Unitled's Blog

Order/Chaos Dice System: Mechanics

2011-06-07T19:45:00.001+01:00

So, I doodled a few ideas about the dice system. I liked the idea of some sort of duality; the idea of pushing a dice pool at the risk of compromising your character. For instance, a Noire-style investigation campaign could have opposing good cop/bad cop stats; dropping further into corruption might make sense in the short term, but will have serious repercussions in the long run; or a pulp fantasy campaign where your character can give in to chaos to give a temporary edge.

I think this can be represented by having three separate dice pools; the first we’ll term ‘Order’. This represents a character’s adherence to the laws of the setting; in the Police Investigation setting it’s the character’s standing in the police department, how ‘by-the-book’ they are. The second we’ll term ‘Chaos’. This will normally be a temporary pool, though it may increase as the character’s Order decreases. It represents a character’s existence ‘outside’ the rules, how far they’ve pushed the limits. Finally, we have a stat (or series of stats) representing the character’s other abilities. In order to keep this simple, I was tempted to go for just three other stats: Power, Reserves, and Finesse. These three stats can apply to a variety of spheres; so Physical Power would be Strength, Mental Reserves would be Willpower and Social Finesse would be Manipulation.

Finally, we’ll call the opposition pool Pain; this keeps it personal for the characters. This keeps rankings for enemies simple too, and modifiers for difficulties can all be rolled up into a single number.

Conflicts are resolved by players gathering all the dice in their pools, and rolling them together. The GM rolls all the Pain dice too. All dice showing a 1 or a 2 are a success; compare the players successes against the GM’s successes. Ties go to the players. This determines if an action is successful or not; the number of successes you win (or fail) by is your margin.

The pool which shows the highest die is the dominant pool; in ties compare the next highest, and so on, until a pool runs out of dice (in which case the pool with more dice wins) or one pool has a higher die.

Example:

A player rolls 3 Order/3 Stat/2 Chaos against 5 Pain and gets:

3 4 2 / 1 6 3 / 6 1 against 2 1 3 4 3

The player gets 3 successes against the GMs 2 successes, succeeding at the action with a margin of 1. Stat and Chaos both have a 6 as their highest die though Stat has the second highest as 3 vs 1. This means the Stat pool dominates. So, the player succeeds at the action by application of their natural aptitudes; depending on the action, this might be brute force or mental agility.

This is a first pass at the idea, nice and basic so far. I want to add a bit more flavour by mixing in some talents, and I’ll talk about that in the next post.

Order/Chaos Dice System: Introduction

2011-06-06T22:38:00.000+01:00

A while ago, I got a copy of the indie PnP RPG Don’t Rest Your Head. It’s an interesting game, very influenced by stories like Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and the neo-noir film Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas.

Although I’ve not had a chance to run it, it features a neat little resolution mechanic I’ve seen called ‘rich dice’. Conflict resolution involves rolling pools of dice of different colours; the success of the roll is determined by how many dice, regardless of colour, show a 1 or 2. The pool which shows the highest number ‘dominates’ the action and gives more information about how the character succeeded (or failed).

A similar mechanic is used in the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; here, you can see at a glance (with practice) why a particular roll succeeded; maybe your second spent aiming was what helped you find the crack in their armour, maybe charging in screaming caught them off guard.

In DRYH, the GM rolls a pool (Pain) against 3 pools rolled by the players (Madness, Discipline and Exhaustion). What makes it interesting is any of the pools can dominate with a success, even Pain. Further, you can push certain stats (such as Exhaustion) for more dice; the extra dice might help you succeed, but if that pool dominates you end up with a further negative consequence.

I had a few ideas about how I could structure a similar system; I figured I’d feel them out on the blog to see if it all hangs together.

“You’re being economical with the Truth”

2011-06-03T10:15:00.004+01:00

I recently finished LA Noire.

Like many recent R* games - yes, I realize it was actually published by R* and developed by Team Bondi – LA Noire kind of snuck up on me. I didn’t go into the game with too many preconceptions. I really, really enjoyed it, but I can see why going into it with the expectations that it’s Red Dead 1947 or Grand Theft Noire would be disappointing. I adored the atmosphere, and even played through in Black & White mode for the authentic cinematic experience.

As I was playing I was struck by how similar it was to a traditional adventure game. You find items, talk to characters and use things from your inventory. I guess the closest game to it would be the Phoenix Wright series, with the witness interrogations and crime scene investigation, though it does cut out the cartoon campness of the Ace Attorney games (to the point where it could perhaps be accused of taking itself a little too seriously). Mainly, though, I was surprised by how neatly they sidestepped a lot of the adventure game niggles that have plagued the genre for years.

Graphic adventure games have traditionally fallen back into ‘pixel hunts’. So, one particular item in the background is interactive, requiring careful combing of the screen with the cursor to find it. This is often exacerbated when only one particular item will satisfy the game’s peculiar requirement. Maybe a stick is needed to reach something just out of reach, but of course it’s only possible to use a stick for this, and in fact it’s not possible to take any other path round the puzzle.

LA Noire uses subtle musical cues and controller vibrations to highlight when your character, Phelps, is near an item he can examine. It even lets you know when you’ve found all the important items in a scene. There’s a limited pool of ‘intuition points’, which are replenished as you progress, that can highlight all the clues you need. I think most critically of all, you can even progress through the story without finding all the clues in an area.

Putting all this together you dissolve the frustration of not finding the correct item. LA Noire retains the satisfaction of solving a puzzle the correct way. At the same time, by allowing the player to progress without requiring them to collect a backpack full of the kind of things you’d find Wombles throwing away, it means players don't spend an hour trying everything in their inventory on everything in the environment. It should also be mentioned that the game lets you skip action sequences too so you can focus on investigating.

The other facet of this is to introduce a measure of replay value to the game. This is something helped by the game’s episodic nature. Each installment has the scope for some branching based on player choice within it without majorly affecting the overarching plotline. But on top of that, there’s an opportunity to go back and pick up any clues you’ve missed; in one case, I entirely missed out questioning a suspect by visiting the locations out of order and, although I still got the right guy, there was about half an hour of the case that I missed.

I’d also like to say a word about the scarcity of the action. In Grand Theft Auto, when you pick up a mission, you know pretty much what lies ahead. You’ll drive to a place, shoot some people, then drive somewhere else. Sometimes you’ll chase someone in a car, sometimes they’ll chase you. All well and good, but it begins to feel like the beginning of an episode of Casualty; When you start a simple sounding mission, you’re waiting for the inevitable complication. You know, you just know, that your job to deliver a package to a contact will end in violence.

LA Noire has much less action, and the action is a fair bit clunkier than other similar R* games, but because it’s unexpected and almost restrained it works brilliantly. You turn up to question a suspect, you’re always aware they might try and run away, but because they don’t always when they do it is much more effective.

I think I’ve said everything I’d like to about LA Noire. Other, real websites have spoken at much greater length about what it does well and where it’s lacking. I was just excited when I played it that the changes made to broaden the genre's appeal mean we may get more strong story-based adventure games.

Plougher of Kings

2011-05-30T13:23:00.005+01:00

In The Witcher 2, I’m playing as an arsehole.

I demand rewards for work I would have offered for free in other games (hey, killing monsters is how I make a living!). I kill people who provoke me. I even fed two guys to a demented ghost they had provoked, justifying to myself their actions had brought their fate on themselves.

I mean, it helps that Geralt is already a bit of a prick to begin with: he’ll often haggle the price of a job without any input from the player, something that in other games would have been a dialogue choice left up to you. But this all works to let me get more inside his head. When confronted by the two guys and the angry ghost, I didn’t think about what I would do, I thought about what Geralt would do.

I’ve played a fair bit of TW2 over the past few days - including a ‘just ten minutes before bed’ session that ended up with me not getting to sleep until after 03:00 - and it’s made me think about roleplaying and consequences in video games. I know that sounds grandiose and pretentious, but bear with me here.

One of the things I didn’t initially click with in The Witcher The First was that you were forced to play as Geralt of Rivia. He's a genetically engineered and mutated monster hunter, covered in scars and with a slightly twisted sense of morality. In a way he’s the logical conclusion of the adventurer archetype, in the same way that the characters in Watchmen were a deconstruction of the superhero archetype. He literally exists only to solve problems in small villages by killing monsters.

Of course, as he is a defined character (he’s starred in books, graphic novels, even a TV series and film), all of the choices you make must be between the kind of things Geralt would do anyway. And as the morality is typically grey-on-grey in the Witcher world, the ‘right’ choice is hard to make.

The thing TW2 really does well is that the consequences for your actions are not immediately obvious. A choice you make might not have ramifications for another several hours of play, so if you don’t like the outcome of the action there’s not really much chance of reloading and picking something else.

And it goes further than that. As a sweeping generalisation, games tend to be very predictable systems. I need enough information to make an informed choice about what to do. LA Noire is a good example of this: because it’s so vital to the gameplay, the facial tics and twitches to indicate lying have to be over the top. Unexpected consequences for actions the player has no information about is kind of a dick move for a developer.

Of course, real life is nothing like this. Getting up late for work one day might have all sorts of consequences for even the rest of your life. If you try and imagine every single thing that would have happened if you got up on time you’d go mad. TW2 exploits this to make your actions in the game world more real by making them less fair. Yeah, you couldn’t predict what the outcome of your action would be. You can’t go back and change it, you’re going to have to live with the consequences and think a bit harder the next time something like this crops up.

So, as you can tell I’m enjoying The Witcher 2. I’ll try and post more thoughts up about it when I’m a bit further through; I’m still only in Chapter One, and I hear the second chapter is packed to the gills with awesomeness.

Demo Reviews

2010-06-28T17:08:00.000+01:00

I've just got a hold of Red Dead Redemption, but as playing that is going to be a pretty mammoth undertaking, I thought I'd do some posts in the meantime!

I was in London this weekend to see some friends over from the other side of the world. Made the mistake of walking down Oxford Street, and happened to walk past Primark... The combination of the close press of a million souls, the 30°C late afternoon heat, and the already fairly ground-in Evil of Primark combined to create something akin to the 3rd Circle of Hell. I manged to avoid its Abyssal pull, and thought I was through the worst.

Then we got on the Underground.

Anyway, I've also been playing a couple of demos.

I gave Transformers: War for Cybertron a whirl, a game I've had fairly mixed feelings about. I was initially excited when I heard about it because... well, it's Transformers, innit? And it could never be as bad as the absolute mess of CGI Michael Bay released as a film, could it? Then my initial excitement turned partially to doubt; surely the whole point of Transformers was they were robots in disguise, right? That's why they said it in the song. I've never been completely comfortable with the Cybertron based parts of the Transformers continuities, and here was a game based entirely on Cybertron.

The demo was multiplayer only, not really the part of a game I look forward to most. Still, it gave a reasonable idea of what the robot-on-robot action would be like (fairly clunky and visually indistinct, as it turns out), and while it didn't strain my underpant elastic at first, I've chewed it over in my brain for the past few days and have started to warm to it. I think a single player mode with a bit more character and charm is exactly what I'm looking for, and I hear that's exactly what the game has. Still, I do hope that the vehicle modes in the full game are more inspiring than they are in the demo; just about everyone in the matches I played stuck to the robot mode, a sad indictment of a game based around Transforming robots.

The other demo I tried was Blur, a collision of Burnout and Mario Kart. There is honestly no other way to describe it. The action is pretty eyeball-searing, but I think the fun of both the above games comes from clustering around the TV with your housemates, handing out the beers, and then squealing obscenities at each other. Maybe if I'd played Blur in such surroundings it would've jumped straight to the top of my most wanted list, but, as it is, it's probably going to stay low priority at least until it comes down in price.

Fable II Thoughts

2010-06-25T16:20:00.002+01:00

I've spent the past couple of weeks ploughing through Lionhead's Fable II. I actually played Brutal Legend just before it (which, looking back over some old, old posts was a game I was really looking forward to) but that will have to be a post for a different time.

So...

I played the first Fable game a few years ago on PC, and quite enjoyed it. It didn't quite have enough freedom for me, I never felt like I was exploring or really adventuring. The world was presented as a series of small, mostly linear 'bubbles' with a couple of key locations in them, so you couldn't wander off the beaten track. The story also wasn't the best, and I think I eventually gave up around two thirds of the way through. That said, there was something engaging about the central character, and the way his appearance reflected your actions in the game.

Fable II builds what I thought were the strong areas of the first game. Unfortunately, some of the poor areas are carried across directly; for instance, the story was particularly uninspiring. It's full of paper thin characters and ridiculous moments where a character (I like to mentally label them Professor Von Plotexposition) turns up and explains what's happening. There was some backstory to explain why the Bad Guy was the bad guy (actually, that's a lie... his fall from his originally tragic situation to a cruel tyrant was explained in one line of dialogue, which itself was simply a cheesy metaphor), but it really was hard to care about any of it. At all. I mean, it says something about the game that I was more upset about a bad guy kicking my dog than I was when my sister was murdered (actually it may say more about me).

I think I would have preferred if the story had actually been more generic and spent more time playing on other RPG cliches, something it does on several occasions very well. Slight spoiler here, but there's a brilliant twist on the classic 'My son thinks he's an adventurer and has wondered into a dungeon' quest; if the style of this quest had been carried across to the main story I would have lapped it up right the way through, and we wouldn't have had the jarring shifts in tone that the game is currently plagued with. One minute, you're helping a pair of bumbling brothers (Freelance Necromancers) who have accidentally raised the dead, and the next you're forced into torturing some prisoners in the Bad Guy's castle.

I did at least enjoy the voice acting; good to see an almost entirely British cast (Stephen Fry, Julia Sawalha), even if it does slip into cliche comedy accents in several places. You'll already be able to tell what accents the peasants have before you even have the game.

One area where there has been an obvious improvement, however, is in the graphics. They weren't too shabby in the original, they had a certain cartoony charm. In Fable II they are absolutely stunning. In particular, the seasonal shifts (sadly there isn't a Harvest Moon-style seasonal cycle, changes in the seasons are driven by plot) and the lighting and weather effects are amazing. Seeing the sun breaking through the clouds, or watching snow slowly drift to the ground are some particular highlights.

The levelling system works well, though it certainly could have been deeper. As your character kills enemies with your various abilities you gain experience associated with that area; shoot an enemy to death and you get more experience to invest in the Skill tree. Your character can specialise in Strength, Skill or Will, and there's also a 'general' experience pool that can be used to advance your character in any of the trees. One small problem, though, is that I reckon most characters will end up with lots of experience in all three areas over the course rather than specialising in one. You are supposed to be the only hero who has the mastery over all areas, so I guess it kind of fits, but one of the central themes about the game is choice. Why not make the choice as to which path you progress down meaningful, instead of allowing anyone become an expert at everything?

What is very cool, though an idea carried over from the first game, is that advancing your hero in the three areas will change your appearance. Focus on Strength, and you muscles visibly bulge, concentrate on Will and glowing runes will start to appear on your skin. Go with Skill and your character... erm, gets taller?

Anyway, leading on from this, the reintroduction of alignment morphing from games like the Black & White series is welcome. I'm a sucker for stuff like this; by the end of the game by character was a 6' tall bodybuilder, sporting a rather fetching cuffed overcoat, shiny white teeth and a halo. In particular I like how there are now two character sliders; one for your character's 'purity', which is a measure of how greedy and indulgent you are, and one for your character's 'alignment' which is how selfless you are. Tou could be a Good character who is Corrupt (a decadent character who drinks and sleeps with prostitutes, but wouldn't harm anyone else) or an Evil character who is also Pure (someone very organised and regimented; more of a brutal dictator than a psychopathic killer!). The former character would end up looking fat and unhealthy, and the latter would attract a cloud of smoke and end up with a chalk-white complexion.

(Incidentally, how stupid is it that you have to eat celery to get thinner? All the running, fighting, dancing, chopping wood, etc. etc. makes no difference to your figure!)

Also, some locations change depending on your actions through the game; the effects of this can be seen fairly early on, with one location in the main city of Bowerstone changing either to a hive of scum and villainy or a fairly well-to-do area with a scattering of shops depending on whether a guard you encounter ends up being fired or not (as a direct consequence of your actions).

The area where I had the most fun, however, was interacting with the world and the economy. Unlike a world like Oblivion, Morrowind, or Fallout 3, prices of goods depend on supply and demand along with the local economy. Keep an eye open, and you can make money shipping goods from areas where they're on sale over to areas where they're in demand. Invest a lot of money in an area and the quality of their goods goes up, allowing for a bigger margin if you decide to play trader. I may be wrong, but I think if you pick up things like blacksmithing jobs it can result in the weapon shops producing more, but don't hold me to that. Still, if you fancy to property trade, you can buy cheap buildings in town, pour a load of money into the local economy, then sell the houses on again in a booming market with a redecorated interior to make a fat profit.

In fact, it would have been interesting if this had gone further, if it would basically a fantasy Renaissance-era version of Elite; imagine if you could own woodmills or ore mines, and by having a stranglehold on the supply of raw materials you could ensure your blacksmiths were producing the best or only weapons. You could even encourage strife to boost the sales of your own weapons (I'm sure this happens in a film, but I'll be buggered if I can remember which one.). By the sounds of it, this aspect of the game is set to be vastly improved on in Fable III. The idea that your entire kingdom will change depending on your actions as ruler is quite exciting, with, for instance, particular neighbourhoods falling into disrepair if you neglect to tackle crime.

I should mention when you take the time to earn money like this playing the game ends up pretty easy; money is plentiful, therefore it's easy to buy health potions, food, and property.

Bottom line is that Fable II isn't really a 'proper' RPG by any means. It isn't even a particularly accomplished action-RPG as the combat is way too simplistic (compare Fable II to a stat heavy, crunchy behemoth like Dragons Age: Origins). What it is, is a toy box where you can mess about with the various tools at your disposal; it sort of reminds me of playing with Playmobil as a child. It's even pretty much one of the only games I would consider playing through as evil, as the evil is much more of the top hat-wearing, mustache twirling Villainy than actual EVIL evil.

In many ways, this all makes it a classic bit of Lionhead software. Similar to Black & White, it's a series of cool mechanics without a huge amount of traditional 'game' holding it all together; this is both the title's main strength and main weakness.

Chaos Rising: Conclusions

2010-05-12T20:51:00.006+01:00

The good folks at Relic and THQ have provided all the new units and gameplay improvements included in Chaos Rising to everyone who already owns a copy of Dawn of War II.

Basically, this means people with only the original can play against people with the expansion, and get to use all the new units for the existing races. In Last Stand, too, the three original heroes can play alongside the Chaos and Tyranid characters. I imagine Relic are hoping that people will load the game up again, see the new faction in action, and be inspired to shell out for the expansion.

Enemies... We need ENEMIES!

As you can probably tell from my previous post, I really liked Chaos Rising. If you've not tried the previous game, this is the perfect opportunity to grab the whole set.

If most of the content is included, though, is it worth shelling out for just another 15 missions and a new race in multiplayer? Well, if you liked the original game's campaign, and want a bit more of everything, then the expansion is perfect. If you preferred the game's multiplayer... Maybe not. Unless you're mad keen on playing Chaos, all of the benefits and units are included with the recent patch.

Relic and THQ have both listened to feedback from the players while working on Chaos Rising, which bodes well for the inevitable future expansions. I just hope they stick to their guns, and work on improving and building on what made Dawn of War II different rather than adding back in what other people thought was missing.

Realisation

2010-05-11T13:51:00.001+01:00

Things That Can Make You Feel Like an Idiot Almost Instantly

I've just realised I'm The Guy Who Hates Everything :(

Rejoice, brothers! Your slavery to the False Emperor ends today!

2010-05-10T21:47:00.006+01:00

I've just finished the single player side of Chaos Rising, and thought I should put down what I think!

The original Dawn of War game was widely lauded for its fantastic presentation though it sadly started to look slightly dated by the third expansion), the charming (and, well, gory) character animation, and fast paced action.

Dawn of War II built on these key strengths, but mixed in some other elements Relic had used in their Company of Heroes games. It was generally well received by critics, but if you head over to the game's Amazon's page you'll find a slew of bad reviews, something I have talked about previously. The most controversial change was the removal of base building, something I loved but others hated.

The single player campaign revolved around small missions with a handful of Space Marines which could level up and be equipped with RPG-style wargear. Unfortunately the missions became quite samey, especially towards the end of the campaign, as they were fought over a fairly limited selection of maps.

Enter the first expansion (or, more properly, expandalone) for DoWII: Chaos Rising.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising (sorry, I had to use the full title just once. From now on I'll use the simple acronym WH40K:DoWIICR... ehhh, maybe just Chaos Rising then) introduces, unsurprisingly enough, the Chaos faction to Dawn of War II. There is a host of new content, including multiplayer game modes, a single player campaign, maps... All that jazz. There might be some balance issues addressed maybe? I don't care that much about it as I mainly love the game for the single player and the odd game of Last Stand (essentially multiplayer for idiots).

The presentation is as good as I've come to expect from the Dawn of War games. The new Ice Planet looks fantastic, though the Space Hulk levels are a slight disappointment to a geek like me. Sounds are appropriately thumping, and the burping, squelching, and drippling noises the Great Unclean One makes are positively disgusting.

The single player campaign takes the Blood Raven characters from the original game up from level 20 through to 30; if you have the original, you can even load one of your saved games and carry on with the same squads. The campaign dumps your characters on a planet recently emerged from the Warp which, predictably enough, turns out to be infested with Chaos Space Marines.

The story is standard stuff, though the characters do stand out as being quite good... for an RTS, that is (seriously though, can you name any characters from an RTS game? Except for Kane, of course). Still, I enjoyed the appropriately gravelly dialogue from everyone, and was interested enough to pay attention until the end of the campaign.

What I did enjoy was the new corruption mechanic. By acting in particularly un-Space Marine ways your squads can gain corruption points and later new bloodthirsty traits and abilities. So far, so black and white morality system. Where the system shines, though, is that some of the choices you have to make are genuinely tough. For instance, in one mission foul Xenos are squatting in the tomb of a great Blood Raven hero. You can risk damaging the tomb (and consequently gaining corruption) to purge the aliens, or you can leave it alone. Or, you can purposefully destroy and raid the tomb to gain access to a powerful bit of wargear.

It's further complicated by corrupting wargear, purposefully overpowered weapons and equipment which slowly corrupts the wielder each time it's used (offset by redeeming items which weaken your character and reduce their corruption), and by a series of increasingly powerful corrupting abilties.

It has the effect of adding yet another layer of strategy on top of the RPG stylings of the original game, and though it feels a bit heavy at times (seemingly arbitrarily punishing you with corruption if you don't take certain squads with you in particular missions) I thought it was a very good addition to the single player.

The Chaos faction in multiplayer is good fun to play. Many people seemed to worry that they would end up too similar to the Space Marines as they shared several units. This doesn't seem to be the case, and they end up feeling very Chaos; I just hope the ability to build 'shrines' around the map (which provide some sort of localised buff) doesn't indicate a return to the game's base building routes...

I'll put summing up thoughts, including what it builds on over the original and whether or not you should get it, in my next post!

Long Absence

2010-04-23T14:15:00.001+01:00

I realise I haven't posted on my blog in ages, so I thought I would take the plunge and write something!

There are a few things I would like to get up over the next couple of weeks... I've got some a new games I want to post up my thoughts on, including a board game I've been playing recently. I'd also like to put up my experiences (brief through they are) of running a Roleplaying Game on Google Wave and maybe offer some tips to anyone else thinking of doing the same.

More X-COM

2010-01-01T17:22:00.003Z

First things first, I managed to limit myself to only a further two games on Steam: Medieval: Total War and Street Fighter IV. No more. Honest.

I played a bit more X-COM: UFO Defense over the past couple of days. The game is just as good as I remember it... For anyone who's not played it, it's a turn based, squad level strategy game. You spend a lot of the game looking at a view of the planet (the Geoscape), managing bases and budgets, manufacturing weapons for your troops, attacking UFOs wth your fighter jets, all that jazz.

When a detected UFO lands or you manage to force one to crash, you can intercept it with your troop transporter and the game switches to an isometric turn-based form. Here, you stomp your troops about killing aliens (or, more likely, have aliens kill your troops).

There are a bunch of nice touches in the game; for instance, you have to keep your funding countries happy or they withdraw funding from the project and, if you don't monitor the skies above their countries, they may eventually be infiltrated by alien spies and sign a pact with the invaders. In fact, advanced scanners can reveal what mission a UFO is on before you attack it; terror ships land in civilian population centres and scare the bejesus out of everyone, scout ships look for your bases so the aliens can attack you directly and supply ships resupply secret alien bases (so they can be followed to locate those bases or simply ambushed to replenish your stocks).

The other thing that works well is how you research alien technology. Just about all of the alien artefacts in the game can be researched and put to use against their inventors. While you feel completely outmatched in the early stages of the game (especially as your troops' standard armour only provides minimal project against a violent sneeze directed against you), you eventually learn to use the alien weapons and armours and even combine alien and earth technologies to make your own spacecraft.

Anyway, my favourite part of the game is its atmosphere. The music still sends shivers down my spine, and heightens the tension you feel while waiting for your turn; the game only shows you aliens that are visible to at least one of your troops, so you often spend the alien turn staring at a screen saying 'HIDDEN MOVEMENT', listening to doors slamming around the map, desparately trying to work out where the aliens are hiding. I maintain that UFO Defense and its sequel Terror from the Deep are pretty much the only scary strategy games (and turn-based strategy, at that) ever made. I would even go so far as to say they would rank quite high on my list of Scariest Games of All Time.

Right, I'll be back to write more about my new games when I get back home to my PC. Hope everyone had a happy new year!

This organization was named the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit...

2009-12-31T00:27:00.003Z

I've been playing XCOM today... Man, that game is just as I remember it. As in, double bastard hard.

I'm doing okay with my current playthrough, no Governments have yet signed secret pacts with the aliens so I must be doing something right. I'm just afraid the aliens are going to escalate hostilities before I get all my advanced technologies together.

Anyway, I might do a more detailed post about it tomorrow, otherwise I'll be posting at the weekend when I'm back with my PC and all my other new games :)

New Year's Games

2009-12-28T18:58:00.004Z

Hello everyone! I haven't posted in ages... I hope to put some new stuff up in the near future, just wanted to put a quick post up in the meantime.

I went a little mad in the Steam Sale and managed to buy enough games to keep me entertained up until about April 2010. I only (only! ha) spent around £70, but got some games I'm really looking forward to playing.

In particular it'll be really good to get Left 4 Dead 2 up and running, I know a load of people I know have already got it, so it'll be good to get some multiplayer gaming up and running (I even bought a headset to play it with!). Also, I'd love to go back and play a bit of X-COM, the first two especially: Terror from the Deep is, without a doubt, the scariest turn-based strategy game I've ever played.

Anyway, here's a full list of what I got:

Penumbra Collectors Pack
Call of Cthulhu
AI War: Fleet Command
Dead Space
Audiosurf
X-Com Complete Pack
Left 4 Dead 2
Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death
Rogue Trooper
Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Rome: Total War Gold

I also got Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas, and I'm still playing a few games of Blood Bowl, especially now I have a couple of friends with the game (and one especially with a new PC!). I hope to post up some match reports in the future once we get a league going, something I saw done well over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

I hope everyone has had a happy festive season and is looking forward to some game-filled antics in the new year!

EDIT: Also, some new photos I took on Boxing Day with my Dad's new camera. I'm going to have to start saving up...

Cockatoo Island

2009-10-09T02:08:00.003+01:00

I took a few pictures while we were on Cockatoo Island the other day... We camped overnight there, and had an explore on Thursday evening. The island is bizarre; it's an abandoned shipyard in the middle of Sydney harbour and is almost completely deserted.

There were three other groups camping on the island, so we had pretty much the whole place to ourselves. It wasn't quite what we were expecting when we booked it, but very impressive none-the-less!

Security failings of Arkham

2009-09-30T14:58:00.002+01:00

Despite the fact that it houses some of the most dangerous criminals in the world, the security arrangements of Arkham Asylum seem to be dangerously slack.* Playing Batman: Arkham Asylum has brought home to me how bad the policies actually are. For instance, I can’t see the logic in keeping unlockable boxes of assault rifles scattered throughout the island; are they honestly that sure there will never be a breakout?

Let’s take a look at some of the other worst offenders:

At the beginning of the game, Harley Quinn seems to have gotten access to the security forcefield control room, and has a pass to enable/disable them. We’ll gloss over the fact that Arkham was willing to employ someone who was obviously already unstable enough to allow herself to be lured by the Joker into villain-dom, and focus on how she managed to get into the control room… Did she break in? If Harley Quinn, with her red and blue Basque and chalk white face makeup, was somehow able to evade security, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Also, why does her security pass still work? I’m pretty sure most high security prisons collect those and deactivate them once you become an inmate.

Leading on from this, why do they let Batman walk right up to the Intensive Treatment rooms? Yes, he’s Batman, and is unlikely to break anyone out of Arkham, but is it hospital policy to allow heavily armed, masked men walk the corridors?

Batman? Upset the inmates? How very dare you...

Of course, once you’re barred from proceeding any further (you’ll “upset the inmates”, apparently… where obviously a chemically-scarred, maniacal, psychotic mass-murderer won’t), that’s where things go wrong. As soon as Joker is able to get somewhere he’ll cause some damage, he is being attended by a single unarmed guard and an orderly. They even take him out of the restraints they had him in to take him down to the treatment rooms!

How did the Riddler hide all these trophies around the place? Most of them are in places even Batman struggles to get to, so Riddler must have been crawling around ventilation shafts for months. As a side issue, did no-one realise Batman had a Batcave hidden in the foundations? How did he even build it?** Who knows what else is lurking underneath the mansions.

A more appropriate level of security

With all of these flaws, it’s no wonder people are constantly breaking out. That said, when the founder of the Asylum’s idea of treatment is fatal electrocution, it’s not hard to see why the place doesn’t have a roaring trade in rehabilitation (and why so many people are keen to leave).

*Beyond the obvious ‘revolving door’ policy on sentencing, of course.

**Actually, this has always bothered me about Batman. Where does he get his labour? Do Bruce and Albert do all the heavy construction work in the Batcave themselves, or do they have a very discrete building contractor?

"Just as I expected. The agile crook also managed to slip an induction receiving antenna into your left trouser leg."

2009-09-29T16:51:00.002+01:00

Now that I've spent a fair bit of time with it, I thought I would put down my thoughts on Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Batman shouldn't work; it's a video game based on comic IP riding the success of a movie adaptation. I struggle to think of a single recent game with either of these qualities that was better than mediocre; I hear the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games aren't too bad, and City of Heroes/City of Villains, although not based on a particular comic IP, are fairly well regarded. Nothing, however, can approach Batman in terms of style and passion. Batman: Arkham Asylum nails the one thing you want in a superhero game: it makes you feel like the Dark Knight himself.

The game begins with Joker captured and en route to Arkham. A wonderful sequence sees you escorting him to the depths of the Intensive Treatment building over the credits before, inevitably, the Joker breaks free. As you pursue him deeper into Arkham, it becomes clear that the joker has been planning his 'party' for some time, and you are his guest of honour.

It's worth pointing out that the game is not based on the recent successful films by Chris Nolan; good though they are, certain things key to the comic book had to be removed in the transition to the big screen. Though Arkham Asylum feels much more true to the comic book roots of the character, I would point to the critically lauded Batman: The Animated Series as inspiration for some of the stylistic choices (and, indeed, the story was written by Paul Dini, a writer for The Animated Series).

In fact, several of the voice actors return from the animated series return here; Kevin Conroy delivers a solid performance as the unflappable Batman, but stealing the show is Mark Hamil as Joker. You'll hear a lot from Joker throughout the game; he regularly pops up on the public address system to taunt you or, more likely, his own thugs scattered around Arkham. There are enough messages that they never get repetitive, though the thugs you fight for the most part of the game have considerably less variety.

The graphics are, put simply, gorgeous. The game runs surprisingly smoothly, even on a mid-level system. The character models are supremely detailed; it may just be my imagination, but I think you can even see Batman's stubble get longer over the course of the game. Some characters are definitely modelled after their animated versions (Killer Croc, for example). As this is the Unreal engine at work, outdoors environments are handled seamlessly (load times in general are very short, except for the unskippable start-up splash screen), though everything does tend to have a bit of a 'plasticy' look to it.

The visuals do a very good job of bringing Arkham to life; there are vague feelings of other games (the more gothic sections of Bioshock, for instance), but this is ultimately the comic book world of Gotham. The sprawling gothic buildings perfectly evoke the feeling of the infamous madhouse. In fact, you sometimes feel a little uncomfortable walking round it; to mirror Batman's sentiments, it's hard to imagine the place being conducive to anyone's mental wellbeing (I could talk for a while about this mirroring Batman's presence in Gotham; after all, in The Dark Knight Returns, Joker has effectively become comatose until Batman comes out of retirement. This would, however, be overly pretentious, so I won't).

The only thing which may cause drops in framerate is the PHYS-X effects. These are unique to the PC and add certain funky physical effects to the game; realistic smoke, cloth and paper curling and flapping realistically, breakable tiles, etc. These effects weren't present in the console versions and, to be perfectly honest, they're only ever a nice little extra; if you're suffering terrible framerates, you could happily turn them off.

Unfortunately, you may not see as much of the environment as you'd like as much of the game has you using Detective Mode. This vision mode allows you to see enemies through walls and highlights grates and weak walls for you to exploit. Though this sounds like it makes the game too easy, when you play for a while it just feels right; after all, you're Batman! The downside is that Detective Mode paints everything a deep blue, meaning you lose out on the lovely textures and models that have obviously had a lot of time and energy put into them.

Gameplay

MORE GAMEPLAY

Controls

Combat

Boss fights (not so good)

The 'silent hunter' gameplay is brilliant; you will occasionally be confronted with a room full of armed guards and will have to incapacitate them all before you can continue. Batman can use his grapple to swing about amongst the rafters and gothic architecture (ie, stone Gargoyles), and can sneak up behind thugs to silently knock them out. Other gadgets and upgrades offer more options, from multiple batarangs and selective detonating of your explosive gel (the inverted takedown comes highly recommended). There are plenty of ways to use the environment as well; there are walls to break down, grates to hide under, so you can meticulously plan your attack or improvise on the spot as you see fit.

The real joy in this mode, however, is watching the thugs become terrified as you take their comrades out one by one. You can hear them starting to talk to themselves ("I'm gonna die down here, and no-one's ever gonna know...") and see them shaking; occasionally, they'll even shoot into the shadows at curtains flapping in the breeze or a boiler venting off steam. Most of these sections are unlockable for play in the game's Challenge mode, so you can attempt them against the clock (or just have fun silently eliminating all the threats...).

Lasting Appeal

Challenge mode

Story mode replay

Hard mode

Unlockables (Riddler trophies)

ODST

2009-09-18T13:25:00.002+01:00

Sorry, but what is the deal with Halo III: ODST? I’ll admit I’ve never been a huge Halo fan, but this is just starting to feel like the Emperor’s new clothes. It’s just another Halo game, people! They’re all boring; boring weapons, boring enemies, boring environments. Give me some Call of Duty any day of the week!

In other news, Batman: Arkham Asylum is out on PC today. Yay! Steam is downloading my copy as we speak… I’m so psyched about playing this; even Yahtzee seemed to enjoy it (speaking of Yahtzee, I’m intending on downloading all of his adventure games to play over the weekend to try and inspire me… I’m hoping to try and write my own adventure game [with a little help from a friend] using AGS!)

Coming up soon (early next week) will be a brief review of Time Gentlemen, Please!, the sequel to the free Ben There, Dan That. If you haven’t checked these out, go do it now! I’m also going to write some more stuff about Fallout 3, just a few thoughts I had about the dialogue that came to me the other day.

Enjoy the weekend, y’all!

Hulk Smash!

2009-09-16T16:53:00.002+01:00

So, I've been playing a particular game a lot over the past couple of weeks... BUT! It's not a video game! I've finally got a copy of the reissued Games Workshop boardgame Space Hulk (well, I say finally, I actually got it three days before it was released in the shops), and have spent the last few weekends giving it a spin and playing through a variety of missions.

Space Hulk is Games Workshop's answer to Alien and Aliens. Your squad of Space Marine Terminators have boarded a drifting mash to derelict ships, the hulk, to prevent it from colliding with a nearby hive world. Scans of the hulk reveal it is teeming with sleeping Genestealers, a brooding and darkly intelligent alien species related to the Tyranids. One player leads the Terminators on various missions through the hulk's twisting corridors, the other takes the role of the Genestealers as they stalk the Space Marines through the ship. The Genestealers are initially represented by 'blips' which can hide between 1 and 3 aliens, and the Marine player can use a secret pool of command points to spring surprises on his opponent. In close combat, the odds are heavily stacked in the Genestealer's favour, so the Space Marines must do their best to engage at range with their rapid firing storm bolters...

The box itself is fantastic and, though it is pricey at nearly £60, it weighs in at around 4kg, with much of that being the beautifully detailed 'debossed' cardboard corridors and snap together plastic miniatures. Beware, though, it'll be a good few hours before you can actually play the game; it took me two solid evenings to clip out all the models and shave the flash off them.

The models really do deserve a special mention. They're as crammed full of detail as any of the metal commander models, and the plastic they're made of allows authentically spindly arms and pointy claws on the Genestealers. For the most part, mould lines are hidden well underneath the joins in plates of armour, and the many intricate details makes the models a painters dream. Of course, as they're snap together, there isn't really any scope for conversions, but as the formation of the squad is fixed this shouldn't be too much of an issue (and for your own games, you could always paint up a regular box of Terminators with any funky conversions). The only two slight criticisms are that the models are undeniably Blood Angels, so tough luck if you fancy painting them up as Smurfs, and that they are maybe too spindly; I had a couple of fine bits of detail snap off as I was assembling. However, as you can see, the models are absolutely fantastic.

It's been many years since I last played the game, so I can't reliably say whether the game has changed much since its previous incarnation, but it certainly feels authentic. The rules are nice and simple; they're very easy to learn, though I would recommend rereading the rules after you've played your first few games as there will undoubtedly be some small point you've missed! The game can often feel unbalanced one way or another, with some maps being very challenging for the Marines, and others seemingly impossible for the Genestealers. However, the point of the game is to play each map with both sides in a single match to even out any unfairness.

I thought I would round things off here with a quick summary of a few hints and tips I've picked up over the past few weekends:

Firstly, and most basically, don't ever let a Space Marine get bogged down in combat. Only the Librarian and the two combat only Terminators can really reliably win, and even then, they should be left on Guard rather than being used offensively.
Don't throw away Genestealers. It may seem like you a limitless amount, but quite often every single one will need to count.
You should really be using the timer, it adds a lot to the game. However, a ten second pause at the beginning of your turn can work wonders; just remember to do the things you really need to get done on your turn first!
Don't bunch your Space Marines up; bunched up Terminators can't fire, and you are therefore wasting their shots!
Remember to read the manual; for instance, notice that Sergeants only get their +1 bonus (+2 for the chap with the Thunder Hammer) if an attack came from the front square only. Also, closing a door will trigger overwatch, as will opening it; a Genestealer can stand behind a door opening and closing it to trigger jams or waste assault cannon ammunition!
Finally, paint your models :)

FUEL Review

2009-09-02T15:31:00.002+01:00

FUEL was a game I never intended to buy; indeed, I’d never even properly heard of it until I read an article on it over at The Escapist. I mean, I was aware of the game but knew nothing about it; I very seldom play racing games (the last one I properly played was Need for Speed: Underground 2 back in 2004), so previews tend to slip under my radar. I only ended up buying it as I wanted to have a play round with the game world!

The premise of the game is that, after a massive ecological disaster, people have abandoned vast swathes of land due to the dangerous and unpredictable weather. You, and a number of other thrill-seekers, have started competing in races across the uninhabited wasteland to win fuel (yes, I’ll let you read that again to absorb how stupid it sounds; you race cars to win fuel).

This game is all kinds of large…

The main draw of the game is its much publicised, massive procedurally-generated game world; the playable area is around 14,400km². I guess this equates to a square roughly 128km on each side, with a few sections on the top of mountains and in the sea being unreachable (this is an area roughly the size of East Timor, fact fans… Thanks to Wikipedia for that one). The game doesn’t store the entire world on your hard drive, however; the landscape is procedurally generated (not the same as it being random; see Elite), allowing the developers to hand-sculpt a few key areas and have the computer fill in the boring in-between parts.

The upshot is you have an enormous post-apocalyptic world you can roam around in (with a handy helicopter mode for quick travelling between zones). Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, not quite. This is not a living, breathing environment like Liberty City or the Capitol Wasteland of Fallout 3; you can explore in a ‘free drive’ mode, but there is little to see aside from the (admittedly hugely impressive) vistas. Exploring allows you to spot challenges and races scattered around the map, but it’s far easier to unlock these by bumping into ‘doppler’ trucks. These are unlocked after particular races; all you have to do is drop down on a helipad nearby, drive cross-country until you catch it up, and bang! You’ve unlocked all the challenges.

The views are frequently breathtaking.

Presentation wise, the game is good; the lighting during races is especially pretty, with sunrises and sunsets bathing the screen with a wonderful golden glow. Cars kick up realistic amounts of dirt and spray, all the stuff you’d expect of a game released in 2009. Interface and controls are okay, I guess… The game is obviously converted from console (only being able to switch between menus with the Y and T keys becomes highly frustrating), but if you grab your gamepad you shouldn’t have too many problems. The music is alright to begin with, but I ended up turning it off as the small selection of tunes started to grate; the same applies to the sound effects, particularly the ‘tyre-screech’ sound. Nothing too gamebreaking, though.

The races themselves are good fun, and FUEL is at its best when it does things differently from a standard racing game. For example, one of the challenge modes sees you pursuing a helicopter from the ground, with the dust kicked up by its rotors obscuring your version. Another has you chasing down rival cars and knocking them off the road in a cops-and-robbers mode. The career races are often memorable; one race has you struggling to stick to the road as a monumental lightning storm knocks trees and pylons into your path, and a further has a tornado hurling burnt out vehicles at you as your descend a mountainside. Even the settings themselves are fun to race through, from a wind farm in a desolate forest to a valley floor littered with wrecked trucks and a tanker ship marooned in the middle of a desert.

Some of the career races feature bizarre weather (strangely absent from the free-drive mode).

The strength of these few scripted races only seems to underline the mediocrity of both the free-drive mode and the other ‘fill’ races. You can’t help but feel a profound sense of wasted potential; yes, the Seek ‘n Destroy (the aforementioned cops-and-robbers mode) races are fun, but they ultimately pan out the same, a fact not helped by the lack of a proper damage model. You can’t help but think what would happen if elements of a Destruction Derby type game were added in to the game, or if we had single player ‘missions’ to perform not unlike the structure for flight or space combat games (the old classic ‘defend the convey’ mission would work brilliantly well here). In fact, I intend to post in a couple of days as to what I think could have been done with the game!

The other main problem with the game is the AI. I don’t know if the developers tried to add rubber-band AI or not, but the computer players can be seen to visibly cheat. For instance, if you lose sight of the person in first place, it’s very difficult to catch them up, though they will frequently slow right down once they get within sight of the finish line. I guess playing in multiplayer alleviates this problem, but in career mode we’re stuck with frustrating AI until a patch comes along to fix it (assuming it does!).

Despite the above, FUEL is a hard game to really dislike. It might just be the fact I’ve not played many racing games, but I love the decidedly arcade handling of the vehicles as I can throw the cars round the track as I was playing Mario Kart, and the thrill you get from hurtling down a slope through a forest like an extra from Return of the Jedi is hard to deny. If the idea of a massive post-apocalyptic world with some fun racing thrown in interests you, go for it. For everyone else, we can just look at the best Mad Max game that never was and sigh disappointedly.

I thought of it first!

2009-08-31T18:57:00.002+01:00

I quick blog today after I heard some news...

So, some Downloadable Content for Dawn of War II has been announced. The idea is pretty awesome; similar to Gears of War II's 'Horde' mode, you have to hold out with a friend against increasing waves of enemies for as long as possible.

A suggestion I made quite some time ago. And I have it in writing! ... At least, I thought I did. I was sure I'd mentioned this in my blog a while ago, but I can't find the reference now. Anyway, trust me, I did have this idea quite some time ago. Honest.

Regardless, the DLC sounds pretty awesome, I'm sure I'll check it out when it lands. Fun times!

Plans

2009-08-17T16:12:00.002+01:00

So, I had a bit of a Batman binge over the weekend; I watched Batman Begins and several episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. I’ve also got a copy of Batman: Year One to read, I’ll let you know how I get on with that…

I spent a fair bit of time this weekend playing Fallout 3. The new mods are working well (though I’ve not got the Hunger, Thirst, Sleep mod up and running properly) and I downloaded a couple of texture packs (new textures for Megaton and Rivet City, a more detailed night sky, and a funky lens-flare mod). As I have FRAPS working now, I might post some videos/screenshots of my game so y’all can see how cool the Green World mod I mentioned the other day is.

A couple of thoughts on future plans here:

I’m thinking of running a Let’s Play… blog, where I’m gonna play through a game not many people have experienced, and document what happens. I was originally thinking of doing this with Dwarf Fortress as the unpredictable gameplay would make for hilarious consequences (the Sims would work well here as well, but that’s fairly well worn ground). However, I think I might go for Independence War II: Edge Of Chaos, a game I recently dug out of my attic, as less people will have heard of it. Providing, of course, that I can get it running on my PC.

Secondly, if I can drum up some support, I’d like to run another WFRP campaign, one with a specific focus. I’ve been intending for ages to run The Enemy Within, a complex, political campaign, widely regarded as one of the best RPG campaigns ever written. It’s also quite lengthy; the full campign covers 5 full books and multiple adventures (The Enemy Within/Mistaken Identity, Shadows over Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik, Power Behind the Throne, Something Rotten in Kislev, Empire in Flames/Empire in Chaos).

I’d still love to run it one day, but I think I’d like to get a couple of players interested in a small, dirty campaign with a tight focus and theme but not necessarily an overarching plot. My idea was to run the players as specific Undead Hunters, maybe allowing people to create characters in their second careers, and run a set of adventures ‘inspired’ by popular films and stories; I’ve recently watched Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, and was struck by how well it would translate to a WFRP adventure. Characters could be based off the typical ‘Van Helsing’ archetype accompanied by his young ‘Dr Stewart’ type protégé. There wouldn’t be much combat, and I’d try and play things for dark humour more than horror.

We’ll see if I can arrange something!

Fallout 3 moddage

2009-08-14T16:08:00.003+01:00

Well, I managed to get Windows 7 up and running, but it didn’t seem to solve my crashing problems. I’m moving back towards the theory that my GPU is overheating, so I downloaded a neat little utility from EVGA that lets me control my graphics card fan; it’s previously been stuck running at 40% power, which may turn out to be too low for running most games. I’m going to crank to up to 80%, see if that gives me any improvement.

Anyway, in the meantime thought I would post about a few mods I downloaded for Fallout 3 last night… Following recommendations from a few other blogs, I went for Green World, Fellout and Hunger, Thirst, Sleep.

Green World

This mod replaces all the twisted and withered trees in the game with lush green vegetation. As the models for these bushy trees are included in the game (I guess you come across them in an oasis somewhere?), and the mod does a straight replace, it only weighs in at 4kb. This can apparently lead to some problems where branches begin to intrude on buildings, but I can’t see this being a huge problem.

Fallout purists may initially baulk at turning the Fallout series green (ironically, if it had been included by Bethesda I would have hated it; it does lend a particular Cyrodiil feel to the landscape…), but you really need to try the mod to appreciate it. Trees sprouting from the middle of the road really lends an ‘abandoned-for-centuries’ feel to the landscape, and makes it seem like nature has taken over. It also helps to break up the oppressive ‘browness’ of the landscape that was in the vanilla game.

Main problem is that the trees aren’t solid; I think creatures can see through them, and they can definitely move through them. This saves any problem with pathfinding, but can look a little jarring.

Fellout

This is a simple mod that removes the green tint from the game (though I must admit, I never actually noticed it was there…). It apparently gives the game a starker appearance, which works well with the Green World mod.

Also included with Fellout are dark nights; and by dark, I mean dark. Going outside with a light means you cannot see anything that’s not right in front of your face. As the pipboy built-in light is pretty weedy, you’ll need some kind of nightvision/torch mod to be able to see anything.

Creepy...

I found a neat mod to go along with this which turns all the street lights in the game on; this might not seem realistic, as the game is 200 years the wrong side of having a national grid, but I like to think all the street lights are powered by microfusion cells. Occasionally you get a flickering street light, which looks fantastic against the deep dark of the night. Also, when you can just about see something scuttling around out in and out of the pools of light cast by the street lamps, it can be genuinely scary; you’re not sure if it’s a relatively harmless dog or insect, or a potentially fatal Deathclaw.

The street light mod also illuminates signs in the game, so you sometimes see a nuka cola machine looming out of the night; with the next mod installed, this can bring a palpable sense of relief flooding over you.

Hunger, Thirst, Sleep

I haven’t really had a chance to fully explore this one yet, but it definitely sounds interesting; I really enjoyed the Realistic Repair Rethought (RRR) which let you repair your weapons using scavenged scrap metal and random junk, and this mod is very much along the same lines.

Instead of skipping straight past those old nuka cola machines or food vendors, you actually stop and dig through them. Also, sacrificing clean water to give to the beggars actually feels worth the boost to karma it gives you, as you’ll definitely miss it.

I’m still playing with the RRR I just mentioned, and the Radio Riven mod I downloaded a while ago which gives you a radio station playing the old Fallout 1 & 2 ambient music. It fits in with the game very well, and gives it a much stronger Falout feeling. It also means you don’t have to listen to bleedin’ Three Dog repeating the same message over and over, which can only be a good thing.

I’ll post again with more thoughts on playing with these new mods over the weekend, maybe even a gameplay video! I also have my eye on a couple of texture mods; I’ll see how it goes…

Do I look like I'm joking?

2009-08-10T14:46:00.002+01:00

The other night I repurchased a game I accidentally bought as a pirate version last year; Sins of a Solar Empire. I really enjoyed the game first time round, but eventually couldn’t keep up with the updates as my game was not legit’. I also took the opportunity to buy the recent expansion pack, Entrenchment. I’ve been playing a fair bit of it, and will post up some more stuff about it soon; suffice to say, I love the game. If anyone else out there has it and fancies an online game, please let me know!

Besides that, I played the demo of a game I have been looking forward to for some time; Batman: Arkham Asylum. In a word, it was brilliant. For a start, the demo is fantastic; it’s exactly what a demo should be. It gave you a proper taste of the game, enough so that you know what the full product will be like. It also left me wanting more; I instantly had to play through the demo again after I had finished it. After a third time through, I immediately jumped on play.com to pre-order it (though I’ve heard it may be available through Steam, so I might get it like that instead).

I must admit, after some of the more recent gameplay footage, I was starting to get a little worried about the game; it looked like it was beginning to turn into a console brawler. After playing the demo, I’m completely reassured that this isn’t the case. You have a very definite sense that you’re, without a doubt, Batman. The graphics bring the lantern-jawed superhero to life and he has a real sense of solidity that comes across in the sound and animation. While none of his close combat moves are that grisly or gruesome, you’ll definitely wince when one of Bruce’s collection of punches and kicks slam home. The little touches help, too; when you run down corridors, his cape flaps behind him, not to mention when you swoop down from above with wings spread to land feet-first on a goon. Gadgets are recreated faithfully, and the atmosphere is suitably grim and dark without going over the top.

The gameplay seems to be a satisfying mix of close-combat brawling, adventuring, and sneaking. Late in the demo, you’re presented with a room full of armed enemies, all of whom you have to incapacitate. You can run in fists first, Superman-like, but you won’t win any awards for style. Far more preferable is sneaking round on the rafters, swooping down to takeout an individual thug, before disappearing back into the shadows. You can hear the bad guys getting increasing worried as their friends seem to vanish (the demo isn’t really long enough to get a good idea of the AI) and even see their heart rates rise with your nifty detective vision. It retains the edge-of-your-seat feeling I get from a good stealth game, and keeps the ‘multiple path’ level design I’ve always loved in the Hitman franchise. The area at the end of the demo really does feel like a playground in which to hunt these bad guys, a chance to turn the table on the violent criminals.

Special mention has to go to the Joker, possibly my favourite comic book character, and definitely my favourite villain. He’s not the anarchistic terrorist from the recent Dark Knight film, he’s back to the over-the-top, mass-murdering, prancing, capering, chemically-scarred comicbook version. Believe me, though, this is no bad thing; we’re not talking Cesar Romano here, we’re talking The Killing Joke. He looks fantastic (the character graphics are truly superb), and his voice is just amazing; the voice-over is done by Mark Hamill (yes, that Mark Hamill) and once again proves that voice-over work should be done by professional voice-over actors; Mark Hamill played the Joker in the animated TV Series, a role he won massive acclaim for. All the (super) baddies look good, leaning more to their comic book versions (though Bane is the psychotic lump of man-flesh he was in the film), but I get the feeling the Joker is really going to steal the show.

2009-08-08T21:06:00.003+01:00

"Waah waah waah, I'm a whiney console gamer, waah waah waah, I deserve more free stuff, waah waah waah, Valve said they'd give us more free stuff for Left 4 Dead, but they've decided to improve on every aspect of the original game in a sequel I'm going to have to pay for. Waah."

Well, you know what?

Turns out Valve have been working on new L4D content all along. So, when all those people were saying 'Dudes, trust Valve... When have they ever let us down?' all the whiney free-loading gamers should have listened.

/rant.

More special characters!

2009-08-03T23:03:00.002+01:00

I found these two in a tavern on the docks in Altdorf... Proper geeks should recognise them!

"...I am learning the true meaning of tedium. Do you intend to bore me to death with your speeches, or do you want to come across here and die?..."

2009-07-30T16:53:00.002+01:00

Bit of fill today… I didn’t really do much last night except play it a bit of WAR.

I must admit, I did some very sad sight-seeing; I went to see Emperor Karl Franz, a well known Warhammer character. Turns out the man is a giant; I’m not exaggerating, he must have been twice my height. I even took a postcard snap of us together.

My hero...

I’m off to see the Grand Theogonist (Volkmar the Grim; basically, he looks after the spiritual wellbeing of the Empire) next.

You can also see in the picture modelling my new set of armour; I had inadvertently been collecting RvR Medallions which can be traded in for equipment, and had saved up enough for my first set. Together with my new hammer, I’m looking pretty swish; I had to work for a while at RvR to build up enough Renown Ranks (the ‘experience’ you gain in PvP combat) to equip everything, but it was worth it. I get a shed load of Strength from wearing it all, which is awesome for soloing.

I’ve also moved onto the next tier map: Troll Country. And there are a lot of trolls… I can focus on levelling again now, rather than RvR. That said, Tier 2 does contain the first Keep, so that’s something I can join in on at some point to see what it’s like.

Anyway, might not get much chance to play this evening as I’m off fencing, but I definitely want to hit Rank 13… We’ll see how it goes!

Peter has been feeling ecstatic lately

2009-07-29T13:49:00.002+01:00

I downloaded Dwarf Fortress again last night. I haven’t played it in months… It’s still on the same release as when I was last playing it, so I guess not much has changed. I haven’t been keeping up with his latest developments on the DF blog, but I gather he was working on poisons, internal injuries, alternative liquid types… All sorts of cool stuff. Those rivers of blood will soon be a possibility…

So, for those of you who don’t know, Dwarf Fortress is an absolutely astounding game. It’s kind of a cross between Sim City and Dungeon Keeper, with elements from many other games (like The Settlers, Civilisation, and even The Sims) thrown in. It has been called a Roguelike, but if you know what that means you’ve probably already heard of DF.

UPDATE: Looking back over this, I’ve ended up writing a review… Meh, nevermind.

The basic premise is that your party of Dwarves (7 to start with, with more immigrants arriving each season) has decided to leave their current home and set up on their own. The game generates an extremely detailed (and huge) world map; everything from the effects of river erosion and weather to wars and political strife is simulated, with your fortress taking up only a minuscule fraction of the overall map; what’s more, all of your games take place on the same world map. This means, for instance, you can reclaim old fortresses to save you tunnelling out a mountain again (well, so long as you clear away the scattered remains of the previous occupants).

You get given a handful of points to train up and equip your dwarves, then you’re dumped in the wilderness… The rest is up to you. You set tasks for your dwarves, they run and do them. Tunnel out the mountain, start chopping down trees, mining precious ore, smelting metal, smithing goods and weapons, trade with your neighbours, harvest food, train up an army…

Your first few fortresses will, inevitably, end in disaster; my first fortress had me accidentally tunnelling through into a channel connected to a river and flooding my fortress (fortresses, being underground and made of stone, tend to fill up from the bottom). You’ll run out of food, become wiped out by besieging goblins, or simply succumb to the stench of death as dwarves start locking themselves in their rooms and starving themselves. You’ll get the hang of it with time, though, and as you gain more experience, you can tackle more ambitious projects. Maybe you could try running an entirely underground fortress; it requires a source of mushrooms to grow in caves for food, an underwater water supply, magma to use as fuel (you’ll have no trees!) and a healthy breeding program (you can’t rely on immigrants!). Or you might decide to try the infamous water/lava cannon to hose your opponents. And, like all dwarf fortress players, you will spend hours fashioning intricate traps and defensive fortifications to stop marauding kobolds and goblins (the notorious Boatmurdered fortress had a magma channel rigged up which flooded the outside world with molten rock to ward off Goblins and… well, and Elephants).

The true stars of the show, however, are the dwarves themselves. You don’t have any direct control over their actions; they more or less go where they want, when they want. This can be frustrating when you just want them to finish moving those last couple of stone blocks out the way so you can continue laying down furniture, but it does mean you don’t have to worry about them starving to death. Well, most of the time.

Much of the enjoyment of the game comes from the interaction of the surprisingly complex and in-depth dwarf behaviour with the procedurally generated content. The dwarves’ odd behaviour is easy to interpret as all-too-human character quirks, and your collection of sprites soon take on their own personalities. One of my stonecrafters, for instance, got a reputation as morbid when he repeatedly carved menacing spiked balls out of obsidian. Or there was my self-obsessed engraver; he had worked his way up to Legendary level, and repeatedly carved masterpiece images of himself carving masterpieces. What an image to have on your bedroom wall. You’ll care for them, and when you start reading their thoughts as saying things as ‘Snorri has seen too much death recently’ you’ll not be sure whether to laugh or cry.

Actually you will; it’s laugh.

Okay, so the graphics aren't great. Still, that's one sweet-ass dining room

So, what’s the catch? Well, the learning curve of the game is almost vertical but, for me, the learning is what I enjoy. Not to sound shallow, but the graphics are as bad as you can get; the game is based around ASCII characters (though I generally use a graphical tileset mod) and the user interface is pretty much non-existent (That said, the engine behind it is complex; there are proper fluid mechanics, for instance, which allow you to create artificial waterfalls, irrigation channels or wells). And, really, that’s about it for downers. I haven’t even talked about Adventure mode, which is a whole other game mode where you can explore the world with an individual character.

To sum up, Dwarf Fortress is a game for serious gamers who want to lose hours of their life watching little computer people. The game is free (yes, free) so you have no excuse not to check it out. Two thumbs up!

The home of games

2009-07-29T12:03:00.002+01:00

Saw this today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_10000000/newsid_10000500/10000568.stm.

All I can say is…

Boo frickin’ hoo; You console players can sit there playing your version with an inane control device, worse graphics, and endless teenage kids playing online, while I’ll be enjoying it twenty five pounds cheaper on PC. Proof if proof were needed that PC games are, in fact, the best. Epic win.

...The Priest dies.

2009-07-27T12:57:00.003+01:00

Where is your faith on this dark day? Chaos rides against you – will you let these beasts destroy your hearths and homes, or will you trust in Sigmar and fight? Forward, men, and drive back this Chaos rabble! For the Empire! For Sigmar!

- Damaslaus Vannemut, High Chaplain of Sigmar

So, I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend playing Warhammer Online. I meant to do some hardcore levelling, but I ended up getting constantly distracted by Tier 1 RvR (that’s Realm vs Realm; Order vs Destruction, Player vs Player, whatever you want to call it). After a whole weekend, I’m only up to Rank 10, so I still haven’t started getting mastery points… But whatever.

I’m mainly working on my Warrior Priest, though I have a Chaos Chosen up to Rank 5 on a separate server just to see what Destruction was like. I had a Priest for quite some time back when I used to play World of Warcraft, but the Warrior Priest has a few differences.

For a start, there is no such thing as mana (which has the side effect of reducing boring downtime between fights). Your heals are powered by ‘Righteous Fury’, which you build through dealing melee damage. In a pinch, you can unleash Supplication, but this leaves you vulnerable if you are counterattacked soon after use. Ideally, you want to balance standing back and healing with charging in and doing damage. In solo play, you can almost act like a tank; I’ve taken on 4 or 5 same level mobs simultaneously thanks to the Warrior Priest’s healing abilities and, in 1 on 1 PvP, they are hard to kill without a very high damage output. You always need to watch out for ranged DPS, though; if you can’t hit them, you can’t build Righteous Fury, and if you can’t build Righteous Fury, you can’t heal!

Unfortunately, the Empire tanks, Knights of the Blazing Sun, don’t seem to be able to hold aggro very well; either that, or the players I’ve grouped with just haven’t been very good tanks. Consequently, as you can be pumping out a fair whack of healing, you can often attract the unwanted attention of several mobs and end up comprehensively owned, especially during the end stages of Public Quests, where Champion and Hero level mobs are inevitably involved.

You see, there's this thing called ‘Aggro.’ It's a very complicated, very technical roleplaying expression. Loosely translated, it means "The priest dies."

- Flintlocke’s Guide to Azeroth

Realm vs Realm is fantastic fun; we can be talking 20 or 30 players a side on a busy day, throwing waves of attackers at each other trying to take hold of objectives; very few people seem to play Warrior Priests as healers, so I get lots of thanks from Bright Wizards (of whom there are thousands) who aren’t used to being healed in the middle of fights… The odd resurrect doesn’t hurt, either, if only people would stop hitting the respawn button as soon as they die.

Once I’ve got a few more Prayers (abilities which affect everyone in your group) I think I can make even more impact; I just have to decide which mastery tree I want to go for. Wrath increases your offensive abilities, and the cost of healing, and Salvation gives you a bunch of pure healing abilities and not much else. Unlike WoW, hybrid builds seem to be permissible in WAR, so I might go for that.

In more general terms, I’m pretty happy with the game; its flavour is most definitely more ‘nu-Warhammer’ than classic warts-n-all, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Warhammer, meaning less grittiness, death and dirt. I don’t think that would translate well to the type of game WAR is, though, so it’s not a huge complaint. Anyway, they’ve managed to retain some of that classic Warhammer feel; hearing your character exclaim ‘Bollocks!’ when they fluff an attack always make me smile.

If anyone is up for a free trial, let me know; I get a referral bonus and can get you an invite to a busy server (i.e., the one I’m on); we can run some Public Quests or hit up some RvR stuff. Especially if you want to play a Dwarf; I have another Slayer character ready to level…

...Darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas...

2009-07-27T10:51:00.002+01:00

I was talking to a friend earlier about Left 4 Dead; he was saying that he usually played as Bill as, when he didn’t, Bill always ended up startling the Witch.

Now, this is most likely rubbish… As far as I am aware, there is no difference between the various characters in L4D, but I find it interesting when people start attributing human characteristics to AI routines.

For instance, many years ago, I spent vast amounts of time playing the original Unreal Tournament. I got it into my head that Locke (one of the AI controlled Bots) had a personal vendetta against me; he always managed to nail me, always seemed slightly faster and more accurate. I eventually started to loathe him, and every match with him in became a grudge match.

Of course, it turned out that I’d once fiddled with the Bot settings and had happened to turn up Locke’s skill adjustment to max… Still, it’s a good story, and ended up making the game more fun.

I’m going to write up some stuff about Warhammer Online later, so stay tuned for that…

'sall in the game though, right?

2009-07-26T14:48:00.002+01:00

As has been pointed out to me, I've blogged about RTS games quite a few times recently... Thought I'd change it up and post a link to my current favourite program. Check out the clip of Omar in action from early in the second series... The man is pure class. My favourite bit is around 6:30 onwards, but it's all good.

He's even wearing a tie...

Anyway, I'll be back next week with some non-RTS related blathering. Probably mostly to do with Warhammer Online and Monkey Island, both of which I've sunk a fair few hours into this weekend.

See y'all later!

And they shall know no fear

2009-07-24T09:19:00.003+01:00

Further to my post yesterday, I just wanted to share with you what I’m up against… I’ve taken a few reviews from play.com.

got hold of this as like the first one (apart from the cut scenes, lol) but all you ever seem to be able to do is the same maps over and over again with a different boss at the end each time. YAWN!!!!

the first one was more similar to command and conquer, you could build your little base, build loads of little tanks, then go and smash the poop out of everything. unfortunaltely this game misses all that and you just get a choice of 4 teams to take into battle with you each time and level up your teams at the end of each level.

in all honesty this is not a great game :(

See? ‘build loads of little tanks, then go smash the poop out of everything”. How does that constitute strategy in any way, shape, or form? Here’s another:

The lack of base building reduces the skill required in the game dramatically turning the campaign into more of an RPG than a strategy game, and the skirmishes more like RPG but the creation of units keeps it a strategy game just not as good a proper strategy game like DOW soulstorm. None-the-less still enjoyable just not really strategy but it depends what you like and what you were expecting.

For a start, if you thought Soulstorm was good, you’ve obviously not got a critical eye for video games. How does having to rely on the various strengths of your troops and not simply their number reduce the skill required? It may reduce the amount of things you have to keep track of at any one time (and, hence, reduce frantic clicking), but that’s because it’s not simply a ‘select all troops, click on enemy,’ game with resource management to keep track of as well.

Finally, to anyone complaining about the lack of races in the game… Idiots, the lot of you. For a start, 4 races are more than the traditional required 3 races in RTS games of yore. Next, this is an entirely new game engine and system; how did you expect them to instantly transport the 9 races across from the original series? There was a gap of nearly 4 years between the release of the original and the release of Soulstorm (not including the development time for the original, either); did you really want to wait another 4 years for the release of Dawn of War II?

Anyway, I’ll blog about something else later, this has just really annoyed me; people seem to much prefer to play the same games over and over. Don’t get me wrong, I loved DoW, I just love the direction the series is going in; it feels different and exciting. I can’t wait for the inevitable expansion packs!

For the Emperor

2009-07-23T15:41:00.004+01:00

I was browsing around Amazon last night, and came across the page for Dawn of War II. I couldn’t believe the number of people who had rated the game lowly, so I looked into why so many 1 Star reviews had been logged. Further to my post the other day about RTS games, I thought I would talk about it here.

The bad reviews boiled down to 3 basic reasons:

Bugs and glitches in the game
Problems running Steam
Problems with the lack of base building

The first one I don’t have an issue with; I never encountered any bugs or glitches, but I have encountered them in the past with other games and it can be frustrating… I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt with this one. Some people are complaining about the high system requirements, which really doesn’t belong in the review… But, whatever, you get that point of view all over the place on Amazon.

The next two points are where I have my real problems.

First, Steam. Now, Steam may have been contentious when it was first released, but it is now a permanent fixture on most gamers’ desktops. I registered the game on Steam, and it was so quick and painless I actually can’t remember doing it. Steam keeps all my games up-to-date without my having to think about it, doesn’t hog system resources, lets me see what my friends are playing (and jump into their games if I want), has community features, lets you buy games and download demos with a few mouse clicks… In short, it’s what Games for Windows Live should be.

Anyone who did have problems would have had to simply spend five minutes looking on the Steam Powered forums for help. I agree that it is annoying having to connect to authenticate your game (well, only if you don’t have a net connection), but it has to do it precisely once per installation; you can then even download the game again if you lose the disc, and you can download it onto alternate PCs if you’re at a friend’s house for a LAN party; in short, unlike pretty much ANY other form of DRM, it adds value to the original product.

To reiterate, you don’t have to be online to play games on Steam. And, for the record, you don’t have to be online to play through GfWL either, or even to register.

Next, people complained about the lack of base building, how it removed tactics and variety from the game. This just shows how narrow minded and conservative people are; the only ‘tactics’ it has removed are the choices between rushing, turtling and teching. Apparently, removing bases removes the ‘epic’ feeling the original Dawn of War had.

I think this is rubbish. Let’s leave aside the issues with the game now being about actual tactics rather than rushing, multiplayer feels a lot more like a small skirmish in a much wider war. Smaller unit caps encourage you to think about how your forces are distributed; do you blob them all together over a central Victory Point, or do you spread them out to try and capture a large number of points? A game makes you do something different to what people are used to doing, and it gets abuse for it. Pathetic.

Any excuse to use this picture

Dawn of War teaches you to think about your units; yes, Warhammer 40,000 is about death and destruction on a massive scale, but Space Marines are supposed to be genetically engineered supermen. Losing just a single marine is a blow to the Imperium, equivalent to tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands or even millions) of Guardsmen; the same goes for the Eldar. The small scale lets you focus on each unit and their personality (which, lets face it, is what WH40K has in buckets), and encourages you to keep them alive. And besides, as the Total War series has shown, base building and epic games aren’t mutually exclusive; in fact, it’s very hard to find an RTS game that’s more epic than any of the instalments in Creative Assembly’s masterful series.

Finally, to the guy who bought the game for his 7 year old son, the game has a 16+ rating for a reason…

How can you kill that which has no life?

2009-07-22T12:05:00.002+01:00

Today I thought I would comment on the row that has blown up over Left 4 Dead 2. I realise I’m several weeks late, but whatever!

My initial feeling on hearing about the imminent release of L4D2 was not one of outrage, anger, or injustice; in fact, I was excited. Left 4 Dead was a good game, and they looked to be improving on it and adding a shed load of more stuff for the sequel. All good, right?

This was not the response of a great many videogame fans (well… the boycott group still has less than 40,000 members, not really many in the grand scheme of things). Their first thought was ‘Where is the rest of the free DLC I was entitled to?” See, it turns out that, as it was released, Valve assured the videogaming public that, yes, while L4D doesn’t have a huge amount of content, it would be bolstered by free downloadable content in the not too distant future. And for a while this seemed to be the case; a new (awesome) game mode was added for those who didn’t want to sit down for a whole campaign, and Infected modes were added for the second two campaigns (arguably something that should have been in from release).

However, at E3, Valve announced their plans to release a sequel later this year, to a general reception that this was a cynical cash in and a betrayal of the fans that were expecting more free stuff.

It’s the sense of entitlement that really bugs me; why would you buy a game on the understanding that they provide you with more free content at some point in the future? If you do, you’re a fool to yourself; either wait for the extra content to appear, or enjoy the game for what it is and treat the DLC as a bonus. Even then, the original game wasn’t that lacking; if we say a couple of hours for each campaign, plus maybe an hour to go through the two campaigns as the infected online, we’re already at 10 hours. Factor in the replayability of the game, the price I paid for it of £25 seems very reasonable indeed.

They’ve given numerous reasons for the decision to bring out their new content as a sequel, compatibility with people without the new content being a big one. However, I would be happy for them just to say “Shut up, and let us work on our game.”

And since when have they been wrong? Valve have never let me down as a consumer. For a start, check out the games they have developed (I skipped a couple of the smaller multiplayer ones):

Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
Counter-Strike: Source
Day of Defeat
Day of Defeat: Source
Team Fortress Classic
Team Fortress 2
Portal
Left 4 Dead

Not a duff game on the list; in fact, not only are they all critically successful, they’re all immensely commercially successful. Further to that, their Steam service (although shaky when it first started) is now almost essential for PC gamers. The Orange Box, containing not just Portal, Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 but Half Life 2 and Episode One as well, is quite possibly one of the best deals in videogame history*.

On top of all that, Valve have even said they’re going to continue supporting the original L4D, with additional content (and, if you’re sensible enough to be a PC user, you’ve got the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools to tide you over; there’s bound to be some good user generated content out at some point).

Bottom line: if I’m willing to give any developer the benefit of the doubt it’s going to be Valve (with CD Projekt a close second). My prediction is that the whole mess will blow over when the game comes out later this year and it inevitably turns out to be brilliant.

* The four best videogame deals are officially (well, according to me, which makes it semi-official, right?) as follows:

· The Orange Box (Obviously)

· Baldur’s Gate box set (more than 100 hours of beardy roleplaying goodness; I got Baldur’s Gate, Tales of the Sword Coast, Shadows of Amn, and Throne of Baal, all for a penny less than £10)

· Fallout Collection (2 of the best games ever made along with Fallout Tactics, now available for five of your British pounds)

· The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (mainly for the armful of free stuff, and also anything to help support CD Projekt :D)

An overabundance of bigness

2009-07-21T16:31:00.002+01:00

So, I went to see Walking with Dinosaurs – the Arena Spectacular last weekend in Nottingham. And it was awesome.

It’s sort of designed for children; there wasn’t any hard-hitting paleontological facts about Dinosaur breeding habits, for instance. What there was, was robot Dinosaurs in abundance, so it’s all good.

For those of you that have seen clips or adverts and are wondering how it all works, there are a combination of fully robotic Dinosaurs and people in costumes (with, I assume, some level of animatronics built in). The robots have wheeled (and camouflaged) bases they move around on, but their legs still move realistically back and forth; after a while of watching, you can actually believe you are watching real dinosaurs. The set in itself is impressive, with gargantuan prehistoric scenery scattered around, and the Dinosaurs themselves were massive.

Highlights of the show included a Stegosaurus (on of my favourite dinosaurs) and an ENORMOUS Tyrannosaurus rex. I must admit, even though I’m an ‘adult’, I was still a little scared when the T. rex leaned over the audience and roared in our face… It was very primal!

Another good moment was when the lady behind us commented to her friend that she was going to bring her 15 year-old daughter, but that she decided she’d grown out of it; James and I both found this amusing.

In other news, I’ve decided to get the full game of WAR. There are loads of worries over on both the official and the gameFAQs forums (fora?) about the future of the game, but, y’know… What the Hell. I’m going to get straight on a busier (hopefully EU server) and start a new character; I might go with Slayer again, or possibly Witch Hunter. Maybe Warrior Priest.

Or Chosen or Disciple of Khaine on the destruction side. We’ll see.

Anyway, managed to find a load of players the other night; had a classic moment as Thogrizan (or Thog, my character) and Soulfaces (a Warrior Priest) were retaking control points from the Destruction side around Mount Bloodhorn. A group of enemy players was retaking the points we were capturing as we moved around the map, but as there was quite a few of them, we decided against taking them on toe-to-toe… As we moved off from our hiding place to the next control point, I had the suspicion we were being followed; turning, I could see a band of six Destruction characters charging down the hill towards us, full pelt, dark magic crackling around their eyes, and squigs bounding alongside.

We looked at each other, contemplated a heroic last stand, then, as one, turned and ran for our lives. Hilarious :P

I’ll (hopefully) be blogging this week about my other new purchase; The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. It’s going well, must be just over halfway through at the moment. Will share my thoughts at some point!

Lizards

2009-07-20T22:57:00.002+01:00

Just a single picture for now... post to follow in the next couple of days!

The EVIL that is base building

2009-07-20T13:07:00.003+01:00

I’ve been playing a lot of WAR over the past few days; I’m getting on pretty well with it, am really enjoying being a Slayer! The lack of other people is really bugging me, though… I don’t know whether it’s the time of day that I’m playing, the server I’m playing on, the area, or the fact that there just aren’t many other people playing the game. Whichever, I’m tempted to give the full game a go, as the large public quests definitely look like they would be fun with a group of other players/friends/strangers.

Anyway, WAR isn’t the main thing I wanted to talk about in my post, though it is still vaguely Games Workshop related; in a recent conversation, someone mentioned to me that the reason he wasn’t too keen on Dawn of War 2 was that there was no resources and no base building.

What the eff?

I took issue with this. To my mind, RTS games have (for far too long) focussed on resource gathering, build queues and base building. Yes, supply lines and resource management are an important part of any war effort, but since when were they part of actual frontline combat? It has been an unfortunate part of RTS games since Westwood invented the genre with games like Dune and Command & Conquer. At first, it allows for some fun sounding tactics; raiding your opponent’s depots, or ambushing their harvesters. However, to have to go through the same rigmarole with every battle in every game is turning the genre into an economic-‘em-up.

The problem is, when you focus the game on these two aspects, the game becomes about either building up a large force quickly and rushing your opponent, or hiding behind a large wall… and building up a large force to rush your opponent. With enough troops, any battle becomes pretty much solely about attrition. And who wants to spend time aligning their Barracks when they’re supposed to be fighting a war?

The RTS genre is stagnating, drowning under the weight of its antecedents and clichés; I’m far more excited about how things are done with Real-Time Tactics (RTT) games.

You see, I much prefer my strategy to focus on the actual movement of units around a map; y’know, matching up the strengths of your units with the weaknesses of your opponent’s (and hopefully avoiding letting them do the same). Games have been doing this for a while (Shadow of the Horned Rat for one), and there have been an increasing number of RTS/RTT games over the past few years which have gone for this approach, with a good recent example being Ground Control. Hopefully, this is the way the genre is moving, with games released like Dawn of War and World in Conflict. Even games like the total war series keep the resource management to an overworld map and leave the battlefield for tactics!

Unfortunately, Starcraft II looks set to bring the economic strategy sim back into fashion...

You've got the touch

2009-07-15T11:59:00.003+01:00

Okay, so I was listening to the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack on my way to work this morning (as in, the original 1986 animated feature, not the Michael Bay abomination) and was struck by how AWESOME it would be to have it as DLC for Rock Band/Guitar Hero. They’ve already included The Touch by Stan Bush (all you need to know about Stan Bush is that his greatest hits album is called Capture The Dream) as free DLC, surely the next step is to include the rest of the soundtrack?

Or, they could go even further… They’re working on LEGO Rock Band, how about Transformers Rock Band? Imagine how cool it would be to rock out to Instruments of Destruction as Optimus Prime himself? With Megatron on drums!

Anyway, extreme nerdy fanboy-ness aside, I installed the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (hereafter simply WAR, the best acronym ever) 10-day free trial last night. I had a run around as my first character, a Dwarf Slayer, just to explore the starting area. It seems pretty cool; basically just like every other MMO, but this time set in the Warhammer world. Lots of the early Dwarven quests involve beer in some capacity, usually combined with slaying Goblins. Which is, basically, how it should be.

Graphics are okay, nothing spectacular, though the characters seem nice and unique. I’ll try and cram as much as I can in before the trial runs out (I’d like to give a Chaos character a whirl as well, but unfortunately you don’t start out wearing your Chaos armour… it’s nice that you have to earn it, but I just want to look like a badass). Annoyingly enough, I can’t seem to get on the Europe servers (possibly something to do with my only being in a trial), so will have to try and catch people in Oceania when they’re awake if I want to group! I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on it at some point, and will add my character and server name here when I get home.

Wish List

2009-07-13T22:09:00.005+01:00

Right, it's been exactly one month since I last posted, so I thought I'd chuck something up quickly so people don't think I've abandonded my blog. I thought I'd tackle that old chestnut, the wish list.

Brütal Legend

Okay, Jack Black's skills as an actor may be questionable (to say nothing for Ozzy Osbourne), but Tim Schafer is a bone fide videogame genius. This game looks awesome; there is no more appropriate word to describe it. None of the ideas in it are particulary new, but the pulling together of elements with a rock-solid, consistent theme and a cracking (and funny) story is

really going to show people why single player games still have it.

No more words are needed.

I hope the Star Power (no pun intended) of Jack Black will be enough to punch this through to the mainstream (the advertising for it has been a lot heavier than with Psychonauts as well). This game DESERVES to have commercial as well as critical success, but I have a feeling as it's trying to do something fresh and different it may alieniate newer game players.

As a side issue, the reissue of Monkey Island is looking pretty hot too; just the opportunity the world needs to play through the game again (and it will, no doubt, show up the new version released by Telltale... this is not a condemnation of them, by the way, Monkey Island was just THAT GOOD).

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Okay, so bit more mainstream this time... I've been excited by this game for a while now; the combination of 3rd person beat 'em up and sneak 'em up REALLY strikes my fancy, not to mention the fact that I get to pretend I'm Batman. It also helps that I think the Joker is possibly one of the best comic-book villians ever put to paper. I've made no secret of the fact I love the Hitman games, and this seems to be taking a similar approach, only it now encourages me to take out all the guards on a level and not just my target!

Anyway, the graphics look good, they've got the classic voice actors in to do Batman and the Joker, the story seems classic comic-book fare, and the gameplay looks very swish. You even get a replica batarang when you preorder!

Dragon Age: Origins

Unfortunately not a PC exclusive... Again, I've been a Bioware fan for some time; I LOVED the original Baldur's Gate games (which this is being pitched as a sequel to) and they've done some pretty awesome games since then; maybe less so Neverwinter Nights, but Knights of the Old Republic was good, and what I've played of Mass Effect seems really good too.

This guy was awesome, too

My only fear with this game is they go overboard on the GrimDark (there, I've done it now, I've linked to TV Tropes... your afternoon is gone, mwahaha!) and slosh a load of sex and bad language in there. The Witcher was bad enough, I don't think I can stomach many more concessions to the teenage market. If they keep it nice and complex, and mature without being smutty, I'll be happy!

Okay, that's enough of that, it's tired and I want to go to bed. I'll be posting again soon, I even have a topic in mind!

My favourite levels of all time, Part 4

2009-06-13T11:19:00.003+01:00

Okay, another in the blog series is to follow. First off, just want to mention two games: Plants vs Zombies, and Cryostasis. The first is a tower defence game, a genre I swore to hate until the end of time (and, even worse, it's a Popcap game!). Anyway, it's good fun, the gameplay is mildly addictive and the whole production just oozes charm and character. Well worth the £6 on Steam, there's plenty to unlock so it should keep you busy for a good long while! There's a demo available too, so you've really got no excuse to check it out.

Secondly, Cryostasis is good fun. It feels reminiscent of Bioshock, but it has a strong 'adventure' element thrown in (along with the first person mêlée combat of Condemned). There are some good shocks in it, and the atmosphere is fantastic, but it's lacking polish and a bit of visual pizzazz. I haven't got too far into it yet (I've not even picked up a gun yet!) but I'm enjoying what I've played of it so far.

Anyway, on with the show!

Museum of Technology - Fallout 3

This may be slightly shorter today, I probably don't have as much to say about this one as the others…

For those who don't know, Fallout 3 is the 2008 big-budget sequel to the original 1997/98 Fallout post-nuclear role-playing games (themselves spiritual successors to 1988's Wasteland). I'm a huge fan of the original games, mainly for the feeling as being part of a living, breathing world… Well, a gasping and wheezing world, at any rate.

All games involve your character journeying out from some secluded upbringing (either living their whole life in a nuclear bunker, known as a Vault, or from an isolated village in the mountains) to follow a quest across the wider desolate landscape. The beauty of this is that you uncover stuff as your character does; you never get into the situation you could in, say, Baldur's Gate, where you (the character) knows what a Kobold is, but you (the player) don't. Neither of you have any idea what a Deathclaw is until one pounces on you and tried to tear you a new one!
The game is set in a 'world of tomorrow' future; It's not the future as we imagine it now, but the future as it was imagined in 50s America. There are nuclear cars, vacuum tubes, Forbidden Planet-styl3 robots, and the Inkspots on the radio. One section of the game sees you journey to DC's Museum of Technology, a showcase for all this retro gadgetry.

The main reason section this is in is atmosphere. I have posted my thoughts about Fallout 3 previously on my blog, but I think one of the things Bethesda really nailed was the lonely and desolate atmosphere. The main exhibit at the museum is a demonstration mock-up of a vault, very similar to the one you grew up in out in the wasteland.

The place is deserted, and has obviously been hard hit by the ravages of time and looters over the years; metal is pitted and rusted, dust hangs heavy in the air, and the floor is littered with debris and rubble. However, the displays obviously once intended for the public are still operating… As you creep through the eerily derelict display, voices chirp from hidden speakers about all the mod-cons available to residents and slide shows flicker to life as you walk past encouraging you to sign up early.

You never know if someone (or something) has made this their home, so every creak of twisted metal makes you jump. The feeling of isolation, loneliness and age has never, in my opinion, been portrayed so well in a game.

He does rush through it slightly, though...

Anyway, this has all got very serious! To sum up, I loved this section of the game… In fact, I'm very tempted to now go and play some Fallout 3!

Man, I wasn't going to write for long today!

My favourite levels of all time, Part 3

2009-06-13T11:10:00.002+01:00

Between a Stone and an Axe - Dawn of War: Winter Assault

A strange one this; probably not what most people would consider a particularly groundbreaking or innovative level. I'm not hugely familiar with single-player campaigns from other RTS games... To be honest, I always found them too difficult! The Dawn of War games have been the first in the genre I have really made an effort to push through the campaigns, and I have found them an awful lot of fun indeed.

This mission is from the first expansion pack to Dawn of War, the pack that introduced the Imperial Guard as a playable race. It was also the last pack to keep the structured single player campaign before moving to the (in my opinion, the much weaker) format of linked skirmishes with an overarcing planet/system map. I'm not a huge fan of resource gathering or base building in RTS games (the phrase 'Space Marines don't chop wood' has always stuck in my head), so the scripted battles of the campaign in the original game and expansion are far more fun to play; you can concentrate on the actual strategy of moving your troopers round.

The mission sees you playing as both the Eldar and the Imperial Guard; as it starts, you take control of the Eldar and have to escape from an endless horde of attacking Orks. Slowly, you teleport your way through the webway away from the marauding Orks, but they slowly begin to catch up with you. Eventually, control switches to Imperial Guard holed-up in a nearby base; striking a quick deal with the Eldar, they agree to defend them until they can teleport their buildings into the safety of the Imperial fortification.

Once they do this, the fun really starts... A tide of green begins to sweep towards your base, and you have a scant few minutes to arrange your defences as best you can. The idea is to hold out until reinforcements can arrive to relieve you; I think it takes around 15 minutes. The first few waves fall fairly easily, and the Ork corpses begin to pile up; as the game can be set to keep all bodies rather than have them decay, you end up with a huge pile of corpses at the entrance to your base. I used two Hellhounds (anti-infantry tanks which shoot twin jets of fire) around the base entrance to hold the enemy off...

After a few minutes, tanks start turning up, and still wave after wave of Ork attacks; you slowly have to fall back inside your own base, abandoning lines of defences as you go. Just when it seems like you're done for, when Ork Stormboyz are raining down from the sky and looted tanks are shelling you from afar, the reinforcements arrive. And what reinforcements. A Baneblade rumbles on to the screen, your first sight of one, and starts to lay waste to the besieging army.

I've picked this level as it really showed me that RTS games can be as exciting and tense as any first- or third-person action game. I was on the edge of my seat throughout, desperately ordering troops to hold their positions against seemingly insurmountable odds.

My favourite levels of all time, Part 2

2009-06-13T11:06:00.004+01:00

UNATCO Prison break - Deus Ex

Okay, if for some reason you have never played Deus Ex, go and do it now. Seriously. I'll wait.
Finished? Good, wasn't it? Now we've got that out the way, I don't have to worry about spoiling the story for you.

Deus Ex is widely regarded as one of the best games ever made, providing a perfectly combined balance of cyber-punk story, player character development (though it's not really a true RPG), satisfying action and magnificent set-pieces. The true joy of the game was being able to tackle missions however you wanted; in many other action games, one 'tactic' is considered preferable. You may be persuaded to try stealth and have little ammo with which to tackle guards. You may be a regenerating superhero with stacks of ammo, and hence be persuaded to use force. Where these games often fall down is not really letting you try other tactics to overcome problems, or, if they do, have these alternate methods be nowhere near as efficient as doing things the way the developers intended.

Far Cry did get some of the way towards this ideal, and I'll be talking about that later in this series. However, for me, the true master of do-as-you-like gameplay was Deus Ex. For instance, the first level was a sandbox full of enemies, whom you could tackle them however you wanted. Silently stun them all with the cattleprod and hide the bodies? Execute everyone with sneaky headshots? Maybe run in brandishing your shotgun and kill before you get killed?

As you trained in each discipline, you became more skilled at it (andconsequently, relatively LESS skilled in other areas). Further customisation was available in the form of bio-mods, allowing game-changing special abilities. Obviously, you became less able to branch out by the end of the game (and it became relatively easy to charge in and hack everyone to death with the super nano-sword you pick up at one point), but the level I've picked is fairly early on.

The level uses that old, old cliche in video games; you get captured and all your weapons get taken away (this used to be a very widespread phenomenon, and it's still in use today... Bioshock? Check. Half-life? Check. Max Payne? Check.). You get thrown into a prison cell without any of your gear. Then, a friendly computer hacker pops your cell door half open; how you proceed now is COMPLETELY up to you. As you have no gear, even taking on the cell-block guard can be tricky. First time through, I spent around 30 minutes getting past him in his chair and the security camera monitoring the corridor!

The rest of your way out through the prison is littered with obstacles you can tackle in multiple ways; for instance, a pair of hulking robots patrol the corridor around the armoury. You can steal some high-explosives to put them out of action, sneak up behind them to shut them down, or, when you find the control console, hack into the security system and convert them to your side. Plenty of plot development happens over this level (such as finding out some truths about your brother AND yourself), but the crucial twist comes when you finally get out the front door... and discover you were in a secret prison on the level below your own office.

A place where you previously felt safe is now the scene of your own escape; you get to drop in on your own office to grab any supplies you've left there and chat to the few friends you have left in the organisation, before finally making good your breakout.

You can see a guy attempting this level without killing

To summarise, this level has real freedom to tackle it how you want. Never before in a game had I felt like I was actually there and the virtual world would respond to whatever action I took; it felt like the game was telling a story particular to me, tailor made for my own character and style of play. Pure genius.

My favourite levels of all time, Part 1

2009-06-13T10:54:00.004+01:00

Okay, so I'm going to start a running series. Hopefully I'll finish this one, I've got the first few entries already written to give me a head start! I'm basically going to discuss my favourite video game levels of all time, explain why I like them and talk about why I think they're important to gaming. Enjoy!

Sanbone Trio - Gitaroo Man

Gitaroo Man is one of the best rhythm-action games you've never played... In fact, it may be one of the best games you've never played. It manages to combine playing music in a relatively realistic way on just an analogue controller, with a surprisingly enjoyable story. The story is told through the songs themselves with a few small cutscenes between each 'battle'; the tale of a young man coming of age, overcoming a bully and winning the girl is by no means new, but the innovative visuals (highly reminiscent of Mexican folk-art) and imaginative setting really sell it.

For those of you who have never played Gitaroo Man, your character is a weedy, whining kid... That is, until your dog Puma (who turns out to be a talking robot dog) throws you your Gitaroo (sort of like a more awesome Guitar). Holding your Gitaroo, you transform into the legendary Gitaroo Man, and lay down all kinds of guitar-based smack-down on the bad guys.

There are so many great moments in this game it's hard to pick one that stands out in particular; other great moment include a duel with an enormous Jazz-loving beeman (called, appropriately enough, King Mojo), a chase involving a Drum & Bass shark, an effeminate Goth who capers around while the main protagonist claims to be 'scared', and a wailing heavy guitar duet version of the Legendary Theme, played back-to-back with your girl in a packed stadium. However, there can only be one winner... The fight against the Sanbone trio is probably my favourite moment in the game.

Towards the end of the game, you are ambushed while asleep by a trio of Spanish (?) skeletons who enjoy playing their ribs like some sort of Xylophone. They tie up your dog and proceed to start beating on you... As your dog is captive, you have no way to get access to your Gitaroo, and all you can do is dodge their attacks. Eventually, they make a mistake, and your dog is set free, allowing you to start wailing on them with riffs of your own.

My favourite part happens around 1:05

What I love best about this level is just the feeling you get when you FINALLY get your weapon back; it makes the hair stand up down my neck when I've finally got the chance to start getting revenge on my tormentors (it's even better as Gitaroo Man is a fiendishly difficult game for newcomers; I died countless times before I ever to that point, and TRULY hated those bleedin' Skeletons!). Other games have done similar things, usually at some point after the Level Where All Your Weapons Get Taken Away (TM). Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is a close second here; after silently strangulating your way across your garden, you get to your shed where ALL the rest of your weapons are kept. Then, it's time to rain down some hell...

In summary, this level really shows you that a well thought out story and sympathetic characters can really involve you in a game, no matter what the genre. Here endeth the lesson!

Test Message

2009-05-31T12:56:00.001+01:00

I'm testing updating my blog through the power of email. Ain't technology brilliant?

Windows Live Messenger just got better. Find out more!

First post

2009-05-31T12:07:00.000+01:00

To start things off here, I'm posting my FIRST post from my gamespot.com blog:

Okay, I've put off starting this blog until I've got something semi-concrete to blog about... I've decided to go for an easy one to start off with: My Wishlist.There are a few games coming out over the next few months I'm really looking forward to, so I figured I might as well list them here:

Lego Batman
Mirror's Edge
X3: Terran Conflict
and, of course, Fallout 3.

All but one of these I'm aiming to get on PC... The real test is going to be FO3. There has been a major trend in the past 5 years of simplifying games; I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, it has definitely made games more accessible. I know more people who've played Deus Ex 2: Invisible War than who've played the original Deus Ex; whether this is a result of the simplification of the game, I'm not quite sure. Still, more people playing games means more money going into games, and better games... Surely?

Maybe not. Any time large amounts of money get involved, the level of risk aversion goes up. This doesn't happen just in the videogame industry; look at Hollywood. Even in my line of work, Railway Engineering, we get little innovation as companies can't afford to take the financial risk. We end up with bland, homogenised games/films/trains.

Anyway, I'll think on this some more and probably post about it sometime in the future.