Fuck off! As far as I am concerned, Easter is for chocolate eggs and nothing else. In my day, all I got was chocolate eggs. I remember getting quite a lot of eggs, mind. And maybe I got some money as well. I can’t really remember. But that was all I got. Nowadays kids seem to get bloody toys and everything.

I even saw one website suggesting that some parents who “wanted to give their children something more special than Easter eggs” would be buying PlayStation 3s for their children’s Easter. For fuck’s sake! These kids will grow up thinking scarce commodities fall into their hands directly from God’s anus (or the Easter Bunny, whatever) at the click of a finger.

Soon enough we will have bossy kids going around wailing their heads off whenever they don’t get what they want. And the weakling parents will cave in and get them what they want anyway. Brilliant. A generation of Little Miss and Mr Bossy Boots will be running the fucking country in thirty for forty years time. As if our leaders weren’t already bossy enough.

People in this country point at places like China and say, “Ooh, look at all those Little Emperors.” Well I think some parents need to take a bloody look at the Little Emperors they are bringing up themselves.

It seems as though some weakling parents are a bit too desperate to be the best parents in the world. And of course, it only takes one of these parents to get an idea in their head. Of course, they will have some hints whispered into their ear from toy-making firms. A sign is hanging in the shop window, “The perfect gift for Easter!” splashed across a picture of a PS3.

I can see the evil parents’ thoughts now. “My little angel is the best little angel in the world. To show her how special she is, I will buy her a PS3! And then she will love me and look after me well in my old age!”

After the Easter break in the school playground, the kids are discussing their Easter eggs. Then Little Miss Bossy Boots pipes up. “Chocolate? Pah! I got a PlayStation 3 for Easter!”

The other kids then become jealous, then go home and tell their parents how the normal thing to do is buy an exorbitantly expensive games console for Easter. Parents are then guilted into buying ever more impressive presents as the years go by. The entire trend spreads around the country and that is us stuck in consumerism hell forever.

In 2006 Tarquin got a PSP.
In 2007 Henry got a PS3.
In 2009 Bobby from the council estate will get a fucking bloody HDTV from guilty parents who can’t afford it.

If I ever have kids — which I won’t — I will give them mud for Easter. That will teach them that luxury goods are earned and not given to the kid that throws the biggest tantrum or guilt trip.

But no surprises as to what was number 1:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour. This post about Russell Brand stormed to the top of all sorts of mucky Google searches after some person in the comments mentioned Imogen’s sex tape. Disgusting. This page accounted for over 10% of all visits to this blog this year!
2. Richard Hammond. Descended into a debate about whether it’s disrespectful to dislike somebody (Steve Irwin) even though they’re dead.
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again. Simon Amstell left Popworld, but most people were only interested in searching for pictures of Miquita Oliver.
4. Another new Freeview channel. This post lays into smileTV, Freeview’s mankiest channel. People arrive at this page looking for information on Freeview channels. I imagine this post is a good advert.
5. Countdown to PS2’s Formula One 06. I’m still a little bit peeved that the actual review I wrote for this game is nowhere near as popular. Gah.

A few posts from 2005 were actually more popular than some of these, but they don’t count right because we’re talking about 2006.

The ‘popularity contest’ plugin, which also takes into account things like comments and whatever else, comes up with a slightly different result:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour
2. Another new Freeview channel
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again
4. Time Trumpet. I can’t even remember what I wrote in this post.
5. MySpace UK seems to have launched. Check out the comments full of emos who are shocked at the way I diss their Space.

So there you have it. My five (or seven) best posts of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can deduce that April was a stupidly popular year. Hmm. I will try and get some kind of Reddit- / Digg-style voting plugin for this blog. That would probably be much better.

Okay, how else can I look at last year? What music I’ve listened to. I know I still haven’t posted my top ten albums of 2006 yet. I promise that is coming. But Last.fm offers a handy way to track what you listen to, and a glance at the rolling year chart on this day allows me to have a look at what I listened to over the past year. This will change tomorrow, so it’s worth taking a note of, if you’re interested in that kind of useless information.

1. Boards of Canada (851)
2. Radiohead (674)
3. Pulp (624)
4. Broadcast (615) — I don’t remember listening to this much Broadcast?!
5. Autechre (607)
6. Squarepusher (588)
7. The Fiery Furnaces (579)
8. Tortoise (472)
9. Aphex Twin (384)
10. Prefuse 73 (366)

Perhaps the most surprising thing (apart from how high Broadcast are) is how low Autechre are. For the most part though, this isn’t too different to my all-time top ten on Last.fm.

As for the tracks chart, apart from two tracks that appeared on two different releases (thus probably getting twice as many listens as they otherwise would have), all of my top ten is made up of tracks from Florida by Diplo and Everything Ecstatic by Four Tet. I got both of those albums for last Christmas. So that is probably proof that I don’t spend nearly as much time on the computer as I used to. The chart will probably look completely different at the end of the month.

This is what my brother got me for Christmas:

I guess that’s almost the same as exchanging five pound notes.

Diving straight into a ‘quick race’ and the game feels quite similar to last year’s edition — on the surface at least. It can be difficult to find your feet when you play a racing game for the first time. Different racing games all feel quite different, so you will often find yourself running wide or spinning off on your first lap. But within another two or three laps you will find your feet and you’ll be right up to speed.

Not so in Formula One 06. A brilliant new feature in the game is that each kerb is individually modelled — they are all different. So you can’t just attack every kerb like you would in most racing games.

Martin Brundle’s excellent book, Working the Wheel, which I read earlier this year, really illustrates the fact that tackling a corner and finding the racing line is not merely a matter minimising the angle of the corner. You must also watch out for bumps, crowns, dodgy drain covers, slippery paint and whatever else might increase or decrease your grip.

Formula One 06 gives a sense of that. You actually have to learn which kerbs you can ride, and which way you can ride them. You won’t always get away with it. Some evil kerbs — such as Variante Alta at Imola and the final chicane at Magny Cours — can throw you up into the air, into a spin or straight into a wall. A lot of trial and error is involved. This is a great feeling though. It feels like you really have to learn the tracks as opposed to just pointing your car towards the apex and flooring the throttle.

One of the other things I quickly noticed was how easy it was to spin the car. It can get quite frustrating. But it would just be boring if it was too easy, right? And that brings me on to another great thing about this game. My biggest problem with last year’s edition was that it was simply too easy. Even on the hardest difficulty level with all driver aids turned off, the AI cars would just tour around at a snail’s pace. The game simply was not enjoyable, and as such I didn’t play much of what was otherwise a pretty solid game.

The good news is that the difficulty has been ramped right up for Formula One 06. At first it is actually quite intimidating. All of your opponents seem almost impossibly quick. When you combine this with the fact that it can be quite easy to spin and that you now have to tiptoe your way around the kerbs, you end up with the opposite problem to what we had in last year’s game.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that F1 06 is too difficult. Besides, it would be better for it to be too difficult than too easy. But let’s just say than in Career mode I’ve been sacked from Scuderia Toro Rosso, and now I’ve found myself doing donkey work for Super Aguri, unable to get a race drive. I guess that’s realistic.

While we’re on Career mode, I must mention how much of a step up this has taken yet again. In particular, the role of test driver has been well thought-out. The qualities needed of a test driver are quite different to those of a race driver. A racer needs to drive fast, spend all day looking cool and spray champagne like nobody else can. Meanwhile, a test driver has to trundle around doing hundreds of laps at a time — not quickly, but consistently, so that the team can collect data.

So in F1 06, a test driver’s role is not merely to go quickly, although that’s obviously part of it. But as a test driver you must go consistently quickly. It’s all very well to beat your target time by two seconds — but can you do that for three laps in a row? Because this is what you have to do in F1 06. And I can’t do it! I am a complete failure at driving consistent laps. The amount of times I have set two stunning lap times only to lose my concentration on the third lap — I am going insane with this game. And I love it!

On a similar note, the developers have also devised a clever way to make Friday practice mean something. It is called Race Car Evolution. Your team will send you out with a variety of different set ups, and from there you can judge how each change affects the handling of your car and ultimately your lap time. At first the process looks laborious. But if you can get clean laps in consistently it can be over quite quickly. Whatever, Race Car Evolution is optional anyway, so you can skip the whole thing and set up your car normally if you wish.

Once you’re happy with the set up, it’s time to qualify. And this is another area where this game excells. You can tell that quite a bit of thought has gone into the presentation of the qualifying sessions, which can be great fun. The on-screen graphics mimick those used by FOM for television, but not just for the sake of it. Pole time is shown, as well as the time you have to beat in order to avoid knocking out. Towards the end of the session, a list of people in the ‘drop zone’ slids out. Watching the times fall while you’re stuck in the drop zone really piles the pressure on. Perfect for a video game.

Come race day and yet another nifty new feature is unveiled — the formation lap. This is one of those things that spoddy F1 gamers have asked to be included in a game for a long time, along with the safety car, pit lane speed limiters and all the rest of it. Now that the formation lap has made it to the game, I realise why perhaps it has never been included in a game before. It is horrendously dull.

Or it would be, if you could ever manage to complete the formation lap. This feature is extremely buggy. Sometimes it will all go wrong. A car might go away slowly or something, and then all of a sudden the game skips straight to the start. Not good. The formation lap is just badly executed in general. It was billed as an opportunity to get your tyres warmed up, but it is actually impossible to do that. Your speed is limited and besides, the AI controls your car to a large extent.

The formation lap is a nice idea, but it needs some real work if it’s going to be included in next year’s game. As it stands, it is far too rough around the edges to be included in the game.

So we find ourselves at the start of the race. A smile was brought to my face when I noticed an added element of realism — James Allen’s commentary is complete with Allenisms in this game! “When the lights go out we are…… RAAACIIIIIIIIIIING! It’s almost as if Allen has scripted the commentary himself.

In all seriousness, the commentary has improved greatly from previous years, especially as you can now hear commentary in Career mode, unlike last year where a bug crept in at the last minute. It could still do with a lot of improvement. There is no interaction between James Allen and Martin Brundle. Indeed, Brundle appears to be confined to the pre-race spiel. Formula 1 97 still has the best commentary in my view, because both Murray and Martin would keep you entertained, and they spoke to each other, even if it was just the occasional “That’s right Murray” from Martin.

Another criticism I would have about the commentary is that they never mention the player during Career mode. Granted, this would be difficult due to the fact that you play yourself in Career mode. (Unfortunately you can’t create your avatar with the Eye Toy this year, but I guess that was a bit gimmicky anyway. You can still enter in your own name though.) But it can’t be too difficult to have generic commentary along the lines of, “the Super Aguri driver has spun!” or, “the Brit is in the lead”. Developers used this method to good effect when Jacques Villeneuve couldn’t appear in the video games.

Now for some more bad news I’m afraid. There is a bad bug in this game which causes the field to start very slowly, almost as though they were on the formation lap. The form a nice, orderly queue — sometimes single file, sometimes in two distinct queues — and they are all very polite, they are slow and they don’t overtake each other. Unfortunately this makes it very easy for you, the player, to charge your way through the field. Even if you started from last place, and even if you are in hard mode, you will find yourself leading by the second corner. Doh!

My first suspicion was that this was a problem with formation laps, so I turned the option for formation laps off. It seemed to be the end of the matter, but a few starts later and the problem cropped up again. I read at F1Gamers.com that the bug could perhaps be something to do with Race Car Evolution — skipping RCE avoids the slow starts. I’ve not had a chance to test this out yet, but it doesn’t matter. This simply should not be happening.

Bugs have haunted Sony’s / Studio Liverpool’s Formula 1 series, particularly on the PS2. In a way it is understandable, as they are made on a very tight schedule. But that fact doesn’t make the pill any less bitter for the gamer to swallow. I find it difficult to comprehend how this game was released with such a massive flaw in it.

Luckily the AI cars aren’t slow for very long — maybe half a lap or something — and after that we are back to the difficult challenge we faced during testing and qualifying. Opposing cars really hound you in this game. They will overtake you, and it is such a thrill to be racing like this after years of fairly duff Scalextric-style AI. The AI is also quite clever during qualifying and practice. If they are shown the blue flags they will slow down and get out of your way if you’re on a hot lap. Oh, and they have been known to make mistakes aswell.

A few laps in and you’ll find yourself having to make a pitstop. No surprise there, but this year’s Formula 1 rules which saw the reintroduction of tyre-changing mean that the interactive pitstops — essentially QTE mini-games — are much more of a challenge. If you need to change your front wing you are bound to get in a muddle! Don’t expect to gain so much time on your opponents during pitstops this year!

A final word on damage. It is much better this year. You can’t really get away with slamming into the wall this time around, which is a relief. There is also a cool phase where your tyre will wobble around like Kimi Räikkönen’s at last year’s European Grand Prix. It doesn’t seem to affect the handling too much, but I wonder if when the wheel flies off James Allen says, “See, I told you!”

So there we have it. All-in-all, not a bad game at all this year round. Yet again the whole thing is let down by some bad bugs, but I can see myself playing this game a lot more than I played F1 05 for the sheer reason that it’s much more of a challenge. I can’t wait to unlock those classic cars and the Jerez circuit.

• PlayStation-F1 website
• F1Gamers.com — Formula 1 video game fansite

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Sony’s Formula One franchise, which started off in fine form with the original Formula One and Formula 1 97 which were made by Bizarre Creations. These days they are making the best racing game in existence, Project Gotham Racing, for the Xbox. F1 and F197 were benchmarks which some still say haven’t been improved on to this day!

Studio Liverpool, who make the games today, always work flat-out on the game right up to the last moment they can get away with. This resulted in Formula One 05 containing a rather unfortunate bug, created at the last minute, which meant that there was no commentary in career mode. Anyway, current estimates for the release date vary wildly, from as early as next Friday (!) to as late as mid-July.

We’re talking about the internet here, so of course there is a website dedicated to Formula 1 video games: F1Gamers.com. It’s a bit ad-heavy, so be prepared for that. Anyway, they’ve built up a good relationship with Studio Liverpool, and there is a good Q&A which outlines what we can expect for Formula One 06.

Overall I’m quite pleased with what I’ve read in that article. When I first played Formula One 05 I was impressed by the graphics and the general feel of the game, but after a while it just became far too easy, even with all the options set to the most difficult settings. I ended up playing it much less that Formula One 04. It sounds like Formula One 06 is going to be much harder, although they explain most players aren’t nearly as good as so-called “hardcore” F1 gamers, which is why features like launch control and the pitlane speed limiter have been removed from the game in recent years (apparently it just confused most players!).

I am surprised, though, that they have decided to include formation laps in the game. And of course, I can’t wait to have a go at the new qualifying format, which is apparently perfect for a video game!

• So now their console literally is a pile of piss.
• At least it will be difficult to take the piss out of it (ehhh kind of).
• The new versions of the games will have to be called, for instance, Mario Wii
• “Mummy, I’m going to play with my Wii.”
• “My Wii is broken.”
• “Your Wii is a different colour to mine.”
• “I need to get the latest Wii game.”
• “I’m going to Gamestation for a Wii.”
• Sony will rename their PlayStation3 console ‘Puu’.

Many of the above shamelessly nicked from this forum (thanks Gordon).

Click here to see the Wii in all its glory.

More here at Joystiq:

• I need a Wii now! I can’t wait until this fall!
• “Mum, I finished my homework. Can I play with my Wii some more?”
• “Hey Mom, Roger’s bringing his Wii over. We’re going to connect his Wii to my Wii and then we’ll play all night.”

…you get the picture…

Update: Canspice:

For the immature person in all of us this is a great day. A great day indeed.

I once bought a flight simulator for my Beeb on the strength of its own advertising copy claiming it to be the best flight simulator ever made. It wasn’t, and it probably remains the one and only text-based flight simulator ever to hit the market.

He also has a list of hypothetical worst-ever computer games which includes ‘Grand Theft Auto: Milton Keynes’.

This actually comes scarily close to one of my friend’s personal projects. Apparently for the PC version of GTA there is a level creator where (funnily enough) you can create your own levels. Well one of my friends did actually begin (and I perhaps still occasionally works on) creating a Grand Theft Auto: Dundee.* Apparently he’s done between the harbour and the Overgate shopping centre, or something. Some people think that I have no life, but that really is entering another realm of sadness isn’t it?

*Although I guess if you were going to choose one Scottish town to be a hotbed of criminal activity, it probably would be Dundee…

Having an 18 certificate is a sure-fire way to get kids interested in a video game. It works in exactly the same way that 8-year-olds were interested in South Park just because it had lots of swearing in it. And it’s why tons of six-year-olds are well into Slipknot — because it has a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker on it.

Grand Theft Auto did it way back in the mid-1990s. I was definitely playing that game well before I was 18 — I think most of my peers were. I didn’t like it because of its 18 certificate — I thought it was quite a funny game actually — but I’m sure that for a lot of people, the 18 certificate was a large part of the appeal of the whole thing.

It’s not news that a video game company might be getting an 18 certificate on purpose as a cheap way to get kids interested, or to get loads of priceless media coverage for free (à la recent Grand Theft Auto games). The thing that stunned me about the 50 Cent game was the sheer size of that 18 certificate. It must be at least four times the size of a normal 18 certificate. Is that even legal?

Of course, the game makers could just say that they are only trying to make sure that parents are aware that the game contains adult content. Ingenious. Of course, it doesn’t stop many parents from buying it on their child’s behalf anyway.