Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a recent, fairly obscure, unusual and very Japanese Wii game, developed by Tri-crescendo, who most famously made Eternal Sonata for Xbox 360 a few years ago, but first caught my attention with their Gamecube card-RPG Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. Eternal Sonata, despite the interesting premise of being set entirely inside the death-bed dreams of the 19th-Century composer Frederic Chopin, was too JRPG cliché for me, so I gave it a miss. Baten Kaitos had some beautiful pre-rendered scenery, a compelling story and characters and an unusual battle-system involving the real-time chaining of randomly presented cards to multiply attack-damage. It remains the only JRPG I’ve actually enjoyed playing, even after slogging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger.

Fragile Dreams is an action-RPG fairly light on role-playing elements, so much more palatable to me than anything Square-Enix ever develop. It actually shares a lot of superficial similarities with another Wii game I recently enjoyed, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Both involve manoeuvring a torch-wielding male protagonist from a third-person perspective through the abandoned, desolate ruins of everyday life, from malls to theme-parks. And both are built around the fragmented stories of people no longer present. Both, too, have the protagonists searching for a girl, and feature survival-horror elements. Their presentation, while both equally strong, couldn’t be more different though.

Silent Hill used to be developed in Japan by Konami, with the aim of replicating as accurate a facsimile of an American town and characters as possible, now it actually is developed by Americans. Fragile Dreams, on the other hand, was developed by Japanese people, for Japanese people. The animé-stylised characters and cutscenes, the kanji graffiti and posters across the walls, and, most of all, the story prove this. It’s a wonder this game saw release over here at all, but it did, and with full English voice-acting. In the nineties it would have been nothing but a curio for avid importers with a knack for Japanese. Actually, even with a PAL release, it still is little more than that; I had to hunt down my copy online, and I’ve still never seen it in a shop, either independent or high-street, which is a shame, because it has unusually high-production values for a) a Wii game and b) a game from a fairly small, relatively unknown developer, as shown not only by the quality English localisation, but also by the instruction booklet.

Yes, the instruction booklet deserves a particular mention, because instruction booklets are part of the overall package, and Fragile Dreams’ one is pretty nice. It’s in full-colour, well-designed in the style of a scrapbook, presents all the information concisely and with illustrative screenshots, and contains short biographies of its characters with nice, consistent artwork, and is all interspersed with the odd quote here and there. I’m sure a lot of players don’t care about the instruction booklet and are only interested by what’s on the disc and, while a good instruction booklet can’t save a bad game, it can add the little extra sparkle to the player’s overall experience of their electronic entertainment.

To continue my digression for a minute, I’ve noticed that Wii games in general seem to have above-average instruction manuals, and not just in Nintendo-published games. I wonder if Nintendo have some stipulations about colour booklets. If I had an EA-published Wii game to hand I could answer that question pretty quickly. How is it that the second-largest and richest publisher in the industry packages some of the most heinously bland examples of instruction-booklet design with their games? An example: by fortuitous chance I managed to obtain one of the last copies of the limited Collectors’ Edition of Mass Effect 2 from Gamestation’s website. This package retails at about £60 and is one of the nicest special editions of a game I’ve seen. It comes with a steel-case containing the game and a bonus DVD, and a second, fold-out cardboard package containing a download-code-card, a comic-book and a hardback book of concept art. All beautifully presented as if produced by the game’s fictional Cerberus Corporation, all in full-colour, until, that is, you open the anorexically-skinny instruction booklet, which is black-and-white and completely dry and humourless. What does it cost to include a colour 20-page booklet with a £60 game? A few pence extra per copy? And to get someone who actually cares about the game to write it (particularly when said game is by a developer famed for their script-writing)? A one-off payment of around £50, perhaps?

But as I said, a swish instruction booklet would be pointless if the game was a disappointment. Despite a fair bit of backtracking and several patience-testingly long corridors, Fragile Dreams is a compelling game. It follows a fifteen-year-old boy, reminiscent of Shinji Ikari from the animé Neon Genesis Evangelion, though, fortunately, less whiny, perverse and pathetic, though almost as emotional. Ultimately, I did like Seto, but he cries a lot, and his lines are often delivered with an almost-painful hesitancy. For most of his life he had lived alone with an old man, whose name he did not even known, in an old observatory. Seto has never seen another human being and when the old man dies, he is left all alone.

Loneliness is the primary theme of the game’s story, and it seems to be a theme the Japanese return to again and again, often, but not exclusively, in animé. Loneliness, disconnection and isolation. I’ve already mentioned Evangelion, one of the most popular animé franchises. That’s about the difficulty in forming relationships and communicating with those around you, and the physical isolation of being trapped inside giant robots, or even inside one’s own mind. Ghost in the Shell deals with how technology can both isolate and connect us, while the film All About Lily Chou-Chou shows how an internet forum can connect lonely/disconnected adolescents. Paranoia Agent seems to be about isolation and being trapped (as well as a semi-supernatural rollerblading child who beats people up with a baseball bat).

And then there’s Makoto Shinkai’s films. While playing Fragile Dreams I wondered if either someone on the writing staff was a big fan of his, or if he himself had something to do with the script. Then again, perhaps the Japanese are just a lonely people, and that’s why these themes come out again and again in their art. But Shinkai’s works often use sci-fi elements as a backdrop to stories about isolation, longing and loneliness. Having a boy follow a girl he once saw across the vast expanses of the empty world that was once so alive, just so he would have someone to share his experiences with, seems distinctly Shinkai.

It’s an interesting motivation for a videogame protagonist as well. So often in videogames your tasked with some combination of save the world / save the princess / kill the bad guy. Even in the games that rely on bestowing the player with a feeling other than “heell YUH, ah jus blew dat muthafucka’s BRAINS out! Ah am the DUDE!”, like Silent Hill, Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, you’re saving someone you care about. In Fragile Dreams you can’t save the world because it’s already ended, and you can’t defeat anyone, because everyone’s already dead. Your most frequent objective is “look for the silver-haired girl.” You don’t know her name or anything about her, except that when you first met, she fell off a wall and you touched her cheek and it was warm. Until about three-quarters of the way through the game, you don’t even know that she needs saving, or that there is a bad guy to be stopped after all. All you want is not to be alone any more. Like the best stories, the main plot-line is simple and powerful. And it’s all underpinned with some of the most beautiful environment design on Wii since Super Mario Galaxy.

There’s a lot of big things I like about Fragile Dreams, but there’s a lot of little things that make it as well. One of my favourite characters was a talking backpack called ‘Personal Frame’ you meet early on. While a practical solution for offering advice within the game, her dialogue is also often quite funny, and offers several moments of self-awareness to the game. For example, the game draws attention to items that can be picked up in the often dark areas of the abandoned world by surrounding them with glowing fireflies. Personal Frame points this out and Seto asks why the fireflies would do that, to which Personal Frame hesitantly suggests “well, it’s because… um.. because it’s summer I guess.” Something about the awkwardness of the dialogue between Personal Frame and Seto makes their relationship all the more endearing. It’s as if they can’t quite understand each other, but Personal Frame is really trying hard to be as helpful as she can. It’s a genuinely sad moment when her batteries run out and Seto is forced to leave her behind in the railway station as he heads back out into the world, alone again.

Fragile Dreams is a good game, but if for nothing else, then you should play it for the story. Good stories with strong characters in games are still rare enough to be special. Like Team Ico’s games, this one deals with simple but powerful ideas. There’s this one line at the end that’s particularly powerful and sad: “and then, then we travelled together, and after countless summers, one day, I was alone again, a peaceful end, at the end of everything, I was truly and utterly alone,” which, because the story is told retrospectively by an older Seto, is then juxtaposed with his first conversation with ‘the silver-haired girl’ as they set off. The power of this fragment comes from the blending of times, which Modernist writers used to great effect. Joyce does it at the end of Ulysses when Molly remembers the day Leopold Bloom asked to marry her and this is paired with their present marital difficulties and helps to suggest a time in the future when they will be happy again, and the same idea pretty much underpins all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because, however sad their end, years are never wasted, and can be regained, if they are simply remembered. It’s a bittersweet ending to a bittersweet game that takes you on an emotional journey through the decaying ruins of an almost-empty world.

Videogames present entirely arbitrary challenges, brought to a whole new level of meta-arbitrariness with Xbox 360 achievements. Sports do to an extent too: manoeuvre this ball to this place, cross this certain distance in the fastest time possible. Good videogames, and sports, make the player forget the arbitrariness of their tasks by motivating the player either through competitive elements, self-improvement or narrative rewards. Well, the last one only really applies to videogames, with the possible exception of spectator-driven sports were the completion of pre-determined routines is the goal.

I’ll give some examples from games I’ve recently played. Games with competitive elements are the ones that emphasise player versus player action, such fighting games like Street Fighter, shooting games like Modern Warfare 2 and racing games such as Forza Motorsport. I don’t think I’m generally a very competitive person (a few exceptions notwithstanding), and these aren’t my favourite sort of games, or at least not in their multiplayer aspect. Games that emphasise self-improvement are those that encourage beating personal high scores or lap-times. There’s a competitive element to these as well, but they’re more about personal bests. Tetris would fall into this category, as well as racing games and more recent ‘lifestyle software’ such as the Brain Training series.

Games that emphasise narrative over challenge or competition are my favourite sort of games. Here we have games such as Mass Effect and, a game I particularly enjoyed recently, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Shattered Memories is notable for the reason that it was neither particularly challenging, nor particularly scary, but is a very compelling game just for the twists of its story.

One of the best things about videogames, good ones at least, is the feeling of accomplishment they bestow on the player. When you’ve saved the world / galaxy / princess, you feel good, but really, you’ve just inputted an arbitrary combination of commands. And sometimes you find yourself stopping and asking why you’re even bothering, what’s compelling you to continue. Ever spent an hour playing solitaire when you were supposed to be working? Ever lost an afternoon to Bejewelled? Ever spent five hours killing the same low-level monsters, just to buff up your character by a single arbitrary level?

Yesterday I was bored and had an itch for some fast-paced, high-score-grabbing twitch gaming. Ideally I would have played Sin & Punishment 2, but I don’t own that, and I was rather limited on my choice of other available games. I had a look through my Mother’s rather meagre collection of Wii games, but the only ones I’d consider playing was Wii Sports or Wii Sports Resort, but, after spending three days playing real table tennis against my girlfriend in her sunny garden, the idea of firing up a virtual representation approximately similar to the real thing seemed doubly pointless.

I was left then with only my DS games to play, and, though I’m excited for the 3DS, I don’t actually play a lot of DS games. In fact, I play my original gameboy about as often as my DS. I have lately been playing Zelda Spirit Tracks, but, especially after completing Majora’s Mask for the second or third time, this game seems more like the other Zelda games than most. I mean, all Zelda games are basically the same, but some are more the same than others. And I just can’t get as excited about the 2D ones, Link’s Awakening excepted, as I do about the four 3D ones.

And so I turned to Tetris DS to kill some time while I waited for my mother to get ready to go to the Sainsbury’s. I loaded up standard marathon mode and set it to endless, so that it wouldn’t end after 200 lines, which is about fifteen minutes playing time. I reached 200 lines and carried on. There was one time, when I was at sixth form, that I reached 999 lines, the maximum it will register. It takes a bit over an hour, but isn’t particularly difficult because, a) the speed of the blocks falling stops decreasing after about level 18, no matter what level you reach and b) even though the blocks fall instantaneously, if the player keeps moving or rotating them very rapidly, they won’t ‘lock’ into place. So, with a little practice, you can go on indefinitely without too much difficulty.

By 999 lines, my score was about two-million. The time I got this high before, I stupidly turned my DS off rather than letting the game end, so it didn’t save my score. I decided that I wouldn’t make that mistake again and, while I was here, may as well go as high as I could. I was interrupted by a trip to Sainsbury’s, but put my DS into sleep mode so I could return later. When I returned and played a bit more, I decided to see if the score would max out at 9,999,999 or nine-million-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine. That was the goal I set myself, the arbitrary challenge, the number that on a 360 might have earned me an achievement, but on a DS wouldn’t even get me that virtual badge of honour.

Apparently, the score maxes out ten times higher than that at ninety-nine-million etc. a score that the game will refuse to save, incidentally, as the few people who’ve put the time in to do that will testify. I decided to leave it at ten million, having reached level 374 over about five hours of playing time. Have I achieved anything? Not really. Have I wasted five hours? Some people might say so. At least I didn’t spend fifty hours on it, which, at a tenth of the maximum score, is roughly what it would have taken. But I don’t’ mind. I set out to do something, and I did it, however pointless that task may have been.

Sometimes the arbitrariness of videogames hits me, and a game I had previously been enjoying will become a chore. The worst is when I have a stack of games to play and there’s one I really want to get to, but I’m already halfway through a different one. I have a bit of a stack now, but it’s so big that I’m not really worrying about it, and, although there’s two more games I want to add to it, there’s no imminent releases I’m desperate for, so I can hopefully hold off buying many more games until at least Christmas-time. It does seem to keep growing bigger though, especially since I bought my Dreamcast. At the moment it stands thusly:

Shenmue

Lack of Love

E.G.G. (Elemental Gimmick Gear)

No More Heroes 2

Fragile: Farewell Ruins of the Moon

Myst III: Exile

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Project Gotham Racing 4

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Alan Wake

Still to finish I have Zelda Spirit Tracks and Forza Motorsport 3 and I still want Sin & Punishment 2: Successor to the Skies and Super Mario Galaxy 2. I think the next one I’ll start will be Fragile, a Wii adventure game by Tri-Crescendo, who made one of the only JRPGs I’ve really liked, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, and any of these worth writing about, you can be sure I will discuss on here in the coming months. For now, perhaps you’d like to discuss in the comments below what games you’re waiting to play…

There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

Considering its age, it is in good condition, having been kept on a bookshelf where, for several years, the sun struck the spine and front at an angle, fading an L-shaped block of cloud-white into the cover. Obviously the books either side of this one where smaller, their imprint left in a rectangle on either side of A Skeleton Key that must be closer to the cover’s original colour. Inside, the book smells of what it is: old paper; the same smell that the case of an ancient Zenit camera I used to own had. There’s no smell of dust or tobacco or food. I like to think it was kept in some airy study somewhere.

I don’t think it was ever read though, not all the way through at least, because the final page of the conclusion is uncut. (I don’t know exactly how books used to be made, but I think they were printed on sheets bigger than the pages and then cut in half after they were put in. Sometimes pages must have been missed). Inside the front cover, someone has carefully written the number 47 in pencil, and on the following page is an indecipherable signature, probably of the previous owner, certainly not of one of the authors. Otherwise the book is unmarked. The following two pages are blank, and then there is the title, alone on a page in plain Times New Roman font. The next page has a slightly larger title with the authors’ names and the publisher’s information and then the book begins.

Here we move onto the content, which is what makes this book elitistly obscure. People who read my site or study literature are probably aware of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of them might even have read it. Further afield I would guess, and this is a complete guess, that fewer than 1% of English-speaking people are aware of Ulysses. Much fewer had read it. Of the people who are even dimly aware of Ulysses, I would guess that fewer than half are aware of Joyce’s fourth novel Finnegans Wake, and probably fewer than one-in-ten of the very few who read Ulysses have even attempted to read Finnegans Wake. I bet a tenth of those never reach the end.

And so, of that tiny proportion of people who are inclined to read the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, how many do you suppose are inclined to hunt down a book that discusses the novel? Naturally such an elitist challenge piques my interest, so now that I have finished university, I have set myself the ‘summer project’ of reading and understanding Finnegans Wake. Last year I read the first fifty or so pages, but comprehension escaped me, so I moved on to something else. Now I’m making the time for a second, proper effort at the book, with my guidebook, my skeleton key to Joyce’s secrets, firmly in hand. I’ll write about the novel itself at some later date.

I enjoy writing these Videogame Diaries. It’s a chance to write some quick, funny pulp, and parody the games I like. In the first VGD I talked about the reasons and ideas behind writing these. I’m certainly not attacking these games, well, not the good ones. Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 3 are fantastic games. Alone in the Dark, not so much. But no matter how good the game, no matter how grandiose or well-written the story, the narrative can always be undermined by the fact that a player has control, or that lines of code are used to generate the onscreen action, or that a game must first-and-foremost be a compelling interactive experience and tell a story only as a secondary priority.

Take Mass Effect, for example, one of my favourite games of all time. You play as Commander Shepherd, the first human spectre, a smooth-talking all-action hero on a quest to save the galaxy. You’re Captain Kirk and James Bond in one badass package. You can charm or intimidate people into telling you everything you need, and yet you can still leave the conversation, turn around, get stuck on a bit of scenery, and spend several seconds running against a wall. And that’s in a good, well thought-out game.

Alone in the Dark then. You may have noticed in my VGD I switch between first- and third-person several times. Like 90%+ of the ‘mistakes’ I make in these Videogame Diaries, this is deliberate, highlighting the unnecessary and inconsistent way the game continually switches viewpoint without warning. It might not be apparent on first reading, particularly for someone who isn’t familiar with the games, but quite a lot of attention to detail goes into recording exactly what a gameplay session would be like. With open games like Far Cry 2, my VGD might not be exactly what someone else would experience, but with Resident Evil 3 or Alone in the Dark, if you play those sections, you should have exactly those gameplay experiences. I’ve also tried to make sure that every line of dialogue is exactly as it is in the games, without adding or removing anything.

One ‘mistake’ in the Resident Evil 3 VGD I’m not sure if anyone will have noticed is that I made note of Jill changing her outfit, and the absurdity of doing so in the middle of a zombie-invested city, but then described her being in her original outfit later on. This happens in the game because several of the cutscenes are pre-rendered with Jill in her starting outfit and the same cutscenes are used regardless of what outfit the player equips her with. This kind of continuity error is less common in modern games, but does still crop up occasionally, and is the sort of mistake you might find in amateur or pulpy fiction. Of course, there’s a fine line between parodying bad fiction and writing bad fiction. I hope people find my VGDs funny whatever they think my intention was.

Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for the dialogue in Alone in the Dark’s VGD. That is all the actual script from the final retail game that someone was actually paid to write. That game alternately had in my stitches and ready to throw the disc out the window. It’s naively brilliant the way the writer tried to make Edward Carnby’s character gritty by having him cuss almost continually. The writer’s real stroke of genius was when he decided that the swearing was so good that he didn’t even need to worry about anything else, like developing his characters, or making them in any way sympathetic. He did still manage to fit in every American TV/Movie cliche he could think of, including one of the most awkward and unnecessary kisses I’ve ever seen. There is no build-up to and no reason for Edward and Sarah falling in love. It is just completely crowbarred in as if the writer had a checklist of things he absolutely must include.

Also, I’ve never seen a kiss in a videogame that didn’t look as awkward as pressing as pressing together the plastic faces of action figure effigies of Jill Valentine and Link from Legend of Zelda. One day the technology will be there for convincing kisses rendered using in-game engines. For now, that’s why most videogame characters shoot everyone within ten feet of them; they’re unable to love.

Alone in the Dark, bah, I’m sick of it now. It was almost worth playing for the hilarious dialogue and the occasional good bits. And believe me, there are a couple of moments in that game that are genuinely fun to play. The opening level’s escape from a collapsing building has a genuine action-movie feel to it, and is a set-piece almost worthy of inclusion in a Call of Duty game. Even a couple of the physics puzzles are okay, though most are fiddly and inconsistent. The first driving section is nice too, like something out of Burnout or Blur / Split/Second. The rest of the game oscillates between tedious and tortuous, saved only by the grace that you can skip any sections of the game you can’t be arsed to work your way through, with almost no penalty.

That is, annoyingly, every section apart from the last couple, which were what finally stopped me playing the game permanently: At the end of the game you have to drive all over Central Park taking out about thirty of these giant tentacles. It took me nearly half-an-hour to take out one of them, which I only managed by exploding a car next to it. Unfortunately, Edward was so injured by the explosion that the several monsters milling around the tentacles, these monsters not only being numerous but also the most awkward to fight, were able to kill him, undoing the tiny bit of progress I had made.

Ultimately, I would not recommend Alone in the Dark unless you see it cheap, go in with low expectations and are looking for a good laugh at some bad scripting.

Read Part 1…

Back to motion control. Apparently Sony like motion control too. They’ve created the ‘Move’ which is a Wii remote with a gently glowing mood-ball stuck on the end. It uses the same technology as Wii, as far as I’m aware, but also used a camera, like Kinect, to follow the wand (or whatever it’s called) for added accuracy. This was demonstrated by a dude playing Tiger Woods, and another dude playing the single most generic fantasy wizard game I have ever seen. It seemed to work pretty well. I mean, maybe when it comes out some people who were thinking about buying a Wii for £170 might think “hmm, for just another £130 I could get a slightly more accurate version of this, with higher fidelity graphics that sit much more firmly in the uncanny valley. Oh, sweet, and I could a blu-ray player with it too, then I can watch blu-rays on my CRT television, sweet.” And maybe some bros will think “I love twitch-gaming my way through Killzone 2 sat on my couch, but wouldn’t it be great if for Killzone 3 I could stand up and hold two controllers out in front of me for the whole time.”

Am I defending the Wii? It sounds like it. The Nintendo press conference certainly reminded me why I love Nintendo. But no, I think I’m being realistic. The Wii, in terms of sales, is the dominant system of the three, but it’s certainly not the most technologically superior by a long way. What it is is the Sinclair Spectrum, the Microsoft personal computer, the Model-T Ford. These were not the ‘best’ products of their time, these were the most affordable. Nintendo made a product for the mass market. Maybe they didn’t know it at the time, maybe they were surprised by the Wii’s success, but they did. Microsoft and Sony made products for the gamer, and Sony particularly made a product for a certain kind of tech-savvy gamer, who needs high-specs whatever the cost. Surely, the people who bought PS3s and 360s don’t want Wii Sports, and the people who want Wii Sports buy Wiis.

One other problem with motion-control, all motion-control, is the lack of feedback, especially with Kinect. There’s stuff happening on the screen, but it’s basically make-believe. You need some sort of tactile feedback. Nintendo and Sony at least put something in your hand, but even this is never anything other than a controller. Take, for example, sword fighting. There’s several problems with this, well-discussed by frustrated Wii developers as they answer yet another question about one-to-one movement. Firstly, to give someone one-to-one sword fighting, they need to actually be good at fighting with swords. Secondly, there’s no resistance when the ‘sword’ in your hand connects with a sword on the screen. Thirdly, real swords are heavy and build momentum. You can’t flail a real sword like you can a Wii remote without tiring yourself within seconds.

Which brings me to another point. The big focus with motion-control is that it puts you ‘in the game’, but it doesn’t, it’s more the opposite. It takes you out of the game, and that’s bad. For me, the best kind of entertainment is the kind where you forget you’re being entertained. It’s watching a movie in a dark room where your only focus isn’t even the screen, but what’s happening on the screen. It’s feeling what the characters feel, and being completely invested in them. It’s reading a book where the images in your mind become more vivid than the words on the page. It’s playing a game where you don’t even think about the buttons, you just think of what you want your avatar to do and then they do it. It’s not sitting in a theatre with a hundred other people, watching some people in silly costumes on a stage (though that has its place), and it’s not swinging your Wii remote too far to the left and seeing a message saying “please point your remote at the screen.” It’s not standing up either.

In conclusion, Move might be good, but with a limited appeal. Which is also how I feel about Sony’s other big ‘thing’ this year: 3D. Apparently, HD is old news, and now everything has to literally jump out of the screen at you, provided you have a lot of spare cash, don’t mind wearing silly glasses, and don’t have one eye that can see better than the other. On the one hand I don’t care about 3D at all, on the other, I’m really excited about the 3DS, probably because it will be cheaper, glassesless and have updated Ocarina of Time on it. So, 3D: cool, but a bit of a novelty. It’s certainly no panacea, no instant-win button for entertainment. Beowulf would still have been one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen even if it was 3D. And I can’t imagine American Beauty would have been vastly improved by 3D. 3D is a cherry on top of the desert, but not the meat and potatoes of the main course.

Okay, let’s wrap up with Nintendo’s press conference. I can’t remember if it was last year or the year before, but Nintendo had an absolutely dire press conference. If it was two years ago, then last year’s was pretty bad too. There was one where they did exactly what Microsoft did this year: they showed a few half-hearted sequels, and then spent the rest focusing on casual games like Wii Music that were of no interest to the ‘hardcore’ crowd that go all the way to Los Angeles each year just to hear Nintendo reveal their best new games. It seemed Nintendo had lost their way, and, for me, owning a Wii became a bit of a joke. I barely even turned it on for nearly two years.

Then last year, at their finale, they half-heartedly revealed the ‘vitality sensor’, sans games, which, to no one’s disappointment, was absent this year. It seemed they were resting on their laurels, safe in the knowledge that any game beginning with the word ‘Wii’ was a license to print money: ‘Wii Gardening’, ‘Wii sit down’, ‘Wii polo’, ‘Wii Sports 5′, ‘Wii on your granny’. I figured the best thing I could hope for was that the Wii bubble would burst and Nintendo would come crawling back to the fans who had kept them going through the difficult times, buying Mario Party 15 just so the company wouldn’t go under. This year I thought “at least they’ll show Zelda, and that will be something.”

They opened the show with a fifteen minute demo of Zelda: Skyward Sword, admittedly dented by a few technical hitches due to the large number of wireless devices in the audience, but amazing none the less. I mean, I can see how someone would be as unenthusiastic for another Zelda game as I am for another Halo game, but I fucking love Zelda. I don’t even care that it’s the same story, items and characters every single time, it’s my absolute favourite game series. And I am excited for this next one. I know have a screenshot from it as my desktop, and I get a new wave of excitement every time I see it, even though the game’s at least a year away.

That would have been enough, but aside from the aforementioned technical hiccup, Nintendo didn’t put a foot wrong the whole show. I would even say it was the best E3 press conference I’ve seen. No, I don’t think they showed any ‘new’ games, it was all established franchises, and Mario Volleyball did look a tad desperate, though I’ve no doubt it will be a solid Mario Sports game, but the games they did show all looked brilliant. Of particular note was Kirby’s Epic Yarn, which has a cute visual style a bit like Yoshi’s Story, but even more stylised. I can’t imagine I’ll buy it unless I get it second-hand one day, but it’s nice to know a game like that exists.

And then they revealed the 3DS. Well, we knew it was coming, but it was still nice to see it in the flesh. And Reggie Fils-Aime made a big deal about not needing silly glasses for it, an obvious pop at Sony to counteract Sony’s Kevin Butler disparaging Wii’s unrealistic waggle-boxing. Unfortunately I have no idea how 3D the 3DS actually looks, since that doesn’t transmit well across a 2D internet stream, but the lineup of games was enough to get me excited. They listed more than sixteen high profile companies and franchises that were on board for the system, among them Capcom and Resident Evil. They showed a very brief teaser trailer for Resident Evil, but all they had to do was tell me Resident Evil would be on the system and I’d be ready to buy one. After all, it was Resident Evil 5 that convinced me to buy a 360, three years before that game even came out. (After Zelda, Resident Evil is my favourite franchise). Higher-resolution 3D Ocarina of Time just sweetened the deal, and I will be well prepared to spend £30 on that, even though I’ve completed that game at least seven times already.

Nintendo finished their conference with a reveal of Kid Icarus 3DS. I know a lot of people have wanted a new Kid Icarus game for years, but it’s not something I’m too bothered about. It looked pretty cool though and seemed like a well-executed finale to a strong show. So, in my opinion, Nintendo won E3. Sony, who still haven’t convinced me to buy a PS3, however tempting GT5 and blu-ray may be, came second, the performance by Kevin Butler adding a nice bit of spectacle to the proceedings, while Microsoft came a dismal third, making way too much of Kinect and not nearly enough of Fable III, or any arcade games or non-Kinect original IP. On top of that, they had a live demo of their new video chat which was tedious, annoying and painful all at the same time, and at the end, as a publicity stunt, they gave away a free slim Xbox 360 to everyone in the theatre, which must have cost them a bundle and would have been a nice gesture except for the really cringy bit where Don Mattrick announced the giveaway, received an applause and then, when the applause died down, smiled, raised his arms and made everyone applaud again. A little modesty would have been nice, I mean, I know it was a generous idea to give away thousands of dollars worth of hardware to a small group of people, alienating all the fans who tuned in on line, but it’s hardly their fault that they couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for a standing ovation after forty-five minutes of marketing speak and stupid motion-control games.

E3 2010, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or the biggest annual event on the videogaming calendar, had just finished, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on this year’s show.

The reason this show is so important is that it is the time each year when Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony announce all the biggest upcoming games for their platforms in an attempt to get their stockholders excited. Every year there is an informal competition between the three over who can put on the best show with the best and most exciting products.

Microsoft’s press conference was the only one I managed to stream live and with friends, but this turned out to be the most disappointing. It was abysmal, a shadow of previous conferences. They opened with Call of Duty: Black Ops, a game by Treyarch which is trying to be a game by Infinity Ward (who made Modern Warfare one and two), to the point where the levels they demoed mimicked almost exactly the pacing and style of Infinity Wards original E3 demo for Modern Warfare 1 three years ago and Modern Warfare 2 last year.

Microsoft then brought out Hideo Kojima, one of the industry’s most respected game creators to say what amounted to “here is a trailer for a metal gear game I have been working on.” I don’t care about Metal Gear, but if I did, I wouldn’t care about Metal Gear Solid: Rising, when the main series is exclusive to Playstation, and all that sets this game apart is the ability to slice enemies in different directions.

They then did the same trick they’ve done the last few E3s by announcing “everything you see from this point in is exclusive to Xbox 360.” They proceeded to show long demos of Gears of War 3 and Halo: Reach, both of which looked and played nigh-on identically to their predecessors. Now it may seem hypocritical to berate Microsoft for showing nothing but sequels when I start gushing about Nintendo’s upcoming releases later on, but the difference there is that it’s one or two years since the last Gears and Halo games came out, but it will be closer to a five year gap between between Skyward Sword and the last Zelda home console game when that is released. And I don’t care about the two big Microsoft franchises.

What I do care about is Fable III, but not because of the Microsoft press conference. Here they gave Peter Molyneux, all the way from England, the same treatment as Hideo Kojima: “I’m Peter Molyneux, here’s a trailer for my game.” Admittedly there might have been a danger he’d steal the show if he’d been allowed to say more, just standing there for twenty minutes talking about how you can have a pet hamster that defecates in real-time, looks sad, digs up hidden magical condoms, then grows old and dies, but something more than a short trailer would have been nice, especially when the accessibility of the last Fable game had the potential to make it a crossover game that could attract the industry’s new darlings, the casual gamer.

The final ‘game’ Microsoft ‘showed’ was a teaser trailer from Crytek currently called ‘Codename: Kingdoms’. The trailer didn’t reveal anything about the story or gameplay, but it was basically God of War 360.

And then they showed Kinect. Kinect. Get it? Because it’s like ‘kinetic’ because you’re moving, but it’s also like ‘connect’ because you’re connected to your games and friends. Basically, Microsoft saw how popular the Wii is and wanted to get a hot slice of that commercial action. Sony too, but I’ll come to them in more detail later. What these two companies seem to have overlooked is that their products, Sony’s especially, are a significant financial investment with an overwhelming array of the features that the average consumer doesn’t care about. While the Wii is cheap and ‘does sports, parties and getting fit, don’t it?’. Further to this goal, Microsoft ‘revealed’ Kinect Sports (actual title) and Kinect Adventures both featuring your Xbox Avatars (Miis) and Kinect Fit from Ubisoft or, as they call it, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

I fear that motion-controlled sports-game compilations are the modern equivalents of Tennis For Two and Pong, and that motion-controlled gaming is going to have a painfully long childhood, if it doesn’t succumb to infant mortality. And Microsoft’s, actually seems the worst of the lot, even with four years more time to get it right than Wii. At the moment one of their big selling-points is “Minority Report style media control”. You can tell a video to pause and then wave your hand to the side to flick between individual frames, <sarcasm>which I know if a feature I’ve just been dying to use</sarcasm>. I think the novelty will wear off pretty quickly when people realise that you actually have to stand up to use this feature. Same with Kinect Forza, which was already a stupid idea. I mean, I have a steering wheel, so why would I want to not have one, but pretend I did? And why would I want to stand up to do so? And how does the accelerator work?

Not content only to rip off Nintendo, Microsoft had a quick look over at Sony’s desk and came up with the idea for Kinectimals, or ‘EyePet’, as Sony called it. Actually, to be fair to MS, Kinectimals is as much a copy of Nintendogs as it is of EyePet, and then only a glorified, high-polygon Tamagotchi. There’s Joyride too, a clone of Sony’s recently well-received ModNation Racers, both of which fall neatly into the Kart-Racing genre invented by Mario Kart.

Oh yes, I’ve forgotten something, Microsoft’s other big announcement: now you can watch SPORTS on your Xbox 360, SPORTS from ESPN. This announcement was accompanied with a lot of marketing speak about complete integrated home entertainment media platforms or something. Maybe some bros who like American FOOTBALL care about this. I don’t.

Read Part 2…

Read Chapter 1…

“Nice work,” Sarah exclaimed, having recovered enough to come out from her hiding place. “how’d you do this?”

Edward’s grizzled, scarred face contorted into puzzlement.

“Not sure,” he said, “it’s like some sort of buried instinct. It’s primal.”

“Something connected to your amnesia?”

“It’s not just that,” Edward said, thinking aloud, “maybe Crowley’s right, there’s something inside me, something dark and violent. I know I’ve done fucked up things in the past. I can feel it. Something to do with the stone, I… I don’t know, maybe I’m doing the wrong thing here. All I’ve got to go on us Paddington’s word, and I don’t even remember who the hell he is.”

“Screw Crowley, and maybe you can’t trust Paddington, or even yourself,” Sarah exclaimed, almost passionately, “but you can trust me and for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing. This path of light or whatever, we need to try and solve this mess.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.”

They stared into each other’s tired eyes for a moment, and then began walking through the flesh and blood under the bridge.

“The museum is quite close now,” Sarah said, suddenly cheerful and enthusiastic, “room 943 awaits us!”

“You know what? I’m dreaming of a beer,” Edward said irrelevantly.

They walked up some stairs, then decided to stop for some more exposition.

“Hey, look on the bright side,” Sarah said, “at least you’re in great shape for an old man.”

“Forgive me for not laughing; my dentures would fall out,” Edward replied gruffly.

“Hey, lighten up, at least we can trust each other.”

It was as if Sarah believed that saying it enough times would make it true, but Edward did not share her sense of optimism.

“You don’t even know who I am, Sarah! Shit, I don’t even know who I am.”

“Okay, okay, I know this is hard on you, but goddammit, do you think this is easy for me? We both feel alone right now, believe me.”

“Oh, drop it.”

Their argument was cut short by Edward’s message tone playing. He pulled his phone out from his pocket and saw that he had a message from the mysterious Crowley.

“Hello Carnby, here’s a little hint for your memory file. Do you remember China?” the message began, “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to track you down. I found you and that damned stone in your so-called sanctuary in Wolong. I’ll find you tonight. There is nowhere to hide. Theo is dead. Without him you’ll never bring back the Light Bringer. You won’t be able to waste the stone’s power on this damned prophecy. You are all alone Carnby. Well… not entirely. I’m just one step behind you…”

Edward was unimpressed by Crowley’s pantomime posturing.

“What the Hell does that mean?” he exclaimed.

“’Light Bringer’?” Sarah jumped in, excited to finally have something she felt would be important to say. “I wonder, did you ever take Latin? I remember this much: ‘light’ is ‘lucus’ and ‘to bring’ is ‘fero’, so ‘Light Bringer’ is actually ‘Lucifer’.”

“You’re suggesting this is all about Satan making a comeback?”

Sarah, disappointed by Edward’s disparaging tone after her insight, peevishly replied, “That’s what he said, isn’t it? The Light Bringer and a prophecy about a stone.”

“I hope the prophecy starts telling us what the Hell we’re supposed to do about it then.”

The tense conversation over, the two carried on their walk until they came across another car. The key was in the ignition, so they were able to drive straight off, ignoring the few humanz that spotted them and futily tried to chase down the car. The path was suddenly blocked by a wall, where part of the ground had sunken or been raised up, and so Edward and Sarah had to drive round, both of them in silence, Sarah staring out the window at the endless expanse of the fractured Central Park, until Edward drove the car off the edge of a low cliff and they landed at the spot conveniently indicated by Edward’s GPS.

They got out the car and saw the way to the museum was blocked by a gaping chasm. Luckily there was a tow-truck with a ramp near by, the only one Edward had seen today, he realised when he thought about it. Sarah suggested that they use it, so Edward ran over, got in and drove it to the edge of the chasm. Once he had bumped it up against a rock at the edge of the cliff, he got out and pressed the button to lower the ramp. An unexpected thing happened here, in that the truck suddenly made a loud clanging noise, and somehow discharged its entire chassis up through the ramp, leaving every other part of the truck in place. It was no stranger than anything else that happened today, but Edward was struck by the novelty of it, and spent several minutes driving the chassis-less vehicle, with its unattached wheels, backwards and forwards.

He soon tired of this little game though, and got out, pulled out his gun and then I shot off the fucking padlocks that were holding the goddamn ramp in place.

“Looks good,” said Sarah, “now we just have to worry about the landing.”

I put the gun back in my pocket just in time to see more vampirz swooping down from the clouded sky.

“Oh shit, not them again,” Sarah shouted.

“Hold on, hold on!” Edward shouted ineffectually.

“They’re here, the fucking vampirz are coming!”

Edward ran towards her, but already they were wrapping slimy tongues around her limbs, lifting her into the air.

“Edward!” she screamed as they started flying her towards the museum. “Help me!”

All Edward could do from the ground was shout up to her “I’ll come find you. Bastards!” And then he was alone, in the park. He ran towards the nearest car, the same model as the one he had driven before, but a different colour, and was about to get in when a couple of humanz leapt out at him. He tried to ignore them and get into the car, but before he could get going, one of them pulled off the door and yanked him out. Rather than kill him immediately as he lay helpless on the floor, they stepped back and waited a few moments to ready their next attack. Edward had time to get up, and was about to fight them, when the one further away took a swing at him that would obviously miss, and instead hit the side of the car. This somehow caused the dislodged door to flip up and knock the monster over. With this one temporarily stunned, Edward ran past the other corrupted human and got back into the car, twisted the key in the ignition and floored it.

He hit the ramp dead on, launched into the air as if in slow-motion and then made a perfect landing on the other side. Some bollards prevented him from driving any further, so he got out, shot through the padlock that was keeping the gates to the museum locked, and walked into the yard. As if he had not already had enough to deal with, a rapidly moving scar opened up in the ground before him and seemed to actively aim for him. Edward narrowly avoided it, then ran and used a large exposed pipe to help him leap across a small fissure in the yard. This got him as far as an unmoving elevator and a fuse-box. Using a pipe that he found lying on the floor he smashed open the door of the fusebox, and was about to connect up the wires inside to make the elevator work when the scar came towards him again and pulled him into the ground.

Before he could resist, the scar, or the entity that was controlling it, pulled him along, waist-deep in concrete and dirt, along the floor, up the wall of the museum and back down on the other side of the fissure. With quick-thinking and a strong grip, Edward managed to grab onto a bollard and pull himself out. He ran back over to the fusebox and I started pushing the fucking different coloured wires together, but they wouldn’t fucking spark until I tried the last of six fucking combinations, then the goddamn lift suddenly decided to work. I got on it, pushed the button and rode it at an excruciatingly slow fucking pace up to the second floor of the damned museum. Once there I found my godamned way blocked by a fucking locked window, so I pulled out my gun and shot at until it shattered. I stepped through the broken glass and I was in a goddamn bathroom.

There was a door on my right, which I went through and into a damned small room. Here I found medical supplies in a first-aid box on the wall and fucking fire extinguisher on the floor which Edward picked up and left the room with. He was about to go through the door at the far end of the bathroom, when the scar returned and cut through all the fixtures, smashing the sinks and urinals and sending plumes of water into the air. Edward avoided the errant scar as best he could and made for the door, still holding the fire extinguisher, which was convenient, because a fire raged in the following corridor. I raised the nozzle of the extinguisher, pointed it at the fucking fire and squeezed until I’d carved myself a nice goddamn little path through the flames. I walked around a couple of corners and then my damn phone started ringing.

“Edward?” Sarah breathed down the line.

“Sarah, what’s happening? are you okay?” Edward asked.

“Hurry.”

“I’m coming, hold on.”

Edward put the phone back in his pocket and I rounded the next corner, only to be confronted with another fucking fire and then, suddenly, another of those goddamn humanz, except this one was bigger. Shit.

Two awkward fights later, both of which were more tedious than edifying, the two large humanz evaporated beneath Edward’s onslaught of fire, and he was able to slowly smash his way through the metal door at the end of a corridor using a bin. This corridor led to another corridor, and round a corner in this corridor Edward came upon Sarah, blindly reaching out from a fleshy sack suspended above the ground. Edward gasped and ran towards her, then picked up a nearby fire-axe and drove it into the sack. Rather than injure Sarah, as might have been expected, this caused the sack to release her into a gooey, barely-breathing puddle. If Edward had not known CPR, she might have died then and there, but he managed to breath air back into her lungs and bring her back from the brink of death.

“Just breathe,” Edward instructed, holding her head close.

“Oh God, they were sucking the life from me, inside I was connected to something, it spoke to me.”

“It’s okay,” Edward said, “it’s over now. You’re safe.”

“I could feel it… something primal. I know what you meant now. I feel what you feel.”

Sarah suddenly jerked forward and kissed Edward, because she had just decided that she fancied him, as she lay there in the bloody, fleshy puddle.

“I thought,” she said, pulling back, “I told you not to take advantage of the situation.”

Their intimate moment was interrupted by something snarling not too far away…

Previously on Alone in the Dark… Edward Carnby woke up in a collapsing building near Central Park, New York, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As he was escaping from the building he met a woman called Sarah Flores. He escaped with her and reached central park, which had been devastated by huge scars tearing apart the ground and is now full of ‘humanz’, people corrupted by the evil power that is creating the scars. It turned out that Edward is part of a prophecy that revolves around a great evil buried beneath Central Park, though it is unclear what part he plays in the prophecy. During a fight with some of the ‘humanz’ he was injured. Luckily, Sarah spotted an ambulance. Inside the ambulance the pair met Dr. Hartford, who pulled up Edward’s medical file on his ambulance’s computer. Skimming over his file Edward read “professor Edward Carnby… researcher, paranormal investigator… disappeared in 1938”…

Episode 4 – Fight Back and Loss

Sarah looked at Edward in astonishement. “But that means you’re…” She trailed off.

“Like a hundred years old!” Edward finished in his deep, gruff voice.

“There must be some kind of mistake,” said Dr. Hartford.

“Waking up tonight was a fucking mistake,” Edward growled, his back to his two companions.

“Take it easy, Edward, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.” What that perfectly reasonable explanation could be was not immediately apparent to anyone, so the doctor jumped in to fill the tense silence.

“Well, for what it’s worth I’ll send the files to your cell phone so you can, I dunno, whatever.” He had hoped to sound more authoritative, but the vagueness of his statement just made him feel ineffectual, so that he was almost glad when the ambulance radio interrupted him to crackle “Doc, we got another call.” He pulled a face and turned to Edward.

“Look, we gotta go,” he said, “you two coming?”

“She is,” Edward growled, “I’m going to the museum.”

“The hell I am,” Sarah cried, “you think I’ll be safe here?”

Edward glared at her. “Don’t fuck around, or I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Oh, you’re a real sweetheart,” Sarah retorted, unconvinced by Edward’s illogical threat. Edward considered arguing further, but decided against it. What difference did it really make to him whether she came along or not?

“Thanks doc,” he said in a different tone, something approximating friendliness. “Stay safe.”

The doctor raised a hand in acknowledgement, but Edward had already turned his back and started to walk away, so it was left to Sarah to raise her own hand in response, before she turned to catch up with him. The ambulance pulled away and the two were left alone in the park, a covered bridge before them, and, beyond that, nothing but a few streetlamps in the mist.

“I know this place,” Sarah said, breaking in on Edward’s brooding silence. “We might find some interesting things there.”

Edward ignored her and checked the GPS on his smartphone, which told him they needed to head across the bridge. He walked forwards, Sarah following a few steps behind, and then he stopped and stood still, listening. Sarah was about to ask what was wrong when she heard it too: a chattering in the air, the chattering of vampirz. Suddenly, a bat-like creature with the circular, hooked mouth of a leech swooped down towards Edward. He avoided it, but it came in for another attack, and then it was joined by several more, all flapping and swarming about above their heads.

“Quick, into the car,” Sarah screamed, pointing to a blue sedan parked at an angle by a tree. Edward ran towards it, ignoring the slumped body of a man, probably the car’s previous owner, propped against the front wheel. Edward pulled the door open and I got into the car. Sarah got in next to me, suddenly remarkably fucking calm, with her hands resting lightly on her legs and her face serene and expressionless as I tried the radio, the lights, the horn, flipped down the sun-visor to see if anything is hidden there, which there fucking isn’t. She didn’t even flinch when one of those goddamn vampir things smashed the windscreen and she got sprayed with glass. I realised it was time to get going though, before the whole thing went to hell, so I twisted the key in the ignition and fucking floored it.

As if attracted by the sound of the engine starting up, another swarm of vampirz flew out in a black cloud from behind a nearby building and swooped down onto the car. They latched on with their sharp teeth and, along with the vampirz before, tried to pull the car up from the ground. Edward was already flooring the accelerator though, and a voice inside his head was telling him that he would have to either drive at high speeds or violently smash into obstacles to get rid of creatures. The advice made about as much sense as anything else that day, so Edward plowed the car into a tree. This dislodged the monsters, at least for a few seconds, but also left a large dent in the front of the car. Then the vampirz were back on them again.

Perhaps Sarah had gone into shock, or perhaps she knew there was nothing she could say to help, but she passed no comment on Edwards erratic driving and crashing. For his part Edward had no idea if he could get them out of this mess, but he was damn well going to try, so he jerked the car into reverse and shot off along the pathway again, trying, and occasionally succeeding, to avoid the fallen trees, broken rubble and abandoned vending carts strewn across the path.

Each time he hit one, either because he failed to avoid it or because the he needed to shake of the vampirz, the car got more and more broken. After only a few tesne minutes, not only was the car all dented and the windows all smashed, but it had become a convertible, with the roof torn clean off. Fortunately, the car still ran just as well as before all its crashes, and Edward and Sarah didn’t get their heads ripped off in the same impact the took off the roof, nor indeed in any of the subsequent impacts, or when the vampirz began to cling to the empty space where the roof used to be. If only they weren’t so fucking tenacious, thought Edward almost wishing they would just get it over with and kill him so he could at least just escape this goddamn chase sequence.

His concentration lapsing for a moment, Edward clipped a bulge in the road where something had pushed the bricks up from beneath and, contrary to all laws of physics, the entire car was catapulted about thirty feet into the air, flipping around a couple of times before landing back on its wheels in the opposite direction to the one they had been heading in. Left speechless by the unexpected occurrence, neither Edward nor Sarah commented, and so Edward put the car back on the path and carried on through the shattered remains of a building, still held partly to together by its steel rebars.

Too late he saw a wall blocking their way and drove straight through it at full speed. But fortune was on Edward’s side, because the wall was only made of cinder blocks, not concrete and rebar, and so shattered as the car went through. Even more fortunately, though the car had no roof, none of the concrete falling on top of them did any damage to either Edward or Sarah, instead just rolling off to be left behind as the car sped away.

For a second, Edward and Sarah naively though they have escaped the vampirz, and both breathed a sigh of relief, but the creatures were more tenacious than the pair have given them credit for, and soon caught up to the vehicle with more ferocious energy than ever. They grabbed the car by its roof and bonnet and lifted it high into the air, with nothing either Edward or Sarah could do to stop them. A few seconds later, the vampirz let go, and the car plummeted into a nearby fountain. Again, despite the car being totally wrecked, Edward and Sarah completely escaped injury, and crawled out from the crumpled sedan to be confronted with what could only be described as a swirling vortex of vampirz. This was too much for Sarah, who ran over to a corner sheltered by a brick and squatted down into a tight ball. Edward, fuelled by anger and adrenaline, was less perturbed by the sudden confrontation.

He noticed on the floor several bottles full of brown liquid, some plastic, some glass, and even a couple of cans of cure-all first aid spray and some bullets. He did not stop to consider the convenience of these items being here, at this exact spot, nor did he consider that the bottles might just as well be full of tramp urine as flammable liquid, as he scooped them up into his jacket and then ran at the vortex. Unexpectedly, the creature, or creatures, had the dexterity and strength to pick up a large piece of collapsed building and hurl it at Edward, who was too busy examining the items strapped to the inside of his jacket to avoid the projectile. The rubble hit him square on, and would have killed a lesser man, but Edward Carnby struggled to his feet, pulled a bottle from his jacket and charged at the vortex again.

Once he was closer, he saw that the vampirz-vortex rose up through a broken bridge, and below the bridge a kind of fleshy pink flower was exposed. This must be what was holding it all together, Edward reasoned, so he took aim with his bottle and threw it at the creature’s base. For a second everything seemed to go in slow-motion as Edward took aim with his pistol and shot at the flying bottle, hitting it perfectly first time. The bottle of unknown contents exploded in a bowl of fire, and the creature contracted as if flinching, sending a whirlwind upwards that temporarily disorientated the vampirz. It would take more than that to kill this monster though; it would take, as Edward eventually discovered, three such balls of fire to make the creature blow up completely and spray the whole underside of the bridge with blood and lumps of flesh.

Read Chapter 2…

Morning, it’s far too early to do much else and I’m waiting for a Dreamcast game to burn so I can see if my new DC will play burned discs. It’s taking ages though, so here I am updating my blog. Today’s beginning was rather too abrupt for me. I had a dream this morning that I was at work (which I was last night) but it was slightly different. And we were trying to close up the shop but people kept coming in because we hadn’t had chance to lock the door or something, then we finally got everyone out and I left. It was light outside, even though I’m sure it was night, and the roads were quiet. I decided to try cycling a different way home, so I set off up the road rather than down it. I went up this road that I thought would lead to my house, but it was a dead end, I think it just led to some locked-up garages, so I turned around and tried the next turn-off. This was like a lumber-yard, and another dead end, but further away. What was strange about this place was that it had flickering flourescent lights on metal posts, about head-height. As I passed them on my bike I noticed that in my hands, resting on the handlebars, I was holding several sheets of paper with dark grey squares on them. Every time the lights flickered, it lit up the squares somehow and they were printouts of CCTV footage from the shop, just of me and the guy I worked with standing around.

I cycled further back towards the road, and then the lights kept flickering and the images kept changing, and then they were like CCTV footage of me on my bike in the lumber-yard, as if the camera was in front of me. I could see myself and then I saw a shape a short distance behind me which I thought was a deer or a stag. I saw it getting closer with each flicker, and saw it was a stag, then I saw a doe and her foal cross in front of the stag, but the stag was still getting closer. I don’t think I realised at first what the images were showing, then I realised it was me and the stag was behind me, so I turned round and then it started charging me. I was still on my bike, so I couldn’t move easily, but the stag missed and went past me, then it turned and got ready to charge again. And I was proper panicking because I could see the road, but the stag was blocking my way. Then I woke up, and the sun was bright through my blind and my window was open, then I heard a cat make a strange yowling noise like they sometimes do around here, because there’s loads of cats, always walking around and making noise. The noise scared me though because I’d just woken from the dream.

The worst part though, as soon as I’d woken up I started thinking about various things, then the thought suddenly struck me that I hadn’t locked up the shop when I left last night. Usually the guy I work with locks up, but he wasn’t in last night, so I was working with someone from the co-op next door (my shop’s owned by the co-op but it’s an off-license), and I had to set the alarm and lock the door. I’ve done it before, but not often. Lying in bed at ten past six this morning though, I genuinely couldn’t remember if I’d locked it or not, and then I was thinking how, if I hadn’t and the shop got burgled it’d be entirely my fault, and even if it didn’t, I’d still be in trouble when someone came to open it up this morning. Even though I was like 90% sure I had locked it, I wasn’t absolutely certain, and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep until I was. So I got up, got dressed, and cycled down there, got there, pushed the door, and it was fine. I’d locked it.

Once I got back in, there was no question of going back to sleep, so now I’ve been up for three hours and I’m bored. I started looking for DC games to burn, and I’m not sure if the one I’m doing now is still burning or if it’s just stopped and is pretending it’s going fine. Guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer, or try a new one. I might blog about my DC soon too, but not now. For now I’ll leave you with the above little tale. Hopefully I shan’t be too tired at work tonight, since I’ll be there until eleven, functioning on four hours sleep…

Every now and then I get an impulse to create something or do something new with computers/technology/the internet, usually in the summer when I don’t have any uni work to keep me occupied. I always think this creative urge could be put towards writing, but it always seems to manifest itself as a desire to learn how to write computer code. I always think it would be really cool if I could write games or applications or other things, but I have no idea where to start, or what I definitely want to do, so  I usually spend a couple of days reading about programming languages then give up, since I don’t have the resources or inclination to follow through.

My general philosophy is that life’s too short to learn how to program, because even learning how to do fairly simple things with code takes ages. Two summers ago I did start this site though, and during short bursts over the next several months I taught myself enough HTML and CSS to make it look and work like it does now. I doubt you have any idea how long it took me to work out how to do a front page that displayed the latest post and a random post in a nice rounded border, but was separate to a page containing my last ten blog posts. It took a long time. Sure, I probably could have done it much more quickly with Dreamweaver or some equivalent, but I did it the old-fashioned step-by-step way so I could learn how it worked. I still know next-to-nothing about web-programming though.

Another time I became sort of obsessed with programming was when a game called Kodu was released on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Community Games channel. It had next to no publicity, and I doubt it received the audience it deserved, but that ‘game’ is amazing. It isn’t so much a game as a serious of assets for making games, kind of like a budget Little Big Planet, but, while it doesn’t have as much charm as LBP, I think Kodu is more powerful. It would take a while for me to explain what it is, so here’s the Wikipedia entry. Rest assured it’s amazing for someone who wants to mess around with immediately accessible games design. I once played it for nearly 18 hours across two days. It only costs about £3.50 too.

For the last few days I’ve been reading a special edition of Retro Gamer magazine that looks at all the major videogame machines between 1977 and 1999. I think that is what’s brought on this fresh bought of desire to learn how to program. I downloaded a BBC Micro emulator earlier. There’s something satisfying about typing in simple commands and watching the screen fill with a blocky red triangle. I doubt there’s a lot of point becoming an expert in using the Micro at this point in time. I was thinking earlier how, if I’d be born in the late seventies, I’d have gotten into programming computers and/or games because it was so much simpler then. I could have learned BASIC easily if I wasn’t distracted by modern videogames and the internet all day. Then I could be making bestselling games today, though I’d be older. Now programming has moved on so much, and so much more complicated. It’s like history; the more time goes by, the more there is to learn. I suppose at least I’m spared the torture of growing up in the eighties, ‘cos the nineties was much cooler.

Anyway, I went to the library earlier and borrowed a book on web programming with HTML, XHTML and CSS. I already know a tiny bit about two of those, so it seems like as good a place as any to begin, if I actually do bother to learn some form of programming. I’ll probably get bored and go play Mass Effect 2 though. Or I found out there’s a new version of the OS I’m currently running (Mint Linux), and, even though my current system is working fine, I’ll probably upgrade anyway, just because I like to mess around with these things occassionally, despite the hassle of reconfiguring all my settings. If I do learn HTML etc. though, at least it might make this site a bit better. And that concludes what is possibly the most boring post I’ve put up here.