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2003 in review: Games

For books and films, I have a full record of the ones I’ve read and seen in my Quick Reviews. For music, I have the date on which I ripped an album to MP3. For games, however, I have no such information. Which means I don’t remember if it was 2002 when I first played Ratchet and Clank, or 2003. This means my wrap-up of the games I played last year is going to be shorter and spottier than the others. Probably a good thing.

The first thing to note about 2003 is that, for me, it was a year of console games rather than PC games. I bought a copy of Everquest at the start of the year, played it for a little bit, and came away very disappointed. I suspect that’s partly because I don’t have the patience (and time) to spend weeks building up a decent character and roaming the landscape looking for quests. I like a game that gives me entertaining action right from the start, and I like a story with some decent structure. I also found the graphics to be poor, and hence distracting. I had been hoping to reclaim some of the magic of old-style text MUDs, but it just wasn’t there for me. YMMV, of course.

And that’s it as far as PC games were concerned. I upgraded my PC in the middle of the year (nForce 2 motherboard, Athlon 2500+, Radeon 9600 Pro, 1GB RAM, thank you for asking) in anticipation of goodies like Half-Life 2, Halo, Deus Ex 2, et al. But what do we get? Sod all, and rubbish, respectively.

I downloaded the Halo demo as soon as it came out, and found it to be slow, slow, slow. I’m running nearly top-end hardware, damn it. Even in 800 x 600 mode with graphical detail turned down low, the Halo demo regularly dropped down to 10-15 frames per second on the Silent Cartographer mission. Not acceptable.

Likewise Deus Ex 2. What’s with this 10 frames per second crap? I had to drop down to 640 x 480 resolution and download a tweaked settings file just to get above 20 fps occasionally. And yes, I do have the latest drivers for my video card. Quake III and Unreal Tournament 2003 time demos give me results that are comparable to other people with similar hardware. In addition to immediate action and good story, you can add the following to my list of gaming requirements: fluid graphics.

Smooth movement is key to keeping me immersed in a game, and that’s what I really want. I want to be sucked in and held tight. Graphics are to games what verisimilitude is to a novel. Verisimilitude means that the details you put in have to seem realistic, not necessarily be realistic. If an author can just make me believe that they know exactly how to run a police incident room during a major murder investigation, that’s much more important than rolling out lists of minute details to show off all the painstaking research they’ve done. In games, characters that are animated smoothly to gloss over the cracks in their polygon models beat the pants off lovingly bump-mapped environments that linger on screen like a slowed-down zoetrope.

In PC games, slowdown is only acceptable because of video card envy and hardware snobbery. If a game runs like shit, it must be because you haven’t spent enough money on the latest kit. Well, bollocks to that. This has got to be the only industry where you get less performance and quality the more money you pump into into your equipment. Want to play Halo? Buy a £100 off-the-shelf XBox instead of a £500 off-the-shelf Dell. Hello?? McFly??

And yes, I know that PCs are designed to be much more than just game-playing machines, while consoles are specifically designed to run them. That’s precisely my point. I can play DVDs on my PC, too, but you don’t see Abi and me cuddling up in front of my monitor with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday evening. PC gaming is dead; it just hasn’t stopped kicking yet.

(Phew. That was more of a rant than I’d intended. Maybe I’m just bitter about Half-Life 2 being delayed.)

So anyway, what console games did I enjoy playing in 2003?

  • Ratchet and Clank was excellent. It’s one of the very few games I’ve played through from start to finish more than once. It’s well balanced, with good challenges, and it has a goofball sense of humour. It’s fun.
  • Ratchet and Clank 2: Locked and Loaded is also excellent. I finished my first run-through of the game about two minutes to midnight on 31st December, so it still counts as a game of last year. It’s basically just more of the same as the original R&C, but that’s a good thing.
  • Metroid Prime was marvellous. Lovely environments and lush sound design gave it a sense of atmosphere to rival even something like Myst. The game was tough, but the sense of accomplishment from finishing it was amazing.
  • Tiger Woods 2004 got me through October. It has a simple pick-up-and-go game mechanic, a good learning curve, pretty golf courses, and lots of collectibles. It’s the videogame equivalent of a puppy: willing to love you no matter how little you really care for it in return.
  • Jak II: Renegade was notable in a “I’m not going to let this $*$%&!! game beat me!” kind of way. The designers took some risks in changing the gameplay so much after the original Jak and Daxter. Some of them paid off, some didn’t. It’s an interesting and entertaining game for the most part; but in places it’s almost impossibly difficult and annoying.

Games that didn’t really make the top tier:

  • SSX 3 dropped a lot of the fun characterisation that SSX Tricky had. Also, being good at SSX Tricky means you’ll be pretty good at SSX 3, too, and so it’s less of a challenge.
  • Super Mario Sunshine was pretty but unexciting.
  • Grant Theft Auto: Vice City hit the 80s nostalgia button, but didn’t inspire me enough to finish it.
  • Pikmin was a fun little puzzler.
  • Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker provided some soothing sailing action.
  • Frequency was different and fun, for a while.
  • Star Wars: Rogue Leader was likewise entertaining, but not very long-lived.

Games I didn’t care for at all:

  • Super Monkey Ball 2 suffered a rapid and catastrophic slide from harmless fun into downright annoying.
  • Maximo didn’t measure up to the quality of Ratchet and Clank, and frustrated me with its lack of camera control.
  • Herdy Gerdy was washed out and drab.

Despite everything I said earlier in this posting, I’m still looking forward to Half-Life 2 for the PC in 2004, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be the last PC game I ever buy for myself. On the console front I’m looking forward enormously to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, which should be shipping soon. Halo 2 might tempt me into buying an XBox. Also, there are still a few must-play games from 2003 I still need to catch up on, such as Beyond Good And Evil, Prince Of Persia, and Viewtiful Joe. I’m planning to start writing Quick Reviews for videogames, too, so with any luck next year’s wrap-up will be a bit more coherent…

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2003 in review: Music

2003 has been a really light year on the CD-buying front for me. I think this is mostly because the places where I listen to music have changed substantially in this last year or two, and partly down to MP3–but not necessarily in the way you might think.

When Alex started walking, we removed our floor-standing hi-fi speakers from the living room because they were hazards to toddler navigation. We could still play CDs through our DVD player and television speakers, but that’s a bit naff. I got a decent set of speakers for my PC earlier in the year, and that has taken the place of our living room music system. However, when we are all downstairs we usually have a game or a DVD playing on the TV. When Alex goes to bed and Abi and I dive into our respective hobbies, we usually leave the TV tuned to something like the History or Discovery Channel for background processing (hello, N.A.D.D.). The only time I tend to listen to music in the living room is after Abi has gone for her bath, and I’m alone downstairs.

We have a radio in the kitchen, which I listen to occasionally while I’m cooking or washing the dishes. Alex has a radio/CD player in his bedroom, and we usually slap on a CD when I take him for his bath, and turn it down softer while I’m reading him his bedtime story. (Right now, he is heavily into Gorillaz the Foo Fighters.) We don’t have a car (yet–more news on that soon, maybe), and I am currently without a portable music player, so I don’t listen to much music while I’m out of the house. (In my old job, it was common for people to stick on some headphones while they were coding, aber was vorbei ist ist vorbei, Baby Blue.) (Bonus points for catching that reference without resorting to Google.)

Part of the lack of new CDs, therefore, is that I haven’t been exposed to much new music over the year. I love radio, and despite the fact that British pop radio is becoming more and more sterile between sunrise and sunset, enough interesting stuff usually creeps in between the cracks to give me a year’s worth of CD buying tips. Not this year. What I ought to do, of course, is develop alternative sources for new musical input.

But that brings me round to the second reason for nor buying much new music, and that is that I’m listening to a lot more of my old music. I’ve now got somewhere between 150 and 200 of my CDs ripped to MP3, and I’m about half-way through re-listening to them all and rating them with iTunes. MP3 makes it so much easier to listen to music from my whole collection. There’s no constant shuffling of discs to find the one you’re in the mood for, and finding the tracks you like from a single disc is much simpler than standing with the CD jewel case in one hand, and the CD remote in the other. I have playlists of music for different moods, and if I’m feeling completely random, I can just hit shuffle on the whole collection. And when I’m constantly rediscovering tracks from old albums, I feel less of a need to go out and gather new material.

So what new music did I like in 2003? Well, in no particular order:

  • Red Hot Chili Peppers – By The Way. Chilled out, funky, melodic, with some magnificently intense grooves, it’s a joy from start to end. Favourite tracks: “Dosed,” “Can’t Stop,” “Minor Thing,” “Venice Queen.”
  • Bleu – Redhead. I saw Bleu in support of Toad The Wet Sprocket when was in Boston in February. He rocked. The album is a genius blend of light rock and power pop. He manufactures catchy guitar riffs with ease, and blends them with off-beat lyrics. There’s a lot of the jilted lover here, but it’s done with wit and maturity rather than angst and bitterness. Favourite tracks: “Could Be Worse,” “Watchin’ You Sleep,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Sayonara” (not available on the Columbia release! Major bummer! Try to get hold of the original release if you can.), “You Know, I Know, You Know,” “Feet Don’t Fail” (also not available on Columbia), and “Dance Baby Dance,” the best song ever written about an inflatable sex doll.
  • Siobhan Donaghy – Revolution In Me. Siobhan Donaghy was one of the original members of the Sugababes back in 2000, when they had a hit with the single “Overload.” (She was the cute one.) “Overload” stuck with me because of its odd mix of the raunchy and the innocent: a menacing bassline, a shivering guitar solo, and blasé yet come-hither vocals from three teenage girls. Siobhan left the band in 2001, and Revolution In Me is her first solo offering. While the Sugababes went down the pop track, Siobhan has pursued a more experimental, indie-sounding direction. The singles “Overrated” and “Twist Of Fate” may be sufficiently pop-like to make the mainstream charts, but the heart of the album lies in darker, moodier tracks like “As You Like It,” “Man Without Friends,” and the rocking “Dialect.” Her web site may be the single worst abuse of Flash I’ve seen this year, but it does provide a streaming music player for you to listen to a generous selection of six full tracks, so you can sample before you buy the album. If you haven’t listened to Siobhan before, do give her a try. Favourite tracks: “As You Like It,” “Twist Of Fate,” “Dialect,” “Man Without Friends.”
  • Matchbox Twenty – More Than You Think You Are. Matchbox Twenty aren’t nearly as popular over here in Britain as they are in the US. Consequently, the song “Unwell” wasn’t played to death on the radio, and I still like it. The album may not be the most daring slice of rock music out there, but it’s energetic, easy on the ears, and with just the right amount of melancholy to make it the perfect soundtrack for bringing you up when you’re feeling down. This, combined with clinically dangerous doses of caffeine, got me through many bad days this summer. Favourite tracks: “Disease,” “Bright Lights,” “Unwell,” and “Could I Be You.”
  • Queens Of The Stone Age – Songs For The Deaf. Heavy and dense, this isn’t nearly as accessible as their previous album, Rated R. The snippets of mock radio scattered between the tracks are annoying, but a curiously integral part of the album as a whole. The songs themselves are a bizarre mix of grungy metal, bass-heavy screaming punk, and trippy prog rock. It’s more than an album, it’s an experience; I find it almost impossible to listen to the rest of the album outside of its own context. I reckon it’s best enjoyed when you’re “in the zone,” whatever “zone” that may be. For me, it’s sitting in front of a computer screen late at night, fingers flying over the keyboard like hyperactive woodpeckers wired directly into my subconscious. Favourite tracks: whichever one is playing at the time.
  • The White Stripes – Elephant. Stripped down and raw in all the ways that Songs For The Deaf isn’t. Everything about this album is up-front in a take-it-or-leave-it kind of way. It doesn’t grow on you, it just hits you between the eyes on first listen and goes, “Yeah? You wanna make something of it?” I love it. Favourite tracks: “Seven Nation Army,” “There’s No Home For You Here,” “I Want To Be The Boy,” “Ball And Biscuit,” “The Hardest Button To Button,” “It’s True That We Love One Another.”

Coming up in 2004: I have absolutely no idea. Any hot tips?

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2003 in review: Films

I saw 38 new films in 2003. (New to me, that is–not necessarily films that were released in 2003.) Although 38 is only one more than the 37 books I read, it feels like a more substantial number. Maybe it’s the way that movies are leased into the cinema in a relatively small trickle–a couple of new films every week–as opposed to the sheer volume of books you are confronted with when you enter a typical bookshop.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t hunger for films the way I do for books. I do love the whole movie experience: from seeing a trailer for the first time, through reading advance press on the film, to actually showing up at the cinema, buying a bag of sweets, and sinking into a deep comfy chair for a couple of hours. I think DVDs are great, but there really isn’t anything like the experience of seeing a film on the big screen. The darkness of the theatre, the sound all around you, the way the film fills your whole field of vision…it’s just magical.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve started bringing Alex along to the cinema with me. He’s all about the magic. The two films we saw together were Finding Nemo and Brother Bear. In both cases he came away utterly entranced, and chattered about the films non-stop for weeks. Much of his play acting right now consists of him telling Abi and me to take on the roles of his favourite characters: “You’s-a Marlin, anda you’s-a Dory, anda I’m-a Nemo!” Whenever he climbs up on my back for a ride, he’s a tiny bear and I’m a big bear. Hello tiny bear. Hello big bear.

There are a bunch of movies I’m looking forward to in 2004, but most of all I’m looking forward to Saturday or Sunday matinées, and seeing all of the silly kids’ films I would otherwise avoid.

Looking back on 2003, though, how did the year pan out? The average review score I gave for those 38 films was 3.2 stars out of five, which is okay. There were two really appallingly bad films that merited not even a single star, and I saw four that were worth a full five stars. Curiously, I saw both of the zombie turkeys at the start of the year, and all of the five star films in November or December. Here are the ones I rated highest and lowest at the time:

Highest

Lowest

I’m actually happier with those ratings than I was with my book reviews. With hindsight, the lists above really do stick out as the best and worst films I saw in 2003.

Performances that have stayed with me:

Worst performance: Christian Bale in Equilibrium. So bad it was funny…for a while…then it got worse.

Actor/Actress I most enjoyed wacthing: Colin Farrell. With highly entertaining turns in Daredevil, The Recruit, Phone Booth and S.W.A.T., he is quite simply a classic Movie Star. The publicity stills for next year’s Alexander look dodgy, though.

In 2004, I will be mostly looking forward to:

All sequels. (Well, apart from The Incredibles, of course.) Hmm. I suppose that’s why they’re on my radar already, though. I’m also rather looking forward to the extended edition of The Return Of The King. If it’s anything like the extended version of The Two Towers it’ll be a completely different film than the one we saw in the cinema.

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2003 in review: Books

I’ve been doing my “Quick Reviews” for over a year now. This means that for the very first time, I can look back over the past year and see a complete record of all the books I’ve read and films I’ve seen. (Well, almost complete. I haven’t kept notes on reference books and textbooks, or on films I’ve watched but had seen previously.) This is great because I always get terribly anxious when I think about how few books one can actually read in a lifetime. With so much fabulous literature (I use the term loosely) out there, and more being published every week, how can I possibly get through all of the good stuff? At least now I can quantify my fears: I read 37 books in 2003.

37. Thirty-seven. Yikes. Maybe it would have been better not knowing, because in the grand scheme of things, 37 is virtually indistinguishable from zero. It also makes me even more pissed off with Neal Stephenson for hogging almost the whole of October with the concrete block that is Quicksilver. James Bamford’s Body Of Secrets took me almost a whole month to get through, too, but at least I finished it and had another notch on my reading list to show for it. If it hadn’t been for Quicksilver I would have broken 40. 40 would have been poor, but almost acceptable. But 37? Thirty-seven??

I don’t normally make New Year Resolutions, but I’m determined that 2004 is going to see me pass the 50 mark.

Looking back on those 37, though, what interesting stuff does my review list tell me? Well, breaking the books down by genre, we have:

  • Crime: 21.5
  • SF/Fantasy: 10.5
  • Non-fiction: 4
  • “Mainstream”: 1

I’m counting Eric Garcia’s Casual Rex as half crime, half SF, because it’s genuinely a mix of both, as opposed to David Brin’s Kil’n People, which has strong potential as a crime novel, but ends up with both feet squarely in the SF camp (to my disappointment). The only “mainstream” book was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

Also, looking back on the whole list, I need to work on my rating of books in the 4-5 star range. I rated Robert Crais’s The Last Detective as only one of two 5 star books for the year. It was a very good book, but I’m not sure if it really was a top three pick. It made me cry, which is a good sign of the emotional impact a book has on me. On the other hand, it’s not as good as LA Requiem, which, if I had such a thing, would be on my list of all-time favourite books. Likewise, I don’t think it was as good as Harlan Coben’s Fade Away. So why didn’t I give that one five stars? I’m not sure. As I said, the ratings need work.

According to the ratings at the time, though, here are my top-rated books for the year:

I don’t think there can be much question that I’m in a heavily crime-oriented reading phase right now. When I was younger, I read almost exclusively science fiction. Nowadays I find that there are far fewer science fiction books on the shelves that really interest me. I’d much rather discover a crime writer with a solid series of private eye novels behind them than an SF writer with an interesting back catalogue. Hmm. What does that say about me?

The writer I most enjoyed reading in 2003 is Harlan Coben, no question. I just finished reading the last two hundred pages of Tell No One in a single sitting this evening, and Coben is da man as far as I’m concerned.

Worst books of 2003:

I came across fewer real turkeys than outstandingly good books, mainly because I tend not to dip into a novel unless I think I’ve got a good chance of liking it. I’m happy enough to take a chance on a film, because films only last a few hours. I have to live with a book for about a week, so I like to know that I’m going to get a good amount of enjoyment from it. That’s why I like Amazon’s recommendations.

What about that “average enjoyment”, then? Here are the average ratings over those categories:

  • Crime: 3.7
  • SF/Fantasy: 3.1
  • Non-fiction: 3.8
  • “Mainstream”: 4

According to these figures, I should probably be reading more mainstream and non-fiction, but the sample sizes are really too small to draw many conclusions from them. The gap between the crime and SF genres is very noticeable, though. We’ll see what 2004 brings, but so far there’s only one SF/fantasy book that’s firmly on my reading list, and that’s Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin Of Souls. Abi gave it the seal of approval, and Bujold is ever reliable, so I’m approaching that one without any apprehension. On the crime front, I’ve got the rest of Harlan Coben to get through (three more Myron Bolitar novels, which I’m going to have to get on import, or on Ebay, and another two stand-alones), and a bunch more Dennis Lehane. After being a bit disappointed by Faceless Killers I’ll probably give Henning Mankell another try. I also need to get back into Michael Connelly.

If there’s anyone else you’d recommend, I’d love to hear about them in the comments! I’ve got a quota to meet this year now, after all.

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Status Reports

A few weeks ago Rands posted a couple of articles (1 and 2) about status reports, those things that people hate writing, hate reading, and rarely tell you anything useful even when you do. In particular, he tries to come up with some ideas about how they can be improved in order to actually contribute to the running of a company instead of just slowing everyone down with paperwork.

I’ve been wanting to comment on these articles for a while, but I’ve had trouble crystallizing my thoughts. I’m still not sure if I can, but if I don’t get this out before the New Year, it’ll just sit in my head forever. It’s not a refutation of anything in particular that Rands said, just a bunch of ramblings that his articles sparked off in me.

To start with, there are two issues:

  1. Why are status reports necessary?
  2. Why are they such a problem?

The answer to these are linked:

  1. Managers need true and accurate information to run the company
  2. Providing true and accurate information–whether it’s good news or bad–is rarely in an underling’s best interests.

In any human organization, whether that’s a family, a company or a country, there is a certain amount of friction generated by self interest and lies, however white and small. Like in mechanical systems, this human friction can be minimized; but just as the second law of Thermodynamics forbids perpetual motion machines, basic human nature means that the whole truth will never make it from one end to the other intact.

A typical modern company is made up of three elements, in varying proportions:

  1. Systems
  2. Processes
  3. People

Those are the ingredients for a beast that eats raw materials and shits finished product (metal into cars, requirements into code, whatever). Status reports are a process. Wikis and blogs are systems. There is only so much in the behaviour and output of a company you can change by tinkering with its processes and systems.

In traditional industry this “so much” can be large, because you’re delivering tangible output from assembly lines (systems) and logistics (processes). Still, there is a limiting factor imposed by the people who have to operate the factory: it’s the workers who implement the directives from management.

In the “knowledge” industry (software houses, financial institutions, etc.) people play a much greater part. Which is a problem, because people are so much more complicated than systems and processes. They get depressed, they affect morale in their departments, they raise awkward questions in meetings, and they need paid every damn month.

Executives hate this, which is why they cream themselves over workflow and knowledge management systems that promise to get the workings of the company out of the heads of their staff, and into easily tweaked databases. These knowledge systems can then be shipped offshore to wherever the labour costs are lowest this month, the original staff can be made redundant, and the executives can jerk off about shareholder value in their annual reports and reward themselves with some healthy stock options.

But surely reducing a company’s reliance upon its people, and increasing its systems load can’t be the only option for affecting overall performance? I don’t think that Rands’s quest for a more systems-based approach to status reports is going to lead to massive redundancies, but I do find it symptomatic of this particular school of thought.

So what’s the alternative? I can only think of one:

  1. Hire people you can trust
  2. Give them a measurable stake in the success of the company

The (big) problem with this approach is that it isn’t scalable. From my experience, it works fine with a company up to about 30 people, but after that it breaks down. First of all, the company starts to get too big for the founders to handle all the recruitment themselves, and secondly, unless the company’s revenues scale with the number of employees (hint: they don’t), the “measurable stake” dwindles to the point where it’s nothing more than a 5% Christmas bonus.

So here we’re back to where Rands started: how do you improve communication in a larger organization, when you’ve had to hire people you don’t even know, let alone trust, and where the only stake an employee has in its success is the continued arrival of his salary every month?

Here is also where Rands ended: have people tell the truth.

Teams represent[ed] by more compelling Status Reports are going to be rewarded by getting their agenda fulfilled. People will talk about these teams and wonder about their success. Soon, we’ll be talking about the products created by these teams and trying to figure out what is the secret of their success… which is simple… they’re just writing down the truth.

Except…they won’t. Human friction, selfishness, and little white lies to cover your ass will get in the way. Better social software (whatever) will result in more innovative ways for staff to hide what it is they’re really doing all day. The content-free status report will be replaced by the content-free daily blog entry. It may be a slight improvement, but only a slight one. If you want to tweak the people of a company, you actually have to tweak the people, not just the systems they work with.

Summing up: damned if I know. But if I ever start my own company, I’m going to try and keep it small and successful, rather than aiming for enormous growth and a fat IPO.

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Quick Plug: Glen Phillips

It looks like Glen Phillips has got most of his new album in the can, and has got proper label backing for its release early in the new year. This is a Good Thing. Glen’s debut solo album Abulum is a solid favourite of mine, and I’m eagerly looking forward to hearing the new material.

One of the tracks is already available for download, and not just as an mp3. The artist Ken Fountain has produced a sweet and sad animated video to go with the sweet and sad song “Brain Trust Kid.” It’s quirky, melodic, moody, emotional, and very typically Glen. (The smoky backroom jazz club feel is a new and interesting direction, though.) If the rest of the album is as good as this, it’s going to be something very special indeed. Head for Glen’s site forthwith, and indulge yourself.

Glen Phillips - Live at Largo