Summer is drawing to a close. Free time awaits.

Outgoing Felix editor extraordinaire Tomo Roberts is looking at a new project for October, which is one of many excitement-inducing things I’m looking forward to. More later.

At the same time, I rented out Grand Theft Auto IV to get an idea of just what the fuss was all about, and so a few things happened in the same week. First of all, I was pleasantly surprised by the Hannah Montana game that I was looking at. And then, you see, Grand Theft Auto IV began to disappoint.

Grand Theft Auto IV is one of those difficult games that leap headfirst onto a media frenzy and hope the crowdsurfing carries them far enough. The Rockstar folks were sitting on one of the biggest licenses in gaming history, and yet they still knew they had to deliver a certain level of quality. People are calling it the ‘most important game ever’ for a reason - but like a lot of big games before it, that might be the wrong reason. Why? Not because Rockstar didn’t deliver the level of quality people expected, but because that level was set low. The bar was set too low, in fact, for Grand Theft Auto to really satisfy me. It could’ve been so much better.

Hannah Montana is one of those licensed games that, on the face of it, seems not to care about the gamer. It’s got the sort of graphics that just don’t sit on the screen properly, and the music isn’t that great for a licensed game. But the play. The play is great. Because the way the game plays is smooth, it’s not frustrating, it’s rewarding to do. It shows hints of playtesting, or good design at the very least. Is it fair to think better of Hannah Montana because the competition are frequently so poor? I think so.

Game scores are a hotly debated topic. If you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the best game you’ve ever reviewed, and then you give it less than other games, it feels like you’re making the wrong statement to the reader. Whether you intend to make it or not, it’ll inevitably get misconstrued by whoever comes to look at it. But the fact is that Grand Theft Auto IV, when compared to what we should expect from a $100million game, actually drops the ball a little. There are a few game design choices that feel broken. The atmosphere’s a bit overdone in places. It gives freedoms in some areas, but snatches them away just as you come to rely on them.

It’s not that it’s bad. Like Bioshock, playing GTA IV is a joyous experience, but every review I read I’m left feeling that the journalist in question is asking completely the wrong questions. Is GTA IV better than previous ones? Yes. Is it the best thing on the 360? Yes. But that shouldn’t be the end of the review, because that’s not how art forms mature. It’s not like those skyscraper races, building a new construction just one inch taller than the current tallest to grab the world record. It’s about considering what the game could be. Hannah Montana breaks free of my expectations of it, and that makes it a good piece of gaming. GTA IV, however, remains firmly nestled in its comfort zone.

GTA IV has been a cash cow waiting to burst open with the money-milk for some time now. Downloadable content featuring entire cities had been mooted for ages, and I’m pleased to say that Felix has seen and played the first city release, and it’s just as brilliant as you might expect.

First, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way - yes, it’s set in London. We don’t have any screenshots to show you, so the pictures that adorn this page are only mockups, but London was Rockstar’s choice for the first release and it’s a good one too.
We played the expansion for around two hours, as well as being shown sneak peeks at later content too, and we’re ready to spill as many of the beans as we can to you - we’ve got a good feel for the story and the locales, as well as the characteristic GTA charm that you’ve come to expect from the missions and so on.
You play Len Kivingstone, a disgraced political candidate who’s been voted out and left for dead by a rebel faction led by John Borisson (voiced by Ian McKellen). We only saw the humble beginnings of the promised eight-hour storyline, but Rockstar say that it’s about “Len’s fight to regain his power and take revenge on the man who murdered his reputation.”
But it won’t be an easy fight. When you start out, you’ve got few friends and many enemies. People spit at you in the street and regular newspaper releases mock you with cutting words that eat away at the newly-introduced ‘Feeling Of Self-worth’ meter.
Crucially, it’s still GTA IV. The taxi service is retained and looking lovelier than ever - although in-car radio is now replaced with a complex conversation system which takes some time getting the hang of. At first we just hammered the racial insult button, but found that the drivers just talked for even longer - watch out.
The beloved mobile phone system is carried through too. Now you can choose from a huge range of phone models and service providers - 3, for instance, has almost no service connection wherever you are in London, or you can sign up to O2 which allows you act like a tosser whenever one of their adverts comes on the TV.

Ah, TV. Rockstar went to great lengths to license huge amounts of authentic British viewing. One channel shows reruns of the same four episodes of Only Fools And Horses over and over again, one just plays a loop of Ant and Dec laughing, and the other has Jeremy Paxman asking a red-faced man to ‘answer the question’ for four hours.
“We originally recorded a whole bunch of programmes for the city, but playtesters found this unrealistic.” my guide explains, “We think we’ve got the television spot on now.”
They have indeed. Right down to the way Ant and Dec blend into each other as they speak. Animators worked for eight months in order to turn motion-captured actors into the lifeless goons that ITV viewers know and love.
Guns are a controversial point in the new pack. Because of their dedication to realism, no-one has a gun in the game. Lead Designer Tim ‘Mitch’ Mitchens explains, “We experimented with a few different loadouts, but we think our approach now works best - you never see anyone with a weapon, you just hear about it.”
It’s a step away from the violence of GTA IV, but that’s not to say they haven’t lived up to the mean reputation some parts of the city have.
“Yeah, the insults had to be there. It’s quite graphic, some of it, and we’re expected more complaints than with the original. We drop the f-bomb a lot. People insult your choice of clothing. Some of it’s pretty close to the mark, but we really wanted to convey the grittiness of living in the big smoke.”
To demonstrate this, he takes the controller off me and takes a taxi up to Hampstead. There we find an artist sitting on the heath, sketching passers-by. He hits a shoulder button.
“Your use of colour is mediocre!”
There’s an awkward silence in the room, as he knows that I haven’t seen anything like this before in a game.
“We’re known for pushing boundaries.” he explains, “There’s more that opens up as you go along. You can throw bottles at people and spit in the street. We think it’s good to have that kind of freedom.”
The storyline is a mix of mission styles. At first, Len’s mainly small time, giving interviews and hosting radio shows from time to time. The media seems to be a big thing - the more listeners you have, the more respect you’ve got.
Later, though, the storyline picks up. After our two hour play session was over, we were shown future missions including hanging around outside the Newsnight studios to face off with Jeremy Paxman, mano a mano.
“Jeremy was great fun to work with. He really got into it and even agreed to do a little motion capture.”
It shows - he sneers and cocks his head around in the cutscenes, relentlessly asking the same questions with a dead facial expression.
“We can’t do dead like Jeremy can. Our animators have forgotten how to do contempt.”

The final mission - an impromptu debate during the Olympic opening ceremony - looks positively electric. “It’s all about how well you’ve grasped the insult system, the anecdote-telling. There was originally an option to headbutt Konnie Huq [during the ceremony] but Konnie requested not to be a part of the game.”
Even with our extensive look, we know we’ve seen very little. The promised story time is just the tip of the iceberg - you can buy shares in Transport For London and eventually incite industrial action, you can file complaints with the Metropolitan Police about the noise generated by your various neighbours, you can even take a stroll around Imperial itself, which operates as a hideout during the series of missions that sees Len gain an honorary doctorate.
All in all, a solid-looking release from a game that was already pushing the boundaries of taste and quality in videogames. There are plenty of changes, but plenty to look forward to, and there’s no doubt that residents will thoroughly enjoy bombing down the London streets in a stolen taxi, on their way to purchase the expansion pack when it’s released next month.
Where next for Grand Theft Auto’s winning formula?
“We’re thinking GTA V may actually be set in Slough. It’s pretty rough. I went there once and someone actually called me a tosser.”
“We’ve interviewed Bloods before, gone with cops on the beat in New York City, but that really cut. you know? In here.”
He touches his chest and looks mournful. This is a developer with an understanding of the modern world, and the emotional rollercoaster it can be. The future’s looking good for both Rockstar and their runaway gaming success story.

The first time I played the Auto Parts garage on SWAT 4, in single-player, the plan went as follows - move in swiftly through the roof, split the element into two, two-man groups. One goes along the top floor to the main garage, above the walkway. The other goes with me, down the stairs, cleans out the car-park and wedges the doors. They wait outside the main garage for the final assault.
In that respect, the Endurance run of SWAT 4 went identically, albeit with me in a lower-ranking position, and everyone having far stranger accents than the butch Americans that accompanied the AI’s chirps of, “Get down or I put you down!”

The difference really came when it was time for me and my partner to break through the door to the office and take out the perp standing directly across the room from us. It was simple - blow the door, shout at the disoriented criminal, and then tazer him. It was simple. No AI pathfinding problems. No misunderstood commands. Just five humans and Voice-Over-IP communications. Simple.

My partner blows the C2 charge on the door, and it flies open, showing that the target has moved since we used our camera-sticks to check under the door. He turns around calmly and has a quite real pistol with quite real bullets in it. My tazer - which looks like a sellotape dispenser - fires off prematurely (always embarassing when you’re in a situation like that) and thuds into the wooden doorframe, buzzing loudly as it defies everything I learnt in Year 9 physics.

Fortunately, the door-breaching Starsky to my Hutch has got his primary weapon out - a pepper ball gun, still a peashooter compared to the Colt Python being waved at us - and has let off several rounds into the perp’s face. He’s screaming. It’s a good sign.

Starsky bumbles over to handcuff the wailing, eye-rubbing chump, and I move slowly into the office room, looking out of the window that looks down into the garage. The other half of our team is waiting on that side.

There’s a shout to the left, and I turn to see another perp on the elevated walkway, behind the glass. My primary weapon is out, another pepperball gun. No chances this time. Pff! Pff! Pff!

The pepperballs explode on the glass like hailstones on a barbeque, leaving a cloud of green smog in the office, and doing very little to the paper-thin sheet of glass. The magnum rounds the perp is firing, it turns out, are far better at penetrating glass. As well as fibreglass. And skull.

So began the seven-hour jog through the most recent outing of the tactical criminal-punching simulator SWAT 4. It was expected to be the shorted Endurance run to date, since each mission only took around fifteen minutes to complete, and the two teams of five were expected to get extremely high end-of-mission ratings straight off the mark. After the 51% report for the Auto Parts mission, things began to change.

It was the diamond merchant’s hostage rescue where things really began to go downhill. After three attempts at the mission, all ending in either the execution of a hostage or - more amusingly - the complete gutting of the team by a single shotgun-wielding attacker, our team’s leader began to change his tactics. We all started with our usual loadout - CS Gas, heavy armour, non-lethal weapons. But someone had an AK-47.
Whoops.

After a few restarts, mostly involving either tazering the rogue SWAT member into submission, or everyone getting slaughtered, terrorist stereotype-style, we managed to group together and progress past the mission - not without half of the team getting shot first, but it was completed either way.

It turned out that missions were not destined to be five-minute jaunts after all, and an estimated two-hour finish time rapidly increased as plans gave way to shooting which gave way to gas grenade fights. By the time we’d started playing the missions properly again, we’d had to merge the two teams together due to dropouts, and found ourselves hopelessly stuck just a few missions from the end.

Single-player runs such as Deus Ex, or more recently, Hitman: Blood Money, were just a matter of plodding through a long enough story at your own pace. Hitman picked up a competitive element once the players got talking to each other, but SWAT 4 was a different challenge. All you needed to do to complete the game was to keep the players focused, and keep concentrating on plans. But with the team at varying levels of inebriation, and problems with the way the server was set up, it was easier said than done.

The final, beautiful moment came in the last mission when, after half an hour of frustrating cock-ups and self-imposed civilian executions, the team decided to shirk their softly-softly approach, ditch the beanbag-firing shotguns, and take some real weapons. A SWAT 4 element, all with Magnums, storming a controversial research laboratory, with self-given orders to shoot first and take no prisoners later.

Like a crazy black ops team from some awful faux-action TV series, the Englishman, the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Northerner stumbled through the eerie spotlights and explosive gas canisters, headshotting and door-kicking like it was Counterstrike on steroids.

After an evening of cock-ups and subtlety, it was a beautiful end. Single-player might have depth, but it doesn’t have heavily-armed Yorkshiremen.

Sidebar - “Radio Chatter”

EDDIE - Pick it.
ANDREW - Someone else pick it, I’ve got the gas out.
MIKE - I’ll pick it.
(Mike begins to pick the lock.)
ANDREW - Is there a way to put a grenade away after you’ve got ready to throw it?
EDDIE - Right-
MIKE - …you mean after you’ve taken the pin out?
ANDREW - Yeah.
MIKE - …
EDDIE - Alright, look, I’ll secure the right hand of the room. Mike and James I want you to secure the left. Uh… Mike I want you to secure the stairs, but don’t go up ‘em.
MIKE - Alright.
EDDIE - Okay guys.
MIKE - Wait, did you mean… no, don’t worry.
EDDIE - Okay, go.

There is the sound of gunshots, and shouting of “Police! Drop your weapons!”

EDDIE - Fucking hell, Mike!
MIKE - What?
EDDIE - You block every door we go through!
MIKE - You said to go first!
EDDIE - Alright, whatever, look I want gas in the middle of that room. Can’t see fuck all in it. Andrew and Mike, go around and go through the other door.
(They go)
JAMES - Already got gas ready.
ANDREW - I’ll breach it.
EDDIE - Okay, go.
MIKE - On your command.
EDDIE - I SAID GO.
MIKE - …
EDDIE - GO.

The sound of a breaching charge being set off, and someone swearing over TeamSpeak.

EDDIE - Mike, for fuck’s sake! I SAID GO.
MIKE - It’s locked, I’m picking it.
ANDREW - It’s not locked.
MIKE - …ah. See I unlocked it, but then it said it was still locked, so…
EDDIE - What the hell do you call that?!
MIKE - Look, I…
ANDREW - The next room looks clear.
EDDIE - Alright, one room left.
ANDREW - This is the last room, I think.
EDDIE - Yeah, I just said, it’s…
MIKE - You want flash?
EDDIE - Look, everyone just shut up, and I can give you the order. Alright? Alright. Now we’ve got a door open at the end of that corridor… Go wedge the door.
MIKE - Alright, I’ve got a wedge.
EDDIE - No, it’s alright. I want someone to cover me as we go in.
ANDREW - Alright.
EDDIE - Okay, look - perp! Hang on, we’ve got a perp. Fall back. Go open the door, I’ll take him.
MIKE - Unlocking now.
EDDIE - Go quickly. Go. Wedge on this door.
ANDREW - Shouldn’t we go in the other way?
EDDIE - I said WEDGE ON THAT DOOR.
ANDREW - Ah, I haven’t got one.
MIKE - Me neither.
ANDREW - I thought you said you did?
MIKE - Yeah, I thought I had, but… I don’t.
EDDIE - Oh for fuck’s sake…

Reprogramming - alright, hacking - is something of a joy for me in Bioshock. It’s simple why - no matter what flavour of hell is breaking loose around me, hacking brings everything to a standstill, and propels the players into something reminiscent of the Amiga classic PipeMania. You move some tiles around, the flow of electricity is rerouted around the machine, and the puzzle gets solved. Deep breaths. You’re back in the room.

So I leave from hacking my latest conquest beaming, the soft green light and gentle whirring being roughly as close as I can get to an actual friend out here in the godforsaken medical asylumn I’m wading through. I notice some bandages lying on the floor, and my health’s a little low. Instinctively, I’m down on the ground scratching for them. But there’s a second packet just on from that - maybe someone dropped it. Or… dropped it.

It doesn’t matter, it’s all useful - I’m pciking it up as I see the third packet. Somewhere in the space between the monitor and my left hand, I remember every episode of Tom and Jerry I ever watched. But by the time I remember what happens to the hapless cat, the door slams behind me, and there’s a burst of frothy, white steam. Everything goes pale, I’m blind, and on both sides of the game something screams.

I don’t play a lot of ‘scary’ games. I played the FEAR demo and enjoyed the atmosphere enough, but Half-Life 2’s Ravenholm section was mostly charged through, shouting loudly, and the less said about my progress through Doom III, the better. That’s partly because I like to think, and I like to shoot, and the aforementioned screaming tends to distract me from these things. But it’s also because horror has become manufactured in a lot of ‘scary’ games. Ravenholm was a city of zombies. That was about as clever as the fear got. And Doom’s ingenuity stops short of the main menu screen.

Bioshock’s slickness of presentation, and brightness of concept, drew me to purchase it. But in truth, I knew nothing about the game. It’s setting sounded dark enough, but I was completely unprepared for how much it tried to scare the player. Somewhere between the brutal murders and drug abuse, I realised this wasn’t going to be all sunshine and frolicking. It was going to be the other thing. Tortured botox patients and demonic little girls with hypodermic needles.

But Bioshock’s horror is different. It’s more natural. It’s more subtle. After the steam clears, only two things have changed in the room - which turns out to be a dentist’s office - that I notice from before. The first is that a small red box has been placed on a desk. It’s a diary entry, and it’s next to the genetic power-up I came for. The diary entries - a trademark of Ken Levine, who designed both Thief and System Shock 2 - are left by many of Bioshock’s inhabitants. My favourite - Tenenbaum - records her discovery of the technology that now powers both mine and others’ amazing ‘gift’. Other diary entries show you the slow degradation of life in the underwater metropolis of Rapture. Some even chart the destruction of lives. Failed experiments, broken dreams, and then the occasional flashes of gory fates. They keep you alert, make sure you’re never fully settled. The white noise of terror. The background hum of pant-wetting. Even when I’m hacking, they’re still playing on.

The second item that’s appeared in the room is a corpse on the dentist’s chair. It’s charred, bloody, and looking a little depressed. Instinctively, I set it alight, leaping around and shouting. But whoever it was, they weren’t in a position to complain. And being burnt alive was probably a preferable fate to the death they received anyhow.

I rush over and play the recording. Some doctor is discussing the ethics of his work - something of a thorny discussion, and I later find “First, do no harm” written in blood on the floor. Just as he gets around to talking about art, or flesh, or something, there’s a hiss of gas and suddenly I’m sucking white again.

But this time, nothing happens. So when the mist clears, I pick up the Plasmid cannister - a powerup for my crazed abilities - and turn around, flexing my muscles and fingering the trigger to my shotgun. As it turned out, I chose the right weapon.

The key is the setting. We’re in a city. Admittedly, it’s an underwater city populated by crazed, pipe-wielding psychopaths, genetic freaks and Irishmen. And its moral code read likes Beezlebub’s own suggestion box. But it’s still a working city, with real people that have desires and needs, mostly revolving around getting out or surviving. You’re all trapped in Rapture - the will to survive grips the player just as tightly as any of the AI, and so the fear you have of the shadows is twinned with your own exploitation of them. The horror of gene harvesting is mirrored by your own quest for the fuel that powers you.

It’s clever, and it’s exciting - the fear is a two-way construct. For the first time I can remember, I’m not being put onto a fairground ghost ride. I’m not being told there’s scary things ahead. My level of control over the situation determines the balance of the fear. Sometimes it’s in my favour. As I spin around to come face to face with a scalpel-wielding surgeon three inches from my face, I realise that now is not one of those times. The trigger snaps close, and the crazed knife jockey gives the room a much needed splash of colour. I try to think of a quip, but nothing comes - no-one’s going to hear it but the turrets anyway.

I have high hopes for the future of Horror in videogames, and Bioshock is one of the reasons for it. It doesn’t need to jump out at you, but it will. It will do a lot of things, if they’re necessary to scare the crap out you. But these things are always - always - secondary to what the player wants to do. He wants to play. The game builds itself around me, and that’s the way it should be. Long after the Orange Box is released, soon now, we’ll get a chance to play Valve’s Left 4 Dead, a co-op ‘Zombie Sim’ with a director that tweaks the level to keep the players on their toes.

That’s the source of truly terrifying gaming. Not from forcing the player to crawl along the floor, whacking on some violins, and setting off a jack-in-the-box in their face. But from giving the player free rein, and having them know that, however they play, the game will come. And the game will find a way to frighten.
Now there’s a scary thought.

Grass grows, sun shines, birds fly, and brother? I hurt people. But not in a childish way, or a loud and brash way. I don’t run around with a stick of aluminium cleaving people’s faces in, and nor do I pump people full of lead. It’s more subtle. In fact, even as the flickknife buries itself in your back, it’s not the one-hit kill that hurts you. That’s not how I work. I humiliate people.

When you go on to play Team Fortress 2 - Valve’s epic first-person shooter that recently enjoyed a free weekend and a bunch of free content - you’re not gambling much. There’s no money on the table, and there’s no fate-of-the-world scenario. Players gamble one of two things when they go online to game, and the most often lost of these is reputation.

Out of all of the playable classes, the Spy stands out as different. There are few gaming characters in multiplayer history who compare to him - hugely underpowered, incapable of dealing damage in most cases, and carrying items that are at best difficult to use, and at worst dependent on luck.

But when the Spy plays well, he stands out among every other player on the server. Spies are the passive-aggressives, they’re the real bullies of TF2 moreso than the Heavy or the Demoman. When you’re disguised as a member of the opposite team, you have a special power over them. And it hurts on both sides of the monitor.

At the start of part of the Dustbowl map, the two teams tend to collect on either side of a corner. On the Red side, several gun emplacements are whirring, and Medics are preparing to heal the big damage-dealers. Heavies are big and stupid, but they dish out the hurt like nothing else if they’ve got a Medic behind them.
I’m on the Blue side, wearing a pinstripe suit and smoking a delicate cigarette. It’s decision time for the Spies, because disguises mean making a commitment. If someone sees you disguised at the start of a round, then people know you’re there, and everyone gets edgy. Edginess means death.

Most people choose the average classes, the ones that blend in. Demoman is a popular disguise, sometimes a Medic to lure people towards you. But good spies take the occasional risk too, and so today I’m slinging on a fat suit and disguising myself as one of the most obvious classes in the game - a Heavy. I tap the cloaking button and dash around the corner just as the last of my team die and go back to await respawning.
I dash up some steps, taking care to avoid others whilst I’m invisible, and leap into an alcove to wait for the right moment. The Reds are pushing around the corner, according to the stream of death messages flashing up, but it seems they’re being pushed back. As the cloaking fades off, a Red Medic comes running back from the fighting. I’m sure he’s seen me materialise out of nowhere. There’s a horrible moment where I see him switch weapon and consider running.

Only it turns out that he’s switching to his healing gun. He turns it on. Interesting things start to happen.
A friend of mine says that he won’t ever play the Spy on moral grounds. I don’t know to what extent he’s joking, and I suspect it’s more to do with the fact that the Spy can be a little boring at times. When you’re playing a Soldier - a more simple, damaging class that Halo fans might be familiar with - the game bobs along at a reasonable rate. You don’t get any of the dizzying highs, really, but on the other hand you’re always scoring, there’s no dull period where you die repeatedly and have your plans dashed.

Because, other than reputation, the other thing we sacrifice by playing online is time. Team Fortress 2 helpfully reminds you of just how much time you’ve poured into it, and my top two classes alone score over a day’s worth of play. That’s not much, however, in comparison to others who have spent something approaching a week with a single character type.

So time is important. Time’s important for Spies, because disguise and subtlety takes planning and patience. It’s also important for Medics. By healing, a Medic can build up a special power that allows him to make a player invulnerable for a short time period. The standard tactic is to walk the player into the midst of the action, tearing apart player after player, before retreating to safety. That’s why, as the medic begins healing me and I see that he’s fully charged, I know that this is going to be a very awful sixty seconds for him.
I shout ‘Medic!’ once, for good measure, and then charge towards the front lines. To him, I look like a lumbering lump of muscle and gun - a brick shithouse that fires other, smaller brick shithouses. But really, I’m a European chain-smoker with a knife fetish.

As we near the corner, I shout at him again and there’s a reassuring ‘whoosh’ as he activates the charge and I glow a fierce red. I walk around the corner, and there is the rest of my team, all ready and respawned. To them, I appear as I really am. Small, weak, and tricksy. A chorus of laughs goes out over the voice communication as they realise what I’ve done.

I walk further into them, and the Medic follows me to make sure he keeps the charge running. It’s probably half full now, and I haven’t fired a shot, something that will be making him suspicious. But, trooper that he is, he stays with it. A quarter left. A tenth. And the ubercharge is done.

Immediately, three heavies open up on the Medic, and he goes sprawling through the air into a bloody pile. He doesn’t know what happened to me. He doesn’t even know I was a Spy. In fact, as far as he’s aware, his team is full of appalling players who get him killed and waste his time.

I run back to base and readjust my tie, my team still chuckling over the ingame chat. ‘Do it again!’ one of them cries.

But what they don’t know is that, behind the cardboard cut-out mask, the balaclava is wet with tears. That Medic just wanted to help people. He just wanted to play the game, and have a good time.

What have I done?

* You Will Respawn As Medic

Mini-transactions, however, are even worse. Like many sandbox games before it, Spore is going to release a creature-creator before the game’s full release so you can get to work on your beautiful creations ahead of schedule. Only… playing God comes at a price it seems, because if you want the full catalogue of parts rather than just a quarter of them, you’ll be shelling out £9.99 for the privilege (assuming the Americans use modern exchange rates to convert currency, which just involves swapping the ‘$’ for a ‘£’).

Ten quid? Just to create monsters for a game you can’t even play yet? I thought EA would stay away from Spore and let Wright break it on his own, but it seems they weren’t content with that. Spore : Makin’ Magic should be on its way soon enough.

Anyway, here’s something I’ve wanted to investigate for a while, but haven’t had any data on whatsoever - how does internet fame work? I’m pretty sure the entire thing could be modelled statistically if you had enough data, and here’s an indication of how it might go:

According to his mochibot stats, Kian Bashiri (the friendly chap behind You Have To Burn The Rope) received 100,000 pageviews on April 6th (102,589, pedantry fans!). Mochibot damages its reputation slightly by claiming only 44 of these were unique, but let’s roll with it and pretend that’s accurate. Of the one hundred thousand, 2,772 clicked through the link to the text edition here at Eff Seven - about 2.7%.

That’s not bad bearing in mind that the link here was ‘under the cut’ - i.e. you had to scroll down to see it - but it might surprise you that it’s so low, given that most of those reaching You Have To Burn The Rope had only been through one click to get there. Does it really decay that fast?

Well, no. Of the people that reached Eff Seven, 412 clicked through to download the text edition that they’d come here for in the first place - about 14% this time.

Now you look ahead two days, though, and any hope of analysis goes flying out of the window tied to a jetpack. Of the 105,000 hits the parent site received, Eff Seven got just 1% of - 1,000 or so. And of them, only 10% clicked through to download the text game. I guess you could explain this by saying that at this stage, most people coming to the site were looking for updates. But what’s more likely is that two days is such a fantastically long time on the Internet, that the entire makeup of the traffic would have changed - where it came from, what kind of user it was.

I don’t know if it’s a bit weird, or nerdy to say, but I think studying this would be pretty interesting. A lot of people try to get a slice of the big Hive minds that surf around slashdot and Digg. I’m sure there’s a way of working out where the hurricane’s going to hit next.