This is going to be one of those posts where I just hit the keyboard running and see where it goes. It’s a Blues riff in B, so watch me for the changes, and try to keep up…

Rob says:
I have a K and an 8

Rob says:
and everyone is calling me.

Rob says:
I hit a K on the flop

Rob says:
but there’s an Ace in there too.

Rob says:
Damnit, I need a king on the river..

GAMBLING, KIDS - JUST SAY NO. Up til last week that had always been my own fully ingrained motto thanks to an upbringing under shrewd just-say-no type parents. Sure, I’d played poker and the like for fun. When you’re playing for penny sweets or bragging rights, it is fun. When money gets involved in gambling (as it tends to do) it’s not quite the same.

Ollie says:
ok dude, so i signed up to pokerroom

Ollie says:
$20 minimum deposit, and these guys SUCK, i’ve just made $20 in 10 mins.

Ollie says:
Well I lost a bit then but it was funny as hell..

Ollie says:
This guy didnt even know what his hand was called!

Ollie says:
I had a jack high, and he was betting all over the place, and all he had was a 7 and a 2!

I got suckered in, as you do. My friend had recently picked up his online poker play and was up A LOT. He explained his tactics and experiences over the course of a conversation and even under some interrogation it seemed like a decent enough course of action. I would sign up, deposit some cash, and hit some poor fools for a couple of dollars before switching tables. All I had to do was play it safe, bet on surefire hands, or bluff when the going got good. Normal score. The clincher was the 20% bonus on my first cash dump. Signed, drawn and quartered..

At first, things were peachy. Ollie and I entered a room together to play a few hands so I could get the feel of the online opponents. They weren’t all that special. Within half an hour we were up around $10 dollars more each. Time passed, and players came and went. Our first mistake was not quitting when we were ahead; when big-money players entered our table with a wad of cash, they gained the control fairly swiftly: even if they were fairly obviously bluffing, with less money it’s impossible to play the percentages and call them on it every time. Inevitably you lose out to them more often than not, and they take your greenbacks. We started to lose..

Rob says:
This is so much BS.

Ollie says:
hold on, we’ll win it back. don’t worry.

Rob says:
Right..not against this prick.

Rob says:
I’m down $12.

Ollie says:
watch me for a hand or two

Ollie says:
i’m gonna bleed him dry, watch me

Rob says:
You can’t, because he ALWAYS bets. And if you sit out and then come in, he folds. So you have to only bet on amazing hands, right? Well then he’s like “waitaminute”. You’ll have a hand one time, but he’ll still bluff you out because he entered the table with money over our heads, and he has all the power. That’s not even poker; poker is giving some guy a look and knowing that his heart is beating a hole in his chest. This is just fucking lame.

Ollie says:
It’s my time..I’ll draw him in.
[…]
Ollie says:
fuck

Ollie says:
Let’s move.

At 4am we were both down at least half our $20 initial deposits. Ollie was worse off than me - on previous days he’d been up as much as $50 before events had taken a dramatic and distinctly red twist. We decided that we couldn’t both win our money back playing at the same table, so my friend went elsewhere.

Gambling is… gambling. Am I indicting it? Not at all. It does what it says on the tin, and it’s your fault for not reading the tin properly. I’m indicting myself. It’s the rocket-fuel highs and the catatonic lows. Your world can fall out from under you in a string of bad hands; your winning streak dries up and you’re left fighting a losing battle against the flow of the game. A sensible person would call it a day and bail. Sensible people don’t gamble.

THE HIGHS. Come 4:30am I was back in the game, and so was my friend. Actually, I was up - A LOT. Not only had I won back the $8 that I’d given away to some high-roller, but I’d managed to entice in people with less money than me who delighted in throwing their cards in the middle on nothing-hands.

Ollie says:
So..?

Rob says:
I’m on $15.70. Seems i hit my luck..

Rob says:
I’ve made up 15 in 15 minutes, i’m nearly back to $20. Well okay now I’m down. But..
[…]
Rob says:
PERFECT

Rob says:
I let this guy in for three rounds, just feeding him up.

Rob says:
Then I play raise me-raise me for flop to river.

Rob says:
He thinks I’m bluffing like I had been, calls me on it again and again..

Rob says:
I win $10 straight out.

Rob says:
$20.05. I am finished. I am happy, fuck, euphoric. I came back from 25 cents!

Ollie says:
Awesome!

I could have quit. That’s the line that gets you later when you check back through your chatlog, when you think back through your mind to all of 30 minutes, hours, a day previous and YOU had played the game, taken the gamble and come out on top. The halcyon skies of euphoria. You’re a sucker, and it hurts.

I think this is about where we came in.

Rob says:
Damnit. A second chance for a king on the river..

Ollie says:
Pfst, flashback humour. In a blog post

Rob says:
..someone will have an ace, I know it.

Rob says:
I know it.

Rob says:
Oh, god.

Rob says:
Nobody had an ace, but someone hit a 10 on the river and just happened to have two more in the pocket. On the river.

Rob says:
That’s me done. All gone. No deposit. No bonus. Dead.

This is gambling. To a certain extent I could accept that. Gambling online though is something that I’d always steered clear of and I will never try again - without the ability to stare into your opponents soul and figure him out, you’re a sinking ship when you come up against career bluffers with some money under their belt. Oh, and remember that 20% bonus? Sure, it was only $4, but this is how it works out:

“You need 7 player points for each dollar you want to redeem.”
Player points are earned by playing hands, simple as that. How many hands to get a point? I played over a hundred hands in 6 hours and only got 1 point, so to redeem my 20% bonus of $4 I’d have to play for roughly (7×4)x6 hours. 168 hours. At the rate I was going it would have been a month before I see my $4 bonus that I signed up for - long enough for most people to have either made it or lost it at the round table..

Rob says:
£11. It’s nothing. It’s the way you lose it. The cold, hard fact that you were once even, in the black, and on a different day or hand you might’ve made hundreds. But that’s gambling for you. It ISN’T FAIR. It just seems fair when you’re up. It’s easy enough to win, and it’s enough fun to convince you to throw sense out the window for as long as it takes to throw away your money too.

That’s the gift and the curse of human nature for you.

Sure, it’s £11. But ouch.

It’s Phriday again: “So the concept is taking a book/movie/TV show, and switching the title with that of another unrelated piece of work, but the title has to work just as well or better than the original title…”

..and it only took a couple of hours.

This was a little quicker.

The current in-production thread is located here, and very amusing it is too.

“Flaw Allows Children To Unlock X-Rated Material In New Harry Potter Book

…Children as young as eight have reported finding sexually explicit sequences just like that spread throughout the book thanks to a flaw in the publication process officials are calling the “hot cauldron” mod…”

I KNEW IT!

“There’s Sex In My Violence! What’s this lame soft-core porn doing in my ultraviolent “Grand Theft Auto”? I am outraged!”

Thank God. I mean, thank God there was a screechy and pointless uproar over the fact that violence-addled teenagers can, via a free downloadable patch, watch badly animated semi-explicit soft-core sex scenes interspersed throughout the No. 1 best-selling video game, “Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas.”

Elsewhere, some giant asshat of a man raises similar “issues” with The Sims 2:

“In a manifesto sent today to press outlets, Thompson focuses on dismantling the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and exposing what he calls the industry’s “latest dirty little secret.” The secret’s out now, and it involves nude sims.”

Guess what? People have sexual organs. And I can conjure them up with my mind!

MESSAGE TO GOD: I DONT WANT TO SHARE THIS EARTH WITH THESE PEOPLE ANY MORE.

In its constituent parts, San Andreas is no short of fugly. It’s something of a modern-day miracle therefore that it outsold its rivals in 2004, and continues to be extremely lucrative after its recent release on PC and Xbox. But then, who cares about constituent parts when the whole is so fantastically gorgeous. It’s a masterpiece of gaming design across all its particular facets - the hilarious and bitingly satirical radio output, the billboards that mock everything from so-called rival game ‘True Crime’ to cars and drinks manufacturers, the various clothes outlets (with perennial target Gap, now ‘Zip’, née ‘Gash’) and all the characters that roam the streets and take their part in the massive storyline, the gangster rappers and the homies and the hoes and the corrupt officials. Brilliant.

It is bizarre, though. Almost every frame has some kind of graphical glitch, be it clipping or frozen models, misaligned textures, grotesque sprite based ‘lighting’ or any combination of the above, and yet we the gaming community have given Rockstar and GTA some pseudo carte blanche to use its now-ancient (at the time stunning) GTA III engine (or a modified version thereof), if only for the likelihood of getting a speedy sequel release. It’s cool. In one way it’s like the community lessening their demands on a developer, which is almost unheard of (think of the demands rightly placed on EA to upgrade and improve with every subsequent addition in its sport franchises). In another way - and without getting too analytical - it’s as if nobody really cares about the graphics, for once, and it’s all about the power of the authorial rhetoric (the ‘text’ if you will) that Rockstar line up to do battle with modern America (or whatever era they pick, in this case the 90s). The idea of them as videogaming soothsayers is rather neat, I think.

These screenshots come straight from the Xbox version of the game, en lui of various USB-based transfer melarky. Of course I could have taken a screenshot in the PC version, but running around San Andreas with a camera (as well as a load of heavyartilleryy) never ceases to be a hilarious sideshow - and playing GTA on a console just feels right. It also allows semi-serious appreciation of the game as a collection of graphical elements rather than the individual bits which may or may not have their faults, which is perhaps why Rockstar added it. I’ll forgive them their moment of hubris because it’s all so.. well, gorgeous.

Expect some kind of picture-based travelogue soon*.

* if I hadn’t been so enamoured with playing it these last few weeks, I’d already have posted it!

It feels good to be back at DevArt.