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Now that I’ve had my 360 fixed & returned, I’m being pestered with requests to fill in a survey about my experience. Ignored the first two, since I was neither ecstatic nor furious about my support experience, so it would make a particularly tedious ‘ok I guess’ response. But, they’re insistent with their damnable reminder emails, so I tried to do it.

I got right to the end screen, and then got this:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ’80040e31′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/CSatCalSrvy/LibProcess.inc, line 216

Heh. So, where do I fill in a survey about how badly the survey system worked?

[Edit] Ah well, 4th attempt worked at least. And to be fair, they farm this out to a 3rd party research firm anyway. But, still funny.

In recent years, I’ve been pretty disappointed with Nintendo (barring the excellent Super Mario Galaxy) and their machines for seeming to totally miss the opportunities that their devices offered for new types of games, lamenting that they just seem content to regurgitate every game from their previous consoles and couple it with a lazy waggle / touch control scheme, and go for the super-casual brigade with  things that can only be loosely described as games (Wii Fit, Wii Music), and leave it at that. Third parties haven’t exactly taken up the baton either, with the Wii in particular being filled with the most awful shovelware. Similarly, when once I found Japanese games fascinatingly different, lately I’ve felt they’re mostly treading over the same old ground over and over again. Then, I see this from Namco:

I haven’t laughed so hard at a game video in ages – it’s just so perfectly, fantastically absurd that it brings back all my memories of when Japanese games still had the power to evoke splutters of astonishment from me. This certainly isn’t a game for western straight men who are in the slightest bit insecure about their perceived sexuality, but for everyone else it looks like a fun party game that is only enhanced by being completely off its tits (or rather, oversized pectorals). It’ll probably get old relatively fast, but Namco, thank you showing us that Japan can still come up with genuinely surprising (nay, startling) games.

There’s a lesson to be had in here about entrusting important, always-on, unmonitored systems to Windows:

Yes, my flight details (this was Gatwick airport) should have been on that second monitor – it’s so nice to be reminded of the frailty of technology when you’re about to entrust your life to a tin box full of electronics and software.

Still, it was amusing to listen to a confused couple trying to read & decipher the BSOD text, clearly thinking it was an official announcement of some sort.

Ok, this is very, very bizarre. Having bought tickets for the last 2 years, I got an email letting me know that the local summer-time comedy festival was returning this year, so I went to take a look at the lineup. The stand-up lineup looks pretty good, I recognise a couple of the names, and in any case it’s good to see people  you haven’t come across before.

But, the main thing that gave me a “WTF?” moment was the banner in the middle, claiming that Spinal Tap were coming over on the 7th June, as part of their tour for the 25th anniversary of their 1984 spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. Dude, no way! I’m looking for the catch here, but it would seem that in fact, the appropriate response is “Way”.

I’m in two minds about this though. On the one hand, it would be very cool to see these guys in person – This Is Spinal Tap is a cult classic. On the other hand, it has been 25 years (wow), I’m not sure if seeing them now might be a bit disappointing, and they’re holding it in what is essentially a tiny venue, for only £5 a head. Maybe that’s part of the joke (given that TIST is all about a band with delusions of rock stardom that never quite make it), I don’t know. I guess it can’t hurt to go and see since it’s that cheap!

Since the ticket office doesn’t open until Friday, for now there’s nothing to do but celebrate the classic scene:

Remakes and comebacks are always in vogue, but unfortunately they almost always disappoint. Whether it’s that a brand new take on an idea just doesn’t quite work as well, or whether it’s an original team getting back together after a decade or more apart and the spark has gone, too often there just seems to be something wrong or missing. I suggest that this tendency should be called ‘George Lucas Syndrome’, in homage of he who epitomised how far you can fall from the heady heights of bygone triumphs.

Red Dwarf was the latest casualty last night, returning after many years away for a one-off 3-parter. It ran for 8 series originally, and whilst the last 2 tailed off really badly it was regularly a really great show. Last night’s return though was pretty disappointing – the lines were far less snappy, the acting pretty wooden and lacking chemistry, many of the gags are recycled and pretty weak, the episode is shorter (to fit into a 30 minute slot with commercials since the return is on commercial channel Dave, instead of a full 30 minute slot like it was when it was on the BBC), and seemed obsessed with special effects and trying to shoehorn a plot in there instead of just focussing on quality comedy. I wonder whether in this case it’s just age, or whether the absence of Rob Grant (this time it’s just Doug Naylor of the duo writing it) that makes it fall a bit flat. I think the lack of a live studio audience detracts too.

All in all, it reminds me of the attrocious millennium edition of Blackadder (Back and Forth) which suffered from the same problems and should never have been created. I was hoping that this return might be like Blackadders Christmas Carol, which was an excellent addition, but sadly it was not to be. It was only made worse by the fact that they showed some of the classic Red Dwarf episodes afterwards – the contrast really was quite stark.

I’ll watch the other 2 just incase, but really this is the way to remember Red Dwarf:

I was already starting to get a little tired of having vanity products targetted at me all the time when I watched TV – seems you just can’t sit down and watch a little bit of sci-fi shlock without having to endure male sports stars and B-list celebrities gurning at you from the screen while they either whisk a razor across their chin at frightening speed, or smear some overpriced goop into their chiseled mugs. I thought I’d reached the pinnacle when the ads tried to convince me that I couldn’t possibly be ready for a life in the morning unless I followed their ‘essential’ 3-step programme of ‘prepare, shave and moisturise’, when in practice I’ve survived happily for ages without doing any one of these 3 things. And I find it hard to contain a belly laugh when they try to combine the use of these products with machismo, such as interspersing some guy doing a frankly impractical level of preening with voice-overs explaining that it’s because he had a “lad’s night out”, and getting a “fit bird” (since we’re being all gruff and manly here) to walk around in a towel in the background. All it needed to complete it was a bit of chest-bumping, talking about sports and a flashing red arrow saying “Not Gay”.

But no, it get’s worse. Now, not only are the grooming companies aggressively targetting men with their generally useless products, but now they’re targetting a specific subset of men – gamers. Yes, there’s now another variant of that ridiculous Gillette brand family called “Fusion Gamer“, the existence of which I was alerted to via Penny Arcade but thought it was a joke, an extrapolation. But no, it really exists.

I’m not really sure where they’re going with this. At the risk of stereotyping here, I have to ask whether, as a rule, most male gamers care a huge amount about personal grooming; speaking as one myself, whilst I’m aware of the need for general tidiness (depending on context), I generally seek out the path of least resistance over any kind of structured vanity programme any day of the week. This is one of the advantages of beards of course – as well as giving you something to tug on when you’re thinking, they turn a daily shaving routine into a much more relaxed, convenient affair.

Maybe it’s just that I missed out on the whole Metrosexual trend. Maybe I just have barely repressed hobo tendencies, or I’m just incredibly lazy, but these ads make me laugh, not want to buy anything. I guess someone must be watching them and thinking ‘mmm, yeah I really should moisturise more’. But, I do not for one second understand these people.

Apologies if you’ve already seen this (it’s 2 weeks old) but it made me laugh out loud today so I thought I’d share it.

Warning: strong language and offensive to a certain brand you may have an attachment to if you’re the inexplicably loyal type. To fanboys: it’s not talking about the PS3, or indeed any real product. It’s just comedy. Put down the knife.

Microsoft Songsmith is a research project that generates accompanying music to a singer’s voice (and optionally instruments), presumably using the same approach a chromatic tuner uses to identify notes. Some genius decided to feed Radiohead’s classic song “Creep” into it, to see what it would do. This is the simultaneously horrifying and incredibly funny result:

Jump to 1:55 for the ultimate effect. Oh, the humanity.

Edit: click here for more musical attrocities. Your ears will hate you, but it’s a laugh innit?

Psychonauts was, in my opinion, one of the most creative and best written games of the last 10 years. The sheer diversity of the environments, the fantastically quirky (and rather dark at times) sense of humour, the pure audacity of creating a game so off the wall that people tend to look at you strangely when you try to explain it:

“It’s about a set of slightly maladjusted psychic kids who enter twisted worlds inside the minds of people with mental problems. With comedy.”

It’s a real shame, if perhaps not that surprising that almost no-one bought it. Sure the game had it’s problems – it was after all in essence a 3d adventure/platformer, and was subject to the common cameras issues that often entail in that genre if you’re not Super Mario Galaxy, but it was, IMO, essentially solid and any niggles were vastly outweighed by the writing and the unpredictability.

Frustrated fans like me can take solace in the fact that Double Fine survived anyway, and their next game Brutal Legend has similarly survived a reorganisation at Vivendi and is being published by EA in late 2009, the unlikely new refuge of a lot of original IP these days.

In the meantime, Double Fine have put up the Psycho-pedia, a homage and reference to all things Psychonauts. I’ll just hug it to my chest and reminisce on some great moments like the Milkman Conspiracy until Tim’s next game.

Very funny. And yes, that’s actually the guy that voice acts Cole in GOW. Thanks Kotaku.