Oh Hubris.

It's never a good feeling to realise that you've inadvertently broken one of your own rules. Especially when that transgression comes back to bite you in the arse. For me, the rule in question was simply that I always research my technology purchases first. The jaw shaped laccerations on my buttocks: the 2.5" 250 GB hard disk sat on my desk that I have absolutely no use for and the hole in my bank account where money used to be.

To give a bit of context, I had intended to upgrade my brother's 360 with a hard drive as the 4GB internal memory is woefully inadequate. Since I'm unemployed and poor, I thought I could do this cheaply and effectively by getting any old 2.5" SATA hard drive, as used laptops, and simply formatting it appropriately. Ever since the floods in Thailand wiped out a large proportion of global hard disk manufacture,  prices had just been climbing and climbing. Since cost is such a factor I headed to eBay for an appropriate drive. Needless to say, I bid and I won.

Flash forward to this morning, the hard drive arrives and I begin the process of trying to set it up to work with the Xbox.

"What's this? Only Western Digital Drives can be made to work?! Oh... bollocks"

So now I have a 250 GB paperweight. All because I broke my own rule and didn't read up on the subject before I opened my wallet. Things have been going a bit too well, and I got a bit too cocky I suppose. Well, lesson learned.

First Impressions and Fitting the Skidmarx GPz-style Nosecone

Well, it took nigh on six weeks to arrive, but finally my GPz Nosecone (or bikini/cockpit fairing) arrived. First impressions were mixed. Packaging wise, it was reasonably well packed in a roomy box, with the fairing, screen and mounting kit all being supplied in separate bags. Both the fairing and screen are reasonably thick and feel quite sturdy. The only issue I had was that the inside of the fairing was a bit rough and I cut myself a couple of times on the rough fiberglass. The universal fixing kit was straightforward to assemble and was again made sturdily. None of the brackets felt at all flimsy. 

The instructions however, left a little to be desired as they were clearly a handdrawn diagram of the fixing kit that had been photocopied. As such, it was hard to really work out anything beyond the basics. Still, as I said, the fixing kit was reasonably simple to work out and the whole assembly is hardly rocket science.

So, overall, the nosecone seemed well worth the £50-odd pounds I paid for it, it may be a bit rough on the inside, but it's robust and the outside is well finished, The sculpt is good too, to the point where it looks like it was molded from a Z1100R nosecone. Obviously, there's the matter of the six weeks I had to wait for it, but I get the feeling that was an error on the part of the place I ordered from, rather than being typical.

Now, that's the boring standard stuff out of the way. As is always the case with these things, I ran into a couple of issues fitting the nosecone to my bike. The most pressing being the fact that the 'scoops' that cover the radiator from the sides were hitting the fairing when it was trial fitted on all but the most minimal amount of steering lock. Since the scoops are one of my favorite pieces of styling on the bike, they weren't going anywhere.

As the scoops were staying, the fairing itself needed to be modified. Working with my Dad, we made up a template using the fairing's existing curvature, to keep it looking as standard as possible, and I got to work with the Dremel. I used a cutting wheel to chop down the lower part of the fairing, using the template to keep it from looking like a hack job. With one side done, the template was transferred over. By measuring the distance from the template edge to the end of the fairing (in three different places along the template) the first time, it was a simple case of making the measurements match on the other side, to keep things symmetrical. Once I was finished cutting (and the fiberglass dust had dispersed) I got busy sanding the burr off the edges. The job wasn't perfect, but then this was my first time reshaping a body panel and I'm pretty impressed with how it came out. It doesn't look like a total hack job, and once an edging trim goes on, it'll look even better. 

That's before it was fully sanded, there is some discolouration to the gelcoat where I made the cut.

After that, assembly went pretty well. Holes were marked and drilled and the fairing was united with its mounting kit. My bike's idiosyncrasies weren't done with though. Good thing, too. It's boring when things just bolt together! The way the different bolts involved sat, it was impossible to fit the fairing with the headlight in place. You need to be able to reach inside the bowl to do-up the mounting bolts (as used by the fairing) and once the fairing is in place it is impossible to put the front of the headlight back on. There seems to be a provision to get around this on some of the bracketry, but in practice, once every is in place and tightened up, it would be impossible to gain access to the bolts needed. Still, this problem was easily solved by cutting the ends from two of the brackets, changing the slotted holes going the headlight into more of an open fork arrangement. This lets the fairing be mounted by backing off, rather than totally removing, the headlight bolts. 

With this done, all that was needed was to move the bike's indicators out a little so that they stuck past the fairing and it was finished.

Well, apart from one last little finishing touch to tie it in.

E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy Review

E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy

Developed and Published by Streum On Studio

Available from Steam: £14.99

“It’s true that I killed my Mentor... and yet, I am not his murderer”: That first standout line spoken by the player character perfectly sums up E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy. The entire game is a long procession of “what the hell is that supposed to mean?” moments, punctuated by some really rather satisfying running and gunning... and occasionally slashing. 

E.Y.E. is an FPS very much in the mould of the original Deus Ex. The dystopian cyberpunk setting, the ability to upgrade your character’s abilities through augmentation and the effect of stats as modifiers upon your actions in the world, speed of movement, damage delivered, weapon accuracy, etc, all, for better or worse, if not directly lifted then heavily inspired by Ion Storm’s magnum opus.

The strange assortment of quotes on the loading screens is a nice touch.

However, where Deus Ex was and RPG that played like a shooter, E.Y.E is very much a shooter with RPG elements. Thankfully, despite all the weirdness, E.Y.E. works very well as a shooter. The ranged weaponry has a very retro, chunky feel to them. The guns feel very deliberate, which gives the impression of real weight. The effect of recoil on aim, the sounds of the weaponry and even the animation of player’s hand being wrenched back by recoil, all mean that even the basic pistol never feels like a peashooter.

Okay...

Unfortunately the combat isn’t all great. The game allows access a small selection of melee weapons beyond the default, last resort sword, but there’s never really any reason to use them in anger. The melee combat just doesn’t feel right, something that’s often a problem in first person games. Enemies don’t react to being hit, and the weapon swinging animations really don’t inspire any feeling of being embroiled in a hand to hand battle to the death. This is especially apparent when using the conceptually badass dual katanas. There is the option to carry a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. This initially seems like a cool idea, until it becomes clear that it’s just the worst of both worlds; you can’t aim with the pistol nor can you block with the sword. Incidentally, blocking bullets whilst you run for cover is the only real use for the melee weapons during the heavy combat segments. 

With the combat covered, so ends the only part of E.Y.E that makes any sense. The game is clearly set in a cyberpunk dystopia, this much is obvious through the huge neon signs and urban decay evident in some of the level design, and the ubiquity of the use of the word ‘cyber’ as a prefix: cyberlegs, cyberarms, cyberbrain, you get the idea. The game’s main ‘minigame’, the hacking mechanic. Playing like a turned based RPG, issuing commands to reduce your enemy’s stats, most importantly HP, you can hack pretty much anything that has electronics in it. ATMs, Turrets, Doors, even some enemy soldiers can be remotely hacked, possessed, or destroyed. This may sound like it makes perfect sense, and it does, until the first time you possess an ATM or a console and just sit there, functionless. Even stranger is the fact that the other side to the ability to hack anything is the fact that they can counter-hack you if you fail. Getting your mind hacked by an ATM is embarrassing, but being killed by a door’s viral counter-attack is just plain horrible.

Cyberdemon,  is that you?

The bizarreness of the hacking mechanic can’t hold a candle to the story and the specifics of the story however. It’s impossible to understand what is actually going on. The relation between you and the factions seems to change from level to level. The people you were fighting in one stage will become allies in the next. Characters will also die then reappear in later levels. The dialogue just makes things even more complicated. You can often make responses that have no relation to what you were just told. By the same token, NPCs will often respond to questions with nonsense. The weirdness of the dialogue system was crystallised for me when I got an achievement for apparently talking someone into killing himself, I had no idea that that was what I was doing!

All of this comes back to the “what the hell?!” at the core of the game. I normally feel fairly comfortable dealing with the unconventional and obtuse, and can usually tell when something is doing it on purpose, or when it’s just badly put together. E.Y.E is an exception. I really can’t tell if it’s doing all of this deliberately or not. The environments are really well put together and atmospheric, the gun combat is fun, and the elements like the hacking mechanic are well realised. There are other nice touches, like being able to return to the main hub area to buy unlocks at any time, or being able to research new skill bonuses and items after picking up certain items from downed enemies. All of these things point to competent design. Yet other elements seem like someone on the team went on a weeklong bender, slowing only to watch Blade Runner, play Deus Ex and Quake, and then at some point, their body and brain worked in concert to vomit the whole mess out and then somehow that became the rest of the game. Having said all this, with the recurring mentions of madness and insanity, there’s just enough strength, between these and the good parts of the game to force me to give pause and wonder if the nonsensical stuff is meant to be some sort of commentary on insanity and though it’s badly implemented, it is nevertheless deliberate. That’s the problem; E.Y.E works a little too well at its best to totally write the weirdness off as being the accidental product of shoddy design.

All of this aside, E.Y.E does have its weaknesses beyond just being odd. The game uses the Source engine in order to pull off some really big environments. Something that it does very well, the environments are usually well realised, and have some great atmosphere. The problem with this is that the environments feel needlessly big. The levels can be quite sparse, with long periods of nothing happening, as there are no NPCs to be found. This combines with a low movement speed, further compounded if you take a heavy loadout, to mean that long periods can be spent walking from place to place doing nothing. Another problem can come from getting lost, levels can often look very bland, atmospheric yes, but bland nevertheless, so it can be hard to work out where to go, especially as levels can involve a lot of backtracking, and there is no map. Even more annoyingly, it can be hard to work out what is interactive and what isn’t. One level had me lost for twenty minutes because the door I was meant to open looked like all the inoperable doors throughout the rest of the level. In the end, I only worked out what to do after resorting to running along the walls hitting the enter key over and over. You shouldn’t have to be channelling the spirit of looking for hidden doors Doom to make required progress in a game from 2011.

This is all especially damning when you compare the level design of E.Y.E to the poster child for Source: Half Life 2. HL2 had its fair share of large environments, but it at least had the strength of design to make the path forward clear without looking like it was spoon feeding you. Admittedly, E.Y.E is a less linear proposition, but it’s far from an open world sandbox, and it wouldn’t have killed them to make the paths to the goals a little clearer.

With HL2 in mind, much of E.Y.E feels like it would have been better off being a good mod, rather than a fully fledged game. The graphics, for instance, are far from bad, but they definitely show off the indie resources. Moreover, the game’s foibles would be less of a problem in the context of a mod rather than a standalone game. Of course, being an indie title does impose certain limitations, but given the quality of indie titles in recent years, and the ingenuity that has been shown in relation to making the best of limited resources, I feel that the days of simply overlooking problems because a game is independently made are over.

Faux product placement?

I really enjoy some parts of E.Y.E, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the gun handling was some of the best I’ve seen in a modern FPS in quite a while. Whilst other aspects, like the hacking mechanic and the ability to choose your own loadout of armour (heavy, medium, light) and weapons (as much as you can fit in the inventory slots with a generous weight limit) give different options of how to approach a situation. However, it’s just a little too nonsensical and a little too frustrating to be called anything other than alright. If the game was a straight FPS, then the weirdness would be more tolerable, but with the involvement of the RPG elements comes a much greater emphasis on story and setting. If it’s going to have these things, then the story has to at least be framed in a way that means it can be followed, even if it is odd, and it’s in this requirement that E.Y.E really falls down. It’s far from a failure, and if it’s on sale I’d say check it out, just to see how strange a game can get, as the shooting is fun and it isn’t fundamentally broken in any way. But that’s the only possible recommendation I can give it.

6/10.

On Reviews

Reviews are not fact. Reviews are opinion. Good reviews are, in turn, substantiated opinion. Too many people expect reviewers to be objective and impartial, but that simply isn't their job. The reviewer's job is to provide an insight to the quality of a product or service, insight that made valuable by that reviewer's own knowledge and experience of the field. Any review that tries to be objective precludes the use of this valuable resource of experience, because experience itself is inherently subjective. Moreover, a review exists to highlight the qualitative as opposed to quantitative aspects of the product. Anyone can read raw figures, that doesn't require a reviewer. No, a reviewer is there to convey all the aspects of a product that raw, objective figures cannot explain. 

This is not to say that a reviewer should just make wild assertions. A good reviewer needs to be aware of their own biases, and should seek to find the reasons behind their opinions, as substantiation allows the reader to understand where the reviewer is coming from, and if the complaints being raised are likely to effect them. For instance, I often find that many FPS games have the problem of guns that 'feel' weak. Through a combination of sound design, animation and enemy reaction, it can feel like shots are having little effect, this is something that can really irritate me. By explaining this factor to be the reason why I 'don't like the gun play' though, others can work out whether or not they're likely to feel the same. Substantiating one's views, is key, in my opinion at least, to a quality review. 

Any views that a reviewer holds that can't be substantiated, should be clarified as such. To go back to games, if a game feels 'off' in some way that can't be explained by design or mechanical choices, the reviewer must decide whether it's a big enough gripe to mention at all. If it is, a good reviewer will make it plain that it is just a feeling. This is a two way street though, and if audiences want reviews that are well written don't have every tiny observation being framed with, "In my opinion...", then they need to have a modicum of intelligence when they read reviews, rather than taking everything written as pure, objective, fact. 

As someone who would very much like to earn their living by writing reviews, this is how I view the role of the reviewer. The reason I want to review is because I wish to use what little insight I have to help and inform others, and I feel very strongly that any opinion that I express must be substantiated in order to best reach this end. It's the experience and explanation that go with a good reviewer's opinions that makes them worthwhile. Without those, they're little more than a glorified pub loud-mouth.

Addendum: The gaming journalist/blogger Jim Sterling, a man whom I very much respect as a reviewer, wrote an example of an 'objective' review as a two-fingered salute to everyone who demands objective reviews. It's very good and highlights the problems of demanding objectivity in reviews. Find it here

Caution: Motorcycle Based Introspection Ahead

Like all the best prog bands, I feel that the sometimes there's no avoiding a voyage up one's own arse, no matter how ill-advised said voyage may be. Today's topic came to mind whilst I was surveying an all too familiar sight: my bike sans its bodywork (and as an added bonus, its rear suspension). I started wondering why riding is such an important thing for me. Why I invest so much time and effort into my bike; why, when the vast majority did the driving route and got a boring little hatchback shitbox, I felt the need to learn to ride and have the joys of freezing my nads off in the winter and getting wet when it rains. As well as never having to wait in a traffic jam or be expected to give people lifts places. It's all good.

I can't imagine not being a biker, but I don't know where the impetus came from. Yes, my Dad had bikes and was heavy into them, but it was 8 years after he sold his last one when I bought my first. The bikes he had in my lifetime were very much a comedown from his biking heyday too. He had a CBX550 when I was very young, which I can remember precisely two things about: him replacing the starter motor in the sun on the drive outside the house we lived in then, and being told to "get away from that fucking exhaust!" when I was about to touch said fucking exhaust... for some reason, after he'd just come home and it was still massively hot. The last bike he had I remember even less about: only that the switchgear was fascinating to me, and that the clocks and idiot lights (from the far off future of the 80s) had some sort of sci-fi quality in the mind of my younger self. For reference, the bike was a CX500EC, also known as the 'plastic maggot', owing to the fact that though it was reliable and hardy, it was also "dull and lifeless". The father's words, not mine.  

So here I am a bit nonplussed. One of the biggest parts of my life, my hobby, my passion, my transport, a huge sink of my time and money; something that often informs how I dress, act and how I look at the world; a huge part of the rich tapestry that is Jon ( XD )  and I have no idea what made me do it. But maybe, I'm over-complicating this by trying to look for a key underlying cause. Maybe its what's left of  the historian in me trying to trace the events backwards in order to divine a  chain of causality which led me from there to here. It could just be that I wanted to. Yeah, that seems about right. I became a biker because I wanted to. 

So I became  I biker because I wanted to, and if I want to do something then (within reason) I do it. So that answers that, but the question remains, why is it so important to me? Well, I think I may have answered that on the way here. Bikes and riding things that massively inform many aspects of my life. I also owe almost all of my practical knowledge to my bikes. Working on them, more than anything has given me not only the knowledge needed to embark on mechanical and electronic tasks, but also the practical mindset which colours how I approach not only tasks, but the world as a whole. How can something that has added so much to my life be anything other than important? That's not to say that its taken over, the sheer amount of stuff I've written about games and models and films is testament to that. Nevertheless, biking's importance in my life is a direct consequence of the huge part it plays in it.

Moreover... bikes are fun and go fast and make a lot of noise and I love them!

Out of Season Game Review: Costume Quest + Grubbins on Ice DLC (PC)

Unsurprisingly, holiday themed titles aren't the first things that spring to mind when looking for a quality game. Ignoring the fact that they simply aren't all that common, holiday games suffer from the problem of holiday films: they're only really relevant for part of the year. Not to mention the inherent tackiness of pretty much anything that's a holiday tie-in. Still, it wouldn't be much of a world if expectations always held true. So hooray for Costume Quest, a short, sweet, Halloween themed RPG that's so good, it didn't feel at all weird to be playing it in November.

In the broadest possible terms, Costume Quest is a JRPG style of game with turn based combat, a limited amount of environmental exploration and item collection. However, trying to talk about it in these genre based or purely mechanical terms really misses the point. The main draw of this game has to be its charm. Everything is bright and colourful, the music appropriately upbeat and, when appropriate, somewhat spooky. A bit like Scooby Doo in that respect. 

Beyond the bright colours, the visuals really convey the spirit of the game. On the maps themselves, things are heavily stylised and cute, the kids themselves having massive heads, big smiles and huge eyes poking out of their cute, appropriately bad looking, costumes. Things change when you get into battle though. The dopey looking cardboard and rag costumes suddenly become huge, living, badass versions of whatever they were meant to represent. It never gets old watching the cardboard robot costume turn into a cross between Megas and a Tau Crisis battle suit from Warhammer. The best part is that there is no disconnect. Despite the change in graphical styles, from ultra-cutesy to Toho style mega monster brawl when you enter a battle, it really fits together well. It's reminiscent of 'Good Times with Weapons', the South Park episode which shifts into an anime style to show how the kids see themselves, then back to the normal animation for how the rest of the world sees what they're doing. Though Costume Quest does the whole transition a million times better... and has a lot less violence... and fewer profanities.

The awesome visual style aside, the battles are simple turn based affairs: each costume has a single normal attack which can be boosted through a quick time event. Every three turns you can unleash that costume's special ability, which may be a a super attack, shield, heal or whatever. Another interesting element of the battle system is that there is no game over for losing a battle in this game, and you may run from any battle at any time, even the final boss battle. This not only fits win well with the whimsical style of the game, it also means that if you go into a battle with the wrong costumes equipped (some boss battles require you to have certain abilities), it's not a big deal just to leave, re-equip and come back. This also means that battles don't turn into hour-long slugfests as can happen in some other turn-based combat systems, because if things aren't going right, you can just try something else instead of settling into a long, repetitive, slog.

The costume mechanic really makes battles fun to watch, a mech fighting beside the Statue of Liberty and a Ninja is really a sight to behold, especially when the Statue heals everyone and a disembodied Lincoln head flies in on a red, white and blue-burst background. On the overworld, the costumes aid exploration with certain costumes having abilities, such as the Robot's skates and the Space Warrior's light, which can open up new areas. It can get a little annoying to have to keep opening up the costume menu to change every time a specific obstacle appears, but the change system is so quick that it's never more than a minor irritation. Though on a personal note, I did use the robot's skates as much as possible to move more quickly around the map, so I found that the robot got a bit more screen time in battles than I would have liked just because I forgot to switch costumes before I started a battle.

Even though the style, themes and gameplay could not be any further apart, Costume Quest really reminds me of Nation Red insofar as they're both games that have a strong focus on doing a few things really well, rather than trying to cram in as many badly implemented features as possible. There's a real elegance of design here, a restraint, that shines through from almost every element of the game. It's shown most by the length of the game itself, which clocks in at around six hours and that's to do nigh-on everything in the main game and the DLC. That's very short for a game of this type, but the game doesn't feel like it needs to be longer. The lack of length also makes for good pacing, the game never drags on or feels padded. It also means that the simple battle system feels elegant rather than restrictive, something that would likely happen if the game were longer. Really, it's reminiscent of watching a series of Blackadder: as much as you'd like more, its good to know that it never got the chance to go a little too far, to jump the shark. Costume Quest, like Blackadder, and unlike this analogy, only lasts as long as is necessary for maximum enjoyment, and not a moment longer.

However, they did continue Costume Quest with a DLC pack (just going to avoid the Blackadder holiday special comparison). The Steam version of Costume Quest includes the Grubbins on Ice DLC as part of the package, which is just as well really, because it is very much more of the same. It offers three new costumes, a little more story and a new area that is about on-par with one of the three main areas from the main game. Taken as part of the whole, Grubbins on Ice is a good addition to Costume Quest, playing both back to back really does stop the game from feeling short. However, it's difficult to recommend buying Grubbins on Ice separately. Yes, it provides about as much content as a third of the main game, but the main game itself is very short. Still, as part of the package on the PC, it's a good little addition to the game. 

Costume Quest has something for all but those with the coldest, deadest, of hearts... and those that really hate turn based combat. As a charming, fun little game full of great ideas that's still cheaper than a trip to the cinema, it's definitely worth a look.

9/10