Stalkers and the VC

I’d make a lousy prophet. In the Old Testament even a 99% success rate warranted the death penalty.
I bought the FPS Vietcong: Purple Haze with high hopes that were very quickly dashed... when the game failed to even start. A supposedly great storyline and one of the best Vietnam shooters of all time bit the dust to a bug I never realised was even there.

Like a VC pun-ji trap. Yuck.

Here’s a piece of advice, 2K Games—as long as there are copies of your product out there in circulation, you’d better keep it up to date with users of Windows XP SP2 or whatever it is the majority of your customers use. Years and years of creativity, development slogging and testing don’t mean squat if a player’s computer cannot run the end product in the first place.
But you’ll still get my money—I own Mafia: City of Lost Heaven, for goodness’s sake, and believe all the hype enough to cough up money for Bioshock at the end of the year. Sad, isn’t it? You publish enough good, and the bad simply gets flushed away. So long as the money keeps rolling in, everyone’s happy...

Except those who want to see what life in the game sphere of 2003 was like and THINK they have a great game that conveys it, or for that matter the green hell of 1967 ‘Nam. Now I think I’ll just go back to reading Mekong: First Light, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young or some other book instead—to paraphrase General “E-tool” Smith, a book doesn’t crash. (The General’s something of a legend; as a US Army captain he led his company in taking a VC-held town. When his rifle jammed he drew his entrenching tool and hacked at the enemy—some accounts say he killed a machine-gun team that way. “An e-tool,” he said later, “doesn’t jam.”)

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At any rate, I was dying to check out THQ and GSC Gameworld’s Seven-Years-in-Development FPS-cum-adventure S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (pronounced ess-tee-ay-el-kay-ee-ar). So I popped the DVD in, installed the game, and adjusted the graphics so my two-year-old PC could run it without the frame rate dropping below thir. Ty. Fram. Es. Per. Sec. Ond.
So now the graphics look like crap. Then what?
I was prepared to give gameplay and storyline a chance—after all, a good story is hard to come by, and even harder to buy these days I loaded up the game, got GSC’s exposition, and off we were.

In this post-apocalyptic game, it seems that after the first Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, a second explosion followed in 1996... and now in 2012 the Exclusion Zone has spawned a vast new industry of exploration. Radiation is the least of your dangers—the Zone is now a hotbed of treasure-seekers known as stalkers, soldiers keeping order (not always peacefully), and science teams wondering what the hell is going on. Anomalies, disruptions in space-time that burn, electrocute, and maim from empty air are everywhere. (I don’t yet have a video card that can handle the game on full graphical settings, even from my VERY LOW-quality pictures I’ve to stop and admire the poisoned, bleak landscape where little thrives, and nothing prospers. Trees droop. Mutants lurk. Even the birds have an eerily erratic flight path—or maybe that’s my imagination.) Into it all you come, a Stalker who wakes up with a convenient case of amnesia with only one link to your past—a PDA inscribed with the words “KILL THE STRELOK”.

But it won’t be easily finding him in the first place. This game is buggy as hell, with one of the largest modding communities I’ve seen. Seems that on top of adjusting game code to make it more, well, fun to play through, it seems they’re finishing the developers’ jobs for them. Make no mistake—this game is incomplete and crashes as often as anything. Why, GSC, why??? Are seven years not enough for you?

Don’t let that, or a two-year-old computer, stop you from exploring the Zone, though. Just remember to grab an assault rifle ASAP, and plenty of ammo.

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Sad fact of life: in these days of hyperinflated budgets, delayed games, and code in the billions and billions of lines, bugs and crashes will become MORE common, not less. First day patches, anyone?

And I’m sick and tired of games simply winking to black and dumping me at my desktop. Every time now I can exit a game with a click on EXIT TO WINDOWS I remember to breathe a sigh of relief.
And best of all, I’ve found a great software place where the prices are decent, the service great, and changes easily and sympathetically made :-) Check out the e2000 Shop on the fifth floor of Funan the IT Mall. I have its sales staff to thank for the reviews above .

A quick rant (and some praises)

I can't believe I wasted a trip to the Central Lending Library.

Sure, it was an SF-themed visit. That's why I picked up Simon Ings's Unplugged and Patrick Wood's YA novel Viaduct Child—what would a mind-upload be like? A teenaged girl in a dystopian London?

And guess what; I still don't know.

But my beef is that I wouldn't mind not knowing had I characters to care about—instead when the first twenty pages of each book yielded nothing interesting, I found myself flicking through pages after page, waiting for something you know... exciting to turn up. Something I understood.

I never found it.

It's one thing not to like a story's subject matter, or the way it is told—I survived Matthew Reilly's Seven Ancient Wonders... so it's not that I don't know how to appreciate a story!

But an SF novel, written by a famous author, not grabbing a reader in the first twenty pages?

Okay, I'm back from Reilly-land. But I think before we can care about a story and follow its characters through fire and flood, we have to at least know what that fire and flood entails, and how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Reilly tells us right off the bat that his heroes are in the running to obtain seven lost pieces of the Great Capstone and stop American and European teams from reciting a ritual in the Great Pyramid of Egypt that will bring a thousand years of world dominance to whoever does so.

Silly, I know. But we understand what's going on, and why it's so important for even an outlandish hero like Jack West, Jr. to succeed.

Which is why I read Unplugged and went... huh?

Surgically connected to their swarm of mechanical workers, architects Christopher and Joanne Yale were turning the Moon into a paradise. Now, without warning, their machines have pulled the plug.

Great.

Then I borrowed the book and read it at the pool. Yawn.

I didn't know anything more about main character Christopher Yale than I did from the blurb (the hook that induced me to borrow it in the first place). Cliffhangers? Descriptions of what it's like to command robots hooked to your brain?

Zilch.

I don't know what Ings was trying to focus on with his hero's neverending conversations, trips to a London I will never understand, and a narrator thinner than the book itself. Maybe I'm just not his target audience.

But I thought I was the target audience of Viaduct Child. We have Dushma, an unregistered orphan in a future London who lives with a Really Cruel Aunt, flees when police raid her apartment, then falls in with a gang of fellow outcasts.

Flip, flip, flip. I got three chapters in before I realised I was so bogged down in backstory I wasn't interested in the Dushma now, the Dushma who takes a stand and becomes worthy of the status of heroine.

Go read Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist instead. That book I read on the way to my camp—I was supposed to alight at Jurong East MRT, but my train went on to Boon Lay before I realised I'd missed my stop.

Now that's master storytelling. I just need to claim my taxi fare from Mr. Colfer's publishers...

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I’ve just had another encounter with the customer-be-damned school of service provision.

I live in a street with just one road leading out onto the highway—one road that bottlenecks the entire neighbourhood and needs some judicious control of wheel and gears to exit. Hasn’t been a problem for my parents...

Until a tree ups and falls across the road. A freaking TREE.

So my mom is late for her classes, and as she frantically arranges make-up sessions and tries to book a taxi—you know, a car ride that can come up to a point bypassing the fallen tree and take you on your way—if the so-called “Customer Assistants” had actually bothered to answer my call instead of putting the line on hold for five. Entire. Minutes.

In this case the National Parks Board turned out to be way faster than CityCab—the tree was clear, but only AFTER a booking had been made without the help of whoever was supposed to answer the phone. (Please note, CityCab; an automatic booking system is SUPPOSED to reduce the number of calls you have to answer—so you will be able to take the calls that are really important. The calls the customer pushes 0 (“For assistance and advance booking”) instead of 1 (for auto-booking) to make.

CityCab, the press of 0 is to get your attention—more specifically, that of a human being who will--you know--assist. If you cannot provide that, why promise?

So fine. Problem is, we can’t take our custom elsewhere—without a car, taxis are much the only way to get to church on time, seeing my dad drives to golf every Sunday. Therefore no matter what, CityCab know their income stream from us is never in doubt. Whoever makes decisions up there is aware that no matter what, they can let us down in our hour of need with impunity—because we have no choice but to fork out the fare to go the church nearly every single week.

Like it or not, we’re stuck with CityCab, its never-ending on-hold music, and a five-time repeat of “Our Customer Assistant will attend to you shortly”. Never mind that “Customer Assistance” is a cruel joke, and the line doesn’t even connect half the time I dial the number (really, Comfort/CityCab, what is it with your phone system that dial-tones every other call we make?).

I haven’t even got started on the driver who finally showed up. Apparently professionalism had been thrown out the window—the tree was gone, my mom could drive, and the driver listened as I told her that.

Then: “We specially send a taxi for you, and then you cancel like this. Why didn’t you call and cancel the booking?”

I explained that we’d already tried. Many, many times. (Have I said “Customer Assistance” is a cruel joke?)

I’m still kicking myself for my truly slow wit—I’m only able to think of smart things to say LONG afterwards. What I should have said was: If the company “specially” sends a taxi for us, why don’t they answer our “special” call asking them to cancel?

She shot an angry sigh, waved dismissively and drove off.

So here’s my own experience with the sorry state of taxi services in our fine city. True, it works well enough—but you’d better not have to call their Customer Assistance. Their lack of attention to the phone lines is a clear signal to us: just get in line like the cash cows you are.

OK...

I need an aim.

Something this blog will stand for--something my mind can make up and put into words. (My own life is boring enough as it is.) When I think of one I'll put it here.

But then again opinions are free, even if shaped by whatever psychologists want. I can bless, I can rant, and I can (just maybe) say a Gift to Humanity to be quoted for ever.

We'll see.