v-s.net v0.6

Thursday, 12:21 pm in Life

I think looking for houses has got to be about the most time-consuming thing in the universe.  I thought looking for rental places was bad, but looking for a buying place is much, much worse.  It’s more money, more hassles and more choice… not that much of it is particularly good choice.  ~Mat [h] and I are looking to buy a two- or three-bedroom house or unit, preferably free title, in either Woden or northern Tuggeranong.  It has to be liveable, if not the most modern thing in the universe (and honestly, we’re not going to get ‘modern’ in our price range).  ~Mat [h] wants ADSL and air conditioning.  I want a dishwasher and plenty of storage space.  And maybe a small garden.  ~Mat [h]’s not keen but… I dunno.  I might like gardening, you never know.  It’s like running a planted tank.  Only less wet.¹

Anyway, we made our first offer on a place on Monday.  Three bedroom town house.  The price wasn’t a bargain by any means, but I still figured we’d get outbid.  So imagine my surprise when we get a call later that night from the agent saying the owners had accepted our offer.  We were dumbstruck.  Tuesday we both took off work and did a bunch of running around stressing about loans and lawyers, before our appointment to meet the agent at 12:30.  We figured it was to discuss the specifics of The Offer and The Exchange and all those other scary capitalised words you get with house purchasing.  So we rocked up, dad in tow, and sat down in an obnoxiously plush conference room.  Who woulda thunk there’d be money in selling houses?  The agent we were dealing with was a baby-faced shyster, a real cartoon-cliché of a man; short and soft and dimply with curly hair and a thin veneer of civility.  I didn’t like him; I wanted to, but it all felt too false.

Anyway, so we’re sitting there and the agent hands us across this think wad of papers I recognise as the contract since mum had printed it out previously².  And then, with his best baby faced, shit-eating grin he says, “Now, I have to tell you, at 10:30 this morning another offer came through that’s higher than yours…”

Things started going down-hill from there.  Dad got angry, ripping into the agent for not calling and telling us this and thus not wasting a whole workday.  ~Mat [h] just flat-out refused to counter-offer; the house really wasn’t worth more, cut-throat property market or not, and we’re not exactly in a hurry to buy.  And I just grinned my evil grin, barely restraining myself from laughing in the bastard’s face.

They’re not supposed to do this, incidentally.  It’s not illegal since we haven’t actually exchanged contracts yet (then it does become illegal, at least here), but it’s considered borderline unethical and some agents do it, some don’t.  The agency we were dealing with is notorious for playing gazumping games.  And it wasn’t exactly like it wasn’t obvious what the bastard was doing; get the young first-home-buying couple all naively excited over their first home, drag them down to the office all excited, then rip the rug out from under them.  The result being, of course, that we come back with a higher counter-offer since we can’t bare to lose our ‘dream home’.

Yeah.  Right.

I think the agent knew that he’d lost the sale straight away.  We left the offer in under ten minutes, hollow promises that we’d be rung back if the other offer fell through.  We agreed that if he did, we’d offer $5,000 less than our original offer – dicking about tax, as it were.  But he didn’t, and the house is now listed as ‘Under Offer’ on allhomes.  I almost feel sorry for the buyers.

The Canberra market is a bitch right now.  I wouldn’t want to have to move in a hurry.

In unrelated news, I bought Pathologic (a.k.a. Мор. Утопия) the other day.  It was only $29.95, and as one of the latest of an almost dead race – the puzzle-adventure game – I just had to have it.  It’s… both the absolute best and absolute worst game I have ever played, all at the same time.

At first it was flaky as hell since it doesn’t deal with dual-core CPUs, but once I’d bound it to a single core it ran all right (though it also doesn’t deal with dual-monitors, so I have to turn one off while playing).  The graphics would have been dated in 2001, and the translation is terrible; the first main character is called the ‘Bachelor’ when what they really mean is ‘Doctor’ and it only goes down from there.  On the other hand, there’s something about the terrible translation that helps make the game even more ominously surreal.  Because those are the best words to describe it so far.  It also shows its Russian roots.  It’s hard to describe, but there’s something about the idea of a decaying industrial town filled with Brutalist architecture on the edge of a wild steppe over-run with a kind of demi-human working class that just screams Russia.  It’s in the characters, the setting, the mythologies… everything.  And it’s really, really refreshing.

I’ve only done Day 1 of the Bachelor so far; there are twelve days and three characters.  It runs in ‘real’ time (as in, real game time; one hour is a few minutes) and stuff happens if you’re there or not.  There are things that you must do in each day – well, unless you want the bad ending – and you have very limited time to do them.  Just to really hammer home the sense of desperate urgency, the town map is huge and you often have to walk right across it and back.  Oh, and don’t get too excited because you also need to eat, sleep and drink water… but be careful, because there’s an infection in the town and consuming the produce will make you sick.  Oh, and be nice to the NPCs, otherwise your reputation drops and they will attack you.  But don’t worry, all weapons are extremely ineffectual and prone to breakages.  Assuming you can use them in the first place.

Got all that?

Pathologic is definitely in the Silent Hill/Phantasmagoria genre, and I’d highly recommend it as being worth picking up for anyone who loves creeping, ominous, eerie, surrealistic, story-driven games ( gnosis, randomredux I’m looking at you guys).  But it’s also very definitely its own thing, not quite like anything else I’ve ever played before.  It’s super-niche – something we’re more used to seeing in foreign films than games – and I think most gamers won’t be able to get over its terrible graphics and obtuse text.  It’s terribly indicative of the stagnation in the mainstream computer game industry, however, that a no-budget no-name production house would be the one to churn out one of the most refreshing games in years.

So yeah, definitely worth the $30 I spent supporting the Russian video game industry.  And in case you don’t believe me, here’s another review of the game I quite liked.

Also, the Executor is the best videogame character ever.  No arguments.

1. Though since they’re talking about banning all outside water use sooner rather than later, maybe a garden isn’t such a good idea after all. ^
2. In Canberra, estate agents are obliged under law to provide full details of the contract, building and pest reports, body corporate minutes and a stack of other random handy things to anyone who asks.  The cost of acquiring the documents falls to the vendor, which is nice for noobs like us for whom spending $700 on a building report for a place we might not even end up getting is a big expense. ^

• Tags » games, house hunting, life, mor utopia, pathologic, real estate
• Comments By » ~Belinda [h], dianastar, Hobopage