Oops, I did it again

I appear to have spent £110 on books while in Toronto (and in Kitchener visiting james_nicoll).

Asimov's January 2005; Paul Kearney Ships from the West; Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Garth Nix Sabriel; John Boyd The Rakehells of Heaven; Stephen Goldin The Eternity Brigade; Joan Vinge The Summer Queen, Heaven Chronicles; Michael Swanwick Bones of the Earth; Wil McCarthy Lost in Transmission, The Wellstone; John Barnes The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King; Harry Turtledove Ruled Brittania, In the Presence of Mine Enemies;
Antonino Terranova Skyscrapers.

A lot of those (the Barnes, the Terranova, the Turtledove, probably the McCarthy) count as guilty pleasures. Sabriel I read on the train to and from Niagara, and thought very good; lots of the aspects had been assembled before, but the non-morbid necromancy felt new and good, and there's a strong sense that victory has costs - even more so than Pullman. I got Lirael from a free-books offer on the back of a cereal packet, and will be reading that next.

Why am I buying so many books when I cannot see where in my room I'd fit a second six-shelf bookcase?

The wrong kind of retro

Every time you start Half-Life 2, it appears to verify its game file by talking to the Steam server.

This takes roughly as long, on my fast PC with ADSL, as it took Snapper to load from cassette on the BBC Micro. I don't know (how could I tell?) whether it's negotiating frantically across the Net as I sit, redrafting this post twice, watching the yellow squares move across the drab-grey progress bar.

And, even with this grotesque verification effort, it wants the DVD in the drive to play. One could rapidly get to resent being obliged to put ones computer to this effort to prove oneself not a thief.

Half-Life informs me that I am

... but an engine that moves in predestinate grooves.
I'm not even a bus. I'm a tram!

The graphics are indeed impressive; at last, shiny things (water, corrugated metal, wet paths) reflect the scene around them [except, that is, for the player]. Textures are still filtered to fuzz well before the vanishing point (apart from thin lines, which appear aliased and flickering), but nearby walls have enough bumpiness not to look like perfectly flat marble expertly painted to look like cracked concrete.

But (as in, well, pretty much everything since System Shock 2, and that was long ago) the player, whilst in principle in control of his destiny in two and a half dimensions (or three, underwater), is constrained to move in a fixed path. For the level set in a boat along a river, that's fine. For the level set in a sewer, where every intersection is a T-junction and one or the other turning leads after ten paces to a blank wall, this is getting silly. For the level set in a trainyard, where all the tunnels and at least one piece of outdoor road are blocked off with transparent, uncrossable, bullet-permeable, train-permeable force-fields, the trains constructed in such a way that you cannot scramble across couplings or lift yourself into trucks, and artfully arranged to oblige you to zig-zag from one side of the level to the other and back, it has reached absurdity.

If I wanted to watch a predefined series of events unfold in computer animation, I'd see The Incredibles again; and their animation is infinitely better than my PC can manage. There really doesn't seem to be much more to this awaited-for-six-years game, exploration-wise, than there was to the games in the JCR at college, where you moved along an absolutely fixed path whilst shooting at irregularly-appearing villains with a lightgun: you can move to a limited extent from side to side, and go backwards if you insist.