Wow…I just watched Hiroshima on the BBC (available on DVD from tomorrow), the new docu-drama about the Hiroshima bomb from the perspective of both the Americans and the Japanese. It was one of the most powerful and interesting factual programmes that I’ve seen in a long time, and really filled in the story of one of the most important events of the 20th Century that I’ve never really known a lot of the background to. No-one does documentaries like the BBC and this was one of the best in a while.

I don’t like getting too political around here because it always ends in tears, but this is one of the things that I have strong opinions about. Suffice it to say that the death of nearly 250,000 people, most of whom were civilians, can’t be justified even if it did end the war. I await the inevitable flame emails.

Whatever your opinions I still recommend you watch Hiroshima if you get the chance. Incredibly interesting.

First thing I did was finalise my choice of Great Gaming Moment. I went for Rainbow Road from Super Mario Kart, a moment as frustrating as it was great. Much like deciding which game I should write about…

After that I started on the task of collecting screenshots and artwork of various point-and-click adventures for use in a GamesTM feature on the genre. I spent the whole day with ScummVM and copies of Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Grim Fandango. I love these games so spending the day playing through various sections and just grabbing screenshots of characters and scenes was great fun. It really reminded me of how ridiculous some of the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle were, but there are infinitely worse ways to spend a work day.

During the afternoon and amid the continuing flood of WE9 matches going on (at one point they had three tournaments going on concurrently on WE9, PES4, and FIFA 2006), one of the guys from Play magazine brought in the near-finished build of Burnout Revenge on the PS2, and from what I saw (quite a lot) it’s going to be fantastic. Firstly, it looked spectacular for a PS2 game. I thought it was the Xbox version that they were running, so I can’t wait to see how that one looks. The thing that struck me the most about it though is how ridiculously, unbelievably fast it is. Seriously, if it was supposed to be a futuristic racer where things are running at 600mph I’d think it was fast, but this game just has road cars. Road cars that do 0-100 in about three seconds. One of the guys raced in a dragster and put it into first person, and ended up going so fast that he crashed because a small bump in the road bounced him up into the roof of a tunnel. It does look like it’s going to be very similar to Burnout 3 gameplay-wise, but it’s EA so what did you expect?

By far the best thing about Burnout Revenge? They’ve gotten rid of that annoying Striker idiot. You now should be able to play the game without wanting to gnaw on the disc.

Started off the day by being given a whole page of the GamesTM retro section to myself. I’ve got the Games That Weren’t section (about games which were finished by never made it to market – in this case Gauntlet III on the C64) and the Great Gaming Moment, for which I haven’t decided what to write as a couple of my suggestions were shot down for being too similar to what they’d already done. As long as they haven’t already been covered one of those should be turning up in GamesTM issue 36.

I spent most of the morning doing research and writing the piece on Gauntlet III which, it turns out, has a fairly interesting story behind it. The game got some great reviews and was finished but never made it to market because the programmer was made redundant and without him they couldn’t master it onto tape from the development disk. You’d think they’d have brought him on as freelance or something just for that little job but they didn’t, so the game only saw the light of day on emulators.

Around this time word spread like wildfire that we had the import version of Winning Eleven 9, and throughout the day there was hardly a moment when there wasn’t an impromptu winner-stays-on tournament in progress. I didn’t get to play it but from what I hear it’s another subtle improvement on the last one with most of the kinks ironed out. As I was drafting this I heard someone behind me describe it as “fucking excellent”.

Ubisoft popped in as promised with copies of Darkwatch and Blazing Angels which I saw demonstrations of. Darkwatch is an FPS that essentially combines a western with Blade, as you play an outlaw who releases and gets bitten by a vampire and has to return him to captivity, either by being a hero or by feasting on the living and being evil. It looked great for a PS2 game (Xbox version is on the way, too) but the gameplay looked very similar to Return to Castle Wolfenstein – spooky catacombs and brainless zombie hordes abound – but with speed closer to that of Serious Sam. Blazing Angels is a WW2 dogfight game which looked great graphically but seemed very simple to play with very little enemy or ally AI to speak of. Could be fun with some work, though.

Most of the afternoon was spent going through retro catalogues to find a game to write the great gaming moment on. I wanted to do the swordfighting in Secret of Monkey Island or the vortex in Sam & Max (I’ve been on a ScummVM kick recently) but they were both no-gos, so at the moment I’m batting around the idea of the Hoth level from Shadows of the Empire (specifically when you drop the AT-ATs to their knees) because it really was a great moment at the time, but we’ll see tomorrow if that flies with the editor.

They’re also going to be getting me a press pass for the Tokyo Game Show so that I won’t have to brave the crowds during the public days. 41 days to go!

Pretty much spent the whole day continuing the long slog through Shin Megami. I’m now about nine hours in, having just reached the amusement park area. I still think it’s good, but it’s getting slightly frustrating now. You can come up against a boss and kill it with no problems and then come up against five normal enemies who just overwhelm and wipe you out. It’s fine most of the time though, and the story is constantly interesting.

Martin, the editor of GamesTM, came back from his trip to Rockstar where he played GTA: Liberty City Stories which, he assured me, is going to be fucking brilliant. Another developer came in with some hack-and-slash game (not sure what it was, but it reminded me of a cross between Otogi and Onimusha) which looked like it had some serious framerate and camera issues to be worked out. It seemed like it could be fun enough, but it looked like a high-res PSX game at times and when they guy claimed it was a near-final build I wasn’t too encouraged.

Apparently Ubisoft are coming in tomorrow with a couple of new games to try out (187 Ride or Die and FarCry: Instincts, I think), so I’ll post some impressions after I’ve seen and hopefully played them.

Pretty boring start…

I got put on GamesTM which is OK with me since I know some of the staff already, but they apparently didn’t have a lot for me to do so I spent the day trawling GamesIndustry.biz and NewsNow for potential stories on what must be one of the slowest news days around. 90% of what came up that was marginally interesting was unfounded rumour or more hype around nothing about the Revolution.

What made it worse was that I was using a 500MHz iMac G3 running the horrible Mac OS 9.2 and the only browser was the absolutely abysmal Internet Explorer 5.1.7 for Mac. I love OS X but I don’t know how anyone survived on the previous versions because I think I’d prefer Windows 95. It didn’t help that the browser had absolutely no provision for CSS layouts so most of the sites displayed completely wrong, and it managed to crash the thing to the point of needing a restart four times in six hours. Just look at what it does to GI even on the “upgraded” OS X version:

I think I’ll be taking in my iBook tomorrow and seeing if they’ll let me use that for the sake of my sanity. Thankfully they’re expecting that I’ll have some preview code to play around with including Rainbox Six: Lockdown and – yay! – Winning Eleven 9.