Sunday 23 June 2013

A boring GT5 rant, sorry.

Hello, blokes & birds!

As you know if you can be bothered to sift through the heartbreaking wreckage of my previous posts, I am a huge lover of the Gran Turismo titles. Gran Turismo is a series of racing games, in which you blah blah, and then blah blah.

You know what Gran Turismo is, this is a gaming blog. It's not going to be a type of fashionable waist-length shoe, is it?

Anyway, so I play GT5 a lot. And I like to play with like-minded people, so I choose to host my own online room. Kind of like a fascist butler.

This room has a title. The title is '100% CLEAN SHUFFLE'. Now, from that title, what would you assume the content & overall point of the room is? Obviously, with it being a 'shuffle' room, you are assigned a car from a pool....of cars. These cars differ slightly in terms of performance, handling, colour and amount of stains on the seats, but all of them are capable of competing in a meaningful way.

Now, the '100% clean' bit takes some explaining. The room has four simple rules, which are streamed through the chat window before every single race, and they look like this:

4 SIMPLE RULES
  •  STRICTLY NO AVOIDABLE OR DELIBERATE CONTACT
  • DO NOT SWERVE TO BLOCK OVERTAKES
  • PLACES GAINED BY COLLISION MUST BE GIVEN BACK IMMEDIATELY
  •  DO NOT ALLOW YOUR MISTAKE TO RUIN ANOTHER DRIVERS RACE

Now, when I was constructing these rules I thought 'Hmm, I can't boil those four rules down any further, or make them any clearer'. They really do cover everything, and address most of the things that can make online racing a sorrowful chore.

Next, once the rules have scrolled by, comes the advisory notice, which is here, honey:

PLEASE REPORT ANY & ALL UNFAIR PLAY

DON'T JUST COMPLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME

MULTIPLE COMPLAINTS GUARANTEES REMOVAL

Hopefully, this is as clear to you as it is to me. It is intended to say 'OK, if you notice someone trying to spoil the fun we are having here, let me know and I'll send them on their way'.

Due to my hawk-eyed enforcement of the rules, and the assistance of quite a big group of regular players, the room is a roaring success. It fills instantly, stays full and the racing standards found are unparalleled, in my boastful opinion.

So why am I telling you this?

Well, I am angry. Angry and unreasonable, frankly. I'm in such a rage that I forgot to put SUGAR in my COFFEE whilst I punch this into my keyboard with balled fists. GrrAAArrr, Son!

Why do people join a room that clearly sets out the way we roll, yo? Why do people join a room which requires 100% decency & civility to be shown towards all participants, then send me sweary messages when I remove them for driving around the track the wrong way? 

It is a lot of work, you know, ensuring that the brilliant, friendly people that frequent my area are protected from the clueless, vacant vermin that can't understand that some people just want more from their pastime. The guys and girls that spend their time in my house are always polite, patient and fantastic. Lovely, even.

That's exactly why I do it, for people like those. The good guys need a place to be good guys. They need somewhere wherein they don't have to wince everytime they brake for a corner, somewhere they can race side by side down a narrow track without being 'leant on' by a yawning fool.

There are MORE than enough rooms catering for gigglers, wrong-way villains and first-corner scientists than I could possibly list here. Loads of them. Why can't these lot stay amongst their own kind? It can't be for fun & laughs, because they are only in the room for roughly 1 minute before I descend on them, like a furious wizard of vengeance & justice. So they are happy to have those few seconds of notoriety in all those hours of trying, is that it? Wow, mindbending life-wastery!

Ok. That's that rant over. I love the guys I race with, my packed-out friends list is full of genius racers with both talent AND fairness in their heads. Thank the gaming Gods for those guys!

Hey, if ever you want to join, please feel free. If you can process the rules, that is. Don't arrive trying to be the end of everything , you won't defeat us, Son.

We love our GT5, and we'll stick together to protect the way we love to play it.


Close & clean, like a shaven embrace between two friends!


 Meanwhile, back in decent writing land:


Yes I know the post is rubbish this week, I was on holiday last week and I managed to get myself terribly sunburnt. My forehead makes me look like a particularly dehydrated Draugr. Not that that has anything to do with the writing, of course!

I do solemnly swear I will improve next week. I'll even start plagiarising it now!

GL & HF!
 













Sunday 9 June 2013

The sun is out!

Hi, did you miss me?


I have been ill AGAIN. I can't believe it. Honestly, May was terrible for my health. I seemed to bounce from disease to disease, like a promiscuous stripper!

Anyway, to clarify, I didn't post last week due to a visit from Mr. Vomit! It's hard to concentrate on being a creative Jesus when you're bent double over the porcelain! So there.

Right, to business. It's summer! The sun is out and it makes me think back to this:

Which games made me feel the most summer-ish?

By that I mean which titles, from past to present, most put me in mind of sweltering days, hay-fever misery and going through cans of deodorant like a hardcore shoplifter!

These are titles that instantly trigger your mind to conjure images of endless summer holidays, late nights and early mornings, and the general feel of it 'being nice out' as we say in 'The North'.

Ok, in no particular order (except from the random order my dehydrated brain offers them up) these are the titles that occur to me, in my summer-themed outburst! Eat them up, buttercup.

I'm afraid various football games have to be mentioned first. I know, I'm sorry Sister.

Yes, I'm afraid I did used to love football games, but then I did also used to like football. I was young, and chasing a ball whilst avoiding dog stools meant a lot to me. I was pretty good, actually. Made the school teams. Well, I made my primary school team, but was dropped due to staying at home one Saturday to watch cartoons as it was raining out. I grew to become a real man, and ladies love me!

Games such as Italia '90 stand out to me, and my almost-obligatory late '80's worship of a chap called Paul Gascoigne. And look! He had a video game licensed to his face:

Man, I still love free stickers.

This game was terrible. It was a nightmare to get going for a start, and on the odd occasion it did actually load, it would crash shortly after. And there was no way of saving, so in order to complete a season you would have to sit, uninterrupted, for at last 3 weeks. It looked awful too, with black, white & green being the only colours available for kits, scenery, menus....like in a communist country!

And the gameplay? Imagine controls that switched randomly, then stopped working altogether, then returned but in reverse format. I'd sit there, horrified, as the heavily-pixellated player under my power would swerve and sprint off the side of the pitch, then stay locked in a perpetual running motion, bumping against an advertising hoarding until the end of time itself. I just stared in wonder!

But it had Gazza on the front! And a free sticker. Those cunning marketing types!

I suppose football is associated with being outside, which is in turn associated with summer, even though football is technically a winter sport! So that explains that.

I'm not really into football much anymore, as an adult I realise that those millionaires don't really care if I'm stood nearby, screaming encouragement at them whilst spitting pie-flakes. I may as well save my time, money and energy for playing video games, that are currently produced by companies that don't really care if I'm playing, posting encourag....oh. I see what I did there. And it was bad.

Anyway, I would have done a bit on the other football game I mentioned, but I can't find a decent screenshot for you. See? Always putting YOU first. I care, man. Forwards, comrades!

Another game that reminds me of summer is the almighty Final Fantasy 7. Do you really need a screenshot/pic of such a legend? Of course you do, you slim cowboy:

Pick a phone number at random from the phone book, dial it and scream those words down the line. Today.

Man, I played this game for a lot of minutes. This is the first and last game I ever rang one of those 'hint' lines for to aid progress. I couldn't find a door or something, turns out it was hidden behind some stairs. That cost me about 18 pounds! I could have bought a slave-chav with that!

FF7 was great. Not the best game I ever drank, but certainly very memorable. All the nice FMV cut scenes, all the summoning of big dramatic monsters, all the exploring, upgrading etc. You could even develop a deadly gambling addiction betting on Chocobo races! Very nice/dangerously realistic!

Now, JRPG's aren't traditionally associated with British summertime, I know. But I remember it being a super sunny summer when I was making my way through this game. I'd be showing up for work absolutely cream-crackered due to playing late. Then, in the daytime, I'd sit inches away from a fan, trying to dry the concentrating gamer sweat as it oozed out of my neck.

And yes, by fan I mean a mechanical device for blowing air around, not a 'fan' as in an enthusiastic supporter of my exceptionally usual standard of writing, sat wearing a giant foam hand, cheering and weeping in anguish when I go to bed. Although I'm sure I have several!

So I include FF7 due to it reminding me of being uncomfortably hot. Which is what summer is.

But the summery of summer gaming award has to go to a game called 'Mashed'. Observe here:

A game made to make grown men brawl in hubris & anger!

June 2004. A flat in Bolton, England. A group of several blokes playing Mashed on an Xbox.

The thing about Mashed was you could, if you so chose, single-out and target one of your pals for an onslaught of unfair punishment in the form of frequently earned airstrikes. These strikes, in the worst case scenario, could end the recipients race. So use of them was regulated amongst us under a code of honour, which was the driver at the front was to receive the pain. Or, if a driver was running away with the multi-race season, he would get the agony until he was drawn back into the contest. See?

Well, this all works fine until someone, for whatever reason, makes it personal. Someone could make the suggestion that an unspoken alliance has been entered into between a pair of drivers, someone could develop feelings of unfair persecution & attention from another driver, someone could even simply want chaos to break out amongst the harmony. And it was easy to make it happen.

To cut a long story short, two of the chaps involved in this gaming session became very cross. And, as the rest of the group looked on with joy, these two grown men attempted to initiate a scrap! The words 'I will take you outside and **** you, you ******* **** if you carry on' actually came out!

Man, it was fantastic for the spectators. We all giggled and silently nudged each other for a good hour afterwards, as the two would-be gladiators simmered at opposite sides of the room! Heaven!

So, Mashed is 'in' because it embodies the drunken stupor of summer get-togethers, when even non-gamers don't mind picking up a pad to join in the fun/undercurrent of aggression.

So, in conclusion, games and summer can be linked if you really want them to. Like this!

Do games take a back seat when the sun comes out? I don't think so.

Is there such a thing as a 'summer genre'? Apart from foot-the-ball titles? I'm not sure.

Can you organise your gaming memories into seasonal categories? Or is that just too much work?

As usual, I have no answers. But at least I tried, what did you do? Sit there and judge me? And what makes you so special? Only kidding, I like that you make that confused face while you read!*

GL & HF!

*If anything confuses you to such an extent you feel nauseous, please stop reading immediately and seek medical attention.