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Three-player co-operative fantasy physics platformer. Provided you have two friends and two gamepads, there’s not much funnier than trying to blunder through these fairytale trapfests without switching characters. The Wizard has to conjour boxes to drop on enemy’s heads, the Warrior has to get his friends to stand on crates as he tosses them over gorges, and the Thief swings elegantly overhead, raining arrows down whether it’s helpful or not.
Lighter-hearted Grand Theft Auto clone. “I threw pimps into lamp posts, I threw pimps into the sea.” Was the heading of an actual article I got to write in PC Gamer this year, thanks to this game.
Budget-priced streamlined Diablo-style action RPG. It ended up being called the Draining Epic Boar Cannon of Venom: the result of a great four-barreled pistol, socketed with a great life-stealing skull, and then run through the Shitty Wizard‘s random enchantment service a few dozen times. The genius is not just that you can soup up your best found weapon to make it even more spectacular, but that most offensive skills – like my wonderful Explosive Shot – multiply that weapon’s damage rather than adding a paltry fixed amount.
Old-school real-time strategy. The most basic tank can turn into a lamp post. If you put a dog in a jeep, the jeep’s gun turns into a megaphone to amplify his bark. I got through one mission by making Sean Connery dress as a bear. In another, my men were audibly dismayed that the lasers incinerating them had come from Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. This is really all I need.
Free-roaming action massacre. You know that move in faux-wrestling where they climb the ropes to jump elbow-first onto tubby bare-chested man? In Prototype, I ran up a skyscraper, whipfisted onto a helicopter and flew to cloud level to get enough height for an elbow drop. On a tank.
Small-scale strategy. This wouldn’t be in the list at all but for the Last Stand mode the last patch added. Three players have one unit each, against twenty ridiculous armies. You fail, but each try earns XP, and XP earns new wargear. Even once you have something you like in every slot, the excitement of earning new stuff never wears off because each bit suggests inventive new loadouts to tinker with. In that, it’s one of the most intelligently designed RPGs I’ve ever played, and a needed reminder that Relic are as clever and full of surprises as ever.
Punching. I really can’t stand the Joker in this, which made me think there was no way I’d end up loving it. As it turns out, the game’s not really about him. The swift and gratifying fisticuffs are more often broken up by the game’s real villain, Scarecrow. His insidious and persistent influence is handled with invention and artistry that lifts Arkham beyond being merely The Only Good Fighting Game.
First-person shooter RPG. The point of randomising weapon stats, which Borderlands was keen to do in an FPS, is the thrill of finding something that seems too good to be true. I found an electric revolver with a preposterous punch, an explosive sniper that obliterated enemy faces, and a shield so strong it turned my slender ghost lady into a thundering tank.
Time-travelling platformer. I get irritated with time travel movies, Primer excepted. No! He wouldn’t fade from the photo, idiots! He’d either never have been there or he’d remain! Won’t anybody formulate a coherent logical framework for this kind of light-hearted entertainment? The great thing about time-travel games is, they have to. The player gets to choose what happens, so the developer has to be able to answer every awkward question he could possibly ask – and even design puzzles that demand your players to understand time travel better than most film-makers seem to. Braid does that, and goes so far beyond; to fringes of twisted thinking and backflips of magical logic I’d never considered. And yet, so long as you don’t force yourself to solve every puzzle first time, it’s surprisingly doable. It invites incredible thoughts, rather than trains them like Portal. For some, that’s why Portal’s better. For me, that’s why it’s worse. First-person free-running platformer. Plenty of more solid games here. Plenty of smarter ones. Plenty of braver, stranger, more surprising experiences. But if I could only save one from the fire, it’d be Mirror’s Edge. Its eye-tinglingly vivid city is one of my favourite imaginary places, and it’s uniquely good at making you feel like you’re there. I play a lot of first-person games, but in the rest I’m a hovering disembodied gun turret, which really doesn’t have much to do with the experience of being a real person anywhere. The soundscape of Mirror’s Edge is your footsteps and your breath, and your scampering, scrambling gait is the most excitingly tactile way to interface with a virtual world I’ve played. It says something when you can start the trailer for your game with a minute of someone playing your game, on an ordinary level, without fighting anyone, set to the game’s music. I’ve never really played anything like this, but more to the point, I wish I had. I wish shooters felt like this, I wish we had art this chic, places this cool, music this good and this sense of embodiment in virtually everything we played. Instead, I’ve got an uncertain wait till the next one.
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Jason L: Correction, that's Patrick Reading's quote. Grabbed from Idle Thumbs 16, from which I've learned anew that Chris Remo was actually applying it to Mirror's Edge. Apparently I am just one of the Intertubes.
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I cooed a little about the amount of free stuff Valve have added to TF2 since release, but it’s not purely to fix or improve the classes. They’ve been experimenting with ways to leverage this free content to add an element of persistent progress and character customisation to TF2. But their experiments have been weird, and so far the resulting system doesn’t really do its job. If you’re all too familiar with why the current system needs changing, you can just skip to how I suggest changing it. Here’s what’s wrong:
You can unlock weapons for a class by earning its achievements. That means everyone plays the same class when its new weapons are released, even before they’ve earned any of them. We’re bribed to play that class at the very time when TF2′s primary problem is inevitably going to be too many people playing that class. And we’re often bribed to play it in counter-productive ways to fulfill achievement criteria, some of which are just fun little jokes. You can ‘find’ weapons and hats randomly. On the plus side, that sometimes gives you a weapon for a class you don’t normally play, encouraging you to try it out. On the down side, well:
You can ‘craft’ items by combining lots you have to produce one you might not. Presumably meant to tackle the dupes problem with the random drops, but what we understand of the current system is totally bizarre. If you don’t have the Eyelander, you seem to need six copies of the other two Demoman weapons, plus at least eight melee weapons, to craft one without losing anything you need. In a given time period, you’re about 13.8 billion times more likely to just find an Eyelander than what you need to make one. For a hat, you’d have to find eighty-one weapons you don’t need just to make a random one. To have more than a 3.4% chance of crafting the one you want, it takes a hundred and twelve. At the end of which, you’ve got something a new player might find in his first hour with the game.
That’s what’s wrong with the current system. I think it needs a few changes to work as an addictive RPG, as a way of customising your characters to your tastes, and as a way of showing off your skill or dedication in the way you dress. The unlocks system ought to make the repetitive violence feel like part of a larger goal, and give you a sense of progress even if you lose. Here’s how I’d do it: Unlockable Weapons: You’d be able to browse these from the main menu to see what’s available, and select one you want to unlock. Each requires somewhere between 250 and 500 points, and once you select it all the points you score in-game, as any class, count towards that. That’s about 2-4 hours play – the Flare Gun might be 250, the Direct Hit 500. You need to be in a game with at least four non-idle players or bots for your points to count, but beyond that anti-exploit measures are probably futile. On top of that, every five hours or so you’ll get a random weapon unlock that you don’t already have. If it’s the one you’re working towards, points earned so far transfer to what you pick next. The idea: Every match gets you closer to something you really want, and the items you choose first make you a different player to those around you. At the same time, you can still get something unexpected for a class you don’t normally play that might encourage you to try them. Achievements: I think they should stay – I even think the silly ones should stay. In fact, I’d get rid of the sensible ones, and just leave the ridiculous accomplishments – taunt kills, ironic deaths, corpse dancing and tortured puns (Slammy Slayvis Woundya? That’s what you’re going with?). But they no longer earn you weapons, they’re just an acknowledgement for any time you do something remarkable. The idea: Silliness absolutely has a place in TF2, and trying to get things like taunt kill achievements just makes the game hilarious for you and your enemies. But no-one should be bribed to go for them if they don’t want to.
Feats: This is where the sensible achievements would go. They’re things that genuinely benefit your team, so you’re rewarded each time you do them: some bonus points towards your unlock (but not your in-game score) and a little pop-up: “Medic Feat! Extinguished five team-mates, +2 points”. Things like multi-kills, capturing a point alone, setting light to a cloaked Spy, killing a fully charged Medic, or making the winning capture would always be rewarded. The idea: By letting people know they’ll be rewarded every time they do this, it both teaches and incentivises intelligent play. Achievements already do this a little, but not reliably: plenty of the actions they suggest are actually pretty dumb.
Unlockable Hats: These are handled separately, but again you choose which you want to unlock. When you do, only points and feats earned as that specific class count towards it, and the number required is in the thousands – twenty hours’ play for most, more for some special prestige items. You still earn points towards your weapon unlock at the same time. The idea: A hat says “I play this class, I play it well and I play it a lot”. A Camera Beard says “I am amazing or crazy.” Crafting: No crafting. I don’t think the system is entirely unsalvagable, and Chris Livingston does a good job of salvaging it in a much shorter post than mine. But ultimately any full crafting system hinges on finding dupes, which I think ruins the “ooh, I found something!” moment by diluting it with disappointment.
More Amateur Hour, Team Fortress 2
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![[FBP] Dirty Squirrel is looking good!_0002](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4052/4207772952_4a98696b4d.jpg)
Jackohbite: What I really like about TF2 is that if you've an understanding of the games mechanics, you know that in one of those shots, the soldier is about to explode.
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There’s only one class left for Valve to update in Team Fortress 2, the Engineer. One by one, Valve have given each of the other eight characters a set of alternative weapons, and with each release there’s been a batch of new maps, game modes and features to play with. The amount of free stuff we’ve had since I wrote up the first details of the unlocks system at the start of 2008 is obscene.
When the inventory system went down briefly before the latest update, we were temporarily stuck with TF2 much as it was in 2007. The feeling was, “Where did the game go?” Compare that to something like Halo 3, released around the same time, which has functionally barely changed and charged a total of £20 ($30) for its new maps. One thing that hasn’t changed since that article (funny to read in light of how much has) is the spirit of the updates, framed there: “The unlockables aren’t just beefed up versions of the weapons, they balance major advantages and disadvantages to fundamentally alter the role of that class.” While Steam forumites have turned that ethos into an imperative law to be screechingly enforced by the limp fist of internet tantrums, the gist is basically universal: the unlocks are supposed to change the way the class plays in a meaningful way. How successful have they been?
It’s an excellent track record. The mis-steps haven’t made those classes worse, just failed to improve them – a failure that’s default in other games. The way these unlocks are earned has also changed, but strangely. For the sake of the scrollbar, I’ll save what’s wrong with that and how to fix it for another post.
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![mann [cp] is looking good!](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2793/4206982845_d09bf17c0f.jpg)
![mr doudou [-mini] is looking good!](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2520/4207742264_19058eff3e.jpg)
Discrider: The backburner is rubbish.
While there is generally a path around the enemy team that enables you to use the crits, this actually translates to choosing not to charge 10 enemies in the face to charge 2 enemies. And then when you get behind the enemy, the crits bug out and don't trigger even though you are burying the nozzle in the center of the guy's back. This being said, it does work quite well on Badwater, since there are quite a few places where you can drop down onto people thus eliminating the need to get through the enemy lines before surprising them. If the crits were more reliable and more maps had such vertical mobility, then it might be a balanced unlock. But at the moment airblast beats a situational crit that has worse registration than the Spy's backstab. As for Bonk! I use it almost exclusively on 2fort. Assuming there is no sentry in their intel room, you can quite easily Bonk your way past the enemy Sentry guns in the courtyard and if no-one has seen you charge in, only the engineer will be chasing you during the slowdown period, since everyone else is too busy deathmatching to notice. You also don't need to run away. Once out of the Sentry's firing zone, merely duck around a corner and wait for the pursuing Engineer. When he appears, your scatter gets bonus damage due to the proximity of the target, and the Engineer gets dominated. Once past the courtyard Sentries, you take the intel and try ducking out through the grate, since most Sentries on 2fort are unable to track you before you disappear through that opening. And if all else fails, drop the intel, circle back down through the basement, Bonk! through the other entrance / courtyard, pick up the intel again since all the pursuers have headed for the basement looking for you, and complete the journey out of the base. This being said, you almost no longer have to do this in 2fort, since you can just go Soldier/Demo, deal with the Sentries, get your speed boosts, and carry the intel out of there at Scout speed. | ||||
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Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?
The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.
The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote! One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit. The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be. He’s invincible, on fire and able to kill anything in one hit – even me. I’m the Blue Soldier here, the video is taken by a Red Soldier named Traxantic, who by rights should have destroyed me many times over.
Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.
I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!
For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else. The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.
More Team Fortress 2
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x25killa: PCGamer Live was epic and I did managed to backstabbed one of the overpowered medics >:)
Merry Xmas and good tidings. | ||||
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So the Demoman and Solider are getting three unlockables each next week, and there’s a seventh weapon that will go to whoever kills the other one more. They racked up 2.7 million kills of each other in the first sixteen hours of this competition, and currently the Soldier’s in the lead. I was trying to remember what I hoped the Demoman and Soldier unlockables might be, a year and a half ago, so I dug it out of the archive. Both my suggestions for replacement melee weapons encourage and reward mid-air whacking after propelling yourself at the enemy with your explosives. I strongly suspect this seventh unlockable weapon, the one that could go to either class, is a melee weapon that critical-hits if used during or shortly after a rocket- or sticky-jump: it’s niche enough not to give the class it goes to a large advantage, and it’s one of the few areas of common ground between them. My only suggestion for the Grenade Launcher at the time was its complete and permanent removal. I still hate it, but if I had to take a guess at a viable replacement, it’d be kind of cool to have one whose charges stuck to players and walls, detonating after a short delay regardless of enemy contact. Less useful for direct hits, but more useful for injuring pursuers while retreating. Here’s the others:
Wee Creepers: sticky-bombs that roll slowly towards nearby enemies, faster the closer they are. If an enemy’s close enough, they’ll follow him at Demoman walking-speed (very slightly slower than most classes). He can only lay four at a time, and they stop for a while if shot. Why? Almost every situation involving these conjours an entertaining mental image. Why not? This would allow players on your own team to screw you over by luring stickies towards you. It’s hard to say how much of a problem that would be, because to an extent it would require the enemy Demoman’s co-operation. If you’re close enough to them to lead them at walking speed, he’s probably just going to blow you up straight away.  The Good Stuff: alternate whiskey bottle which, if not yet smashed, temporarily adds 50 health when doing the drinking taunt – even if it takes him above his usual maximum. The boost decays over fifteen seconds, during which time the Demoman is also immune to fall-damage. The bottle always crits while the Demoman has been airbourne for more than a second. Why? Bracing yourself for a good sticky-jump, whacking people at the end of it. Why not… that swingy dynamite he had in the first trailer! I’m only guessing, but I would think that made it too easy to take out an Engy, all his kit and everyone defending him without actually entering line-of-sight. The swinging charge-up animation was interesting, though – I wonder if you had to stay still during that.
Last Ditch Digger: broken trench-shovel whose damage and attack-rate are proportional to the amount of health the Soldier has lost. Why? Apart from encouraging unlikely comebacks, it makes rocket-jumping spade-attacks more effective. And fun things should always be made more effective.  Imploder: rocket launcher whose blasts suck people in rather than knocking them away. The actual damage radius is smaller than a standard rocket, but the ‘suck’ radius is larger than either. Why? Lets the Soldier cluster large groups of people into a tight space for maximum damage, but sacrifices his ability to juggle enemies, keep them at bay or rocket-jump – though some wall-climbing and ceiling-sucking is doable by firing the rockets above you.  Skeet Shooter: shotgun which only and always crits on airbourne opponents. Can be drawn, fired and holstered by pressing Right Mouse, whichever weapon the Soldier is currently holding. Why? If you manage that, you deserve a crit. Why not… grenades! Hey, good idea! It looks like Valve completely forgot to put these in TF2, despite how fun it is to get killed by speculatively flung munitions bouncing arbitrarily around corners by trigger-spamming morons! Thank God we reminded them! Why not… heat-seeking rockets! Because aiming highly explosive projectiles to hit within a few meters of a target is still too hard! Not only should the modicum of skill required to play a Soldier successfully be removed, but it should be removed by an unlockable weapon that only the most skillful players will earn. Perfect! Why not… a rocket-launcher that’s more powerful but has to be reloaded more often? Reloading all the damn time is the least fun part about playing as a Soldier, and dying in one hit is the least fun part about fighting one. Let’s not exacerbate either. The rest of that post was here. War Were Declared is from, apologies for shakeycam, this.
More Team Fortress 2
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Lack_26: Jazmeister: I am a scientist, through thorough testing (fancy guessing) I can conclude that the Community Scattergun does in-fact make you suck.
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I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones. I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.” Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I approve. It’d be a shame for anyone to hear a couplet so painfully double-edged as “When you touched a friend of mine / I thought I would lose my mind” and miss the grim joke. Oh yeah, good news: I’m working on a really long post about a really esoteric subject that involves lots of strong opinions about game design ideas I have no experience working with. 
More Music Downloads
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Crilly: Man. I haven't even heard of this person till now, and cried after reading that page. CURSE YOU TOM!
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In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it. By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (“stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go.
When I finally did win him, I discovered that he has something of a violent side:
Smokers want him:
He doesn’t like to look at zombie guts:
He’s afraid of rollercoasters:
He’s calm under pressure:
And while he doesn’t see dead people – or indeed anything – dead people see him:
It took several runs to even get to the finale. Twice I ran out of time in real life, and when I did have an evening free, I got so caught up apologising for accidentally setting everyone on fire that I played through a whole level before realising that I’d lost him. Once I got into a few games that worked, with people willing to help, we found that Rochelle hates him:
Ellis worries about him:
Coach is serious about him:
And Nick doesn’t fucking trust him:
But through it all, the gnome is serene, the gnome is beatiffic, the gnome is- is the gnome strangling Rochelle?
It looks like the gnome is strangling Rochelle. She seemed to like carrying him even less after that, but she did it anyway.
It eventually became apparent that my quest was under some kind of curse. I got into so many bad games that I eventually settled for playing with one quiet European stranger, who played virtually the entire campaign using only the katana, and showed no interest in the gnome. His businesslike dispatching of the slavering hordes seemed to say “I have more important things to do.” He was good, though, and at last we made it to the finale.
(In case anyone mistakes this for a screenshot that doesn’t involve a gnome, he’s in the bottom right.) In all my cursing of attempts cut short or failed through distraction, I never really considered that I might just not be able to do it. But Quimby and I immediately hit real problems with the final battle. On our best run, we lasted until the rescue helicopter arrived, with enough time to spare for me to truly panic: where’s the gnome? I’d left him in the mosh pit, but all I saw were corpses. Dying I could live with, but succeeding? Without the gnome? Unthinkable. Suddenly, over voice chat, the previously silent, previously gnome indifferent Quimby stated in an unplacable accent: “I have the gernome!” He did, but he fell. And though I snatched the gernome from his body, a Tank barreled into me on my last hitpoint, and I lay dying, alone, inches from the helicopter, that ceramic asshole beaming obliviously by my side.
We needed help. Happily, that’s about when freelancer Will Porter showed up:
Along with Craig:
And even the gnome seemed unusually pleased.
The fight that followed was still tonguey.
Sometimes crushy.
Sometimes not far off an actual nightmare.
But after three or four attempts, and an appallingly timed crash, we made it. I climbed aboard the chopper, gnome tightly in arms, and watched guiltily as the other three struggled to survive. I couldn’t provide covering fire with the gnome in hand, and I wasn’t about to try setting him down inside a moving helicopter with no doors after coming all this way. Craig made it, as did late joiner Dark Wolf, but Will was too fat or crazy to escape the fray.
Sorry lady, the class where your head stays intact is all booked up. We might have something in economy though.
My prize. It’s over. I’m exhausted. The added stake of all the work it takes to get the gnome to that final battle charges it with a terrifying pressure, which triggers a wildly inappropriate surge of adrenaline. The very real possibility of losing him in the chaos at the last minute is horrible to contemplate. Now that I’m finally done with it, I just want to relax. But I have a nasty feeling that chipped-hatted twat is going to drop from the skybox ten minutes into Episode Three, and I’ll be forced by my own idiocy to go through this dark ritual once again. | ||
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May: I got the gnome shirt but it says I can only wear it in depeche mode how do I do that
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Finally had to throw out my Halloween pumpkin yesterday – he was not in a good state. | ||
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Halloween 2010, by Tom Francis: [...] was mine, a dramatic departure from last year’s. Comment More Team Fortress 2 Lack_26: I love the [...]
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A Stab At Meet The Spy
The Team Fortress 2 Experience
Plan B
Tim Edwards
Craig Pearson
Graham Smith
Rich McCormick
Richard Cobbett
Chris Livingston
Jon Blyth