Scotland died laughing [Slim]

Tributes are being paid to Scotland this morning after the entire country laughed itself to death.

The alarm was first raised at around 10pm last night as thousands of phone calls and text messages went unanswered.

Small groups of volunteers from Berwick-Upon-Tweed and Carlisle ventured north just after midnight only to find houses full of dead people gathered around still blaring television sets.

By dawn, as RAF helicopters flew over deserted city streets, it was clear that the whole country had suffered a catastrophic abdominal rupture.

Wayne Hayes, a special constable from Northumberland, said: "We went into one house in Dunbar and found three men sitting on the sofa with huge smiles on their faces, still holding cans of 70 shilling. They seemed to be at peace."

He added: "In a house near Edinburgh we found a man face down on the living room floor with his trousers and pants round his knees.

"It seems he may have been showing his bare búttocks to the television when he keeled over."

Roy Hobbs, a civil engineer from Northampton, said: "I got a call from my friend Ian in Stirling at about 9.50pm.

"He was already laughing when I answered the phone, but after about 25 minutes of the most vigorous and uncontrollable hilarity, everything suddenly went very quiet."

Moving tributes are already being placed along the Scotland-England border with many mourners opting to leave a simple bag of chips or a deep fried bunch of flowers

When your Hero Goes Mad [Lurks]

Jeff Minter recently had a bleat. Which is newsworthy for us since our hero and inspiration for the clan name itself is non other than the Yak himself. He's bleating about the fact that Space Giraffe on XBLA was outsold by Frogger:


"not seeing a ot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.""OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga."


I have to say I find this more than a little odd. The Yak has basically done virtually everything he can for much of his career to make sure that his games are played by as few people as possible, leaping from one crap defunct platform to another. He's also gone to absolutely no lengths whatsoever to make his games approachable by people who are not familiar with his psychedelic musicolour type background.

With that in mind, why on earth get upset about a game now that's a remake of an arcade game. I mean let's be clear, most of Minter's classics were themselves remakes of arcade games. In terms of genuinely coming up with a new game, he's just never done it. He takes arcade gameplay and then makes the graphics nutso. It's well and good but quite clearly it's not going to be as popular as one of the most famous arcade games the world has ever known. Buying into his own bullshit perhaps?

The last bit is just as rich really. Vaguely remember playing on the Amiga. So let's lambast the entire retro gaming scene, only the genre which actually gives succor to his self indulgent game development career of late, and take issue with the exact flavor of crap old arcade remake they want to play.

I think it's about time the Yak got out of bed in the AM and smelt his own rancid wet fur. Maybe look out the window, realise it's a new era and maybe it's time to get a shave, play some modern games and see what people are really doing these days. Assuming he wants to earn an actual living from this stuff.

You can be an ecentric nutjob, and you can wear your heart on your sleeve (as they did when faced with the tiniest bit of reasonable constructive criticism on their forum), and we'll still love you. There's a place for that but everyone has to have a dose of commercial reality out there and not just believe that their own whacky out version of reality ought to do well because it's really good man.

Yak dear chap, if you want your games to actually sell, you might want to look outside the legions of forum yes-men and groupies who are looking to you because they vaugely remember playing something you did on some old computer. I think XBLA is a fine place for the last of the backyard coders (when the fuck are Introspective going to do stuff on XBLA?!) but gaming has moved on since Tempest and Trip a Tron. Mostly there's just more games, so if you hide all your stuff underneath piles of impenetrable psychedelia then most people will simply wander off to play something they know they will like.

Most of all, though, I'd say you just need to walk away from Space Giraffe with a bit of humility and respect for the audience. I wanted to love Space Giraffe desperately but it just didn't quite work for me. So learn from it. Go off and listen to people (without spinning into a forum tantrum) and work out what CAN work on XBLA. I think we're receptive to a Llamasoft game. We'll definately try it when I wouldn't try any crap like Frogger (I mean come on, that's HARDLY your audience is it). You just need to pick your socks up and bounce back with a better executed game that people can largely pick up and play because that's what XBLA is about.

I know you can do it. I've still got faith in you. All you need is a little more patience and a little less emo.

PC Gaming madness [Am]

As Clan Electricdeath is populated by battle hardened PC gaming veterans, it is safe to say that between us, we have seen a game-drought or three. Many times over the years has our cardre of wan-faced listless silicon sailors sat becalmed in the Sea of Nothing-Worth-Playing idly flicking at their mainbraces and wondering how to catch the cabinboy (little Jim Rorz) with his pantaloons round his ankles for want....of....any....just.....*any*....entertainment.

Somone forgot to tell October and November 2007 about that then.

In the space of five weeks we have had the release of The Orange Box featuring Half-Life Epsiode Two, the rather spiffing Portal and a little multi-player game called Team Fortress 2. Then we get the astonishing looking COD4, Gears of War for PC and FEAR Perseus before mentioning that today I was in a queue with eight people all holding a copy of Crysis and that in 7 days time we have a little number called Unreal Tournament III clambouring up the gang plank.

God knows when us scurvy dogs are supposed to find the time to play this all (I still haven't finished the truly excellent and criminally under-regarded MOH Airborne which was also out this year) but lets not stop 'em while they are at it.

And when you come to think of it, Dave found PROJECT:IGA as well *and* we held more than fingers-of-one-finger lans *and* we went to the Isle of Man *and* the clan started playing competitive games as well again after a 7 year brief breather.

Blimey. 2007. A bit of a pearl then. Arrrrrrrrrrrrr.......

Pay as you Throw? [Lurks]

Looks like we're set for a pilot of a pay as you throw scheme whereby you are charged for how much waste you produce. I'm a little baffled by that because it would seem that it's being said the scheme must be 'revenue neutral' so the coucil doesn't earn any extra money. Then surely what this means is that small households such as a couple like us, end up paying less while families pay more. That doesn't strike me as completely unreasonable.

However I think I have to take issue that just throwing this all onto the consumer ends up helping the issue of the amount of stuff thrown away. I'd really like to see a two-pronged approach with the government also 'going after' business. These are the real bad guys when it comes to rubbish with the mountains of unnecessary packaging and, a bugbear of mine, unnecessary paper communications.

I recently switched to Virgin credit card, for example, and I swear it's ridiculous the amount of paper junk they've sent me. Loads of things trying to sell me on this or that, duplicates too, booklets of rubbish, paper statements (which I don't even want, it's 2007 ffs) and the list goes on. And then there's the stupid plastic and cardboard packaging for everything. You don't have to buy much at all to end up with virtually a bin full of assorted plastic and cardboard. I mean even a goddamn cable in a box has to have a cable tie around it and then put inside another plastic bag. Why?!

We're pretty good recycling wise. We compost what we can. We recycle everything the council accepts. Yet I feel like it's basically companies working against our best intentions, fulling up our bins with crap.

I'd like to actually see companies face a levee for packaging and for paper communications. If they want to do it, sure, but it'll cost them. Then with the economics turned around suddely they'll make the effort. Just like companies made the effort to get everyone onto Direct Debit for billing when it became apparent they wouldn't be paying credit card clearing rates. Hit them in the pocket and they will comply.

Quad Core, do we need it? [Lurks]

There's an increasing industry momentum behind quad core processors. Which is what you'd expect since Intel wants to drive up the average price of the processor they ship in PCs and PC manufacturers are happy to have some new feature which drives up average selling prices and margins too. The situation is such that I've recently read reviews of things like gaming PCs where the authors have complained that the PC doesn't have a quad core processor. Despite the fact that in reality, for games, a dual core processor is cheaper and faster because generally you get a higher clocked unit for less money.

The popular 'wisdom', if you can call it that, is that game developers will come to grips with multi-core processing and there's all these games around the corner. However this has been said for quite some time now, remember dual-core processors have been on the market for an absolute age now. Even the supposedly multi-core and extremely CPU intensive Supreme Commanded ended up being a pigs ear. They made the game highly threaded but then didn't balance the threads across processors.

Most games, eg outside of the RTS genre, simply don't have a lot of things going on which lend themselves to offloading to another thread. Physics is one of the biggest ones, which is one of the reasons add-in physics cards are stupid. PCs have spare CPUs doing nothing in them as it is. Now the Crysis demo is out and they couldn't even be bothered to make that use anything other than a single core.

There's a solid case for a dual core processor. For a start the second processor is on the actual die. With absolutely no game support at all, generally your game runs on one core and Windows balances its own internal OS threads out onto the other core. Video encoding too, this works brilliantly on dual core. And of course most people end up only doing one CPU computationally intensive thing at once. That loads up one core, leaving the other for making your desktop and other apps responsive.

Current Intel quad core processors are actually two dual core processors in the same package and the power consumption ends up shooting up to around about the last generation of processors anyway. I think it's quite nice to have a fairly cool and quiet PC and that's a solid benefit of Intel's dual core stuff.

The news today is the launch of the new ridiculous extreme edition 'Penryn' quad core QX9650. This is a cool chip, don't get me wrong. It's got some nice enhancements and fabricated with 45nm, it's cooler, has more space for loads of cache and sports a new SSE4 which is something which absolutely can be used in games (in video drivers particularly). It's burning up benchmarks. Yet what's inside is basically two 'wolfdale' CPUs. It's that which is what we really need but of course if Intel are going to wrangle PR out of launching the new architecture it's going to be on-message with quad core stuff.

On the power side people have pointed out that the QX9650 used about the same power under load as the previous generation, the E6750 in particular. I'd rather take a processor that's able to offer more performance and use half the power, rather than adding another two largely underutilised cores. And I'd rather not pay for them too, given this part will likely cost in the region of £600 upwards. While the E6750 costs a meagre £117 and can be overclocked, easily, to outperform the QX9650 comfortably in games.

The thing is, the industry momentum continues. People benchmark this processor in countless reviews and they largely go for benchmarks, or at least feature heavily, those which show a clear benefit of quad core processors. Yet that's nothing at all to do with what you will be doing with your actual real world PC.

Why can't we put a stop to this. Enough is enough. Quad core when the software has caught up to even dual core. Give us 45nm dual core processors now, that don't cost £600, that use less power than the chips we're using now. It's high time that the whole industry of enthusiast hardware editorial journalists stopped trying to sell up the latest and greatest and actually got back to what matters to people who actually use computers.

PC vs Xbox 360 [Lurks]

A decade of gaming under our collective belts and I think there's one issue I've been yelling at people to sort out all that time. Microphones. This was brought home to me recently in reading someone's review of Valve's Orange Box and TF2. They said they prefered to play the Xbox 360 version purely because it was likely you could communicate with people in game. They're right too, most publics are silent with the occasional talker.

Our server is very heavy on voice comms but even so, at any one stage I'd say 50% of the server don't have microphones or wont speak. It's funny, we said there's no way they'd allow 360 users to play with PC players because PC guys with their keyboards and mice would annihilate the console guys. However one thing I've noticed on the PC is that you can basically call out the losing team right away (if you're on it) by the complete lack of anyone talking and coordinating things.

It loses you games, quite a lot. I was getting highly annoyed with a team I was on last night because none of them deigned to tell us where they had gone when picking up the enemy intelligence. Naturally they were then killed somewhere, who knows where. Now we can't get the intel if we want to, it's not in the intel room, it's some random place along the way being camped by enemy until it returns.

It wasn't like it was one guy. Multiple guys came in, picked up the intel and carried it another 10 meters before dying. All without saying a anything. The chap who wrote how he prefered to play on the 360 spoke about the TF2 heavy/medic pair. The medic is often another pair of eyes that needs to call out where bad guys are lest he get taken out first. On PC, from what I've seen, it just doesn't happen.

So I thought an interesting excersize is this: Have a team of Xbox 360 players with voice comms go up against a group of PC players with no voice comms and see how they get on. Of course it's not practical because Valve haven't provided a mechanism for that but it'd be interesting to see.

And of course the handicap on the PC side is entirely user created. It's amazing how just making a microphone as standard on Xbox Live has done the trick. I guess you reach a critical mass and everyone realises oh, I just put this on my head and talk just like everyone else and they just do it.

On the PC you've got to go out and buy a headset. Then you've got to get it working in Windows, which is a complete fuck up - has always been a complete fuckup. Then get the levels right so that you aren't inaudibly quiet (very common) or completely distorting out (very common) so that you may be heard. You'd think it wouldn't be a problem for PC gamers, used to higher levels of complexity and faffing about with their gaming, but evidently it is.

The thing is, lots of people can be bothered and you know what, they tend to be gamers who do give a fuck and who, coincidentally, you want playing on your server. Not just because they tend to be more clued up, more tactically aware, it's the social issue too. It's almost as if what we want is some sort of cvar set on the client side if they have got a headset configured and working. Then the server can test for it and not let people join who haven't got a headset sorted out.

Impractical on many levels since microphones are purely analogue. And it'd require Valve to do something on this front and it's clear they will not. So that just leaves it down to human control. We're working our way towards a sort of white list, if you like. Where everyone in our Steam community has a reserved slot. Generally we invite people to the community if they are >14 years old and they talk etc.

It's still nowhere near there though. Howling on the MOTD blatantly wont work. What would? [Microphones required] in the hostname?

Fatlash USA [Slim]

Doctors apparently aren't doing fat people any favours by telling them being fat is bad for your health. This is the USA 'fatlash', a fat backlash vs what they think is unfair discrimination vs their weight, there's a video covering the rebelion on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDakFfLQDF4

There's even a lobby group, http://www.naafa.org/ - national association to advance fat acceptance, who basically get together and tell each other how pretty and wonderful they are. That's all well and good, but let's be realistic, if you stop telling people it's bad to be fat, won't people be inclined to do nothing about it?

There is some hint of the truth here, however. Simply telling fat people to get thin or they'll die really isn't always going to help, and for many obese it's going to make things worse. There's many complex reasons why people are obese, and dealing with these issues effectively simply isn't happening in the main.

Saying it's fine to be fat isn't the right way either though, obesety does kill after all.