung around liked “What was in the charts” basically through primary school I was around people who were content to be told what they liked. I just couldn’t bring myself to agree, so I generally accepted that, aside from the odd flash of something I liked that chart music wasn’t for me. As I grew up obviously my horizons expanded. This is the crux of the matter. While my rock taste was developing if I hadn’t been to rock clubs and talking to rock fans then many bands wouldn’t register. I often think that if a good rock song could get up the charts and get the radio play then more people would realise how awesome rock is. Its stupid but there we are. And that’s my final reason. If one person who has been content to listen to the manufactured drivel gets inspired to Rock from this, then it’s been a success.

XMas TV

Yes, all these posts will be behind schedule, but I reckoned Xmas TV was worth mentioning this year, why? Because it was a mess.

Now Xmas TV isn’t what it once was. In previous years (read, when I were a lad) the Xmas schedule was mainly about big film premiers. This was the tent pole to every channel’s schedule and I’m sure many of us remember sitting around marking off films in the radio times arranging who got to see what. The prevalence of Sky Movies and cheap DVDs now means that people are more likely to have seen the big films at home before a normal channel gets them; this takes a lot of the power out of these films. The thing is Xmas TV is hard. For close to two weeks you have to act as if everyone now wants to watch TV all day, not just between 6pm-11. People are on holiday after all, you can’t get away with Diagnosis Murder here. A good few premiers fill up hours of schedule, but now a film premier is less of a ratings guarantee the main terrestrial stations have been a bit confused.

In the vacuum caused by this state of affairs, the BBC has definitely done the best. This is despite the tabloids normal BBC bashing announcement about the number of repeats on over Xmas; this is despite calling ITVs higher number of repeats “Classics”. The BBC has risen to the challenge with a variety of Xmas specials. In fact, on Xmas day it was BBC1 all evening. The mainstay is of course now the Dr Who Xmas special, which brought me out in fanboy delight this year, because such a big deal was made of it. David tenant was in everything and the Beebs Xmas idents were Dr Who themed. This year Dr who was Xmas. We also had specials from programmes for all tastes, a Catherine Tate special, more Gavin & Stacey, strictly come dancing, plus on other days we had Xmas specials of QI, Russell Howards good news, a 2 part mini-series of Day of the Triffids and the Top Gear South America special. In fact the BBC should be praised. They filled a hole normally occupied by films, new or repeats, with new, self made programming. So what did they do wrong? Well, on the run up quite a few shows got mucked about in the schedules, specifically for me Defying gravity and James May’s Toy Stories. Second, there were some very odd repeats, such as the Top gear special being on two consecutive days. Finally there was a missed opportunity, the big film this year was Pirates of the Caribbean 3, shown on Boxing Day. However, later that week they showed Pirates of the Caribbean 2, when they could have shown 1&2 on the run up to Boxing Day making 3 a bit more of an event.

Still, like I said, the BBC was odd, but overall good, if still messy. ITV, C5 and C4 were worse. ITV and C5 just outright failed to have anything worth watching at all neither did Sky 1 or Virgin 1, the former showing the two Discworld minis on a loop (not a bad thing but not great for anyone not wanting to watch Hogfather twice in one day) and the latter just not changing its schedule at all. In fact only C4 had anything, mainly the Big fat quiz of the year, along with all quizzes from yesteryears repeated. C4 however was rather confusing as they had 2 films that could have been big over Xmas, The Simpsons movie and Slumdog Millionaire, however bizarrely they chose to show these after the Xmas period.

Overall other stations could learn a lot from the BBC on this one.

Defying Gravity & Virtuality

In my preview of this years TV I may have mentioned Defying Gravity as a show I was interested in seeing, well its been and gone and I’ve managed to catch it thanks to BBC’s IPlayer and no thanks to BBC’s bizarre roaming schedule.

Defying gravity was made as an international co-production, loosely based on a BBC Drama doc about a more realistically themed tour of the solar system. Defying gravity ditches some of the hyper realism of its documentary predecessor, a technobabble nanotech idea explains gravity in most parts of the ship (Although they are very consistent in showing the “Gravity Suits” under clothing) and eventually uncovers a mystery surrounding what is in Pod 4, however for the most part the Antares is a realistic ship, its slow and low tech. This meant that the series would mainly focus on the crew interaction and the dangers inherent to space travel. This is added to with some focus on mission control and the politics there, and with flashbacks to the training and selection process.

I really warmed to the characters, both in their training and on the mission. This I think was the show’s strength or weakness; basically if you don’t click with the characters you won’t enjoy the show as a lot of it is people in a tin can naval gazing.

I will agree with the critics on one thing, the Final episode was fantastic, the show’s critics say this is how it should be. I say it showed what something like Defying gravity could do where other SF would have a space battle. They really highlighted the risk of landing on Venus, a very hostile place and still managed to advance several plot threads in the process.

Perhaps DG was a little slow, but then so is the Antares on her grand tour of the universe. Shame we won’t see the rest of the solar system, however for those who want to know where it’s going an interview with the creator exists here.

A quick aside, It may have been a couple of years ago, Ronald D Moore made his attempt at a similar idea. He even also lumbered it with a duff title, Virtuality. It never made it beyond pilot, and I won’t say how I saw that.

Virtuality follows the crew of the Phaeton, an international mission to find a habitable planet outside of the solar system. The reason, because Earth is dying. However, in order to keep funding the mission is also a giant Reality TV show, with cameras on the ship recording the crew’s conflicts. In fact two of the crew serve as director/producer and presenter. This leads to some nice asides, like some of the food supplies being donated by a ready meal company, the crew having to wear different clothes, depending on that day’s sponsor.

The virtual bit comes from the way the crew get to escape from their tin box. Each crewmember has access to a VR module, however, there is a ghost in the machine and he seems to be intent on doing cruel and nasty things to the crew while they’re in VR. However the twist at the end of the pilot could reveal something more.

Overall Virtuality is grittier and less sanitised than Defying Gravity, and many thought more interesting. I can’t judge, Defying gravity had many hours for me to bond with its crew while virtuality had a pilot, still it’s a shame it never got commissioned.

War machine, Final Arc

This was initially going to be a post about the second arc of War Machine, but this arc has also been the final. Its been fun, and lasted just a little less than half the number of issues of the first ongoing, still, 12 issues is better than none, and at least calling it an ongoing showed confidence from Marvel.

First, the story itself, this concerned War Machine and his crew travelling to the US following the trail of the Ultimo Virus seen in the previous arc. This pits Jim directly against the US army, HAMMER and even Tony Stark's brother Morgan. During this he sets up Bethany Cabe and Jake Oh as armoured support and encounters his old buddies from the West Coast Avengers. The final two issues have Jim on trial for war crimes, mainly set up by Norman Osbourne as a distraction after Jim revealed inpropriatories by various Politicians.

Not to spoil for anyone trade waiting, but basically by the end Rhodey has beaten Osbourne (in a subtle way) is cleared of all charges and placed in his cloned body. In short he has been set to a basic point where he won't seem completely unfamiliar to movie audiences should he appear in Iron man after the release of Iron Man 2. But to the comic.

I've loved Greg Pak's writing, for starters it is very obvious that he has read a lot of War Machine, perhaps more than me. Yes he may have got hold of that "tales of the Marvel universe" where Rhodey looses the Eidolon warwear. It's not referenced but I believe he has read it. The art was a little inconsistent but again used various flashes which referred back through War Machine's history. The story itself really brought out Jim's humanity, despite his cyborg nature in this series, whether it was his past love and old friend in Glenda and Parnell respective, or his relationship with his mother as seen in the first issue of this arc.

Overall it was a worthy run, and I look forward to seeing much more of War Machine after his upcoming big screen appearance.

Finally, this is covered very well on my good mate Reilly 2040s Blog Here.

I Miss Late Night TV

I will warn the intrepid reader (Hi) that this contains nostalgic ranting and may include rose tinted memories of the 90s. Warning over I miss late night TV.

Now, some observers may question me on this, after all, in our multi channel age there are many channels that broadcast 24hrs, and often with content the likes of which I’m nostalgic for. Indeed come the digital switchover this point will be technically moot, but this is a nostalgic rant so reality doesn’t need to apply.

It may surprise younger reader to know that as late as 1990, only ITV ran 24hrs (And skies were bluer, and chocolate tasted better and pints were bigger) now I first started being allowed to set my own bedtime at weekends around 1992/3 and at this point while on a Friday and Saturday BBC1 and Channel 4 might run programmes until as late as 2am sometimes after which on the BBC you got the national anthem and then dead air. BBC2 showed Ceefax until the morning and C4 was similar dead air. ITV however was a bizarre combination of eclectic programming.

ITV’s late night was where they aired shows that they reckoned were to grown up for a Saturday afternoon/evening, but too unpopular for anything resembling prime time. Indeed it is on ITV night time TV that Prisoner Cell Block H obtained its cult status amongst students. For me, initially it was the hope of some sex/nudity on TV (I was 12/13, these things were important and harder to come by then) but it opened the door to some great TV.

First and foremost, late night was where ITV would graveyard shows, so it was where you could see the War of the Worlds TV series, Old US shows like Magnum PI, The Equaliser and Hunter, and newer cop dramas like Hardball and Tropical Heat. Things which just have no home even in our current multi-channel world.

Similarly there was a odd selection of non-US programming, ranging from the good, like Video review show “The little picture show” to the average, like “The big E” (A cheap mans eurotrash) and the bad like “Whale On” (Find out why “Shock Jock” James whale is better on Radio) It had dross and some gems, but regardless it was better than the rolling quiz games we now get.

In the mid 90s ITV received competition as Channel 4 went late night, if memory serves it was only on Saturday nights, but it was a start. They also launched with an interesting array of programmes, most interesting was the showing of Anime series late at night. In fact Channel 4 went through bouts of brilliance in their Late night programming, it was all low budget, however this is the slot that gave us some great post pub TV (in the 90s Channel 4 were the masters) and we were treated to shows like Vids and Bits both gave a bit of an anarchic take on the film and video game review shows.

In short, yes we have much in the way of late night telly these days, but very little of it is purpose designed, and with late night gambling more profitable than low audience graveyard programming I can’t help but feel we’ve lost the choice to see some things that now don’t even get an airing.

Games That Stole My Life - X-Wing

Back in the mists of time LucasArts was virtually a by-line for excellent game. They really couldn’t go wrong and obviously Star Wars Licences were a big draw. In 1994 they released every fan’s dream. X-Wing, a space combat simulator that put you in the cockpit of the mighty X-Wing Starfighter.

X-Wing

The basic concept of the game is simple; you play a rebel pilot flying various missions for the rebels. The core game contained 3 Campaigns, leading up to the Death Star mission as seen in Star Wars Episode IV, and was followed by two expansions, Imperial Pursuit, which focused on the evacuation of the Yavin Base (Just because they lost the death star doesn’t mean the empire is just going to leave it there) and B-Wing, which focused on the development of the B-Wing Starfighter and the relocation to Hoth. These expansions were later available in a collector’s edition.

It was great, addictive fun, on top of the campaigns there were training missions which simulated real missions, or flight training where you flew down an assault course. This meant that I spent a lot of time on X-Wing. In fact, I never finished the B-Wing expansion (one really tricky mission) but overall it was great fun clocking up medals and the like. These were then displayed on your Rebel uniform which could be viewed on the menu screen.

X-Wing allowed you to fly The X-Wing (All rounder), the A-Wing (Nippy interceptor) and the Y-Wing (Heavy Bomber) with the B-Wing being introduced in the B-Wing expansion. Sadly it lacked the option to select the craft for the mission (Not really a biggie) and the weapons loadout (A bit worse); your wingmen were pretty useless as well. Also, while there is a fanboy thrill flying the trench run, I would have actually preferred it as a training mission since it kind of made you Luke Skywalker for the mission. I generally try and justify it by saying I was the guy who missed first, see I used my targeting computer rather than the force. Still, a few annoying missions aside it was a great fun game. The sequel was even better

Tie Fighter

Tie Fighter was a sequel in terms of technological advancement and release date, but didn’t technically follow on from X-Wing (This could be argued it does, as X-Wing ends prior to the battle of Hoth and Tie Fighter picks up just after) Instead it put you in the post of an Imperial pilot. Tie Fighter was bigger, more campaigns, more ships (With expansions up to 7 compared to X-Wing’s 4) and in general a more involved story.

A notable point is that you spend very little time doing “evil”; instead you fill the empire’s general role of keeping order in the universe. In fact an early mission has you performing customs inspections at an imperial post. The interesting part comes from the side missions, issued by a mysterious cloaked figure which allow you to progress through the ranks of the secret order of the empire. These uncover the imperial coups that feature prominently in the campaigns. For fans of the expanded universe you also get to serve under Grand Admiral thrown and fly on the wing of Darth Vader.

A criticism of the game would definitely how the game develops. It starts off being a different game to X-Wing, with the Tie-Fighters being flimsy beasts you really rely on your piloting Skills as the Tie fighter can take about 2 hits (And that first will fry half the systems) and the hardiest is the bomber (4 IIRC) but aside from the odd missions in the Assault gunboat (Which sacrifices speed and manoeuvrability for shields) and the Tie-Advanced (Much rarely deployed), you graduate on to always using some craft or the other which possesses Shields, letting the game fall into a more X-Wing like mould. It also has a little too much love for the Missile boat but that’s a personal preference.

These don’t get in the way of what is an awesome game.

The success lead to two sequels, the first, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter was based more around Multi-Player gaming, and while it did feature a proper soundtrack (based on the CD) I really wanted (ideally and orchestral version) of Tie-Fighter’s specially created soundtrack included, sadly not to be. By this point it was beyond my machine and while it was popular, it sacrificed story for multi-player. However it is still played online.

Finally X-Wing Alliance, which went back to a single player focus and featured the opportunity to fly the Millennium Falcon, however it included some unpopular tweaks and failed to capture the imaginations like the predecessors did.

Still, like X-Com, if stable versions were released on Steam, I’d be very tempted to pick them up.