First, gentle reader, a confession: in case you didn’t already know, I’m a bit weird. If you were to pass me in the street, you’d probably wonder, why is this person walking so quickly? Why does he look so tense, and why does he appear to be avoiding eye contact with everyone?

I’ve never been formally diagnosed with social anxiety disorder; though, ironically, it’s probably my affliction that has prevented me from going to a doctor to talk about it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve even written about how being in public makes me feel. At any rate, I’ve read and heard enough from other people suffering from social anxiety disorder to know that I suffer from a similar condition.

I suppose at heart it’s a fear of judgement from others. When I’m in any public space, whether it’s walking down the street or standing alone in a pub, I’ll begin to worry that people are staring at me, or taking in my strange silhouette and thinking ominous things.

It’s something I’ve suffered from all my life, though it’s only in recent years that I’ve understood the true nature of it, and how limiting it’s been. I used to think it was a form of agoraphobia, since I’d often feel tense and uncertain in crowded places (I still avoid tunnels or tube trains wherever possible), but I now realise that it’s not whether the place is indoors or outdoors that’s the problem, but how many people there are around me. The more people there are, the worse I feel.

I can only describe my anxiety in these situations as being like a pressure on my chest. At the same time, my head will swim, as though overloaded with information. If you’ve ever been in a situation where things are happening too fast, or on the brink of spinning out of control – during a car accident, for example – it’s not dissimilar. In extreme cases, I’ll feel as though I’m about to suffocate.

As I’ve come to understand my anxiety, and gradually work out how to control it, I’ve also begun to wonder whether the emotions I feel have begun to bleed out into the rest of society, too. In both my work and my leisure time, I use Twitter and Facebook, a form of interaction with the outside world which is peculiarly modern. Since the advent of social media, we’ve begun to compare ourselves with other people in a way that was once reserved for celebrities, and the criteria by which we judge ourselves and others has gradually changed.

Social media gives us more opportunities to promote ourselves and our work than ever, and more chances to connect with people with similar interests. But at the same time, it also makes us constantly aware of how we rank alongside others. We can tell with a single click how many followers one celebrity has on Twitter versus another, and how few we have by comparison.

Money and popularity have become the major yardsticks of success. And just as the amount of cash we earn can be quantified, or at least hinted at by the size of our house or our jobs, by the same token, popularity – or a narrow definition of it – is easily gauged by how many followers we have on Twitter, the number of friends we have on Facebook, or how many hits we’ve acquired on our latest blog post.

Similarly, we can receive instant feedback on everything we post on the Internet, whether it’s someone clicking ‘Like’ beneath an off-the-cuff Facebook update about what we’re having for dinner, or leaving a comment on a post we’ve written for a website. Everything we say or do in this virtual environment is subject to instant approval or condemnation.

Secretly, I suspect that every user of social media has had similar feelings as I have at one point or another. We quietly crave the quick burst of acceptance that a retweet or two provides on Twitter, and dread those occasional moments when someone clicks unfollow.

This constant monitoring of public approval was something Charlie Brooker highlighted in his unsubtle yet very good Black Mirror, which aired on Channel Four on Sunday. In it, the British Prime Minister (played by Rory Kinnear) finds himself in the middle of a peculiarly 21st century type of humiliation. In order to satisfy the demands of a kidnapper who holds a member of the royal family hostage, the PM must debase himself on prime time television.

As the clock ticks down to the deadline, the PM’s advisers constantly monitor public opinion on the Internet, which wavers from approval to disapproval with each moment that passes. Although elevated to comically grim levels, the scenario presented in Black Mirror is similar for almost every web user in the modern age. We’re all watching our words and subtly modifying an outward version of ourselves for public consumption.

Even that old dinosaur of communication, the television, has modified itself to conform to the social media age. Progammes such as Big Brother, X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing are only nominally about living in a house, singing or prancing about in a sequin dress; they’re popularity contests, where the public can decide at the press of a button who it loves and who it chooses to hate.

This is perhaps why those programmes are all so perennially successful – they encapsulate everything we fear and desire from our peers on the Internet. We’ve all seen how the web can make celebrities and billionaires out of those it favours, whether it’s the creator of the latest meme on YouTube (as I write this, people everywhere are screaming “Fenton!” at every given opportunity), or the creator of one of social media’s soaring pillars, Mark Zuckerberg.

At the same time, we’re also aware of what happens when the terrible eye of Internet hatred trains its gaze on one person or entity – just look at the derisive comments that followed in the wake of Rebecca Black’s song, Friday. (Free hate sample: “Dear Rebecca Black, we don’t hate you because you’re famous. You’re famous because we hate you. Sincerely, Everybody.”)

The Internet has therefore created a virtual form of social anxiety. Just as I feel a horrible sense of dread in my stomach when walking down a crowded street, a paranoid feeling that the people walking the other way may be smirking inwardly at the way I look or act, so the web has, to varying degrees, made everyone anxious about how they’re perceived by the outside world.

So if social media has inadvertently resulted in the spread of anxiety, what can we do about it? I’ve no idea. Probably nothing. Most of us would no sooner cut off our web connection or delete our Facebook account than we would cut off our own water supply or stop using electricity.

The Internet and social media has become an integrated part of our modern life, and there’s no going back. I suppose it would make for a dramatic conclusion to this post if I were to suggest that we start an anti-Web 2.0 revolution, a deletion of Twitter accounts and blogs, a smashing of Internet servers and a William Morris-style retreat into a pre-industrial age. But I don’t believe that’s the answer.

Rather, I think social media anxiety has to be handled in a similar fashion to my own neuroses. Every day, I try to remember that I’m more than the bumbling, awkward chap that people see shuffling up and down the Euston Road most weekdays – that socially anxious bit of myself is just one aspect of my personality. Similarly, we’re all so much more than the avatars, posts and updates we put up on the web every day.

The Internet may make it appear that our entire world is a glass cage where everything’s on public display, but this isn’t the case. There’s still the private aspect of ourselves that grows cress on bits of tissue paper, or sneakily watches Eastenders whenever it’s on the TV, that looks forward to ringing up mum and dad at the weekend, loves a Sunday roast, and wants to one day travel the world in a hot air balloon. Whether we’re weird and awkward, or lucky enough to be outgoing and confident, these are the bits of us that are truly special – in an environment that requires conformity, our individual eccentricities are more important than ever.

Our online society tries to force us into hierarchies, and  rank us according to social reach and retweets, but we’re so much more than that. To paraphrase Tyler Durden, we’re not our websites or our Facebook walls. We’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the earth.

It’s my first time in the land of the free, and I’m both excited and apprehensive. Excited at the prospect of seeing this sprawling place for myself, having grown up with images of US life since childhood, but at the same time I’m nervous that, as a dweller of villages and provincial towns, I’d somehow become swallowed up, lost forever in this cavernous republic.

Los Angeles viewed from the Hollywood Hills

I learn, as I spend almost two hours waiting to go through security and then a further forty minutes having my passport checked once again at the exit, that the land of the free has quietly morphed into the land of the paranoid.

Before I flew, I filled in my visa form online, which asked if I’d been a Nazi between the years 1938-1945, if I’d ever been convicted for the kidnapping of a minor, or whether I’d ever been to prison for making explosives. Then I filled in another form on the plane, where I certified that I wouldn’t attempt to smuggle any kind of deadly bacilli, raw meat, vegetables or snails onto US soil.

Having sat patiently on the hulking 747, an upended conning tower stuffed full of chairs and blankets, I staggered blearily into Los Angeles airport to be met with an unending conga line of the defeated and exhausted. This was homeland security, where each luckless traveller had to present their passport and various forms, before having various parts of their anatomy scrutinised, photographed and scanned.

After nearly 100 minutes of waiting in line, during which I listened to the bizarre ramblings of an Irishman who may or may not have been insane, I had the four fingers on my right hand scanned, then my right thumb. Then the four fingers on my left hand, then my left thumb. I then had my eyes scanned.

What do they do with this information? If one of the vast number of people streaming through LA’s turnstiles every day ultimately proved to be a mass murderer of some description, what purpose would a scan of their fingers and eyes serve?

But let me rewind a little bit, and return to the Irishman. Cheerfully corpulent, with ice cream hair and varifocal spectacles, he had a gentle, avuncular but only fitfully intelligible accent. At first, I thought I was mishearing what he was saying, as each utterance became more outlandish than the last.

First, he talked enthusiastically of his hatred for the Scottish. “They’re racist,” he said, with not a suspicion of irony. Then he talked about the castle he renovated, which had twenty rooms.

He told me of the magnet technology he and his company had invented, of the saucer-like, wingless aircraft he’d designed. It was revolutionary, he said. “Didn’t Skoda design one in World War II?” I asked. He hotly denied this.

Then he talked about an electric car he owned that was worth 800 million dollars (though, again, I’m sure I must have misheard this), a vehicle that had only driven for thirty miles before breaking down. This he followed with his list of houses: a flat in Wimbledon, another in Scotland, others in Europe and the US. And the castle? Sold, he said.

“But just because I’ve got all these houses and plenty of money, doesn’t make me special,” he said. “I still talk to ordinary people. Like you.”

While I stood wondering at this man’s extraordinary tales – and weighing up the possibility of asking him to lend me some money – it suddenly dawned on me that he’d somehow sidled in front of me in the queue. Part of me was incensed, but an ancient, working-class synapse in my brain fired and told me to wring my flat cap and let it go. He did own a castle, after all.

The Irishman had, between his tall tales, repeatedly told me that I probably wouldn’t be allowed through security, as I hadn’t printed my ESTA ticket. I replied that I’d paid for one, but simply hadn’t printed the receipt out – it’s all electronic now, isn’t it?

Having sneaked in front of me in the queue, he walked up to the security desk. But instead of having his fingers, thumbs and eyes scanned, the man behind the counter shook his head, and pointed to another queue some five miles away on the other side of the building. I’ve no idea what was said, but the Irishmen shuffled off quietly, until he was a mere dot on the horizon.

An hour later, and I’m out of the wretched airport, and blinking in the California sunshine. The air lies like a blanket, thick and almost unbreathable. I later learn that LA is in the grip of a heat wave, and that it’s roughly 35 degrees.

I slump into a taxi – a yellow taxi, like Travis Bickle may have driven – and notice that it’s a Tardis in reverse. Vast on the outside, cramped on the inside. As apparently huge and ungainly as US cars are, they appear to be all bonnet and trunk – there’s less room for the knees in here than in the back of a Peugeot 205.

The driver – terse, sunglasses, the spit of Cheech Marin – drives like the forces of hades are at his heels. We hurtle between lanes, weaving in and out of Oldsmobiles, Chevrolet Corvettes (there are dozens of them here, all white) and lumpen SUVs. We approach red lights so quickly that it feels as though Cheech is thinking of jumping them, but then chooses the final terrifying second to change his mind.

American cars are as spongy and nautical as the movies would have you believe. Every petulant jab at the brakes from Cheech’s size six feet sends the taxi pitching forward, affording a glimpse of tarmac that fills the windscreen, before the vehicle flops back on its heels, providing a glimpse of clear blue sky.

Hot.

It really is searingly hot. I look out of the window at streets that look like movie sets. There are stadium sized shops devoted to Halloween outfits, tiny Psychic parlours, fast food joints I’ve never seen, or at least was only dimly aware of: Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Jack In The Box. Women push shopping trolleys filled with tin cans (I thought this only happened in Death Wish movies) joggers huff through brutal California heat, their brows weeping with grief.

We hurtle past Electronic Arts, the video game publishing giant, whose building looks like the one Arnold Schwarzenegger blew up in Terminator 2. In fact, everywhere looks like Terminator 2. It appears that James Cameron simply turned up in LA with an Austrian, a small boy and a video camera, and recorded the thing like a documentary.

Forty minutes, thirty dollars and eight near-misses later, and we’ve arrived at the Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica. Like all hotels, it’s not as good as it looks on the website, but there’s marble in the lobby, and Cheech could have parked his taxi in the lift.

My room is pleasant, in that beige, Stepford bedsit sort of way, and has air-con. It also has a television hidden in a big faux-mahogany cabinet, which isn’t something I’ve seen in over two decades.

A television. In a cabinet. In 2010.

American television is extraordinary. The ratio of advertisements to programme content is skewed heavily towards the former, to the point where it’s not clear what the programme between the adverts is even after twenty minutes’ viewing.

Thankfully, the adverts are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Adverts for pieces of plastic that save space in your closet. Five minute commercials about pressure washers. Anti-smoking advisories with big poisonous spiders.

Then the weather. It’s only now that I realise how extraordinarily accurate Steve Carrell’s turn as a weather man was in Anchorman. It wasn’t crass comedy, but an astutely observed docu-drama. The chap on KTLA (or KGB, or something) is warning of the possibility of flash fires and widespread death with the breezy off-handedness you’d expect from someone reporting mild rain.

Later, I meet with my fellow writers and friendly PR people, and we eat dinner at a dimly-lit Mexican restaurant. I ask for the marinated beef, and receive a platter of unidentifiable things which were various shades of grey, brown and green. Beneath the beef lay something that appeared to be pickled lizard skin, or perhaps a shower hat. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t taste of much. In fact, nothing tasted of anything. The black beans were like textured water, the beef as chewy as a dog lead. I love Mexican food, but this was like eating a fax of a meal rather than the real thing – grey, chewy and as bland as an Ikea funeral.

It’s at this point that, if we were characters in a movie, we’d all be getting hideously drunk – there are approximately a dozen hacks, writers and bloggers here from all over the place (Russia, Mexico, France, Germany, the UK), and for most of us, it’s our first visit to America. Surely, we should all be drinking cocktails in one of those LA clubs I’ve read so much about.

Instead, we head to Santa Monica beach, now under cover of darkness, where something called a Glow Festival is in full swing. Or we assume it’s in full swing – it’s little more than a group of people standing in the blackness holding a glowstick. Where’s the hedonism? Where are the drugs? Defeated, we headed back to the hotel.

* * *

Sunday morning. Breakfast arrives at my door, which consists of two fried eggs, two pencil-thin sausages and a pile of something that I later learn is yam. The eggs are undercooked, and still have the unmistakable consistency of phlegm. The yam is more colourful to look at than eat – it’d look better in a bowl by the television, like potpourri.

I meet my fellow hacks in the lobby. It’s the Tron: Legacy press day, and there’s a palpable sense of excitement amid the pink eyes and jetlag.

We’re piled into a van that looks like the one out of The A-Team, but without the stripe. Again, there’s a mysterious, claustrophobic air to its interior, and we’re jammed in, my fellow hacks and I, knee to knee. We’re driven down cracked streets already dusty with heat, past laundromats and pawn shops and secondhand car dealerships. Could this be where John Carpenter shot Assault On Precinct 13? I hope so.

We’re on our way to visit Digital Domain, the special effects company currently putting the finishing touches to Tron: Legacy, and given the difficult task of creating a convincing Jeff Bridges with an Amiga and a copy of Deluxe Paint.

The unassuming exterior of Digital Domain HQ

As we pull into the car park, we learn that Digital Domain is located in the warehouse out of Reservoir Dogs. It’s low-key, and faintly scruffy on the outside. Inside, there are exposed ducts and cubicles where the staff do things on computers. There are model skyscrapers and scale planes hanging from the ceiling. There’s a miniature Titanic somewhere, and posters of the films the company has worked on over the last 17 years. These include True Lies, Apollo 13, Star Trek: Nemesis and Transformers.

There’s Tron: Legacy stuff everywhere. There’s a life-size Light Cycle, a glowing Program suit, little scale miniatures in a glass cabinet, and odd bits of merchandising: glowing Wii and XBox 360 controllers, light-up PC keyboards and meeces,  a shiny Light Cycle belt buckle. Two models (the human variety) stand on a dais, wearing figure-hugging Tron outfits. They look bored enough to die.

But before we can look too closely at anything, we’re crowded into the screening area, where fold-up chairs are arranged in the darkness.

Inside Digital Domain

We watch 25 minutes of unreleased, unfinished footage. It’s very shiny and loud. We’re all quite impressed. Later, we’re split into groups, and engage in carefully managed interviews with Legacy cast and crew. We speak to Steve Lisberger, the director of the original Tron, who has grown into handsome old age. He has long hair and a beard, and looks as though he should be able to perform miracles. Lisberger is opinionated, sharp, funny, and quite wonderful.

Later, we meet Olivia Wilde, the actress who plays a feline, wide-eyed computer program in the movie. She sits with a little cellophane-covered plate of nuts, berries and raw vegetables, which she doesn’t eat. In the background sits her assistant, who looks the same but smaller. Ms. Wilde is articulate and intelligent, and mentions philosophy and Joan of Arc. After the interviews are over, we’ll later see her playing Tron: Evolution on an Xbox 360. Then she leaves, still clutching her uneaten plate of nuts and berries.

We’re ferried back to the hotel in the A-Team van. Once again, we’re all knackered – the flight, time difference and almost eight hours of interviews have taken their toll, and many of us are too tired to leave the hotel. I eat a burger, knock back a beer and three or four double gins, and return to my lodgings, where I fall asleep to the sound of pressure washer commercials.

* * *

Monday. I awake to the sound of pressure washer commercials. I head to the lobby, where two of my fellow UK writers are loitering with their bags. There’s about five hours until we get back on a plane to England, and we’re anxious to see a little more of LA before we have to head off home.

A helpful chap at the concierge desk books us a driver to chauffeur us around, a friend of his, he says. Twenty minutes later, and a black Mercedes arrives outside, hazy in the morning heat.

Our driver is tanned, with incredible teeth and hair. “I’ll show you stuff you won’t see on a normal tour” he drawls, before taking us off down a busy highway. The car slows down outside an anonymous collection of hedges and palm trees in a quiet suburb. It’s where, the driver says, OJ Simpson’s wife was killed.

Later, we arrive at what at first appears to be a car park behind a huge collection of skyscrapers, including the shadowy Oppenheimer Tower. As we emerge from the Merc into acid sun, we realise it’s a graveyard. The grass is weird – crispy, yet still fluorescent green, like astro turf. The names on the stones are all familiar: Jack Lemmon, Truman Capote, Dean Martin. The late comedians have humorous things etched below their names; Billy Wilder’s says, “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.”

View from the cemetery

The driver ushers us to a quiet corner of the cemetery, where a great marble wall stands in the sunlight. There are plaques arranged on it in a grid, like a filing cabinet of the dead. One of the drawers says, “Marilyn Monroe 1926-1962.” There are coins balanced on the plaque, and flowers suspended in a little vase.

“If she were still alive, she’d be 84 now,” the driver notes, philosophically. “Man, she was hot. I would have banged her for sure.”

We all stand thinking about this for a moment, until we notice our skin begin to simmer in the blistering Californian sun. The driver notes this, too, with a comment I don’t recollect. Faintly wounded, we pile back into the Mercedes.

We head down Trenton Drive, a corridor of scorched palm trees. We see Sunset Boulevard, full of expensive-sounding shops: Jimmy Choo, Lalique. The driver assures us that we’ll see “Muchos chicks”, but the streets are deserted – no doubt due to the oppressive heat.

The driver applies foot to accelerator, and the Hollywood hills loom up in the distance. Over his shoulder, I see the Hollywood sign on the arid hillside, as white as Californian teeth. We’re taken high up into the hills themselves, where we see Los Angeles spread out beneath us. It’s a weird place – surprisingly quiet and ominous. I begin taking pictures of sweating buildings, the Hollywood sign, before a man comes out of a shed and tells us to fuck off.

The Hollywood sign, taken shortly before we're told to fuck off

We drive down into Hollywood Boulevard. Like typical tourists, we get out and take pictures of Grauman’s, the famous Chinese Theatre built in the 20s. There are handprints in the concrete – the cast of Star Trek, John Woo, C3PO out of Star Wars. Mel Gibson. I’m surprised his hasn’t been dug up yet.

Then there’s the walk of fame – a breadcrumb trail of stars. James Cameron. Donald Duck. The real and the fictional intermingled, as though they’re interchangeable. In Hollywood, they probably are.

Back in the Merc, our driver points out the flat where John Belushi died, and the nightclub where River Phoenix breathed his last. The recession has left its scars here. Shops are boarded up, streets cracked.

We’re also, the driver tells us, not far from Leimert Park, the place where the horribly mutilated body of waitress Elizabeth Short was found dumped in January 1947. Short was nicknamed Black Dahlia by LA journalists, who depicted the 23-year-old as a temptress in “a tight skirt and a sheer blouse” who “prowled Hollywood Boulevard.” Her immoral lifestyle, the papers claimed, “made her victim material.” Short’s killer was never caught.

The driver’s taking us to the last stop on our tour – Greystone Mansion, a 55-room mock-Tudor pile that squats high up in Beverly Hills. In what appears to be a repeating Hollywood pattern, the building’s history is a murky one.

Four months after its wealthy owner, Ned Doheny, moved into Greystone, he was found dead in his bedroom along with his secretary, Hugh Plunket. Years later, the house fell into the hands of the City of Beverly Hills, and has since become the go-to location for filmmakers in a hurry. Greystone has appeared in dozens of television shows, movies and music promos, including Spider-Man, Rush Hour, Murder, She Wrote and my personal favourite, The Big Lebowski.

Greystone Mansion

Greystone has the vague air of a classic country mansion, but even from a distance, there’s something not quite right about it. Something strange about its proportions. Appropriately enough, it looks like a film set. At close quarters, you can see the joins: Greystone isn’t built from stone, as it first appears, but from concrete.

In the garden, there’s a large pond filled with koi carp. Rocks jut out of the water, upon which sit a brace of pissed off looking terrapins. In the febrile heat, they observe me coolly.

On our way back to the airport, we’re driven past the vast homes of Bel-Air – Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts – almost invisible behind high walls, hedges and electric gates. There are security cameras mounted on every corner, staring anxiously down at the road. Truly, these are the houses of the paranoid.

There’s an empty, inert feeling throughout Hollywood, like a mausoleum. Even in the heat, its buildings are cold, sterile. There’s the atmosphere of an industrial estate, or an ant farm.

Before we get back on the plane, we stop off for burgers in a diner with polished floors. I think about Hollywood and its weird, heightened state of existence. It’s a place of insane wealth and fame, but also death and bizarre violence, too. A place of vast mansions with towers like a German castle, cemeteries with filing cabinets of the dead, famous names scrawled in wet cement, pissed off terrapins and weird, unsolved crimes.

An hour later, and I’m back on a plane, and ascending back up again, up through blue and cloud wisps.

Los Angeles disappears far below in a shimmering haze of cash and silent madness.

Here they are: the pissed off terrapins of Hollywood.

Elsewhere on the web, I’ve compiled a list of 8 films that have influenced games, and I’ve also penned a brief review of the BBC’s informative Story of Science documentary.

The videogame industry isn’t immune from plundering its back catalogue either, with Final Fight: Double Impact reintroducing the street fighting antics of its topless, raging mayor to a new generation of gamers. One of this month’s oddest announcements comes from 2K Marin, who in its infinite wisdom has decided to remake Julian Gollop’s strategy masterpiece X-Com.

If you’ve been playing videogames for a very long time, the name Julian Gollop may mean something to you. Beginning in the early 80s, he earned a devoted following for a series of increasingly ambitious turn-based strategy games. Chaos was among his first, and still stands as one of the very best games of its ilk you’ll find.

Essentially a computerised card game, Chaos pitted a group of wizards against one another in a straight fight to the death. One of the few eight player strategy games then available, Chaos made for a uniquely entertaining multiplayer game, and even its more obvious drawbacks (your opponents would have to promise not to look while you selected your spells) added to its charm.

Thereafter, Gollop released the sci-fi strategy classics Rebelstar, Rebelstar II and Lasersquad, before returning to his earlier fantasy theme for Lords Of Chaos, which took the spell-casting concept of the original Chaos and expanded it into a strategy RPG. While a clear line of evolution can be drawn through all of Gollop’s games, the key thing that links them all is their uniquely addictive quality.

Since the advent of the Command & Conquer series, it’s more-or-less taken for granted that a strategy game can make for a compulsive evening’s entertainment. In the 80s, the genre was still largely the preserve of people wearing sandals who enjoyed reading lengthy books about Rommel.

For many, Gollop reached the height of his powers in 1994 with the release of X-Com, or UFO: Enemy Unknown, as it was called in some territories. Although expanded, after publisher MicroProse suggested its gameplay lacked the epic sweep of  Civilization, X-Com was a natural progression from the Aliens-inspired squad management of Rebelstar and Laser Squad. Like those games, X-Com made what, in lesser hands, would be the most ponderous of genres both compelling and addictive. That it’s still regularly mentioned in ‘best games of all time’ forum threads is a testament to its timeless ability to enthral and engross.

Given the widespread devotion that X-Com still receives, it’s unsurprising that 2K’s series reboot hasn’t been given a warm reception by gamers of a certain age. If there’s one thing the PC doesn’t need, it’s another first-person shooter, and one based on a resolutely cerebral strategy game like X-Com is needed still less.

Other retro titles have survived genre crossings, of course. Metroid Prime shoved Samus into the third dimension with aplomb, but how can 2K possibly retain even a small percentage of the original’s tactical depth from a first-person viewpoint? It makes about as much sense as ‘re-imagining’ Halo as a pet simulator.

For a developer with more than the cachet and industry clout of 2K Marin, the appropriation of an old and much-loved property like X-Com seems like a curiously opportunistic move. Without the X-Com name, wouldn’t the project be just another generic sci-fi FPS? Does 2K’s announcement make other fondly remembered retro titles fair game for the FPS treatment? Will Crytek make a shooter based on Horace Goes Skiing, Atic Atac, Monty Mole or Frogger?

If I found myself in Julian Gollop’s position, there’d be only one course of action to take: create a turn-based strategy game based on Bioshock. A properly old-school 2D one, with Rapture rendered in blocky tile-based graphics like a Byzantine floor, and hulking Big Daddies moving around one square at a time. Hell, at least old duffers like me would buy it.

Originally posted at the wonderful Den of Geek

Best of all, though, you’ll find the shopping channels, and it was there, on a quiet Monday evening,  that I beheld the single most gorgeous, crappy object I’d ever seen. It was a globe, standing two feet high on a faux gold pedestal, inlaid with mother of pearl and sparkling things. The place names were set in Zapf Chancery, one of the top ten most awful typefaces in the world. It rotated and glowed. It was £200.

As much as I’d have loved one of these gloriously dreadful abominations, there was no way I would actually buy one, and I assumed at first that nobody else would either. But incredibly, I’d underestimated the public mood. The consignment of forty or fifty globes sold out within a few minutes.

On a somewhat related topic, I learned this week that a twelve-year-old boy had spent around £900 – much of which had been purloined from his parents’ credit card – on Farmville, the browser-based management game hosted by Facebook. This story, along with the light-up self-propelling globe, was a timely reminder of how true the old adage about a fool and his money really is.

Yet, as ridiculous as spending almost a grand on a virtual farm may sound (and I shudder to think what my mother would have done if I’d done the same thing as a youth), this pales into insignificance next to recent sales in the free-to-play MMO Planet Calypso.

Funded by micro-transactions, the game has become chiefly notable for the increasingly outlandish prices some of its items fetch in online auctions. In February, David “Deathifier” Storey handed over the equivalent of £45,300 for a non-existent egg. The most bizarre thing about this? Storey doesn’t even know what, if anything, the egg holds.

The whole idea of games based on micro-transactions seems alien to me in any case. I’m too steeped in the old-school method of buying games, where money is handed over and the game is yours to play. The notion of having to pop into a virtual shop every few days to buy more bullets or whatever seems insane. This probably comes down to the fact that I can be quite miserly over how much I’m willing to spend on videogames. I’m constantly hunting around for the cheapest deal, or buying ancient Mega Drive cartridges second-hand from eBay.

Nevertheless, the buying and selling of virtual goods represents a potentially lucrative money making opportunity for those brave enough to invest their money. The original owner of the Planet Calypso five figure egg, John “Neverdie” Jacobs, originally bought the item for around £6,500 in 2006. In 2005, Jacobs purchased an asteroid from another Planet Calypso player for almost £65,000. And while remortgaging your house to pay for a gigantic in-game rock sounds like financial suicide, his gamble appears to have paid off once again. After building a nightclub on it, Jacobs has reportedly seen the value of his asteroid increase ten-fold.

To somebody as tight as me, it seems inconceivable that something so intangible – a piece of data that could quite easily disappear off a server at any moment – could be valued so highly. It seems more like (virtual) insanity. I’d lie awake at night, terrified that the MMO’s production company might go bust, or that all the in-game data might spontaneously disappear.

On the other hand, is investing large sums of cash in virtual items really any more risky than betting it on stocks and shares? For those with a sound head for business and a strong stomach, the answer is “possibly not”.

And if dozens of people are willing to pay significant sums of money for a hideous spinning globe that will almost certainly end up in a car boot sale in a few years’ time, then maybe investing your disposable income on virtual eggs and asteroids isn’t such a ridiculous proposition after all.

So the final bloody QTE has played out, and Kratos lies fallen on his own sword, with Zeus defeated and Athena thoroughly disenfranchised. But as the camera pulls out for one last, lingering shot on Kratos’s bloodied corpse, there’s a clue that the belligerent anti-hero won’t stay that way for long. Etched into the rock beneath him is a giant bird – could this be the mythical phoenix?

It’s pure conjecture for now, of course, but if the bird does indeed represent the phoenix, then Kratos could be returning for another sequel in a couple of years’ time. And if you watched beyond the closing credits, you’ll have noted that Kratos had apparently crawled out of frame – possibly toward the edge of the cliff – leaving only behind only a pool of blood. Did Kratos sprout his legendary Icarus wings and fly away? Only time will tell.

I’ve made several attempts to justify the purchase, to myself as well as my better half: that I got it for a really good price; that we truly, desperately need a Blu-ray player to go with the HD television; that the PS3′s black case will go really well with the TV stand.

Ultimately, I bought it for the system exclusives now available and yet to come: for Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2 and, best of all, Fumito Ueda’s forthcoming Shadow Of The Colossus sequel, Last Guardian. It was therefore with eager hands that I tore the sticky tape from the PS3′s cardboard cocoon.

For a console named and marketed as the PS3 Slim, I’m slightly alarmed by the size of the thing as I haul it out of the box. It looks like a middle-aged rock star in a black t-shirt: weighty, ungainly, and not as svelte as it thinks it is. (Having said this, the PS3 is a wee slip of a thing when placed next to the hulking menace that is the Xbox 360. The Wii sits underneath, looking gaunt and anxious.)

This sense of bloatedness continues as I power the beast up. The UI is a turgid mess of options and lists of settings with other lists of settings within them. Scrolling through it all is akin to the bafflement I feel when poring through a restaurant menu with too many dishes to choose from.

And then there are the updates. My God, the updates. First a gigantic system patch which, thanks to my village’s own patented 1MB Hickband service, took close to three hours to download. This was followed by the endless forms to fill in for PSN. It’s now three-and-a-half hours since I pulled the tape off the box, filled with enthusiasm, and I still haven’t played a game.

It took an unpleasant, swear-filled ten minutes to find a username that hadn’t been taken or wasn’t mystifyingly refused. At the end of the whole, draining process I was asked if I’d like to fill in a questionnaire. My resulting outburst was keenly audible, and I’m almost surprised the neighbours didn’t call the police.

With the head rush of new toy joy rapidly ebbing away, I shoved Uncharted 2 in the drive. Another patch update. I’m beginning to feel like Sisyphus. I try to form a Vulcan mind meld with the progress bars, and will them on as they crawl across the screen.

But then, just as my patience reaches breaking point, a ray of light appears among the figurative clouds. I finally get to play Uncharted 2, and it’s very, very good. I begin to titter and grin, my enthusiasm at last beginning to return. Uncharted 2 is everything you could want from an arcade action epic. It’s Indy 4 without the bad bits (which were many); it’s Prince Of Persia with Kays catalogue models. I like the characters. I like the script. I like the way the gorgeousness of your surroundings in any of its 25 chapters successfully disguises the reality that you’re actually shooting away at three or four kinds of bad guy for hours at a time.

It may have taken until Saturday afternoon to get to play it, but Uncharted 2 is perfect Saturday matinee material: trashy, airport fiction fun that wears its pulpy heritage proudly on its sleeve.

So, I’ve just about forgiven the PS3 for its finicky menu system, its opaque shopping experience, and its obsession with downloading things. Sarah’s just about forgiven me too, especially when I tell her about Noby Noby Boy, a typically surreal PSN game created by Keiti (Katamari Damacy) Takahashi. Featuring a central character that grows and stretches as he eats his way around a world of doughnut clouds and starry-eyed animals, we both agree that it sounds like videogaming manna.

A protracted purchase from the PlayStation shop and a 365MB download later, and Noby is ours. We load it up, our thumbs primed and waiting. But what’s this? A 550MB patch update. My reaction was sharp, vocal, and loosened several roof tiles.

In the final analysis, videogames are just a collection of rooms and corridors. Sometimes, the rooms and corridors are very, very large and the walls very well disguised, but nevertheless, the walls are there. You may remember, with a shudder, the 2008 reboot of Turok, in which you wandered around a lush green planet infested with dinosaurs – or this was, at least, the illusion. In reality, you were actually being herded through a series of corridors dressed up to look like a forest. Attempt to stray far beyond the ferns and fauna that lined your path, and you’d come up against an invisible barrier. The woods and soaring vistas beyond were little more than wallpaper.

Nothing takes you out of a game more quickly than, while playing the part of a rock-hard space marine who looks as though he could pull the head off a horse with his bare hands, you find your path mysteriously blocked by a flower bed. You’ve got arms like a shot putter’s thigh, yet you’re unable to break the stem of a daffodil, or jump over a rock no higher than your ankle.

Most recently, Final Fantasy XIII has come under criticism from some quarters for its particularly obvious linearity. Its environments, it’s been said, are little more than a series of long corridors with a huge boss at the end of them.

The flipside to these kind of experiences, of course, is the open-world sandbox game. These take the rooms and corridors and make them much, much bigger. They take the boss encounters, non-player characters and objectives and place them much further apart, to the point where you need a car to traverse the vast distances between them.

By Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar, apparently worried that the length of time it would take to traverse Liberty City in a hotwired Nissan Cherry would leave players falling asleep at the wheel, decided to lay on an optional taxi service to chauffeur them to and from the main points of interest.

I have a love-hate relationship with sandbox games. In fact, some of them leave me with a particular kind of dread. I’m the kind of person who gets lost looking for a post box in my own village, or who will walk out of a shop and forget which direction I came from. I’ve heard and read numerous reasons for this condition: a genetic deficiency; a misfiring hippocampus; outright stupidity.

Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: put me in a free-roaming virtual world, and I will get hopelessly, utterly lost. I’ve wandered the forbidden zones ofS.T.A.L.K.E.R. like a well-armed ghost with no idea where I am or where I’m meant to go next. I’ve thundered around the mean streets of Liberty City in my Nissan Cherry, only to take a wrong turning onto a railway line and into the path of an oncoming train. I’ve lost myself among the crimson dust and prefabricated houses of Mars in Red Faction.

Oh, I know there are maps. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. even provides you with a PDA and GPS, kind of. But these toys and gadgets provide problems of their own. I’ve stared at the little maps too long and crashed into walls. I’ve stared at a PDA screen with a furrowed brow, only to receive an uncharitable bullet in the back.

So before you criticise FF XIII‘s invisible corridors too harshly, spare a thought for gamers like me, the perpetually lost and confused. Those of us who spend so long squinting at radars, maps and diagrams that we barely notice the wonderful world around us; those of us who are perpetually disoriented, bewildered, discombobulated and stumbling around in maze-like networks of avenues and alleyways.

Without games like FF XIII or Turok, we’d probably have had a nervous breakdown by now. Without those invisible walls to guide our path, we’d almost certainly never find our way home at all.

Originally published over at Den of Geek

The glorious chaos of Gerbil Physics

It’s an awkward moment. We have friends around for dinner, and as we relax in our chairs with brandy and cigars, Sarah (my long-suffering better half) decides to show off her animals. “That’s my Lickatoad, who I’ve called Jeremy,” Sarah explained as she scrolled around her virtual garden in Viva Pinata. “And this is Hillary, my Chippopotamus. I’ve already got an achievement for romancing geese, and once I’ve romanced my salamanders I’ll be a level 52 gardener.”

To our friends, who are dyed-in-the-wool FPS fanatics, this is mystifying, horrifying stuff. They stare at the television with incredulous eyes. One of them looks as though he has a headache. Rare’s pastel-hued animal management game is not going down well at all.

“It’s good!” Sarah insists, to a wall of utter silence. Someone coughs. Far away, a church bell issues a muffled clang.

“Perhaps we should play something else?” I suggest, quietly removing the 360 controller from Sarah’s grasp. “A shooter?” one of our friends asks, suddenly perking up.

“Gerbil Physics!” Sarah blurts, taking the controller back again. “It’s brilliant!”

Our friends settle further down into the sofa, their faces clouding with gloomy resignation. Things are looking bad. If they don’t like whimsical management games full of animals, I think, they’re not going to be thrilled at the sight of a puzzler full of rodents either.

But I’m forgetting the fact that Gerbil Physics is one of the most accessible, gleefully fun puzzle games ever made. The aim is simple: to use your limited supply of bombs to knock down a stack of blocks (which, by-the-by, are full of gerbils) so they fall below the lower quarter of the screen – kind of like Jenga in reverse.

Within seconds, the atmosphere of the room has changed from apathy to a strange kind of sugar-rush glee; we’re shouting advice at whoever happens to be playing, laughing as another gerbil is sent flying off the screen with a squeak, or jeering as a tower refuses to collapse. It may only possess a single player mode, but this is party gaming at its purest and most simple. Everybody has an opinion about where the next bomb should be placed or which block should be blown up first, and everybody wants to have the next go.

Gerbil Physics‘ destructive gameplay taps into a universal desire to blow down a house of cards or kick over a sand castle, and its cutesy presentation is brilliantly at odds with its explosive concept. Its gentle soundtrack is constantly punctuated by the crockery-rattling din of another explosion. The gerbils themselves are full of cheeky personality, screwing up their eyes when a bomb is placed next to them, or muttering “abject fail!” when a level goes awry.

Given that it’s the product of a tiny developer called Pencel Games, and that it costs a piffling 80p on XBox Live, it’s unsurprising that Gerbil Physics ends all-too-quickly – we finished the 24th and final level after around ninety minutes of shouting, swearing and cheering – but it’s a proof-of-concept for a potentially incredible commercial release in the future.

With Gerbil Physics completed, we began a Halo 3 deathmatch. Curiously, the mood began to drop again. Our friends, too used to their PS3, began to moan about the 360′s controller. They grumbled about the positioning of the analogue sticks, and tutted at their apparent unresponsiveness. After less than half an hour of running and shooting, these self-confessed FPS junkies wanted to go back to playing Gerbil Physics. And that, surely, is the sign of a truly great puzzle game.

Originally published over at Den of Geek