• My Let’s Rock piece for Cult of Mac – http://tinyurl.com/5rlt96 – was picked up by the BBC – http://tinyurl.com/5cn6e5 … which is nice. #

Needs more polish! (Sorry.)

A week ago, I posted my thoughts on Google Chrome, based on Google’s press release and comic book. This got me my fastest-ever flame, in just ten minutes (way faster even than the negative response I got for the oft-misunderstood Why the new iMac sucks).

I put this down to not toeing the line. Everyone and his cat has jumped on the ‘Google is teh bestest’ bandwagon, and even Macworld—a Macintosh magazine—gushed over Chrome, giving it a four-star review before quietly conceding the point that one of Chrome’s negative aspects is perhaps that it’s not yet actually available on the Mac.

I’ve been a bit more cautious. Having reviewed practically every Mac and Windows browser under the sun for various magazines, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that they’re all deeply flawed in some way. That’s why Google Chrome’s distinct lack of innovation (despite claims to the contrary by various ignorant commentators) was something I’d have been willing to set aside had Google really been a best-of browser. Sadly, it really isn’t.

That’s not to say Google Chrome is bad, and on Windows it certainly grabs with relish the position of ‘best browser for beginners’. The minimal interface clearly borrows from Internet Explorer 7 and Opera, mashing the two together and offering a few handy extras, such as thumbnails of your most-visited sites on new tabs, bettering Opera’s equivalent feature by way of being updated as you surf.

Tab management is excellent, with you being able to reorder and drag them to and from windows with ease (take note, Safari), and although the address bar’s ability to root around your history and bookmarks to try and find a match for a text string is bettered by both Firefox and Opera, it’s still impressive enough to warrant a mention. That said, it’s a shame Chrome didn’t pinch Firefox’s tagging feature—I find that a much more efficient way to store and retrieve favourite websites.

Elsewhere, I found it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Using WebKit is great, but Chrome’s change of graphics engine over Safari has resulted in a slightly botched implementation, and so it actually supports less CSS than Apple’s browser (albeit advanced features not currently in general use). And in terms of usability, Chrome makes some odd decisions.

The lack of a title-bar is baffling. This is often used to aid users, providing an indication of the site they’re on, or even their location within a site. Since Chrome still sits within a window (rather than you being able to peer between tabs to your desktop), its omission makes no sense at all. The lack of menus makes more sense, although it remains to be seen how these decisions will affect the Mac version. Elsewhere, not being able to double-click the top-left corner of a window to close it will likely irritate many users, and the ‘chatty’ tab headings within the Options dialog are utterly hateful, not describing what’s found within.

Perhaps the biggest problem I had with Chrome, though, was that it’s not rock-solid stable. It actually locked up Windows, forcing a total reboot, on more than one occasion, and just the browser itself has locked up a good few times. For a product touting the importance of one tab never affecting another, this is something that won’t be acceptable in the final product, although it’s maybe to be expected for a beta.

Clearly, Chrome isn’t done yet, and so it’s perhaps unfair to compare it with the likes of Firefox, Opera and Safari. However, that’s the reality of the market Google’s entering into, and Chrome has to be more than merely good enough. The fact Chrome is about ‘picking the best bits’, copying and refinement, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to get everything right, rather than offering another imperfect product. And when you’re cheerleading radicalism, it pays to actually be a bit radical as well.

I’ll revisit Chrome once it gets out of beta (which, judging by other Google products, might never happen), but for now, I’ll be jumping back to Firefox 3.

Now That’s What I Call A Browser! 57.

Causing lactic acid build-up since 1983

Konami understands retro gamers. Unlike certain other companies, Konami isn’t content shovelling the same old garbage out to consumers time and time again. Instead—and particularly with handheld games—its retro content appears full of thought and devotion.

This was definitely the case with Arcade Classics for the GBA and last year’s similarly titled DS compilation, but New International Track & Field shows that the same magic still flows through Konami’s veins when it comes to more focussed titles.

As its name might suggest, New International Track & Field is the latest in Konami’s long-running sports series. In practice, it’s essentially 1983’s Track & Field and 1984’s Hyper Sports mashed together, doubled in size, and redecorated, with the ’80s pixelated athletes replaced by a cast of super-deformed Anime-inspired characters.

Gameplay, however, remains firmly retro, with the button-bashing of the original titles replicated by smacking seven shades out of your DS buttons. And for users who grew up with joystick-waggling home conversions, the alternate control method of frantically scrubbing the stylus back and forth evokes fond memories of severe arm-cramping to shave a tenth of a second off of your best 100 metre dash time.

Although some of the events are needlessly fiddly (mostly regarding timing—something not helped by the intermittently inept instructions provided), most are actually a lot of fun. Double-trap shooting is perhaps the best, practically identical to the skeet-shooting event in Hyper Sports and similarly addictive. Springboard, javelin and archery also provide a decent mix of physical endurance and precision timing that ensures this compilation isn’t all about repetitive scrubbing or bashing.

As is seemingly law these days, New International Track & Field begins with most of its content locked, and while most unlockables are trite (such as new character outfits), some achievements unlock new characters that have their own challenges. These are typically based on events elsewhere in the game. Standouts include Evil Rose’s hammer variation, where competitors are thrown from a wrestling ring on to a scoreboard, and Simon Belmont’s skeet-shooting-inspired-vampire-bat-massacre, set in a spooky castle.

A few irksome difficulty spikes, a couple of really awkward events, and the hateful way in which you can enhance your athlete’s performance by yelling into the microphone (quick tip, DS developers: using the mic like this makes gamers hate you) stop New International Track & Field from reaching the dizzy heights enjoyed by retro remake Space Invaders Extreme, but Konami’s game isn’t too far off the pace and wins a well-deserved silver medal.

New International Track & Field is out now, and although it’s not worth the 30 quid RRP, it’s well worth tracking down for a wee bit less.

Repetitive? Sure. Painful? Definitely. Fun? Too right. God knows why, though.

You get the feeling someone’s spoiling for a fight in the browser race. Compared to the late-1990s pissing match between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, we’re now in a period of relative stability, and once Microsoft finally wheels IE 8 coughing and spluttering into the daylight, designers and developers will be able to code pretty much without hacks across all current browsers.

Bar Microsoft, what remains of the browser race is all about innovation, but as the Redmond giant has shown, ‘innovation’ can also mean waiting to see what others do and copying them. With Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft got all excited about ‘innovative’ features like tabs, which had been irrevocably welded to practically every other browser for years. And with Google essentially being the new Microsoft, should it have come as any surprise to see its upcoming browser project, the badly-named Chrome, pushing the innovation angle hard, and yet pilfering as much as possible from other browsers before anyone really notices?

At the time of writing, Google Chrome has yet to be revealed, bar the press release and a rather odd comic book. (Expect to see that adapted into a Hollywood movie starring Shia LaBeouf by November.) However, we can glean the following:

• It’s based on WebKit (like Safari)
• The so-called ‘special tabs’ are above the window (like Opera’s)
• It offers thumbnails of recently visited websites (kinda like Opera’s Speed Dial)
• It has a privacy mode (like Safari)
• It has intelligent address bar auto-complete (like Opera and, to some extent, Firefox)
• It has malware protection (like Firefox)

… And so on. In fact, bar its ability to launch web apps in standalone browser windows without browser junk, I failed to see a single piece of major innovation. (And even that idea isn’t really new—Prism and Fluid are single-site browsers. Chrome’s only addition is in making it easier to launch SSBs from the main browser itself, and then protecting them by ensuring all instances are separate processes.)

I should be livid about Chrome, shouting from rooftops and damning it to places where things are damned. Google is doing the thing I hate most: it’s a massive company, nicking other people’s ideas and smushing them together into a big ol’ sticky ball of best-of goo.

The thing is, having recently reviewed every major Mac browser for a Mac magazine and most PC ones for a Windows publication, it appears Chrome is exactly what I’ve been asking for. It’s picking the best bits, potentially killing that nagging feeling that you get when using one browser’s great feature and just wishing it had that other feature from that other browser. Whether that’ll be enough for me to get over that feeling of utter wrongness at seeing everyone else’s ideas compiled into the browser equivalent of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation, only time will tell.

Demon days

Revert to Saved recently had Hellboy week, so you might already have an inkling that I’m a fan of Mike Mignola’s blue-collar demon. However, the first Hellboy film didn’t entirely deliver. Although it retained something of the spirit of the original comic, it lacked its humour and fascination with folklore, instead concentrating on Lovecraftian nutcases and an inevitably burdensome origins arc.

Hellboy 2 is an entirely different beast, and although the story has veered far away from the comics, the movie feels much more like Hellboy. It’s funny as hell (pun possibly intended), has buckets of visual flair and imagination, and ticks all the boxes on the emotions checklist, providing a balanced, engaging movie with plenty of heart.

The folklore angle also comes to the fore. The plot centres around elf prince Nuada (a surprisingly buff ex-Bros Luke Goss) declaring war on humanity and aiming to use the mythical Golden Army to reclaim the world for the legions of underworld creatures that mankind has forgotten. But, like with Mignola’s comics, there’s more to this than a bunch of brainless scraps between strange-looking beasties—this is intelligent craziness.

First, it’s hard to egg on Hellboy and company as they battle to contain the various foes Nuada unleashes on humanity—after all, the humans in Hellboy’s world are often greedy and soulless, and Nuada’s desperately trying to save his kind before they fade away forever. And while Hellboy is ultimately the ‘hero’ of the flick, his role becomes increasingly questionable: he fights for humans who’ll never accept him, killing his ‘own kind’, who perhaps need his help more.

But it’s also telling that the most ‘human’ scenes in the movie happen with so-called monsters. Hellboy and fish-man Abe Sapien share one particularly memorable scene, drunkenly trying to understand the opposite sex. German mystic Johann Krauss—a disembodied ectoplasmic spirit—slowly realises that he’s lost his own humanity and needs to regain it. And even Nuada, despite his penchant for death and destruction, has sorrow etched across his face when his kind are harmed.

If there’s a negative aspect to The Golden Army, it’s that it sometimes feels like a series of set-pieces, strung together with a few slightly flimsy plot threads. However, the movie looks fantastic (not least the stunning clockwork Golden Army, and the troll market, which by comparison makes the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars look humdrum), and it has more heart, humanity and imagination than any other movie I’ve seen this year, let alone other comic-book adaptations.

An angry Abe Sapien says how many stars he’d have given The Golden Army.