Electron Deficient Entertainment - High Voltage Edition

I haven't done a lot of reading this month, so instead here's the games I've been playing over the last thirty days or so.

Borderlands - One of the main issues I always had with Diablo was that there was no actual gameplay. Borderlands addresses this by being a shooter but has every other attribute of classic dungeon crawlers. It would also have been nice if a game that touts its four player co-op as one of its main selling points had functional four player co-op. We got it working in the end, but the entire process was very custom modem connection strings circa 1996.
Batman: Arkham Asylum - I'm about a third of the way through the story I would say and so far it's not too bad. The combat system is a little odd and it takes a while to get used to just how sneaky Batman is walking around in brightly lit areas.
Modern Warfare 2 -  Shortest game I have played since Portal. Good fun and with the traditional level of polish one expects from Infinity Ward. I wish games came with some sort of indicator of the multiplayer/single player balance so that I could make a more informed choice about whether it's worth the outlay if I'm not really interested in the multiplayer.
Dragon Age: Origins - Barely started it despite having played it long enough to have finished the Modern Warfare 2 single player campaign in its entirety. It honestly feels like a throwback to the days that are maybe not quite as Halcyon as people might like to think. I hear it's very good though, so I shall return to it once I finish playing through all the games I have at the moment that are fun.
Eufloria - A very chilled out almost painfully indie game that reminds me a lot of fl0w while at the same time being a completely different game. Would be better if it didn't randomly crash midway through levels.
Brutal Legend - A wonderfully created world with endearing characters, a well-written story, a proper horn-throwing soundtrack, and Lemmy from motorhead. And isn't ruined by Jack Black, which deserves some sort of special award. It's a real pity about the game part of it.

Then I also have Trine, Assassin's Creed 2, and a few others that I can't remember right now. My eyes should be totally shot to hell by Christmas.

End Of An Era-Bashing Era

Although many things have changed since my formative teenage years the laughability of eighties fashion and popular culture has remained a touchstone. Even today people make fun of it in an offhand fashion, as if it was a nadir to which humanity will never fall again.

I recently saw the highlights from this year's American Music Awards and the ARIA Awards and I have some observations to make.

Archetypal one hit wonder and general eighties lovechild Adam Ant alongside Luke Steele from breakout Australian electropop act Empire of the Sun.

Goth legend Robert Smith of The Cure side by side with Billy Joe Armstrong of the good-punk-turned-annoying-emo Greenday

And of course Madonna's classic cone bra is one of the great mockable fashion items of music history, but Lady Gaga is willing to at least try and make it look tame.

It was nice to know that no matter how tragic hair got, or how bad the pop music was, that at least we would avoid the pitfalls of the eighties. Sadly it is time to find a new era to pillory. Perhaps the Restoration, or maybe the last days of Czarist Russia. I hear that druidic Britain was pretty funny, what with the sickles and dolmens.

Non-Life Update

I've made some changes of an entirely cosmetic nature to the site design, I think the only actual layout change is that the main column may be a few pixels wider. If you read my posts from within some sort of crazy feed reader, then everything still looks the same so you'll just have to imagine the glory of it.

Anyway, I figured now would be a good time to provide a general Bice in the tubes update for anybody who may be interested.

The Undignified Cactus: this blog.

Feats of Play: my newly created blog for all things gaming, put elsewhere to keep this blog readable for those not interested in games. I recommend reading this post first.

Write Run Rue: my work and code blog. In the best medieval three field practices it has been left fallow for the last few months to improve its fertility. Also I have been everywhere but at work.

If you want an easier way of finding this information than trying to find this post again, there are links at http://metagnome.net to everything. Once I find a feed aggregator that isn't a useless pile of something indelicate I'll put up a combined feed for those self-destructive individuals who want to read everything I write.

Look, It's a Complicated Issue

Consider Gough Whitlam, arguably Australia's most famous Prime Minister (in Australia at least). Here's some edited highlights of his achievements:

• Created a national health care service
• Abolished the death penalty
• Established Legal Aid and no fault divorce laws
  
• Gave Papua New Guinea independence
• Established diplomatic and trade relations with China
• Introduced the Racial Discrimination Act (which despite its name, prevents racial discrimination)
  

He was PM for about three years, and had a hostile senate (which is to say he needed the support of a party besides his own to get bills through). Everybody in Australia knows how Gough's political story ended (sigh, here you go) so it wasn't necessarily a recipe for political longevity, but it does show that being in power does allow a leader to institute change.

Every time I hear a Rudd or Turnbull or one of their lackeys claim that introducing climate change policy is complicated, sensitive and potentially Bad For The Economy and that a working party with a broad-ranging mandate should be set up by 2015 to deliver its findings in ten years at the most I think: what would Gough do? The answer never involves a working party or a steering committee.

Electron Deficient Entertainment - Meh Edition

Stardust - Neil Gaiman. Good read, strange how different it was from the movie, but much better. The book better than the movie? Hard to believe I know.
Child of Fire - Harry Connolly. The problem with most modern fantasy is that it's not Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I guess is not incredibly modern, but is modern enough to warrant comparison. A Madness of Angels is better, but still not up to the same standard.
A Madness of Angels - Kate Griffin. See above.
Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan. Not bad, but in a world where people switch bodies on a regular basis and can have psychosurgery to recover from traumatic events, why is it a struggle for highly trained supersoldier protagonist to quit smoking?
Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson. Neuromancer was pretty good once you accept it was written in the 1980s. Mona Lisa Overdrive was also written in the eighties, but is not good.