I had a bit of a realisation last night. I can’t remember the last time I looked at a game’s instruction manual. At all.

Fair enough, it doesn’t help that a lot of games I play these days (I would say maybe around 95%) are rented, or downloaded – neither of which come with manuals.

But I haven’t missed the option.

The last two games I bought boxed – Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Batman: Arkham City definitely didn’t have their manuals fingered. They could, in theory, be misprinted in such a way that by pure chance they detail a cure for cancer – and my lazy reliance on in-game tutorials would be damning us all.

I think maybe Fallout 3 was the last one I read, because the game contained all manner numbers in it and abbreviations that I didn’t understand.

Should I have to read a (admittedly slim) book in order to understand a video game – how to play it, how to navigate the menus, the context of the world it takes place in?

Have we reached the point where even the most complex of games is essentially “pick up and play”, in that they will guide me by the hand until I am ready for the training wheels to come off?

Is it better this way, or worse?

(The answer is “better”, by the way, so give yourself a house point if you picked that one.)

Yes, I’ve been quiet for the last couple of weeks. Sorry.

There have been two main reasons for this. Or three main reasons, but one of them is “been working” and that’s fairly boring because despite a lot of graft there aren’t any exciting new screenshots to show. And as much as I’d like to think my readers are cleverer than the average ape, I secretly suspect you still mostly get excited when I tickle your visual brainy bits.

One of the other reasons is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Which is a game so good I played it through twice, almost back to back. Not quite, there was a brief period of trying to play Crysis 2 in between, but I quickly got bored / annoyed (I feel there should be a word specifically for this combination. “Annored” or “Boyed” maybe).

Deus Ex is very good, despite its numerous little (and not so little if you believe the anti-boss fight hype) flaws. It’s a game that manages to combine shooting and stealth and exploration and minor RPG elements in a way that I find entirely intoxicating, hence diving almost straight back in for a second play.

Yes, there are issues. The acting is pretty much crap, too many conversations are linear, the opening section is boring (these last two grate more on a second playthrough), many of your available upgrades are rather too limited in use, the battery recharging system could be improved, some of the achievements have suspect conditions (I’m not going to try another Foxiest run since it didn’t tell me why I failed the last one), the bosses are definitely a weak point, and probably lots of other things as well.

But it is way more than the sum of its parts.

And it contains one of the better hacking minigames I’ve seen.

Aside from getting stuck deep inside my current game of the year, I also did this, which took some time training for.

And raised (at current count) £596 for the Sick Kids Friend Foundation, which is great. There’s still a little bit of cash to come from my charity game.

The sponsorship page is still open, so if you were waiting to see if I could actually perform before you put your money in, now is the time!

So now we’re up to date. Perhaps my next post won’t be so long. It might even be tomorrow. If I remember.

So this morning my iPhone suddenly and unexpectedly shuffled off the mortal coil. Very frustrating, annoying, inconvenient, etc. Imagine being thrust back in to a world where you can’t check your email and twitter at any given moment? It’s literally like the dark ages again.

Anyway, during the support request one thing that stood out to me was that I have to wait for Apple to send me a box to ship my iPhone off in. This seems a little silly, and a bit of a waste of time. I have boxes. If they let me print out a shipping label, I’d send it away today, and my repaired gadget would be back in my hands sooner.

(Especially as I’m away for the next few days, and although it claims to offer the option of having the box delivered to an alternate address, trying to use that option will dump you without explanation on a “sorry, we’re unable to fulfil your request right now” page. Must be trying to combat all of that box fraud you always read about.)

Anyway anyway, I thought I’d send in a bit of support feedback about having a “print your own label” option. So I filled in an online feedback form. “Even though they probably don’t read them”, I thought. This reply I got shows how close to the truth I was (click for full size).

There really is nobody listening.

I’ve not had the promised automatic mail about my actual support request yet. I hope that’s not going to the same mailing list!

The other thing that has been taking up some of my time recently is training.

You might remember that last year I took part in the Sick Kids Save Point – a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for the Sick Kids Friends Foundation. This is a great charity that supports the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, by providing comforts that make a kid’s stay in hospital more bearable; more child and family facilities; extra medical equipment; and funding extra research and training. Here’s an article about an upcoming project of theirs.

It was good – playing games and also helping a charity – but I sort of felt that after sitting on my backside for 24 hours I should do something a little bit more physical this year (and no, 24 hours of Wii Fit or Sports was definitely not going to happen).

I’ve been gradually losing weight and getting fitter since moving to Edinburgh (living a five minute walk from a gym will tend to guilt trip you in to that, I think). After doing a bit of resistance training on my legs (to strengthen my knees to the point they can handle high impact exercise), I found I quite enjoy running. Not horrible treadmill running, but running outdoors.

So they idea of doing a charity run came up, and thankfully Bupa have just the thing. I entered, again to raise money for the SKFF.

All was going well (I can’t remember how much information is public on my RunKeeper page but I was doing decent 11km+ runs in May) until I went too far and my old knee problem came back. Apparently you’re not meant to increase the amount you run by more than 25% a week, but me being an idiot didn’t know this.

After a month of being in pain even after just walking 5km, things looked bleak. Gradually the injury has been healing though, and over the last month I’ve been slowly pushing the distance I can run back up again – I’m currently able to do 8km, with just a month to go before the event. Hopefully I will be fine, and the injury will hold off until I’m done.

Why am I telling you all this? Isn’t it obvious by now?

I’m raising money. I want your sponsorship. The Sick Kids Friends Foundation need your sponsorship. It’s for a brilliant cause, and involves a game developer huffing and puffing his way around the hilly Edinburgh streets.

Go on, sponsor me. Please.

(As an aside, at the time of writing I’ve raised £285. Which is great, but less than half of what I eventually raised through playing games. It seems that despite the mickey-taking at the time, people are more willing to shell out for games playing!)

Only two posts so far this month? Blimey, have I died or something?

No, I have generally been having a more relaxed month and as such haven’t seen fit to post. So I’ll sum it all up and hopefully then we’ll be up to date.

Work-wise things have been ticking along. The game that I’ve been blogging about most recently, with the scientist guy, the factory and the killer robots, has been shelved for the time being. I was hit with the realisation of how much content would be needed to finish it, and I’m not sure such an undertaking is a great idea for me at this point. I still love the idea of the game though, so I’m hoping to keep dipping in to it during quieter periods and hopefully continue making progress that way.

In its place I’ve started working on something less content heavy (I hope), that’s kind of a cross between the old arcade machine Defender, and the Amiga game Ugh! (I think there are a quite a few other “flying taxi” games of that nature too, so chances are you’ve played something vaguely similar). It’s coming along okay, so I might have a screenshot or two to show off soon.

Games I’ve been playing-wise there has been a glut of checking things out. Things like Minecraft, which you may have heard of. Also Limbo (didn’t really like it, it felt like Rick Dangerous with arty graphics and the kind of physics-based controls that I hate in platforms games and that has always eventually soured me to Little Big Planet).

I’ve also surprised myself by getting more in to Dead Rising 2 than I ever managed with the first game. It seems a lot friendlier to a casual player, though still layered with a lot of optional depth. I can see myself giving up when the time limits to do things get in the way again, though (especially the main daily one that forces you to find an item and return to your daughter every 24 hours).

And finally, because it’s August, I’ve spent what is probably an unhealthy amount of my time going to see comedy. Some people would say it’s crazy to see 48 shows (though James Parker would disagree with those people).

Obviously I’m not going to list everything I have seen (oh, the things I have seen) not least because some of it was absolute rubbish. But if you get chance to see Nick Helm’s Dare to Dream, Olver: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Tim Key’s Masterslut, John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil: The Behemoth, Hannibal Buress: The Hannibal Montanabal Experience, or the Pajama Men: In the Middle of No One, you definitely should. And if you were at the Fringe this year but missed the chance to see Comedy in the Dark, The Wrestling, Comedy Countdown, and Alex Horne’s Taskmaster II, then shame on you.

Oh, there is one other thing that’s been taking up my time, but I’ll post about that separately.

Google+; it’s the exciting and hot new social network on the web. Everybody’s clamouring for invites, because the beta is taking the concept of social network in a brave new direction by making it difficult to get on. Who cares if you can’t communicate with everyone you want to? Exclusivity – That’s what it’s about these days.

Anyway, the stupid invite limiting isn’t what puts me off. My real problem with it is the interface.

Pictures speak louder than words, so I’ll just start off by putting these three screengrabs of comments I have made on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. These are all screengrabbed off my computer, running Chrome with default font size etc. They’re all cropped to the top and bottom of the post horizontal rule. Each of my posts has a couple of follow up comments by other users, the Facebook and G+ ones both have a “like” / “+1″.

(Sorry about all the blacking out, but I don’t feel it’s really my place to publish other people’s comments, even if they are just on the banality of my own eating.)

The Twitter grab spells out my problem explicitly. My desktop is 900 pixels high. When I load G+ I can see fewer posts than on either of the other two social sites. This seems very bad to me, I like to be able to quickly browse the goings on in my networks, and then interact with those that interest me. G+ makes browsing much more time consuming.

It’s a problem made worse by the inlining of images and video at their native resolutions. At least Facebook has learnt to crop and scale to keep things from taking up too much room.

If one user has posted three updates in a row, they have taken over my entire G+ screen. It feels like they are spamming me. The same three posts take up just a quarter of my Twitter feed view, so it doesn’t feel like they’re taking over.

Circles (as nice an idea as they are, and they’re certainly the main thing I hear people talking positively about) don’t help in this situation. A noisy user is a noisy user. The only thing I could do is put them in a circle by themselves, or a “7th Circle of Spam”, or something. This might be exacerbated by people not yet having worked out where G+ “fits” into their social life. Is it designed for high volume posting like Twitter, or is fewer richer posts, like Facebook?

Still, it is a worry for me that with the dozen or so people I currently have on the network, my feed is already feeling overloaded.

(And yes, I know I could send them feedback, but I’m not sure it should really be up to me to help companies make their products be something I want to use. I already have two networks that serve my needs pretty well. I can’t believe that everybody in a position to influence this at Google thought that a huge font and no theme support was the right way to go.)

Here’s an interview I did with the UK magazine & website Edge. I think it’s a bit more wafflesome than previous interviews (though at least it’s not going on and on about money!) and that’s probably down to it being a phone interview.

That said, despite having to think of what to say on the fly, I don’t think I’ve put my foot in my mouth, except for one bit.

Is making games that can be played in a lunch break any less volatile, though?

People are still going to buy Call Of Duty; [Activision has] got two million people signing up for Call Of Duty: Elite beta. But the way the industry is at the moment, the iPhone is there as an option, just like everything else. Not every TV programme is going to be The Sopranos, but not every TV programme is going to be Eastenders either. You’ve got to have a range of entertainment there. I think we went through a period – through PS2 and early this generation – where it didn’t seem that there was anything there other than shooting for triple-A and making that gamble with your money – it had to pay off.

What I had meant to say here was that there was a period where PC sales were poor, and there were no good digital distribution channels (such as XBox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Apple’s App Store, Android Marketplace, or Steam) that smaller games could be released.

Your only option was to find a publisher so that you could release a boxed console title, and that was very limiting.

Now it’s reaching a point where every boxed console game has to be a AAA gamble, so it makes a lot of sense that developers, even big ones, are looking at the many options for releasing much smaller games – much smaller gambles.

Like the everyone and their mum, Mainly About Games is now on Facebook.

As well as posting updates on whatever’s going on around here, there will also be links to whatever indie game (or just general games industry) news, videos, pictures, and blog posts I find interesting.

There are already a bunch of things on the wall, that I think are fairly representative of where it’s going, so maybe go and check it out?

Applications, and in particular games, have the system requirements listed on them.

Many Macs are built from Apple’s factory-standard components, and bought “as is” in one of a handful of possible configurations. The Mac knows what bits it has inside it, and how good they are.

So why doesn’t the App Store give me an indication of how well a game’s likely to run? Maybe on a little scale of “should have no problems”, through “might be a bit slow, but it’ll run at medium settings”, to “not a hope, don’t waste your money”. Obviously you’d have to have a disclaimer that this is just an approximation, and it might not be right.

Can’t be that hard to do, I would have thought, and it’d give customers more purchasing confidence. Why don’t other online stores do this too? I’m sure Steam could do it if they wanted to. This should be one of the benefits over buying a physical copy and having to remember how good your machine is, and if it cuts the mustard against the list on the back of the box.

Sometimes phishing spam just isn’t even trying.

From: ivette hardeman chardermanivette@hotmail.com
Subject: Mr Anthony Gowland

Already got job?
You can apply to start your unique job career!

Vacancies available : 3
Country: Europe
Earnings: GBP 900 / week
Probation period: 1 month
Occupation: part-time, 2 hours a day

Tempting, but I’m not sure I want to commute to Europe for two hours a day.

Is E3 over yet, I want to talk about the exciting stuff that’s happening to me goddammit. (If you read this on the site rather than on the RSS feed, you might be able to guess.)