Konnie Huq's broken hand

I'm fairly sure I felt something crack when I shook Konnie Huq's hand. I didn't really register just how petite and fragile she was until I squeezed her tiny little child-like paw. And coming immediately after Charlie Brooker's workman-like mitt I didn't think to adjust the pressure applied. Cue the sensation of spaghetti snapping in a balled fist. She left pretty quickly after that. It wasn't the best of starts.

I was at the videogame BAFTAs, discovering that I was slightly worse around celebrities than I am normal people. Meeting Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was fine, I had a purpose: “Congratulations Mr Bushnell on your fellowship to the Academy, may I have a picture please?” Easy. Every other encounter I sort of doomed without even trying by thinking that, a) they must dread randoms approaching to notch off a meeting, and, b) what the hell would I have to say to them?

It's not that different to how I deal with most people, really. That only made it more disheartening when one of my friends just kept rolling up and striking easy conversations with a “Hello, how are you enjoying the evening” approach. Why didn't I think of that? Annoyingly, I got on really well with some of the celebs I met once the threshold was crossed, which only made it more frustrating to find it an obstacle in the first place. We spent ages talking to Ralf Little and Michelle Terry (who's in England People Very Nice). Both were lovely and I was genuinely sad to end the evening and go separate ways. Anyway, it's made two things clear: firstly, I have got to loosen up a bit and, secondly, I should pay more attention when shaking girls' hands.

Mr Bubbles' secret

So I'm playing Bioshock again, and returning to a game is something I almost never do. They're like films: the expectation, the rush, the discovery – all that only exists for the first time. I like the journey over any sense of achievement. But. I've been working on a feature about the sequel and that's meant doing loads of research on the original, getting me all interested again.

Even second time around it's still massively impressive. Not because it's the most amazing game I've ever played, there are loads of incredible games I've never gone back to. The thing that makes it impressive is that it's utterly distinctive and different from just about everything else out there. 

You usually have two choices in games: American (chunky angry men with guns) or Japanese (skinny boys on a quest). This is neither of those, and that's why it's so important. No homicidal aliens, scowling bald soldiers or roaring spaceships. Instead you get Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sense of colour with Rapture looking like a left over set from City Of Lost Children. You get golden age RKO cinema with sharply tailored 40s suits, brylcreem and flickering celluloid. Even the mutated, dehumanised Splicers reek of 80s horror movies, all lumpy latex misshapen faces and slasher movie hooks.

It doesn't shine because it's bright but because it's a totally different colour. Even Fallout, which does a great job with it's fifties theme is basically the same old story in a new coat and combing its hair a new way. For all the style it's still predictable: good vs evil, save the good, kill the bad. In Bioshock everything is a question or a contradiction. The Big Daddies and Little Sisters mirroring a combination of wrath and fragility found in everything from Leon to Beauty And The Beast. Their relationship a story in its own right. Then there are the Splicers who for all their disfigurement and malice are essentially addicts, hooked on the mutating substance Adam. You've only got to listen to their anguished cries to realise these are tormented souls in purgatory. Their tattered finery covering their bodies like scars that'll never heal. Okay, they're angry souls who want to smash your face off with a pipe, admittedly, but as motivations go it's deeper than usual.

The moment that affected me the most, though, is when you discover the orphanage where the Little Sisters are 'born'. Snoop around enough and you find a morgue. Look a little closer and you realise the autopsy tables are smaller than usual. Almost as if they were meant for a child. Then you see ghost, (a reoccurring device in the game to fill in back story). It's a Little Sister. She cries, “No! I don' wanna!” and runs off into a little cupboard before disappearing. Follow her, to take a closer look, and you'll discover piles of little dresses, neatly stacked on the floor. The implication is too horrible to dwell on. Find me another game where a room full of clothes can make me feel nauseous and then maybe Bioshock will have some company..

Is it over yet?

Today is a strange day. Partly because I haven't left the house at all (horribly, not that unusual) yet but mainly because I'm playing games, online, in an unbroken 24hr stint. This is for a magazine feature, not some weird lifestyle decision. I started at 8am and won't finish until the next 8am. I'm already getting the distant, disassociation from reality that you get from a transatlantic flight. My entire contact with the outside world has been through a headset and gChat. I might as well be in space right now.

The longer it goes on the weirder it gets. It's entering into that 'this isn't real any more' feeling that staying up late often takes. I'm quite exciting about seeing daybreak though. Anyway I know this doesn't really count as a real post but it hard to compose something when you're playing games for an entire day. My eyes hurt. And my brain. And my knees.

Tell me about the f*cking game

Despite what I actually do for a living I still feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer. Writers are amazingly talented people that can create worlds on a page, or change the way people think. I just put words in an acceptable order to describe things. Usually it's reviews. I love writing reviews; dissecting why things work and championing the highs or discussing the lows. I take pleasure from trying to get across a point, moulding language to deliver opinion and experience. I'm not saying I'm good. I just like doing it.

Which is why I hate stuff like this, “Perhaps Resident Evils 5's most remarkable achievement is how it deftly straddles the line between the franchises sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating, legacy gameplay mechanics while incorporating more contemporary action adventure elements like enhanced interaction and exploration of environments and a decidedly more shooter-like control scheme.” It's a quote from a review of Resident Evil 5 that appears on Metacritic. I can almost smell the sense of satisfaction the writer got from penning that. How clever they must of felt when they said... the thing... about the... stuff. The problem I have with that sort of writing is that it tells me nothing about the game. Having played it I can tell you it's mainly about shooting angry men in the face. I think that's what the bit about 'legacy gameplay mechanics' might be about.

It seems to be a real games journalism thing. I don't think I've ever seen a film, book or music review like that. Generally they seem content to explain what the experience is like and whether it's recommend or not. When it comes to video games, however, it's all about the big words and twisty sentences, delivered by people content to revel in the belief that their every word is a gift. I've worked for two people who's catchphrase was “tell me about the fucking game” whenever they encountered stuff like this. Usually screamed through strained vocal chords while veins popped on their foreheads. The paper it was written on crushed in a balled fist and shaken to emphasise each word. I think it's because games are still a relatively new medium. It subconsciously drives people reporting on them to try and sound all grown up and intellectual to compensate for the suspicion that no one takes them seriously. What they really want to say is, “man did you see that head come apart?”

LittleBigPlanet hates me.

I have an issue with LittleBigPlanet. It's absolutely amazing: a collection of accessible, easy to grasp tools that let you create anything; your own game, a race, a working calculator. Whatever. It's honestly brilliant. We just don't get on and in this relationship I'm the one who walked into a door.

You need time. Loads of time. More time than I can ever really spare, bar redundancy or crippling illness. (Note to God: neither please.) Building, tweaking, testing – it all takes an incredible effort and commitment. It can take hours to perfect the smallest piece of gameplay. Especially if you want lots of moving parts controlled by motors, switches and sensors. I want that. 

And I want to make proper games as well. Not LBP ones, real games. Exactly the kind of thing LittleBigPlanet can't do. It's like someone gave me one of those three in one biros and I've decided to recreate Hopper's Nighthawks. I'm basically an idiot.

The last thing I tried was a zombie game. I spent ages, days, making zombies that rose out of the ground and chased you. It was brilliant. Almost. The problem were the checkpoints. You only trigger them by walking past so if you get killed by a zombie before you reach a new checkpoint, or the zombie goes past the old one, you'll respawn behind it. Ah-ha, I thought. I'll attach the checkpoint to wheels and a sensor so that it moves and stays in front of the corpses. This is the point I discover you can stand on the wheels and catch a ride, making the whole 'escape zombie' challenge pointless. Bugger. Bugger it to hell. Damn you! I tried creating an electrical platform to stop you hitching a lift but it also killed you as you respawned which was catastrophically pointless. That was when I gave up, for now. I'm already concocting a plan involving poisonous gas and split levels but I know, deep in my heavy heart, that won't work either.  

[Update]

Fuck, wait, hang on. If I put the checkpoint wheels in a slot you won't be able to ride them unless you jump down and I can put gas in there to stop that.

Score-pocalypse

It might not seem immediately apparent from this blog but I get paid to write. Features, news; that sort of thing. And also reviews. They're the most interesting but not because of the insightful opinion and carefully reasoned arguments I so carefully agonise over wording just so. No, it's because, whatever I say, it all boils down to the number at the end. Whether it's 2000 words or 100, all anyone cares about is the meaningless, unquantifiable number.

Not literally unquantifiable, obviously. Numbers count, that's what they do. But make it a number out of something and it becomes an arbitrary, abstract value. Six out 10, 47 out of 100, four out of five. Make it a score and the whole concept becomes about as fruitful an exercise as collecting gas in a net. Recently I reviewed Resident Evil 5. I gave it 8/10. In one forum I found discussing it, the overall consensus was that the game must be really broken to get an eight. Expectations were so high that this was seen as a failure. Wow.

The problem is that scores seem to have become a statement rather than a point on a scale stretching from very bad to very good. Games like Resi 5 and other big hitters have to land in the 'very good' range - a nine or ten, - in order to be seen as worth playing. Average or okay is disastrous. One of the posters on the forum went so far as to say, “An 8 for a cover game of this magnitude from OPM is a bit of a shocker. I'm getting the Angel of Darkness vibe from this (as in they want to mark it lower but they feel they can't). Not looking forwards to the game”. Eight out of sodding ten! It got the score it deserved and one that means it's a great game worth checking out.

If I had to blame anything it would be fan boy mentality and the internet. The first part sees people over scoring games they love to validate their opinion – the numbers aren't unbiased assessments of worth, they're flaming torches waved over head to ward off heathen non-believers. While the latter part means the wealth of reviews, figures and aggregators flooding the web leave reviewers having to court controversy to get noticed. Either way the system seems near to crippled with the only values that have any value being seven (fail), eight (not worth buying), nine (acceptable) and ten (good). Science uses a standardised system of units and measurements to make sure people talk the same language. I'm starting to think reviews need something similar. That, or I'm going to use arbitrary objects to grade everything from now on. (Which would make Resi a Philippe Starck juicer)

Rule number one...

...practice. I hope I can get the hang of Street Fighter IV. I like the idea of being good at a fighting game. Partly because it must be more fun than actual fighting, what with all the pain and teeth loss issues. But, mainly, it's because I like the idea of mastering a skill. A pointless one that only exists in fantasy land, admittedly, but something to achieve non-the-less.

So far I'm rubbish. I'm playing as Dhalsim, simply because he's the first person on the list. If I stick to cautious, jabbing attacks and block loads I can just about win a fight. One. There's also a little button mashing panic in there as well just in case. The one thing that's sorely lacking right now is any semblance of skill. A steely gaze, precision dodges, well timed blocks and tactical counters – non of these things are in my game.