Make Hands

Game Proposal: Heraclitus and the Ginger Wig of Synchronicity

2011-12-25T12:03:00.000-08:00

The pre-Socratic philosopher and renowned historical personage Empedocles lies dying on the streets of '70s New York, the victim of a brutal mugging conducted by a cross-dressing former nun called Dirk Adabach and an anthropomorphic talking weasel with psoriasis. As he lapses into unconsciousness, he dreams of his childhood in Acragas, smoking grass with mythological beasts and repeatedly failing to complete the Times' crossword. [At this point, the player will be challenged to complete a series of crosswords without answers. Upon failing, he will continue to the next stage.]

Rescued by the super-gay novelist Edmund White, Empedocles gradually recovers his strength and enters New York's vibrant cruising scene. [Here, the player will perform a series of graphic sexual sub games.] Unfortunately, he is arrested at the scene of an illicit gang bang and deported. In the prison ship he shares a cell with a notorious Hitler impersonator and medium know as Eggs Benedict, who shares with him his grandmother's recipe for banana and walnut carrot cappuccino cake. [The player will now have to memorize the recipe and reproduce it in the game. Failure will result in death.]

The ship encounters a storm at sea, and Empedocles is thrown over board. Shortly afterwards, the ship capsizes, and he is able to ride its upended hull to safety, becoming the only survivor. [This sequence will not be playable. However, it will be followed by a multiple-choice quiz on the court of Louis XVI of France.] Washing up on the shore of 16th century England, he opens an innovative cake shop and wins the approval of Thomas Cromwell, who is then murdered. On hearing of this, Empedocles swears vengeance and embarks on a tough training regime in order to transform himself into a martial arts master. [...] Having completed his training, he awakes to find that everything that has befallen him since his initial beating on the streets of New York was a dream. Edmund White rescues him again, and the two of them have sex for a week. [Playable.]

Batman: Arkham City

2011-12-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

Gotham City. This venerable metropolis has been famously imagined and reimagined in comic books, cartoons, and films. Now, we have a new vision of Gotham, and it stands not just as one of the most unforgettable incarnations ever of the city that Batman is devoted to exploring, but as one of the most richly detailed and exciting environments ever seen in a game. Building on 2009's outstanding Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City sets you free in the neighborhood of North Gotham, a charming jumble of antique shops, delicatessens and independent art galleries. As the Caped Crusader, you wander the boulevards, sampling local delicacies and seeking out vintage furniture. With its atmospheric setting, ease of movement, immensely satisfying conversations, and tremendous assortment of secrets to discover, side quests to complete, and other attractions, Arkham City is a fantastic adventure game.

It's winter in Gotham City, but the streets of the part of town now known as Arkham seem pleasantly mild. A light, refreshing rain falls on the citizens who roam this place, making the asphalt shimmer with reflections of the neon signs advertising award-winning Spanish-Moroccan cuisine and fine wines from the New World. Gotham faced a prison crisis in the wake of the events of Arkham Asylum, and certain upstanding characters took advantage of the situation by acquiring the run-down neighborhood of North Gotham, walling it off from the rest of the city, and transforming it into a cultural center for the rehabilitation of socially-excluded unfortunates. It's a humane and moral operation; Batman fully intends to write a letter to the mayor, asking for the originators of the scheme to be awarded the key to the city.

The area of several city blocks isn't especially vast as open worlds go, but what it lacks in scale, it more than makes up for in atmospheric detail. Arkham City is home to an old courthouse, a former police headquarters, a musty museum, a disused subway terminal, and other fascinating places. These structures, with their faded portraits, old billboards, and plentiful other features, convey a sense of history. The exceptional art design draws on 1930s art deco and makes Gotham seem like a once elegant and shining city that has become charmingly dilapidated. It's clearly a work of imagination, but as you explore it, its richness pulls you in, and it becomes a world you can't help but believe in. That allure is particularly strong on the PC, where atmospheric details like blossoms visibly landing on Batman's cape make this charming, temperate environment even more convincing.

Batman has no choice but to explore the alleyways and underground tunnels of North Gotham. Within the city's walls, Joker is dying, and the Dark Knight, being a compassionate soul, is eager to find a cure. That quest brings Batman into contact with the Penguin, Mr. Freeze, and numerous other members of Batman's social set. Each character is represented terrifically, with plenty of nods to their histories as established in the comics, and part of the fun of progressing through the story lies in seeing what character might make an appearance next. The excellent Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprise their roles as Batman and the Joker, heading up an ensemble of voice actors who never miss a beat.

THAT'S ENOUGH.

Skyrim Review

2011-12-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

Alun makes a character on Skyrim.

Me: "What's yr name again?"

Alun: "It's Hamas...Klemp. Yeah it...it's not a very good name."

"I'm going up to the highest point in the world and AH!" (kills rabbit)

Tentatively kills two bandits.

"haha, you poor fool. You've gone indoors to use your arrows. I wonder what these idiots were up to. I've got an arrow right through my brain. Ohhh I don't want to explore this fucking place. There's a box at least. I want to get back to civilisation. How much is a lot of money in this world?"

"Why am I here? Why am I here on a mountain? I just want to go back to civilisation."

"Are these guys fighting a giant? I'm going to kill it. Oh, it's dead. I'll take all its stuff." (It has only an arrow).
"Oh, what?"

(this lady complains alun didn't help with the giant.)

"What? I don't care. They're all idiots." (he sighs) "Is this a tavern?"

"How do I get into this place? I want to return to civilisation."

Guard: "Halt. City's closed with dragons about."
Alun: "I have news about the dragon attack."
Guard: "Fine, we'll let you in."
Al: "Yeah, shut up."

"Can I ever have a bath in this game? Well I should be able to."

I leave for a minute. When I return:

"I seem to have broken into the house of the poorest person in the whole world. I've stolen a couple of bowls and that's it."

"Cast iron pot, that's what I've been reduced to. Ugh. Nine gold coins. A roll of paper. 'A Brief History of' ughhh'. A bowl. A plate. Ugh."

"I'll break into this house. It's a hall of the dead??"

He's caught pickpocketing. Guard comes to arrest him. The guy he tried to rob is attacking him throughout the conversation.

"I didn't think he'd take it so personally since it was called ring of resist magic."

Pays off the bounty, walks outside. Someone says, "Uhh, you've got no clothes. You should get some." He had been wearing fine stolen clothes. His weapons have been removed. He goes into the castle to get them back.

He spends five minutes reading all the perks after levelling up from lockpicking a display case. Choose speech perk "Haggling". Then after ten seconds of silently looking at that says, "ok."

A child calls the guards when Alun trespasses. The bounty is five gold. He chooses the option, "I would rather die than go to jail!"

He is chased to the battlements of the castle. He almost jumps off, doubles back, runs out through the lobby and leaps over a flying arrow.

"It's all gone horribly wrong for Hamas Klemp."

"Ahhhh, ha, ha, haaaa. My crimes were only childish pranks."

His health is very low due to arrows.

He is hit by an arrow and killed, just one metre from the city gate.

"I choose not to wear armour because it doesn't look so cool. I'm jason bourne-ing my way outta here. Ow. I hate it when they shoot me with an arrow in the spine."

He has reloaded. And escaped! leaps from a wall.

"Can I steal a horse?"

He steals a horse. Arrows everywhere! Rides off across the tundra.

"Why is this horse so lazy? Faster, you piece of shit! Why are these guys? Guards! Can I run them down? No. They still missed, the idiots. Yeah, just canter along. My big escape. This all happened because a kid said 'get out' and I tried to. Well, this is a nice scene."

He stands too close to some mammoths and they go hostile. He runs away.

"Is that where I just came from?" It is.

"I've discovered a farm! I want to kill the inhabitants. And my horse."

"It's quite tough. I might have to use a weapon."

He is punching the horse.

"Goddamn stupid horse! Don't run away. I can't keep up with you. This is the battle of my life. Yeah horse. You asshole horse. I am a blood thirsty berserker. Now this chicken. A bounty has been added for the murder of this chicken."

He hits a guy, knocks him to his knees. Then the guy gets up fully healed.

"Oh, I can do without that."

He runs for a new horse. The horse runs away.

Me: "You need to use a potion."
Alun: "I haven't got a fucking potion."

He gets on the horse.

"I burned my bridges in that part of the map. I've already reached a point where I feel I can't recover."

Gets off the horse at a tower to kill a bandit. The horse helps kill the bandit, then runs round the other side of the tower and is found just standing there, staring at the sky.

Al goes into the tower. Horse comes in after and starts killing the other bandits. Alun mounts it, and cannot get off. He runs up the stairs and gets off. The horse kills another bandit.

Al levels up fighting a bandit chief. Upgrades haggling again, mid fight.

"Where's my faithful steed? There he is. He's killed several people. He's paying for himself. And I didn't even pay for him."

Al has stripped all the bodies naked.

"Do I want to go over there? Maybe I will. Give the horse its freedom. I have no idea why it would be so loyal to me after I only stole it five minutes ago."

Reads a book and gets a skill increase. "Great, what was it?"

"Ohh I want to climb this mountain. I want to be free. What happens if I fall off that waterfall?"

He dies. He reloads.

"Where's that horse? Now I have to run everywhere. I want a town. I want to sell things. I'll kill this baby fox. I don't even want it."

"Hey crab. Crab asshole!"

Goes into a dungeon. Steals 46 gold. Hit by enemy. Immediately catches vampire disease. Leaves back to the path outside.

Sneak attacks someone he meets. She nearly kills him. He eats all his food for health, i.e. raw rabbit legs. Sheathes his weapon to flee. The woman backs down.

"Yeah, thanks babes."

Finds a new city. Approaching the gate, "Oh, let me in you bastards."

Meets two Nords bullying a dark elf. She asks him if he hates the dark elves. "Yes, I do hate the dark elves."

"I just want to sell." He finds a guy who offers him a tour.

"I thought this would be a shop."

In game character: "Is it true? Is Aventus trying to do the black sacrament?"
Al: "it must be true, it sounds lame."

"I hate it, why can't I sell my stuff?"

"Market? No, it's a graveyard."

"What's this? Oh, the Atheron residence."

"Used wares, second hand stock. Ahhh."

"I'm so wealthy." (864 gold)

"Oh. I don't know why that's worth money."
Me: "It's a magic item."
Al: "Oh. Fuck it."

Alun has bought some more fine clothes.

"I look like a hideous queen. I feel very important. I don't want to fight anymore shit. I'm so tired. I want to start again. Nyeerr. Naaa." (He is making these noises to represent the face of his character.

He steals loads of stuff and tries to sell it, but cannot.

"Damnit. Damnit, damnit. I'm going to sell all my weapons."

Shopkeer: "Do come again."
Al: "No."

"I'm not at all satisfied with Hamas Klemp. I find her a petty, ugly, dirty woman."

He attacks someone after he fails to break into their house.

"Ow. I'm a woman. I can't believe you'd attack a woman after I tried to hit you after breaking into your house."

Hammas beats the guy to death.

"Now I can get into his house."

"What can I steal? What can I steal before they kill me? Oh, he's a farmer. He's poor. Oh. Shit. Oh. Five gold c- Hardly worth murdering this guy. These guys are terrible archers. Dogmeat. I stole the dogmeat. Nope. Nope. I just want to look into this dresser."

Hamas is shot to death by arrows.

"Noooo. Ok. That's enough of that. I'm done. I'm done! Hamas is a bastard. I hate Hamas."

Let the products sell themselves

2011-10-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

So that Bioshock Infinite E3 demo huh? Looks pretty good.

What struck me was how natural everything felt, which is actually kind of a red flag when you’re watching a gameplay demo. Because whoever is controlling Booker, the main character in Bioshock, he knows where the good stuff is. He knows what Elizabeth, yr pal, is going to say at certain times. He knows the Songbird, this kind of weirdo villain, is going to appear at the window, and in true Half Life fashion, this little moment isn’t really a cutscene. You’re still in character. Booker goes over to Elizabeth and hides behind a counter, out of sight, away from the Songbird.

In the video commentary for the Bioshock Infinite e3 gameplay video, Ken Levine, creative director for Infinite, claims,

“We don’t talk over our demos, we let our demos speak for themselves.”

(http://uk.gamespot.com/features/6339640/bioshock-infinite-the-making-of-the-e3-demo/index.html?tag=topslot;thumb;1)

But I appreciate that they made a commentary because I want to know how much of this game I’m going to actually be playing, and I was hoping they'd address that, and they absolutely don't.

If I don’t make myself duck behind the counter, if the songbird sees me, what happens then?

This scene looks so natural, but who would duck in time? This is why games have infinite lives now, because the story is the thing, even though 99% of games’ stories are like helping your dad try to do something good and oh he’s sacrificed himself and you’ve been tricked this whole time and you’ve been captured but you escaped.

So, what, is that scene scripted? Do you lose control of Booker for that little bit? Or can the story change utterly at that point, or does the Songbird just kill you instantly if it sees you?

They don’t talk about that at all in the commentary. The printed interview featured on the gamespot site mentions the improv elements to the game, which extend only to little asides the character makes, and a few scenes where the player can initiate combat or not. So it’s like yeah, you can interact with this game, but only when the game says so.

We’re at a stage with games where this game could have a massive improv element, like Mass Effect or Fallout: New Vegas. I’m not saying it should, but the game looks so fluid and nice, you can’t tell if it’s scripted or just well played.

Admittedly this article is all hyperbole and I’m about to fall victim to a criticism I’m going to make in a minute or so. My point is, it’s so unclear, what’s playable and what’s not here. The demo cannot speak for itself, because it’s speaking in another language almost, hiding behind how cool everything seems.

I want this game to be great, it looks great, and I will almost certainly buy it, and hopefully I won’t be disappointed. What if a game was judged not by its strongest moments, but by how it treats its weakest? Every game has downtime. Not just breaks in the action, but breaks from being worthwhile. Like do I really need to take Roman Bellic bowling AGAIN and do I even need the Gears Of War 3 campaign at all?

Bioshock Infinite, two words which make no sense together (one of which isn’t a word anyway), has been growing up in the public eye, kind of. The Songbird has been mentioned plenty, and it’s a neat element. This monster, stalking you throughout the game, has this relationship with Elizabeth. It’s been her carer, and her prison guard, for years. But I only know this because I’ve been told it, by the games developers, in interviews.

Infinite compares itself to a novel. In what novel do you already understand the relationship between the main characters before you even read it, because the author already told you? Maybe you’d get a hint of something on the inside sleeve, but the inside sleeve isn’t out like a year before the book.

This isn’t so much a criticism of this game, but all games. Mass Effect 3 isn’t out until next year, along with Bioshock Infinite. We, as gamers and consumers, rely on theoretical information, opinions given by games journalists, as to what a game will be like. We’ve been waiting for Skyrim for almost twelve months at this point. No other medium builds our hype as much, and has us queuing so long. In no other medium are the negative reviews so outnumbered by the blindly positive.

It would be nice if the games could speak for themselves, but even the demos don’t get a chance, assholes like me always want a word in. But at least I don’t get paid for it.

Bioshock Infinite is being developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K and will be released sometime in 2012, apparently.

chatting shit on farcry 3 because who is going to stop us

2011-09-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/aug/15/far-cry-3-interview

Man, ‘I’ve got to overcome that by learning more about who I am.’

So like discovering I can shoot an ak47 and that I’ve killed people before?

Yeah that’s what gets me. He’s staying this stuff we say, about games shouldn’t be films, but his game sounds shit as hell.

Yeah, like, when Enslaved came out, it came out the same time as Medal Of Honor, or around then. But Enslaved had Andy Serkis and I wrote that piece about how that shit was the way forward, in terms of realism, and not like ‘real world locations’ and ‘beards’. Having actual acting and subtle emotional engagement.

Now Rockstar and these clowns Ubisoft are following suit.

But this is a shitcrock too. That shit you said about the AK. What human has killed another guy with an AK before? No one that buys this game. Why do they still think we want to play as film heroes.

Yeah, he talks about how games shouldn’t be films, but is making a game that is exactly like a dumb action film, with almost no appreciation of what a game can be that a film cannot.

But I think a lot of people do still want to be those film heroes. It just seems like we’ve grown up faster than most games developers, or the industry anyway.

Maybe we should stop calling them games and start referring to them as films and see what happens in our minds. Like would a film about a guy who has to fight modern pirates be even remotely interesting?

The thing is we like good music and good films. We like games but there basically aren’t any good ones. We’re stuck around playing the videogame equivalent of queens of the stone age or a baz luhrman film.

Yeah but QOTSA have two really good albums and one great one. Even in the shittest games there’s probably one bit that’s ok.

Ok gayman. I love qotsa. I’m Roland, qotsa qotsa qotsa.

Hey man it saves typing out their stupid long name.

Hey man that last burn on you was A*

Yeah, A for Asshole. You asshole.

I think mostly it’s a lack of broad influences that damage games.

Yeah. All protags are so same like same person. Or ridiculous Japanese shit.

Yeah. I remember when Half Life was coming out, and this is a game I love. Some games journo saying like, Gordon Freeman is a scientist, so he has to learn to survive. That actually meant nothing, because I’d played shooters before. I know how to point and click, you know?

Yeah, that sort of shit is ass. Only time I’ve felt like that before is in that like Supernatural Detective Game 2, when you get a gun and you’re pretty fucking awful with it, and you have like 8 bullets.

That’s sort of like learnng that anew. Feel like you’re doing something new that you don’t quite grasp.

Yeah, Condemned 2. That game had some brilliant ideas, but I’ve never heard a games developer talk about it.

But like for Left4Dead Valve were studying the Spanish flu epidemic. Just to give the world a realistic epidemic grounding.

Wasteland Lover 7: The Poverty of Felix Kluge

2011-09-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

We rejoin Kluge as he wakes up at the Wolfhorn Ranch after a long day of killing geckos beneath Vault 19. It's just us and ED-E. We are apparently afflicted with the maximum amount of drug addictions, the game not giving me any more, despite taking about 15 doses of jet the previous day, and we are in withdrawal from all of them. And we're thirsty.

Felix goes outside to the dirty tank of irradiated water that he uses as drinking water. Probably as a shower too, when my Xbox is off. In exchange for quenching his thirst, the vat gives him radiation poisoning. But shit, Felix's endurance is already 1, so whatever. We can fix that when it gets worse.

I check Felix's gear before we head out and I notice he only has 36 caps. What the fuck. They're not in the lockers back in the ranch, they're not even inside ED-E. Try to think back to that murky play session lost in the mists of time (I cba blogging it) and what I did inbetween Vault 19 and here.
Oh yeah.

Felix had gone to New Vegas Square after Vault 19, all pumped up on victory (>40 gecko steaks!) and drugs. I think the guys that hang out here are the sort of people Felix wishes liked him. There's that cool guy in the picture above, who will never talk to Kluge because he doesn't know enough about guns. But I'd just raised Felix's guns a little to snag the Cowboy perk, and if he read one of the magazines he had, he could bluff through a conversation with this guy. It worked out great; right after the guy started talking about survival, and Felix loves that stuff, so they hit it off great. So great, he even told Felix a secret recipe for making special .44 magnum rounds. Kluge thinks he's hot shit right now. He goes straight to the Gun Runner's vendor robot and buys a .44 magnum and a trail carbine. Then he buys a scope for the carbine and a customised frame for the magnum, even though I don't know what that is.
I find them in one of the lockers now, underneath all the baseball bats. They cost Felix all of his money. He doesn't know how to shoot guns. He isn't good enough to make the bullets that guy told him about. He doesn't even have enough money to buy normal bullets. Felix leans over and is sick into the bucket next to his bed. Sick with disgust at himself, and radiation poisoning.

So we need money. Felix's drug habit isn't going to support itself. I think it's about time we checked out Black Mountain. We go to Jacobstown to get Lily first - if we're going to mount a raid on a radio station run by an insane mutant, I figure it can't hurt if we bring one of our own.
There's onle really the one path up the mountain, and at the foot of it we run in a mutant. He's called Neil. He doesn't sound moronic and can form sentences so I guess he's one of the good ones. It turns out that this mountain is some kind of colony for all these bad mutants. Whatever man. He says if we meet him at the top of the mountain he'll help us turn it over. Then he says it will be a lot harder for Felix to get to the top than him, and runs off. He's a dick but whatever, having one mutant following Felix is enough.
The sun sets as we head up the path ourselves, all maximising our 100 sneak skill and Lily's stealthboy prototype. It's a big, zig-zagging path up the mountain, with little scrap metal checkpoints here and there. We make it past the first two just fine, but after that some nightkin manages to sneak up on us and starts smashing ED-E, because I guess he can't sneak so good, or at all. The mutant doesn't last a minute against Lily and Kluge though, and nor does the next one.
We're at the final checkpoint when it all kicks off. Some mutant up on the cliff above us is literally raining fire down on us. Lily's got the same gun he has though, so I let them shoot clumps of fire at each other until my one wins and the other one dies. But more mutants take this opportunity to rush us. There's four or five down with us and two more up on the cliff. Lily wades in to it so I get Kluge to drug up and follow in, chainsaw in hand. When we're done cutting them up, I see ED-E, with his little laser, is locked in a shootout with the two mutants up on the cliff, who have miniguns. By the time Felix runs over, ED-E is on 1hp. He tries to give ED-E stimpaks but it's not enough. Probably because he is a robot and they are medicine. He drops to the ground. Lily and Felix run up around the cliff to kill the last two mutants. The minigun shreds through Felix's non-armour and very nearly kills him. But he's all mad so he doesn't care. That robot was probably really expensive. With them gone Felix heads back down to ED-E.

Felix doesn't know anything about computer or robots, but he's pretty sure you don't bury them. He looks at it for a minute, checks to make sure we didn't leave anything valuable in it, then go.

we made it to the village at the top and Neil's there like he said he'd be. He says his plan for helping us is that he'll say there's an intruder in the village to draw the nightkin out. We point out that there is an intruder in the village, and that it's Felix, and that this plan doesn't help me at all. He tells Kluge to sneak past them and then he runs off.
So we sneak. Lily has an advanced prototype stealthboy, Felix's sneak is 100, and ED-E is dead so won't mess us up again. The nightkin spot us instantly. Neil is a dick. It's another horrible fight going toe-to-toe with giant mutants who are way stronger than Kluge. He makes it through thanks to buffout and the fantastic anti-limb properties of his chainsaw.
Neil comes back now (thanks!) and tells Felix that it's now a clear run to Tabitha, the mutant who runs the radio station. He doesn't want to come with.
We walk up to the station. On the broadcast tower before we get there, is a nightkin who isn't Tabitha, but does have a rocket launcher. The first missile hits Felix dead on. He's on less than 20hp. Fuck you Neil. I hide Felix behind a rock and have him eat one of our precious but fantastic desert salads. Back to full health, and back out from behind the rock. Straight in to another missile. 27hp. Come on. Another desert salad, but this time Felix doesn't stop running. We're underneath him when he's reloaded so he can't shoot us. Felix is on him before he has a chance to turn around. He's fucked, Kluge has got a chainsaw. Cut his head and all his limbs off. take his rocket launcher. It has a girl's name on it. Gay.
There's three buildings here. Felix goes for the one in the middle. It's full of crap. Some good but mostly bad. There's a robot lying on a table in one corner that doesn't work. it's that Rhonda from the radio show. I don't really give a shit about this, and Kluge definitely doesn't. But if he takes some mentats, then reads a science magazine, he can just pass the skill check to fix Rhonda. So we have to. We follow it as it goes outside and Tabitha is there, all enormous and definitely insane. She's just really happy that Kluge fixed her stupid robot though, and leaves peacefully. Stolen so much shit at this stage that I just fill up Lily's inventory with it and send her off for home. One of the other buildings is a prison. Inside is a ghoul. He's called Raul. He's sarcastic and snarky but he wants to come with me becaue he's scared of dying. Felix says ok, he can come.

Kluge pulls a special 'angry face' when he's using the chainsaw. I love it.

Felix and Raul walk around a few days, talk about Raul's life. He used to do some stuff but he's like 200 years old now so is kind of past it. Kluge says that if he wants he can stick around and fix his shit for him so he can feel useful. He's happy with that. And I could really do with the maintenance. This chainsaw is the only one I have.

Raul Tejada

Because one of the guys you need to talk to for Raul's supposedly-organic-quest-that-totally-isn't-because-I've done-it-before-already is Corporal Sterling, we find ourselves in Camp Mccarran. So I figure we can do Three-Card Bounty. Felix still needs the money. I don't care if the NCR are Caesar's worst ever enemy. He's been a dick to Kluge and not been paying him enough at all. If these guys want to pay Felix to kill some guys he'd probably kill anyway, then I'll take that paper.
First bounty on the list is Cook-Cook. Felix talks to a bounty hunter in the camp about him. The hunter is full of shit but he knows he is, so I guess he's okay. Felix ignores everything he says anyway, and just runs in a straight line until he's at Cook-Cook. He's in some ruined house. Raul actually has a gun, unlike basically anyone else who will follow me around, so that's a nice change. He just stands at the back and starts putting rounds in to the house. This draws out all of Cook-Cooks pals and Felix can just cut them down with his huge axe one by one, until it's just Cook-Cook left. He's got a flamethrower and probably thinks he's a real cool guy but Kluge chops his head off so whatever buddy.
Back at camp Major Dhaltri and his huge beard gives us all this shit about how Felix messed up Cook-Cook's face and so he can't pay us the full bounty. Cook-Cook wears a mask covering his entire face, and Dhaltri never met the guy anyway. So Felix steals shit from around the camp until I figure we're square.
Next bounty is boring. Have to cut a bunch of dogs up and then a woman. One of the dogs breaks Felix's leg but I'm used to that now. Clean kill so full caps from Dhaltri.
Last bounty on the list is some guy called Driver Nephi. Dhaltri tells Felix to ask First Recon for help. An opportunity to get paid for no work appeals to Kluge so we take up the offer. We meet the whole gang and hear their plan. It's a real doozy: they all sit around hiding while Felix runs out on his own. Nephi and his friends will then supposedly come out to kill me, and when they do, the First Recon guys will gun them down. It's a huge open flat space between the Recon guys and the Fiends. The sort of place Kluge is absolutely helpless in. But he runs in anyway because he's not about to let the NCR know he's a little bitch or that he cares that the NCR's plan fucks him over.
But man does it fuck him over. The Fiends only run out a little bit. The Recon guys aren't firing. Nephi isn't here at all yet so I guess they don't want to spoil their incredible plan. So it's basically Kluge in a field getting shot by a bunch of lasers. This fucking sucks and he's dying so I pull him back to near Raul, who starts shooting the Fiends. This makes them switch to shooting him, cause I guess they figured out I wasn't doing shit. So I run back in to the field and try and get close. They're not as dumb as they look though, and start throwing dynamite at Kluge. The lovely flash of crippled limbs on the screen. Nephi's finally shown up though. He runs fast as fuck and is barreling straight for Felix. I try to run him back towards Raul on his broken legs but it's really not that impressive. First Recon finally start firing right before Nephi gets to Felix. They're shitty shots though and don't manage to hit him even once before he hits Kluge, crippling his head instantly. But he dies pretty much after that. We take his head back to base. Turns out First Recon shot him in the face over and over so I only get half pay again. Thanks guys. They pay me some NCR money though, and Kluge stole some more shit before we left.
Felix goes to see Usanagi to get all his limbs healed and cure his radiation poisoning.

I'm pretty sure Raul is my favourite companion and Three-Card Bounty is one of my favourite quests. It's not a very exciting quest. It's short, and it's easy. But there's just a lot of characters, of things happening. The one big problem with the Fallout series for me is that nothing ever happens when you're not around. You can go around and meet a whole mess of cool people, but they never meet each other. In Three-Card Bounty you have Dhaltri and all the First Recon guys, the three Fiends you have to kill, and even that Little Buster bounty hunter guy. It's nothing major, but it's just nicely done. You know who you're killing and who's helping you do it, and it just adds a lot to what is a very bare-bones quest, ultimately. Even the Nephi bit with all the sniper ambush is basically just smoke and mirrors, but it's cool because the big walk down to the crushing plant combines with the stories you've heard from everyone to get some proper build up. Telling Betsy you killed Cook-Cook (and telling Pretty Sarah, too), and getting her help from Dr Usanagi, and sending First Recon off to Forlorn Hope after you take care of everything (only that didn't happen this time on account of how I've wiped Forlorn Hope out), that shit just breathes a little life in to a world that, while awesome, can feel a little static and lacking in characters at times.
As for Raul, he's just the only one who really fits as a sidekick (although Arcade is pretty close). Boone's dead as a human, basically, and can't really do things like make friends. Lily's insane. Rex is a dog, ED-E's a robot, when it comes down to it Veronica is Brotherhood, and I guess I haven't given Cassidy a fair run yet. But Raul just slots right in to the role. The self-deprecation, the fatalistic jokes about your decisions and actions, even his maintenance perk all set him up as a great complement to your guy. His character quest deals with this too, about taking a back seat but still helping, which I guess is why I tend to finish it that way, rather than the way where he becomes a vaquero. The latter way, he's just another gun you bring around with you sometimes for fights, same as Boone or whatever. But as the sidekick mechanic, he's the only guy I can really see sticking around with the main guy as a proper 'companion' (no homo).

As for Kluge, he's level 22 or 23 or so now (I actually did all this like three weeks ago and can't remember properly), and grabbing Raul was the last of the main Mojave sidequests I wanted to do. Which means it's DLC time. Next four posts will be the four DLC stories (I figure Lonesome Road will be out just about the time I finish up the first three), and then we'll hopefully steamroll on to the grand finale at the Dam.

If I owned a bar in the Fallout world I would call it "The Good Luck Kid"

2011-09-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

A bit ago I wrote this really adolescent thing about how I wasn't really up for any more New Vegas. And then that game kicked my ass, and now the absolute opposite is true.

The DLC for this game has become perhaps my favourite aspect, in terms of the weird territories it takes you to, the microcosm of difficult choices you have to make, and the way it expands on the mythos and world of Fallout in a way that far surpasses any of the DLC of Fallout 3.

It's like the stuff Obsidian did with this game and it's content, what they wanted to do with it, never even crossed the minds of the Bethesda boys and girls. That's not to discredit the Bethesda team, at all. The engine of Fallout 3 is prety fantastic, and the grimy architecture of everything was, well, not the only good thing about that game, but one of like maybe three good things about it.

Having said that, the DLC for Fallout 3 was basically just a couple of standalone missions, pretty uninspiring stuff, whereas you're geared up for the DLC in New Vegas from the first time you spot some weird graffiti on some half demolished wall. There are references to it all throughout the main game, subtle things that don't get in the way. And when you get to explore them (granted, you have to pay 800 points for each) you get this sense of how well the world of Fallout is thought out and plotted.

So Old World Blues, the third and penultimate DLC realm made me love my main character again.

And I was bored of him. His build is nothing spectacular. He had guns and speech as his main skills, I can't even remember the third skill I tagged, you know? He's done so much shit and he's called Harvey From Sabrina which at the time I thought was hilarious but now is just ridiculous and I'm a little embarassed about it even.

But the world of Fallout, the world of Harvey from Sabrina, feels so vital and important, and it's not because my dad died and I purified a lot of water, but thanks Fallout 3.

It feels like it matters because people can die whenever, not just at scripted times. You can mess things up, so the choices feel much more real. It's like Bethesda wanted to tell a story, and they got so caught up in that story they didn't want you to mess with it.

New Vegas is all about messing with shit. Obsidian have faith in their players and if you kill a quest giving character then too bad, but that will lead you on to other things and the result is so much more rewarding than the limited Fallout 3.

With all that in mind, things happen at the end of Old World Blues that made me sort of reassess and everything clicked into place and felt poignant and bittersweet. That's not to say Old World Blues is a bum trip, it's funny as hell.

Easily one of the funniest games I've ever played.

And when I get back to the Mojave after all that craziness is done I don't know what to do with my guy. I've got a few side missions I could be getting on with, sure. But I'm so geared up for meeting Ulysses, I have no idea what that will be like, and it feels like it will actually be the pinnacle of these introspective and lonely journeys I've taken outside the Mojave.

But that won't be the end. I'll have to come back and fight the second battle of Hoover dam and initially I thought this was a bad thing, but it might be one of the most mature examples of mood manipulation in a game to date.

For starters the DLC, with the except of Honest Hearts, is mostly to do with itself. Like the characters you meet there, they've affected and are often mentioned by people who live in the Mojave, but the characters in the DLC have removed themselves, or been removed, from that world and it's like this weird behind-the-scenes shit you get to experience.

So it will finish up the DLC stuff nicely. Plus this meeting with Ulysses is being billed as this final showdown sort of thing, except I'll have to go and deal with Lanius after.

And that will become a joyless affair, like something I just have to do, some business-like conclusion to the whole thing. Without realising it, Lanius will become the final voice of the game, a voice of combat (as long as that doesn't sound too pretentious, which it probably does) because War Never Changes.

It's like I'll fight him, and kill him, but the greatest battle of Harvey from Sabrina's life will already have been fought against, and with, characters I can never meet again, in realms I cannot, for the large part, revisit.

And that makes Harvey from Sabrina feel sad. But now I want Obsidian to make all the games I ever play, and they have totally killed my jammedness for Skyrim.

Skyrim, it's like it's there in the Mojave, and it'll be an ok game, it'll be big and showy and it will have taken control of Caeser's army, since Caeser is dead now. But it won't be Fallout: New Vegas. My great battle will have been fought by then. But I guess Skyrim has dragons.

Wasteland Lover 6: Klugemeister Harmonies

2011-08-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

The group in early December 2281. I can't help but feel that Kluge is experiencing social decline.

High on life (also drugs), Felix Kluge swings by the Fort to go visit Caesar and report that he's offed House for the big man, expecting lavish praise and reward. But he's fucking furious with me because I killed the Omertas. I ruined his big plan or whatever. Hey pal, I'm sorry, but don't get fucking angry with me if you don't tell me your fucking plans. I am literally your most important guy in the Mojave and you have told me to go kill everything in the building directly across the street from where the Omertas live, and you don't think to fucking mention this shit? He says he'll forgive me this once, and gives me the opportunity to just this once admit to any other crimes against his Legion or other fuckups of his plans. He asks me if I've done anything he should know about. How should I fucking know? Guy doesn't tell me shit. Felix is close to losing his shit and Caesar changes tack (he totes noticed) and tells Kluge what a great guy he is for killing House or whatever, and then gives him another mission, to go meet the Boomers and either get them on my side or kill them all.

Caesar's kind of a dick though so Felix just goes to Primm instead to pick up ED-E, since I accidentally opened the wrong locker in my Wolfhorn Ranch base and realised I'd had the stuff to repair him stashed in its own locker since fucking January or whatever. So Felix fixes ED-E and goes to Nellis AFB with him and Lily in tow.

Now I don't know how I feel about the Boomers really, I guess. Or like, there's not a lot to say. They're one of a couple if things in this game that when you read/hear a one-line description of you're like 'man, what is this, Fallout 3???' The Kings are another one, but they pretty much pull that off and the Kings are great. The Boomers aren't bad. I like how they dress and I like that their base is realistically huge and contains shit like that biofuel refinery in the picture with Felix. There's no reason for it to exist beyond a little verisimilitude. But I like that. So much I didn't even steal all the maize (but only because it's not an ingredient in any of Felix's favourite dishes). But there's just nothing really going on. You'd never want to hang out there by choice. I guess it's just very homogenous (they're all Boomers) and none of the characters there are interesting at all. Plus the fact that it's basically just this one big mission you have to complete for all 4 of the endings in basically the same way, it's just some lame plot thing you just autopilot through after doing once. You do at least get your pick of the missions though, and Felix duly picks the lazy good-for-nothing ones (watch the kid tell his shit story, give that surfer guy scrap metal) because fuck killing a bunch of ants by myself or whatever. I do decide to fix the solar panels though, so I have to head way south to Helios One for those.

Helios One, on the other hand, I think is great. It's pretty similar to the Repconn site, in that you find them both at around the same time, and they're the first two of, and kind of the biggest, sidequests. All very self-contained and more-or-less unrelated to everything else, and once you're done with it you never really go there again. It just has a great feel to it I guess. I ran out of opinions a bit earlier than I thought I would here.

So yeah anyway Felix blags his way through the NCR guard outside and heads into the facility. Inside there's a moron and a very stern guy called Ignacio Riveras who Kluge effortlessly relaxes with some gay charm.

He fills Felix in on the situation, which is basically a 4 way choice between doing what the NCR wants (giving their bases power), doing what the Followers of the Apocalypse want (giving everyone power), taking all the energy for yourself to power a superweapon, and this weird option that makes no sense, giving power exclusively to Westside and 'Fremont', a location that doesn't even exist. I have no idea why that last one is in the game. I thought a while about how Felix would play this one. Obviously he wouldn't help out the NCR, and the super weapon isn't really his style. The last option makes no sense, so I guess we're just doling out power to everyone. I don't see a problem with that, Felix is more or less fine with everyone being their own people or whatever. I chicken out of also using the station to electrocute all the NCR soldiers outside. Mostly because all the NCR would hate me, and I can't really deal with this (stopping in on one of those little shacks around the wasteland, I was attacked by three giant rats and died).

That said, when Felix gets down there, they're all asleep on these weird outdoor beds they have, in the middle of the day. Whatever, I guess. I figure I'll steal this guy's dogtags to sell to the Legion, but when I set up to do it, a little menu pops up and asks me if I want to pick his pocket or murder him. I had totally forgotten I picked that Mr Sandman perk and have never used it. I feel a bit guilty for not lasering everyone outside, and Felix still feels like he has something to prove, so I go for it. It would be really brutal and unpleasant, only when you do it, this little percussive refrain plays. The best way I can think to describe it is the sort of sound effect that would play in the Sims if you made your sim do a magic trick. It's just like, so moronically light-hearted. I just love it.
I'm pretty much hooked right away, and gleefully dispatch all the other guards in the area the same way. I can totally see this becoming my modus operandi. That little jingle, man.
So yeah I got that nice scene where all the sunlight is reflected right in to your face and you are blinded by blissed-out wasteland progress, and I go tell Ignacio Rivas what I've done and he's pretty pumped for me. All that shit he was explaining about Helios One before also triggered that ED-E dialog, and in a little minute the Brotherhood of Steel guy Lorenzo comes and asks Kluge to hook up with a Brotherhood patrol and give them ED-E at the Repconn HQ. We figure okay because Felix hasn't been there before. It's all mad nerdy shit that Kluge has no interest in, geeky computers and displays of the universe and shit.

Felix has no extra-terrestrial ambitions

There's a couple of things to steal but not a whole lot of interest, and when Kluge finds the Brotherhood patrol they're fucking dead or whatever, like a roof fell on one of them and the other one just died of sadness or some shit. I get a password to their little base off the corpses, and Felix is on his way there when the Followers call him and say to take ED-E to them instead. Fine by Kluge - I don't even know these Brotherhood assholes and it would probably be a little awkward what with Felix being entirely responsible for Veronica's death. Also he's still pretty cut up over that shit. So at the Mormon Fort we hand over ED-E and Felix talks to ever-lovely Julie Farkas, who just loves him so much at this stage that she asks him to join the Followers (after a couple of questions, Felix accepts. Why not, I guess.) and gives him the key to their little safehouse. Which isn't bad, although basically all the free shit on the beds is stuff Felix can't or wont ever use. Has some nice chairs for Felix to hang out on though.
He's starting to look pretty old. Maybe it's just the hat and glasses combo or the way he's sat. Felix is a pretty vain guy though. First Veronica, and now his looks? Plus Caesar was kind of a dick earlier. All his gains are accompanied by equal or greater losses. What is the point of being the king of the Mojave if you are ugly?

Anyway, pushing those thoughts out of his mind, Felix hightails back to the Nellis AFB, fixes the solar panels, reports back to Pearl (the leader of the Boomers) who is pretty happy, then he gets told to raise a bomber plane from the bottom of a lack using 'deployable ballast,' the physics of which I don't understand at all. How does it work? It's a long-ass walk to the lake too, made much longer by the fact Felix sneaks for more or less the entire way, since there are fucking deathclaws right by the roadside and my compass thing has little red marks on it the whole time and I'm too scared to even go three metres off the road to grab some prickly pear.

There are cazadores inbetween Felix and the lake, so we have to fight them. They're only young ones so Felix and Lily manage to fend them off, although Kluge picks up another addiction (Buffout) to add to his growing list. I did get a poison gland though, so I can make some poison of my own or maybe even some Turbo later, if Felix ever learns anything about science. But yeah it's all fine and the Boomers get their bomber and everyone's happy and I go to Caesar for some praise and reward but he's just a dick again, all 'waa, my head,' standing up and not even finishing telling me what he wants me to do, then swearing at me and saying he'll kill me when I ask for more information. Felix also gets what is essentially a written warning from the NCR, saying any more pro-Legion activity will leave him branded as a terrorist. I guess shit just got real for Kluge.

Wasteland Lover 5: Many Events Including A Tragedy

2011-07-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

So it's been a long time since we found out what Felix has been up to. 7 months, almost. But basically just because I haven't been playing the game for almost all of that time. I got burned out, or whatever. But our dear co-author of this very blog, dear reader, wrote that post about the game and we talked about it a little bit and I guess the prospect of this new DLC got me back into wanting to play the game (not that I've downloaded any of the DLC at all, though, as it happens). So this isn't going to be 7 months of gameplay here. However it is still pretty big, because I just started playing because I wanted to mess around, and wasn't planning on doing another one of these again. But eventually I decided I would. So there's too much to do some close commentary, and also I can't even remember half the shit I did anyway. This will I guess be a big synopsis of Kluge's little adventures in the downtime before we crack on with season 2. This is Felix Kluge's November 2281. But in a world where you only need to sleep a few hours a week, he got quite a lot of shit done.

First up was Benny. Benny fucked Felix over. Shut him in his suite and sent in a bunch of people who can be described perfectly as 'goons'. I like the fights on the Strip because no one else wears armour either, and it's normally indoors, so I feel like I at least have a sporting chance. I also have Veronica with me, and she took a cue off the pool table in this suite-death trap, and pretty much beat them to death herself while I hid in the dining room. We broke out of the Tops, but without Benny or that platinum chip we need. Outside on the steps of the casino, both the NCR and the Legion have sent a representative to talk to me and request my services. Yes Man is there too, and Mr House, who wants to see me as well, is across the street. And so the game has elegantly set up the 4 paths I can choose to take to finish the game. Only not elegantly at all, because those NCR and Legion guys just running up to me together the second I leave the casino is mad terrible bullshit.
Anyway, Felix goes to the Fort like the Legion guy asked. Because that's where Benny went with the chip, and because I was going to be Legion anyway. So we sail to the Fort and meet Caesar for the first time and he gives Felix his big speech. Now this speech is great, I think. I read about 30 reviews for this game as some weird thing to prove to myself that games journalism was terrible, and the only good review I found, some 5 page review on some nothing website, said this speech was bad (the other reviews didn't mention anything like that because they were facile garbage). But I think it's great.
I think the Legion aren't handled particularly well in this game, for a couple of reasons. First off is the look, just think it's too Roman. They're wearing american football outfits and using lawnmower blades as weapons, but you can hardly tell - people don't even realise they're american football outfits until you point it out. They just look like Romans in the wasteland, which is fucking weird. Which is a shame, because I thought the american football thing was cool, and very 'fallout' or whatever.
But the main one is that they're the bad guys. Making it so that you can be one of the bad guys and help them win in an rpg puts a big onus on you, as the maker of that game, to make them relatable and justifiable, and not just some evil nonsense. When they're just the bad guys that you have to kill to win, that gives you a bit more leeway (but even then, in F1 the Master has a pretty appealing plan, at its core at least, that you could see getting on board with). And the game is set up for them to be the bad guys. The amount of game devoted to NCR places and NCR quests far outstrips the amount of Legion places and Legion quests, and this is a common thing in games.
But yeah, I like Caesar's speech. It's about the only thing you get that justifies what the Legion are about and why they're doing this (besides a few lines from Raul and a couple of comments about trade being safer), along with making Caesar a character rather than just some Frank Horrigan clown you have to kill. I remember the first time I heard it, I was kind of tempted to switch sides and go Legion. Which is exactly what you want from a speech from a guy who is supposed to be mad smart and charismatic, and exactly what you want from a game where it's supposed to be a sensible choice for you to pick the bad guy. That one review I mentioned said the voice acting was bad, but I like it. But maybe just because I could tell it was Sgt Rawls.
Anyway Felix goes in to the bunker to do what he was told. He's not good enough at science or repairing to deal with the computers and faulty door thing at the start so he has to get shot up by all the lasers on the way to the reactors. We throw dynamite at each of them and put on our radiation suit and head out. Now the little faulty door thing I managed to sort out on both of my previous playthroughs, so I was not aware that a bunch of those horrible monster robots were going to roll out. I was expecting more of those useless walking guys. Felix is killed in under a second. I reload and use the 5 pulse grenades conveniently stored at the start of the bunker, but it's still a hell of a fight and Veronica has to save my ass for the 300th time. But we're okay. We fuck the place (and Mr House) up, Caesar's cool with me and we're back to Freeside.

Felix Kluge, Freeside, November 2281

At this stage I decide something must be done about Felix's abysmally low level, and I take a breather from the inevitable hardship of working for Caesar and do sidequests to make Felix a big strong boy. Starting off around Freeside, I eventually expand to Vegas, then all of the Mojave Wasteland.

This goes on for a good while pretty uneventfully until it comes time to eliminate the Scorpions gang from the Monte Carlo Suites for the good of humanity (one of them has a ripper and I want it).

This was always going to happen. Veronica was the reason Felix was still alive, pretty much handling all of his fights for him single-handedly. But it looks like Kluge got her in to one she couldn't handle, and now she's dead, crumpled in the corner of the Monte Carlo Suites next to some gangster. To his credit, Kluge doesn't take this lying down, and viciously murders the rest of the gang in a display of violence we haven't seen out of the guy before.

But Veronica, Felix's only friend is still dead. I did get that ripper though.

So Felix needs a new friend. We try the usual suspects. Arcade Gannon refuses to be seen with me because I like the Legion. Boone walks with me a while, but after Felix blows up the NCR monorail (the first quest I did with him - had to test this guy's loyalties) he says he's lost respect for Felix and leaves immediately, and wont even speak to me anymore. I pick up Cassidy, but she hates my low karma (Felix still survives almost entirely through burglary and petty theft). After a few lengthy moans about what a terrible person Felix is, he decides against this partnership and takes her to Jean-Baptiste cutting to have her murdered in exchange for 250 caps.
It seems the events in the Monte Carlo Suites have scarred Felix. He lost the only person who would accept him for the meritless shit that he is, and he picked up a couple of drug addictions (Psycho, Hydra) that give him awful screen-ruining headaches along with various other physical ailments.
So I clean him up and get him a dog. Dogs love everyone; they are morons. The only dog on offer is a sort-of-charming hideous half-robot dog with a broken brain called Rex. Felix has to go on an incredibly long walk to Jacobstown to find a doctor who specialises in the brains of robotic dogs, and then an even bigger walk (or incredibly quicker fast-travel) to the Fort to kill a dog with a machete in ritual combat in order to honourably claim its brain to be implanted in Rex. I guess it gave Felix something to do to take his mind off his horrific drug withdrawal.

Felix Kluge and Rex Jacobstown, November 2281

After a little while they are pretty much a team. Rex isn't quite the powerhouse Veronica was, and I'm now more afraid of him dying as I realise there's not a whole lot of replacements going, so Kluge has a more 'hands-on' role in combat now. We go to the Repconn facility together.

Felix Kluge and Rex, Repconn Facility, November 2281

I think I like this quest. It's pretty much not connected to anything at all. The guys you're doing it for are these very weird guys you don't really understand, seem kind of dumb/retarded and you can't take them seriously because they're a bunch of quasi-religious idiots who want to go in to space. But you help them anyway and it all ends with some kooky set-piece with a nice emotional payoff, like some New Hollywood film. It's a nice feeling, even if it doesn't make sense for it to be.

The Bright Followers go to space. Taken by Felix Kluge, November 2281

Felix's new partnership cemented, and some levels gained (at the time of writing Kluge has just hit 17), I think it's time to get back on with sorting out the main players. We get the White Glove Society on board via Beyond the Beef, which I think is the best quest in the game. It's basically impossible to photograph though. Nothing happens. But it is excellent. Felix also goes to clean up the Omertas. The denouement of that quest is a horrible point-blank shootout where you start off sat on a sofa. I'm in a t-shirt and I have to take two shotgun blasts and a big burst of assault carbine before I can even stand up, let alone pull my cleaver out and slicing their arms off. Why didn't they shoot that fucking dog I'm carting around? I'm on about 30HP by the time I can move, it's nail-biting shit.

All of that blood on the couch and the walls is Felix's. Now that is a ruined sofa.

After that, I cross the street and kill Mr House. If only it was that easy. Companions can't go to the penthouse, so I have to take on all those securitrons, and receive all their bullets and rockets, myself. Felix has 4 pulse grenades he got from somewhere, and that does a lot of the work, but there were a few failed attempts. Eventually got it working where I'd separate one or two off from the rest and just hit them over and over with a sledgehammer. It kept them knocked down basically all the time, but took forever. Then I smashed Mr House's gross face in with it.
So Felix is pretty much king of the Strip right now. As a favour for my Legion pals, who were feeling pretty ignored, Kluge dons that fantastic NCR engineer outfit and minces in to Camp Forlorn Hope, casually (and frankly, much too easily) slipping dynamite into the pockets of all the officers. The NCR troopers around seem to just take it in their stride that sometimes people explode, and that it isn't anyone's fault. It's retarded, but I really couldn't handle the NCR being hostile to Felix and I'm running a pretty narrow reputation with them already. Plus what the hell else did I put all those points in to sneak for?
Anyway, this goes down a storm all over. In Nelson, a guy called Dead Sea gives me a unique (and excellent) machete called the Liberator. At the Fort, my boy Lucius hooks Felix up with a key to a Legion safehouse right by the ranch he uses as a home, and over at Red Rock Canyon, Papa Khan likes the cut of Felix's jib so much that he names him his heir.
The safehouse is full of stuff for me. Mostly shit I'll never use (armour that is much too good, guns), but there are some lucky glasses which are pretty great, a guy who pops by Tuesdays and Thursdays and will give me 2 stealthboys each time (excellent), and there's a fucking chainsaw on one of the beds. Fantastic.
So, king of the Strip, poster-boy of the Legion and heir to the Khans. Felix is moving up in the world.
Taking it easy in his new digs, Felix Kluge plots his next move.

Fallout: New Vegas DLC

2011-07-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Fallout: New Vegas is a game I think is great. The post apocalyptic wasteland evokes a creeping loneliness, a sophisticated feeling shared by few other games. Lonely as it is, it is not without hope. That sense you might meet another soul, someone you can connect with. And maybe they'll have some cool stuff you can take after you bludgeon them to death.

One of the greatest achievements of this game was the faction system. A lot of named characters you'd meet would have standing with various factions. Helping them out by completing quests improved your standing with that group and the areas they held influence in. Acting negatively, like, killing those questgivers, would mean you couldn't pursue that side of the storyline any further.

It helped the world of Fallout: New Vegas feel like people were living in it, and doing things, and that those things at least kind of mattered. Even though I was going to kill them as soon as they finished talking.

So, I love this game. It's great. I love it and it's great. But I don't really want any of the new DLC that's out.

I mean, I bought Dead Money, and I played it, and it was amazing. It was unbelievably atmospheric, by which I mean it was incredibly immersive and effective, sharing some ideas with Silent Hill 2 and the Thief games to create this extremely eerie horror style sideline to New Vegas. I became really attached to the other characters I met there, partly because the world was so hostile the air was even killing you. In terms of loneliness, man, it amped it up, making a practically empty desert seem like the ghost of christmas present in The Muppet's Christmas Carol.

So, that bodes well for the other three DLC releases, one of which are already out (Honest Hearts), one of which is out any day now (19th July - Old World Blues) and one of which is out, I don't know, whenever it's out (Lonesome Road).

Writing this has nearly got me back in the mood for it. I loved making those big decisions that affected the shape of the world. And yet...

I think what it is is how seperate these add ons feel. It's like they would have made more sense if they were kind of stand alone, rather than revolving around this one courier who has to deal with everything.

On the one hand there are several hints throughout the game, and in Dead Money, as to what these other add ons have in store for you, and I love stuff like that in a visceral way.

But I don't like how you, this courier who holds the fate of this world in his hands, can disappear into caves and deserts, practically entirely different worlds, and when you come back nothing seems to have changed.

A nice change of pace for a game would be for the world within it not to revolve around you, for things to be happening which you could influence if you found the right time and place to be, the right person to talk to, then maim.

Probably I'm just being fussy. I don't know really why I'm not into the idea of these DLCs. Maybe it's just how long everything takes in New Vegas. Even killing things is kind of a chore, and my attention span is like milliseconds.

Or maybe it's because the game doesn't affect anyone in the real world. I've been playing a lot of Halo: Reach, and I'm pretty sure I'm only in to that because I can unlock these crappy magic hats which do nothing and look shit.

Perhaps it's just New Vegas I'm tired of, and with Skyrim coming up I only have enough love in my heart for one massively open world RPG?

I don't know. I'll probably get the DLC and love it.

New Vegas is still a great game.

Fallout: New Vegas Old World Blues is developed by Obsidian Entertainment, and it's out on the 19th July for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

2011-02-25T00:53:00.001-08:00

This game isn't out until November. It's something like 9 months until we are all able to play this game (except those of us who are dick journalists and get all their games for free and don't even enjoy playing them, I bet).

So why has the trailer already been released? A teaser trailer a week ago, and now a loosely titled "gameplay trailer", which features the gameplay of walking around, then sneaking around, throwing some spells around and being around some monsters you're throwing spells at. And you nearly see a wolf, or something, get shot in the face by an arrow.

Hype is perhaps the answer. Obvlivion, the precursor to Skyrim, was an ok game. For all the stale voice acting and characters who looked like old potatoes, it was very compelling, almost entirely because of the world within it.

But Skyrim is set some 200 years after the events of Oblivion. This might be an excellent call, since the events in Oblivion will have passed into legend, and whilst that will lose a lot of the dynamism created by those events (how great is it in Mass Effect 2, or Knights of the Old Republic 2, to be reminded of characters and events in the first game?), everything in Oblivion was overblown and ridiculous, the way legends tend to be, so that is fitting with the vibe of the game.

But where is the trust in that world? There's a heritage there, to some extent. I spent so much time playing that game, all because of the scale of the world. Even though I hated Fallout 3, basically, and when I think about it Oblivion was very boring, I still believe I will enjoy Skyrim.

I would buy it if it was out tomorrow, and I would probably love it, because I haven't been told how amazing it is. When it finally comes out, in nine months time, the time it takes to gestate a baby, a human baby, imagine all the shit we will have been told about it. People will be writing fucking fan fiction by then, for fuck's sake. And the game will only disappoint.

Perhaps this symbolises the dire problems of the games industry. Is it so expensive to make games you need to hedge your bets almost an entire year in advance, trying to get everyone so amped up they're writing "Skyrim" on the walls of their bedroom in their own blood, to ensure sales?

Yeah, well, it's already happened, in this article: http://raidingparty.net/featured/five-things-we-can%E2%80%99t-wait-to-do-in-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/

Games Journalist "Rob" writes: "We reckon this points to a more robust morality system than the simple ‘Notoriety’ meter from Oblivion..."

It's speculation, and hope, from the journalists which sets us up for the fall. So when Skyrim comes out and it's morality system is as robust as a pile of something not at all robust, perhaps buttons, or dry sand, we will shrug and not give a shit because of dragons.

Now, without wanting to pick on the raidingparty.net writers, have they been hired by Bethesda to shine the shoes of Skyrim wherever it walks?

"It’s coming! The brand new Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim trailer with in-game footage! We can’t wait, and are excitedly counting down the seconds until we get a peek at what Bethesda have in store for us come November, when our most hotly anticipated RPG of 2011 hits the shelves."

- Rob, again, writes that. They are counting down the seconds, excitedly, until they get a peek, much as a curious teenager waits by the hole in his fence hoping his middle aged neighbours start having sex in their backgarden. Rob, who are you, man?

In their third post about Skyrim, the raidingparty.net writers, personified in this instance by Rob, tell us what the new creation engine, created by Bethesda, means for Skyrim. It means it will look nicer than Obvlivion. That is ALL THAT IT MEANS, but thanks for trying to sell me a game it is your job to critique.

Previews should be only pictures, gameplay footage (from random moments in the game) and maybe an interview with the developer, basically as close to a wikipedia entry as you can get. Then, maybe, if games journalists had any balls at all they could write an actually honest review of the game, when it came out, based on its merits and flaws.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is out on 11/11/11.

Major Lee Handsome's Gaming Week, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is for Bad Humans

2011-01-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

With General E Cute celebrating the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell by attending the fruitiest fortnight-long bacchanal in Scotland, and all the various lower ranks embroiled in such games as Tony Hawk's Pro Assassin: Brotherhood that I do not own, Major Lee Handsome here has been all alone in Camp Huggington, and my videogaming has been suitably single-player as a result.
I don't actually know if Don't Ask, Don't Tell got repealed, I wasn't following the story that closely. So apologies to any homosexual Americans actively serving in their nation's armed forces who get their political news from this blog: I may have given you false hope.
The rest is true, though. I more-or-less lost interest in single player games in around 2004, when I stopped playing San Andreas. Between then and 2010 I played, as far as I can remember, two single player games 'properly': Shadow of the Colossus, the only videogame I bought for over five years, and Bioshock, which my erstwhile flatmate owned. Although I'm pretty sure both these games have come up repeatedly on this blog before, in case I've not made myself clear, I found one of them to be alright, and one to be catastrophically poor. Bioshock. When I started buying games again at the tail-end of 2009 (is tail-end a cliche? Do they say not to do it in style guides?) I had exactly zero desire to play any single-player games ever again. However, a charming migrant student called Santamaria bought me Mass Effect as a late Christmas present. Possessing a keen sense of astronomical appropriateness, Santamaria gave me the game at around about midnight on December 31st 2009, both giving me a nice metaphorical book-end and saving me from having to look anything up on wikipedia, like I probably should have for San Andreas' release date. Since then I've been unstoppable, buying three completely single-player-only computer games, two of which aren't even sequels to Mass Effect. Although I haven't really played one of them yet.
That is a brief history of single-player videogaming.

I didn't play much Fallout: New Vegas this week, on account of how I've played so much of it recently that I am conducting my real life conversations by standing directly in front of the person I'm talking to with a completely blank expression, and handing them a card detailing the three things they are allowed to say to me at this juncture of the conversation. I also make sure the things they can say to me make them sound really dumb!
I was on that little XBox website looking at my profile, in the vain hope that someone I liked would show up in the online list playing a game I wanted to play (this never happened) when I clicked my gamerscore icon. This showed me that I had played all the games I owned within the last few months, even shit like Modern Warfare 2, except for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, which I had not played for a really really long time. The reason for this is because it is not a very good game, but I did not realise this at the time, and instead put the game in my XBox and played it for several days. I apparently only had around 200 of the achievement points for this game, and I'd definitely completed it at least once, so what the fuck? I had to explore that if nothing else. I've got no great love for achievement points, but this did seem to indicate I'd only really extracted a fifth of the available fun from this game. Turns out that half the achievements on offer are for playing it multiplayer, or 'adversarial' as the game calls it. In fairness, there are also two co-op multiplayer modes, but the word contributes to the almost creepy feel to the game which I'll get on to in a moment. That explains the bulk of why my score is so low: this game is terrible multiplayer. It is just not built for it at all to the extent that in some ways it's barely even a first-person shooter, at least compared to all the ones that are good. It's definitely the only fps I've played that is significantly better offline (or co-op) than online. It's just not set up for it at all, which is weird considering all the achievements and the 'persistent' character that you play in all multiplayer games as well as solo. By persistent, I mean you can dress yourself and slowly unlock guns and new kneepads and shit. Being able to dress yourself improves any game considerably (except GTA IV; don't give me the option to dress myself and then only provide 3 types of blue jeans as my options) and it even has an effect in this game, letting you pick a balance (or no balance at all) between protection and mobility as you choose what bits of armour to wear. But it's all for nothing, on account of how the game plays like complete shit online. All the problems with it can be encapsulated or at least symbolised by simply throwing a grenade. Everything about the experience is horrible. The grenade looks horrible and you look stupid throwing it. It flies really slowly in this bizarre physics-ignoring arc, and doesn't roll around or move, at least in any normal way, when it hits the floor. Where you aim it only has some resemblance to where it goes, on account of how the grossly unnatural throwing animation involves moving you quite a lot sideways and vertically. This being a cover-shooter, the amount of times this leads you (me) to bouncing grenades off doorframes, corners and windowframes (that you specifically aimed to avoid) right down to your own feet and killing yourself is truly obscene. And, even if you did manage to somehow compensate for this, your highly trained "rainbow operative" can only throw the grenade maybe six metres, and only if you really make him try. It also takes about five seconds for him to do this (doubled if you need to switch your grenade type using the awful equipment menus). Needless to say, the grenade often fails to kill people it lands directly next to, for reasons that are not at all clear. Except for the fact it kind of fits with the theme. Gears of War isn't quite so bad, but basically the key problem with cover shooters is that they're obviously completely based around cover, and that it's always suicidal to use it in multiplayer. The mechanics are clumsy, it's slow to get in to it and out of it, slow to fire out of it, and invariably some elbow or foot is poking out of the cover that the computer will apparently ignore but a human will not. There's no point using it, so you're left with a weird half-game that's played in a way it wasn't designed to be.
I said before that in some ways Rainbow is almost not a shooter. At it's best (which invariably means in the single-player), it's almost a puzzle game. You have rooms full of baddies that you need to 'solve' with your choices of equipment, entry point, method of entry, what you do with your squadmates (or co-op pal), and so on. Often you'll die a couple of times trying to clear a room, only to notice that you can go upstairs and rappel down the side of the building and shoot the guys through the window whilst your chums go in through the door. It's all broken up in to these little rooms or sections, and you respawn at the start of each section if you didn't solve it/died. The actual shooting part of it is fairly unimportant and most shootouts are essentially won or lost before they start. You have to occasionally move from bits of cover to other ones, but shooting when exposed is more or less suicide, so you don't really move. You aim and pull the trigger the same as ever, but that's about it.
This isn't a bad thing. It is genuinely fun to to plan out your little strategy, to spend a minute or two sorting your equipment, your RoE, deciding to be silenced or loud, positioning your squadmates and yourself, in preparation for a shootout that lasts maybe three seconds. It's the planning and problem-solving that's the fun bit; the brief action scene is just catharsis and a little bit of satisfaction of how efficient you were. Less excellent plans that don't involve you dying take longer, are messier and scrappier, maybe your squadmate will die. It's more like a little grading on how well you planned, like after you spent hours finally completing Metal Gear Solid, only for it to present you with a disapproving scorecard and deem you to have only achieved "Facile Horse" rank. The reasons it's different and interesting single-player are why it's terrible online. Spending a full minute using the slow and clumsy 'radial menus' to put on a silencer, turn off your laser sight, switch your grenade from frag to flashbang and decide if you want your gun to shoot one or three bullets at a time is only fine if the people on the other side of the door are patient computer baddies without the ability to open doors themselves.
The other big problem with this game is that it's creepy amoral murder-porn. It's GTA and Call of Duty and so on that make all the controversy for being violent and making children shitheads, but I never got that vibe from them. There was always something happening. I need to kill this guy to save my brother, we're ruthless killers but we're at least presented in a fairly even-handed way and at the end we're all killed for our sins anyway. Sure sometimes in GTA you kill a guy just to steal his car. Well, lots of times. But, you still did it because you wanted to go drive around in a nice car, and it's all so exaggerated (GTA) or bromantic (Call of Duty, Gears of War) that you're never really focusing or caring about the fact you're shooting dudes. It's just a thing you have to do to finish the story and save the world/your bro/whatever.

In the world of these 'dumb' and violent shooters, Rainbow Six has a bit of a reputation as the intellectual choice, something for the discerning player, and I've never seen any criticism levelled at it. I've completed both Rainbow Six: Vegas games twice each, and I have no clue what the bad guys were fighting for. Genuinely no idea. They're referred to as terrorists and they plant bombs and whatever, but what for? It's not important. You're not killing them to achieve something. In this game, the killing is the goal. You just need to kill the people, it doesn't matter who they are or why you need to do it. The game promotes a cold, efficient approach, right from using terms no actual human would use like 'adversarial'. You can switch your gun to fire only one or three bullets at a time instead of being automatic, because you shouldn't waste bullets. You should be really good at killing. Throw a flashbang so they don't see or hear what's happening, kill them then. If you shoot someone in the head, they die right away. With a silenced pistol, you can shoot everyone in the head with one bullet, never missing, killing them before they knew they were in a fight and being the best killer ever. The whole game is just completely devoid of humanity. "I had to shoot, he was going for his gun," your character says after killing a prisoner. "Shit, that bitch owed me money," a baddie says, after you kill the man he was stood next to. It's odd, the game is set in Vegas, very different territory to other shooting games I've played. All during the day, very naturalistic. The sound is excellent. You storm a convention centre, loud punky skater music plays with the tinny sound of an overworked PA system. A fight in a garden and you can hear a baby crying inside one of the houses. Walking through a hotel you have a point-blank fight-to-the-death in a bedroom to the relaxing classical choral music left on by the recently-alive occupant sprawled on the floor.
It's all perfectly pitched to provide huge amounts of humanity to the story in the way that Burger King defence level on Modern Warfare 2 tried and failed magnificently to do. But it is completely ignored. There's never even a reference to the fact that you're having your battles in places where people live, where people were seemingly until five minutes ago, food left unfinished, tvs left on. The game completely ignores it. Feels like the sound guy and and level artist were making a completely different game. Because this game is dead inside. The closest it comes to an emotional scene or even an actual conversation is when you fail to save some hostages.
Squadmate: Damn!
You: There was nothing you could do. It was my call.
Squadmate: We're a team.
You: And I'm team leader.

And I'm team leader. That is the grand total of your characterisation. You aren't CJ, or even Snake. You are a faceless nothing who exists purely to kill people the best. There's no torture here. Screaming, all that, too emotive. Just kill them when they don't know you're even there, be the best most efficient killer of humans there ever was. You can even (and this unlocks another achievement that I will never get) take a picture of yourself and map it to your guy's face, so you can actually be him as you go around killing all the people so well, so efficiently and emotionless. What the fuck?

Wasteland Lover 4: Mushroom Samba

2011-01-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

Waiting around isn't Felix's game, but Novac isn't a town of delights or distractions, especially at night. Nobody is around and everything is closed, so we break in to people's properties and steal whatever's worthwhile as we wait for day time. Eventually, when breaking in to a motel room, we find a real awake person, the gay ex-Khan ex-NCR Manny Vargas, in cosy roll-neck jumper. With Felix's top-tier homosexuality, he discovers that the guy who shot him in the head went to the next town down the same road. It's barely dawn even after these staggering revelations, and there's no reason to stick around in this dead town anyway, so Kluge hits the road.

Goodbye, Novac. Felix Kluge, October 2281

A couple of hundred metres down the road I get my first reminder that I am some little wuss on level 5 with no armour at all. I run in to three Jackals, only one of whom even has a gun, and they tear the absolute shit out of me. I die twice, pathetically, and eventually am forced to make them all chase me around this rocky area until I can beat the two with knives to death one at a time. The one with the SMG brutalises my unguarded torso at depressingly effective ranges, but by taking one of every drug I have and running from rock to rock, I eventually manage to get close enough to hit him in the arm with a tire iron over and over again until he drops the gun. After that it's all Kluge, baby.

Maybe thirty metres beyond the ambush point, there's a 'gas station' with an armed and friendly caravan of traders and guards. Thanks a lot, dickheads. They all get up to leave when Felix rolls in, and they're heading the way I'm going, so Felix tags along. The road goes along the side of a big dry lake for a little while, then hits a T-junction, with the city I want to go to on one side, and a trading post just a couple of metres the other way. The radical pathfinding of this caravan means that instead of following the road to the junction and then going left genuinely about twenty metres, they cut across the dry lake. This place is completely full of fire ants, radiation-enlarged ants that are bigger than a person and breathe fire for no reason. There are so many of them, I really should have taken a picture. It's a big firey mess. Thanks a lot, dickheads.
Both caravan guards and one of the traders are burnt to death, as is one of the pack brahmin, the other one having run off or something, I never see it again. The sole surviving trader, limping he's so near death, eventually makes it to the 188 Trading Post, glad he took that shortcut to save time, and I arrive with him, glad I managed to get 23 portions of fire ant meat (for making fricassees), not to mention all the equipment of the slain guards, without getting a scratch on me.

South-eastern view from the 188 Trading Post. Felix Kluge and Veronica Santangelo, October 2281.

The 188 Trading Post is one of my favourite locations in the game, despite being tiny and not really containing anything. Basically in Fallout games you get places that were already there before the war, and places that weren't. Of the places that were there before, you have the above-ground stuff, chiefly towns, and then the bunkers and vaults and shit that were all sealed and whatever. For me, and I guess I'm influenced heavily by Fallout 1 and 2, they've got these mostly all wrong. The towns and buildings, they're all too good. They look like they were squatted for 20 years, not like there was an apocalypse 100 years ago and no civilisation since.

I mean, is this couch really ruined? If this was a videogame of Death of a Salesman then yeah maybe this couch is ruined. But this is a place where watching a homeless man die whilst trying to kill a mutated scorpion is good enough entertainment to make you live in the sewer near to the arena where this takes place.
On the other hand, the pre-war stuff, the BoS bunker, the Vaults, they're all too dilapidated and grimy. In the first two, these sorts of places are fucking pristine, because why wouldn't they be? No one's been in to fuck about or whatever. The electricity still works because it's had no reason to break, there is no one popping in to smear shit on the wall and drop Nuka-Cola bottles everywhere. Not really sure why this is the case in New Vegas. Reminds me of the trailer for the abysmal Fallout 3, in which the voice-over declared, more or less: "Vault 101, where no one ever enters, and no one ever leaves. Your father just left, so now you're going out to find him," and then it cut to you approaching the first town, and the guy on the gate waving, "Hi, you must be from that Vault!"
Having everyone know about all the old shit is fine, but then it makes no sense when you go there and find some magical plasma rifle. And that couch is fucking fine.

Anyway, my point was supposed to be that the places that were built after the war tend to be nicer and more interesting, all the way from Junktown in F1 to places like the 188 here. I guess there's less opportunities for them to make no sense. Of course, there are still plenty of opportunities for them to make no sense, see Kansas City in Fallout Tactics, a town built around an unexploded nuclear bomb, or Megaton in the abysmal Fallout 3, a town built around an unexploded nuclear bomb (really Bethesda?). But there's also more scope to play around with them too.

Anyway, Felix fucking Kluge has been sat around the 188 for ages while I talk shit. He got talking to Veronica Santangelo (in the grubby robes in the picture above. She never looks at the camera), a sassy techno-lesbian who wants to follow Kluge around so that she can see more of the world, because it's not safe enough to go alone. Little does she know, all fights from hereon out will involve Felix running off and hiding while Veronica has to kill them all for him. With her in tow, we fuck off to Boulder City. I guess if I was a settlement with maybe 6 buildings in, I'd make sure that City was in my name with a capital letter too. Eagle eyed viewers may have noticed I'm wearing some overalls in that poor picture of the 188 above. I was sick of carrying those 26lbs of NCR rookie costume around, and this 1lb NCR engineer garb is clearly way better. Plus Kluge is a pansy and could never pass for a soldier.

Some little stand-off has been going on in town. The Khans, who were there when I got shot in the head, and I think buried my body, got in to a sticky situation, and have taken a couple of NCR suckers hostage, but then been surrounded by all the other NCR. Probably because he heard about me installing a new sheriff in Primm, the NCR guy in command of the situation instantly lets me get involved in whatever capacity I see fit. Cannot abide that shit, and I repay his trust excellently. Using the stealthboy I stole off Joe Cobb all the way back in chapter 2, Kluge moves like an invisible Agbonlahor (before he put on all that muscle mass), planting dynamite on every NCR sucker in sight, including this wacky commander. With them all exploded, and their possessions duly robbed, Felix can have a nice uninterrupted chat with the Khans. Turns out they were played too, or whatever, and that the guy who shot me in the head is called Benny, and disliked by more or less everyone. He runs a casino in Vegas called The Tops, which is finally a lead of some worth. The Khans can walk off freely, and I can stroll off to Vegas. Veronica didn't seem to care about what Felix just did, which I guess bodes well for their relationship.

For all I said about the pre-war stuff, sometimes it can look pretty great. The huge destroyed flyover looming over you here almost feels like the great Man vs Architecture game that was Shadow of the Colossus.

Felix arrives in Freeside, a fucking shithole surrounding The Strip, which is where I need to be. I need 2000 caps to get in to The Strip, and Felix, despite going up 2 full levels for his beautiful action in Boulder City, is still incredibly feeble and can't really do anything except hide and cook food. Start a bunch of quests I'm too unskilled to finish, eventually finding one about my level: standing still outside a shop.

I almost like this 'quest,' because it is I guess the anti-quest. No questing involved. You just stand still for five minutes. Makes you feel a little bit embarrassed by the lame terms such as 'quests' which sit on top of videogames and shit themselves whenever people suggest videogames aren't just for children.
But the downside to this is that it's fucking boring. The guy guiding me through it is a completely flat tool, and is voiced by the same VA who does nearly all the black people in this game (and even, weirdly, quite a few of the white people). And at the end, in an event I don't remember from the last time I did this quest, I have to help him clean up a corpse from infront of the shop. He walks up to it and doesn't seem to be doing shit, so I grab the corpse and start dragging it down an alley. Then he accuses me of stealing the gun and armour he gave me to help guard the shop, and kills me effortlessly. So I have to reload and sit still again for ages, and this time he just cleans up the corpse by himself instantly. I try and pass the time by taking a photo where Veronica isn't just looking straight at the door, but it never happens.

After this, though, and a little (lots of) well-executed burglary, Felix Kluge has enough caps to be permitted entrance to The Strip, for his big showdown with Chandler! See you next time, everyone.

I didn't write about the sewers. I went into the sewers this time through, having avoided them the first two. I just stumbled across them and thought it might be interesting. It was pretty gross. I was in a sewer, killing giant rats, with a fucking dagger. That is one of the very things I never ever want to do in videogames, and the big reason why I can never bring myself to play Dragon Age or Baldur's Gate or Oblivion or any of those games. Get it the fuck out of Fallout. There were also a bunch of ghouls in there for no reason, and even a bunch of Fiends, who very nearly killed Veronica, and past them, a room filled with even more ghouls. After way too much sewers, I finally break in to a bit of the sewers, right on the far side of the map, that is fine. Just a bunch of guys sat around smoking and hitting on Veronica. As you walk past them, they say things like, "don't go farther in to the sewers, it's full of monsters."
Fuck the sewers.

A Coward Does His Duty

2010-12-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

There comes a time when even the most stalwart FPS aficionado gets tired of charging into the fray with all guns blazing. For me, the appointed hour arrived one afternoon a few years ago. I was playing the level ‘War Pig’ from Call of Duty 4, in which you have to escort a tank through a hostile city. Having spent half an hour experimenting with variations of the kamikaze assault, I decided that it was time to try something new. Why not, I thought, play through the level as a coward? Not all soldiers are heroes, after all; even duty can call a wrong number.

To begin with, my new approach worked well. Having restarted the game, I immediately took cover behind a wall, far from the enemy’s front line. Bullets rattled against the brickwork, but the effect was strangely comforting, like the pattering of rain on a sturdy roof. My comrades exhorted me to advance, but I stayed where I was. Let them do the work for a change, I thought. What does a tank need a human shield for, anyway?

It wasn’t long before my resolution began to falter. Lying in the dirt is fun for a while, but once you’ve run out of pixelated blades of grass to count, there’s very little left to do. More importantly, from a military perspective, my squadron wasn’t making much progress: the tank was still parked right where it had started, bullets pinging impotently from its armoured frame. The crew appeared to be asleep. This state of affairs was unacceptable: a coward I may be, but that doesn’t make me a good loser.

I crawled out of cover and took up a new position behind the tank. For a moment I fretted that this behaviour—situating myself next to the enemy’s primary target—was insufficiently spineless, but it soon became clear that I was in no more danger than I had been before. However, neither did my relocation appear to have effected a tactical improvement: the tank was still motionless, and no amount of pushing was going to help. Reluctantly, I decided that it was time to enter the fray, or at least to knock quietly on the door of the fray, in the hope that the fray wouldn’t be able to hear me over the sound of itself.

I crept out from behind the tank and made my way slowly along the periphery of the battlefield. A distant adversary fired a couple of rounds in my direction, but they missed by a comfortable margin. All the same, I couldn’t help but feel that I was failing to respect my true nature: a coward must have the courage of his convictions, or he might just end up brave and dead.

Happily, I soon found myself back in cover. Not only that, but my expedition appeared to have roused the occupants of the tank from their slumber. The vehicle began to inch forward, following the trail that I had blazed just moments before. Could it be? Had I instigated a victory without firing a shot?

As it turned out, no. The tank came to a halt just short of my position, its driver seemingly unwilling to advance in his armoured vehicle to the point that I was occupying with my fleshy body. The enemy had abruptly vanished, and my comrades were rallying around me, but it appeared that we would make no further progress until I had personally evicted from the road ahead every one of the 500 Kalashnikov-wielding insurgents who had taken up residence there. This honour I declined. I have my principles, after all, and chief among them is the conscientious objection to the prospect of my own demise. With this in mind, I made a swift battlefield resignation. As the saying goes, you should always quit while you’re not dead.

Wasteland Lover 3: The Rise and Fall of the Powder Gangers

2010-12-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

With the shit town of Goodsprings saved, Felix definitely had no reason to stay there a second longer. He heads out in to the wastes, following the road to a town called Primm, which is where the trail of clues was currently leading. I guess I should point out that there is some sort of narrative thread to this game, namely that you get shot in the head by Chandler in the opening scene, and he takes some macguffin you were carrying from somewhere to somewhere else; it's not that clear. You want to find the person who killed you, and that's pretty understandable. Once you do that, you very quickly get wrapped up in the overall narrative of the area, and the link's a little hazy, but by then you probably have enough opinions, or at least enough curiosity, to want to get involved in that. It doesn't get in the way of messing about, but it's definitely more present than say, the storyline of Fallout 2, which is about 3 scenes.

So yeah, that's why Felix is going to Primm, because that's where the guy who shot him in the head was going. I said I followed the road to Primm, but that's more like a good idea that I had rather than what happened. Every fucking barrel and possibly-exciting plant was enough to drag Felix 200 metres off the road and get him involved in all kinds of terrible shit. Felix met a dickhead who was wearing a nice jacket, so he borrowed if off his corpse. Geckos were all over the place though, so the Powder Ganger armour we got back in Goodsprings stayed on for now.

Of course this is a diguise and of course I forgot and the NCR trooper outside Primm started shooting at Felix. Just because he was dressed like a wanted criminal? What an asshole. After hiding behind a rock and getting changed, I guess the guy forgot about us. He was happy to talk nonsense to Felix about his job, so I guess that's cool. However, he'd also just chased Felix in to the wastes whilst shooting at him. This made him pretty unpopular, and also in the middle of nowhere. He was also wearing an NCR disguise, which Felix could really do with having if this pans out anything like I expect. So, Felix puts some dynamite in to his pocket, which is a great feature that is still great the twentieth time.

Primm is a surprisingly big town containing surprisingly little. By the time Felix arrives, it's been more or less taken over by Powder Gangers in great outfits. The little western side of town has a handful of NCR troopers in tents, and the original residents of the town are holed up in the Vikki and Vance casino (a building Felix would quickly and thoroughly burgle), but mostly the town was dominated by aforementioned prisoner types, holed up in the Bison Steve Hotel. Irritatingly, it turns out the guy who knows where Felix's would-be murderer went has been kidnapped and is being held inside said Hotel. Never one to want a fair fight, Felix sneaks in, frees the captive and sneaks out with him, only having to beat two innocent criminals to death with a tire iron in the process. Turns out the man who shot Felix in the head continued along the road. Couldn't have figured that shit out without having to run in to a hotel full of insane criminals I guess.

Felix Kluge outside the Bison Steve Hotel, October 2281

The guy Felix was forced to rescue is whining about how the Sheriff died or whatever and how Felix should get a new one. You get pretty inured to this shit, playing videogames. I'm basically just accepting of the fact that obviously they'd choose Felix for the role of picking the new sheriff, on account of how he's never been to this town before and knows nothing about law enforcement. Deciding to repay their trust, Felix walks to the prison nearby and selects a convicted felon to rule the town. This goes down very well with the local population. With a sheriff installed, the citizens finally leave the casino, getting in to a big fight with all the Powder Gangers I didn't kill earlier, and doing Felix's 'job' for him. It wasn't really his job anyway so he doesn't even feel bad a little bit. After he's finished looting all the corpses, he notices one Primm resident has a rather baller outfit. Sadly the old dynamite-in-the-pocket routine didn't run so smoothly because the guy noticed it was happening. He also had some beasty revolver so we had to run outside of town and hide behind a rock until he was close enough to beat to death with a baseball bat.

By this stage Kluge has killed four people purely because he wanted their clothes. Someone is coming out from the town to investigate what was just happening though, some weird young really tanned guy with a white flat top. Looks god damn hideous. Don't really want to be caught next to the corpse of this guy's friend whilst wearing his clothes, so Kluge runs off in to the wastes. After maybe 10 steps a Powder Ganger shows up and says he has a present for Felix. It's a lie though, he just wants to kill him with his friends.
There are a shitload of Powder Gangers in this game. All from that one little prison? I mean that prison is still full of guys, and even discounting all the ones over the wastes, they have four camps, those guys in the Bison Steve, the ones in Vault 19 (this is a spoiler) and the ones in Nipton (also a spoiler), with a few more dotted around, like the ones who attacked Goodsprings. That's a lot of guys, but whatever. Anyway these guys have attacked Kluge because apparently they hate him. Not really sure how I've wronged them so severely, and a few hours ago they were letting me walk around in their prison, so fuck these guys. Felix heroically runs back towards Primm, where that rancid grey flat-top guy is investigating the murder of his pal (by me) and gets him to fight the Powder Gangers for him.

That shit dealt with, Felix heads over the wastes to Nipton, on the way seeing a horrible mutated dog-human get beaten to death by a herd of Bighorners. Turns out Nipton's gone to hell, it's all on fire and shit, and the only guy around is this complete tool that Felix was going to bludgeon to death before being distracted by barrel cactus plants. I mean hey, that guy was a dick, but maybe I can cook some cool shit with this fruit. Is what Felix would have thought.

So yeah Nipton all got burned down and all the population killed of enslaved by the Legion, using some fruity lottery. I guess these guys have a certain style if nothing else. The leader of the group, with his weird voice like out of date caramel, or a rat pretending to be a sexy mouse, is cool with Felix just strolling around though, and even gives him a little job to do. So he's okay in Felix's book. After doing his job, Felix continues on up the road, getting in to a few fairly unexciting encounters until finding a pretty radical ranch.

It's got some boxes to put my shit in, some plants, a campfire, a bed, and I guess some fences and shit too. Kluge duly stores his shit in said boxes, steals the unique cleaver 'Chopper' from the stovetop, and has a little nap. It's nice to have a house, and this one is a shitload better than that shitty presidential suite you get later on (that is a spoiler).

On the final run to Novac (Novac is where our current tidbit of clue is leading us), we pass a little unit of NCR troopers. They look okay, I guess. The uniform's okay. They're out patrolling, which is maybe fairly noble. It seems a lot like work, though, and Felix isn't really feeling this shit. And he doesn't really mind when they get slaughtered a few dozen metres up the trail. Continuing on, pretty soon Felix sees a couple of dudes he can totally get on board with.

Hell yeah. Whatever Felix is up to, it's not as good as whatever these two lads are doing, and he wants to be a part of it. Sadly right now he still has to deal with the fact that someone shot him in the head and then stone cold walked away like he didn't give a shit about it. Passing a ranger station, Kluge ducks in for a minute. There is one solitary ranger in here. Great station assholes. Put some dynamite in her pocket to steal her shit, works like a charm. Annoyingly, her ranger outfit isn't a disguise. This shitty NCR uniform Kluge stole outside of Primm weighs 26 fucking pounds for 2 DT. Shit is most definitely hampering his ability to operate effectively (i.e. carry 200 bottles of nuka cola and pretend to be those Legion vets he saw earlier). Felix trashed the outfit then, because he aint wearing some fruity shit with a neckerchief just for no reason.
It's night time by the time he rolls in to Novac, and the god damn hotel desk is closed. Isn't night time when people want to use hotels? This place is being run terribly. Nothing to do except wait around in the lobby for daytime.

Wasteland Lover 2: Felix Kluge

2010-12-16T17:07:00.000-08:00

Now that this is going on a blog, suddenly my character has to have a name. Can't run around the wastes under such monikers as Sweet Baff or Cram It. I hate thinking up names, so for a little while, whenever I need one for whatever reason, I've had a few tactics. Went with my favourite one this time, which is stealing names from the Bundesliga. Heard about a midfielder playing for Schalke 04 called Peer Kluge, which is just a fantastic name. Took the surname for my own, then added the first name of his Schalke 04 manager. I'm like the Tarantino of names, except I'm not a complete fucking imbecile.
Name down, next up is face. I followed what I outlined before, and it ended up like this:

I am not some fruit, I had no real goal here beyond making something I wouldn't completely hate looking at for ages. Hopefully you feel the same way. If not, fuck you, that shit took me ages. Like five minutes just on his jaw. The Mass Effect facemaker is much better. This shit has a lot of options that make no sense. Like there is an option in 'tone' called 'eyebrows' and it does absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. All the options for changing the nose use fucking esoteric terms for different parts of the nose. I thought I was doing okay knowing what a philtrum was, but now I have to know exactly how wide I want this guy's sellion to be. And ultimately you can hardly change it anyway. Poor facemaking software.

Anyway, next came stats, and I went for hell-of-generic and standardised.

Bearing in mind I pick up Small Frame in a moment, we have 6 6s and 1 5 (sorry Charisma. I didn't drop you down but you are still terrible.)
Right after you pick the stats you have to answer all these questions, and then it tells you what skills you should have. Then it lets you change them, which everyone who has ever played this game definitely does. This interview shit is fucking terrible. Nobody wants it. It didn't use to be there. At least, knowing it was meaningless, I could just skip through it all and pick Melee, Sneak and Survival like I already knew I was flipping gonna. Also picked up Small Frame and Good-Natured like I fucking said I was going to.
Then I stole everything of value (and several things of no value) from the Doc's house, and stepped out in to the wasteland.

This game is marred by its opening frankly. This whole town is fucking awful and has almost nothing to do with anything. All the characters in it are gross verisimilitude-destroying failures. I can just about see why you'd need a tutorial, in case somewhere in the world there existed a person who had never played a single videogame before in their life, but had still managed to ease through the fucking cheek-sallowness sliders. Yeah, there's really no one this tutorial is for. People know how to play games, and people that don't know how to play games tend not to give a shit and do not want to learn. There are good ways to do tutorials, like Left 4 Dead, which has a tutorial you don't even fucking realise is being given. This is the exact opposite of that. It's very weird having this stupid town and its population of children's tv presenters in the same world as the rest of the game.

Not really going to go in to it, because it really is that rubbish. I helped out around the town and eventually fended off the 'invasion' of the town (by six people, three of them wearing only shorts). But mostly I just went from house to house stealing everyone's shit.

Because:
A) Fuck this town and everyone in it.
B) It's really easy to do and I probably need all these boxes of detergent.
C) Feeble Felix Kluge can't really get in to fights that often on account of his small frame and all that, but the audience still has to know he isn't made of the finest moral fibre. Probably a poor fibre e.g. flax.

This goes down mostly successfully. Highpoint being stealing from the leader of the people who were about to invade whilst he has an argument with one of the residents (he had a stealthboy). Lowpoint being when I got cocky, stealing from the shelves of the shop while the shopkeeper was right there, and then selling everything back to him. He caught me and nearly shot me to death before I ran far enough away and I guess he just forgot it all happened, and I sold the rest of his shit back to him.

So yeah, I was born, I ran around and looted the town, then saved it from the bad guys. All set for heading off into the wastes in chapter 3.

I got to level 2. Picked Confirmed Bachelor, which is the perk that lets you chat up other guys who are in to it. Hilariously, there is much messageboard moaning from guys who somehow selected this perk without realising that it blatantly makes your character gay. I took it because it's great that it exists, and because I need as many non-violent ways to get through shit as possible. This was the stupid tutorial town and I came extremely close to dying twice. I might pick up the corresponding perk to make me a multi-gender smoothtalker, or maybe I'll just stay the most desirable homosexual in the Mojave.
Along with the stealthboy, I got the Powder Ganger guard armour off Joe Cobb and a baseball bat off one of his friends. A decent weapon, the equal-best armour I'll ever be allowed to equip, and my first disguise. Hooray. I also did some cooking at the campfire. This shit is way more radical than I thought. I cooked the legs of a giant mantis in wine! I thought this shit would be much more caveman. This is fantastic.

Wasteland Lover 1: The Intro. What and Why

2010-12-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

I thought about writing a review. I read a lot of reviews, even after playing the whole game. I'm not exactly sure why. Played the game a lot when it came out, more than I have played any other game since I was 18 even. Didn't want to review it when I could be playing it, and by the time I had got over wanting to play it all the time it had been out 6 weeks or so, and reviewing it felt pointless. I mean, it would have been pointless anyway, but this just made it especially so. Plus I'd already stated most of my most trenchant points in conversation anyway, so there'd be a lot of retreading, or whatever. So yeah, I never did.
Fallout New Vegas has four endings, and I wanted to do them all. I left a lot of quests unfinished and places unexplored on my first go through the game, so there would be new shit for later ones. Goes against my innate completionist/perfectionist, but that side of me has totally faded as I've grown up anyway. Much rather do something enjoyably than well.
So, the main problem with New Vegas isn't the bugs, like I'd say if I was some weak journalist. It's that it's too fucking easy. My first go through I had it on 'Hard' setting (normal mode is for wimps, babies, toys and lame fucks) with the Hardcore more also enabled. It really wasn't that hard, so next go, I put it up to Very Hard and decided I wasn't going to wear power armour (like older Fallouts, it's the armour, especially power armour, that really reels in the difficulty). But, since I knew the game fairly well by this stage, it was actually even easier than before.
So, I got to talking with videogame journalist-for-hire Sam Balthier about ways to make an additional playthrough difficult enough to be engaging enough for a third run-through of the game.
The shit we discussed piqued my interest. Seemed it would necessitate playing the game slightly differently, require more thinking or whatever. Basically, I wasn't most likely going to bother playing this through a third time before, and after I wanted to fucking write this shit down.

I guess the restrictions and their reasoning run roughly like this:

No wearing shit with a DT above 5

Like I touched on before, it's the armour that really makes this game easy. No PA is one thing, but nothing over 5 is crippling. Can't even wear a leather jacket. Basically all this allows is the little grimy clothes with radical names like Merc Cruiser outfit and Raider Blastmaster Armour. Luckily, that contains all the best looking shit in the game anyway. What it also allows, and I get a feeling this might be crucial, is disguises. There are Legion, NCR, Great Khan and Powder Ganger disguises all at 5 DT or below, so that whole thing is open to play around with. They're not really necessary at all normally, but I'm guessing they might get more mileage when any sucker can kill you.
This was the idea the rest were based around, the nexus of the whole concept or whatever. A DT of less than 6 means you'll look way better (and we all love taking photos of our guy, hence this whole fucking thing) and the game will be hard enough to make you think.

No getting your fucking addictions cured by the doctor lady in five minutes for like fifty woolongs

Drugs are powerful shit. Even with essentially no armour, a shitload of drugs could still make you pretty baller. This way, you can still take them - and as this much of a wimp, it's likely I'll want the aforementioned shitload - but you have to deal with the consequences like a big boy.
Addiction curing is much too easy and cheap in this game anyhow, making shit like Fixer totally worthless except for a couple of quests in Freeside. My most memorable and fun playthrough of Fallout 2 was as a jet addict (in Fallout 2, you couldn't cure addictions at the doctor, but they did pass over time. Except jet. Jet was for life (yeah, there is a quest to make an antidote, but that shit is for babies and I did not touch it)). Being a legit addict if you play around with drugs, searching for Fixer, saving your last dose for either a big fight or to stave off a headache, should be fun.

No repairing shit

This one is another pretty big dampener on a lot of dudes' parades. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go with it. What's definitely out is swapping caps for CND with some repairing NPC behind a counter. Repair kits, maybe. But I don't have that much of a problem with like-for-like merging in the Pip-Boy, especially for the sake of saving some unique weapon or whatever (some of them look nice, plus they're sad to lose), but probably Jury Rigging should be out. Or maybe not, I don't know. Repair isn't amazing without it.

No companions

Companions are overpowered. And by companions I mean Boone. Although in fairness, most of the rest are too - especially Veronica - but Boone is just fucking egregious. I'm actually going to break this one for a couple of reasons:
I'm playing Hardcore mode (obviously) and if they die, then they're dead. No reloading that shit. I'm aiming to side with Caesar's Legion too. Not a lot of the companions are cool with that, notable fan-favourite Arcade Gannon and Boba Fett-fan-favourite Boone. So I wont get a whole lot of free reign. The reason being, I'm writing this shit up on here. Figure a companion dying or leaving me will make this shit better reading.

No save-scumming

Ironman that shit. If you die, you can reload. Anything else, fucking deal with it.

Character

Guess I might as well laden myself with a few more restrictions during character creation, huh?

Stats

Min-maxing is still as good as ever (pro-tip to beef up your character: dump CH, probably PE and possibly LK depending on your build. Over 6 IN isn't really necessary, especially if you take educated early). So this time I am having no part in it. Gonna put my free points where I want, but those 5s are sticking around. I'm going to be a lovely well-rounded human being.

Skills

Tagged guns before, plus it's very good and very generic/boring. Done explosives before too (can't recommend them enough though, they are too fantastic) and unarmed as well. Melee seems like just about the worst combat skill going (except perhaps having only explosives), so lets go with that.
Speech is too fucking good. Might build it later, but I'm at least giving the wasteland a chance against me.
Mostly I just didn't want to tag anything I've tagged before. Along with melee, sneak and survival are my picks. Sneak for running away from everything that can effortlessly kill me (everything), and survival for getting by in the wastes after I run away.

Traits

Small Frame and Good-Natured. I'm already going to get dicked in fights, so I might as well fucking emphasise this aspect of my personality or whatever. Plus the good sides of these traits will be nice.

Physique

Black or hispanic, clean-shaven.
Every motherfucker who played this game played a white guy with a beard. So fuck that. And since I'm a white nerd, by playing as an asian guy I might as well just get a fucking Thane Krios tattoo, or kill myself, or whatever. No.

So i guess that's pretty much my brief. My plan is to side with the Legion, be a dick to the NCR, be a dick in general, see Lily's little quest because I haven't yet, maybe activate ARCHIMEDES if I feel like it, finish as many quests differently to how I've done before/how most people do them/avoid the 'best' endings, and most of all just have this not be boring shit.

keeping people playing games

2010-12-16T10:49:00.001-08:00

The way to get people to revisit games in not with achievement points.

This, for me, could be said to sum up a lot of the problems in games development today.

“If we put more achievement points in people will keep playing the game.”

That’s true, for some people. But what do achievement points mean? Nothing. They are some made up currency of excellence.

Games like Fallout: New Vegas, or Mass Effect, which feature a variety of ways to interact with the world and its characters provide replay ability through depth, exploration of a world and character. It is a good, intelligent and mature thing for games to do. Unlike Gamerscore, which is the exact opposite of that.

open letter to games developers who want to make games like films

2010-12-16T10:47:00.001-08:00

Why do you want games to be more like films?

There are a lot of films. Hardly any of them are taken seriously. The big blockbusters are often derided by critics, who praise the more personal, or artistic, to use a semi-bullshit phrase, works of Peter Greenaway, Ken Loach or Terry Gilliam.

What is it you want from games? We already have blockbuster games, and they’re still looked down upon, if anyone looks at them at all, generally. A lot of people know almost nothing about, for example, the Call of Duty franchise. Even less know anything about fucking Limbo or any of the indie games.

Do you think any of this is to do with the fact that most people think video games are for kids because they’re played mostly by kids?

I mean yeah, if you’re male and aged 20-30 you might play games. But more killing, more explosions, more weapons aren’t going to make games be taken more seriously. That is all impulse attention grabbing bullshit, which is some MTV technique used to grab the attention of young people, kids, the same as the summer blockbuster films. Is it any wonder, then, that people think games are for kids since they seem to be designed for kids?

Games already make money. You don’t need to churn out blockbuster games.

Wikipedia:

The total revenue from first day sales in the U.S. and the UK was $310 million, making Modern Warfare 2 the biggest entertainment launch in history, surpassing (in revenue) its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto IV,^[84][85] as well as items from other media types.

No one really cares about those big films either, they’re almost always just brief entertainment.

Why not let films be like films, because they’re films, and let games be like games?

Fuck you Rockstar

2010-12-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

Hot off the heels (not really that hot. Like a year and a half) of producing what was undoubtedly the most boring game I've played in the last five years, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games have flopped out some kind of trailer and interview about their next project, L.A. Noire, being developed by Team Bondi, who I also hadn't heard of. There are some quotes from Brendan McNamara, the head of development (he founded Team Bondi, worked on The Getaway, and apparently is British, despite being called Brendan McNamara), and producer Jeronimo Barrera (he's all downhill after his name), and some other shit too. They haven't said a whole lot though, so I'm surprised they've made it sound so awful.
"I want this game to be the flashpoint where people start to think of games and film as being on the same level, because I'm confident they already are," whines Barrera, declaring his somewhat flawed perception of his own importance and the fact that he is an idiot very concisely. Just in case there was any doubt as to what he was getting at, he also says, "we're definitely blurring the lines now [between games and film]." Yeah, he's another one of those guys. The best bit is, he also says, "it's been a challenge to be viewed as a legitimate medium."
No shit you fucking shill. Your dream is for games to be films that take forever, look weird, are shit, have achievements, involve 30 hours of superfluous shooting and the ability to jump. This is the equivalent of a comic maker, frustrated at the lack of prestige accredited to his medium, releasing a graphic novel where every single panel is completely full of text in the search for legitimacy.
Rockstar has always, at least since Grand Theft Auto III, basically just been trying to make films. It used to be alright and they used to make great games. Perhaps they used to have a better sense of scale and purpose. A half-dozen years ago they put out San Andreas and The Warriors fairly close together. Where the promise of this Rockstar went I do not know. Those were interesting games. The Warriors was a game version of a film, but it wasn't some tie-in. The film was over 20 years old, pretty off-beat in its production, and the demographic targeted by the game contained almost no one who'd even seen it. They weren't doing it for money and they didn't feel the need to explain themselves. They were confident that the game was good enough to stand on its own, and it fucking was. San Andreas, obviously, was about a black guy. Hilariously, even now, years after this game came out and was a big success, this is still completely left-field, a wacky radical move to take which has pretty much not been repeated. I could get in to it more but it's apparent enough if you've played it, at least two other games, and met a couple of real people, or even just watched a few films.
Now though, it's all a lot of bullshit. Red Dead Redemption was the most tired and flat setting, collection of characters and plot they've scraped together yet, and this is the company who made Grand Theft Auto IV. A trick I've noticed Rockstar doing of late when hyping their own games, is just to lie and say the opposite of what has happened. For both GTA IV and Red Dead the pre-release spiel went on about how they'd completely redone the combat system, when in actuality it's exactly the same alternate-trigger-tapping shit from GTA III, which was already dated in San Andreas, and so ludicrously poor by now that it makes Red Dead essentially unplayable, unless all you wanted to get out of it was watching a really, really, really long and completely fucking shit film, with over 3 hours of blood spraying on to the camera as the protagonist skins animals, exclaiming, "Hoowee! Stinky!" And other such statements, on account of what a conflicted and complex character he is. I'm guessing the same system will be in L.A. Noire, probably with a meter-based "Hardboiled Mode" where the screen goes black and white and gets smoky and you just press one button to kill everyone with your revolver whilst making wisecracks, on account of how conflicted and complex you are.
The same system, too, is evidently being used when it comes to hyping this game. "We know we're asking a lot from players," lies Robert McNamara. No you're not. You've called this game fucking L.A. Noire. You're not even asking them to work out what this game is by looking at the cover picture, or to have to remember what it's about later. You've just named the game what you want it to be like, a testament to the glib, facile and meretricious piece of shit it will undoubtedly be. Red Dead Redemption was a lot of things, but it wasn't called Angry Cowboy Dad.
And fucking complex, moody characters. "The character Aaron plays is conflicted and has quite a lot of depth," lies McNamara again. No he doesn't, I bet all my money. These unshaven, bad tempered, extremely white characters have always cropped up as game protagonists, but the last few years it's been pretty much just them. And they are all, literally all of them, every single one, fucking awful. It's not just aping films, it's aping a really tiny view of films, and mostly aping other games what did make all the £££.
CJ from San Andreas wasn't moody and conflicted. He knew exactly what the shit was up, what he had to do, and how he felt about it. He even gave off the vibe of knowing that he was the protagonist of a videogame, with the gallows humour and detached, fatalistic wit of someone who just spent nine hours driving over women and being shot by police because a 14-year-old boy wanted him to. He was pitched perfectly for the game, and the medium. Rockstar is now giving us protagonists from films (and awful ones from shit films, at that), all serious and gruff, whilst still making games that are at by far their most enjoyable when you're flying a helicopter whilst wearing disco pants, being chased by everyone in the world because you shot the hot dog seller by mistake and you don't want to go to prison (for 5 hours) because you'll lose all your cool guns and because it was just the fucking hot dog seller why does everyone care so much, he's just one guy, how did this get so out of hand why are there tanks after me? That is what these games are for, what they have always been for and still evidently are for. But they're shoehorning all this awful shit in in this totally misguided and frankly massive unwanted push for legitimacy. Riding your golf kart through town in your disco pants, casually shooting pedestrians with your TEC-9 as you pass them before getting out and talking to David Cross and shooting down hundreds of toy planes with the four miniguns he has on the roof of his downtown toyshop, that was fine, because it was San Andreas, you were CJ, and that was what happened. Riding through the desert on your bull in your inexplicably pristine suit, casually lassoing nuns as you pass them before getting out and talking to an insane grave digging hermit with a silly voice is not fine, because you're playing Red Dead and you're fucking John Marsden and you have conflicted emotions and are so complex and it's just fucking jarring and awful.
By deciding you weren't happy just making games, and that you had to try and make them films too, you went from making great games that were genuinely trying new things out and forming what 'games' were as a medium, to making shitty, bland, overblown boring games. And they aren't even like films. And, if they somehow were films, they would be fucking atrocious films.
So fuck you Rockstar Games, you big pile of dicks.

L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, Rockstar Games) is expected out in the first half of 2011 for PS3 and Xbox 360.

i was just watching the matrix

2010-12-13T15:40:00.000-08:00

There is no spoon/nothing good about the matrix.

You know what the matrix is?

It is the greatest comment on life in our times.

I talk, first, specifically about the lobby shoot out scene. It is interesting that a group of humans, dedicated to saving other humans, don’t think twice about killing humans to save humans. There is that phrase that circulates the internet, and protest signs across the world: Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

There is no absolute idealist theory behind the motives of Neo, and Not Samuel L Jackson Lawrence Fishburne. Just fuck these security guard humans, Morpheus is more important.

Fuck a lot of people, save whoever you want.

At one point Neo is hidden behind a pillar whilst these security guards uselessly pound round after round into the barrier he hides behind. After a while when, I assume, the guards are reloading, Neo runs out and starts shooting.

The guards haven’t even started reloading, they've not even stopped shooting, he just runs out for no reason. His tactic is to run, in a straight line, whilst shooting.

He fights like someone who has learnt to fight through playing video games, which I guess is what he is exactly.

This is a very subtle and clever comment by the Wachowski brothers, or whoever made the film, and they are clearly not just dumb shits who wrote this film because they saw a mobile phone once.

But where the commentary of the film really comes into it’s own is in the final chase between the Agents and Neo.

Neo runs up a fire escape and the Agents fire their guns and miss with every shot.

Even though they are scientifically completely perfect in every way and have complete control of the universe and all physics.

The moral of the matrix is not to do with the take over of technology, but this:

Whoever you are you will always be shit at what you do.

The Wachowski brothers are a shining testament to this.

Review: The Trial

2010-12-02T16:36:00.000-08:00

When Franz Kafka released The Trial in 1925, computers did not exist. It might take a moment for that to settle in: no YouTube, no Wikipedia, no email. Even the word processor was an invisible speck on the horizon of the future. Given all that, it’s unsurprising that he never quite got around to finishing the book. It’s a wonder he ever got started. Nevertheless, The Trial has done very nicely for itself, and now it’s finally received the greatest accolade available to any narrative artefact: a videogame adaptation.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Od, the studio behind such esoteric releases as Trigger Toe and The Lonely Berserker, has created what they call a “hyper-version” of the classic novel, an “exploding of Kafka’s brain-world, cut out of time and digitised for a generation of people who find books too heavy to enjoy.” The original plot has been ditched in favour of a multi-stranded narrative, although the strands converge at numerous key points. In fact, they barely diverge to begin with: no matter what you attempt to do, you invariably find yourself performing the same actions again and again. The clever part is how the game makes you feel that this is entirely natural, that your freely made decisions lead inevitably to the same conclusion.

In one sequence, you have the option of calling on a young lady who lives in the apartment opposite your own. It’s late at night, so there’s a chance that she’ll resent the disturbance, but it’s also possible that she’ll fall madly in love with you. Brilliantly, the game ensures, through subtle sleights of hand, that both outcomes occur every time. You have the thrill of making a new romantic contact, coupled with the pathos of immediately severing it. Similar events occur throughout, with the result that every possible permutation of human experience is condensed into 30 hours of playing time. This is one game that represents definite value for money.

There are, however, a few areas in which the good people at Od take avant-garde game design too far. Most notably, there’s a sequence that occurs in total darkness: the player has to navigate a labyrinthine office building by feel alone, responding to the vibrations of the controller pad. Although this is a nice existential touch in theory, it’s marred by the fact that it takes about 40 minutes to complete, during which time dozens of anonymous characters interrogate the player about the most mundane of his daily habits. Scrolling through dialogue options like “Why, I bathe every day without fail. Good hygiene is essential in the modern world” gets tedious pretty quickly, especially when each one provokes the same response: “The judge will be very glad to hear that, or perhaps he’ll hold it against you. One can’t be sure.”

Other aspects of the gameplay are equally frustrating. The controls are occasionally re-mapped without warning, sometimes at incredibly inopportune moments, such as when the player is standing by an open window. For a game with no enemies, in which the most hazardous feature of the environment is a balcony with a broken guardrail, The Trial has an exceptionally high mortality rate. (It’s actually impossible to play it through without dying at least once.) And if you’re thinking “Good, I like a challenge,” think again: the arbitrary nature of each death means that you never get to learn from your mistakes.

Despite these problems, The Trial is ultimately a success. It’s worth sampling just for the queasy, claustrophobic atmosphere that permeates its every scene. Silent Hill might be scarier, but then it has the advantage of being populated with disembodied legs and pyramid-headed rape monsters. The most frightening character in The Trial, by contrast, is a dwarfish court clerk with psoriasis (whatever you do, don’t agree to bathe with him).

Review of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's New Vegas review

2010-11-13T04:35:00.001-08:00

Whilst I appreciate the old school sort of humour story telling nature of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s review of New Vegas, it harks back to the kind of shit they used to do in PC Zone in 1997, and I have had to resist the urge to do that sort of shit myself, it seems like Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has been broken by sequels.

About Fallout: New Vegas Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw says this (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2435-Fallout-New-Vegas):

“New Vegas is functionally just an expansion pack of Fallout 3 and I said everything I needed to say about Fallout 3 in my Fallout 3 review of Fallout 3.”

I’m not in favour of sequels generally either, Half Life 2 being the exception in terms of me actually wanting more of that story. In fact I think sequels, instead of having numbers should have the word "Again", so Assassin's Creed 2 would be called Assassin's Creed Again, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would be called Call of Duty Again, Again, Again: Modern Warfare Again. (can't remember if that idea is already on this blog so fuck it)

I wouldn’t have asked for New Vegas, I held out as little hope as possible, seeing as I’d wanted Fallout 3 to actually not be shit and was so, so disappointed. But as things turn out New Vegas rams the shit out of Fallout 3, so it’s all ok.

So, in this instance, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, we need to go beyond the standard Christian concepts of Good and Evil and judge each game on its own merits.

Fallout 3 defined the game Fallout 3, as you may well expect, but New Vegas is actually worth playing, being so much more refined, and subtle, and what a game should be. There’s nothing more to say about the engine, sure, but a game is not an engine and no one should ever buy New Vegas for the fucking engine.

Also, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw: reply to my fucking emails DAMN.

And, seriously, those “Day One” panel things in that New Vegas review went on for far too long.

A review, basically, of Fallout: New Vegas

2010-11-04T11:43:00.001-07:00

The amount of times I climb a hill, turn a corner, and I’m confronted by some huge valley or mountain range on Fallout: New Vegas is frankly ridiculous. The best part of Fallout 3 was when you left the vault for the first time. You’re on this ridge, and when your eyes adjust to the sunlight you can see this vast, lonely wasteland.

Except it’s not that lonely, it’s fucking annoying and every five seconds you’re attacked by some generic raider, a crazy robot, or a couple of wild dildos.

The only thing I liked about Fallout 3 was the feel of the wasteland, when no one was around. It evokes an overwhelming loneliness, which can be affecting, but by having hostiles randomly strewn throughout the world it, like a premature ejaculation, ruined entirely the atmosphere it had going on.

New Vegas doesn’t make the same mistake. In this game it’s rare to encounter animals wandering aimlessly in the desert. Humans tend to gather around camps. Scorpions pick around the ruins of a gas station, ants have colonised an old barn. Shit like that makes it feel like the world of New Vegas is a living one.

However, the openness of New Vegas means there is often very little tension in your travels. There are moments, for example your initial approach to the Strip, where the environment works particularly well, but at other times journeying around can be tedious, and I find myself leaping from rock to rock, perilously trying to descend a radioactive cliff face to get somewhere ten seconds faster. It more or less depends on my mood how I feel about this. If you're feeling sort of ponderous, it's kind of cool, trudging through the desert. But, man, it’s almost always great when you turn a corner and there’s this freaky forest, or a massive lake that appears out of nowhere. I am in awe a little bit of those things when I see them.

New Vegas is also like a better version of Red Dead Redemption. I liked that game, but not because of any kind of message it tried to tell me. It felt like it was trying to make this point about revolution, the rise to power, the impact of which was lost because even though it is an open world game, you’re basically following a script, killing certain people at the times you’re told to.

New Vegas deals with that. In Fallout 3 you couldn’t kill certain characters, because it would mess up quests. New Vegas doesn’t give a fuck. Normally, you kill a character, it affects your standing, and what quests are available, with a faction. Different NPCs belong to different factions and all your actions affect how they see you, a bit like when you make one Sim kill another in The Sims and those red minus signs appear above their girlfriends head. I mean what did you do in The Sims?

This system increases the level of interactivity in the game, making it unique from, say, a film, and thousands of other games, and making it feel like your actions and decisions have actual resonance in a world that could feasibly exist (sort of). I didn’t hate Red Dead, I thought it was a good game. It’s just a lot of things you’d do in that didn’t seem to affect anything at all, even though the events themselves seemed like they were meant to have significance.

For a world to feel lived in, in games, the characters need to feel real. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of a game that does this really well, as is New Vegas. You get a feel for various characters through quests that don’t involve combat, where you sometimes have to deduce things, or you can talk your way out of a potential conflict. It is a subtlety missing from most games.

One character you meet, when you ask about her goals, wants a dress. She’s also some kind of technical whiz, and she probably just punched the head off a guy, but when you talk to her she feels like a real person, not just a single purpose tool, and is captivating as a result. Conversations with characters have actually made me laugh because they contain actual jokes.

Dungeons are absent from this game, by which I mean the shit dungeons from Fallout 3 are gone. I stopped giving the tiniest bit of a fuck about dungeons in Fallout 3 after my second dungeon. Here’s what would happen: I’d find a dungeon, go inside, discover the interior of every single building had been designed by the same architect, explore the whole thing, find nothing of any consequence, grab some stimpaks and bottle caps and call it a day. It was like trying to jerk off and abandoning it half way through. And you’re masturbating over a picture of some rusty tins.

In New Vegas the buildings, vaults and things you can enter in the wasteland relate to various quests. It feels like they were built, like buildings in real life, for an actual reason, and they’re worth exploring to discover another angle to a quest, or the world.

Without Fallout 3 we wouldn’t have New Vegas, probably. That is the closest Fallout 3 will ever get to being worthwhile. I don’t know why Gamespot thinks Fallout 3 is better. They probably got erections from reading the words rusty and tins.

Someone writes an article about Philosophical games, and I write this

2010-11-04T11:26:00.001-07:00

Someone linked me to a forum, or blog, or something, this article a guy called ChristOnIce wrote about “philosophical” games. He writes this, about Bioshock:

Is our culture so bankrupt that something this lacking in any originality qualifies as brilliance? http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/christonice/philosophical-my-ass/30-30442/

Yeah, frankly, I think it is. There is very little brilliance in games. It’s not even subtle stuff. “Brilliance”, it seems, games like Portal, Shadow of the Colossus (my go to games for “games that aren’t utter shit”), is just not doing the awful shit that games normally do.

Bioshock’s big point of “You are a mindless killer” is a point made in Half Life 2 in a much more gradual, subtle way, as you start to realize the character you control (ha ha) is under some kind of cosmic contract, and it seems you’re helping these people you’ve grown to like out of some arbitrary reason you have no way to comprehend.

But people, gamers, I guess, see guns, and aliens, and they want to shoot those aliens with those guns and so what if there’s some creepy guy with a briefcase, or it’s all under water, as long as your gun has a chainsaw on it.

In Half Life 2, yeah, you’re shooting guys, things, because you’re been told to, but, unlike Bioshock, it doesn’t act like some 1^st year art school student trying way too hard to prove it’s different. It just gets on with being brilliant. Or shit, if you hated it.

See also, please, because everything I write is brilliant and to the point: http://makehands.blogspot.com/2010/04/make-games-that-arent-shit-please.html

The bugs of Fallout New Vegas

2010-10-24T15:22:00.001-07:00

On the one hand Fallout: New Vegas is a phenomenal improvement on Fallout 3. It feels like the middle ground between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, and is what I wanted its predecessor to be. Options are prevalent, and that is the spirit of Fallout 1 and 2, and what should be the spirit of all games. It’s so open ended, and the faction system gives you the feeling that your actions actually have consequences.

The dialogue and characters are so much better than in Fallout 3 it is actually embarrassing. I’ve met interesting characters, who have made me laugh. I can’t remember anyone I met in Fallout 3. My guy was like one of those assholes who never remembers your name (so also like someone with Alzheimer’s).

But Fallout: New Vegas is not a finished game, at all, and the bugs featured range from comical (I’ve seen an old lady slide across the wasteland as if she were sat in a chair), to freaky (the fucking possessed doctor bullshit), to game ending (every time I use the scope on my gun now a computer monitor appears on my screen, as if I’d activated a computer in the game. I don’t know if this is some meta commentary on the person I am but what the hell).

How is this shit allowed? Yeah, I bought this game the day it came out, I wanted to play it. But I would have waited a few more weeks whilst this shit was sorted, you know? This is like going to see a film and the sound is really quiet, and when you listen it’s all been reversed anyway. Or you go to a restaurant, order a meal, and then you have to eat it off the floor, and someone else already ate half of it.

Or you buy a pair of pants from a shop and they fit nice but everyone now and again the person who made them rubs shit in your face.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have just learned I was born on the same day as Gene Kelly and I look nothing like him and this must change.

Also: Kevin VanOrd, if you're reading this, and I know you are, I totally understand what you were saying, and I apologise for using you to illustrate how bad your review was.

Review of Fallout New Vegas Review

2010-10-23T06:19:00.001-07:00

On Gamespot, in their reviews, at the start, they break down the game into the good and the bad.

For example, in Fallout New Vegas, they have this to say:

The Good:

Incredibly huge and detailed world, loaded with stuff to do. Etc.

The Bad:

Some quests are not enjoyable. Main story isn't compelling.

And yet Kevin VanOrd, who wrote this review, sums up by saying:

“Fallout: New Vegas is periodically awesome and consistently compelling.”

http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/falloutnewvegas/review.html?tag=topslot%3Bthumb%3B3&page=2

During the video review (available here: http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/falloutnewvegas/video/6282519/fallout-new-vegas-video-review?hd=1) he talks about the numerous problems of the game, which seem largely technical, and always counters by insisting the game is “really good.”

“Make no mistake, this is an outrageously buggy game, with major technical problems….manages to be totally fun in spite of it all.

Multitude of bugs…things break in pretty amazing ways….crashes are common, the game slows down the more you play, and the loading times get longer and longer. These things wouldn’t be so bad but…missions are broken too. And of course that doesn’t include the problems associated with the aging engine powering this game, that includes horrible pathfinding, NPCs bumbling around in rather pathetic ways and so on.

But make no mistake this is still a really great game. Some of the surprises, like an assassin that chases you round a casino, aren’t really that good.

You probably weren’t expecting things to break to the extent that they do in New Vegas. And yet this still is a really good game.”

I know I’m nitpicking here, arguing semantics, being a pedantic motherfucker, but this review is the culmination of how shit reviews for games are.

They’re so general, so generic and basic, devoid of all personality. They’re so even handed, saying, basically, this game is perfectly average by being so bad and so good at the same time.

I’ve been playing New Vegas, and enjoying it.

I was bored, admittedly, by the time I finished creating a character, but the sense that the world exists outside the player is something absent in so many games. The faction system is a great way of letting the actions of the player affect the world, and shape the experience of New Vegas.

That’s what I hated about Fallout 3, it just had nothing going for it. The combat was tedious, the characters were fucking dreadful, nothing you did had any consequence whatsoever.

New Vegas is what I wanted Fallout 3 to be. Now, do you see there how I wrote I wanted. I’m not saying this review, of a review, is any good, but I have quickly laid out what I didn’t like about Fallout 3, and what I did like, by contrast, in New Vegas.

I can say something is good, or bad, until my tongue wraps round my eyes, and not in a good way, but until you have context, and opinion, that doesn’t mean shit.

Realism in games

2010-10-13T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have this idea about why maybe games aren't taken seriously.

Games are art, technically, but there isn't a single fucking headshot or sex mini game or bulging bicep that can compare to Picasso's Guernica, or Kevin Spacey's disappearing limp in The Usual Suspects, or, I don't know, fucking Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah. Not that a close up of a chainsaw to the face wouldn't have improved any of these works.

Games won't be taken more seriously because you've given characters beards, or because geo coordinates featured in the game correspond to real world locations, and I'm looking at you, Medal Of Honor.

Quote from Greg Goodrich, Medal of Honor executive producer:
"If you plug those geo coordinates those into google earth you'll actually be represented by the actual location... I guess some people, most people, probably won't notice..." - Greg Goodrich (quoted from a gamespot uk inteview, available here)

Yeah, or maybe literally no one will notice even though you have actually told actual people this.

Enslaved: Odyssey To The West features acting, voice and motion capture (I presume, though obviously I have researched this not at all), from Andy Serkis. Fucking ANDY SERKIS. The story is written by Alex Garland, author of, most famously, The Beach. Though the game follows the God Of War formula (take an old folk tale/myth and give it a top down view and special moves), it's working really fucking hard to go beyond that and make an impact in the games industry.

Garland and Serkis are well respected artists, with proven talent, working on games. The game they're featured in has nothing to do with a real world war, but it builds a stronger connection with you than Medal Of Honor, through actual acting and characterisation.

Soldiers, by definition, are meant to be characterless. The HBO mini series, Generation Kill, features soldiers who are characters with actual personalities, and you learn who those people are by spending time with them, in and out of combat. Modern games are flawed, in that sense, in being constant stimulation shit fountains, but there's a balance to be found between exploding heads and artistic expression.

When I say artistic expression I don't mean games like Limbo or Braid, the go to indie arts games. I mean shit like acting, poignance, atmosphere, craft. Call of Duty 4 has shitloads of this in moments such as when Captain Price grabs you and pulls you into a helicopter, or obviously in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion mission. Modern Warfare 2 has none. We've seen it all before, in the first game. All the subtlety is lost in the sequel.

Maybe I'm way, way off on this, and the people making those big FPS games aren't trying to even be taken seriously, don't care about games being taken seriously, and just want to make money, because any game with quadbikes, sand and guns is going to fucking sell right now, but if they are trying to make something artistically valid, the only way to do that is to express something personal and to involve people who know how to do this, and are really fucking good at doing it. Or, if you're going to do it yourself, watch more than just Quantum of Solace and fucking Black Hawk Down.

Realism is people, emotion, not just beards and numbers.

Medal of Honor is out on October 12th, yesterday, (US) October 14th (AU) October 15th (EU) and October 21st (JP) 2010 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. It is a first person shooter. There will be sand in the game.

Pre-ordering Fallout New Vegas

2010-10-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

I never used to pre-order games. Final Fantasy Nine I did, and it was the fruitiest game of all time. I pre-ordered it because of Final Fantasies Seven and Eight. But Nine was set in the least masculine universe ever designed and I had to be a guy with a tail who dressed like a stripper version of a 13-year-old son of a noble from Venice in 1500. It wasn't totally awful or anything, but it wasn't great either, and it was as gay as hell. I shouldn't have pre-ordered Final Fantasy Nine because of Seven and Eight, I should have pre-ordered Seven and Eight because of Seven and Eight. Which obviously doesn't make sense.

So I didn't pre-order any games for a long time. I guess I didn't even really buy many games for the next half a decade or whatever. But whatever fuck you.

My teen reasoning was pretty sound. I liked Eight right after Seven, and this one was also made by the same people and was about saving the world like all the rest. But that massively did not stop them inserting a treehouse city for rat people or a king who was a frog with a moustache in to Nine. I learned my shit. I would not fall for this again. No one would catch me ringing magic bells in Gizamaluke's fucking Grotto or running a postal service for a fucked up race/society of mentally undeveloped cat pandas. But yeah, about a year ago I forgot all this shit. I pre-ordered Modern Warfare 2. And it was fucking awful. Exact same shit as last time. I bought MW2 because I liked a different game (MW1). This is the reasoning of a moron. Still, the punishment didn't fit the crime even remotely. Modern Warfare 2 is fucking atrocious and nothing warrants that shit.

Anyway, fuck what I'd learnt. Maybe I just wanted to spite whatever weird didactic narrative was running through my life (because fuck you, right?) or more likely, not that at all. Regardless, I pre-ordered two more games in the next couple of months and they were both fine. Fuck you, everyone, I win this round etc. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this industry is to trick me in to buying games that are shit. I don't think this is even particularly far from my actual opinion.

Obviously I pre-ordered a game yesterday (I guess it's not obvious if you are a fucking idiot). Half of why I started doing it again is probably due to me rarely being out shopping and feeling like a huge dick if anyone sees me in public with a videogame (had to buy some fucking Xbox charger the other day and I knew the girl behind the counter. Only my wearing a suit saved me from pure shame. She probably thought I had a good job or some other fallacious shit). Plus I guess I have money, and after years of poverty I'm probably reveling in consumerist disposable income joywanks. Actually that's pretty much all of the reasons.

Anyway, game I ordered is/was (the shit is the right tense there?) Fallout New Vegas. After the painless pre-ordering non-upsets that were Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, this thing is already giving me prescient vibes or being a big shit that I got tricked in to willingly paying for.
I liked Fallout a lot, and I think Fallout 2 is more or less the best game ever made, so I guess I hate Fallout 3 a bit more than it merits for just being a shit game. And this game is more or less Fallout 3. But, three people who made Fallout 2 have important if somewhat ambiguous roles in the making of New Vegas, including Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer, who seem like the two guys who give the most shits about the created world that Fallout takes place in overall. Q.f. Avellone's Fallout Bible and Sawyer's 'pen and paper' Fallout RPG. I should mention Feargus Urquhart too, but I'm writing this on my phone so can't really check up on him. Don't even know if I spelt his name right. I got the impression he was more or less the number two guy behind Fallout after Tim Cain anyway. Basically, pretty much the best 3 guys you could get. And apparently it's going to largely ignore Fallout 3 and be a lot more related to 1 and 2. And you can look down the fucking sights of guns, apparently. Which is I feel fairly useful in games where you have to shoot guns. But yeah, the guys who made Final Fantasy Seven also made Nine. But I guess I felt I was being too fucking cynical or whatever, and decided I would buy this game and play it without deciding that it will probably be shit. And, if you pre-ordered it, you got the one-sleeved leather jacket from the first two games (and Mad Max I guess, but I don't like it because Mad fucking Max wore it), and I'd avoid the ignominy of having to go in to a games shop and all that shit. So, decided I'd do it. Went on the website. For no good reason, the 'buy' button is unnecessarily small on this website, even if it is in the right place, so I missed it. Spent a second looking down the page, and there was a video for the game. Fuck, man. I should not have watched that shit. It was atrocious. It was like one of those hordes of meritless Modern Warfare 2 videos where morons who don't know any better upload edited clips of themselves 'no-scoping' their equally worthless opponents. This was interspersed with clips of the eponymous city which made it look way too much like Red Dead Redemption, which I guess wasn't an awful game, just unbelievably boring. I am pretty sure there is not a single line of dialogue in the video. For a series that was originally way more about talking and shooting, a video consisting of no talking, and loads and loads of shooting, is a fucking great sign. Maybe my pals Avellone et al had nothing to do with the video. Maybe that 3 minute video is the whole 20 hour game with all the non-shooting bits taken out. Maybe it is just a really shittily targetted and made video, created by some shit asshole, and the game's actually great. Like how the cover/poster of In Bruges makes it look like complete shit. But probably not, you know? I don't like to form opinions about shit from trailers and demos and press releases, but it's hard to avoid them. Told myself I wasn't going to be put off by that shit video and I ordered the game anyway. If I make a big stink about not buying a game because the demo was good, can't exactly go and not buy a game because the trailer was awful. But god man that trailer was really fucking terrible. Only worse things I can think of are those adverts for Halo. Which are genuinely the worst things that have ever been on television.

So yeah. As I get older, I think I'm going to be ordering nearly all my games online. So I'm likely to order a bunch of shit in my time, like quite possibly Fallout New Vegas. I could probably pre-order shit less though. That would dodge a whole lot of shitty bullets. I'd miss out on my one-sleeved leather jackets, but it would probably be cheaper, and I could feel legitimately superior to all those Ciaran Howleys who will buy something because it's new out and has a big release.

But I'll probably just end up buying a whole load more awful pieces of shit like Modern Warfare 2.

Fallout: New Vegas is out on October 19th (US) October 22nd (EU, AU) and November 4th (JP) 2010 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Infinity Ward: truth speakers

2010-10-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

"The old maps were ditched due to gameplay reasons, according to the developer, because some of the new features being added didn't gel well with the size, layout, and design of the old maps." - Randolph Ramsay, GameSpot AU

http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/modernwarfare2/news.html?sid=6227722&mode=previews&page=2

Ok, yeah, so this is coming a bit late, but it still sums up exactly what is so shit about dlc in games today.

I mean, I didn’t just imagine that some of the cod4 maps have been brought out as dlc for mw2, did I?

So when the developer of mw2, Infinity Ward, said they ditched the old maps because some of the new features being added didn’t gel well with the size, layout and design of the old maps, what they meant is the new features actually fit to an acceptable degree, we’re just going to suck more money from you so you can play them. Is that right? Is that what I was just fucking told here?

And then there’s the story of anthonyaisrael8, who managed to hack the mw2 disc and uploaded a video showing that the dlc maps were already on the fucking disc that you paid money for. If you paid money to download those maps you paid money to unlock THE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME.

When did pride in your product and good value for money stop meaning a fucking thing? When computer games moved onto consoles, apparently.

anthonyaisrael8 was banned, incidentally, from xbox live and youtube for exposing that shit, by this fucking guy, Robert Bowling, director of Communications and Community Manager for Infinity Ward:

And we lap this shit up every day because we’re fucking bored out of our minds.

It reflects badly on the quality of modern warfare 2, and the production values at Infinity Ward, or their moral character, if they can say “some of the new features being added didn't gel well with the size, layout, and design of the old maps,” and then put those maps in anyway and compromise the quality of their game, or just fucking lie to us, the fucking dicks.

THIS GUY:

What Bungie are doing to make me keep giving a shit about Halo (which I never really did anyway).

2010-10-11T10:31:00.001-07:00

Halo Reach only exists because of me, and I am not alone in that, and the reason I own any games now is because of Bungie. When I was a kid my dad had a Mac and I bought all three Marathon games because they were weird and I didn’t understand them and I didn’t finish a single fucking one but, hey, computers ran on magic back then, as far as I was concerned, and the upshot is that I'm now pretty good at pretending to shoot someone in the face.

Marathon, obviously, was Bungie’s first big release and without me, and people like me, buying those games, they would never have gone on to create Halo, and its, at present, ultimate incarnation, which is, sort of, the best Halo game to date.

But would you expect anything else when the series has been steadily improving, shedding fat, tightening things up, with every release? No, I guess probably you wouldn’t, unless you’re someone who ignores causal blah blahs.

But it’s only so good because of the other Halo games. I played this game having only played most of the first Halo and all of the third, so didn’t really give a shit about the story, but I sort of half understood it. I knew there was a story and there was a big war and all that shit, and that it has something to do with this ubermensch, the Master Chief, who is also maybe the single most boring character in any game since the blocks in Tetris and while you could probably argue that the blocks aren’t even characters, I just won’t listen, and Master Chief will still be boring.

If they made a film of Halo it should have been Reach. The campaign expands on the mythos in a way that makes me want to go back and play the series. By giving a different perspective on the war, and giving this sense of struggle, victory and loss, it gives a greater meaning to the events in the games. If you made a film about the Master Chief it would just be like watching someone play a flashier version of Halo, and no one, no one, fucking needs that.

And though there are a few clichés in the story it doesn’t really matter. I mean, they build all this tension to the discovery of the Covenant on Reach, and then you see these aliens and they’re all fruity multicoloured fruits shooting pink pencils at you. The game does an ok job of making you forget you’re fighting monster fruit pastels, but it gives it this sense of tongue in cheek, which is what I think is weird about the bonus dialogue.

I say bonus dialogue, and I mean optional. You can turn on the option to hear “funny” extra bits of dialogue, which appear randomly in combat, though I’ve never heard any and I always have it on. Why make this optional? Why not just make a funny game, what the fuck? YOU DON’T NEED TO BE ASHAMED IF YOU MAKE ME LAUGH, BUNGIE.

So who buys Halo for it’s single player? Haha! No one! That’s who! Fucking right, am I right? Let’s talk multiplayer.

Yeah, it’s ok. It’s ground in gimmicks though, which is sort of its strength.

It’s fucking fantastic that it is nothing like call of duty. Halo is needed in the world of games. But you can boot up Halo, go onto multiplayer, expecting to shoot a motherfucker, and end up racing around on a quadbike trying to reach checkpoints to score points. Then you’re like wtf I thought I was going to shoot someone and the game, and everyone else playing, is like fuck you.

But the reason this is good is because you can play Halo all fucking night. It’s like some kind of multiplayer computer game DJ set. You start with some huge team battle, then a small objective based game, a couple of free for alls, a race, some kind of rocket only game. You can have an evening of this shit, and it works. I can get burned out on COD or Battlefield.

The voting system, the party system, these are the best they have been in any game that has ever been made, as far as I am aware, and whoever designed and implemented that shit should be hired by every computer games company in the world that wants to have multiplayer in their game.

Now I am going to stop writing because I’ve just remembered no one is going to fucking read this.

Review of Hydrophobia Trial game

2010-10-01T12:11:00.001-07:00

The big selling point of Hydrophobia isn't the story. Set in the future, two factions fighting.

It's about water. Revolutionary new water physics and etc, etc. I was interested in this game for a couple of years, now it's out as an arcade game.

To be honest, that's for the best. Sometimes it seems like physics are the reason a game gets made, there's too much of a fuss around physics. I mean it's cool and everything, but fucking The Force Unleashed had all this shit about the physics of breakable objects. I didn't notice that shit at all whilst playing that game.

So fuck it, here's Hydrophobia for £10 on Arcade.

But you know, if the selling point of your game is the physics of water it's a good idea to show more than an 8 second long corridor of water in the fucking trial game, because I'm sure as shit not going to buy the game based on the dreadlocks of the main character, the Irish accent of the tech sidekick or the 1992 graphics/playability/storytelling.

Show me why the water physics are awesome. Let me wipe out a squad of 2nd rate Deus Ex terrorists by flooding a room with sea water. Give me a puzzle. Don't make me watch 10 minutes of boring cutscene and have me run up and down some stairs.

Despite the simplicity of everything I did, and how tedious I found it all, I approved of the details. The amount of climbing equipment strewn around the main character's apartment explains why she is so good at climbing around elevator shafts, for example. The hacking minigame was sort of nicely done too.

It's not a bad thing that this isn't a big budget game, but it seems like it's tried to pretend it is, and that isn't working for it. More water in the demo, and maybe I would have bought the whole thing.

Kane and Lynch, the movie

2010-09-30T00:58:00.001-07:00

Bruce Willis and Jamie Foxx are on board to play the leads, which is fine and everything, and I mean I only played the demo of Kane and Lynch 2, there was no better reason not to play that game than Kane and Lynch 1, but I can’t remember which of the two white main characters was black. Maybe Jamie Foxx is going to white up for this?

I feel like, in a way, this illustrates how out of touch Hollywood and games are with each other, and the entire world.

A film about two white gangsters won’t sell. Kane and Lynch is the most generic possible title, in both forms. Making money seems like the top priority here, well above telling an interesting story that will stick with you for the rest of your life.

The rights to a film adaptation of Kane and Lynch were sold before even the first copy of the game was.

It’s a shit game and it will almost certainly be a shit film.

Ben and I review the film Predators and it has nothing to do with computer games but who gives a fuck

2010-07-18T14:22:00.001-07:00

Pal Budster says:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/07/13/robert-rodriguez-talks-difference-between-predators-trailer-and-film/
“Usually people complain that trailers show way too much. But in this case, there was a nice piece of misdirection used to, as Rodriguez says, get the idea of the movie across while retaining some surprise for those who actually pay to see it. I don’t see the problem.”

"get the idea of the movie across"
doesn't the fucking TITLE DO THAT?
we've got the film "Predator", it's about AN alien that hunts people
now we have the film PREDATORS
I WONDER WHAT THE FUCK THAT WILL BE ABOUT MAYBE SOME ALIENS?

Rad C Hauser says:
this has made me annoyed

Pal Budster says:
“And reveals that on Earth he was a psychopathic murderer”
i hated that part of the film
like
i mean
psychopathic murderer is a role it is pretty easy to show
but when the character has to fucking explain that he is a psychopathic murderer?
it's like what is this?
the fucking 1950s?
where's his top hat and moustache you fucking DICKS

Rad C Hauser says:
hahaha
the characters in that film are SO awful
that shit you said
that rodi rigz wanted each one to be able to be a star of his own film
made me angry
because not one of them can handle even a second sentence of description
and most are described in maybe 3 words

Pal Budster says:
hahaha yeah

Rad C Hauser says:
except the ciaran
who is described with like
one word at most

Pal Budster says:
one
yeah
that fucking russian guy
of course he had a minigun
said Antal, "and would have done this film a disservice because we are not trying to remake or copy the original film."

Rad C Hauser says:
haha
you're not eh
good job

Pal Budster says:
oh you are not copying the original film except for it is in a jungle and there is a minigun and the predators don't appear for 20 minutes and there is the song from the original and soundbites from the original and just fuck you
I think Predator is a good film

Rad C Hauser says:
same

Pal Budster says:
and i mean it's a little kitsch, in a way
but like

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah definitely
it's toned nicely and shit

Pal Budster says:
Predators could have been great, and really enhanced the "Myth" of that film, you know?
but like

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah
but it's just too sci hi

Pal Budster says:
as soon as there was that "action beat" with the dogs
it's like

Rad C Hauser says:
too schlocky cartoony

Pal Budster says:
all the tension is just fucked off
yeah cartoony is right
it's like "oh shit when did george lucas walk past the fucking script writing meeting"

Rad C Hauser says:
hahaha

Pal Budster says:
George Lucas: I have one word for you my friend: dogs and spikes.
Anyone else: that's two words George
George Lucas: THAT WILL BE ONE MILLION DOLLARS PLEASE
Laurence Fishburne as Roland Noland:
I am killing myself

Rad C Hauser says:
haha roland noland yeah when i read that
i was like
DIGGITY DAMN

Pal Budster says:
Changchien, who plays "Hanzo", also stated about his own character: "I guess he used to be a guy who can murder someone without a qualm, but by the time he arrives to the Hunting Camp, he'll no longer be that kind of person. Those things aren't explained in the script, but you'll get it when you see the movie."
I mean, i like the idea there is something goin on in that character’s mind that we don't really see
but at the same time
fucking 1999

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah i like when there's this effort
but that was no effort
that was some turdo times

Pal Budster says:
yeah
like
i mean
maybe that guy was just quietly reflecting the whole time
but when he decides like "oh you know what i don't want to run through this field i will just stand here and fight a predator"
WHAT
it's like
maybe he would decide "now is the time to maybe sacrifice my life"

Rad C Hauser says:
i hated that he killed the predator

Pal Budster says:
but just like

Rad C Hauser says:
made me so mad

Pal Budster says:
in the middle of a fucking run?
yeah man
i hated that whole thing

Rad C Hauser says:
i hated
the "japanese noise" that happened
when he made his decision

Pal Budster says:
hahaha
yeah

Rad C Hauser says:
and i hated that it used the billy music

Pal Budster says:
no one from outisde japan understands japan
yeah
well
that's one of the good things about the first film
you can basically describe any character from the first film in about 5 seconds

Rad C Hauser says:
he died, and it didn't show it

Pal Budster says:
but together there was a chemistry, you could tell these guys were close and it was cool
but yeah also that
but like

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah

Pal Budster says:
fuckin
minigun guy in the first film
he has a little joke with one guy at one point
and then mac is like having a drink in his honor and shit
it suggested something more
made those characters more 3 dimensional
and obv in Predators all the characters have just met each other
but they're ALL really shit
the african guy was vaguely enigmatic
but everyone else was just shit
and like
the fucking lunatic inmate wants to kill him? then he doesn't give a shit?
all the characters were like that

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah totally
yeah mac and blaine are 'friends' in the first one
and it's kind of just fleeted over but it's there and it's nice

Pal Budster says:
yeah
if there had been more tension, like a lot of tension, between the characters in this film
like you were basically surprised they didn't all kill each other
or maybe if they did kill each other more
like fucking

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah they become friends much too quickly

Pal Budster says:
battle royale with predators
rather than just being the shittest x men ever

Rad C Hauser says:
and the only 'nice' guy is the one that indiscriminately fires at them all with his minigun

Pal Budster says:
hahah yeah
also like
i mean
the predators are meant to be hunting the humans
but like
hang on phone
ok hello
yeah
preds hunting humans but like
when the predator kills fuckin russian
it's like
in a corridor, having been shot in the chest, as the guy is running away
just doesn't seem very hunterly?
more like
he's the bad guy? in a sci fi horror film?

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah they definitely are shitter
In an interview, Carl Weathers said the actors would secretly wake up as early as 3:00 a.m. to work out before the day's shooting. Weathers also stated that he would act as if his physique was naturally given to him, and would work out only after the other actors were nowhere to be seen.

Pal Budster says:
hahaha
what the fuck
also, going back to the "hunter" thing
and without wanting to talk about what does and doesn't make sense in the film Predators, because obviously on a fundamental level NONE OF IT makes any fucking sense
but like
if you took a human and made it fight a lion in hand to hand combat obviously the lion would win
and that's what hunting is about
that's why people use guns and set traps and try to out smart the lion
but the predators
a naked predator would kick the absolute shit out of a human
and they're invisible
and they can blow up spaceships by pushing a button
it's like
what's the fucking point in hunting anyone, you know?
and i mean
the predator in the first film
comes to earth
sneaks around, kills people, splits up the group
it's a hunter
and it's trying not to be detected by humans
and when it IS
it blows itself up to shit, presumably not just as an honour thing, but because it has failed it's mission of remaining undetected
all that alien technology has to go

Rad C Hauser says:
yeah

Pal Budster says:
i can understand the aliens doing that
but putting humans on some shitto alien planet
it's like
what the fuck fuck off
and like we were all saying
that yakuza guy
why even put him in a fucking jungle?
what the FUCK is he going to do there, apart from take his fucking shoes off?
You don't hunt a lion by taking a lion and putting it in the fucking sea
FUCK OFF PREDATOR DICKS YOU ARE DUMB AS SHIT

Rad C Hauser says:
hahahaha
yeah imagine how much better it would have been
if the predator beat all the characters on their own terms
like fucked danny trejo's wife and stole all his coke
beat the yakuza at gambling and dishonoured him

Pal Budster says:
hahaha
i would love it if predators were just really shit at urban combat
and like the predator in predator 2 was the best they had ever done

Rad C Hauser says:
haha

Pal Budster says:
and every time they see a building they are hugely embarassed

Rad C Hauser says:
it set them back decades when he died

Splinter Cell

2010-04-29T17:30:00.001-07:00

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction is a franchise within a franchise, much like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction is basically a waste of time.

Tom Clancy is also indirectly responsible for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, a sequel within a franchise, within a franchise, and I just realised the main characters in both Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 look the exact same. Are they actually the same person, or is it just that everyone who produced this game is kind of early forties and has stubble?

Despite the fact he’s a clone of a character with even less personality, I grew to like Sam, the main character, and part of it was just how good at his job he is, and part of it was the little quips he makes to himself. Sometimes when you grab a guy you’ll whisper hi there into his ear. It makes Sam seem a little more casual, more off the clock, and since he’s meant to be this renegade ex-agent, it makes sense.

But by the end of the story I still don’t really care about him, or his friends. The narrator, who you play at one point, is meant to be Sam’s best buddy that he loves like a brother kind of a thing. They build that connection by making you play this character during the most uninspired mission in this, and perhaps any, game, but more on that later. Friendships come about through bonding experiences, sure. But friendships are about people, and there are 0.5 personalities in this game. Sam hints at having one, but he’s just so boring. His buddy makes all the conversation, tries to make a couple of jokes, which aren’t funny, and as such illicit no response from Sam. There’s no engaging dialogue, and I couldn’t care less about the characters as a result.

And the villains: you have to wonder what these guys do when they get home from work. How do they spend their spare time after a day of shooting scientists in an out of town warehouse for no reason? What kind of TV do these guys watch? Do they go to BBQs ever?

What I enjoy about stealth games, i.e. what I enjoyed about Metal Gear Solid (among other things), is just getting fucking ruthlessly efficient at what I’m doing. Killing 20 plus people without any of them knowing they might be about to die. Maybe this is because I’m just nice, you know? Like, I don’t want to put the fear of God in some minimum wage worker just before I drop his face into my knee and break his neck.

But what a lot of stealth games suffer from, and Splinter Cell is truly one of them, is some of the worst AI in any game that has ever existed ever. Seriously, the AI in this game is on a par with the ghosts in Pacman, or a wasp.

The guards the bad guys hire must be real misanthropists, since they clearly don’t like each other. They never cover each other, or even talk to each other. They don’t spend any time together even. They just walk around by themselves shouting abuse at you.
And if two of them set aside their differences to stand there, facing each other, it’s always around the corner from someone who is just hanging out by themselves, so you can silently kill them and do your magical execution spell on the guards you can’t sneak up on.

The stealth system in this game is as follows: when you’re in the shadows everything is black and white, and this means you’re invisible. The bad guys are never black and white, which doesn’t make any fucking sense, but I’ll forgive the game because, though it is tiny, this black and white idea is still an idea. What’s less innovative is the mission briefing projection bullshit.

Every time you start a mission your objective is projected on a wall or some such nearby. This doesn’t look that cool, though I get the feeling, from watching interviews, that the developers were pissing themselves from the eyeballs when they thought of it. It is practical though, for example when you turn a corner and there is your objective sprayed on the wall in front of you. It keeps the rhythm of the game going, helps direct your attention, and this is important. It’s just…Isn’t there a way to make something like that more relevant? The film projector motif plays no role in the story or content of the game, it’s just a cool little visual gimmick and, in a way, sums up how vacuous this game is.

The tutorial, for example, takes place in the past, as Sam recalls telling his daughter about how cool shadows are, how if you’re in shadows bad guys can’t see you (though obviously it turns out later that if bad guys are in shadows you can still see them just fine. The moral of this game? If you’re bad, you glow. Live it up, dicks.)

Your daughter complains about being afraid of the dark because maybe there’s monsters in it. You tell her how to make the monsters go away, and seconds later some actual rapists are actually breaking into your house and you just fucking kill them all. Then your daughter gets all indignant, what did you do to them daddy, it’s like make your fucking mind up, kid.

Later on, however, there’s a fairly long scene where the plot twist, or something, is explained to you. I wasn’t listening really at all. A DJ Shadow song plays in the background, the voice acting is pretty good, and though the characters are talking about other characters I’ve never heard of and know nothing about I was fucking pumped about taking cover in some shadows. Except that’s not what the game wanted me to do. I walked into a room, was instantly spotted by three guys, so I took cover. But I realised I had automatically tagged them all, and was able to pull off my magic execution instant kill power up attack.

This section, as you escape an exploding building, is meant to be this action run scene. You automatically tag everyone in a room, and then you can press a button to kill them all. It would have been pretty cool, pretty fast paced, except I still thought I was playing a stealth game, since Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction is a fucking STEALH GAME, so the fast pace was somewhat marred by my crawling through the first 3 rooms of this section before I figured out what the fuck was going on. That, coupled with the Middle East soldier mission made me think the game didn’t know what it wanted to be.

Normally in games like this I feel nervous. In Metal Gear Solid, for example, I feel like I’m on the run, like I need all the help I can get and don’t have an advantage in the world. Splinter Cell is different, and it is refreshing. You feel like you’re in control of the environment, and everyone in your way is just fucked, and that, as much as anything, makes the game a lot of fun.

Without its stealth system this game would be utter shit, which it proves to you by taking away the entire stealth system for a mission where you play Sam’s buddy, a soldier, who must rescue Sam in some Middle East excursion. Instead of an ok stealth game you have what equates to a really shit Gears of War with, effectively, a world war 2 rifle, since if you fire more than one bullet in 2 months the aiming reticule grows to the size of a planet, and you can’t hit anything. I mean yeah, I played the game on realistic mode, but did these guys have any training at all? Like when they were in the army? Which is more or less the only place people train you how to fire guns accurately?

And yes, thank you for asking, I would like to talk about Realistic mode. Realistic does not mean difficult. Sometimes things in the real world are difficult, realistically. Maths tests, sometimes, for example, or climbing a mountain. Maybe wrestling a body building shark, or getting into space are things which are hard, that I guess you can do in real life.

Realistic does not just mean you have less health and get spotted easier. It would mean that Sam’s arms get tired when he hangs onto a window ledge, with his fingers, for 10 minutes at a time. It would mean if you had a human shield his friends wouldn’t immediately start shooting, which they always do, regardless of whether or not he died. Realistic would mean if you destroyed a urinal by slamming someone’s head into it they would fucking die. They wouldn’t get up, take a swing at you, and be able to think and answer your questions. They probably wouldn’t be able to shit themselves.

Am I being pedantic about the use of realistic here, or am I just fucking correct?

Throw in a couple of aiming glitches (the amount of times I’ve been hidden, lined up a perfect shot and it’s all been ruined because Sam leans back to fire, thus missing wildly and leading to my detection and inevitable death has probably given me cancer) and you have an average game, weak on story and characters (and I can think of maybe 3 games which aren’t) but strong on visceral combat, with a couple (literally 2) of visual flourishes.

The Passing

2010-04-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

There has never been a better zombie game than Left 4 Dead 2. Dead Rising was good, and it gave us what we all want from a massive zombie apocalypse: the ability to just kick the shit out of some fucking zombies. I mean Resident Evil, get it together yeah? For fuck’s sake, it’s like great yeah, there’s some kind of evil conspiracy/company plot but can I cut a zombie’s head off with a fucking scythe, or ride a motorbike down an escalator? Can I fuck.

And it is fun to turn a zombie into paste with an automatic shotgun or a chainsaw, but it’s more fun if your friend is watching and it’s even more fun if he’s doing it with you.

You: Dude, I just used my golf club on that zombie’s head and now it doesn’t exist anymore.

Your friend: I know, I fucking just hit this guy with a samurai sword and his intestines were flying around like one of those weird balloon mascot things they have at car showrooms.

You: I fucking love it when that happens. I just get all those intestines and shove them in my mouth and chew on them oh god I love it so much.

Your friend: I fucking know, holy shit I think I just saw a flying jawbone.

Left 4 Dead understands that, and that is what the entire game pivots on. The gameplay is great, but without other people this game would drag. The characters’ personalities are great. I mean I thought humour in games was dead until I heard Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2’s stories about his buddy Keith, but that only goes so far.

It’s one thing to shut the door on a computer game character and listen to their screams as they’re torn asunder by a swarm of the undead, but when it’s someone you know and they’re so angry they’re calling you, for example, a nobasaurus? It just gets you right there, you know? Makes you feel great.

Left 4 Dead 2 expands on everything that was good about Left 4 Dead and improves it with better characters, more variety of weapons and environments and, crucially, changing the rhythm of the levels.

No longer do you reach an elevator and have to wait for 5 minutes, holding off waves of zombies, until it fucking arrives. Now you have to sometimes run around a fenced enclosure to shut off an alarm, fighting hordes of zombies, or get some cola from a shop so a fuel tanker explodes. Yeah, that’s right. There’re explosions.

The only thing that could make Left 4 Dead 2 better, frankly, is if Valve made the zombie apocalypse happen in real life, and instead of zombies trying to kill you if it was babes trying to make out with you. And this is where the new downloadable content, The Passing, falls down.

It’s an extra campaign, three chapters, and the new survivors meet the old survivors. If you played the first game you’ll have bonded with those characters and it’ll be great to see them again. It’s just a shame the characters don’t really talk.

I mean there’s some random dialogue which changes more or less every time you play. Sometimes you meet Zoe right at the start and there’s a little back and forth between her and Ellis. Sometimes it’s Francis you see, and Nick calls him a vest wearing monkey, or some shit.

But man, if that was me in either group, I would have so many questions. I would talk to them for hours if I could. But that’s not really what this game is about. Valve, I imagine, don’t want you to feel like you’re playing the role of your character in some kind of Zombies teen drama like Well I was dating Francis but then he was literally torn in half. The game is about you, and your friends, and how you hang out, go to a mall, stand about in a swamp and visit the funfair, and also how everyone is dead and you have to kill them again because they’re zombies.

The characters are almost a sideline. They’re there to give depth to the world, to indicate there’s more going on than just what you see when you’re playing, and I think, ultimately, Valve have the balance between story telling (or story hinting) and insane violence just about right.

So here it is! Valve have released actual downloadable content. Not some bullshit already on the disc shit like Modern Warfare 2 gave us (for twice the price of the Left 4 Dead 2 dlc, which Valve wanted to be free anyway, but Microsoft demanded they charge for). Thank you Modern Warfare 2. You truly are the shit of shits.

The Passing also contains Mutation mode which is going to bring some more variety to online play, with Valve changing the parameters of the game every week or so. Valve have a real interest in their customer community, which is commendable and fucking rare in the world of computer games, and they deserve as much recognition for that as they do for making fantastic games.

make games that aren't shit please

2010-04-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

Technology has run away with games.

Games and films are compared all the time.

The big difference is film has a heritage that games don’t.

The first film, Strongman Sandow, or whatever it was, which came out in 1890: that’s pong, or space invaders, or whatever.

The silent films translate into Doom, or Super Mario Bros. The graphics are awful, though at, presumably, the peak of what was possible, but there’s a retro charm there.

Even then the stories in silent films are better than their game counterparts. Although admittedly this system of comparison is something I have subjectively made up. And it took me about five seconds to do it.

It has taken films years, literally one hundred and twenty of them, to get from that basic Space Invaders shit, Strongman Sandow, The Great Train Robbery, to where they are now.

This is a debatable point, but technologically speaking games have reached the same point as films in around a fifth of the time.

There hasn’t really been a game like Napoleon, a film by Abel Gance from 1927. He would tie a camera to a pole and film from the side of a running horse. No one had done shit like that in films, and no one has done shit like that in games.

You have games like Portal which mess around with physics systems in games, or Shadow of the Colossus, which mess with the boss fight/minion structure, but these examples are few and far between.

There are too many games like Dante’s Inferno, which are just big visual spectaculars, doing nothing inventive or refreshing for games.

The films we love and the guys who make them; Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, they loved film and they studied it and drew in all kinds of inspirations from the history of film, art, and storytelling in general to make great films. Films which are regarded as classic, timeless works of art which have touched at least two generations of people.

Games don’t have this, because the people who make them think going from 2D to 3D is a beautiful achievement. Would The Incredibles really be a worse film if it was a 2D cartoon?

People who make games think games have developed because of health regen and cover systems, because of open world games and bosses that fill the screen.

These things can be great, but a shit film is still shit even if it has a great actor in it.

It’s not even that games designers need to look at old films. They need to be looking at everything; the films of Tarkovsky, documentaries about Spanish explorers, books about medieval torture, the paintings of Mark Rothko, sunny days.

Then they need to make games which can stand up next to that shit. Or else everyone will keep making shit games that steal from other shit games.

Hydrophobia

2010-03-31T14:32:00.001-07:00

Alun Richards: "Looks every bit as fucking retarded as I'd imagined."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO0nIBzzOEE

Phil Duncan: "'Bioshock with tits' - one of the comments on youtube...I think its a quote from the Lead Designer"

Alun Richards: "Bioshock with blowjobs. Dolphin blowjobs."

Roland Le Good: "Bioshock needed more dolphin blowjobs. Everything does, now I think about it. Good examples: University, the bible, every single item of clothing I own."

Roland Le Good: "So I finally realised there was a video link here and watched it. You know what this game is? Someone built a good physics engine for water and they put together a shitty, ultra basic story around it. 'There should be terrorists and they should be somewhere with a lot of water. Where in the world is there a lot of water? IN THE SEA. I'm going on a break.'
But who knows? Maybe the water physics will be shit too."

What Mass Effect 2, and all games, should have been

2010-03-03T16:01:00.001-08:00

Where does it come from? I don't know. Ben sent it to me. (click for the full show)

hey do you remember

2010-03-03T10:27:00.001-08:00

when infinity ward made such a fucking huge deal about Modern Warfare 2's release, resetting the leaderboards and everything at the midnight of it's release and banning anyone who played it early and in the end it didn't fucking matter because it was just a game?

why I don't own mass effect anymore (maybe)

2010-02-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Ciaran
also, did you give me roland's copy of mass effect?

Alun
yes
I may have told you that

Ciaran
why?

Alun
maybe not
he was away in America

Ciaran
no, you told me it was my copy
you a trixy one alun

Alun
I definitely never said it was your copy
that would have been a lie
and wise men NEVER lie, as the Jesuits like to say

Ciaran
when I said "you can have bioshock if you return my copy of mass effect"

Alun
think about it

Ciaran
and you gave me mass effect without mentioning anything about it not being my copy

Alun
all I needed to do to satisfy you was to provide you with a copy of the game
why would I have come out and TOLD you it was yours?
I would have voluntarily perjured myself

Ciaran
which makes you a terrible person

Alun
for nothing

Ciaran
you still owe me a copy of mass effect then

Alun
well okay

Ciaran
until such a game is returned to my posession, you shall be known as 'awful person'

Alun
I was sure I'd told you; evil deeds never enter my mind

Ciaran
nope, 'awful person'

Alun
well okay
and I'll call you "Ciaran the Speccy Fatso from Swindon"
see?
see how little a name means?
so don't even bother
unless you want to call me "Fragrant Al the Comely Gal"

Ciaran
but your moniker is deserved
im not from swindon

Alun
you could be
all it takes is for a story to circulate
100 years from now

Ciaran
I do not care how my name is carried after death

Alun
when my memoirs are the only historical document of the 20th/21st centuries
such lack of foresight!

Ciaran
it is only in LIFE that we make our name

Alun
that's why they call you "Speccy"

Ciaran
and your is justly 'awful person'

Alun
"I remember my first meeting with Ciaran. He was an enormously fat man, and, being unable to walk, he had to be carried around by a team of weightlifters. These weightlifters all went on to be Olympic Champions, with the result that Ciaran was knighted for 'Services to British Athletics'. Ironically."

this week in stupid games

2010-02-05T11:45:00.001-08:00

I’ve been looking for a game to replace Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I was hoping it would be Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but it won’t be. Mostly because it feels like the world, your character, and all the walls are made of a weird jelly. I’m distracted by how wobbly everything seems when I move around and then I’m being shot at by an army of bored looking clones, and I can’t tell, when I return fire, if I’ve even hit them, never mind if I’ve killed a motherfucker.

Aliens vs Predator won’t be replacing it either, the demo of which came out this week. The predator is not as tough as you’d expect, the marine is totally over powerful and the aliens best weapon is confusion and the game throws confusion at you by the shit ton. Most people don’t even know how to change weapon, or select what species they want to be.
I think having free for all as the only available game mode in the demo is a mistake too.
The stealth kills are either the best or worst aspect of this game. Only the aliens and predators can perform them, and they take so fucking long to do that I’m normally killed when someone comes up behind me to shove a tail up my asshole. It normally ends up like a queue of rancid murder. You turn a corner and see people lining up to fuck each other to death.

But I will say this for COD, the controls are great. And Aliens vs Predator has acknowledged this by copying them completely for the marine class, which I actually think is a pretty good call. But it does mean if you’re good at COD you’ll be great at Aliens vs Predator, since it’s almost the same, except sometimes guys are invisible or on the ceiling. I heard a guy shout "what the shit" when someone grabbed him from behind, and it seems like that is the bassline for this game.

I also became obsessed with Mass Effect 2 this week, pumping in 30 of my waking hours, and probably more whilst I was sleeping. It got to the point where I wondered why I couldn’t skip conversations in real life, and why it didn’t load when I went up and down the stairs.

Mass Effect 2 is basically about this guy who is trying to become the world record holder for sleeping with the most aliens, ever. The plot twist is that two of the aliens you can sleep with are actually humans (didn’t see that one coming, and that’s not a sex joke).
Sheperd, the main character, has also kidnapped an entire crew to pilot his ship, The Normal, which backfires when he doesn’t let his chef leave to even buy some ingredients, so he goes out to get it himself. And when he gets back the crew have shrunk themselves down and gone inside his body, so he has to go in after them. The lack of realism here is where the game falls down. Case in point: you actually have to meet and kill Sheperd’s skeleton. What makes less sense is it looks like it fits entirely in his stomach. Otherwise the game is good, and has some nice conversations.

Thankyou for your time.

This week: Ben and I discuss Mass Effect 2, which I have played for more than a day, because I'm unemployed.

2010-02-02T16:34:00.001-08:00

Roland says:
so i think shephard can die in the final mission

Fal Killmer says:
mass effect 3 will suck for those guys
put in the disc
'do you want to import your char from mass effect 2? GAMEOVER'

Roland says:
what mass effect needs
is more character interaction between yr crew
it doesn't really feel very homely on yr ship
but
i would like to see more of the universe
from a different perspective
like
everything feels very pristine
somehow sort of rigid and weird

Fal Killmer says:
ship needs more carpet

Roland says:
the best parts of the game, when it is most believable
are when people are talking to you
and you realise they've really thought out the history of this place, and how everything affects everything
but yr crewmates never hang out
you never see people just doing dumb shit, like moving crates and things
or whatever

Fal Killmer says:
i definitely agree with that
they never talk to each other
they just sit in their alloted spots

Roland says:
Yeah
the world doesn't feel lived in, but has a lot of background

Fal Killmer says:
i think they put a lot more effort in to the characters this time
which is a good show since there's like twice as many
but they still would be the one thing that would make it a lot better

Roland says:
yeah
but like
samara
totally unnecessary character

Fal Killmer says:
yeah they could trim off a few
if it meant making them better
but i mean it wouldn't be that hard to write a few more lines
just have them chatting shit to each other is all i want

Roland says:
yeah same

Fal Killmer says:
and yeah more shit that could just change on your ship
'where'd this table go'
'who fucking knows'
'oh it's over here kaidan alenko is playing poker on it'

Roland says:
what they need
you have made me realise
they need a scene
like that one in the wire
when herc and carv are trying to move that table in different directions

Fal Killmer says:
man yes
just some shit like that
the characters need to exist independently of sheperd

Roland says:
yeah
also
sheperd
i nearly really like him
but when he's being good
he seems like such a tool
and when he's being bad
it seems so forced

Fal Killmer says:
renegardpard
but yeah

Roland says:
i think he needs a slightly more desperate personality

Fal Killmer says:
he's best doing the neutral responses
they need a neutral emotion

Roland says:
Yeah

Fal Killmer says:
and if you have loads
you can deliver really neutral un-engaging speeches
to solve problems

Roland says:
Yeah

Fal Killmer says:
'well i think both sides have some points but what's important is that we move on to the next station'

Roland says:
yeah
"I don't feel one way or the other about either of you, but not in a negative way, let me assure you, we can keep this dynamic exactly as it is"

Fal Killmer says:
neutral bar man
maybe some neutral button on screen
you had to press it to stop yourself doing things

Roland says:
yeah
then sheperd just pulls out a newspaper
browses it, with casual interest
i bought an alien porn mag in the game
but i only just remembered
i haven't read it

Fal Killmer says:
you can't fucking read it and it sucks

Roland says:
oh WHAT
that's BULLSHIT

Fal Killmer says:
i know

Roland says:
Man

Fal Killmer says:
i want to complain

Roland says:
the game would be so much better if
in cutscenes that were mostly between two other people
in the back ground sheperd was always just reading it
so like
samara and that girl are fighting
it pans round
sheperd is just reading this porn mag
turning the page for the centrefold
all comedy games are just point and clicks man

Fal Killmer says:
man fuck for real
they need to let us make games

Roland says:
yeah
what the hell

Fal Killmer says:
it's a fucking outrage

talkin' bout blocks

2009-12-15T20:28:00.001-08:00

fuck all other games

Call of Duty: Medieval Warfare

2009-12-05T21:30:00.000-08:00

Ben says:
and i still want a classical warfare game
or at least medieval

Roland says:
yeah man me too
can you imagine that shit

Ben says:
imagine that shit
WHOA
instead of switchin to pistol
SWITCH TO YOUR SLING

Roland says:
it would be great to have like a huge, 40 vs 40 lag fest search and destroy
where one team has to assault a castle or something
and like fucking catapults are coming at you
everyone has to fall back

Ben says:
DEFUSE THE WICKER BASKET FULL OF GUNPOWDER

Roland says:
PUT SOME WATER ON THERE
TREAD ON THE FUSE

Ben says:
shooting bows
killstreak would be like
a horse would appear and you could be cavalry

Roland says:
yeah
or a flock of birds attacks someone
doesn't do any damage
but they can't see right
or like
you get a 3 kill streak
and it makes someone trip over

Ben says:
COME TO ME MY FALCON
falcons up in the air
UAV
shoot it down by putting bread on the floor
it flies down to eat that shit

Roland says:
oh man
this game
too hilarious
and everyone can wear football shirts anyway

Ben says:
it would also have the benefit of not taking itself as gayly seriously as cod does

Roland says:
yeah

Ben says:
and there would be no fucking wizards

Roland says:
but who would carry bread into combat
that would have to replace your ye olde claymore

Ben says:
bread would be a high level unlock clearly
i want some indiana jones temple shit instead of c4 and claymores
ewok shit
log falls on you
rock rolling down hill at you
crossbow bolt firing in to legs

Roland says:
and when that happens it goes in slow motion
the camera pans round to your guys face so you can see him scream in agony
and it's sean bean's face
and then he gets shot to shit with arrows out of nowhere

Ben says:
your drinking horn is sliced in two
instead of perks
you would just have a variety of heartening beverages in your drinking horns

Roland says:
one should make you instantly sick
and then everytime you respawn after dying
your character is still just being sick
can barely move
until the game ends

Ben says:
they should all do that
frankly the terrible health of medieval times should not be under represented

Roland says:
yeah
if you get a 25 kill streak
instead of a nuke
everyone gets the flu

Ben says:
everyone would have tuberculosis

Roland says:
or cholera
or the bubonic plague
just thousands of rats and fleas swarm the screen
and it goes black
and you can just hear coughing and screaming for about 5 in game hours
then the scoreboard comes up and it's a double loss for both teams

Ben says:
there would be animal shit all over the place
and there'd be thousands of peasants all over the place all the time
gettingin the way of your swordswipes

Roland says:
how do we get this game made
i want to play it so badly

Ben says:
yeah man maybe we just take it on to dragon's den
no grenades
just bags of sand
get in everyone's plate armour

Roland says:
did they even have sand then?

Ben says:
make them really itchy

Roland says:
so yr guy has to stop and scratch for a few minutes
gets arrowed

Ben says:
i want a little peasant narrating everything
SIR YOU ARE TOO ITCHY TO FIRE YOUR BOW
SIR YOUR TUBERCULOSIS IS ACTING UP TODAY, YOU CANNOT WIELD ANY HALBERDS OR TWO HANDED SWORDS

Roland says:
oh man halberds
if you could use a halberd on modern warfare 2
i would use NOTHING else
i wouldn't even have any perks i don't give a fuck

Ben says:
would be so great just guarding a bombsite
just chopping every single guy in half as they approach

Roland says:
the bombsite would be like a pig
or a bale of hay
you could tell who had the "bomb" because they'd be carrying a flaming torch
to set fire to your pig

Ben says:
everyone kicking the pig out of the way of the attackers
throwing it over walls

Roland says:
someone ties it to a horse
you have to set up a net
all the while your guys are like "throwing a pig!" and "Verily!"

Game Pitches

2009-11-25T11:11:00.000-08:00

Open your eyes. You are Magnus Ahlquist, a young Swedish symphonist of the 1930s. You are standing in the Berwald Hall in Stockholm; before you stretch the expectant faces of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, instruments poised like weapons from a distant, long-dead culture. In less than two months time, Germany will invade Poland and World War 2 will begin.

You are here to conduct the premier of your new symphony, which you have entitled "The Sallow Dove." It is a fraught, anxious work; you drew inspiration from Sibelius' Fourth. The hall's 1300 seats are all occupied, and a successful performance tonight will propel you into the ranks of Europe's most eminent living composers. Not that it makes much difference, because in less than a year you will be in Munich, living under a new identity and passing secrets to the Allies.

You try to calculate how much time has passed since you took to the stage. Have you waited too long? Are the audience becoming restless? It is impossible to tell; the room and everything in it justs hangs there, as though it were a sophisticated network of marionettes, with you standing motionless at the strings. I am powerful, you think. Then you feel ashamed and absurd. Your 31st birthday is two weeks away; a month before your 33rd, you will be shot dead in the street by an agent of the Gestapo. His name is Walther Fuhrmann. You wonder if you should have reduced the dynamic in the opening brass passages of the fourth movement.

You wonder if the choral in movement two should be faster. If the string scoring is too thin, too frail. How many people in the audience will cry? When and why? If more cry than don't, have you written a good piece?

When you were a child you fell from a tree on to a rock, and now the scar on your back is beginning to tingle. The bullet that kills you will pass through this scar; hot metal will triumph where cold stone failed. If you knew about this now, would it change how you will feel about helping with the war effort? About fate? (Is the scar, which sits over your heart, a warning to guard that heart from grand causes?) How many more symphonies might you have composed, had you lived to old age? How many would it take to annul that beautiful and confused sacrifice, whose worth neither you, your superiors nor even the Gestapo will ever be able to calculate?

The baton twitches in your hand without warning; you wonder whether you are just another marionette, after all. A message comes on screen: "Press A to begin conducting the debut of Magnus Ahlquist's 5th Symphony." You wait for a stranger's thumb to fall.

Dragon Age Discussion

2009-11-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

Ciaran says:
so I bought Dragon Age, it makes me smile

Roland says:
everytime i go on xbox live
and it says Anoush is a level 12 human warrior it cracks me up
i've not played dragon age yet
i do want to
but i heard it's not that good

Ciaran says:
well
it's basically Neverwinter Nights
with dialogue that's not quite as good as Mass Effect thrown in

Roland says:
admittedly i liked the dialogue in mass effect, generally
almost every aspect of that game that wasn't to do with the main plot was absolute shit though
it was like
"Ok we have a good game, now let's fill it with awful useless shit"

Ciaran says:
yeah exploring planets
wasn't fun
at all

Roland says:
no
in fact
what's that thing
that's the opposite of fun?
is it...not fun?

Ciaran says:
defun

Roland says:
defun yes of course
"oh this planet looks exactly the same as all those other planets, in that it's completely barren and devoid of any land marks or anything interesting whatsoever"
"good job we're here having fun"
when is the new one even out?

Ciaran says:
next year
I shall buy it
apparently they made it better
like assassin's creed 2
which is supposed to be considerably better

Roland says:
yeah i've heard it's good
shame
as i have no money

Ciaran says:
haha same
I havent even got fifa
or call of duty

Roland says:
i've got call of duty
it's quite good

Ciaran says:
I could only afford dragon age because it was £26 on pc

Roland says:
oh
you're PC playing
the PC
what a fall from grace

Ciaran says:
yeah, I heard it was better on pc

Roland says:
1995 - "PCs are sort of shit, but haha i love them"
2009 "get this fucking PC THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME I HATE IT"
the plot
for dragon age
sounds so generic
in fact
isn't it the same plot as oblivion
except with characters that aren't the same as empty coke cans

Ciaran says:
actually
it's the same plot as mass effect
you are a man
recruited in to this elite order
OH WAIT FUCK EVERYTHING GOING WRONG
THERES SOME KIND OF EVIL SCOURGE THREATENING US
AND THIS GUY WHO IS LIKE GOOD AND A SAVIOUR
IS TURNING ON US

Roland says:
uh ohhhhhhhhhhhhh

Ciaran says:
WE MUST TRAVEL TO FOUR LOCATIONS TO MAKE SHIT RIGHT

Roland says:
it would be good
if it was the exact same bad guys from mass effect
those alien squid fuck ups
and there was just no way to beat them

Ciaran says:
Saren/Loghain

Roland says:
because all you have is swords and a fireball

Ciaran says:
there's a complete breakdown of how bioware's plots are exactly the same
and the developer actually responded to it with something like "fuck off, it works"

Roland says:
nice
oh games
when will you learn
right
well
i'm probably gonna copy/paste this into make hands
i'm literally doing it right now
if you want to stop me you better travel to four locations and cast a spell

Modern Warfare 2

2009-11-19T18:18:00.000-08:00

Most of the time I feel like my life totally lacks direction. When this feeling isn't completely crippling and I'm lying, numb, arms limp, basically dead, staring a blank computer screen, slowly allowing the blinding light from my 200" monitor to wear away at my retinas or gibbering and moaning about how everyone in the world has got it together apart from me, I play games.

Modern Warfare 2 is the only game I have been playing the last few days.

This isn't because it's good. It's because some part of me believed Cod4 was one of the greatest games ever made. I would play that game every day with my friends and comrades. We'd just chat shit and sometimes shoot a guy. Oh, but it's really balanced and well polished and etc, etc and really, who cares?

We're playing Modern Warfare 2 now, instead. And sometimes it's a good distraction. If I can allow it to make me forget about the awful, every-day-the-same-nothing-bullshit of my life. But you know, masturbation is the same. And really so is writing shit like this. And neither this writing nor Modern Warfare 2 is as good as jerking off.

The biggest problem with Modern Warfare 2 is that there is no point in not using an assault rifle at all, for anything. If you need to kill a guy, from far away or close quarters, or if you want to tame a wild horse or open a Cajun style restaurant: you only need the Scar-H.

Sure, I've made some fruity classes and named them things like "fear" and "tremendous poopan'" and they utilize sniper rifles or SMGs. But the Scar-H, or the M16, or FAMAS, or M4 are like an SMG and a sniper rifle COMBINED. THEY ARE PERFECT.

But really, playing COD:MW2 with your buddies is the best part. When you have a great back and forth and you own some useless fuck who was chatting shit the entire time you were in the lobby, that's what the game is great for.

So what about all the guns? Maybe this should be a casual game for the games lover.
Or maybe this just means masturbation is better with more people?

Zebra Trooper: Wall Street Intervention

2009-11-17T20:32:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is beginning to get silly. Just one year after the release of Fighting Zepplin Clerics, the award-winning strategy game in which rival theologians do battle in the skies over a mythical medieval Europe, France's premier indie studio, Pantalon Rouge, returns with yet another bizarre and brilliant concoction in Zebra Trooper: Wall Street Intervention.

Imagine this: it's August 1929, and the Wall Street Crash, one of the most devestating events in global financial history, is just two months away. When it comes, it will send the western world into a deep recession, the most notorious result of which will be the Second World War. If only someone were able to intervene!

Well, help is at hand, in the form of the legendary Zebra Force Combat Patrol, a team of time-travelling commandos from the year 2253. It turns out that the Wall Street Crash was the pivotal event in human history; it sent us off down a path of misery and destruction that was to culminate in something called the "Szymanowski Shit Loop," whereby the entire history of Homo sapiens, from roughly 180,000BC to 2255AD, repeats indefinitely, but with everything omitted apart from the bad bits: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Black Death, the Holocaust etc. And the Zebras represent our last chance to turn the tide.

The player assumes the role of Pzilpop Demitard, the Zebras' courageous leader, at the moment he completes his time jump to 1929. Unfortunately, his genes have been disrupted by the journey, transforming him into a bunch of seedless grapes. But just as it seems that all is lost, an elderly rabbi named Josiah Goldman eats one of the grapes, and by some miracle Demitard is able to take control of his body.

Consequently, the player has to proceed through the whole game in the role of a time commando controlling an ailing old man; the health system works a bit like the one in Assassin's Creed, in that when Demitard takes damage he becomes "desynchronised," and in order to recover he must eat more grapes. However, there are only 23 grapes to begin with, and they are never replenished, even when you start a new game. Additionally, Demitard must do his best not to offend the rabbi's sensibilities, so he must avoid eating non-kosher food, working on the Sabbath and owning a strip club.

The game's early stages involve the infiltration of the stock exchange: stealth-based team coordination in a Rainbow Six style. But after level three, the action switches to a spreadsheet format, and continues in that vein for roughly 26 hours.

Game Pitch: Scavenger: Siege of Leningrad

2009-11-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

In Scavenger: Siege of Leningrad you take on the role of Alexei Grushenko, a 12-year-old war orphan fighting for his life in the streets, sewers and ruins of Leningrad, circa 1942. Food is scarce, and Alexei has turned to cannibalism to survive; he stalks through the night, feeding on the bodies of the freshly fallen and, when necessary, adding to their number.

Scavenger: Siege of Leningrad is a third-person-perspective sandbox game. A historical survival simulator that calls upon the player to use sophisticated stealth tactics. It also features challenging cannibalism sub-games, which demand a detailed knowledge of anatomy, not to mention a strong stomach!

Tekken 6

2009-11-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

Do you remember 1998 and how it brought out Tekken 3 and it was good?

Of course you do, everyone does.

But do you remember Tekken Force being a good idea?

No, this is an impossible thing to remember. Tekken Force was the shittest thing about any game ever, at that point, I am fairly certain.

And yet Namco have NEVER GOTTEN RID OF IT. It's still there in Tekken 6.

You know all the special moves in Tekken? Literally hundreds of unique combos and attacks? None of them are in Tekken Force, you have only the basic punches and kicks.

The story and dialogue does seem like it was put together by a ten year old, but as such it's lacking in the goofy cameos of Indiana Jones and Batman, which it sorely needs.

I would have genuinely prefered it if they hadn't bothered translating the dialogue at all and I could draw my own conclusions as to wtf is up with this pink haired chick with chainsaw hands and why all these fighters are hanging out in parks and on the docks.

The actual fighting element, the vs mode (which is obviously what Tekken is all about) is still GOOD and the new characters fit in with the spirit of the game pretty neatly.

Online it's just so laggy it's almost unplayable. Particularly annoying is one of Lee's moves, three low kicks followed by a mid kick. Easy to block, except the lag means the last kick ALWAYS hits me. Maybe I'm just totally cack handed at this game; I've seen no evidence to suggest otherwise, so maybe other players will do better.

It's nice to see Tekken again, but it's not the triumphant return it should be. But this is what we were all expecting, right?

bobby kotick: like a low level james bond villain that works with computer games

2009-10-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

Read this horrendous shit.

Maybe he's fucking joking? Or it's a joke website? Who even knows?

In other news: does anyone else remember when Modern Warfare 2 died for our sins?

the punchline is that i'd also do it in real life

2009-10-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

Ben says (23:57):
anyway so like
on ROME TOTAL WAR
when you capture a settlement
you can either just occupy it
or enslave half the population
and send them to yr other cities
or execute 75% of the population
and like
if i capture like a roman city or a greek city or something
i just occupy it
but if i capture some barbarian gaul or german or briton town or something
i'll enslave them all or execute them
i'm a fucking snobby racist
in a computer game
against my own race

Not alot of good games adverts

2009-10-16T16:49:00.001-07:00

But here is one: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/699996/Assassins-Creed-II-Magazine-Ad-Best-Game-Ad-Ever.html

It doesn't take alot to make an interesting advert. This is what studying illustration and hanging out with graphic designers has taught me. But so rarely do good graphic design and games meet.

Interview with Infinity Ward

2009-09-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been waiting an hour and a half outside the Infinity Ward offices in Boston, Massafornia, the permanent, matrix like rippling effect they’ve installed on the building only entertaining me for perhaps 20 minutes. The effect is created by holograms the programmers built out of old PS2s and car batteries in between birthing Modern Warfare 2, the game I’m here to talk about.

I wouldn’t mind the wait, God knows I’m excited about this game, but chief designer, Dennis Nedry, has been standing outside the building, staring at me, the entire time. I tried to introduce myself but he just stared ahead, stoically, ignoring me absolutely.

Finally at exactly 10:30 he explodes into life, greeting me so loudly that I’m startled and a nearby bird explodes in the sky.

“Please won’t you join me inside,” and with this he leaps 20 stories and crashes through the office window. I’m forced to take the stairs.

Or I would be, if there were any. Inside the building is a huge, artificial Jungle. The design team constructed it with nano technology, so I’m told. It’s beauty is startling. I have to wipe away a tear when a baby Stegosaurus turns up and asks if I’m it’s mother. Which I’m not. So it chokes itself to death.

Eventually, after locating the tallest tree in the building, and probably the tallest interior tree in the world, I make it to Nedry’s office.

“Ah, congratulations. Beer? We’ve been wandering many aeons,” he begins.

“Whoa now, wait a minute. How did you leap into the building like that?” I ask, as any man would.

“Ah yes, I see you’re staring at my dress.”

“No, what? I’m talking about the jumping. The superhuman leap you exhibited that got you INSIDE the building past the massive jungle you built.”

“Well now we’ve nearly finished Modern Warfare 2 we decided the time was right to push ourselves beyond human limits. Everyone here just one day discovered they could jump incredibly high.”

“Bullshit, how did you just discover that?”

“It was a team building exercise.” Is the only reply I can garner.

Fuck it, let’s talk about the game.

“It’s going to be very good,” Nedry insists. But we’ve all seen the videos. Where has it come from, I want to know.

“Good questing,” says Nedry, his trademark facial tick working over time.

“Would you like a pie?” I accept. It’s delicious.

“It’s kitten,” he says. Usually the thought of eating kitten pie would repulse me, especially given the amount of fur that has been cooked into the crust, but somehow Nedry’s words are soothing and I’m soon going back for seconds.

“The entire building is powered by cycling.” Nedry explains.

“You mean someone is powering a generator in the building on an exercise bike kind of thing?”

“Oh no, I mean all cycling in the world directly generates power here. We found a way to link all energy created by cyclists and transfer it into our computers.”

Before continuing we take a break to relieve ourselves. I find it hard to concentrate, two urinals down, because Nedry's urine comes out as thousands of tiny metal beads, causing a constant buzzing/rattling sound.

Nedry furthers our tour of the office. Huge posters, much larger than can comfortably fit on the walls, of Jimi Hendrix, Chairman Mao and Henry the 8^th, line the walls, spreading onto the ceiling and tangling on the floor. I trip over several times.

“We just wanted to represent the best mankind has to offer, to give us something to aspire to. I guess you could say we surpassed those expectations!”

I’m silent for about a minute until he explains it’s a joke about the jumping.

“That still doesn’t really make any sense,” I say.

“Well, you better keep an eye out for the Henry V statues in Modern Warfare 2!”

“Henry V?”

“From the posters? C’mon man, you’re English.”

“That’s Henry the 8^th.”

There’s another pause, this time from Nedry.

“Please, call me Dennis,” he says. I continue to eat my kitten pie. Then he says,

“There’s an achievement for getting all the statues.”

Of course there is.

He shows me the office swimming pool. Every single computer in the building floats on it, teetering on inflatable desks. Dennis shows off, performing underwater barrel rolls, insisting I applaud and grade each one. This goes on for some forty minutes before I realise the pool contains no water, only urine.

“Ok,” he says, “it’s time.”

“Time?” I ask.

“For you to see.”

“to see what?”

“Our crowning achievement,”

“Crowning achievement?”

“Where Modern Warfare 2 has come from.”

He takes me to a tunnel, which leads to a massive vault.

“We researched,” he tells me, “for decades how to invent a spell. An actual spell. So here you have the only Lightning Field in the world.”

He draws back a curtain and a wall of pure electricity crackles and screams in front of me.

“Jesus CHRIST!” I exclaim.

“Oh don’t worry, it just looks dangerous. It only paralyses you. A child…could be killed in it though.” Dennis is suddenly distant.

He claps his hands after a moment and the lightning field dissipates.

We enter a massive vault lined with drawyers, every one identical and perfect white.

He picks, seemingly at randomn, a drawyer and opens it. Inside, in a large plastic container is a fraction of what seems to be a CD. He says something about the moon landings, Aleister Crowley and King Kong, but I’m distracted by the glass ceiling.

Looking up I see a chamber full of whale hearts, massive cables running between each one. Children with no eyes wash them endlessly with dirty sponges, blackening the hearts with sooty water.

“What the fuck is this place?”

Dennis doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then:

“This is how is must be. We must create this game. The moon landings. The moon landings.”

He lunges for me, still holding the fragment of disc, which I knock from his hand. He leaps after it and I pull open several of the white drawyers. I find a butterfly collection, an old mobile phone and a luger, which is loaded.

I shoot Dennis Nedry several times, his final words a gurgle. Then I turn the pistol on the glass ceiling, losing an eye when a shard of glass falls typically downward into it. I put the remaining bullets in as many hearts as I can.

There is a sound like an air raid siren, pitch shifted as low as possible and then a massive rumbling begins. I run from the chamber, about to go back for the disc fragment when the lightning field lights up again and I’m forced to leave it.

I get lost on my way out but the collapsing walls have revealed a life size model of Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine.

“I know this,” I say, and somehow I do. Operating it is like breathing. I launch it from a window as one of the massive worms from Dune appears and swallows the building whole, before disappearing like the image from a television into a white dot.

And that’s why no one can play Modern Warfare 2 now.

Semi-Coherent Observations on the Video Game Dead Space

2009-07-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

(I found this on my computer and thought I'd put it up; it's nothing but a half-finished rant, but I think it's a pretty good half-finished rant.)

Dead Space is derivative. And how. It’s militantly, unapologetically derivative, like the designers are actually so fucking postmodern that they don’t even believe in the possibility of creating something that’s not a totally self-conscious hybridization of a string of other things that were baldly rehashing ∞-hand ideas in the first place. Most notably, Dead Space is an enthusiastic rip-off of hack-director-extraordinaire Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 schmasterpiece Event Horizon, a movie already neck-deep in its own lack of ideas and dialing Michael Bay for swimming lessons.

From the F.E.A.R.-style opening, in which the player is treated to some clunky real-time exposition from his digital co-stars (after a shot of a lover’s distress call, intended to establish the human angle of the tale), to the appearance of the stricken spaceship that is the game’s setting, to the crash landing on said ship, to the initial exploration and subsequent attack by terrifying The Thing-type beasts (which, naturally, separates the player from his cohorts) and so on; every aspect of Dead Space is wantonly uninventive. It fairly shrieks of a high-concept brief that never really got expanded on (“It’s Resident Evil – IN SPACE.”), except for being stuffed with the scooped-out innards of various books, movies and other games.

Of course none of this would be worth pointing out were it not for the fact that this title is being feted as an envelope pusher: the gameplay boasts an unprecedented level of immersion, with the H.U.D. and sub-menus operating in real-time; plus there’s a whole zero-gravity dynamic to play around with. Besides that, the production values are roof-bypassingly high: graphics and sound and all that are consistently impressive, and the whole thing’s just about as cinematic as hell, which seems to be the primary concern of games designers these days. Unfortunately, it’s cinematic in the increasingly pervasive sense of the word that connotes ‘spectacular’ or ‘eye-catching’ or just plain ‘loud’; a sense that makes no allowances for the different capacities of the gaming medium.

This approach to game design is currently most conspicuous in the Gears of War series, wherein the player is generally called upon to do no more than move forward periodically in order to activate the next action set-piece (basically like arcade rail-shooters, and now I think of it, also vaguely analogous to American football). Dead Space has a bit more to it than that, but there’s a prevailing feeling that game aspects such as the storyline and characterisation and resource management and equipment personalisation etc are all supplementary; the developer would be just as happy having the player passively witness a series of sensational audio-visual events, and is only making minimal concessions to the notions of interactivity/immersion/active involvement.

blog rename

2009-06-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

not that anyone reads this thing, i mean it's a blog ffs, but ben and i decided to rename it "Bombs and Monitors". It's a reference. Deal.

games marketing

2009-06-19T17:31:00.001-07:00

We here at Make Hands are blah blah blah. And always we etc etc etc. But nevertheless jfedhf jhauio\wf euwhdfhve.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jun/11/gameculture-controversy

I review prototype. Also I think it's my first review. A prototype review you could say. Ok, I'll stop.

2009-06-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

You know what prototype is like?

It’s like going for a piss at a party only to find the floating turd of the last person who used the toilet, because it didn’t quite get flushed away.

Except maybe Prototype is worse because you don’t generally have to pay £40 to find someone else’s turd at a party. Unless it’s one of those kinds of parties. Then £40 is actually quite a bargain, I imagine.

You play Alex Mercer, charm less, boring amnesiac and there’s something about a virus and New York and monsters everywhere. I can’t really say the story is bad because there just doesn’t seem to be one.

The intro is all explosions, you kill a ton of people, there are zombies. Then you start the flashbacks. You escape from a sinister lab, named Gentek (which is a name Alun came up with when he was 10 years old for some sinister company in a story we were making up at the time: that’s how fucking generic this game is.)

Obviously things are more toned down in flashback town. You’re not all powerful, though still basically invincible. Everything is normal, so no zombies.

I wish it was like a tense foreshadowing to what was going on before. But any tension is sidelined by the gameplay and mission structures (we’ll get to the character flaws in a minute). Basically you just run from one location to another. Then everyone shoots at you with bullets which do nothing, because they’re presumably made of pasta, until you eventually decide to consume some random fuck and get some precious memories.

It genuinely doesn’t matter which asshole you consume, since I accidentally threw one of these military geniuses into the sea only for him to re spawn five seconds later in a much more isolated location, so he was even easier to consume.

Smashing stuff up is fun, but only just. The game feels a lot like the Spiderman games and suffers from the same rigidity in the environment. The game never feels real, not the buildings, population or anything. I mean I know it’s a game and most of your running is done vertically, but even so.

It’s just little things, like how the civilians react. You can leap from literally the highest point possible, landing with such force you leave a crater and unless you land within about 3 inches of the populace they just won’t notice, since apparently they’re all too busy walking down the street to nowhere at all. It is impossible to care about these people.

In some ways this is very effective. Since you’re supposed to be a near Godlike monster, your military codename is even Zeus, it makes sense that you’d give as much thought to snuffing out a life as you would scratching your face. I did spend most of my time just throwing members of the public as hard as possible into the nearest wall, or cutting them in half with giant claws and probably I was scratching my face at least a few times I did this.

But the game is too effective at making everything feel worthless because after a while I just stopped wanting to play it. Is that a burn on the game? Who would make a game you’re not supposed to want to play, other than fucking 2K obviously?

Alex Mercer is a fucking fruit of a character too. In some shots he looks almost like a prepubescent girl, despite the constant, ridiculously over the top scowl. Hopefully that’s some side effect of all his mutations.

He’s so wooden, as is literally every character in all the cutscenes, which in turn seem to be randomly stitched together from different moments in the game. In one, early on, I landed near my apartment building. I went inside, a bomb went off and I land on the street. I see a guy in a suit get into an APC and Alex says “HE’S THE ONE!” and so I have to chase him to indulge in Alex Mercer’s schizophrenic fantasies about eating random businessmen alive. I mean you don’t go into a newsagent to buy an ice cream, see they’re sold out and then attack (and absorb into your body) the first person you see assuming they bought the last one. Or maybe you do, what do I know?

Later some chick tells me she needs genetic samples from some buildings. Before I leave for the mission Mercer thoughtfully declares to her “whatever’s happening here…is only the beginning.”

Does he mean the beginning of some experiments? Because I think that’s what we’re working towards by collecting raw genetic material (which manifested itself as giant glowing yellow balls, incidentally.)

The missions themselves are spliced almost directly from the Spiderman games and most of them make no fucking sense whatsoever. For example: the military have these alarms that detect you if you get too close to them. So to protect your safehouse, which has no alarms within two blocks of it, you have to track down and find these immobile alarms for no reason whatsoever, compromising your cover and putting yourself in the line of fire. Which doesn’t matter since you’re fucking invincible.

I have a fucking ton of things I hated about this game, lots of little things about how you progress through missions and the obscene lack of detail. It all comes down to the fact the game isn’t at all polished, the missions are retarded, the characters aren’t characters and the fact it seems like it was put together by the children of Josef Fritzl.

But to end on a more positive note, the greatest strength of the game is that you can absorb anyone. The game was tenfold improved when you’re running up buildings and tearing people to shreds as a doughy old woman. See her throw cars into tanks. See her take down a helicopter with a flying kick. Joy is known.

[edit]

I did find a couple of redeeming features to this game, which sounds pretentious and I feel bad about that. As the infection gets worse the city deteriorates. You leap from building to building, transforming at will, gliding over huge brawls and flaming cars and all this chaos and it’s pretty atmospheric.

When you’re running through the city, helicopters gunning after you, everything exploding, it feels very fluid and engaging, and this is also good.

I also had fun sneaking around rooftops doing “stealth consumes” on various soldiers. Although stealth is a strong word since almost all the military guys in the game barely notice you doing anything weird, such as throwing a car across a street or leaping 500 feet in the air. You’re their number one target, they know who you are. But when they see a dude leap from a building and glide off down the street they don’t even bat an eyelid.

The random cut scenes continue however. One of your allies, later in the game, explains you need to inject this monster with these antibodies then consume it and it will help deal with this cancer thing you were infected with. Mercer replies “yeah…I’ve heard that before.” What the fuck. When has anyone ever heard that? “I need you to cure a mutant cancer by injecting a weirdo monster fuck with this magic goo I invented.”
Definitely it wasn’t whilst I was playing the game that Mercer heard this, and he’s an amnesiac, so if he heard it before I started playing he probably…doesn’t…remember.

You also get five seconds of emotion time with your sister where you both start apologising to each other and she’s all “you’re still my brother”. This is, conveniently, seconds before you’re supposed to give a shit about her – as she’s whisked away by some super beast. It’s just fucking lazy story telling, or like they’re ashamed of their inability to write convincing characters, so they just try to glaze over it. Every single cut scene features nonsense like this. I’m not saying that cut scenes make the game, obviously. It’s just how Prototype tells it story, and it does it incredibly badly.

Oh god and the tank missions. Anytime you have to take a character anywhere you always have to do it in a tank, even though it’s slow as fuck and blindingly boring.
And your passengers never say anything when you take to the pavement and ruin a couple hundred lives by killing some innocent sons and daughters.
One of your road buddies is a fucking doctor and he still doesn’t give a shit.
And the army? They must just find it fucking hilarious when you run them over and blow up their trucks since they never even think about asking you to pull over.

So a couple of neat ideas, but the game doesn’t do anything with them, and then it shovels shit in your face for 90% of the time. Great.

Left for Dead Once More: Character Info

2009-06-04T03:08:00.001-07:00

Okay, some more info has come to light re the "bland" characters seen in the L4D2 trailers. (Doubters, prepare to be humbled.) They are: Coach, Ellis, Nick and Rochelle; the collected members of the Church of Christ's Almighty Love That Rains from on High Like Blessed Lead, a militant evangelical sect of Christianity that practices polyandry (one woman may have several husbands), compulsory abortions (to keep more sin from entering the world) and mass shootings.

After returning from a wilderness retreat, held at their fortified compound in Texas, the quartet discover that the Apocalypse has come into effect a few days ahead of schedule. It is their God-given task to put down all the sinners of the world once and for all, starting with the wicked folk of New Orleans (did they not get the hint after that whole flood deal?!).

Each member of the group has a rich history, involving various childhood traumas, broken marriages and failed careers. Nick is a former sportswriter and NFL commentator who became a heroin addict after his wife and infant child were killed by the Washington Sniper; Coach is a "reformed" homosexual who used to work as a male model and fashion designer; Rochelle is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who denounced music as "blasphemous" and staged a public burning of the Well Tempered Klavier; and Ellis is a train driver from LA who lost his job when he developed epilepsy.

Left for Dead Once More

2009-06-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

The M.O. of this blog being what it is (i.e. excoriating lazy-looking sequels), I submit, for your delectation, Left 4 Dead 2.

Hmm...samey. Okay, so it looks a little sharper; there are new characters (amusingly, naysayers are complaining that they look "bland", as though the cast of the first game was highly-developed); new weapons; a few new zombies; and a new setting (New Orleans? That would explain the Dixieland music). But on the whole, it appears to be exactly the same thing again.

Considering that it's only been about six months since the original came out, the question is begged: what's with the rush? The chattering denizens (God love 'em) of Webland report that this is the game Valve originally wanted to put out, but they had to release a premature version for financial reasons. Or something. Be that as it may, you'd think they'd make an effort to really switch things up for part two...this seems more like a glossy director's cut.

Of course, the gameplay in L4D was already pretty spot-on in its limited way, so perhaps there's no sense complaining; but then that leads us off into the old why make sequels at all? debate. The answer to which is "because there is no God".

assassin's creed 2

2009-06-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

Feel free to check this out.

It's gamespot's mini coverage of assassin's creed 2 from E3. I just want to point out a couple of reasons why games are shit right here.

Firstly:

"Gaining the ability to swim has long been the mark of a good sequel,"

Why are games so shit that this is an acceptable element to a sequel? I think that Gamespot mention it a little sarcastically, but if everyone knows it's embarassing and stupid that you can't swim in games why are people still making games where you can't fucking swim in them?

Secondly:

this game play video.

The developer comes out on stage. Rocks back and forth like the most autistic motherfucker of all time. Says "the main thing I said to my team was diversity. Give the player more things they can do in all aspects of the game."
That's great except one minute later he says "you can only reach your target from the sky."

Beautiful diversity there, I feel so diverse right now I think I might go and roll in shit.

Why doesn't anyone call these dicks on this stuff, for fuck's sake?

It's good to see that leaping into carts full of hay is still in the game though, and good to see it looks totally unrealistic and shit. Also you notice that bit where the guy runs up to two guards and nails them both in the face at the same time? I bet you're going to meet alot of guards who're just hanging out chatting in this game.

already bored of games i haven't played

2009-06-02T09:29:00.001-07:00

So Prototype. You’re nearly here and you’re one of maybe 4 games I want to play by the end of the year.
But I have never been less excited about a game I’m excited about. And you know why? I’ve already fucking played the game.

Not in any actual sense, no, ha-ha. I mean in the horrendously pretentious so have you kind of aren’t all games the same sort of way.

I’ve been watching trailers trying to psyche myself up for this game, but it just can’t be done. At the end of one of them there’s a quote from Game Informer describing prototype as “the first of its kind.”

So what’s up Game Informer? You didn’t play GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 4, Spiderman 2, 3 and ultimate or web of shadows, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Fallout 3 or any of those other open world action games?
Get your hands out of your pants for five fucking seconds and scratch your heads if you have to.

Probably I’m being unfair. That quote was almost definitely taken out of context or maybe it wasn’t ever said at all.

Still, the game looks fun. Game Informer, in fact, described it as "really quite a blast." It’s just I’m sick of viruses and New York and Mutants and Soldiers. Aren’t there any other stories out there?

I can take monsters. I can take cities. I’m not asking for the story of Billy: the goat with the longest horns or any shit like that.

But what happened to I Am Alive? A game set in Chicago or somewhere after an earthquake: a survival horror with no monsters and almost no guns? Where water was going to be a big deal?

Sure, I’ve heard promises like that before. Water was going to be a big deal in Fallout 3 too. You’d drink it but it would make you sick with radiation. Did anyone actually drink water ever, except to get irradiated? I had stimpaks flowing out of my eyes by the end of that game. Why bother trying to purify water at all; everyone could live off stimpaks for fuck’s sake.

But no monsters would be different. If they get the NPCs right, so interacting with them feels like a big deal, then I Am Alive might be different and really good, for a change.

So I start watching another Prototype trailer. It’s the Top 10 Reasons why Prototype is far from typical. 10 reasons you must have Prototype.

Reason number 10, the first reason: “Run and Gun Firepower”.
Ok, surely they don’t mean you can run and shoot in this game. Surely that’s not what they’re proudly displaying in a list of unique facets of this game?

Because that would be unique as fuck.

Only I’m sure there’s another game you can do that in. Just…what was it called?

Seriously I can’t remember. Can anyone name another game you can run and shoot in?
Is that even possible with today’s physics engines?

Game Review: Centaur City MCMXXXI

2009-05-30T03:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a strange one for you. TeamDTs, the developers behind 2003's anthropomorphic rob'em'up Chicken Bandits, went into liquidation late last year, having spent more than half a decade working on an untitled mega-project involving a team of hundreds and costing something in the region of $40m. Assets were sold and employees were scattered to the far corners of the game-development world; it seemed for sure that the masterpiece was never to see the light of day.

Cut to only a few months later, and here's Centaur City MCMXXXI (that's 1931 for those uncomfortable with Roman numerals), landing unheralded like the cargo of a stork caught in a downdraft and forced to shed ballast in order to save its own skin. Funny old world, eh?

So what's it all about? Well, the game is "best described as a mytho-historical sandbox adventure", according to the backcover blurb. If you're buying a hardcopy, that's all you'll have to go on: the box is otherwise completely blank, and grey to boot (would black have been too glamorous?). Open it up and you'll be presented with a game disc and a slender volume of poetry entitled Cold Dreamers of Old Town:

First thing to go's the colors;
look out yonder on our fine city
and see how everything's now but one hue.
It's the color of money;
we painted all our rooftops
with them green bills, see?
And then when the rains came down,
they washed through;
they stained us all green,
and now there ain't one thing in this town
is worth the paper it's printed on.

Mysterious, n'est pas? And not a reference to secondary-fire mode in sight. In fact, it took a good three hours of gameplay before things started to make sense. The premise is this: the years is 1931, and the Great Depression is in full effect. Bendorion, an amnesiac drifter, arrives in the southern US city of Dustyville, where he immediately creates a stir among the locals. He's a centaur, see: from the waist upwards a man, below that a horse. And it doesn't help that he can't speak English (at the beginning of the game, the speech of the city's residents consists of nonsense syllables, which gradually morph into intelligibility as time passes); within minutes he's been attacked by an angry mob, who beat him into unconsciousness and steal his lute.

Awakening in a barn, Bendorion finds that he's been rescued by an old horse whisperer named Miller, who seems to know more about centaurs than he lets on. And so begins a mystery-adventure of uncommon ambition, set over the course of two decades and dealing with racism, poverty, the rise of nationalism, identity politics, quantum physics, prohibition, universal grammar, musical serialism and advertising.

C.C. MCMXXXI's gameplay is highly indebted to the GTA series: long periods are spent doing sub-quests for shady mobsters and corrupt policemen. However, these potentially tedious exercises are enlivened by the game's incredibly open-ended structure. One mission, in which Bendorion is assigned to assassinate a twelve-year-old witness, proved to have no fewer than fourteen possible outcomes, one of which involved an experimental theatre group performing the first scene from Ibsen's A Doll's House with the role of Nora played by a Model T Ford painted green.

THE REMAINING 5,000 WORDS OF THIS REVIEW ARE AVAILABLE ONLY TO SUBSCRIBERS...

BioShock 2: THE FACTS

2009-05-19T15:36:00.001-07:00

BioShock 2: Chunky Martin Sets Sail is set two and a half hours after the shipping date for the original game. Rapture does not yet exist as an imaginational construct in the brandscape of 21st century global capitalism; rather, it is a potential entity, housed within the minds of its creators. This is about to change.

An electrical storm at sea sinks a freighter carrying 100,000 copies of the game, which are released into the ocean. It is the worst rec-tech spill in recorded history, with ecological ramifications that threaten the entire planet. Furthermore, the storm actualises the content of the game discs, manufacturing a fissure in the material of factitional-space-time that allows Rapture's inhabitants to access dimensional reality. They quickly establish a real-world Rapture, which attracts all of the human race's greatest scientists and artists. Unfortunately, this version is a massive success, and nobody wants to leave.

The player assumes control of Manuel "Chunky" Martinez, an aspiring maritime hero with a small-but-noticeable weight problem, who must travel to the new city to kidnap as many people as he can before he starts to feel bad about himself. Since the game is set in real life, the player must ride on Martinez's shoulder, shouting instructions in pidgin English.

New features include the "Big Sister" (literally the elder female sibling of the player) and the removal of the contentious Vita-Chamber feature, which enhances the game's immersiveness by making death fatal.

fuck bioshock 2

2009-05-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Bioshock 2:

Firstly let’s hit that subtitle running, shall we?

Sea of fucking dreams?

I know its set in the ocean but, for fuck’s sake, pull yourselves together 2K. Why not just call it “twilight of the mysteries” or “shadow of tomorrowmore” or how about “Bioshock 2: a giant whales dick” or some other equally generic piece of crap title a two year old could shit out.

Now I’m not against sequels per se, and I’d like to apologise for using the expression “per se”. Half Life 2, COD 4, Silent Hill 2: these are good games. And they’re distinct from their predecessor in terms of gameplay, graphics and their world or they expand on the story and answer the questions the first game didn’t. Or sort of anyway.

But what questions will Bioshock 2 answer that Bioshock one didn’t? Because what questions are there, other than “why the fuck did I buy this fucking game in the first place?” (read it and weep)

Basically that whole big sister angle looks really shit. You know what the big sister is? It’s Godzilla. It’s Rambo or the T-1000. It’s Darth Vader and the monster from Cloverfield (and that was Godzilla again anyway).

It’s just another ultimate hard ass monster designed to make your dick spasm uncontrollably and get your controller vibrating so hard you froth at the mouth. Or maybe that's just what happens to me.

Huge cyber monster badasses aren’t inherently bad (despite being the bad guys – little villain joke for you there) and maybe I’m just looking for cheap, extremely cheap, digs at this game. Except isn’t this sort of shit already mocked in films, T.V. shows and books?

Like how the hero meets some ultimate super villain and for 80 minutes just can’t make a dent until everyone comes together just right at the end and the pain is brung.

Here’s a super toughie you can’t even hurt!

You can’t kill it! You still can’t kill it!

Ok, finally we let you kill it. Well done, noble warrior of the sea. Go play with your drill and your little girls.

Anyway I was thinking about how they’re going to develop their characters and world in this game and I remembered hearing how they might make up to 7 Bioshock sequels.

I started thinking about old school comic books, from the golden age of comics. You’d have a set list of characters who’d appear in a number of issues, and most of the stories would be completely separate.

With Half Life and its sequel, the story continues fairly neatly. But the only connection, it seems, between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock 2 is the setting (and at least one of the characters from the original will appear).

That’s not necessarily bad, it worked for those comics. But can you imagine if 2K had a story so complicated and intense it was going to take 7 games to tell it? Rather than 7 games which just happen to be set in some ever expanding underwater city?

Maybe it’s not 7 and it’s only 5 or something, but even so everyone knows making a ton of sequels is a really bad call. Look what happened to Rocky.

They’ll get to the third one and you’ll be a team of marines descending into Rapture or some shit. Then the fourth one will be a prequel.

Then, like a tidal wave of shit, horrendous franchise games will flood the market, each with more sequels than the last and we’ll all soon be drowning in subtitles like “sea of dreams” and “mountain of snuggles”.

Everyone will realise their mistakes too late and spend the rest of their lives in self induced exile, endlessly remaking Bioshock in Flash until they’re torn asunder by a woolly mammoth. All because of Bioshock 5.

game worlds

2009-05-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

By now everyone's seen the trailer/gameplay footage/bullshit of Beyond Good and Evil 2.

But if you haven't, here it is:

Hopefully the free running won't be the heart of the game, like Assassin's Creed, but will just be a way to flavour a game based around strong characters and story.

What interests me more is the setting. Looks like India to me. This has got me thinking a little.

The setting in Bioshock was ok, but sci fi lab stuff is more or less done to death now. Fallout 3 suffers from the same sort of thing (although the wasteland is one of the best things in games to date). GTA4 is the best example of a big city environment and Prototype, inFamous (are they actually the same game?) and all those other open world city games can just go to hell.

Resident Evil 5 was a great setting for a game. African shanty towns. Have we ever seen that in a game before? Vaguely ignorant racism aside, that was a pretty good call for a game setting right there.

And now some Indian looking city. This looks promising.

But I am so certain it will inspire lots of shit rip offs in subsequent games. Like how Gears of War had a cover system, so suddenly all shooters need cover systems. This exactly sums up why games are shit: because people who make them think that basic, surface stuff is what a game is. The invention of cover systems is not a way to take games forward to the "next level". It's just a step sideways, another tool for telling a story.

Games will improve when they're giving us something dramatically different. By which I mean not just a pronounced change but some actual drama. When the stories are heartfelt, personal and interesting. When the characters and game world are engaging and feel authentic. When you get a more intense connection from games, this is when they'll have improved (in my mind).

This "footage" from Beyond Good and Evil 2 shows it has potential, the basis for something. It remains to be seen whether they make the most, or anything, from it.

the ultimate purpose of a blog

2009-04-27T14:17:00.001-07:00

The reason we all have blogs is because we're all very boring and no one gives a shit about anything we say on a level higher than a handful of people.

The world owes us, we feel, we're worth something, we think and we all want our voices heard, however similar they may be to the next man and the result is this massive internet drone of shit with a couple of exceptions from people who are sometimes actually quite interesting.

And this is a games blog, brought about because the only thing relating to games that is AS SHIT as MOST GAMES ARE is FUCKING GAMES JOURNALISM which is sort of like finding a loved one has died trying erotic asphyxiation. It's like they were trying to have a good time but it went so fucking wrong that they died. And now you have to deal with the fact that you saw your dad's erect penis and he was dead at the time because of something he decided to do.

The point of all this is that a blog, typically, is a tool of the powerless - the majority of which say nothing, to no one. And this one is about games, so here is a story about how I screwed myself over, Microsoft kicked me when I was down and how I was unable to do anything about it.

The E74 error. It's been running amok in our 360s, ruining everyone's fun, since (basically) time immemorial. Mine got it and I dealt with it in the worst way possible.

To get the fucking thing repaired I was going to have to pay £80. This is utter bullshit because the E74 is a hardware problem. Meaning Microsoft made the fucking problem in the first place and wanted me to pay for it. So fuck that ridiculous bullshit, right?

I did want any man's man would have done and tried to fix the fucking thing my fucking self.

Which obviously didn't fucking work and now every time I turn that poor xbox on it sounds like it's going to castrate me via explosion.

There's a side story here about my friend, Kris Bradley, coming up with a plan to get me a free Xbox. At the time Coke were running a competition: you drink coke, you get points, enough points = 360. He had like 550 points out of the 600 needed for a 360 and was just going to give it to me, because he's a hero.

I bottle it. I couldn't accept that gift. It felt like too much. The day I call him to tell him I ordered a new 360 he tells me this little sob story about how Coca Cola ran out of 360s and said not to worry, they'd be getting more in stock. The day before the competition is supposed to end Kris has enough points for the 360 and calls up to claim the prize, only to find out the competition was taken down a day early and there were no new 360s anyway. To him the fact I ordered a new one is a massive relief.

So yes, I just said fuck it and upgraded to an elite, 80% of the point of which is that they have massive external hard drives but since I didn't want a hard drive it was basically a waste of money and I hate myself.

So recently Microsoft recognised they'd just fucked up with the E74 error (again: hardware fault) and extended the warranty and set about paying people back for those £80 repairs.

Three times now I have phoned up explaining in tones as masculine and unpleading and somehow almost Scottish about the unfairness of having to pay that £80 to fix Microsoft's error. About how I only opened my 360 because of their inability to recognise the fault as something so major and it would be ludicrous and awful of them to not accept my 360 for free repair, even though it is now technically tampered.

They've not only said no but that they wouldn't even repair it if i paid them.

It's all a matter of policy, it was explained to me. It goes through some scanner which reads the warranty sticker inside the xbox is damaged and it gets sent back with either the message "tampered" or probably just a shit in a box.

So there's nothing I can do about this? I ask.

Nothing, comes the reply.

And presumably no one higher up I can talk to who will help me?

No, there is no one who can help you.

And the phone line connection was actually incredibly bad, so the voice was muffled, crackly and distant which accentuated the bleak and lonely message the technical support line supervisor delivered to an almost unbearable level. Seriously, emotional stuff.

Anyway, this Serious Bullshit only really came about after I bought Silent Hill 2: Inner Fears. I tried to play it on my 360 and it didn't work and it turns out it's because it isn't backwards compatible. Presumably this is some other basic xbox 360 knowledge everyone but me has, along with, obviously, don't open your 360 like a fucking moron.

It turns out that all xbox original titles have to be updated and patched before they run on 360s. For the European version of the game Microsoft just haven't done this and there is no way of finding out if they ever will. So us European's have to play the game on our xbox originals. Which I don't have.

No, they've only done the American version and supposedly they've done a really shit job.

It was whilst I was looking for the backwards compatibility information that I found out about that E74 recall/refund bullshit. If they'd already updated Silent Hill 2: Inner Fears I never would have known.

And that's the real tragedy here. So here it is, an unheard FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT. The impotent cry delivered in it's rightful format: a blog. About games.

Not the moral: give money to charity.

bioshock movie

2009-04-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

NO, BAD, WRONG, MISTAKE are some of the words that come to mind when I think about this bioshock movie that is going to exist alongside me and other real things in the real world that I actually really live in.

On the IMDB page for it there's a plot keywords section. It's like "spoiler alert scroll mouse over to read plot keywords". Let's look at these ok here they come: Survivor | Underwater | Plane Crash | Utopia | One Word Title

ONE WORD TITLE???

I showed this to Ben. His response: I FEEL LIKE WATCHING A FILM WITH A ONE WORD TITLE. IF ONLY THERE WERE A LIST.

Maybe this supports my argument that 2K don't give a shit about making games, just money.

Prototype

2009-04-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

FUCK i am basically just SO BORED I've decided to try and do as many things in the next half hour as possible. After posting this I intend to piss, but i need to do that so badly I might have to divide this activity (the posting) in two.

So Protoype is basically a mix of crackdown/GTA style action adventure with a sort of assassin's creed twist to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_(video_game)

Yeah, it looks like a high school goth's wet dream, but we all have that side of us.

It will probably be fun for about an hour and then the story will turn out to be fucking dreadful and etc etc.

One thing that I'm thinking about this game is that you will probably unlock more powers and moves as you progress in level.

I am fucking SICK of that SHIT. Wouldn't it be more interesting if you started the game with all the powers at your disposal, each one assigned to a different combo or complex movement of one or other analog stick, but without being shown how to use them? Then as you play the game you get more used to them and figure them out and just generally end up with a better control/sense of how to apply the attacks/powers.

But no, it will just be levels and experience points just like EVERY OTHER GAME.

bioshock, my problem

2009-04-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

Bioshock.

There’s so much shit going around, always, about this game.

I want to discuss, as briefly as possible, my big problem with the game. This whole thing came out of a massive debate with Ciaran, incidentally.

There was a lot of crap in the game I hated; the hacking, the camera research, but I can write that off as personal preference.

Basically the game is critiquing all first person shooters where you just run and kill everything you’re told to without thinking about why.

That’s fine and good and I guess someone needed to say it and they had to say it as a game. But I’ve been playing first person shooters since I was maybe ten years old (starting with Marathon on a mac).

I know how games are, I know that first person shooters are generally linear, dumb and you never think about the whys and wherefores.

The problem with a lot of those games, Halo 3 for instance, is that the world just doesn’t matter. It’s all combat, the background is unimportant.

And for a game that is critiquing that, Bioshock follows exactly the same track, and this is where we start to get to the root of the problem for me.

You get to the bit with Andrew Ryan and all that “would you kindly” and the game is basically saying “look, ha ha, you just kill without thinking! Whoops! Gotcha!” but it doesn’t make me feel like it matters a shit.

The environment is interesting and (sort of) unique but it just didn’t do enough to compel me, to make me feel like anything going on there mattered.

Take GTA4, for example. I ended up really liking Roman and Niko Bellic. I wanted things to end up well for them. Bioshock never made me care about anything that was happening.

The Little Sisters, for example. I never killed any of them, basically because I’m not an insane bully. Why just today I helped a woman carry a pram down the stairs at a train station. My point is I don’t generally want to kill little girls.

The reward for doing so just wasn’t enough to tempt me. It didn’t feel like ADAM and the Plasmids mattered, and that kind of sums up the game. If they’d worked it harder, made it more intense to the point I was considering killing a little sister it would have made the pay off, the would you kindly, feel like a genuine statement, something worthwhile.

As it is it’s just like every first person shooter it’s mocking, just self aware. It’s like a retard saying “I’m retarded.”

Kieron Gillen sort of sums this up for me in his defense of Bioshock [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bioshock-a-defence-article]:

“...They can't help themselves, and your awareness of how they're trapped makes you falling into the role of protector make a lot of sense - you're fighting, on both levels, to end this videogame. Hell, you could expand that to the final uninspired boss sequence - this is what we're trying to get away from.”

Note the word uninspired. The game doesn't bring anything new to the table, it just says everything at the table is shit. I mean why even include something mediocre in a game when you could do better? The statement Bioshock is making could and should have already been made by the final fight in the game, and it should have been done a lot subtler – making you feel like you were in a world that mattered.

Bioshock is a game that should be regarded as bad because of how little it does with its world (a world which should be fucking great). The fact it is actually a stand out game leaves a lot to be desired about the industry.

I want to say the game is like a cynical statement putting all these run and gun first person shooters to rights. But the fact the game follows all the same conventions as those games, even after they twist them on their head, makes it feel like 2K have seen how base those games are and are just cashing in.

I hope Bioshock 2 tries harder.

On the topic of indie games

2009-04-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a good couple of years for 2D platformers. By which I mean that about five have been released. Still, that's got to be about 50% up on the first half of the decade.

http://www.andyetitmoves.net/index.php?content=trailer

Left 4 Dead expansion

2009-04-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

New Left 4 Dead expansion is supposedly out on Tuesday the 21^st of April. I don’t know if that’s true, I read it on some website.

Left 4 Dead is nearly a very boring game and a lot of people apparently just don’t get it. These people join, don't talk, and quit when they consequently do badly.

The game is about teamwork, organisation. In versus mode the best organised team wins, which is great.

The fun comes from setting up ambushes, as the zombies, and tearing the shit out of the human players.

There is not as much, tactically, to playing as the humans. You just have to stick together and shout out when you’re downed. There is basically no point playing without a headset.

Making it to the safehouse is not so much satisfying as it is a relief.

Left 4 Dead is only really fun on versus, with both teams full of human players whose sole reason for existence is the utter destruction of the opposing team. So when it’s good it’s really good.

One thing that basically annoys me about the game is the zombies and how you deal with them. All you do is shoot more or less constantly.

For example: someone got Boomered next to me in a room with a pile of ammo. As the horde burst through the door all I had to do was hold shoot for five seconds and they were all dead, no one was even touched. Even after that I was on full ammo.

Maybe the lack of dynamism here is not so much a failing of the game as it is a failing of the zombie players to utilise the horde to instigate an ambush.

Left 4 Dead is trying to be a sort of arcadey, semi kitsch game and it does that well.

But a change in rhythm or style might make the game a bit more exciting. Take that sequence in the hospital when you activate the lift and have to fight a massive horde of zombies for 60 seconds or so. You have, effectively, infinite ammo at that point. All you need to do, to survive, is shoot.

What if you had no ammo, or almost none, and had to deal with the zombies in a different way? Perhaps creating a barricade or diversion?[1]

That sounds like something you might get in Resident Evil. I’m not asking Left 4 Dead be a duplicate of that. It’s doing its own thing and that’s great.

It just feels like it’s doing the bare minimum with what it’s got.

Some variety might be nice.

[edit: I just found a blog for Left 4 Dead, an official one run by Valve. It has some details about the construction of the new Survival Pack: http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=2417
It sounds great, I am optimistic!]

[1] Although maybe this would detract from the zombie players ability to do anything.