Affectionate Diary

It’s been, like, fucking ages since Affectionate Diary was really pushing the exclusive envelope of exclusive, definitive reviews. I think this is mostly because my own writing had become far too obscene and obscure for me to finish the first paragraph of just about any review, so you all have my sincere apologies for that. I also ended up playing Forza 3 for like a whole fucking year and then Gran Turismo 5 for six months after that, and despite starting at least three reviews for GT5, I never got near to finishing one. Games came and went and I wrote bits and pieces here and there, but nothing felt ‘right’ to publish, really.

I think this is down to lots of stuff, but one key idea is that originally, Affectionate Diary was satire. It was a piss-take of the then-current state of game reviews – their overt and covert obligations, their language, their apparent short-sightedness, the blinkered cultural contexts, the assumption of shared (and tiny) reference bases, the lack of discrimination between design integrity and glossy effect, or spectacle and sophistication. I mean, we have a situation now where, from my point of view, the majoirty of professional game reviewers have appalling taste in games. They also have appalling taste in films, books and music, judging by reviews for things like Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain. Obviously, what this really means is that as a grumpy old cunt and I’m out of touch with the mainstream. Thing is, I’m not interested in it, nor am I that enlivened by the insights from reviewers dedicated to the increasingly dubious ‘experiential’ output of AAA game publishing – LA Noire cemented this for me. No-one mentioned that it was JUST FUCKING CUTSCENES AND WANDERING AROUND until the comment threads built up post-release. The *real* review is in there, not in the copy of the editorially-minded few that have paid writing positions, nor the utterly ill-equipped youths that watched LA Confidential, and not Double Indemnity, before reviewing it to give themselves some amazingly dubious qualification to comment on game hell-bent on being a shit film.

The idea that one single opinion should determine whether or not a game is good is bullshit, yeah? So my contribution to Affectionate Diary set about making sure it was obvious that my reviews were the opinion of a madman, the opinion of an obsessive with strict and certain prejudices, unreasonable tastes and astonishing capacities to endlessly play particular genres based purely on genre rather than objectively questionable metrics like ‘game quality’ or ‘production values’ or ‘polish’. In my own way, I wanted to fight back against review-lead media, which is now almost completely news-lead media, where rigour and balls and insight is rare, and where tabloid-like sensation drives the hits. Most websites will attest that the right review at the right time, even one that’s well-written and not a fucking instruction manual, will give a traffic spike to make their quoted average UUs and PIs seem as if that outlet is on a par with The Mail on a seriously trolling Jan Moir day, but ultimately, this doesn’t make me particularly happy, nor does it satisfy my thirst to read meaningful content.

As an old gamer, I don’t actually have a media outlet that caters for my tastes. I know what will work, and I rely on the testimony of players, rather than writers, to help me chose when I can’t work out if something’s worth playing. Now, that’s actually a bit of a lie, as I do trust some writers that I know personally, or who I’ve followed for ages, but there’s precious few of them and to be frank, I’d rather they didn’t write reviews at all. I’d much prefer them to write about games rather than appraising them, and had a lot more opportunities to properly express their passions and insights for the medium. But it seems that doesn’t generate the advertising serves the whole online economy utterly relies upon. That’s as sad an indictment of the audience as it is the media, but it’s still the status quo. Who has the real opportunity to change? And no, I won’t ‘like’ your outlet on fucking Facebook.

I kinda wish I had the balls to name or shame the people and outlets I like and don’t like, but I won’t, for fear of upsetting generally nice and decent people who only commit the crime of mediocrity, especially considering the judging context is my own set of seriously disturbed and batshit mental criteria.

SO ANYWAY if I am a grumpy, disaffected bastard, maybe it’s time to stop reviewing and start writing something else. Goodbye, I love you all. Especially the real commenters.

NOW FUCK OFF. I’VE GOT NUFF DWG3 GRINDING TO DO.

[21]

First, let me say FUCK YOU. There, that’s all I’ve got. That’s all the anger I have left in me. Nothing affects me anymore. There is so much fucking shit everywhere and anywhere that gamers inhabit online that I’m now numb to all the fucking bullshit. Which leaves me in a tricky place, because that anger was all that I had to cling on to with my writing. Because I guess I no longer care about you. I really don’t. I’m sorry to say that I don’t care if you’re not excited about Disgaea 4. I don’t care if the best thing you have to play is another fucking quirky 2D platformer that has one new mechanic and a nouveau art direction and so you need to spunk your fucking load all over it like all the other indie-fetishists that are looking for the next N+/Super Meat Boy/Braid. Fuck you. Because really, that’s fine.

It’s all fine. You can play what you want, and you can enjoy it, and that’s brilliant. I mean it, that’s really brilliant. You can play Quiz Climber or Tiny Tower and I’m happy for you, as long as you’re happy. Because you’re not that important to me. Really, the most important person in my life is me. Which is quite heart warming really, because it means that the next time you see a kid telling you to ‘SUCK MY NIGGA BALLS U FAGGOT THAT GAME SUX THIS GAME IS AMAZING!!!!!’ you know that he cares about you. And really, isn’t that what life’s all about?

So go, play your games. You don’t need us anymore. You don’t need anyone. You might secretly think that you want to play Pilotwings but some ‘journalist’ tells you that it’s only three hours long, but really, what the fuck do they know? Ignore those fucking cunts. They don’t even play games they way we do anyway. They spend five hours with one then they move on. They never fall in love with a game and spend 300 hours with it just to unlock a new colour of ribbon for their character’s hair. They don’t know. Only you know how much fun you’ll have flying through a hoop over and over again until you get it just right, and that might take you 40 hours. Because you’re shit at games.

So you don’t need us anymore. Or at the very least, you shouldn’t need us anymore. There’s no need for yet another fucking website giving you opinion about games, and what games you should play, and what gaming is about. Go out there and play games yourself you lazy cunt. There’s fucking millions. Choose which ones you want to play based on whimsical shit like if the lead character dresses well, or because you heard that there’s a really pretty tree on one of the maps.

I wish I still had a Gamecube and Super Monkey Ball, I’d do the 0.1 string on the guitar level right fucking now. But I wouldn’t write a blog about how sweet it was to do that, because I don’t care about you anymore.

Michael is a lovely German man who knows a *fucking shit load* about computers. Most notably, Michael’s educated me on two topics:

- Security implementations and flaws on modern game consoles
- The Commodore 64 and the 6502 microprocessor

To say that Michael is something of a god in both of the above areas is pretty much accurate, as he’s adroit in delivering concise information intelligently and with a dash of Germanic humour. However, it’s clear that the latter is much more a labour of love than the former, where he’s a great spokesperson for an entire scene more than a ferocious instigator for exposing the shortcomings of corporate responsibility.

Michael is most publically active at the legendary Chaos Computer Congress, a convention for hackers (of both the MIT tradition and the modern meaning) that’s been running in Germany since 1984, itself an offshoot of the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker community that’s been around since 1981 (and which famously transferred and replaced a sizeable sum of Deutschmarks to raise awareness about security weaknesses in the fledgling digital banking industry). This year’s C3 (as it’s known) is more infamous for the astonishing PS3 Epic Fail talk, where the shortcomings of the PS3’s security implementation were laid bare, though not utterly torn open – it was GeoHot who did that by releasing the fundamental PS3 security key, presumably to steal some kudos back from the Fail0verflow team. ANYWAY, let’s just say that each year, C3 is a real highlight for me. Not only does Michael always deploy at least one amazing lecture, but lots of other people do to. One stunner was this lecture from 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp4TPQVbxCQ

Which explained how to reverse-engineer chips from the transistors up. Deep shit – and a process that lead to the cracking of the MiFare RFID chip found in Oyster cards. Not at all related to games, but well worth a watch. Note that there’s also a fantastic presentation about the Wii’s security from the 2009 C3 floating around the streaming sites too, as presented by two dudes that would go on be sued to fuck for being in Fail0verflow and doing a similar hatchet job in the interest of corporate responsibility.

BUT BACK TO THE LOVELY MICHAEL STEIL:

It’s no secret that I’m still very much in love with the Commodore 64, so Michael’s a real kindred spirit in that regard. His ‘Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk’ (with a presentation in 256 slides, no less) is a landmark lecture in retrocomputing, being as complete an overview of the machine and its capabilities as anyone could hope for in a decently-sized lecture format. In it, Michael intimately details the machine’s hardware and covers the best of the C64’s best-kept visual secrets, including arcane techniques such as raster-interrupt sprite multiplexing (tricking the C64’s video chip into displaying more than 8 sprites per frame by making it think each line it draws is a frame, rather than the whole screen, meaning you can fill the screen with sprites if you’re jiggly enough with code timing) and the deeper art of exploiting peculiarities in RAM addressing that allow you to paint more colours on-screen than the hardware spec initially allows. Sadly, his plea at the end for others to step up to his stellar standard and produce similar lectures for other hardware seems to have fallen on deaf ears, though no doubt this is more down to Michael’s singularly impressive debut for the concept than it is to a lack of enthusiasm.

Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E

I learnt more in that lecture than I did in 25+ years of C64 use, magazine reading and Internet searches. Michael followed up the Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk with an even geekier, yet more compelling, lecture about the MOS 6502, touching on a variety of topics within the context of reverse-engineering one of the most popular 8-bit processors of all time (and, obviously, the heart of the Apple 1 and II, the C64, Nintendo NES etc).

AVEC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reIYvmuWHhk

Starting with the chip’s original design and manufacture and leading through to modern marvels such as the virtual, every-fucking-transistor-and-gate-modelled Java version available at visual6502.org, Michael lovingly peels back the mystery of the 6502’s inner workings while deploying some seriously neat trivia. For example; the 6502 was designed by hand, on paper. No computers were used. None! The etching stencils were cut *by hand, with scalpels* from a sheet of acetate (or something) and then shrunk photographically. Astonishing when you think about it, non? Deeper still, Michael fearlessly unravels the raw logic of the 6502 and sheds light on a particularly geek-cool aspect of the C64’s processor – that it could process completely undocumented opcodes.

Being a cunt, I should probably explain that opcodes are essentially the series of noughts and ones that make a CPU perform tasks. These translate to three-letter mnemonics, which form the basic language of assembly, the most fundamental programming language there is. Now to the chip, these are essentially just sequences that lead to sequences. Obviously, you could feed any sequence of data to the chip and, in most cases, manufacturers make sure that ‘illegal’ codes (as in opcodes not explicitly designed for the chip) result in an empty instruction or something worse, like a hang or program termination. Not the C64’s 6510 variant of the 6502 – it’ll take on anything and give it a go, resulting in a select few ultra-leet secret opcodes that essentially perform two normal opcodes for the CPU cycle price of one (and which have been reputedly used in games – Wizball being one that springs to mind). To be fair, contemporary processors to the 6502 like the Spectrum’s Z80 and the venerable Intel 8086 also have this capability, but no-one’s bothered to do a lecture where they’re explained.

Michael manages to explain both how the 6502’s decoder works and why the illegal opcodes work the way they do, and in such a manner that even I could understand it. This is something I never really expected to be able to comprehend - CPUs have always been a kind of Maxwell’s Demon to me, being mystical things that work on magic and mindfuck, but Michael had the articulation and clarity of explanation to reveal the inner workings in a way that didn’t make my brain fall over. Another stellar achievement and a serious upping of my geekcrush on the dude resulted. The notion that you could prod three ASCII letters into a piece of silicon and get a new capability still charms me immensely, and I’m all the better for knowing how such trickery works.

I now want to touch on Michael’s other line of public presentation – console security. Michael is a huge advocate for Linux and open systems and he maintains that console security is bound inextricably to the openness of the platform. I’d say that’s very likely to be true in the modern paradigm, and the hacking of the PS3 bears testament to this in a roundabout way. While the coals of the PS3’s fall have been raked over far too many times already, I think it’s still valuable to point out that even a restricted Linux implementation held back the floodgates for far, far longer than the closed nature of the 360 and Wii and that if Sony had been amenable to allowing full Cell and RSX access from Linux, the machine would still be happily secure (despite the point that in actuality, it was never really secure in the first place). Michael’s delivered some amazing lectures in the past, describing the security and shortfalls therein for the Gamecube, the Xbox and the Xbox 360.

Xbox and 360 are here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjpmc8ZIxM

It’s awesome to see the inner workings of modern machines revealed in much the same manner as Michael uncovered the mysteries of the 6502 and while open OS implementations are all well and good, I personally think public discussion of security shortfalls benefits consumers just as much. We take security on trust, with no real way of gauging precisely how secure a system actually is. It’s these geeky Linux dudes that show us how and however much rage, both corporate and consumer, they get, their work remains noble and morally good in my view. Why? Because they want to share. The bad guys wouldn’t – and no-one would know until all connected PS3s or Wiis suddenly bricked themselves and our stored credit card details were decrypted on botnets (in a blatant worst-case scenario). And thank fuck Michael’s one of the good guys.

PS: Michael also runs a blog, here: http://www.pagetable.com/

21

I’m like such a fucking dick about games that I recently carried a Vectrex for 1.5 miles along one of the most dangerous roads in London. This was because I’d bought it from a pal for an alarmingly good price -£50 for a Milton Bradley model that had its vector tube still running at tip-top condition, though the pot for the volume is well crackly and one of the buttons on the control pad is a bit ropey. Nonetheless, the fucker came with original, boxed copies of Scramble and Bezerk, complete with manuals and overlays. It also still had the overlay and manual for Minestorm (the Vectrex’s built-in game) and a modern, homebrew cart that contained versions of Defender and Space Invaders.

One thing that cannot be stated emphatically enough about the Vectrex is how fucking awesome it is as a THING. Having the monitor built-in really does make it feel like a miniature arcade cabinet, and the screen is genuinely something special and precious, particularly as it’s in TATE or portrait orientation. It’s actually near-magical to witness, and leaves retinal after-images when things explode (as long as the programmer has seen fit to include the necessary overdraw, of course) and the combination of the screen’s extreme precision and white-on-black starkness titillates your visual cortex with some primal shit that faux-vector shit on a giant flatscreen will never, ever achieve. Another thing that cannot be stated emphatically enough is how shoddy the original release games can be in the context of what anyone would expect from the most basic of game functionalities. Scramble was pretty enough and works really well, but it’s a sparse affair and, as far as I can tell, dumps you straight into play from boot. Likewise, Bezerk insists you’re ready to go as soon as the boot sequence is done, only it’s a slow-motion version of the arcade game (which killed two kids, you know) and as a result, is total fucking shit. As for Minestorm, it will proper fuck with your head until you realise the tutorial you’re watching is actually the game waiting for you to start playing and you’ve lost all but one of your lives by the time you’ve realised it. Mind you, Minestorm is almost certainly the root of modern neo-retro fare like Geometry Wars and by all accounts is a brilliant game once you get the measure of it, but for me, I couldn’t really get to grips with its weird-ass sense of intertia and the fact that whoever owned the Vectrex before my mate did had hammered Minestorm’s fire button with such fury that it’s now hard to place any confidence in it having your back when you need to shoot some cocksucker.

One major revelation, however, is that the tiny homebrew scene for the Vectrex is fucking stunning. I am not shitting you – the version of Defender I got with the machine is genuinely FUCKING BRILLIANT. So good, in fact, that I’m actually playing it as an actual game now, rather than some nostalgia/history lesson, with the proper control method and everything - which is something I’ve never been able to do with emulation of the original ROMs. And fuck me, Defender is a fucking glorious game once you’re really into it. It’s always been a nine-nines cunt of a game to the newbie player and remains a nine-nines cunt once you’re a bit wiser to its rules, but having built that essential knowledge of how not to totally fuck up and just basically survive, it soon coalesced into a twitchfest delivery method of astonishingly large rewards for me. While Robotron often gets the plaudits for its twin-stick mayhem and supreme challenge, there’s something extra-special in Defender’s conciseness that inches it just slightly ahead in terms of my respect. Robotron’s central survival urge is borne out of claustrophobia amd fighting your way out, whereas Defender is about not being in the right place when you need to be and fighting your way to it. A single sound effect, that a lander is nabbing one of your dudes, is enough to induce a panicked dash across the landscape and you need all the zen twitch you can muster to not completely fuck it up and die when you do actually get to where you need to be, let alone actually kill the fuckers and save the dude in distress. What’s more, saving a humanoid who’s about to be abducted, and then picking them up and returning them safely to the landscape in no more than 3.5 seconds is a pleasure far, far deeper than the awesome 500 points you get for pulling it off. Not bad for a mechanic that’s now some 30 years old and remains sorely under-utilised in the modern age.

I’d always thought Danmaku shmups of the Cave ilk were the pinnacle of this shit, but I was wrong – Eugene Jarvis nailed it on his first go and this homebrew Vectrex version, gleaming with silvery vector beams and twinkling pixels (and some additional bits from Stargate) is about as sublime as it gets, being a perfect harmony of predictable mechanics and raw fucking chaos. The ship’s movement is wonderfully balanced, with thrust speeds and turnaround timeframes pitched so perfectly that the random newbie will always smack into something that kills them, but the leet pro will dodge and weave like an untouchable motherfucker of stupendous magnificence. LIKE A BOSS is how I feel when I clear a level without losing a life, which is a frighteningly rare occurrence..

The amazingly success of Protector (as it’s titled) to convince me it was worth playing until the Vectrex’s joystick burrowed into my fingertips spurred me on to contact pro-level deep motherfucker John Dondzilla, who offers a range of Vectrex homebrew carts via his website, http://www.classicgamecreations.com/. I ordered three more new versions of old games in the form of Thrust (a direct port of the 8-bit Firebird classic), Gravitrex (John’s own translation of Atari’s awesome Gravitar, itself the inspiration for Thrust) and an Asteroids clone that I can’t even remember the name of. OH YEAH – ROCKAROIDS REMIX! Once payment had cleared, John burnt the eproms himself, built the carts and shipped them to me in a wonderfully short amount of time. I felt immensely proud to be feeding brand-new carts into my somewhat dusty Vectrex and seeing more shimmering vector lines blaze across the screen for the very first time. I’m a disgustingly romantic weirdo about this kind of thing and being the facilitator of some old-fashioned silicon-to-silicon electronsex has a mystique that seems more direct somehow – that the raw code flashes from the ROM to the CPU to the electron gun in the screen in (what is probably a totally contrived and utterly artificial) sense of harmony and purity that’s lost in the complexities of multipass pixel shading, frame buffers, HDMI, upscaling and the like that determines the modern visual style.

So yeah, I got a Vectrex and it’s fucking beautiful. I didn’t really expect to be as enamoured with the fucker as I am, which is a pleasant surprise. I do feel like I’m cheating on my PC Engine, though.

21

If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s Pokemon. OR SO I THOUGHT.

Pokemon isn’t about the strategic choices you make when building your team. It isn’t about the tense flow of a two-player match using one of the most interesting turn-based battle systems ever made. It isn’t even about the emotional connections you make with the different Pokemon (FUCK OFF BIDOOF). It’s about the people in the world, and what they say to you. Fufufufufufu!

“Fufufufufufu” - I know I’m in a Pokemon game because when people laugh they laugh like that. They don’t say hahahahaha! or lol!!!!!!! They say fucking fufufufufufu and that’s the fucking RULES. But THIS TIME, for some fucking reason, they’ve not said it once. I’m like six badges in and nobody’s even laughed. What the fuck has happened? Is this world full of dead people? What’s it called, Uvova? Unova? Vulva? I don’t even fucking know, because it’s so fucking DEAD TO ME.

I’m ready to quit this piece of shit and go full time Tactics Ogre. I’ll give it another couple of hours to get its act together and if there’s still no fufufufufufu then I’m going to go to Nintendo’s HQ and kick the fucking shit out of everyone in sight.

What a fucking cunt. You can’t bemoan a lack of creativity and then suggest a new Pac Man game. Jesus fucking Christ. Also, you absolutely cannot say there’s no creativity in gaming today. Has he not seen the fucking iPhone? Or the PC? If you’re playing Call of Duty and Halo over and over, sure. But don’t look at the top 90% of sales, look at EVERY FUCKING GAME YOU CUNT. Honestly, I dunno. There’s infinity creativity right now. In fact, it’s the best it’s EVER been. If you have a PC and the internet and no actual money you can still access a broader spectrum of gaming than has ever existed before. I’m not even going to try to list anything because any list less than a thousand games would be doing gaming an injustice.

What a cunt. He’s worse than the Katamari Damacy guy, who at least waited until he was a commercial failure before having a moan. This guy won’t even try his hand.

Fucking Lord of the Rings. They throw in some sub-Scottish enunciation for anyone saying a name or place with an R in it (MoRRdoRR) and now you can’t be proper fantasy without sounding like you’re from the Highlands. Or, as Castlevania’s cast ably show, Russia.

What the fuck is going on with the accents?! I guess some of the Scottish accents are non-Scots trying to put on Scottish accents, which I find quite funny but it keeps pulling me out of the world. And the world is a pretty place to be, so that’s kind of a shame, but that’s only likely to affect you if you’ve ever met either a Scot or a Russian. Or heard them talk in a film.

The combat seems pretty slick, and the management of building focus versus using magic makes an otherwise basic system challenging on a strategic level that fits the overall pacing really well. By which I mean you need to be ready for what seems to be Final Fantasy XIII albeit with interesting gameplay, right down to the arbitrary construction of invisible walls, some of which can be jumped and some of which stop you with a slightly raised twig. Which isn’t an issue, because this isn’t about the construction of a believable world (fuck off to Minecraft if that’s what you want) but actually about being coerced into sliding through a sumptuous world with some character development slightly akin to Castlevania 2D, punctuated with the occasional bout of the worst acting of all time. All at a glorious 20-30fps, depending on what the game feels like.

More as it happens. And in case it’s not clear, I quite like it. But you’re right, it’s no Minecraft.

“Paparazzi” - Lady Gaga 
“Evacuate The Dancefloor” - Cascada
“Beautiful Day” - U2 
“Call Me” - Blondie 
“Fireflies” - Owl City 
“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” - Simple Minds 
“Heavy Cross” - Gossip 
“Radio Ga Ga” - Queen 
“Oops I Did It Again” - Britney Spears 
“Light My Fire” - The Doors 
“Back To Black” - Amy Winehouse 
“Teenage Kicks” - The Undertones 
“Ruby” - Kaiser Chiefs 
“You’re Beautiful” - James Blunt 
“Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” - Kylie Minogue 
“Rio” - Duran Duran 
“I Want You Back” - Jackson 5 
“Always Be My Baby” - Mariah Carey 
“Doesn’t Mean Anything” - Alicia Keys 
“She’s The One” - Robbie Williams 
“Up” - The Saturdays 
“22″ - Lily Allen 
“All Night Long” - Lionel Richie 
“Release Me” - Agnes Carlsson 
“Boys & Girls” - Pixie Lott 
“Break Your Heart” - Taio Cruz 
“In Your Arms” - Stanfour 
“So Soll Es Bleiben” - Ich & Ich

Are you fucking shitting me?! What the fuck is this lazy fucking slap in the face that’s being pushed on us? I can’t remember any of these songs appearing on The X-Factor ever. AND Baby Hit Me One More Time is forever Darius Danesh’s song from Popstars. And who wants to remember that dislikeable cunt even a minute longer than necessary? 

There’s surely not an X-Factor fan in the country that isn’t crying into their parents’ genitals right now over not getting to sing The Climb, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Over The Rainbow or even the massively over-exposed Don’t Stop Believin’. What kind of fucking high-trousered cunt would do this to us? 

I’m not paying a penny over £30 for the Joe McElderry DLC. 

Really? You’re going to make any statement at all and use these two terms as if they have any significance? How small-minded, blinkered, uneducated and blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the world must you be for the term “western games development” to have any sort of meaning? Come on. That’s like Americans thinking the term European has any sort of cultural significance, only this time you’re taking literally everything games-related in the western world and making a judgement on all of it. Come on. If you’re a dev talking like this, you’re mental. More so if you’re a Japanese dev ignoring Nintendo. If you’re a journalist running it as news, I guess you know your (ignorant) audience, so you may as well. Why not run stories on immigrants as well? It’s worth a hit or two, and you can avoid thinking clearly in the process.

Farmville

I don’t understand why anyone would not ‘play’ this ‘game’. You probably already hate it, because cunts like me have flooded your wall with bullshit posts about how I want you to be my neighbour, or how I’ve found fuel. I do that, because it gives me 0.01% more free shit for my farm. And you have now blocked the application.

Free shit. That’s clever, isn’t it? I percieve that everything in Farmville has a real life monetary value. Which it does. A value entirely created by Zynga, the game’s devs. Well done! I haven’t actually given them any money yet, because (as someone said to me recently) it feels like cheating. But actually, I fucking love Farmville and want to give them some cash. I just haven’t found something I can buy that is completely and utterly worthless in the game yet. It’s like they’re *too* clever.

I started playing because it hit iPhone and I didn’t want my daytime productivity to take a hit. That’s me, I’m professional. But they tricked me! There’s some fucking mental high level shit going on here, because although you can do pretty much everything to your farm from the app, there’s a ton of free shit you can get only on the app, some you can get only from your browser toolbar and some you can get only from logging in via facebook. So now I’m fucking. I’m in on this shit 24/7, farming fucking cupcakes and raspberries and wheat and HOLY SHIT I FOUND SOME FUEL, which means I can plough the ground slighty faster, and OMG I FOUND AN EGG! Which gave me a chicken, which in turn gave me a 0.05% better chance at finding more eggs. Soon I’ll be earning eggs and chickens every second! But WHY? How many more fucking chickens can a man need?

Clicking things - I fucking love it.