By Pentadact

Most of last week, I wrote things on the internet instead of in a magazine. We’re ramping up our efforts on the PC Gamer blog by around 5,000%, to see if people like it enough to justify developing it into something more. So with a few exceptions, my job for a while will be ‘blogger’ – a thing I have been doing for fun since 1995. This is exciting! Here’s some of the stuff we did last week:

My five favourite games ever, in which I am paralysed, dismembered and killed. (Plus Graham’s, Rich’s and Craig’s).

Tim’s guide to horribly rushing people in Starcraft 2. And what they can do about it.

Five good things about Supreme Commander 2 you don’t get from the demo – my attempt to explain the game’s virtues better than its own ill-chosen demo managed. I wish I’d done this for the Hitman: Blood Money demo back in the day, too.

Why I love the Adaptor in Supreme Commander 2. The game’s best unit is tiny.

Our Napoleon: Total War review, and what Creative Assembly changed in response to it.

Tom Robert’s open letter to PopCap claiming that they stole 800 hours of his mother’s love. Tom will go far.

Craig’s tale of touching camaraderie in STALKER: Call of Pripyat. AIs must get confused by the player sometimes.

You can subscribe to all the PC Gamer stuff here. Your thoughts much appreciated.

I had to visit the US Embassy in London today, to renew the Visa I need to go on press trips. They won’t let you take any electronics in there, and they won’t hold them for you either – not without ’severe delays’ and a chance they’ll cancel your appointment, which costs $121.

So when I was heading out before dawn this morning, I put down my phone, picked up my MP3 player and left. Then I realised I was forgetting my phone and grabbed my phone, then I realised I couldn’t take my MP3 player and put back my MP3 player, then I realised I couldn’t take my phone and put back my phone, then my phone rang and I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up, hung up, put it down and left.

I shut the door, locked the door, then armed my alarm with the electronic remote control that looks like nothing so much as a detonator.

I disarmed the alarm, unlocked the door, opened the door, armed the alarm, threw the remote indoors, shut the door, locked the door and left.

This was to be the beginning.

At the station, rummaging through my bag to make sure I had the nine bits of paper I’d need, I found the USB stick I keep in there. It’s a decent-sized one, and probably contains some personal stuff, so I wasn’t immediately sure what do to with it. I had ten minutes, and the office is five minutes from the station, so I decided I’d drop it off at work.

Five minutes later, I found the office wasn’t open yet.

I wasn’t ready to throw this thing away, but it wasn’t life-changingly vital. I thought for a second, then put it in the flowerbed outside the Future offices. Then, realising it looked like rain, grabbed a nearby paper cup to give it some shelter.

It was great. It was like a dead drop, but for myself, of incriminating evidence, only not incriminating or evidence, and with a paper cup hat. Real Spycatcher stuff.

I made my train, sat down and relaxed: electronics-free and above suspicion. It was around then that I started to look at the non-electronic items I had with me through US Embassy eyes. Amongst some discs and documents with words like ‘Assassin’ on them, I had:

• A notepad containing detailed ideas for experimental nuclear payload delivery systems.
• A satellite image of the US Embassy.
• A stick-on Hitler moustache.

These were for a Supreme Commander blog post, navigation and from a Richard Herring gig last week, but I worried this might not be obvious from their presence on my person. Still, I couldn’t really ditch them: I wanted everything except the satellite image, and there were no bins anywhere near the station or embassy for security reasons.

When I finally got in, this was my interview:

“Who do you work for?”
“Future Publishing.”
“Any particular magazine?”
“PC Gamer.”
“And how long have you worked there?”
“Just over five years.”
“Your application has been approved.”

This will sound bad, but the last thing I expected was for BioShock 2 to be worthwhile. It’s like making a Fight Club 2 – either you’re not gonna have that twist, or we’ll kinda see it coming. It wasn’t any lack of faith in the team – BioShock was very much Ken Levine’s gig, sure, but the prospect of a Jordan Thomas gig is just as enticing. But starting from a position of Least Necessary Sequel Ever, given too little time to both form a studio and significantly reinvent the game (MoonShock!), and committed to the obsequious inclusion of multiplayer – I could see fun, I could see interesting, I couldn’t see “I’m glad they made this.”

I am glad they made this. It feels like a remake, a ridiculous thing to do immediately after a great game, but some of BioShock’s systems needed it. By the last third of that game, you’d found enough interesting plasmids and tonics to develop some properly demented playstyles, ones very personal to your preferences. BioShock 2 is saying: what if that moment was just a few hours in, and you could just keep getting more bizarre, manipulative and powerful from there? Mechanically, it finishes BioShock’s clever sentence.

Plot-wise… I guess my only problem with the plot is that I missed almost all of it. As a Big Daddy might, I grasped that I was after my Little Sister, but all the other voices in my head seemed like a very long list of names all angry at me for something I didn’t understand. After hours and hours of hearing her talk about it, I still have no idea what Lamb’s plan for Eleanor was, or even what she believes in – except that it isn’t ‘the self’. I thought doing philosophy at uni would help, but I think I need a degree in listening. I can barely process basic information in a game unless it affects the level in front of me.

Both BioShocks often feel like two different game ideas, layered on top of each other but not convincingly connected. There’s the Ecosystem, this alien world of inhuman protectors stomping around with delirious gatherers, while packs of crazed aggressors try to steal them away. Then there’s the Backstory, a tawdry tale of fifties dames and johns doing the dirty on each other while high-minded well-to-dos carry on like they own the joint.

I buy into both, and I even buy into the Backstory leading to the Ecosystem, as the failed utopia finds a physical outlet for its neuroses in Adam, and creates something monstrous. What never works for me in either game is that the Backstory is still going on. Ryan set these Splicers on me? Why, don’t they just attack everything anyway? And now these Splicers are working for Lamb’s Family. They came to see the fundamental validity of her ethos in the last ten years, did they? In between screaming “Semen! On EVERYTHING!” and scampering across the ceiling with meathooks?

Michael here feels disillusioned by objectivism, and is thinking seriously about his worldview.

It makes it hard to understand what’s happened in the ten year gap. Lamb’s seized control – of what? What does control constitute in a leaking city of lunatics and corpse-sucking drones? And it leads to a structural clash: you must find your child and stop the demagogue psychologist as soon as possible! WAIT: You have not harvested or saved all the Little Sisters on this level, are you sure you wish to proceed?

WAIT: The rest of this post contains ending spoilers, are you sure you wish to proceed? Show.

The issue of PC Gamer out today – which I’m pleased to report you can now buy anywhere in the world with cheap or free postage – has a six page feature about Spelunky in it, by me.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for months: the game possessed me, and no matter how many pieces I read on it I’m never happy that its appeal has been conveyed. I always feel if I’d read this stuff without playing the game, I’d have no inkling of the hilarious, ridiculous and terrifying situations it gets you into on a regular basis. My stab at this, as usual, was to just write some of them down.

Thanks to Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton and Spelunky’s level editor, we put together one of my favourite opening spreads:

It’s spliced with some great quotes creator Derek Yu gave me when I interviewed him, as well as the story of my obsessive search for Spelunky’s deepest secret: the lost City of Gold. It took me over a thousand attempts to find it, and stepping into that low-res treasure trove is one of the most spine-tingling moments of my gaming life. The opening to this feature is what I wrote about it minutes later.

It doesn’t feature a robot apocalypse, though. That’s in a report Rich and I did about a match of Supreme Commander 2:

It ends in with a bizarre twist that took us both by surprise, one I’ve never even heard of happening in this type of match before.

The other thing I want to highlight here is that Chris Livingston, who once blogged about what it’s like to play Oblivion as an ordinary citizen, writes a great mini spin-off to that in our Now Playing section this issue. In it, he attempts to be completely law-abiding in Grand Theft Auto IV. I am not prepared to confirm at this time whether or not hijinks ensue.

More on the issue here.