Steel Thunder

In Persona 3, the Compendium info for Sandalphon says that it would take 500 years for a human to walk the length of his body. How long is this?

I happen to know that I can walk about 2 miles in 45 minutes; that was the distance and time it took me to walk to school. A quick check of Google Maps confirms this: the distance from my house to my old school is 2.2 miles, and Maps even tells me this journey should take 45 minutes on foot.

2.2 in 3/4 of an hour equals 2.93 in one hour. I'll round this down for ease and to provide a conservative estimate, so 2.9 mph it is.

If I walked continuously for 24 hours, I would walk 69.6 miles.

1 year of this would be 25,404 miles.

500 years of walking would cover 12,702,000.

Of course, leap years occur every 4 years. In 500 years we'd have 125 of these, so that's 125 extra days of walking to give a true figure of 500 Earth-orbits. 

That's another 8,700 miles, giving us a total of 12,710,700 miles, making Sandalphon taller than the star Capella.

The Earth is less than 8,000 miles across, making Sandalphon over 1,500 times as tall as the Earth is wide. Earth's average distance from the Sun is approximately 93,206,000 miles. If Sandalphon stood on Earth, he would reach nearly an eighth of the distance to the Sun.

Sandalphon becomes much smaller if we take '500 years of walking' to mean walking as much as you comfortably could in a day, with breaks for eating and sleeping. This will vary considerably from person to person. (Assuming 8 miles a day for myself, this would make Sandalphon 1,461,000 miles tall - somewhere between the diameter of the Sun and Sirius A.)

I chose to round 2.93 down to 2.9. Some might have rounded it up to 3, and I'm sure I could walk 3 miles an hour if I needed to. Assuming this speed, Sandalphon becomes 13,149,000 miles tall.

Perhaps Atlus got it wrong, and it's not meant to be 500 years. (Though even the more sensible-sounding 500 days gives us a Sandalphon 34,800 miles tall, still much taller than the diameter of the Earth - bigger than Neptune.)

Wikipedia seems to not only back up but increase Atlus' figure, saying that Sandalphon is taller than the other angels by a distance that would take 500 years to walk. Their source for that piece of information isn't quite as clear, though. 

Searching for Sandalphon online yields little to no information about his absolute size, except for Wikipedia and sites related to Persona 3 or other MegaTen games. Most sites either say that Sandalphon is 'very tall' or that his size enables him to reach 'from Earth to the Heavens'. (Is Heaven only 13 million miles away?)

Trying to find out how Rabbi Eliezer arrived at his figure of '[a height that would take] 500 years to walk', I found that he was eventually charged with heresy, and that he was generally viewed with suspicion. This figure of 500 years is probably a little datum that slipped through the net - and I wonder how Atlus got hold of it.

A web browser that doesn't suck would be nice, but I've learned not to expect that from Sony. The PS3 browser makes Internet Explorer look swish. What I did expect was video playback. Reading Twitter (the Vita app for which is pretty good, by the way) and someone posts a link to a YouTube video? Denied.

PSone games playable. We could play those on the PSP, so why not? Perhaps Sony is trying to gently move us on from a console that ceased production 6 years ago. But still - get the Spyro trilogy, WipEout 2097 and Wip3out up in the PSone Classics section of the PSN store and I'd rebuy them all for my Vita.

A number of onscreen keyboard improvements: the ability to turn keytones off, for a start. Also a capslock, so I don't have to hit shift three times just to type 'BBC'. I'm sure a better button layout could be made, considering how big the screen is. I do get fed up with having to go to a sub keyboard just to type numbers and apostrophes.

Ability to select a name the Vita will appear under to routers and Bluetooth devices.

No music playing in the background of Near and the PSN Store. You can turn off system music, but inexplicably not for these apps.

The ability to turn off or quieten the REALLY LOUD shutter noise on the camera.

Larger photo size output, though I'm not sure if this could be fixed without changes to the hardware. The quality of the Vita's cameras is pretty awful. The one in my old phone (a 6 year-old Nokia E70) was better.

Less restriction on when I can take screenshots. You can’t take them in PSP games or in most Vita games’ cutscenes. Why the arbitrary imposition?

The ability to play PSP games scaled down to the original resolution (like playing PSone and PS2 titles on the PS3) instead of forcing fullscreen and making the game look blocky. Some might prefer the fullscreen, but it's nice to have the option.

Shallower paths for a lot of the settings. It takes a long time to do some simple things such as changing the brightness of the screen.

Themes/skins for the main menu. Not a strong wish; just a 'would be nice'.

I started writing this shortly after I got the game in late February. It’s taken me this long to get round to finishing it, because I’ve been having too much fun actually playing the game and chasing PSN trophies.

In this time of prequels and reboots, it's refreshing that the oddly-named Rayman Origins is neither. There is some minor exposition, most of it on the game's official website, but Rayman's 'origins' here largely mean a return to the 2D platforming of the original PSone game.

Origins is a very good advert for both the Vita and the Ubi-Art engine with which the game was made. It's a port (from 2011's P/X/W version), but what a port! This kind of gameplay was what handheld consoles were made for, and the graphics look gorgeous on the Vita's screen. It also makes use of the touchscreen with some features not present in the P/X/W version.

Like the original Rayman (released in 1995 for the PSone), Origins is very pretty and absolutely nails. Unlike the first Rayman, Origins is made much more fun by virtue of not using the quaint mechanic of finite lives, and by being easily the silliest game in the Rayman franchise (with the possible exception of Raving Rabbids, which has been retconned out of the series' continuity). It has Loco Roco-levels of brightness and cheer with almost Ren and Stimpy-esque character animation. 

There’s almost no plot to speak of. Oh sure, the game’s blurb says something about saving the world before it vanishes like a bad dream, but the game keeps it unobtrusive. All we take from the brief & wordless intro video, and all we really need to know, is that the baddies were woken up by Rayman & co’s loud snoring, and stole all the lums and imprisoned the electoons in a grumpy huff. You need to go and get them all back, and you might as well stomp on the baddies while you’re at it. (Incidentally, lums are “‘looms’ like ilLUMination, not lums, for dumb.”)

Progress is simple: reaching the end of a level unlocks the next one. Incentives for doing more (finding relics, finding and opening cages of trapped electoons, collecting lots of lums, or successfully speed-running a level), include PSN trophies, extra characters and a couple of exposition scenes. 

Origins is a very fluid platformer that needs quick thinking and responses, and pulls this off well enough that it feels more like not thinking and just acting. The enemies are often the most static and least menacing obstacle - the challenge coming from the environment shifting beneath and around you. Cliffs break, bouncy plants sprout, walls re-align and form a different path from the one you were going to take a split second ago. 
The game has a nice difficulty curve, and is saved from repetition by granting you a new power at the start of each new world (Rayman yet again having forgotten how to attack, glide, swim etc. at the beginning of a new adventure).

The level design plays with staple themes by mashing them together in ways not normally seen, resulting in something more fun than the sum of its parts. The Desert of Didgeridoos is a desert level - phooey. But wait! - mixed with a musical theme. Gourmand Land is the staple slippy-slidey ice level (and later fire level), saved from familiarity-induced boredom by being made of food.

Recovering plenty of electoons unlocks more playable characters, but all are simply re-skins of starters Rayman, Globox and two Teensies. There’s no difference between each except animations (though the Globoxes can be slightly easier to play because of the noticeable hurtbox/sprite dissonance).
Collecting lots and lots of electoons earns you access to the Tricky Treasure levels; the only reward that’s not simply cosmetic/flavour. Tricky Treasure levels are the game distilled and then turned up to 11. You must chase a fleeing treasure chest, and if it manages to get off-screen you die - if you don’t get killed anyway by spike pits, incoming piranhas, falling rocks, etc. Finishing all 10 gives you access to the incredibly hard Land of the Livid Dead.

Exclusive to the Vita version are the previously-mentioned relics. These are camouflaged against the scenery and must be collected by tapping the touchscreen. Most of them are so well-hidden that the only clue one is nearby is the rattling sound they emit. It’s somewhat odd, given that picking one up usually involves staying still, tentatively zooming in (pecking at the touchscreen with your fingers, like an uncertain pheasant) and poring over every millimetre of screen, hoping to spot a relic when it makes its periodic twitch. It’s quite a contrast to the running and jumping and gliding. It’s also the only bit of the game where sound helps you (and by a large amount) instead of just being atmospheric; if you can’t hear, your opportunities to pick up relics are probably limited to sheer luck. 
Relics unlock wall mosaic tiles in the home level - when complete, they show why Globox is blue and how Rayman is able to use his hair to glide.

This game is wholly silly and delightful. It’s slick, and even the loading screens are gorgeous. The music is charming and jubilant. The whole package is a great blend of superb art direction and 2D platforming that shows it’s still a worthwhile genre.

If I block someone, I should never see any of their tweets retweeted. Really, Twitter, this shouldn't be hard. If I block someone, it's because I want them out of my stream. And stop suggested them under 'who to follow'. It's like that time my dad kept showing 7 year-old me bits of dead turkey "because I thought you'd find it interesting" after I'd repeatedly told him to stop because disembodied turkey lungs are gross.

If someone with a protected account follows me, I should be able to see their tweets.

The ability to mute certain words and hashtags. I'm sick of getting Raptr and Foursquare tweets in my feed, for example, but don't want to unfollow those people. I know there are browser extensions for this, but I've yet to find one that doesn't break Twitter for me.

A 'guffbeak' button. "54 people think you're being a guffbeak right now. Maybe you should shut up for a bit."

A way to RT a protected account that keeps that account anonymous. Currently you can do this using only by using an old-school RT and redacting the name, e.g.: "RT [protected] Tweet goes here." Something like this should be available with 1-click functionality, in the same way as an ordinary RT.

An open/protected account hybrid. I want a public Twitter stream (only possible with an open account), but I'd love the ability to veto followers. That way, I'd know my followers were all real people and not bots or corporate accounts who follow everyone.

An option to mute everyone who hasn't changed their userpic from the default eggy. If you have an eggy, I assume you're a spambot. I don't even check.

Auto deletion of accounts that are at least 3 months old and have never tweeted. Ideally, there should be a way to extend this to those that have tweeted, but their first and only tweet was along the lines of 'learning to use Twitter!'

In fact, when you write your first tweet, it should detect if you've written a 'learning to use Twitter!' tweet and say "This is a terribly boring first tweet. Are you really sure you want to send this?" 

Adding someone to a list should count as following them for the purposes of playing Echo Bazaar.

Videogames are one of the best things ever (and are more or less the main subject of my blog). Poo is one of the funniest. Sometimes these two things occur together. Here's a list, more or less in ascending order, of pooey pixelated perfection.

Wario Master of Disguise (DS, 2007) 

One of the minigames has you unite falling objects with their correct containers, including a poo into a loo. Wario himself gains a guff attack in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Persona 4 (PS2, 2009)

One of the personas your character can summon is Belphegor, a demon of sloth. Developer Atlus chose to depict him as a horned demon sitting on a toilet, and his attack animation makes it pretty obvious he's pooing. Persona 4 also averts the lack of toilet-needing common to games (and films) - your party member Yosuke spends much of the first dungeon level frantically looking for a toilet, and is eventually forced to wee in a corner.

Ratchet & Clank 3 (PS2, 2004)

Sewer levels are a videogame staple, which is why this list doesn't simply include every game with one. R&C3 gets in because the sewers are not only probably the biggest level, but are populated by giant slime beasts that drop poo crystals. A plumber buys them off you because he wants them for a necklace for his wife. 

A Dog's Life (PS2, 2003)

You can briefly relieve the tedium of this insipid game by having Jake lay a dog-egg, and then pick it up and even throw it at humans. Boringly, no-one screams in disgust at this - or shows any indication of giving even the tiniest shit. Jake also guffs copiously if he eats bad food.

Black and White (PC, 2001)

Having to deal with poos is unsurprising in an sim game that involves animals. The fact that your creature is taller than a house is. You can instruct your animal avatar to pick its tonne-turds up, and then throw them or eat them.

World of Warcraft (PC, 2004)

WoW has a number of poo-related quests, the funniest of which is probably Doing Your Duty: an Alliance-only quest to take a laxative and shit out some seeds you were weren't supposed to have eaten. There are sound effects. They're even different from your character's standard I've-been-hit grunts, implying the screams of horrified agony were recorded specifically for this quest. After you turn in the quest, it's implied that this isn't the first time this has happened - i.e. you ate seeds that have already been through a previous adventurer's cornhole. 

WoW also has /fart, /burp, /nosepick and /moon emotes, but unfortunately not /poo. (Tip: make a macro to couple Chained Essence of Eranikus (don't tell me you handed the damn thing in!) with a /fart emote.)

Okami (PS2, 2007)

In Okami, you play as the goddess Amaterasu reincarnated in the body of the wolf Shiranui. Appropriately, you can wee and poo on enemies to make them drop rare items. The game politely refers to the moves (Golden Fury and Brown Rage) as 'insulting' your enemies. 

Space Station Silicon Valley (N64, 1998)

In this game by the studio that would eventually become Rockstar North, you assume control of various robot animals. Among these are rats who have an exploding poo attack.

Conker's Bad Fur Day (N64, 2001)

One of the bosses is the Great Mighty Poo, who lives in Poo Mountain.  As you fight him, he sings operatically about poo, and flings jobbies at you.

Conker's Bad Fur Day would probably win the title of pooiest game in existence, if not for...

Toilet Kids (TurboGrafx, 1992)

A Japan-only release for the TurboGrafx, Toilet Kids was a shoot-em-up versus jobbie-flinging enemies. Among these are poos who throw poo at you. My word.

Bonus list:

These games are rather toiletty - unfortunately, hilarious though wees and guffs are, they aren't poos. In no particular order.

Team Fortress 2 (PC, 2007)
One of the sniper's attacks is called 'jarate'. It's a jar full of wee. 

Abe's Exoddus (PSone, 1998)
Though Exoddus wasn't quite as polished as its predecessor, Oddysee, the cover price was almost wholly justified by the fact that one of Abe's new moves was an exploding fart. Abe can drink a tin of semi-lethal Soulstorm Brew, trump, possess his trump, and fly it somewhere and explode it.  You can also use (non-exploding) farts tactically to make your allies move one step away - much quicker than a 'follow me'/'wait'.

DJ Boy (arcade, 1987)
In the original Japanese version, one of the bosses was a woman with a guff attack. The US version changed her appearance to make her less of a a racist caricature (good), but, boringly, bowdlerised her attack into doughnut-throwing. Boo!

Postal 2 (PC, 2003)
You can piss on people, which causes them to urp a sick in disgust. This is probably the least offensive thing about this game, which ended up banned in Australia.

The Sims (PC, various from 2001)
Toilets are a not unexpected artefact of a life simulation game. The Sims, however, is remarkable for being probably the only game in which you can kill someone by surrounding them with toilets. 

How to be a Complete Bastard (ZX Spectrum, 1987)
Based on Adrian Edmondson's book of the same name, Bastard places you in the role of a party guest, whose objective it is to be wankerish to the other guests. There's a fartometer with which you can clear the room.

Leisure Suit Larry (various from 1987)
The series is more known for its sexual themes (such as a wanking minigame) than anything else, but features some amount of trumps &c. The 2004 release Magna Cum Laude includes a weeing function for reducing Larry's drunkenness. 

Samurai Shodown (Neo Geo, 1993)
One of the character Earthquake's moves is a guff. In fact, guffs seem to be something of a staple in fighting games. (Note that Earthquake gains 'better graphics on the fart'.)

Fur Fighters (Dreamcast, 2000)
Toilets in games are unremarkable by themselves. Fur Fighters' get a mention because they're GIANT toilets (used by dinosaurs).

Duke Nukem Forever (multi, 2011)
The trailer makes a thing of the fact that you can do massive pisses. Informs @TummyCustard: "It may restore "ego" (health) but the game was so boring that I honestly can't remember."

Super bonus time!

I didn't bother with indie/browser games, because there are probably loads and would be worthy of a list in their own right. Here's one to start you off: Don't Shit Your Pants

Know a good one I've missed? Tell us about it in this Shortmail thread!

I have a Vita and yes, it's pretty amazing.

Hardware:

I went for the Wi-fi only version in the end. I wanted to get the Wi-fi + 3G version because get ALL the things, but decided against it after looking at how much Vodafone (currently the only Vita 3G provider) charge you. (Plus we don't like Vodafone because they don't pay their taxes.) It seems that the only thing you can really do with the 3G model that you can't do with the standard one is use GPS - and while it would be well swish to have a pocket console that's also a GPS, I don't need it that badly.

The Vita is a more elegant shape than the PSP: its form is one continuous cartouche instead of having truncated shoulders. As with the PSP, the two shoulder buttons are contiguous with this shape, and are mirrored on the base of the console by two slits, presumably to attach wrist straps to. (A lanyard would be silly.) 

It's much easier (in convenience, not in accident-potential) to turn off or put into sleep mode than the PSP; you just press the power button quickly (to sleep) or hold it down (to turn off) instead of farting around with the PSP's trigger switch's position.

The screen is touch-sensitive, and so is the back, with two recessed inert areas on the back to put your fingers when you don't want to touch the rear pad. The touchscreen has exactly the problem you'd expect - as it doesn't use a stylus, it will grow a sheen of finger oil. This usually isn't that visible, but it's really obvious when you're using anything that makes the screen display mostly white (such as the Twitter app), then you can see just how slick with oily interference patterns it's become.

The touchscreen is remarkably sensitive, and I've made several accidental selections by just waving my fingers over it instead of actually touching it. It's also capable of detecting two touch points: in many applications you pinch or spread your thumb and forefinger to zoom in and out, like a baffled finger-faced bird futilely pecking the screen.

There are two thumbsticks, and they're proper thumbsticks with ball-and-socket bases as opposed to the PSP's little slidey nonsense. The home button is curiously situated under the left thumbstick. Hard to accidentally press, true, but it seems more obvious to place it centrally under the screen, where the PS Vita logo is. The face buttons don't appear to have pressure sensitivity (or I'm just sausage-fingered), but do have a nice decisive feel to them when pressed. It's a little disappointing, as WipEout 2048 uses square for airbrake and I'm using to playing WipEout HD on the PS3 and being able to apply a gentle squirt of airbrake. The Vita's face buttons feel much more digital.

The cameras - a front-facing one that looks at you and a rear-facing one - are a bit crap. You tap the touchscreen to take a picture instead of pressing a physical button, which feels wrong, and the shutter sound effect is obnoxiously loud. The cameras do badly in lighting other than very bright, and it can sometimes be hard to take a picture of something with the rear camera because the Vita's shadow falls on it. Everything you photograph also looks quite desaturated and washed out. You can also record video using either camera. Again, the quality isn't great, and if you have a nice phone you're probably better off just using the camera and video on that. Even my 6 year-old Nokia lets you zoom in or out when taking photos or recording video, which the Vita doesn't.

The Vita comes with absolutely nothing besides its charger and some AR cards (more on those later). No carrying case, or even a memory card (the PSP came with a 32mb one, which was much too small for a game or add-on, but was enough for save files and a few mp3s). There are also no game demos included or pre-installed. I bought a memory card with my machine, and it's absurdly tiny. Seriously, you could swallow it without a glass of water.

The game boxes are just darling; probably about half the size of a DS game box.

Default software:

The Vita ditches the Cross Media Bar of the PSP and PS3 for a couple of pages of dinky bubbles. It's a little similar to the Wii's system of adding blocks ('channels') to the home menu. The menu is very customisable: you can rearrange the bubbles (within a set grid) and add and insert pages. I immediately shoved all the bubbles I don't think I'll use often down to an extra page on the bottom, and kept the top page for games and page 2 for apps I like. You can also change the background of each page. I haven't uploaded any pictures to use as wallpapers yet, so I've used some of the default animated wave ones, going for a nice rich pink-red one at the top gradienting down to a pale yellow on the last page.

The first thing the Vita tries to get you to do after entering the time, date, your DOB, and doing a system update, is to play with the Welcome Pack. This introduces you to the device's functions and is somewhere between toy and tech demo. It even has trophies for beating the best times etc. You can use the tilt control to make a wee stickperson on a skateboard dodge incoming marbles, tap some numbered bubbles in the correct sequence to make them disappear (showcasing the touchscreen's ability to register two touches simultaneously by making you tap two equally-ranked bubbles at the same time), and take a photo of something and have the Vita make it into a little slidey-panel puzzle (boring - remember how disappointed Child You was when receiving a slidey-panel puzzle in a Christmas cracker). The most odd of these gamelets is Faces, in which you take a photo of something that looks like a face, and then the Vita animates it, making it blink and talk. The results are invariably terrifying. I took a photo of a little painting of a barn owl I have on my desk, and the Vita animated its beak in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of the Navigators in Dune.

Near is a slightly sinister application that attempts to gamify your movement in the real world, and lets you see who nearby is playing what. You can set some locations as private (in which you'll appear to other Vita users as an anonymous player instead of by your PSN name), so in the end I chose to let it show my location to other players, except for in a nice fat radius around my home town. You can also set individual games and apps to private.

The Vita also comes with a group messaging function for your PSN contacts, Google Maps (a little slow, but usable), and Party: essentially group chat using the mic. The web browser is much the same as the PS3's. Nintendo had the right idea: they outsourced the DS browser to Opera. I'd love to see a version of Chrome or something for the Vita and PS3.

Test of anything with a browser: can it play Echo Bazaar? Yes, it can; it's just rather clunky.

The onscreen keyboard is dire. I shouldn't have to toggle another set of keys just to type an apostrophe or a number. There's also no caps lock, meaning that to type anything in caps I have to keep tapping this button. That said, having it as a touchscreen makes it a damn sight easier to use than the Sixaxis-controlled PS3 keyboard (I do have a USB keyboard plugged into my PS3, but it's usually under a pile of games and I can't be bothered to excavate it).

You can take screenshots by pressing the Home and Start buttons simultaneously. I've yet to try this out because I've got only WipEout 2048 at the moment, and it sports a very fine screenshot mode of its own.

Other software:

Twitter app is ace. It even has a button for old-school RTs (used for writing MTs, as I don't think there's any way to copy and paste text). You'll probably need it if you want to do any tweeting at all via your Vita; the actual Twitter website runs appallingly in the Vita browser, and often makes Javascript crash. The app only supports one account, though, unless I'm missing something.

The Flickr app is okay, pretty much what you'd expect. You can also upload photos you've taken with the Vita directly to Flickr, which I can't see myself doing, as I see Flickr as a site for nice processed photos, not a place to dump your snaps.

Predictably, there's a Facebook app. Not used it myself, but it's there.

AR

The Vita comes with 6 AR cards, with basic QR code-like shapes on them, simple enough that if you lost the cards you could probably draw some new ones. Placing them on a table and pointing the Vita's rear camera at them allows you to play some cute but gimmicky little games. You get 3 after redeeming a code in the PSN store (you can just download them free from there anyway, but the code conveniently loads them all into your download queue simultaneously): Table Football, Fireworks and Cliff Diving.

Fireworks is a piece of piss. You put an AR card down and it's a house. The garden has a machine that ejects fireworks, and you can tap the fireworks to detonate them - do it at the apex of their ascent for more points. And that's it. You can make it 'harder' by putting down 3 cards, each one generating a different building. Even with 3x the fireworks it's still pretty much impossible to fail, so you can just sit there tapping fireworks until you get bored. Hardly a game at all; pretty much just a tech demo, and not a very exciting one at that.

Cliff Diving is quite funny: put down a card and a pool and diving board erupt from your table, and you then press buttons to make a little man do a dive. If you get it wrong the poor wee man crashes and you lose some of your prize money to his hospital bills. You can also use two cards at different elevations (one on a table, one atop a mug or something) and have the higher one be a diving board and the lower be a pool. It's actually pretty hard to get both cards in frame in a manner that satisfies the Vita, and the game itself has limited appeal. 

I didn't get to play Table Football because it needs all 6 cards (3 for the pitch, 2 for the stands and 1 for the scoreboard) and I don't have that much free space at my desk. I could go and try it on the dining table or something, but I can probably imagine what it'll be like. I expect you'd need to play this one on a surface you can easily approach from all angles. 

The AR seems to have the same problem the EyeToy had: it's cute, it's quite fun, but once you've been impressed by the tech it doesn't have much to keep you visiting it, and you also need lots of room to play, and chances are you don't have nice big open rooms like the people in the adverts. At the moment I can't think of any use of the AR that would actually enhance a game rather than just look cool.

Demos I tried:

Lumines: nice, but it's just Lumines. It's still the exact same game you played on the PSP, just with different songs, backgrounds etc. There are a couple of new types of block, but can you really be arsed?

Dungeon Hunter: Alliance: crap. Game mechanics seemed okay, if generic (it's an action-ish RPG), but the atrocious slowdown makes it unplayable. 

I also downloaded the PSP game Daxter (an interquel between the first and second Jak & Daxter games) for £7, as it was one of my favourite titles on that machine (plug: I reviewed it for Gamestyle in 2006 here). It's a little ugly, as the PSP game's lower res is stretched to fill the Vita screen. I'd like to see a way of shrinking it to the original resolution, like you can do when playing PSone or PS2 games on the PS3. Speaking of PSone games, there doesn't yet seem to be a way of downloading them to the Vita; I've bought a few for my PS3 and I'd quite like to put some of them on my new handheld. Considering you could play them on PSP, I'm assuming this is functionality that'll be added to the Vita later.

WipEout 2048 is mint! I'll write a review soonish, I hope.

For this week's #Thursdaygames, I asked Twitter what lessons they'd learned from games, video- or otherwise. Here's a selection:

Rocket launchers can destroy helicopters, but not small, wooden doors.

"..." is an excellent conversation filler.

Attractive people are good guys and unattractive people are baddies. This is why many people whose alignment is unknown wear masks.

Food that glows, hovers and rotates is safe to eat.

If someone displays any overt sexuality, there is a high chance of them betraying you or attempting to destroy the world. Chances of this increase exponentially the more gender nonconforming their appearance is if male, or if they exist & are female.

Read the rest

The #Thursdaygames hashtag on Twitter is normally just to discuss what games we've been playing recently. Now I'd like to make these discussions part of it. I might do some as open Shortmail threads, so that people without Twitter accounts can join in too.

David Hayward was kind enough to stick me on the guest list to Bit of Alright. And you know what? Being able to introduce yourself as 'Anna Ghislaine, Steel Thunder' is bastard cool. 

The day began with about 30 audience members playing the Blackadder intro on recorders. (It's actually a tune originally written by Samuel Pepys.) Ian Willey from My Note Games demonstrated Baroque Band, an iPad app that helps kids learn to play a musical instrument by providing feedback on whether they're hitting the right notes at the right rhythm. The talk contained the word 'bobbins', which is clearly the best word for 'quite rubbish'. I discovered that I was as bobbins at the recorder as Samuel Pepys. Lots of us laughed that playing the recorder in a cold hall was giving us flashbacks to being forced to play it at school. It was quite impressive that the app could meaningfully pick up on the combined squeek honk tooot of a couple of dozen people.

Richard Perrin did a lovely talk about the genre of interactive fiction, which can be quite hard to get into as a consumer because it has a fairly isolated fanbase. He talked us through five of his favourite examples. They had to be spoileriffic, to demonstrate why they were effective pieces, but it made me want to check them out anyway. (And that reminds me, the sequel to Choice of Romance is out now and I haven't played it yet.) 

Grethe Mitchell did a piece on playground games and how they've evolved, or rather not done so. Many children's games have stayed the same over generations and only changed names or subjects while the core stays the same. We were invited to try some of the games ourselves, but out of typical Britishness/nerdy social awkwardness we didn't. I spoke with Grethe afterwards about her work with motion-capture using Wiimotes and Kinect hardware (children can record themselves playing clapping games, and then play the game against a stick-figure version of themselves). I'm pretty interested in that sort of thing because one of my brothers has trisomy 21 and doesn't get how to use controllers, but can grasp things like the EyeToy. I'd love to make games he could play but don't know where to begin. 

Grethe Mitchell has also co-edited a book, Videogames and Art, that is getting a new edition next year.

Holly Gramazio's Deadly Serious Games was one of my favourites. Everyone loves pie charts! It was an expose of fictitious games and their tropes, as well as looking at how the in-universe devs are portrayed. It was especially interesting how many fictional games are created (in-universe, not necessarily by author) by women, and how many of these games turn out to be lethal for the players. The only type of fictitious dev that kills more players is governments.

Later I played Closing Time (a real-world game where you have to get rid of your boxes by putting them on other people's box stacks) with Holly and a couple of other people. I think I was a bit bobbins at it.

I missed Wallfour's main talk on the stage (or it got moved) but I caught some of the demo in one of the smaller rooms. We had to use laser pointers to try and pull jigsaw pieces around on a screen. It demonstrated that such a mechanic doesn't work all that well, because it's easier the fewer people are doing it, and it's often more fun to grief the other players than play co-operatively. We then got to play a little tech demo in which players have to shine laser pointers on rings on the screen to activate them (it has to be done co-operatively because one laser point can't light up all the ring by itself). Wallfour suggested that it could be a backdrop to a party, but I'm not sure giving some actually quite hefty laser pointers to a bunch of pissed people is a good idea.

I enjoyed Claire Bateman's talk on the reward mechanisms games use to compel us to keep playing. She mentioned Echo Bazaar (reviewed here by me) and how most of its storylets reward you a little bit even if you lose. The funniest bit was about the non-game Cow Clicker, in which you simply click cows and that's it. It was meant to be a pisstake of games like Farmville, but it proved (frustratingly to its creator) popular.

Psychological Effects of Audio was one I was most looking forward to; it was a shame it couldn't have gone on longer. I would have liked to have heard commentary on more games (showcasing good examples of game sound design) besides the ones Alistair Lindsey has worked on. It could also have done with examples of doing it wrong, showing how inappropriate sound effects can be a mood-killer. I'm not normally into RTS-type games but I'm quite looking forward to Prison Architect now. 

I Get So Emotional Baby  was a bit too quiet for me to hear a lot of the talk, but I got the gist of it and I now want to try Sweatshop. Kerry Turner and Simon Parkin gave an interesting commentary on the emotion-inducing mechanics used in Ico and its sorta-sequel-sorta-prequel Shadow of the Colossus.

There was so much I missed because there were several events all happening at once and I had to make sacrifices (I missed Cat on Yer Head, Game Design Rocks and most of Several Amazing Things About Tetris), plus I had to leave at one point to go in search of a baked potato. I was disappointed that one of the talks opened almost immediately with a gratuitous rape 'joke', which made me walk out of that one right away. It wasn't clever and added nothing. Boo!

I rather like my little badge and sticker, but I don't think I'll wear the badge because wearing one that says 'Bit of Alright' has other connotations to anyone who doesn't recognise the logo. My brother (brought along as his 19th birthday present) got one with a badger on it. We realised we couldn't think of any videogames with badger protagonists. Someone should make one. Maybe I will one day.

Tl;dr: Yes, it's definitely worth $7. It's 11p per level. You might as well buy it; it's probably better than all the crap you bought in the Steam sale and have never played with.

Swift*Stitch, it turns out, is not a tailoring sim, but "a game about going fast, taking the right route and trying not to crash into stuff". 'Swift' presumably alludes to the blinding speed, and 'stitch' to the warp- and weft-style movement, as well as the slightly stitched appearance of the boingy walls. S*S has essentially two controls: hold the left mouse button to move your little ship vertically, leave it unpressed to go horizontally, boing off coloured walls to switch direction. It's bloody hard. It elicited many angry mooing sounds. It's also great fun, holding my interest more than my other recent purchase of Bejeweled 3.

It's a challenging game, but S*S is wonderful in its implementation of non-guffbeakery. The learning curve is sensible. If you get it wrong, it's always your fault. You can play any level whenever you want, instead of having to play through a level to unlock the next one (a wonderful bit of design that shows this game is meant for playing). The game invites you once and only once to switch to a lower speed should you crash like a sugar-rushing monkey. No remapping needed for a left-handed mouse. Don't like mouse? Use keyboard instead.

The game also has some graphical goodies, such as 'Invert colours' (surprisingly nice) and 'WTF mode', which adds confetti and motion-blur. The best of these is Cruel camera, which simulates the camera operation of that of Homer Simpson distracted by a butterfly.

S*S is available for Windows and Mac. I can confirm that the Windows version runs nicely under WINE, albeit with a bit of jaggy scrolling in any speed class above 3 (no impediment to gameplay; it's just not as pretty). Unfortunately, you can't try the demo in Linux, as it requires Unity web player.

01. Mastodon: All the Heavy Lifting
It's really hard to decide which track from The Hunter I like best - nearly all of them make me feel my head's going to explode (in a good way). In the end I picked this one because 'point of no return'-themed songs make my hair stand on end, and the 'we didn't come this far just to turn around' bit in this one always gives me chills. It's a quest song that's a bit scary.

02. Skindred: Cut Dem
I saw this live and it sucked; Birmingham Academy is a shite venue. (Plus I wish Benji Webbe would fuck off using 'pussy' or 'pussy-hole' to mean 'weak'. My pussy hole could push out a 3kg baby. Can your cock hole do that?) When heard properly and not through wall-of-impenetrable-noise speaker stacks, this song is like a platter of all the little things that make Skindred brilliant: it's badass but it makes your heart sing. Listening to this makes me feel like punching my way through a brick wall. Why couldn't nu metal have sounded like this?

03. Mastodon: Black Tongue
This album's better than Crack the Skye. I didn't think that was possible. I must have listened to the 40-second preview version of this song for hours (I'd never seen a trailer for an album before. Great idea!). It's a complete belter of a track, a fucking metal beast, coming at you like a glacier: it's slow but completely unstoppable. You're doomed.

04. Mastodon: Curl of the Burl (possibly NSFW video)
I listened to this over and over again, alternating with Black Tongue, while I waited for my copy of the CD to arrive.

05. Celldweller: Disposable War Pigs
Dubstep mashup of War Pigs + Iron Man + Disposable Heroes. What's not to like? (Don't like dubstep? Piss on you, Jack! It's great.)

06. Mastodon: Stargasm
By Mastodon's standards this song is almost cute. It's about fucking in space and has Chemical Brothers-style synth screams.

07. DJ Schmolli: Riverside Got You All In Check
Having said in the past that every house track works better as an instrumental (one word: Groovejet), putting Busta Rhymes' vocals over Sidney Samson's Riverside ("motherfucker!") hugely improved both tracks.

08. Ananda Shake: Heart Beat
I didn't pay enough attention to new psytrance this year (2011's been mostly about the metal for me), but you can never go wrong with Ananda Shake. If you tried to make a Rez-style game of this it'd melt the screen.

09. Bjork: Mutual Core
All of Biophilia is bizarre and wonderful, often sounding like two unrelated songs playing over each other, but never clashing. This one has Bjork going drum & bass and singing about plate tectonics.

10. Scorb: 13.5 Hours (Reanimated remix)
How psytrance should be: filthy, post-apocalyptic and terrifying.

11. 16 Volt: Fight or Flight
Is this industrial? I don't know. Whenever I link to a track that I think is industrial I usually get about 4-5 responses saying 'that's not industrial!' and then they engage in a pissing contest to see who can post the most unlistenable noise. I don't know if 16 Volt are industrial; I just know they're boss and so is this track. Maybe I should have posted Burn instead; it's hard to pick a favourite from this album (and not just because it has 'Dead Horses' in the title).

12. Skindred: Game Over
Ragga metal song about videogames = relevant to Steel Thunder's interests.

13. Ry Cooder: No Banker Left Behind
Funny, topical and musically good! How does he keep doing that?

14. Chase & Status: No Problem (strobing video)
Great opener to any d&b set. I saw this at Wireless this year and loved it.

15 CoLD SToRAGE: Omen Natrium
Ice cold synths make this sound like a WipEout circuit falling to pieces as the ship races to outrun the disintegrating track. (Let's hope it is actually one of the ice tracks; those ones are pants.)

16. And One: Shining Star
No-one does futurepop like And One!

17. Scroobius Pip: Death of the Journalist
Distraction Pieces is an amazing album - not just that it's good, but listening to it for the first time, I was actually amazed: Pip is a brilliant poet. Death of the Journalist is probably Distraction Pieces' worst track musically, but the most political and hard-hitting, which is Pip's forte. It's just missing Dan le Sac's musical input.

18. Futurebound: Blind Cobbler's Thumb (Tantrum Desire remix)
I didn't really get into much new drum & bass this year but this track stood out like a huge happy d&b kitten.

19. Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory: The Reunion
Portal 2 = game of the year. It's a retro-futuristic-puzzler-shooter-survival-horror. And it's funny. And has a multiplayer mode.

20. Lingmops: The Rules of Footbal
The best song about footbal!