My interest in PC Games has so far been under-represented on this blog. To remedy this, here is a list of the up and coming games that are getting my juices flowing.

• Half Life 2 - Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Everyone who even passingly likes computer games is following the progress of Half Life 2 with eager anticipation. The first Half Life is still the pinnacle of single player first-person shooters, and one of the few games I’ve ever played all the way through. This sequel promises to revolutionise FPS graphics with real-time shadows and bump mapping galore. Add to that the impressive physics demonstrated in the preview videos, and the fact that, well, it’s Half Life, and there’s no way I’m going to miss spending several hundred pounds upgrading my PC so I can play it.

  Half Life 2 is expected sometime in the Spring.

• X2: The Threat - Yet another reason to upgrade, this time the real-time shadows are cast by planets and space stations onto ships and asteroids. It’s an open ended space trading and combat fest in the tradition of Elite, which, as we all know, is the best computer game ever. X2 has a huge universe to explore and allows you to build your own space stations, fly anything from a tiny fighter to a multi-turreted carrier, and recruit fleet of wingmen.

  The European release of X2 has been delayed for a couple of months, but it will be shipping from DVD Box Office in Canada any day now.

• Deus Ex: Invisible War - Another long awaited sequel to another superb single player FPS, this one has recently suffered from the release of a slightly disappointing demo. However, having adjusted some settings to make it feel less console-y, and played it through a few more times, I’m starting to warm to it again. The twist of Deus Ex is that it offers multiple ways of achieving each goal. For instance, to get into a secret base you might shoot the guards, sneak in through the ventilation system or hack into the security system. Its branching storyline means that the way you play and decisions you make at key points affects the plot. This is what makes it unique. Despite its shotcomings, Invisible War’s demo shows that these features are equally to be found in the sequel.

  The developers, Ion Storm, are being somewhat shady about release dates.

• Lock On: Modern Air Combat - I’ve always loved flight sims, and with increasing development costs for games and the low returns of such a niche market, they’re few and far between these days. LOMAC lets you fly a variety of Russian and American jets, including the famous A-10. The terrain and object modelling is some of the most detailed ever seen in a flight sim, and the flight models and avionics are about as realistic as you could hope for. There’s even a community supported, 300 page leather bound manual. Trust me, that’s a good thing!

  LOMAC is released on the 5th of December.

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Oblivion Lost - Out of nowhere (or more accurately, out of a development shop in the Ukraine), comes Stalker. It hardly seems possible, but Stalker seems to have even better graphics than Half Life 2; see the videos to believe it. Stalker is a first-person shooter, with Elite-like open-endedness, set in a 30km square exclusion zone around Chernobyl. You can explore the environment, walking or driving vehicles, seeking artefacts to sell, avoiding radiation, defending yourself against mutants, and trading and fighting with other humans. Days and nights pass, so you must find food and sleep occasionally. Weather is modelled dynamically, including rain, thunderstorms, and wind that rushes through the bushes and trees.

  Stalker looks like it will be the most stunning FPS yet - but don’t hold your breath. It’s currently billed for a Spring/Summer 2004 release. Plenty of time to get that PC upgraded, at least!

• Richard Burns Rally - Driving games can be extremely cathartic, providing instant fun and endless replayability. For me, the more realistic the better. To date there hasn’t been a completely realistic rally game. Although car physics are modelled very accurately in some games, damage modelling has always been lacking, and the stages are never as long as real-world stages. Richard Burns Rally looks set to provide all this in one game, with realistic physics, full length stages and touch-a-tree-and-you’re-out damage modelling. It looks beautiful, too.

  Richard Burns Rally is due some time in 2004.

Update: There’s an excellent article about Stalker on Eurogamer, which describes how the team visited Chernobyl for research. It’s also revealed that the game is inspired by the movie Stalker, which was made by Andrei Tarkovsky, who brought us the original version of Solaris.
It seems that people who work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone also call themselves stalkers.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Games at 12:48 AM EST

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The Horizon documentary on BBC2 tonight stopped short of saying that the Bible code is complete hokum, so I’ll make the leap for you. The Bible code is complete hokum.

In case you missed it, the idea is that by turning the original hebrew version of the Bible into a giant word search and finding words made from equidistant letters that intersect each other, you can predict future events. So, for instance, since the word “Kennedy” intersects the phrase, “assasin who will assinate”, we can predict that Kennedy will be assasinated. Presumably God or the aliens who wrote the Bible inserted the messages for some reason or another.

The code was discovered by three Israelis, including Eliyahu Rips, who published a paper on it. They found that the names of famous rabbis intersected with their dates of birth, and came up with a method of measuring the probablility that this could happen by chance. This probability was very low: 1 in 65,000. What they didn’t mention was that there were numerous ways to spell the rabbis’ names, presumably helped out by the fact that the Bible as written in Hebrew contains no vowels (something the Horizon programme didn’t mention). When the experiment was repeated with alternative spellings it failed. The probability came out at somewhere between 1 in 2 and 2 in 3, indicating that the names were selected by Rips and co. to get the wanted results.

Cue Michael Drosnin who, thoroughly taken in by Rips, published a book or two on the subject. He was spurred on by his prediction that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin would be assasinated, and now thinks there will be a nuclear war in 2006 unless he can get to George W first and stop it. This is slightly scary because W is a religious loony and will soon be making major policy decisions from Bible codes if Drosnin gets his way.

Drosnin once challenged the skeptics to find predictions in Moby Dick. Statistician Brendan McKay, whose website contains much detailed information, did. He points out that the problem with Drosnin’s method of making predictions is that he looks for a name, and then looks for anything interesting that appears near that name. Given the lack of vowels in the Hebrew, and enough controversy over just how you spell “Tony Blair” in Hebrew anyway, and, well, you can see…

I thought this post might turn into a rant about how biased the Horizon programme was in favour of Drosnin. He did get much more air-time than the skeptics. But the weakness of his argument, essentially just repeating how unlikely were these combinations of words he’d chosen to be found near each other, was so obvious that he did most of the skeptics’ work for them. Couple that with Rips’ hopeless attempt to make out that a few accidental errors could cause the results of a follow-up experiment to be out by four orders of magnitude, and it’s quite clear who won the documentary.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends at 12:07 AM EST

2 Comments »

Much of what I think about the anti-Bush protestors has been said elsewhere, but I want to go on record and say that they’re not protesting in my name. I’m not Bush’s number one fan by any stretch, but rhetoric accusing him of being the world’s number one terrorist, or an evil dictator, or a weapon of mass destruction, or the worst threat the planet has ever seen, is ridiculous.

Iraq is now far better off than it was before the war, and things are improving all the time. Does anyone really not believe that? If these protestors had time machines, would they go back and kill George Bush to stop the war? It seems to me that most of these people would protest about anything Bush did, because it was Bush that did it.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 9:04 PM EST

4 Comments »

There’s much goodness to be had over at The Daily Ablution. With articles with titles like, BBC Licence Fee Rises, Budgets Tightened - and Executive Bonuses Increased, Police to Investigate Bishop for Doubleplusungood Thoughtcrime and Senior BBC Reporter Calls Saddam a ‘Saint’, what are you waiting for?

This comment on the BBC’s attempts to take over the running of the Iraqi Media Network, once Saddam’s main propaganda vehicle, made me chuckle:

Should the BBC win this ‘potentially lucrative contract’ the transition should be straightforward, as no change in editorial position will be required.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 12:25 AM EST

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I should be careful what I write.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 11:44 PM EST

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Andy Duncan of Samizdata beautifully deconstructs the NHS and explains how he would reconstruct it in a rather long but awfully well written article. In short, he had to wait 24 days to find out whether his potentially aggressively cancerous condition was actually aggressively cancerous. He’s not too happy about it, either.

Here I am, a piddling UK taxpayer, being forced to hand over at least £8,000 pounds a year to a compulsory NHS health insurance policy, for my family, whether I want to or not, and all I get back is something I wouldn’t pay £800 pounds a year for, in which I may be lucky or unlucky depending on which specialists I’m designated to see, which is dependent on where I live in the country, and on which particular waiting list target the government, in its vast munificence, is concentrating on, at that particular moment in time. Yet that massive wedge of coerced tax, extracted ultimately at gunpoint from my wallet, prevents me from being able to afford proper health care, for me and my family’s benefit, which on a free unprotected market would be better and cheaper, anyway.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it. He even explains how the system of training new doctors works. He would know, he was once a medical student. Oh go on then, here’s another sample.

…as one nice professor said to me back at medical school, “Just keep passing your exams, Andrew, and you’ve got a well-paid job for life. We’ve designed it to work out that way. That’s why junior doctors will always be under pressure. Because we need to avoid a career pyramid, as each junior doctor must be guaranteed a senior post when they’re older, and we can’t do that, as a profession, if we expand the numbers of junior doctors.” Oh, the highways and byways of jobs-for-the-boys protectionism. And so well camouflaged. Don’t you think?

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 11:41 PM EST

3 Comments »

I’ve just been watching the BBC2 documentary Flooded Britain, which details a new approach to coastal defence - namely not defending it or, euphamistically, “managed retreat”.

For the record, I’m all for it. It seems like a much cheaper approach than spending zillions of taxpayers’ pounds on maintaining sea walls just so some farmers can continue to grow their subsidised crops. If it can generate money by attracting tourists to the wildlife reserves that are created, so much the better. But what struck me was the attitude of some of the people interviewed.

One woman, living on some coastal development in Essex, was asked what she would do if there was another huge flood like the one in 1953. She talked about buying a boat, and ended with, “shouldn’t the government protect us and buy us boats?” So let me get this straight: like an idiot she goes and lives in a house that could at any minute be consumed by seawater, and she wants the government to protect her, with my money?

The oyster farmers who were worried about their yield being affected by the Abbott’s Hall Farm project used similar language. “We need protection” they said. But who do they want to pay for their protection? Me and you.

Mark Dixon, the brains behind the managed retreat idea, says that one of his problems is dealing with the concerns of farmers whose land stands to be flooded. He talks about buying the land off them as compensation. I have a better idea. If they so badly want the sea walls to be maintained, let them pay. Sell, or even give them the sea walls adjacent to their land. I don’t want another penny of my money spent to protect them.

The problem with this country (and I’m about twenty years too young to be using phrases like that) is that people want other people to protect them, when they should be out solving their own problems.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 12:46 AM EST

9 Comments »

Sarcastic articles with titles like Flashing Yellow Lights Puzzle BMW Driver are just not fair. Some BMW drivers are very good drivers.

No thanks to ThePresentOccupier for that link.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Driving at 10:47 AM EST

5 Comments »

An article by Richard Poe about the Merced pitchfork murders is worthy of wider readership. Here’s an excerpt:

Jessica heard noises from the livingroom. Still half asleep, she rose from bed and walked to the kitchen. Then she froze. There was a man in the livingroom. A strange man. He was stark naked.

Jessica fled back to her bedroom and locked the door. Someone knocked. Then he knocked again. And again. Jessica picked up the phone, but heard no dial tone. The intruder had taken the receiver off the hook.

That’s when Jessica thought of her father’s gun. Mr. Carpenter had taught Jessica and the other children to shoot. Jessica had passed her hunter safety course and received her certificate at age 12. She knew that her Dad always kept a .357 Magnum in his bedroom.

In deference to California’s safe storage laws, however, Mr. Carpenter kept the pistol high up on a closet shelf, unloaded and out of reach of the children…

Poe also makes some wider points about the way stories like these are reported in the media:

According to a 1995 study by criminologist Gary Kleck, Americans use firearms to defend themselves up to 2.5 million times each year – or nearly 7,000 times per day. In 11 out of 12 cases, the attacker flees as soon as his intended victim brandishes the gun or fires a warning shot. Such incidents form part of everyday life in America, yet they rarely make the news.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Self Defense at 10:18 AM EST

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Looking at the Isle of Man web site, I’m thinking it might be quite a good place to go and live. Mainly this is because the tax is much lower. Only 10% standard income tax, and 18% higher rate. Obviously, this is 10% (and 18%) too much tax (all tax is theft), but it’s a lot better than the situation on the mainland. The government has even, “commited itself in 2002 to reduce company tax to 0% by 2006″. When was the last time our government reduced any tax?

Clearly the low tax is designed to attract industry to a remote location. It leaves me wondering just how much more the economy would thrive in a densely populated area like the Southeast of England with such low tax; or if lowering tax would give a boost to the struggling North.

There are other good things about the Isle of Man too. As demostrated on a recent edition of Top Gear, there is no speed limit. And details are hard to come by, but it seems like it might be possible to fire a wider range of guns there, too.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 10:19 PM EST

4 Comments »