In loving memory of Michael Kerry

Sit down, my friends. I am going to tell you my small part in the life of a good man. This is not a short story, nor is it a long one, but it is one that I want to tell you and that has been held inside me for the past few days.

You know that I love to draw down on the classics, using Emperors, myths and legends to make my point. Sometimes the message is simpler. You draw on a life. You look to your part in that life. You try to make something from that.

Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" open with thanks. The most powerful man in the Roman Empire, philosopher and wise ruler, sat in his tent and wrote notes to himself in Greek and opened his thoughts upon life and philosophy by thanking people. One of the characteristics that Marcus Aurelius valued in those who inspired him was that what one did exceeded any clever words or artful argument that was not matched by deeds. He reflected this himself when he wrote "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

And this is a story about a good man. My father-in-law, Michael Kerry. Cheerful, often cheeky, kind, inquisitive, funny and, above all in the time that I knew him, a man who was unstintingly generous and loving.

He did not have volumes of classical ethics to draw on nor had he been given the privilege of reflection granted to those who have spent a lot of time in education. And yet he acted with a greater dedication to love and truth than any moral philosopher I could name and far beyond many, many people.

He loved, he laughed, he lived. He loved his family and his life as hard as anyone I have ever seen and he let that guide him in his life. His raw enthusiasm and pleasure at meeting the man who made his youngest daughter happy was almost terrifying to me when I first met him. I struggled, initially, to interpret this as my family were always more restrained in such things. But then I realised that he did what he did from exuberance, from honest emotion, and from joy.

And it made the world more joyful.

He was not perfect but none of us are, nor do we expect to be, whether you hold us to be divine creations or happy accidents. But he was good. He loved.

He would call up and say "Nick, it's Dad" when I answered but it did not cause me the heartache I assumed such a term would hold when addressed to me. It was meant with love. To include. To make me part of the family. And I loved him for it.

When his beloved Judith passed, it cut out a large portion of his soul, because men who are made of love are halved when they lose their love. In later life, the man I knew faded behind an older man, a man who missed his wife, a man who struggled with continuing to live.

And, briefly, kindly I hope, he passed.

I shall miss him but I had already started missing him and I suspect he had, too.

Wherever good people go when they die, he's there. And he's not separated from his beloved Judith anymore. Wherever good people go, they have gone there together.

He did not concern himself with worrying about how to be good and how to bring love, he was good and he brought love.

I shall miss him but I am so glad I was able to know him for as long as I did. He is at peace.

Judith and Michael at the start of their journey together.

Tomb Raider 2013: Who is in control of the story and why does Lara have a giant fan up her ass?

I had heard good things about the game Tomb Raider 2013, the tenth game in the franchise and a reboot to give Lara a new origin story. (If you're wondering who Lara is, this post is going to be hard going unless you read the previous links.) I buy new games infrequently but this seemed to be worth trying. I don't have a current gaming PC or any of the major consoles (I keep a PS2 for Karaoke) and I have to wait until things are ported to OS X to play them. This also keeps me out of the hype and patching cycle, which means that most games have been well tested by the time that they make it to me.

I've just finished playing Tomb Raider for the first time and it's been really interesting to play something that is both so good and so problematic. Let me start by saying that it's a very enjoyable game and I suspect that, for many people, they will not have the problems that I did. 95% of my experience was positive and, based on that, I don't regret buying it at all.

Let me start with the positives.

For someone whose last big title games were Half Life 2, Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2 and Bioshock, the graphics are really impressive. There are moments when it feels more like watching a movie than playing a game. (That's not news to all of you with new console hardware but it's new to me, okay?) I could spend days looking at some of the views or exploring some of the environments. The interface is great, once you accept that it won't work with a standard Apple magic mouse. You need two mouse buttons that can be triggered and released individually. Okay, okay, I know, but I'm slow to change.

I love the bow. I have lost weeks of my life shooting things with a bow in Team Fortress 2. I should go as far as to say that I am disturbingly good at judging the tracking on a running target where I have to take flight time into account. To have a bow in TR was great. Overall, the weapons were pretty good.

Lara's overall movement control was good and the camera placement was only occasionally irritating.

The story is interesting and the new Lara backstory has some legs. It's a good adventure and they've done a nice job. The world is large and beautiful.

Now to the negatives.

Lara, apparently, has a giant fan up her ass. I say this because of the number of times I leapt into space and missed a jump because I stopped pushing 'forward'. It took me a while to learn that you have to keep pressing forward while jumping because otherwise Lara's ass-fan does not blow her towards that stone surface you want to climb. Lara's ability to totally change direction in space is impressive but it took me a while to realise that this was giving me problems. I ran across similar problems in trying to jump from ice face to ice face, in that you had to keep 'willing' the jump.

Combat is a little weird. Lara has a lot of abilities she gains where she can make special moves but they totally break up the action. Everything s l o w s   d o w n and you get a count down circle that focuses in to get you to (excitingly!) hit the 'f' or 'e' key. If you've been rolling and striking, it totally takes you out of the action. I kept missing opportunities because it just didn't feel right to stop doing things to hit the magic key. Eventually, I gave in and the magic key KoolAid allowed me to dispatch enemies... although it didn't feel the same.

But that brings me to my major gripe: you keep losing control of the character. Lara's backstory now makes her younger and less experienced, which is fine, but then you gain control of her to play and suddenly you're shooting people in the eye with a bow. Until, bang, some plot happens and you go to a cut scene where Lara is agonising over a death. Then, bang, it's you again and you're setting chickens on fire with arrows (don't judge me) and blowing up people. Then Lara's struggling with angst again and you have to kind of sit there while she gets it out of her system. Then you're climbing a mountain. Then you're falling down a tunnel and you have some control over where you go but you have to take exactly the right moves or you're impaled. Then it's another cutscene...

It totally breaks immersion. On three separate, and plot crucial, occasions, I totally lost control of the character and had to watch as she did things that I would not have done and had not done, all the way leading up to it. She takes the wrong decision. She ends up having to watch a friend die when I knew that I could have dealt with that combat situation. She shoots the wrong person.

At one point, when I actually had control, I had a perfectly good shot at the big bad guy, only to discover that my crosshairs went away when I tried to point at him and my weapons wouldn't even fire at him. That's really bad design: don't offer me a peach I can't eat unless the name of the game is PEACH TEMPTRESS.

Another good example of this forced approach was on a beach where, after a long and difficult part of the game, I decided to loot a tomb (don't judge me) before heading back to my buddies on the boat. I tried to enter the tomb - BANG - and I was entering the cut scene with my buddies on the boat despite them being a long way over on the other side. I reached a point where I started reading a book during the cut scenes and waiting until I thought I had control back before I went on. I actually don't know the final part of the story because I was so pissed off at having my game interrupted to be lectured by people I no longer cared about telling me to do things that I wouldn't end up doing it because I'd lose control.

Of course, in the middle of this, we have the traditional nonsense that is the ongoing 'achievement' scavenger hunt, where pausing my desperate mission to find my missing friends occurs every time I stumble upon a shiny box, a hidden cairn or, in one glorious case, I go mushroom hunting instead of trying to save my friends. "No, friends! You will be fine! I have to collect mushrooms and set fire to these Japanese flags!"

I get why all of this is there, I do, but I wouldn't be complaining about the side quests if I always felt like I was in control. And, as the game moved on, I felt more like I was being asked to do valet parking rather than driving the car.

The biggest offender in the whole lost agency category is, unfortunately, the ending of the game. In order to achieve an iconic result, the end boss level is almost totally out of your control and really, really lame. The last actions in the game are not yours, despite them being the ones to save the day. I nearly stopped the game just before that point, because I could see what was coming, but had to confirm the ending.

Overall, I still think that it's still a good game, most people will really enjoy it, and those sections where you don't keep getting controlled by cut scenes are great. There's some real challenge and suspense. But a good narrative requires immersion and engagement. It feels to me as if some of the design here didn't get adapted to letting the player get inside it. I'm watching the end of the party from outside and nobody has invited me in.

I don't regret buying it but, boy, do I miss the illusion of free action that I had in Deus Ex.

Nothing is less #Bowie than standing still.

What Would Bowie Do?

He’d change when he felt the need
to change.

He would do something creative and
amazing even if it took the rest of us
twenty years to appreciate it

He would stay still for long enough that
we could almost catch up and then he
would be off again, a comet in flight.

He would embrace the new that he had seen
in his dreams and he would build from this to
amaze us once again.

I suspect he would tell us to go and find the new,
to make the change, to be creative and amazing,
to not stand still.  To live. To love. To fly.

Nothing is less Bowie than standing still.