Grumpy man with too much time on his hands.: December 2011

Friday, 16 December 2011

HOLY SHIT IT'S CHRISTMAS

WHAT TO LOOK FORWARD TO IF SANTA BRINGS YOU A FIFA 12 FOR YOUR PLAYSTATION THIS CHRISTMAS.

If you are interested in football, computer games, or just humour, you probably have seen the above image of Liverpool's striker Carroll and Arsenal's goalkeeper Fabianski sharing a passionate embrace on the Playstation game FIFA 12. Below is the full video:

In our house we have always played football games. All football fans want to simulate the real thing. Even if you are overweight, out of shape, or just plain useless, you can play a simulated match, where you are the star player.

Even before computers and game consoles were invented it was....

Blow football....

Fussball....

Subbuteo....

striker and all the other toys, machines and contraptions that were available at the time. Then, as now, we wanted realism. We wanted to forget that we were playing with magnets or skittles and to believe that we were playing in stadiums with real players.

In the late 1970’s Intellivision, a very early games console, brought out the first computer game that achieved maximum believable realism for a football game. Sadly, it wasn’t long before we started to pick up on the games weaknesses and we got to know how to beat it, which as we have subsequently learned, happens with every game. The flaw was that because the game was scrolling, it was a tactic to run an attacking player off to the left, only for him to return on the right as a defender. Then the illusion was broken and it stopped being a football game and it just became a computer game.

Following on from Itellivision we went through years of various consoles (SNES, Mega drive etc) and games. Each of them was an improvement on the one before; different angles, viewpoints, joy pads and teams etc.

The same problems kept coming up, which was that you find a flaw in the game and you are able to exploit it. Usually it was a blind spot in the game where you couldn’t fail to score. If you got in a certain position and hit the ball a certain way, you were guaranteed to score. Then it was a case of focusing all your play into trying to get in that position and preventing your opponent from getting there, to the exclusion of everything else. The other problem that we encountered was that the better we got at a game, the more restricting it became. We were thinking faster than the console would allow. For instance, on one game, we played so fast that the thing had a heart attack and died.

While we were playing we realised the restrictions, but were able to fantasize about where we were eventually heading….to a virtual reality place where we would be in a game….literally.

Playstation was the quantum leap. In 1994 when Playstation came out we had the luxury of the choice between two games Pro-evolution soccer (PES) and FIFA.

We decided on PES because it was at a good angle, the team could build moves, pass easily and you could play your team your way, whereas FIFA was rigid, at a poor angle and had an annoying yellow circle around the player being controlled.

Every couple of years PES brought out an update. It was as if someone had been listening to our conversations, because every update seemed to fix all the problems that we had spotted in the previous edition. In addition, technology had moved on and we were able to play the games on the net, so we didn’t even have to be in the same room to play, or even with each other and I found myself playing with people from Java, Japan, and Jersey.

Everything was sweet until three years ago when FIFA upped their game. At first, people started saying stuff like “Have you seen FIFA lately?” moving on to “I don’t play PES anymore, FIFA’s better”. In the end I found that I was the only one who hadn’t changed. In the end my grandson went out and got me a FIFA once and for all.

I got with the programme quickly and life went on, until one day I got a phone call from my son:

“You’ll never guess what just happened, I was playing the game and a defender took Theo Walcott’s leg off….like right off. He was rolling around with one leg”!

It seems that it has got even weirder than that in that you can now look at YouTube and there are all kinds of glitches appearing in the game.

The three videos above are just the tip of the iceberg. If you go to YouTube you'll see players melting, flying, levitating and all kinds of madness. It seems like we have moved on from cyberspace to the Twilight Zone.

We might not have to put up with it for much longer. If you have ever seen the movie "The Matrix" you will be familiar with the process that the hero, Neo, goes through in order to be a supreme martial artist by being plugged in to a computer that downloads the skills into his brain.

Like most science fiction that becomes science fact, it will soon be possible. Scientists at Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have been studying a process called "Decoded Neurofeedback" , a functional magnetic resonance machine, which can download knowledge directly into someone's brain through their visual cortex by sending signals that change their brain activity pattern. In the near future all superior human skills, like football, will simply become apps which you will be able to download into yourself.

If you visualize everyone possessing the skills of Maradona, nobody would want to play simulated soccer anymore. But that would open out to a whole lot of problems like; getting fit, training and getting injured. Perhaps people would like something relaxing to take their mind off it all....

Like blow football.

With thanks to Simon.

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC OBSERVES BANANA TYPE ALIEN.

In 2009 the Ministry of Defence released sketches and drawings submitted by the public of supposed alien sightings.

In 1989 this sketch was made by a member of the public of what seemed to be a banana with human style arms and legs, seen in London

If you happen to see one, don't get too close....or you might slip over....and nobody can hear you scream in London.

STUPID AMERICANS #11. 6% OF AMERICANS CAN'T FIND THE USA ON A MAP.

Even the above wording is wrong. He's saying "Yeah, (of) course. We were schooled in England"

6%? That's the good news. The bad news is that hardly any of them can find anywhere else, especially us!

A couple of months ago the White House sent out some press literature which included a map which incorrectly identified the state of Wyoming as Colorado. It's a miracle how the US can find their way to all the countries they invade!