Oh dear. On Saturday, The Times newspaper came with a DVD with World of Warcraft and a free 14-day trial on it. Naturally, I couldn’t resist, even though I knew World of Warcraft would do terrible things to me. Like make me want to play it all the time.

And even though it meant having to buy The Times, which, thinking about it, wasn’t the first newspaper I’d have thought to do this sort of promotion. In fact, it’s did a pretty good job of introducing WoW to a new audience, with a mini supplement devoted to the game containing fairly enlightened articles about journos getting their first taste of MMOs, and the following, which I found on the back page:

› read more

A new issue of Edge has just come out and it’s all the better for having a rather lovely article in it by me. It’s about The Crossing, a new game from Arkane Studios art directed (and co-written) by Viktor Antonov, who art directed Half-Life 2.

It looks a little like this:

The piece was one of the most enjoyable writing gigs I’ve done for ages - it’s about how in The Crossing, Antonov has realised two alternate visions of Paris, one a hard-bitten concrete urban hell, the other a modern Gothic megolopolis, and how game environments can tell stories and facilitate play.

› read more

Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules – as well as the imagery – of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something wed ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.

Steven Johnson, the liberal nerd’s intellectual superhero, has played Wii Sports, and he likes it. I think he’s been carried away by the hype a little, though. Wii Sports has less to do with athleticism than it does (play) acting.

› read more

Some games just creep on you. They might be labelled with a genre that you’re tired of, or generally disregard. They might be styled in a way that turns you off. They might seem hyped up too much, or sold on misleading premises.

For me, Crackdown was guilty of all of these. It’s a Grand Theft Auto-a-like free-roamin’, drivin’ and shootin’ sandbox, a genre that has barely been able to improve on GTA’s original template, despite its many faults and annoyances.

› read more

My, my, Nintendo sure makes dry, worthy things a pleasure to use. On Friday, its Wii console saw the release of Nintendo’s Wii News Channel, an application that displays Associated Press news stories. It joins the Forecast Channel, which was made available in December.

Both use a 3D globe to display location-specific information, and both are infused with dozens of little playful touches, whether it’s the sound of rain when you view the weather at a rainy location, or the way the words in news stories rearrange themselves when you zoom the text in and out.

› read more

For reasons I’ll most likely go into very soon, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about transitory things and how one doesn’t invest much in something that one knows won’t last. Grappling this morning with my new mobile’s obscure refusal to allow Opera Mini to work, I started thinking about how sadly temporary mobile phones feel.

Replaced by a “free upgrade” every year, it often seems futile investing in them the time in making them mine. As a result, they always have an edge of awkwardness, because I can’t be arsed to iron out the little quirks that prevent them from being perfect - well, good - companions.

› read more

Nucklous Rope at vi-R-us has sent me one of them internet meme things. Seems Im to list 5 ‘interesting’ things about me. Well, here they are, friends.

1. I’m currently listening to the Tindersticks’ Marbles. It was released in 1993, which means that I’ve been regularly listening to it for coming on 14 years, which is nearly half my life. Yet I’d never really realised it must be one of my favourite songs until today.
2. When I was a kid, my heroes were Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy books fame. I wrote to them once, asking them to advise me on how to write my own FF-style book. Steve Jackson(’s secretary) replied on extremely thick and coarse yellowed cartridge paper that I thought amazingly classy. I don’t recall the advice was very helpful, though I did end up writing one some time later for a project set by my progressive, racing motorcycle-riding, multiple-divorcee first year secondary school English teacher, Mr Lawrence. It was about ninjas.
3. My dad played table tennis with Bobby Robson once.
4. Despite the fact I spend unhealthy amounts of time playing and thinking about videogames, I’m not so sure I actually enjoy them. I mean, they’re a bit of a chore, aren’t they?
5. I feel a guilty wave of pride whenever my 18-month-old son expresses an interest in hitting stuff or taking things apart, even though I reckon I’m a reconstructed male.

Right. Time to tag five chums to pass this onto:

› read more

I’ve written a review about Oyster card in the latest issue of icon. Oyster card is an RFID-based payment system for public transport in London, and it’s probably most Londoners’ first explicit contact with the big, bad, exciting world of RFID.

Incidentally, Jack Schultze recently posted a series of sketches his graphic design students at Central St Martins had made for a project about signage design for Oyster recently. They’re about the other side of the Oyster experience, a side that my original draft attempted to tackle.

› read more

Good old Nintendo localisation - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess contains a cheeky reference to the common practice of charging people in one region one price and a different one elsewhere for the same goods. I’m not sure I totally let Nintendo off the hook just because they’re wry about it, though… (price of a US Wii = $250/£126; price of a UK Wii = £180/$353, cough)

On the topic of other nice little socio-economic comments in Nintendo games, there’s also the KK Slider comment in Animal Crossing Wild World. “Those industry fat cats try to put a price on my music, but it wants to be free,” says the musician dog, before handing your character a copy of the song he just played for you.

› read more

Cos I’ve been doing a spot of writing for them, Three Speech invited me to their special evening at Sony’s ‘3rooms’ installation in Spitalfields on Tuesday. They kitted out a couple of floors of what seems part of the Truman Brewery with Tom Dixon et al furniture and laid out artfully-chosen trendy magazines among a collection of flat-screen TVs to demonstrate the joys of its March(?)-bound console.

The picture above is from an intimate Q and A with Sony’s head of worldwide studios, Phil Harrison. It was fascinating seeing him in the flesh. He’s given to sounding like one hell of a braggart in quotations, saying things, referring to Nintendo’s DS versus Sony’s PSP, like, “The idea of a handheld rivalry with Nintendo is an irrelevance, … Those formats don’t appear in our planning. It’s not a fair comparison; not fair on them, I should stress. That sounds arrogant, maybe, but it’s the truth."

› read more