Fujica Half: Turin and Genoa: Socialismo O Barbarie

Or Torino e Genova, if you're using the Italian train network. It's important to remember that. I remember being in Italy several years ago and I was very drunk, so I wanted to go to Turin. I spoke quietly to a figure on the far side of the road wearing a suit. "I want to go to Turin", I said. "I want to go to Turin". I said it quietly because some people find my manner offensive. "I want to go to Turin", I said, but he didn't hear me.

Why do I like Italy so much? The pragmatic answer is that I only go there on holiday, so I'm in a happy mood. And I have an escape route, so whatever problems affect the average Italian do not affect me. And I'm shallow. I only see the surface.

If Italy is so great, why do other countries exist? There must be a catch. Something nightmarish, something sinister beneath its attractive exterior, its good-value trains, its countryside that is beautiful in both the sunshine and the rain, the epic coasts, the museums, and everybody is thin and lovely etc.

It's probably something to do with house prices and economic opportunity. You'd think that a country with such huge tracts of land would have masses of cheap houses, but no. Or rather it does, but they're in mountain towns miles from anywhere. New Zealand and Canada have huge tracts of land as well, and house prices in those countries are famously high, so perhaps the land is full of poison or something.

Many years ago Italians moved en masse - that's French - to the New World to seek their fortune. I know this because I visited Genoa's Maritime Museum, which has an exhibit about Italian migration to the Americas during the 1800s. Nowadays around twenty to thirty million Brazilians - half of them in Sao Paolo - can trace their ancestry back to Italy, which means that Brazilian-Americans actually outnumber North-American-Italians.

Perhaps in another world Martin Scorsese might have been born in Brazil. Today he would be single-handedly responsible for the stereotype of Brazilian-Italians as mobsters, although in interviews he would be at pains to point out that only a minority of his films are gangster films.

A strip of half-frame film. Look at that dust!

I'm digressing. Ten years ago - ten years! - I bought an old Olympus Pen half-frame camera, and I've been interested in half-frame ever since. Half-frame cameras use ordinary 35mm film, but the frame is half the size and turned on its side. By coincidence it's almost exactly the same size and shape as Super 35mm motion picture film. Standard photolabs have no trouble processing it.

On a practical level half-frame is frugal. That was the sales pitch back in the late 1950s, when Olympus sold the Pen. Despite being popular in Japan and Europe it never took off in the United States. My personal theory is that Kodak was horrified by the idea, firstly because the company's goal was to sell more film, not less, and secondly because half-frame was a relatively open standard.

Instead Kodak came up with 126 and 110 Instamatic, which put a small roll of film in an expensive plastic cartridge of Kodak's own design. As of 2023 Instamatic is dead as a doornail, but half-frame lives on, or at least it will continue to live on until the cameras have all broken and film chemicals are no longer available.

On an artistic level half-frame changes the way I photograph things. Portrait orientation forces me to put a little bit of thought into composition. Instead of just wildly pointing the camera at clouds and people's feet I have to think. The fact that I can make seventy-two exposures per frame encourages me to take lot of pictures, and perhaps use them to tell little visual stories. I'm less precious about what I photograph so there's more of an emphasis on editorial selection than on-the-spot photo judgement.

The use of sequential still images to tell stories is probably as old as art. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cave paintings that depict a figure with a spear, and then a tiger, and then a figure with a spear standing over a dead tiger while a group of other figures cheer.

Or, say, a cave painting where a recent graduate of physics arrives at work and puts on a hazard suit and then goes into a big room and presses a button and then everything explodes and he escapes from the lab but gets put into hibernation by a mysterious businessman and then he awakes and finds himself in the future after the Earth has been taken over by aliens and then he goes on the run and then leads an attack on a notorious prison and then gets trapped in a teleporter and then leads an assault on the alien headquarters and I can't remember what happened in Episode One and then there was a boring bit with alien insects and then a big fight in a forest and then there was a big cliffhanger that was simultaneously resolved and not resolved thirteen years later by a VR spin-off.

Olympus is the company most associated with half-frame. Their range of cameras culminated with the Pen F half-frame SLR system, which put half-frame into a gorgeous little SLR body with a range of interchangeable lenses. I took a Pen-F to Chernobyl a couple of years ago because I could sense the window of opportunity closing. And close it did.

However several other Japanese manufacturers also a go at half-frame, including Canon, Yashica, Petri, and Ricoh, with the Caddy. For the most part the format faded away in the 1970s, but it had a second wind in the late 1980s with the Yashica Samurai half-frame bridge camera. As mentioned earlier it was never popular in the United States and remains alien there.

For the images in this post I carried around my Fujica Half, which I first wrote about back in 2017. It's a simple thing with scale focusing and autoexposure. It has an 28mm f/2.8 lens, roughly the same field of view as a regular 40mm lens. It has manual aperture and shutter control, which is useful because a lot of old point-and-shoot cameras need special batteries that are no longer available.

But the Half also has autoexposure. It uses a solar-powered selenium lightmeter. Surprisingly mine still works. It even seems to be accurate. The shutter and winding mechanism also work, so I salute the technicians who put it together back in the 1960s. I suppose if they were in their twenties they might still be alive today.

I have no idea how much the Half cost back then, but my guess is that it was relatively posh for a point-and-shoot and would have been built to what was at the time a high standard. By technicians who had something to prove, because Japanese industry was at the time trying really hard to establish a reputation for quality.

The autoexposure system can only be set from ISO 12 to ISO 200, but the 400-speed Agfa Superia I used is out of date, so I set it to ISO 100 and left it at that. The results were slightly flat and yellowy, like a panna cotta, which is an Italian dessert from Italy which is where I was.

I'm not a photo snob, and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing inherently magical about film. I'm old enough to remember when film photography was the dominant format, and there was nothing magical about it back then.

My tastes were formed in the 1990s, and back then the fight wasn't between film and digital, it was between technically perfect, automatic-everything film cameras and the occasionally beautiful scuzziness of the Holga. It was between middle-aged men with moustaches photographing sports with a Nikon F5 (on the hand hand) and stoned students persuading women to pose naked while they fumbled with the controls of a Seagull TLR in a disused factory (on the other). I naturally sympathised with the latter group of people, because naked women are awesome, but I'm not a format snob.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I carried my Fujica Half with me not as an affection, but because it's still a practical image-making tool. Compared to my mobile phone I prefer the ergonomics of a viewfinder - of holding the camera to my face and peering through a covered window, rather than holding it at arms' length and trying to deal with glare.

And the shutter response is positive and instant, whereas with a mobile phone there's a tiny bit of lag between the decision and the image. On a technical level negative film captures highlights without blowing them out, but on the other hand digital sensors have much better low-light performance - colour film never advanced much beyond ISO 800 - and of course the images can be instantly shared with the whole world, so both formats have their advantages.

As mentioned up the page ordinary photolabs will process half-frame 35mm without issue, if you can find a photolab. Here in the UK I used to use a company called Peak Imaging, but they no longer exist. Scanning half-frame is also relatively easy - I use the black border in between the two frames to set the black level, and then process the images as normal - but it's laborious because there are twice as many images.

Half-frame has half the resolution of regular 35mm, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It has the same resolution as motion picture film, so the grain is more apparent, and there's nothing wrong with grain. Life has grain, grain and surface noise.

BioShock: Ladies and Gentlemen, we are Floating in Space

Let's have a look at BioShock (2007), but to make things real spicy-like I'm going to play the remastered version that was released a decade later. And I'm going to play it on the PlayStation 4. And everybody who reads this article will lead a happy, fulfilling life. I guarantee it.

You remember BioShock. It was the art deco shoot-em-up with the diving suits and the creepy little zombie girls. There was a second game, BioShock 2 (2010), but you don't remember a thing about it. And there was a third game called BioShock Infinite (2013) that didn't have diving suits and it wasn't underwater and it was basically a completely different game, except that the plot somehow joined up with the first two but it didn't make sense.

And that is BioShock.

The first and last games attracted rave reviews, although nowadays I have a sense that the critics regret going ga-ga over the third game. In 2013 BioShock Infinite was a Big Thing. It looked gorgeous and it had a charismatic co-star, but it wasn't much fun to play and its attempts to tackle big issues was hamfisted. I haven't played it. Maybe it was a masterpiece. Dunno. That stuff about leading a happy, fulfilling life? That was an April fools' joke. This article was originally posted on 01 April 2023. You won't lead a happy life after all. Sorry about that.

All three games are available as The BioShock Collection, which is out on budget, so I decided to see what they were like. BioShock began as an XBox 360 exclusive, but it was ported later on to the PlayStation 3 and PC, and then ten years later it was polished up and re-released with some console-exclusive addons and improved textures for the PlayStation 4 and XBox One as well. The remaster includes a Director's Commentary, although it's actually a selection of interview snippets rather than a Deus Ex: Human Revolution-style in-game commentary:

E.g. you literally watch footage of an interview. It's all available on YouTube.

The original release had an uncomfortably narrow field of view, but the remastered version has an option to expand the screen:

The remaster apparently removes a bunch of configuration options on the PC, and it also gets rid of EAX audio effects, but I can't tell because I played it on the PS4. It froze once and ran out of space for save files, but not until right near the end of the game, so that wasn't a problem. Deleting some of the save files fixed that. Apparently the BioShock Collection's remasters of BioShock and BioShock 2 have a shared space for save data, and so it's a good idea to trim down your BioShock save files before you launch BioShock 2.

What is BioShock? It's a first-person action-adventure. A few months ago I wrote about System Shock, a classic old PC game from 1994 that combined elements of first-person shooter, role-playing games, adventures, even puzzle games. It even had rudimentary physics-based gameplay, and it popularised a bunch of ideas that have been mined by countless games since then.

In particular it popularised a gameplay model whereby the player is trapped in a disaster area, with a storyline told in retrospect using audio logs and environmental cues. On a pragmatic level it's an efficient way of conveying a complex plot without having to model a bunch of NPCs - everybody is already dead, so the developers just have to record a lot of voice logs - and when it works the results are unusually creepy.

Most games of this ilk separate the player from NPCs behind safety glass etc, but BioShock mixes things up a little by allowing the player to interact with a few characters, albeit only a couple, such as this chap here:

System Shock was developed by the late, lamented Looking Glass Software, under the auspices of a chap called Warren Spector. Looking Glass had a knack for releasing classic games that didn't sell well, and after sinking a lot of money into an unprofitable golfing title the studio went bust. But it was a hotbed of talent, and among its staff was BioShock mastermind Ken Levine, who wrote some of the early drafts of what became Thief: The Dark Project, another classic that wasn't especially popular.

Warren Spector went on to make Deus Ex for Ion Storm, while Ken Levine went on to develop System Shock 2 for his own startup, Irrational Games. The two games are conceptually similar but at the same time very different.

Grim Fandango, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Kevin Rowland's "My Beauty". I had good taste back then. If only I had kept the boxes. Where did the time go.

Deus Ex and System Shock 2 are action-adventures with role-playing elements. They both have fundamentally linear plots, but Deus Ex is more complicated, with branching plot strands and a large cast of characters. The game's maps are designed in such a way that the player can achieve their goals through several methods, usually a choice between sweet-talking or sneaking or high explosives. Shock 2 on the other hand is much more straightforward. The storyline is simpler and the player has much less freedom of action.

But the tight, focused storyline and oppressive atmosphere of Shock 2 give the game a sense of creeping menace largely absent from Deus Ex. The constrained environments and ever-present enemies complement the game's nightmarish storyline, whereas for all its downbeat worldbuilding the player freedom of Deus Ex often works against its attempts to build tension. In particular the side-quests and exploration aspects of the game's famous Hong Kong section are at odds with the fact that the player character only has a few hours left to live at that point in the storyline; the game doesn't take place in real time, so it's easy to forget that the hero is desperately racing against the clock.

BioShock was developed as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. But not an actual sequel, because in the mid-2000s the rights to the System Shock games were owned by the company that bought up what was left of Looking Glass. Nonetheless it shares a number of ideas with its inspiration. The player is trapped in a multi-level complex that swarms with respawning enemies who chatter to themselves as they run their errands; the player can buy supplies from vending machines, or hack them and get a discount; mid-way through the game there's a plot twist; there's a hydroponics deck; there are occasional ghost visions that tell a little story:

Back in 2007 there was a certain amount of controversy as to whether BioShock was a worthy successor to System Shock 2, or just a standard shooting game with some complications. What do I think? In its favour BioShock is a lot better looking than Shock 2, and the shooty-shooty is more fun. But it doesn't really advance the genre at all; it feels like an action-orientated remake with better graphics, which is fine, but after the passage of seven years I expected more.

There are simple stealth elements, but it feels older than it is. It dates from a time when first-person shooters were fascinated with working toilets and sinks. Some of the background textures are downright ugly, and the game very rarely exploits the vertical dimension, which I assume is a result of its console genesis (aiming up and down at an angle with a console controller is awkward).

Perhaps for the same reason the game doesn't appear to have climbable ladders, or climbable anything, albeit that this was two years before Mirror's Edge and a decade before Doom 2016. There are a few hidden areas, but for the most part the maps don't reward exploration, or when they do, it's with the same generic junk that appears everywhere else.

The art direction is fantastic, but I have the impression that if the kibble was stripped away the maps would just be a series of square boxes. The underlying architecture is very plain. But then again 2007 was a long time ago. The inclusion of a telekenesis power-up dates the game to a period when physics-based gameplay was so hot, and the square-rooms-but-with-nice-art-direction reminds me a lot of Half-Life 2. The use of bloom and colour grading and lens effects (specifically water-on-the-camera) is very much of its time, but it's all done tastefully, so it's a rare example of a "shedloads of bloom" game where the effect works.

As mentioned in the text BioShock generally looks great but has some sloppy texture work.

Superficially Shock 2 feels more complex, but some of its mechanics are just busywork. It has an inventory system, for example, whereas the player in BioShock just picks things up automatically, but an inventory system is not gameplay. The biggest difference is that character building in Shock 2 is irreversible, whereas in BioShock the player can mix and match power-ups as necessary, which feels less authentic but is much less frustrating.

BioShock is full of junk that the player can use to craft ammunition and tools, but it feels pointless. Your character just picks up junk automatically, so instead of carefully searching levels for an elusive tub of glue you simply inspect every single crate and then rush off to craft some ammo when you feel like it. It's not a million miles from the Borderlands series in that respect. BioShock also has the post-Half Life 2 craze for unusually limited ammo, particularly - and oddly - with the shotgun. You'd think that a game set in a fragile pressure vessel would be awash with shotgun ammunition, but I found myself barely using the shotgun, because our hero can only carry a few shells and ammo is very rare.

As with Shock the player can switch between different ammunition types, and there are a whole raft of pseudo-psychic powers, although they're presented as genetically-engineered plasmids. Most of them are utilities that complement the weapons, but some of them are directly attack-y, and some of them are designed to work in tandem with the guns; early on the game encourages the player to freeze the enemies in place with an electrical blast and then whack then with a wrench while they can't move.

On the PS4 the tonics are mapped to the left shoulder buttons and the weapons to the right, which works surprisingly well. The console version has a pause-time weapon/tonic wheel. I'm not sure if that's in the PC port. Later games in the series allowed the player to fire off weapons and tonics simultaneously, without switching, but the original system is fairly painless.

In theory you can travel between the game's levels at will, but with the exception of one easily-missable easter egg there's no reason to do so.

I have to admit I completely missed BioShock when it was new. Is it any good? Yes, although I could sense myself losing interest as the game went on. Storywise you are a chap called Jack, who is on a flight across the Atlantic when his plane crashes in the ocean. He happens to land next to a strange lighthouse, which houses a bathysphere that takes him to Rapture, a city beneath the sea.

Rapture was built in the late 1940s by Andrew Ryan, a businessman who wanted to create a society of elites free from the grasping hands of governments and unions and religions. It's a lot like the floating tax havens that were frequently featured in Wired magazine in the 1990s. Presumably Ryan grew up liking Art Deco, which would explain why a city built during the heyday of mid-century modern resembles the 1920s.

The storyline explains that the people of Rapture initially made great advances in the arts and sciences, but a combination of isolation and infighting eventually led to a breakdown in society. In particular the use of splicing - genetic enhancements - resulted in a population of inbred mutants driven mad by superpowers. Thus the player is thrust into a warzone filled with paranoid, genetically-altered superhumans who can shoot lightning from their fingers. As a neutral party Jack is quickly enlisted by the few remaining sane survivors to help them fix Rapture, or at least ensure that the whole city doesn't fall apart.

Which for the most part involves shooting things, pressing switches, and playing a hacking mini-game that resembles PipeMania:

That particular hack was doomed from the start. BioShock has a number of unusual mechanics. Each level features a number of Big Daddies, giant ambulatory diving suits that shamble around. The Daddies don't attack unless you mess with them. Instead they guard Little Sisters - genetically-altered little girls who use giant syringes to extract genetic power-ups from corpses. At one point you find their nursery, where they are indoctrinated:

Optionally you can fight the Big Daddies and rescue the Little Sisters, although the game gives you a choice between harvesting the girls for their genetic power-ups or letting them go. The game was praised at the time for its moral complexity, but sixteen years later that aspect feels overblown, as it only influences a tiny amount of the gameplay and has a minimal impact on the story, at least until the final cutscene.

As with System Shock 2 the game was also praised for its twist, which is lessened somewhat if you've played the earlier game because it's essentially the same twist. I don't want to spoil things, but it turns out the the guiding voice on the radio is not being completely level with the player. This leads to one of the game's most famous sequences, in which the player confronts the chief baddie and is given a choice between sparing him, or beating his brains out with a golf club:

It's very well done, although on the downside it does mean that the game peaks at about the three-quarters mark. Whether you choose to spare Andrew Ryan or not, the remainder of the game feels like an afterthought. Ultimately the game ends with one of two cutscenes, a happy one and a sad one, but the actual gameplay remains the same.

In defence of BioShock I can't think of another game since then that genuinely solves the problem of how to account for moral choice in a game without railroading the player, if only because the extra work involved in writing numerous different storylines would be impractical. Spec Ops: The Line suffered from that limitation, in the sense that your only choice was between continuing to play the game or not.

In fact Shock 2 also had the same issue. Even if you knew that the voice on the radio was not your friend there wasn't anything you could do about it. Off the top of my head the player was allowed to rebel once, and only once, but the outcome didn't affect the storyline.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution cleverly masked the effects of the player's choices by making it seem as if the player had no choice, but development of that game was rushed, so the moral aspect only informed a handful of scenes. I haven't played the BioShock sequels so perhaps they deal with it differently. Towards the end of the game BioShock feels as if it's building up to a twist - one character asks the player to disguise themselves as a Big Daddy, in a way that suggests the process is irreversible - but nothing comes of it. One thing that struck me as particularly odd is a sequence where the player becomes an assassin for one of the NPCs. He asks you to kill his rivals and photograph their bodies. The player seems perfectly happy to become a motiveless serial-killer-for-hire, and the game doesn't bring it up later, even though it feels like it should be a major plot point.

In any case BioShock is at heart an action shooting game with an old-school, flat level layout. The interplay of different weapons and tonics is fun, but as with the gravity gun of Half-Life 2 I found that trying to be clever with traps was generally much less effective than just shooting things, and the endlessly respawning baddies and linear gameplay put me on edge, because I had to keep rushing back and forth instead of exploring the maps. The hacking mini-game is monotonous and suffers from what appears to be a limited set of starting states. If you have the right tools you can skip it, with no penalty (unlike Fallout you don't get experience points for hacking things).

On the positive side the art direction is top-notch. It has some of the environmental storytelling of Fallout, with clever use of lighting and map design to draw the player's attention to important details. Before going into BioShock I assumed that the oppressive art deco style would start to grate, but the game is good-looking throughout. And as with Shock 2 the sound design is also unusually polished. The baddies talk to themselves as they hunt the player, with each enemy type having a unique and surprisingly extensive set of stock phrases.

On the downside the weapons are an anonymous bunch, and the game throws most of the enemy types at the player in the first few levels, so by the end I felt as if I was just going through the motions. An awful lot of the gameplay boils down to fetch quests, whereby the player has to collect a bunch of arbitrary things, and it ends with an escort mission that is at least easy (at that point in the game the player is a heavily-armed killing machine).

And for all the style there was something unaffecting about it. Shock 2 looked ugly, but it had a nightmarish quality, because it was tonally completely serious. In the second half of the game the player was the doomed puppet of an evil supercomputer, trapped in a wrecked starship with no hope of rescue. BioShock on the other hand has an underlying spoofy tone, not as unsubtle as Fallout, but spoofy enough that I found it hard to lose myself in the story. And the double-crossing corporate warfare plot - as opposed to the thematic meditations on free will - is taken from something like Bonanza, but to be fair the game isn't about that. There are a few clever surprise moments, generally towards the beginning of the game, but none that really made me jump.

And that is BioShock. A decent shooter that outstays its welcome, with excellent production values allied to a prosaic story, but with some clever points about free will. It's memorable but I can't imagine playing it twice.