Bark: Hard work is good for the soul

At the time of writing, it's just past 10pm. This is quite literally the first free moment I've had since I woke up at 6.15am this morning. Today I've taught two pretty dreadful lessons (for various reasons), am suffering from just about every minor ailment known to Mankind thanks to all the bugs that the kids drag into the school, and I've got a two hour commute every day that eats up time I could otherwise use lesson planning.

People always moan about teachers getting long holidays. If the last few weeks I've had are anything to go by, bloody hell, we need them. Teaching makes working for a large multinational IT company look like a walk in the park by comparison. This is without doubt one of the hardest weeks I've ever had in my working life. But do I regret jumping ship?

Hell no.

Byte: My beautiful netbook

Eariler today I acquired a Samsung NC10 netbook, which I had been tech-lusting after for some time now. I bought it with roughly one quarter of my first installment of my PGCE training bursary, and consider it to be money very well spent.

Not only will I be using it for late night emergency lesson planning, but it is also a fine machine catered for mobile internet surfing and retro gaming. X-Com: UFO Defense (a.k.a. UFO: Enemy Unknown) runs brilliantly on it, while Trials 2: SE and the Steam version of Star Wars: Dark Forces also run passably well. Rumour has it that Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War (possibly my favourite old school RTS ever) ought to run decently on it as well, so I'm downloading that from Steam as I type.

I'm also going to be trying out Warcraft III, Diablo II and Starcraft on it, since I can now download them digitally, thanks to merging my WoW account into a Battle.net account a few weeks ago. If I can stomach the download time, I may even try to download WoW and see how well that runs. It would be nice to have a backup machine to play WoW on after my gaming lapdog died earlier in the year, and since my new netbook has a VGA port, I can hook it up to my TV as an external monitor, so even if it doesn't have the processing power of my old laptop, at least I can get the big screen experience via my TV.

Gaming aside, easily the most impressive thing about using the netbook thus far is the battery life. I've not exactly been holding back on the screen brightness or the wifi access, but the battery is still going strong (good for at least another hour) despite having been hammered royally for a good five or six hours. Consider me mightily impressed. The keyboard is small but perfectly formed (just like Nichole from the Renault Clio adverts of yore)... comfortably large enough to type on without making typos every two seconds, but petite enough to not make you feel like you'd have been better off buying a full size laptop. The keys have a lovely soft spring to them as well - very tactile and comfortable to type on for extended periods of time. I approve.

I have been turning into somewhat of a Samsung fanboy of late (not only do I have one of their netbooks, but also an LCD monitor and LCD TV as well - they do make some outstanding LCD screens these days), and if you've been thinking of getting a highly portable laptop, it's hard to find a reason why you shouldn't pick up one of these beauties. Even Fleur (the French luddite that she is) looked at it longingly, as if amazed that someone as tech-macho as myself would be willingly seen with such a sleek, dinky piece of technology such as this.

Samsung may have come out with some newer model netbooks in the last few months (the 9 hour battery N140 being perhaps the pick of the bunch) but if you don't fancy paying the extra £50, the NC10 represents some pretty staggering value for money.

Bark: Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast

Some amazing pictures from the 'great sardine run'.



Pretty awesome.

Bark: Saturn equinox

A composite photo of Saturn taken by the Cassini probe last month. Absolutely stunning. If there was ever a one-way scientific mission out to Saturn, I'd be first in line to sign up. I dream of being able to go out into space and see this kind of stuff with my own eyes.

Byte: One last level rush

With my inter-career holiday break now almost over, I've really been ploughing an obscene amount of hours into three games lately, in a last grasp of game time before I spend the next ten months or so being stressed and having such a big workload that I won't have time to play anything.

Inevitably, one of them has been World of Warcraft (or as Fleur likes to call it, rather charmingly, World of Bullshit), as I've been putting time into my lower-level alts, if only to get them to skill-up their professions skills. My priest still needs another six levels before she can take the next level up in Tailoring and Enchanting, but her she can now do some really useful enchants, especially for my lower level alts. I don't really enjoy playing with the character that much, since priests aren't great for soloing with, and I don't really fancy respeccing to Holy, as I don't want to spend all my time healing in instances. But I do have some incentive for levelling her waiting for me in the bank. That and I've got about 40 stacks of Netherweave Cloth stashed away, so that once I do get the 300+ Tailoring skill unlocked, I can make lots of lovely stuff for my Mage, who is about to hit level 61 and is firmly entrenched in Outland, but since I blasted through Outland with my Death Knight not too long ago, I'm going to get back to her once I've made her loads of cool cloth gear to upgrade her all the way through from 60-70.

The recent 3.2 patch lowered all the level requirements and costs of the land mounts (level 20 for the first mount, level 40 for the swift mount) and flappy mounts are now available from level 60, though the swift flappy training will still set you back 5000 gold. Though that's not so much of an issue now, as they uprated the speed of the first flappy mount from +60% to +150%, so now the first flappy mount is at least faster than the swift ground mount. But the real bonus for me was that I hadn't training my Mage for the swift ground mount, so I got it at a discount - and at some point I will get my other characters to forward her some cash to buy the first flappy mount. So all my Alliance characters have the swift ground mount now, as I pushed my lowest level Alliance alt (Corleth, my rogue) up to level 40 over a couple of nights so that I could get one for him, too. Rogues are quite fun to play, and I've got quite a few rare armour pieces lurking for him in the bank for when he (eventually) gets beyond level 50, but I'm concentrating mostly on my Paladin, Gormlaith, at the moment.

At the beginning of the summer, she was on a par (in level terms) with Aoibheann, around level 40 or so, but I've been fairly streaking through the levels with her lately, and should get up past 50 with another couple of hours' worth of play. I think it certainly helped having an epic weapon to murder mobs with, but the Paladin is a really nice class to play, since they're resilient, can heal and aren't terrible in DPS terms, either. I do need to work on her blacksmithing skill though, as she can't really make any decent armour yet.

In all this, I even managed to find the time to put another level on my oldest character, Shareth, who is still a very long way away from the level cap. I haven't really played much with my 70+ characters at all lately, since even though I really like all the design in the Northrend areas, needing 1.5 million XP per level makes progress seem rather too much on the tortuous side for my liking. I will try to get at least one character towards the level cap in time for the next expansion pack (flappy mounts in Azeroth! about bloody time!), but I am enjoying going for the quick win with my alts. It would be good if I could get them all beyond level 50, but inevitably, I think I will get bored with a couple of my alts and then neglect them for a few months. I really ought to just use my high level characters to gold farm for a while and throw some cash at my alts to buy them some nice gear and the flappy mounts (when they can use them), but I'm not sure if I can be bothered to plan that far ahead. It's amazing that after four years and goodness knows how many days of playing time I've put into the game that I still love it, but somehow, I do.

But I just wouldn't be me if it weren't for the tendency to play at least five different games at the same time. Even WoW isn't able to consume all my gaming time. I've been dabbling a little with the old Delta Force games, since they appeared on Steam a little while back (I may knock off a Replay article about Delta Force 2 and try and convince Tim Edwards to print it) and I've been enjoying their retro charms a lot, but it's on the Xbox 360 where I've been spending quite a lot of my late evenings (and early mornings!). I picked up Trials HD from Xbox Live, and it's probably the best thing out on the 360 right now. It's got quite a few different game modes compared to the PC version, and lots of new tracks, though I think on the whole, I prefer the PC version - if only because the camera is better. The console version is a bit out there, compared to the PC version, with explosives littered around all the levels (obviously, it wouldn't be fun for the console crowd if things didn't explode), and it makes some of the levels ridiculously hard (and Trials wasn't exactly easy to begin with). Though if I don't really approve of that, the challenge modes (ski jumping, bone breaking, riding in a huge cage ball, for example) are fabulous fun. I really like the target collecting mode, which essentially turns your bike and rider into a pinball, as you're catapulted around the level by huge flippers. AWESOME. If you've not picked it up yet, it's well worth the 1200 MS points.

The other game that's really been eating my time lately has been Far Cry 2. I did pick this up on PC when it came out last year, but somehow it failed to spark with me. But something inspired me to pick it up on 360, and now that I've put 25 hours or so into it, I think it's one of the best shooters I've played since Half-Life 2. I'm about 60-odd percent through the main story missions, and I'm finding it absolutely compulsive. The game's not perfect by any means, as you can't travel more than 400 metres on a road before having to blast your way through a roadblock, which does get tiresome after a while, but there's a tactical freedom that you don't get in most FPS games. I've unlocked most of the weapons and there's a great balance and variety in the way you can kit yourself out. You can go super-stealth (silenced Makarov, silenced MP5, Dart Rifle), fully automatic (Uzi, AK-47, PKM), super-sniper (IED, Dragonov, Dart Rifle, or super-explosive (M79 grenade launcher, MGL grenade launcher, mortar), though obviously, doing that is a little on the extreme side, and you're better off having a good mix of weapons. My favourite loadout is to take the Dart Rifle to pick people off silently from a distance, have the silenced MP5 (which the game oddly classifies as an assault rifle, rather than an SMG) as your main weapon after you've picked off as many people as possible and need to get in close, and have an Uzi as your weapon of last resort, since it gives you a lot of close range killing power. Another good combination is to have the Dragonov sniper rifle to spring long range ambushes (I did this rather epically on a convoy destruction mission - as the convoy was passing through a checkpoint, I sniped an oil barrel, setting the whole place on fire, allowing me to pick people off safely from distance as they fled from the flames), backed up by the M79 grenade launcher (it's the one Arnie has in Terminator 2) to blow things (particularly vehicles) to hell from medium range and have the PKM light machine gun to mop things up if they get too close to take out with the Dragonov or the grenade launcher. Fire is also a great tactical option, as you can use Molotov cocktails to literally smoke people out of buildings or long grass, and it adds an element of confusion into the combat that you can generally use to your advantage.

So even if the game lacks a little in design terms (too many roadblocks and assault trucks magically appearing 20 seconds after you get into a vehicle), the combat itself is great and very satisfying. The game does get significantly harder in the second half, as the enemies start using better weapons. I messed up a stealthy approach on one particular mission and got a very rude shock when mortar shells started raining down. That got rather frantic, as I'm not only dodging mortar fire, but also having to fight a dozen goons who now know exactly where I am and are throwing orange smoke bombs to mark my position for the mortar guy... Yipe. And you can also expect to have a hard time if you don't take at least one scoped weapon with you, as there are snipers dotted around some of the roadblocks, too. But I haven't had too many frustrating deaths (they've generally been my fault for doing idiotic things), and I also like the buddy system. It's nice that they characters aren't all white, middle-class superheroes. There's a good, diverse mix of people in there. I've got a bit of a soft spot for Nasreen, the Tajik woman merc, who's rescued me a couple of times from botched missions. And I was doing really well with Paul in the first half of the game, too - but unfortunately, I had to give him a morphine overdose after he got too badly wounded during a story mission. I got quite upset about that, as we were up to 17 on buddy 'history' score. If the game tries to kill Nasreen, I will not be pleased... I might have to shoot a zebra in the face. Hell, I may just do that anyway. It ought to be more fun than running them over in a truck.

Bark: I am not a personnel number, I AM A FREE MAN!

As I vaguely hinted at a couple of months ago, my life has taken a slight turn for the weird lately. And as my dear Hunter S. Thompson once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

If it appears that I've forsaken the internet in the last couple of months (as evidenced by an absolute dearth of new posts here and a very intermittent presence on MSN Messenger), well, there's a very good reason for that. I kind of have. For the last nine and a bit years, I've gotten very used to having the electric world at my fingertips for upwards of 12 hours a day, every day. This was a consequence of being sat behind an LCD monitor in my day job for 10 hours a day, and being stuck behind another LCD monitor for most of the evening, playing games, blogging or just surfing the websites I use to keep up with the events in a rapidly moving world. So, you might ask, what on Earth could tear me away from this wired, interconnected existence?

Well, rather devastatingly, a nagging sense that I wasn't doing all I could with my life. After nine years of work for a rather large multinational corporation, I found myself with a choice. I could either embrace the 80% work, 20% life culture that we laughably call a "work-life balance" and continue to be a slave to my job (albeit one with a decent salary), or I could quit my job, find another career and do something different. I made a decision a few months ago, the implications of which I'm still trying to get to grips with, even now.

To get to the bean-spilling, I left my life as a corporate worker bee behind at the beginning of July, and after the longest holiday of my entire life, in a little over a week, I go back to university. Me, a filthy student again. It's quite a bizarre notion, now that I'm on the wrong side of thirty years old. There are other details about my decision that I'm not going to go into here (for fairly obvious reasons); they're pretty much already in the public domain - so you don't need to read about them here - but that's the essence of it. Lots of people are absolutely fine with the 80%-20% work life balance you find in most large companies these days, but I found over the years that, increasingly, I'm not one of them. In fact, I consider myself lucky that not only did the people I used to work for help me make the decision more decisively than I might otherwise have done, but also helped make the whole thing a lot less financially painful than it might have been. I consider myself very lucky in this respect, and have no regrets about the time I spent with the company - it was a great place to spend my 20s and early 30s in the early part of my career, but I couldn't see myself there in another 20 years (or even 5 or 10 years), so when I saw the opportunity to move, I jumped at it like a lion pouncing on a wildebeest.

It takes someone very brave or very stupid to leave a well-paid career in the middle of the biggest recession since the 1920s, but the timing of everything was just too good to pass up the opportunity. In about a week, I start a PGCE in Secondary-level Science, with a specialism in Physics at Roehampton University. Science (and Physics in particular) has always been my first love, intellectually. I only really went into IT because it was a career a Physics graduate can get into pretty easily and get handsomely paid for doing so. Hell, the programming options in my Physics degree were my least favourite parts of the course (embarrassingly, I was a terrible programmer - there's a real irony that I was able to find someone willing to pay me to do it). What I really wanted to do was carry on with Physics, except that I spent too much time falling in love with Fleur in my second year and too much time playing Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D in my third year to really do myself justice academically (Again, I have no regrets - I'd do it all over again in an instant). So it's taken 12 years since I graduated, but I'm re-engaging with Science and Physics again in a major way, this time by teaching it, rather than studying or researching it.

Why become a teacher? Well, it's something I had a very long, very hard think about earlier in the year. There's an element of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", since not only is Fleur a teacher, but so are her parents, one of her sisters, my brother and my sister-in-law... So it's not like I don't have a realistic idea of what the profession is like. And even better, I've literally got decades of experience to tap into whenever I need to ask one of them for advice. My brother has always joked with me that there are only two reasons to be a teacher: July and August. The truth is that you can't really argue with 13 weeks holiday a year. If you're going to get worked half to death in whatever profession you opt for, go for one with proper holidays. But the main reason for wanting to become a teacher is that not only are Physics specialists in real demand (only about 5% of the people applying to do a Science PGCE are Physics specialists - 80% are biologists, with the remaining 15% being chemists - so if you're a Physics specialist, you've picked quite a safe profession in the long term), but I also think the time is right for me now. It wouldn't have been if I'd gone straight into teaching after leaving university (indeed, I once swore at the time I would never go into teaching), but now I've mellowed a bit (yes, really!), got some real life experience, and the favourite part of my old job was mentoring the IT placement students on their industry placement year. To steal a gag from Mass Effect - knowledge is like herpes: if you've got it, spread it around - and I found that I really enjoyed doing the spreading. Knowledge, information, has always been my drug (well, other than alcohol), which is why I was constantly plugged into Wikipedia and read huge volumes of the Children's Encyclopedia Britannica (a set of 24, as I recall) that my parents bought for me and my brother when we were in our early teens. There's no doubt that teaching is a high-workload, high-stress, underpaid, under-appreciated career for the most part - but it's also a whole lot more existentially rewarding than shunting numbers around an Excel spreadsheet for 10 hours a day. As a teacher, you're helping shape lives and have far more of a hands-on impact on the fabric of society than any corporate job. I have to confess that I find the prospect both exciting and no small part daunting.

I will try and keep this blog up to date with my progress throughout the year, but I can't guarantee how regular updates will be, as I'm not going to be spending much time at a computer during my course and teaching placements. Wish me luck... I'm going to need it!

Bark: Feeling the heat

I'm Scottish. I'm not built for weather like this. Where's a traditional British summer (i.e. thirty days of unbroken rain) when you really need one?

Bark: The real big news story of the week

The mystery of how crop circles get created has finally been solved. It's nothing to do with aliens or hoaxers. No, it's wallabies off their heads after snacking on opium poppies.

Fucking awesome.

Bark: Michael Jackson broke the internet

Inconsiderate bastard.

Bark: Why you should always buy Sennheiser

I'm going on a bit of a health kick for the summer, and unusually for me, I've hit the gym twice in the last three days. When I was getting ready to go to the gym tonight, I realised with a dawning sense of horror that my dear lady had just washed my gym kit, which was a bit ripe from my session on Sunday.

Unfortunately, she'd neglected to tell me that she was going to wash it before I saw it hung out on the line. The reason I was horrified was because I knew that Fleur had just stuck my kit straight into the washing machine without bothering to check the pockets (she never does) and I'd left my best set of mini-headphones in the pocket of my cycling shirt, as I use them to plug into the TVs on the cardio machines at my gym.

Over the years I've had a pretty terrible record with breaking sets of in-the-ear headphones (one of the reasons I upgraded to a set of wireless gaming headphones for my PC a little while back, because at least I can't accidentally pull the wires out of the earphones - usually by treading on the lead or moving too far away from the jack socket and almost taking my head off in the process - if there are no wires to pull out), so having had this set go through the wash, I wasn't confident about their chances of survival. Thankfully, they only went through at around 30 degrees (rather than a boil wash), so after they'd dried out, I tested them on my laptop and they still worked! And now they smell of lavender, which doesn't make any difference to the sound quality of the music, but does make the whole experience a little more pleasant, nonetheless.

Granted, earphones aren't exactly hugely complicated bits of electronics (they're just coils of copper wire and a couple of magnets wrapped up in plastic and a occasionally a bit of rubber, really), but the fact that they'd survived being thrashed around in the drum of a washing machine for an hour or so was pretty impressive, I thought.

Byte: Now with added Madness!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that my post archive now goes back to 2003, rather than starting in December 2004. This is because I've used a nice bit of functionality in Blogger to integrate all the posts from my old blog.

I'll probably delete the old Mad Iain blog now that I have all the posts consolidated in one place, and will spend a little time over the summer weeding out all the old posts with dead URLs and broken image hotlinks. I haven't imported any of the comments from the old posts, because (as I remember) some of the comments threads did have the tendency to turn into slanging matches because of a bit of cross-pollination of ire from the old State forum, and we don't really need to drag all that up again here. A lot of water has passed under the ruined remains of that particular bridge by now.

I did originally intend to do this blog integration job on my own little piece of internet real estate, but in the end I decided that doing it this way was a whole lot easier, and free, to boot. Never underestimate the attraction of doing something something quickly and cheaply as opposed to spending lots of time and money to essentially get the same result... What? What did you expect? I am Scottish, after all...

In other news, you will have also noted that it's been very quiet around here for the last few weeks. All will be revealed in a month or two - but I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet. (How's that for being enigmatic?)

Bark: My new method of dealing with cold callers

Byte: The Old Republic

As game trailers go, this is pretty epic.



Yeah, I want this one for review... I will, however, be a bit disappointed if you can't do the fighting combos you see in the trailer in the game. There's nothing worse than seeing all these flashy moves being showcased and then the game utterly failing to deliver on your ability to do them within the game. (Which, I would note, the opening cinematic of World of Warcraft didn't do - broadly speaking, your characters can do everything you saw - shapeshifting, commanding demons, etc) It's right up there in game-crimes with allowing enemies to perform actions that you, as the player cannot. I'm specifically thinking about Unreal 2, here, where you had Skaarj leaping, jumping and rolling about to avoid fire, while you lumbered around like a pregnant elephant. Still, getting back to The Old Republic, the hype looks good - whether it will live up to it is quite another matter. BioWare have long been one of my favourite developers, though, so I'm pretty hopeful.

Bark: Go-go-Jonny!

The research scientist, Doctor Jonathan Rae, quoted in this piece on the BBC website is one of the guys I studied with at Leicester. I'm not quite sure how he ended up in Canada, but to see someone you knew personally pretty well as a student doing real, new, hard science is pretty awesome.

I also recognise quite a few of the names of co-authors on his Publication list, too. M. Lester was my tutor, T.K. Yeoman was one of my core Physics lecturers (he was the young, 'cool' one - he used to wear very funky shirts, as I recall) and A.B. Stockton-Chalk (better known as 'Molly') was a girl in my tutor group.

How cool is that? Kind of makes me wish I'd studied a bit harder instead of spending quite so much time on TIE Fighter and Dark Forces. 1997 was clearly a vintage year...

Byte: Toodle-Pip(boy)

I've been playing rather a lot of both Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 recently. And I was going to write a huge long post of analysis about both games, but my review copy of The Sims 3 just dropped through my letterbox, so all bets are off! There goes my productivity for the day...

Bark: We like to flip our homes a lot in Scamalot

This whole MPs' expenses scandal has been keeping me broadly amused for the last couple of weeks. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show had a nice take on it - I thought using Terry Jones in drag (from The Meaning of Life, I think) as Douglas Hogg's wife was rather inspired.

I've especially been loving all the insincere hand-wringing and contrition in the press - the only thing they're really sorry about is the fact that they got caught. Though the response from one MP about the size of his expense claims was breathtaking in its level of sheer arrogance, and is probably a truer gauge of the feelings MPs have for their constituents. But I'm amazed at just how naive people have been in thinking that the MPs *didn't* have their hands in the pot. Come on, if you've got an expense account that's larger than the average national wage, and you can claim stuff of relatively modest values without even having to provide a receipt, how is that system (which the MPs got to police for themselves) not going to be widely abused?

So now we've got the likes of David Cameron (or Tony Bland, as I like to call him) shouting out that there's got to be a revamp of Parliament and their expenses system, but curiously enough, he doesn't want to change the voting system over from our current first-past-the-post system (which basically means if you live in a constituency that's predominantly inclined to one party, say Labour or Conservative, when you're a Liberal Democrat, you might as well not vote, because there's no way you can affect the outcome) to a system of proportional representation, where every vote has an equal weight. So at the moment, we have a system where governments are decided on a few dozen marginal seats, where only a few hundred thousand votes might be cast. The rest of the population gets absolutely no say at all, because the constituencies are divided historically down party lines and very rarely change sides. Neither Brown or Cameron want to do away with this system, because it means they wouldn't get so many seats in Parliament, compared to a proportional representation system. Politicians clinging desperately onto their power? Surely not! So much for putting real power back into the hands of the people.

Though I have to say that Cameron's idea of putting ordinary people up for election into Parliament isn't what I'd call a good one. Mainly because the average man on the street is an idiot (that's why we define "average" as average). It's bad enough that we get politicians making decisions about how to run the country - put the same decisions in the hands of your average Sun reader and that really would end in chaos. There's a certain irony in the leader of the party that's most flagrantly abused the current system saying "join us to help us clean up politics", too. It takes some chutzpah to stand on a mountain of shit and tell people that you're on the moral high ground. If the Conservatives had been in government right now there would be riots in the streets. It's only because they're seen as the government-in-waiting that they're getting away with it. That and the fact that Gordon Brown is about as charismatic and likeable as a maimed dung beetle in comparison.

The problem isn't that we have a political elite class - it's that this political elite is an untrustworthy, self-serving bunch of incompetents. Maybe that's a little unfair - some politicians do have integrity and do a good job, but as a breed, in touch with normal day-to-day reality they are not. Try getting MPs to file expenses like someone who works for the NHS, or a school, or any large organisation (where you need VAT receipts for absolutely everything you try to claim) and they might understand why people are pissed off about them being able to spend £400 a month on food without even providing so much as a receipt from Waitrose (somehow I don't think many MPs buy their grub from Aldi or Farm Foods).

A little reform certainly won't do the House of Commons any harm, but do I expect any substantive change out of this furore? No, not really. Mainly because my cynicism could power several small towns for a year, but also because while it's relatively easy to get people to accept more power or privilege, trying to get them to relinquish it voluntarily never really works. The politicians will talk a good game for the next couple of months, and then conveniently forget the whole thing by the time the next general election comes round. I think it would have been amusing if Gordon Brown had called a snap election - unfortunately his balls aren't nearly as big as that pathetic excuse for smile he keeps flashing about on Youtube. I used to think Tony Blair had an insincere, Cheshire Cat smile, but Gordy's really takes the biscuit. A piece of advice, Gordon - if you're a miserable git, don't try to hide it with a smile that make's the Joker's look natural. It's painful to look at and doesn't fool anyone. Be yourself - be a dour, miserable Scottish git. You might get more respect for it.

Byte: Nice Muscle!

That's got to be the strangest game I've ever seen. WANT.

Byte: The parabolic arc of a severed head

Now that my PC is starting to show its age, I've started to buy quite a few cross-plaform games on my Xbox 360, rather than the PC, because at least then I can be sure that they're going to bloody work. At the weekend I paid a ten pound premium (versus the PC version) to pick up Fallout 3 on the 360 and overall, I think it was money well-spent.

Due to other commitments on my time right now, I've only had the chance to play around the opening few areas around Vault 101 and Megaton (no, I've not blown it up yet, though I suspect I will once I've exhausted all the other quests there), and I'm fairly impressed. I never played the original Fallout, but did attempt to play Fallout 2, before I got so frustrated with the turn-based combat system that I uninstalled it and never looked back.

That was probably a bit naughty of me, so I reinstalled it last night and started a new game on it. I found that the best way of getting through the rather tortuous temple of trials at the start was to put some points into melee weapons and then wait until the ants or scorpions got within range and hit them with a targeted thrust from my polearm, using my spare action points to run away bravely so that they'd use their action points to close up to within striking distance for my next turn. That makes combat a whole lot less painful (even if it still takes ages) but my main, overriding impression from playing it last night was just how awful the quest journal was, compared to what you get in modern RPGs nowadays. You get a one-liner for each quest and that's it. No other help than that. It just shows you how much RPGs have come on in the last 10 years. Anyway, I digress...

Combat in Fallout 3 is much better than I found its predecessor. Various people have described it as "Oblivion with guns", and that's a relatively fair assessment. Fallout 3 does play a lot like Oblivion, but the VATS combat system allows you to be much more efficient in the way you use your ammunition, compared to playing it in real time, like another FPS-RTS hybrid, such as Deus Ex or Vampire Bloodlines. Which is just as well, because ammo is relatively scarce and you can't afford to hose down weak enemies with an assault rifle when a .32 calibre pistol could do the same job, albeit just not so quickly. I'm quite proud to say that I have managed to take down a rocket launcher-wielding Super Mutant outside Big Town with just a 10mm pistol (at only level 4), though it's not an experience I intend to repeat in a hurry. I'm certainly dreading the point at which I run out of ammunition, too. But I'm not at this point yet, leaving me free to enjoy the way using VATS allows me to take the heads off raiders and mutant ants and see them fly through the air with a complete disregard for the laws of physics. One of my favourite kills so far was a sneak headshot on a raider with my trusty 10mm pistol in the Super-Duper Mart, which crit'ed him for a one shot kill, sending him catapulting off the top of the supermarket shelf he was walking on, somersaulting and cartwheeling ludicrously through the air in slow motion, like an over-enthusiastic stuntman in a John Woo film. That might get old. Sometime next year. Maybe.

So it's hard to fault the combat right now, and the openness of the game world is very enticing, even if they've gone a little bit too far in the "wasteland" stakes. I know realism in games is the done thing these days, but crikey, is all that wasteland dull or what? Couldn't they have raided the local B&Q and painted up Megaton a little? Where's a post-apocalyptic Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen when you really need one? The sheer sameyness of the town really makes it hard to navigate initially, particularly at night. Surely they could have found a few tins of paint from somewhere to brighten things up a little. There are certainly enough paint guns lying around the place...

That's not my only gripe, either. Bethesda have done the same thing they did with Oblivion and blown their entire voiceover budget on a single character you only see for about ten minutes at the beginning of the game. The consequence of this is that after you've talked to a person twice, they've run out of things to say and all you get from that point on are repeated lines and throwaway comments like "Nice to see you're back". And there's the Oblivion thing where characters all say the same lines, but at least there's a wider variety of voices now. It's also a little disappointing that Bethesda have done away with another one of Fallout's standout features - being able to get married or otherwise basically slut your merry way around the wasteland.

I've always found it odd that developers will be quite happy for you to decapitate and maim your way around the game world, but the merest mention of sex is totally off limits. The closest I've seen so far in Fallout 3 is being able to spend the night with Nova, the redheaded working girl in Megaton, but even that's mostly implied and you don't even get to see so much as her underwear, let alone have her comment on you spending the night together if you rent the bed at Moriarty's. Even something as archaic as Baldur's Gate II had a much more mature treatment of romance (and even casual sex, should you choose to sleep with Phaere in the Underdark). That the subject seems to be totally off verboten in modern games is a tad disappointing.

But overall, I am enjoying the openness of the game world, which is well-realised, if a tad on the dull side (something the post-apocalyptic Auto Assault had trouble with as well). I don't have any followers as yet (not even Dogmeat - hell, I don't even like dogs) and I'm not very far into the main quest, so I'm reserving judgment for a while yet, but I'm enjoying it so far. That I played it well into the early hours of Sunday morning the day I bought it, when I only intended to muck about with the character creation system (which is really nicely done, incidentally - a lot more better than Oblivion's, I'd say) is a good sign. I even picked up the Broken Steel expansion off Xbox Live, since I've heard it fixes a lot of the problems with the way the main quest ends in the unexpanded game. And a raised level cap is always good...

Byte: EVE vs WoW - the revenge!

Last night I filed a review of the latest release of EVE Online - Apocrypha - with my editor at Videogamer. It's written mainly for the benefit of prospective new players, because I didn't really see much point in preaching to the converted. If you're already playing EVE, then the retail release now in shops isn't really meant for you.

Obviously, Apocrypha has been out for some time now, and in order to review the game properly, I've had a much longer stint playing it than my previous effort a couple of years ago. And what I found was very surprising. It's actually grown on me over the last few weeks.

The key to this was that rather than blindly flying around solo wondering what the hell you have to do, I enlisted the help of some EVE veterans I'm friendly with in what's laughably called "real life". They chucked me some money, a couple of spare frigates to get me out of the pathetic starting frigate as quickly as possible and then gave me all sorts of invaluable advice as to what skills I should be training and how to clean up your system overview window to concentrate only on the important stuff (and also how to avoid accidentally shooting one of your Corp-mates).

So rather than piddling around running missions for NPC agents (or worse, mining), instead I was able to head straight out into 0.0 space and see what's really out there. The first thing I learned was that frigates aren't entirely useless. Their speed and maneuverability make them great for harrying larger ships when you're in a fleet, but you still wouldn't want to fly into 0.0 space in one solo. If anything, I've found that EVE is a much more social game than WoW. It's players are certainly much friendlier and helpful in the chat channels than your average WoW player. I've found very little snobbery about the kind of ship you fly. This is because, unlike WoW (where unless you have a full set of top tier Epics, most people look at you like you're somehow inadequate as a human being), each class of vessel has its own particular strength. A small frigate or cruiser set up for electronic warfare or drive jamming, when used in a coordinated way with the rest of your Corp's fleet, is just as useful to have in a fight as the most heavily armed battleship.

This is something I missed entirely in my previous forays into New Eden, mainly because I never really made it out of 1.0 space and didn't see any of the tactics that can be employed in PvP. Even so, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of EVE now, but I suppose that's to be expected. The game is so huge, so complicated, it's only really now after dabbling with it for a month or two that I'm getting any sort of handle on it at all. I've still not really done much with the economic side of EVE, mainly because I've been trying to get to grips with the social aspects of the game. EVE is famous for its political intrigue and inter-corporation warfare, and I have to confess, this is one of the things that appeals to my Machiavellian streak. And it also demonstrates the real difference between EVE and the more traditional structure of an MMORPG like WoW.

The fact that you can influence the in-game economy and the social balance of power is extraordinary after you've played something like Warcraft for four years or more. There, if you nail Onyxia in her lair, she never really dies. She'll respawn in a week and you can kick her scaly butt all over again. But if, for example, you infiltrate a rival corporation alliance and use an administrative loophole to disband it (as recently happened to Band of Brothers), you've just made a profound change to the balance of power within the game. That's almost incomprehensible to someone used to the regimented structure of something like WoW. That the developers would allow players such freedom to do a thing that literally destroys years and years of effort on the part of the alliance involved, just beggars belief when you see the way Blizzard stamp at the merest hint of people playing the game in a way they don't want you to play it.

I still think I probably need to play EVE for at least another six months before I could really pass a proper judgment on it, but having experienced both games properly now (and I freely admit that I was an idiot for trying to play EVE like any other MMORPG in my previous efforts), I think I can do a more reasonable 'versus' comparison now.

Both games have a lot going for them. In their own way, I like both immensely, and it's not really fair to draw a direct comparison, because of the way that the games have been designed and structured.

WoW is a far more regimented experience. You have your levels and your level grind and the objective of the game is to work your way up to the level cap, enjoying (or not) the story along the way, before devoting yourself to either doing organised PvP or high-end raiding at the level cap, or rolling and levelling a new character. You also have to live with the fact that you're never going to be able to change the lore of the game. That's imposed upon you and what you do will never truly make the blindest bit of difference to the game world. That's just the rules of the game.

EVE on the other hand doesn't attempt to restrict you in any way. The game world is vast, complicated and dynamic. It's as much about making money and gaining power as it is about flying around star systems blowing shit up. EVE is what you want it to be. There's no grind, just time invested in skills research. I do still have massive reservations about the learning curve, however. While you can get started in WoW relatively easily, EVE remains utterly overwhelming and bewildering to begin with, and despite CCP Games's best efforts to tone down the learning curve with some nicely put together tutorials, I can see it still putting off a lot of players in those first couple of weeks. The key is to get in with a corporation quickly and let them show you the ropes, rather than stumble around in the dark wondering where the light switch is.

If I had to recommend one game out of the two for someone to pick, assuming that they've never played either before and would be starting a new character from scratch, it's a tricky decision. WoW is clearly a lot easier to pick up to begin with, but if you want to get involved with a guild and what they're doing from night to night, it's a long journey to get to the level cap so that you can participate in the top-end raids (assuming everyone doesn't sniff condescendingly at you because your gear isn't good enough to come along). I'm not sure what the average level 1-80 time is now in WoW, but it's got to be something of the order of 200-300 hours or maybe more - especially if you're a brand new player. That's a lot of time to invest in a game before you can really get stuck in and involved with the end-game. Which, frankly, I've never found all that interesting, myself. I'd much rather explore the game world and level characters. WoW was always more about the journey than the destination, for me.

I suppose this is why, now that it's finally clicked with me, I think EVE is arguably the more rewarding game, both in the short-to-medium term and in the long term. Those couple of hundred hours you would spend in WoW just getting to the level cap could (in EVE) instead be spent getting directly into the action with a corporation. Whether you wanted to go down the mining, trading or PvP route, EVE's structure, as unwelcoming as it might be at the initial outset, doesn't stop you from getting involved in a meaningful way, right from the start (because the whole game is the 'end-game').

So I've definitely changed my mind about EVE over the last few weeks. This may surprise a few people, given what I've said about it before, but hey, wisdom comes with age, I suppose...