I was sitting here, absent-mindedly drinking my tea and feeling slightly morose that I am just getting over flu (and in the summer to boot when the weather is just starting to improve), when I realised that I hadn't written a blog in over a month (apologies, I just forget sometimes) and I might as well write about something topical. So, with this big event called the Electronic Entertainment Exposition just around about finished for this year, it seemed the perfect opportunity. It felt slightly more like E3 this year than it did last year (despite, of course, the absence of various people who are now off doing other things), mainly because the show was held inside the LA Convention Center, which is just a building with the scale and grandeur necessary to lend weight to the event.

The Big Three

All of them claimed (as usual) that they were the most innovative, original and had gained the biggest profits. Microsoft decided that they would blatantly copy the Mii system on the Wii with their new Xbox Avatar system, down to the way the little people look, and having the Avatars star in various games. They also slightly took inspiration from PlayStation 3's Home, by having people chat to each other and play together, etc. Microsoft also had a bevy of games to showcase, from Fallout 3 to Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. My personal favourite was Fallout 3, which I am loving the retro-futuristic 1950's style (as though envisaging the future as was predicted in the 50's). They also had a variety of Live Arcade games, such as Portal: Still Alive, which I am guessing is a half-sequel with extra test chambers and challenges. Overall, a good conference.

Nintendo was rather lacklustre in several ways. They announced a remarkably large selection of new games and expansions and already known titles, such as a new Animal Crossing, GTA: Chinatown on the DS, Shawn White Snowboarding and Wii Music. However, although it is impossible to dent Nintendo's incredibly impressive financial record (which showed year upon year sales increases), all of their games have become extremely casual, pick-up-and-play titles. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this, and it is bound to rake in huge amounts of cash, many of the games didn't look like they would have long-lasting appeal. Focusing on the casual market is financially profitable, but it won't get people ever really excited.

Sony also had a large selection of game announcements and showcases, such as Resistance 2 (which had a 500ft monster smashing about), Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet and MAG (Massive Action Game, which apparently will support over 200 players in the same FPS). They showed off their sales figures though the medium of a LittleBigPlanet level, which was infinitely fun and nifty way of putting across both the game and the often dull numbers and financial results. They talked about how great the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player was, and how amazing the PSP was generally because of the things you could do with it (although I'm not sure what they were specifically). An interesting conference again. If there had to be a winner (and there always does), then I would say Micro/Sony.

Any Other Business

The actual keynote address by the governor of Texas attracted a very meagre crowd (since he was incredibly obsessed with the Texan game development industry specifically), as did the speech by the ESA's president (which had a good rhetoric, but did really address some of the problems facing E3, such as dwindling attendance). Considering that Actiblizzard (I am going to constantly refer to them as that from now on) decided to coincidentally hold their own press junket just down the road from E3 at exactly the same time, many journalists hot-footed their way over to find out about a new Wolfenstein, Guitar Hero: World Tour and much else besides, leaving the ESA to cruise along in the slow lane the following morning. Business never changes.

So, on the one hand it was nothing like E3, and on the other, it remained true to form, or at least, the form which has been developing since 2007. Will E3 return next year? I think so, but the ESA will really have to think up some changes to the layout and style of the convention if it is going to survive into the next decade. With other events such as the Tokyo Game Show, the Consumer Electronics Show and E for All (which sounds to me like an advertisement offering drugs to people of all ages), E3 will have to work hard to show that it is still the best in the business.

And no one calls us to move on,
And no one forces down our eyes,
And no one speaks, and no one tries,
And no one flies around the Sun.

A distinctly non-gaming related weblog today mainly, so you will have to bear with me whilst I get all nostalgic. To be perfectly frank, I haven't really done a whole lot of gaming recently, what with exams and revision and getting a temporary job for the next month and attempting (and failing miserably) to get a haircut (alright, I'll admit that didn't take up much time). The only things I have been playing are Audiosurf, which I'm still pretty addicted to, and occasionally playing some Trackmania Nations Forever or Portal via Steam, naturally. Trackmania is pretty excellent, considering it is totally free, so I recommend that. No, yesterday was quite a sad day for me. I have just moved out of my University Hall of Residence, which means that my first year of university has officially come to an end. My temporary, but full-time job I have landed started today, and although my residential contract in Soton doesn't end until the end of June, I had to vacate yesterday, since the job is back home in Oxfordshire. Almost everyone else in my hall is still down there, basking in the wonderful sunshine and relaxing by doing nothing much. Instead, I'm stuck in an office from nine 'till five, this being my first truly solid work of my life. Dolly Parton hit the nail on the head: "what a way to make a living". It wasn't terrible: I just sat in the office at County Hall all day typing up things. Tomorrow I get to phone people, the excitement doesn't stop. Still, at least it keeps the money rolling in I suppose.

It's been a reasonably eventful first year, and I have loved almost every second of it. It was seriously excellent. Living in hall is something you are never going to forget for the rest of your life; I seriously doubt I will forget it. The many, many people you meet (and then instantly forget their names), the time that passes so incredibly quickly (or slowly during the dullest lectures), the food you cook (or don't, as the case may be), the 3-4am fire alarms that force you to stand outside in the pouring rain... money can't buy these kind of things. Well, on second thoughts it can, it costs slightly over £3,000, but you get the principle of what I am saying. Experiences that will haunt you to the grave. And it was sad that it was all over for this year. It will be back next year, but it won't be the same, since I won't be in a building with over 200 people, but a rented house.

It is also hellish when you contemplate just how much university costs. There is the tuition fees, then the accommodation fees, and then the maintenance loan to help support you through the year with food and clothing. After three years, the average student wracks up about £15,000 worth of debt which will eventually need repaying to the Student Loans Company (as long as you earn about £15,000 per annum). Anyway, I now return to gaming. Since I've got employment and am making some money, I judge myself to be entitled to a reward. I'm thinking of first buying Tropico, because I played the demo some time ago and it was fantastic, and you can get the Gold edition at Amazon for just £5. However, I also want to get a 'new' game. When I get my new Gig of RAM, my computer should be able to store a bit more memory, but it still won't be close to playing Crysis, so I'm weighing up several games. Either World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4, Assassins Creed or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I know that last one is getting slightly older now as well, but I missed out the first time around.

I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 yesterday. It has changed, seemingly, absolutely nothing (apart from removing the address bar on Windows Explorer, for some unknown reason). How utterly pointless. Isn't it amazing what Microsoft decides to spend their money on? I mean, not on stuff like solving issues with the incredibly buggy Internet Explorer 7 (so buggy, that it has to be uninstalled before Service Pack 3 could be installed, and then reinstalled after that. If you don't, it is impossible to ever uninstall Internet Explorer), or addressing any of the still quite frequent random crashes and lockups that have perennially affected XP. Well, I suppose they want to push Windows Vista now (a window with a view, no doubt). I happen own Windows Vista Home Premium (got it for the wonderfully cheap price of £25), but I am very reluctant to install it on my system at the moment, due to the continuing issues surrounding playing video games on the system. Games using the Source or Doom engine suffer a noticeable drop in framerate, because the graphic processing unit drivers are not as matured as those in XP. There are also a bunch of errors within older games for systems such as 98 and 2000/Me. Service Pack 1 was supposed to help, but it appears it did not.

Anyway, I think that some time in the future (no idea precisely when), I'm going to get some more physical memory for my computer. It's relatively cheap, and I think it will solve an important issue I have recently discovered. For some bizarre reason, Norton AntiVirus, even when it is in standby mode, uses a hell of a lot of memory, even when it isn't doing anything. Now, this only affects games which are using sizable chunks of memory, such as Half-Life 2: Episode 2, where the memory is liable to time-out, stating a paged-pool error. I had uninstalled Norton, but I was naturally frightened to be facing the infinite, open front that the Internet is without the Army of Norton firewall to stand behind, and so I soon reinstalled it. Getting some extra memory should create enough free space to allow both to run without overflowing. I also need to work out how to connect my second hard-drive, which the computer company provided when my old one failed (though they didn't give me the old one back, like I wanted. Bastards, it's probably sitting on a skip right at this moment. And I bet I could have recovered some of the lost data on it.

On an utterly unrelated side-note, I've got a Logic test this Thursday. It's the only part of Philosophy I don't intuitively get, because it's so mathematical (Statement Logic: Proofs, from that great C. Steven Layman tome, "The Power of Logic"). I've got to get 46 or over in order to pass that section of the course. Eek.

Now the moon is almost hidden,
The stars are beginning to hide,
The fortunetelling lady,
Has even taken all her things inside.
All except for Cain and Abel,
And the hunchback of Notre Dame,
Everybody is making love,
Or else expecting rain.
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing,
He's getting ready for the show,
He's going to the carnival tonight on,
Desolation Row.

1. I own a PC.
2. I do not own a console.
3. I have never owned a console.
4. I never have any intention of buying a console.
5. There is still at least six months until the PC version comes out (if indeed, it does come out, which seems highly likely).
6. Go figure.

You never turned around to see the frowns,
On the jugglers and the clowns, when they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain't no good,
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat,
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,
Ain't it hard when you discover that,
He really wasn't where it's at,
After he took from you everything he could steal.

On a side, completely unrelated note, Nvidia motherboard drivers are the most annoying things. For some reason, the Nvidia Firewall (the most useless piece of software since a "Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit") was causing my computer to constantly restart or Blue Screen of Death every hour, so I had to run Verifier.exe to attempt to find the problem, before finally uninstalling the Nvidia drivers and then reinstalling them without the Firewall and networking controller programme. Thankfully, I think that this has solved the problem. Have fun playing GTA.

EDIT: I just saw one of the in-game movies that GameSpot just put up, and do you know what was playing on the radio? "The Seeker" by The Who. That's it, I'm officially sold.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

*Looks at the number of forum posts he has made (i.e 666). Shivers.*

Well... Yes. It was bound to happen eventually I suppose. Here's an utterly unrelated, obscure pop-culture reference which has no place here for you, Number 1. "What kind of a shop doesn't have Alpen?" If you know where that's from, very well done. I've only just got around to watching it.

On a completely different subject yet again, vaguely remember this guy?

Yes, it's Alan Wake, suave, sophisticated, totally unknown by all, the waking dead, International Man of Mystery. It's been quite a time since we've last seen him. It's been even longer since we've heard anything from his developers, Remedy Entertainment, whose last word on when this game would finally be released was "when it's done". While that might be ok for the guys sitting in the office, working on the game and seeing it develop, for the ordinary man who hasn't seen or heard anything new about anything concerning the game for quite a while, it's rather irritating and disconcerting. On their official forums, a poll of users has shown 40% to believe the game will be released sometime in the autumn of this year, but another 20% are more pessimistic, guessing 2010 or beyond. I quote Jeff Gerstmann when he once said "that game is never going to get released", because at the moment, it feels like it.

One of the slightly controversial parts of the development of Alan Wake was the announcement that the game would be only available for Windows Vista (as well as the Xbox 360), yet would probably still be compatible with DirectX 9, as well as 10. The developers have said that this is because only Vista will be good enough to run the game. Furthermore, they said that quad-core processors will be the most effective for computing the vast array of sums required to produce the near photo-realistic scenery. So people with Windows XP, as well as single, or even dual-core processors won't get the full and supposedly impressive effects. So far of course, we can be dream about these effects, as well as the free-roaming square miles of Washington State wilderness.

Amazon.com has put up a provisional release date of October 1st this year, but since they have been continually pushing back the date with the passing of each economic quarter, their predictions cannot be fully trusted. Will this game ever be released? Will it hover in the background like some kind of malevolent man from Seattle lurking in the shadows? Only time will (eventually, possibly, hopefully) tell.

In these enlightened days of worldwide media, constant advertising and volatile international stock markets, the world has become saturated with various marketing lingo, though we often fail to notice it. All of this is subtly assaulting our minds with constant subliminal messages, almost all of it whispering exactly the same thing; "BUY ME". However, marketing has gone beyond simply being an exercise in enticing the consumer to buy a particular product. It now expands to fill all aspects of the individual's life, so in reality you are being encouraged to buy into a particular mindset and lifestyle. Here then, I attempt to decipher some real and true meaning from the mountains of Gamespeak-related marketing jargon. Please note that this is intended merely for the purposes of satire.

Long-running successful franchise: Limitless pot of gold. No matter how awful the games, someone is bound to buy them.

Superior graphics: Superior to, say, a greyscale game on the ZX Spectrum.

Release date: The only date you can be sure that the game will not be released on.

Gaming experience: It's like a Buddhist or Hippy experience, dude, in that it's metaphysical and totally mental for the gamer, man.

Single player: You are charged for buying the game in the first place.

Cooperative multiplayer: You are occasionally charged for extras and add-ons as well.

Massively multiplayer: You are constantly charged permanent subscription fees.

Intense action: In that a game of Minesweeper has lots of intense action.

Series: Each new game is a faithful replication of the previous incarnation.

Press statement: As close to blatantly lying through your teeth as you can get, without actually doing it.

Announcement: Someone has whispered something to someone else during a coffee break.

Official announcement: A boss has coughed whilst making a passing comment at a board meeting.

Exclusive: This game will be an exclusive, for as long as it continues to rake in the cash. After that it's a free-for-all.

Multiplatform: Like the plague, or Spanish flu, this game will spread throughout the world and infect everything in its path. Flee in terror!

Publishers: The middlemen who just publish the game, and therefore naturally get the vast majority of the profits.

Developers: The guys who actually did the real work and made the game, and therefore get a small fraction of the profits.

Consumers: It is pretended that these guys matter, but frankly they are only seen as mindless sheep.

Investors: The only 'real' guys who actually matter in the corporate world. What they decide is law.

Downloadable content: A few needless extras, sold at extortionate prices, which should have been included in the original game.

Worldwide launch: Launched simultaneously worldwide, apart from the US, which doesn't count, and Japan, where it was released last year.

In-game advertising: These words will never issue from executive's lips. If they have to refer to it, it will be called "a marketing presence".

UPDATE: Spotlight: Focus all of your worldly attention upon this game. The rest of our catalogue can get stuffed. For the timebeing, this is all we are willing to talk about.

Expansion pack: Adds one or two new things which are of merely novelty value, and their appeal lasts five minutes, maybe.

Intuitive design: In that the design of a garden hose or a teacup is extremely intuitive.

Faithful representation: Looks nothing at all like the screenshots had suggested.

Specifications/System requirements: Written in the smallest possible legal font, crammed into the bottom left-hand corner of the box, so as not to scare the unwary or those with weak hearts.

If you have any other examples of this kind of infectious marketing Gamespeak, feel free to post them in the comments. Many thanks.