Stalin Vs. Martians and the Future of B-games

B-movies have a special place in the psyche of most film buffs, particularly if you're into horror or sci-fi. Made on a shoe-string, these second-feature specials aren't always bad by any means - many British horror greats from studios like Hammer were B-pictures, as was 1956's chilling Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while 1992's El Mariachi (the film that launched director Robert Rodriguez into the mainstream) was made for a pittance. Then again, you've got films like Ed Wood's 1959 so-bad-its-good classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Like movies, most of the games you get to hear about are funded by major studios with massive production teams and huge budgets, but there has been a recent increase in the number of independent games studios making a go of it. One of the best recent examples of a great indie game is Number None's Braid, which is easily one of the best games of the last 12 months.

But what about the games that, well, just aren't very good? When they come from a mainstream studio, they're just an overpriced, high-budget flop, doomed to linger in the Computer Exchange bargain bin for the next decade (EA's Lord of the Rings: Conquest comes to mind).

It's a bit different when you're dealing with an indie game, though. While your average major-label PC release will go on sale for around £30, most independent games cost under £15. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more willing to blow £9 on a ropey (yet strangely fun) game than £20.

Which leads me directly to Paradox's Stalin vs Martians, a Command and Conquer style real-time strategy game that pits the forces of Second World War Russia against an alien invasion. Even the title sounds like a B-movie. The game itself is genuinely weird, with tanks and infantry units pitted against giant eyeballs, strange fungi, hordes of little green (and pink, and blue) men and Pixar-esq one-eyed, big-headed, fire-spitting things. Oh, and later in the game you can field a skyscraper sized Stalin. Basically, it's a bit mental.

See? Giant Stalin. Told you.
Unfortunately, all this bizarre, vodka-fuelled ingenuity is let down by an inordinately steep difficulty curve that is almost entirely down to the unresponsive control system. You can't zoom in much and the graphics are little fuzzy around the edges, too, but I'd have forgiven that if the controls were better. This is a real shame because the basic premise is pure genius (unless, of course, you think it's in rather poor taste to engage in light-hearted japes involving genocidal dictators…). If you want to give it a go anyway, it's certainly cheap enough, at £7 from GamersGate. It's quite possibly worth it for the music alone.

However, the absysmal control system, for me, puts Stalin Vs. Martians out of the running as a true Bad B–game Classic. I prefer it when a game's flaws don't render it largely unplayable. What I'm really looking for here is something that has half-decent gameplay, but with a ludicrous plot and awful acting. Remember the voice acting in the first Resident Evil? That bad. Right. Any suggestions?

Blu-ray – I thought it was a standard

After a hard day's work yesterday, I decided to go to the trouble of getting my projector out, dropping the screen and firing up the Blu-ray player to chill out with the new Futurama movie. Once the projector had warmed up, I was greeted with the unexpected error message 'Unknown disc', which changed to 'Cannot play this disc' as I furiously mashed the buttons on the remote control.

Checking the disc revealed no scratches or fingerprints, and The Dark Knight played fine. I figured a firmware update might solve the problem, so checked the Network Update menu to see if one was available. Surprisingly, considering I'd updated the player – a Sony BDP-S350 – just recently, there was one.

Ten minutes later, the update was installed and I tried the disc again. Same error. With nothing left to do, I gave up and stuck the disc back in its wallet ready to return to LoveFilm with the 'faulty' box ticked.

Whether the disc is faulty or simply incompatible remains to be seen, but it prompted me to vent my anger about the need for firmware updates. My DVD player never needed updating to add compatibility with certain discs. In my view, and I'm sure plenty of others will agree, that Blu-ray should be a standard just like DVD, and this should be finalised before discs and players are released.

Not everyone has a convenient network connection behind their TV, and for some it would be nigh impossible to update their player. It's only thanks to a pair of HomePlug adaptors that it wasn't a major hassle for me.

While firmware updates can be a pain, I can appreciate that there are benefits as well, such as new features. It would just be nice if those updates could happen automatically without my intervention, just like my Freeview PVR does. Even my Philips TV has required a manual firmware update since I bought it less than a year ago. At least the updates are free, unlike Apple's. I still can't quite bring myself to shell out £6 for the latest 3.0 firmware for my original iPod Touch, given most of the benefits only apply to second-generation Touches or iPhones.

Getting back to the point, if anyone knows why Futurama – Into the Wild Green Yonder won't play on my BDP-S350, I'd love to hear from you.

Why isn't my browser in the ballot?

Recently I've got sick and tired of the browser companies sticking their oar in, complaining that it's anti-competitive that Windows 7 being shipped with Internet Explorer. The shouts, loudest from Opera and Google, have forced Microsoft to take the rather drastic decision of offering to implement a ballot system in Europe. Under the new plans, rather than just get one browser when you install Windows 7, you'll have to choose which of the top-five browsers – IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera – you want to install.

This seems stupid to me for several reasons. First, the kind of user that doesn't really know much about computers is going to either get confused about the choice or just choose Internet Explorer. Secondly, the user that knows what they're doing will either pick Firefox or Chrome, and then install IE8 anyway for those sites that require it. It seems unlikely that given a choice anyone would want Opera, anyway.

The bigger point is that why do we even care what Opera says, and why should people have the choice of this browser? Depending on which survey you believe, Opera currently has somewhere between 0.4 and one per cent of the browser market, making it significantly less popular than all of the other browsers in the ballot.
A similar argument could go for Safari, which currently enjoys around 8.5 per cent of the browser market – the large majority of this on Apple Macs. Why should we be offered this browser on PCs, then?

The problem with the current system is that it seems to reward browsers that PC owners generally don't care about, and the line for inclusion seems quite arbitrary leaving even smaller browsers out in the cold. So, I have a plan.

I'm going to take the source code for Firefox (it is open source, so I can do that) and just rewrite the titlebar, so that the browser's called DaveFox 3.5. I'm then going to complain to the EU that Microsoft's being anti-competitive for excluding DaveFox 3.5 from its ballot screen. I'd like everyone else to do the same thing and create their own browser. We'll then petition the EU until the ballot screen is thousands of pages of competing browsers and confusion; perhaps then some sense will be made of this whole affair and we can get Windows 7 with Internet Explorer installed, so it's nice and easy. Then, people that want a different browser can use IE8 to download the browser of their choice. A bit like today, really.

Google's Bookmarks Are Confusing...

... but we'll show you how to make them work as they should do.

Google Chrome is a fantastic web browser that is noticeably faster than Internet Explorer and is easier to use in many ways. As fewer sites use ActiveX these days, making Chrome your default browser is a sensible move. However, despite its many advantages, the way it handles bookmarks can be confusing. Let me explain.

Internet Explorer saves webpage bookmarks (Favorites

) to your hard disk, which is all well and good but most of us use more than one computer (one at work and one at home, for example). This means that you'll have a list of Favorites on each, which isn't ideal. You'll end up duplicating effort and probably find you have two out-of-sync lists.

One solution, which works well, is to install the Google Toolbar and use the button labelled 'Add this page to your Google bookmarks' whenever you want to save the address of a useful page or site. Instead of saving the address to your hard disk it saves it to your Google account. You can then access your bookmarks from other computers either using the Google Bookmarks webpage or direct from the Google Toolbar, if it's installed.

Now here's the thing - the Google Toolbar button that adds a page to your bookmarks is a grey star with a blue outline. Click it once to save the bookmark and it will go yellow. This looks mightily similar to the Bookmark button used by Google Chrome. When you visit a site using Chrome and click the grey/blue star and it becomes yellow/blue too. However, it saves the web address to the hard disk and not to Google Bookmarks, which is counter-intuitive.

Google Toolbar Bookmarks

Google Chrome Bookmarks

You can't solve the problem by installing Google Toolbar on Google Chrome - it only works with Internet Explorer and Firefox. This makes sense, because you'd expect all of the toolbar's useful features to be built into Chrome. But they are not.

This is a silly design decision. The Google Bookmark button in Internet Explorer does something very different to the virtually identical Bookmark button used by Chrome. So far so grumpy. But we really want to be able to use the online Google Bookmarks service easily from within Chrome. This should not be rocket science as Google has created both the service and the browser, but you do need to jump through a few hoops. Here's what you need to do:

1. Visit this Google support page using Chrome and drag the grey 'bookmarklet' labelled Google Bookmark to Chrome's bookmarks bar. If you can't see this bar press Control-B.

2. Visit Google Bookmarks and click on the Web History link at the top left. Now hover the cursor over the Bookmarks link at the bottom, click and hold the left mouse button and drag the link to the bookmarks bar. You might like to place it next to the Google Bookmark entry.

3. You should now have new icons on the bookmarks bar. Click the one labelled Bookmarks to access your saved Google Bookmarks, which will be displayed as a webpage rather than the customary drop-down list.

4. When you visit a site that you want to save to this list click the Google Bookmark icon. This does the equivalent of clicking the blue star in Internet Explorer and saves the address to the online service.

It seems that the next version of Chrome will allow you to import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks, but this doesn't solve the problem of keeping things synchronised.

Apple considers iPhone users fools

The iPhone 3GS has been on sale for a month now, but it was only last night that I saw the TV advert for it. This is how it goes. "This is the new iPhone, and it lets you do some pretty incredible things. You can copy a phone number and paste it in a text [message]."

What were Apple thinking? Cut and paste is not pretty incredible. Not even close. Cutting and pasting on computers has been around since 1974, first used by Xerox, and then Apple itself made it popular with the Lisa in 1981 and the Macintosh in 1984. Quite how this is still supposed to be pretty incredible now, 35 years later, is a total mystery.

What is pretty incredible is that it has taken Apple this long to introduce this basic function into iPhone OS. It isn't just iPhone critics that like to point this out – just about every iPhone user (and iPod Touch owner, for that matter) has been angry about its absence until now.

Why Apple chose to focus its advert on cut and paste is almost beyond understanding, given the other new features in OS 3.0, some of which are actually worth shouting about.

Trouble is, none of this matters, as Apple can do no wrong in the eyes of its fans. Perhaps Apple is right to consider iPhone users fools. After all, who in their right mind would pay close to £900 over 18 months for a 32GB iPhone 3GS?

Linux needs Chrome polish

Google's made a lot of promises about Chrome OS, but when you look through the official blog post, one thing sticks out: "Google Chrome [runs] within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel".

It's easy to look at this and rewrite the whole Chrome OS announcement as, "Google launches a version of Linux". Put like that, it suddenly doesn't seem all that revolutionary or, if I'm being honest, interesting. But then I started thinking, and maybe the whole point of this project is that Google is launching Linux, which can only be a good thing in the long run.

I'm a big fan of Linux. It's free, stable, works well and provides a decent alternative to Windows for a lot of jobs. The one problem with it is that there are simply too many flavours of it, each with its own interface and way of doing things.
This is fine for people who love Linux and find a version that they're happy with, but for normal everyday people, it's confusing. There's no one place to look to find out how to do something in Linux, as Linux is not a standard operating system like Windows is.

The other thing is that Linux inherently frightens some people. We've even heard stories of people taking netbooks back to the shop because they wanted Windows and not Linux. With Google behind a Linux-based operating system things could really change.

Google is a company with almost unlimited funds. When it sets its mind about doing something it does it properly and with style – just look at Gmail and Google Maps. It's not just about quality, but branding. With Google there's a multi-national brand that people trust; Linux just doesn't have that.

With a trusted brand will come more ready acceptance of a new operating system. That and the fact that Google's got enough clout to get netbook and PC manufacturers to sit up, pay attention and start selling kit with Chrome OS installed.

The one thing that Google needs to do is learn from Apple: with OS X Apple created an operating system based on Unix (essentially a full-on enterprise version of Linux) for people used to soft, fluffy and easy. If Chrome OS can do the same thing with Linux and fool the mass population into not even realising that it's Linux they're running, it could be a massive success.

If that sounds like I want traditional Linux to fail, that's not true. Chrome OS could be good for Linux in general. Once people get Chrome OS and like it, they may start to look deeper into the OS and slowly become accustomed to the way that Linux works. Once that happens, you never know, people may then want to 'upgrade' and start using a full Linux distribution.

Even if this doesn't happen, the fact of the matter is that there's a massive company threatening Microsoft's dominance. That has got to be good news, whether it means that Microsoft has to become a more competitive company with better products or that it annoys Steve Ballmer so much that he throws another chair across his office.

eBay forces sellers to offer free P&P

It's a well-known fact in the Shopper office that I vehemently dislike Apple's tactics when it comes to squeezing their customers for more money. Charging iPod Touch owners for firmware upgrades, for example, is a despicable practice when iPhone users get them free.

Now, eBay is at it again. I was clearing out a cupboard over the weekend and decided to sell a few things rather than throw them away. One item was an old foldable keyboard for a PDA, which I thought could fetch enough to be worth the hassle of listing. I set what I considered to be a fair price for postage and packing, only to see an error message telling me 'P&P cost for this category cannot be more than £0.00'.

I'd seen no warnings or messages to inform me that certain categories would be switched to free P&P, so it was a nasty surprise. Searching Google revealed hundreds of angry forum posts on the subject, plus eBay's official page detailing the change.

No fewer than 39 categories now have forced free P&P including clothes, shoes and accessories, video games, mobile and home phones, consumer electronics, computing and photography.

According to eBay, the change has been introduced since people now expect free P&P when shopping online in these categories, and it will benefit sellers because shopper's are more likely to buy your items than if you charged for postage.

This is surely a thinly veiled excuse for eBay wanting a bigger cut of the sale, since most sellers will have to find a way to increase the final sale price of their items in order to offset the loss of P&P. As one forum poster correctly observed "there's no such thing as free P&P – if you don't believe me, go ask the Post Office".

While frustrating for me, the switch is much more serious for businesses selling brand new items, especially heavy ones that cost a lot of money to post. Ebay already takes a big cut of the sale by charging a listing fee and a final value fee, which can combine to be more than 10 per cent. Any business that uses PayPal (a subsidiary of eBay) to receive payments gets a further chunk removed from the total, and I won't be surprised if many sellers decide this is the final straw and find somewhere else to sell products.

The biggest insult, though, is the way eBay tries to sweet talk sellers into continuing to sell in these categories. As well as final value fee "promotions from time to time" – whatever that means – "sellers should also bear in mind that the requirement to offer free postage & packaging applies only to the first domestic P&P option. Further chargeable shipping services can be offered in addition." I somehow doubt any buyer will opt to pay for delivery when they can get an item delivered for free. Plus, the onus is on sellers to ensure goods arrive safely with buyers, not the other way around, so there's no incentive for a buyer to pay extra for insurance when they can request a refund if the item doesn't arrive via an uninsured delivery method.

An upgrade too far?

If you look at a lot of the announcements that companies are making at the moment, it's about how they're doing a great job reducing the amount of waste they produce. Clever new manufacturing techniques, alternative materials and new initiatives, such as the universal mobile phone charger, are all marketed as environmentally-friendly and a way to reduce waste.

You can't help but agree that this is true – to a certain point. A large volume of electronic waste is simply caused by the fact that we throw away kit too quickly.

Go back twenty years or so and it used to be that when something broke, you'd call a repair man round to fix the fault. Now, the cost of new equipment means that it's often cheaper and easier to replace a broken appliance that to pay to have it repaired.

This, you could argue, is progress. But, what about being forced into upgrading? In order for companies to make as much money as they can, it's in their interest to make you want their latest kit. Apple's one of the worst for this. Take the original iPhone, which had no built-in 3G, despite the necessary chips being cheap and readily available.

Call me cynical, but it seemed like a carefully orchestrated plan, so that people would want to upgrade when the 3G version of the phone was released almost a year later.

It's not just phones. Televisions basically didn't change that much since their launch until recently. Now with LCD, we've gone through a progression of different standards (720p, 1080i, full HD, 100Hz, 200Hz and so on), each with the express intention of making us have to upgrade.

Progress needs continue and improving technology is something that we all want, but if companies really want to bang on about their green credentials, they should make products that will last, can be repaired cheaply and aren't designed to force us into unnecessary upgrades.