When, inevitably, I become a super-villain (I find myself buying a lot of black clothing with high collars lately), this is how it’ll end. When my swarm of Gogglesharks march on Beijing, when my jetpack drops me gently in the thick of the clash of Tian’anman Square, bullets pinging off my power-armour, the sky black with my aerial drones, my image burned in phosphor over that of Chairman Mao, China’s Segway-surfing police force shredded like crispy duck.

Someone - probably called John or Jack - will urgently command their technically minded sidekick to Google me, + “fatal weaknesses”, snapping that “There’s got to be something!” The sidekick, who will have spiky hair, a differently coloured shortsleeve outside his longsleeve and a name like ‘Skeeter’, will find this post.
“I think I’ve got it! Routing it through the local police band… now!” And he’ll hit this play button:

The Gogglesharks will stop, mid-chomp, and point their eyeball arms quizzically to me. It will rain deactivated silver drones. Everything will stop dead for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, forty hectares of carnage shakily frozen like the closing credits of a macabre sixties sitcom, the only sound the opening track from the latest Mates of State album Re-Arrange Us, the groans of the dying and the slightly squeaky wheel of a broken Segway whirring away. When it finishes, I will hang my head slightly and mutter “Okay, I’ll be good.”

So begins music week on James! I’ve got a ridiculous amount of new stuff I’m listening to at the moment, so I’m picking a track from each a day and posting it here until I get bored or you get bored or I forget or the week ends.

And just so you know, Jack and Skeeter, I foresaw this.

Update: Heavy to get “balancing additions” as well as his unlockables, suggests a new post by Jakob Jungles at the TF2 blog. Also, alternative idea added below.

I summarise the rules here because Robin phrases them as an onslaught of questions, and on first reading I wasn’t always sure if “Yes!” or “N- no?” was the right answer. Also, the Steam thread on this misquotes one of the rules.

• The goal is to “Make the Heavy more viable when he has no Medic to pair with.”
• Don’t make him more effective when he does.
• Don’t change the role so that it encroaches on another class.
• Don’t make it hard to tell what’s going on when you use it or it’s used on you.
• Things that take a lot of models and sounds to implement are generally bad.
• Things that are easy to use but hard to perfect are generally good.
• Things that are better for some situations but worse for others are generally good.
• Things that make the player think differently a lot of the time are good.
• Things that have wide-ranging knock-on effects on other elements of the game are generally good.

And they only want one from you. I suspect they have several goals for the class, and try to come up with one unlockable to achieve each.

Obviously, the difficulty a Medicless Heavy has relative to a Medicked one is a lack of healing. He’s most effective against a group of opponents at close range, where the damage he can’t avoid wears him down quickly. So the simplest suggestions revolve around some form of health regen, health-stealing or, in one case, a really big sandwich to replace the shotgun. But I think any self-heal steps on the Medic’s toes: restoring hitpoints should be exclusively his domain. And, sandwich excluded, most of these don’t gel well with his personality or concept.

Like everyone asked to come up with one idea, I have two. I’d like a Minigun that sacrifices its crit chance for an absorb chance: your crit probability while firing instead becomes the chance that the next shot that hits you will trigger a second of Uber-like invulnerability. Only while firing. For those who don’t know, your crit chance is a factor of how much damage you’ve done in the last twenty seconds: 5% if you’ve done none, 20% if you’ve done over 800.

The essence of the Heavy, for me, is that “GRAAAHAAHAAAHAAAAA!” moment, when you’re just… killing… everything… This intends to prolong it, reward it and improve survivability. For the Heavy, the primary use of crits is to own at range: you already own close-up. So this unlock is great for close-range work like most parts of 2Fort, which is also where you take the most damage, but hurts your flexibility in big open areas like most parts of Dustbowl.

As for not letting it combine with a Medic’s healing, a doctor’s healing beam would visibly falter once the Heavy starts firing, and healing is suspended until he stops. But it doesn’t break the beam, and the Medic still builds Uber while it’s active. I don’t believe in these suggestions where the Medic is punished or discouraged from trying to help the Heavy: the rule is to stop the pair becoming overpowered, not to file for divorce.

By my count, this has a decent stab at the goal, stays within the three constraints (it’s not reliable enough to be used for any of the things the Medic’s Uber is good for), but doesn’t fare well in three of the five bonus considerations. Its main strengths are that its cheap, simple and easy to understand: the uber-sheen is already in there, and everyone knows what it means. So that’s what I’d be suggesting if I was sensible.

But of course, what I really want is expensive to implement, difficult to understand and stupid. It’s a Quick-Release Bandolier. I guess it would be an unlock for the Fists slot, so you’d switch to Fists, hit alt-fire and you’d drop everything: Sasha, shotgun, ammo. In return, you can run at the speed of a Demoman.

It’d solve a recurring problem I have as a solo Heavy: I can often accurately guess how long I’ve got before I’ll be dead, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to escape. I’m at the whim and determination of whomsoever chooses to pursue. Obviously messing with the Heavy’s speed is a big deal, but since he can’t do anything but punch until he gets his weapons back, it doesn’t really change his role. He can only get Sasha and co back by fetching them from where he dropped them, or returning to a storage locker.

The point, of course, is only partly tactical: there’s also the humour value of pummeling a Heavy so hard that he eventually drops his gun, turns tail and runs. An exaggerated jogging animation for a ‘naked’ Heavy would communicate the fact that he’s vulnerable and fleeing, but would of course be a silly amount of work for such a ridiculous concept. But it would be a shame, at the suggestions stage, to limit ourselves to things that are actually a good idea.

Moar: I have an alternative version of this idea that solves a few of the conceptual problems I have with the Bandolier (primarily, why do I need an unlock to be able to drop my gun?), but is a bit more far-reaching.

It’s an unlockable minigun that’s really a big cluster of shotguns taped together. It fires about two blasts a second, the same maximum damage per second as Sasha, but you hit everything in its cone of fire with every shot. Kind of a rapid BOOMBOOMBOOM rather than constant DAKADAKADAKA. The spread makes it even less effective than Sasha at medium-long range.

It’s much the same shape as Sasha, but when it’s out of ammo, it’s light enough to hold by the barrel and use as a club (left mouse) or throw at your enemy (right mouse). The Heavy automatically switches to club/throw mode when you run out of shells. It’s slow to swing, naturally, but does a hefty amount of damage: 90 points or so. When thrown, it goes about as far as a Sticky fired parallel to the ground, and does about half that.

Polite note idea courtesy of commenter SlowShootinPete

It crackles with electricity while it’s lying on the ground, and mildly zaps anyone running over it. As with the Bandolier idea, you run at the speed of a Demoman once you’ve chucked your gun, and you can either grab it from the ground where you left it, or get a new one from a Supply Closet - whereupon your old one vanishes. Because it uses shotgun shells and is only throwable when you’re out of them, you’re always left with just your fists after you’ve tossed it.

Part of the idea is to encourage the Heavy to just keep blasting until he runs dry - because that gives him a weapon and an escape method, rather than just leaving him screwed. That’s always fun for the Heavy and dramatic for his enemies, and the running-dry CLICKCLICKCLICK is invariably entertaining. When followed by having the big fellow simply chuck his firearm at you, turn tail and run, even more so.

This whole clip just incapacitates me every time. The timing is perfect, Bob Page and Harley Filben both take on magnificently surreal new roles. Walton Simons is still kind of a dick. It even ends beautifully.

There’s a Malkavian mod for Deus Ex that messes with the dialogue similarly, but it errs on the side of purely surreal which makes it slightly less funny to me. Still, it looks like it turns Deus Ex into one of the most hilariously bizarre adventure games ever. Manderly is a pigeon, and the drinks machine is Agent Orange.

The ominous silence for a while here was because I’m tinkering with a dark, lengthy and ancient post from my drafts folder that I’ll hopefully put up this week.

I look forward to the people who said we were kidding ourselves calling this announcement ‘inevitable’ and then ‘obvious’. I say ‘we’, but actually even the most zealous posters at Diablofans.com were crying into their forums on Thursday - Blizzard were called both ‘cockfags’ and ‘fucktards’ for so obviously gearing up to announce Lich King beta signups instead of Diablo 3. One Diablo fan pronounced that they would ‘not survive’, by which I’d love to - but cannot quite - believe he only meant their company would go bust.

The Evil Penguin and the Lost numbers were both kind of funny red herrings, but to be fair to the huge number of people who got it utterly wrong, Blizzard’s teasing of this announcement turned out to be pure nonsense. Those eyes meant nothing - they just changed them on the final day, then replaced them with something completely different. The Diablo face in the game’s logo doesn’t look anything like the illustration of Diablo on the official logo for the event, and it doesn’t even look like the eyes we saw on Thursday. They kept most people guessing by simply lying to them.

Luckily, since I am Sherlock freaking Holmes, I was able to piece together the fact that they bought Diablo3.com, advertised for people who like Diablo 1 and 2 to work on an unannounced project, arranged their annual event for the day that the last two Diablo games were released, then put a huge picture of Diablo towering over the other characters in their logo for the event, then let slip that they’d be announcing a new game, and by an arcane leap of logic come to the conclusion that they would announce Diablo 3 there.

Oh, right, the game. I was distracted for a moment by how right I was. Now I can move on to being seriously excited. There’s a full-res movie of the whole presentation they showed at the event on their site, but it insists you use the astonishingly shitty Blizzard downloader to get it, so try Softpedia.

I initially had mixed feelings, watching the live stream of this: it really doesn’t lend itself to blurry, laggy, rubbish footage narrated by an insufferable twat and repeatedly disconnected by an unspeakably crap bespoke streaming protocol called Octoshape. That’s why it’s so essential you watch the high-res version: the insufferable twat* is still on there, but everything else is immeasurably improved.

* I think it might be Diablo 3 lead designer Jay Wilson, who before that was Dawn of War lead designer Jay Wilson, and before that worked at Monolith on Blood, where he had to suffer regular e-mail exchanges with me about stuff they should do in Blood 2 (and look how that worked out). If this is the case, then he’s an insufferable genius twat.

You need to see it high-res because Diablo is all about crisp, satisfying interactions. The combat actually looks superb when you see it properly: not only are the blows connecting in hot spurts of blood, the camera rocks subtly to ram home the impact of the most forceful strikes. It also pans too far when the Barbarian uses his Charge ability, and has to nip back to center on him when its done: a classic cinematic trick to give the impression of extreme speed that turns out to work beautifully in an isometric game.

I also couldn’t make out the new interface properly in the shit-stream, as I shall now call it - get over any WoWificiationophobia, it looks ace. You have a four-slot hotbar to instantly activate skills with the number keys, plus slots on 5 and 6 that look to be dedicated to scrolls (of Town Portal and, presumably Identify). Then next to that, as with Diablo, you can put whatever skills you like on your left and mouse buttons. There’s another, smaller slot next to those two, which I think corresponds to your middle button. Best, you scroll through your right-mouse skills with the mouse-wheel, so you don’t need to touch the keyboard to use everything at your disposal quickly.

My main concern, and this will sound silly, is the noise when hitting a few of the enemy types. To be clear, the noises when you hit stuff in Diablo is the defining feature of the game: loot and skills pale in comparison to the importance of feeling like every blow really fucking smacked that thing. Against the fat things that blow up into Lampreys, and the ghost things that sap your whatever, the Barbarian’s axe makes a pathetically wimpy noise. Seeing a big burly man swing a huge axe with all his might to no audible effect is just disastrous for game feel, I hope they realise that before they’re done.

The Witch Doctor excites and saddens me in almost equal measure: on the one hand, his abilities are fantastic, on the other, they clearly demonstrate that he’s intended to replace the Necromancer, my favourite class not just in Diablo, but in gaming. The Witch Doctor can do scary stuff, sure, but he doesn’t look scary: he’s a quivering little heap of fancy dress. My Necromancer was a walking nightmare, a vision in bone that ten-foot demons ran scampering from as he spread poison and blood raging across the room. Maybe I can sort that out with armour. I certainly want to strip people of their flesh, make zombie-fences and blow up my own pets.

Oh yes, nerdy but really kind of cool news: gender choice! I actually think Diablo 2 was pretty good at avoiding the more offensive RPG gender conventions - it rejected the notion that healing is woman’s work - but a lot of players, particularly girls, don’t like to gender-bend, and that restricts the classes they can like. Personally, I only like to gender-bend, so it’s good for me too.

Once they get outdoors in that video, the art is magnificent. They’ve got for a subtle smoothing of the scenery that makes it look like watercolour concept art, and makes the characters stand out strikingly. I’m also appreciative of the fact that they’ve gone for exquisitely detailed, high poly-count monsters: WoW’s artists worked wonders with that game’s simple, pointy models, but Diablo demands smooth curves and complex shapes.

My friends and I had a LAN party when Diablo 2 came out just to play it. Ross sounds quite excited about it, and Tim’s a big Blizzard fanboy, so we may be able to do the same thing in the office with this one. That’s the main reason to be excited, I think: just that there’s a new and shiny game of this type coming out. Of Blizzard’s three big series, Diablo was always my primary vice, the Greater Evil. It was by comparison to that game that WoW fell short of obsessing me.

So it’ll be nice to have it back.

It’s fascinating to read the comments on this, over at Digg or Vimeo. Those that respond most strongly to it often have no idea why - some find it hilarious but aren’t sure what the joke is, others cry and have no idea if it’s happy or sad. A few of us have been talking lately about how every time you travel, you come back slightly dismayed at how small and repetitive your normal life is. This is a sharp smack of that, but I consider it a good thing. If it makes us feel bad, it’s a bad feeling we need. It’s a spur for change, experimentation, or just a cool holiday.

It’s a particularly good thing for America, where supposedly 23% of the populace have a passport. Matt Harding doesn’t evangelise about it much, he just says “it’s important to know what the world looks like.”

That’s in a series of talks he did about the 2006 video (the one embedded is his third). Listening to a lecture given by a man whose claim to fame is dancing badly in a multitude of countries sounds unappealing, but I did it anyway and was riveted. It’s a travel diary, mostly - turns out five seconds of bad dancing isn’t the whole story of his visits to each of these countries. And the notion of getting paid - as he was the last two times - to tour the world and jig like a six year-old is magnficent.

Matt was a game designer. He wanted to make a game about animals in balls that smack into each other, but Microsoft shifted their focus to games about killing people. He said they could make a game where you’re aliens trying to wipe out the human race. His publishers said “Yes!” He said “I was kidding.” His publishers green-lit the game. Matt left a while after. That game is Destroy All Humans; it came out in 2005 and got 9/10 in Stuff magazine.

In a rare act of trust, Valve told Craig and I back in February that they’d be lethalising the Pyro’s Street Fighter ‘Hadouken!’ taunt. We were asked to keep shtum, so that players would have to work it out for themselves when they saw there was an achievement for it. And in a rare act of journalistic nondickishness, we did.

But once the cat was out of the bag, I had to have it. The moment the new Pyro content went live, I arranged to meet up with my friend Al for a Hadouken duel - may the winner let the loser fireball him next time. But in the blazing madness of Pyro Night, where 10 of our 12-man teams were playing as the gasmasked deviant, all plans were forgotten. And in the course of joining in with that mayhem, I kept finding myself in situations where it might just legitimately work. Where I could actually Hadouken an enemy.

I failed. Again and again and again. But I’d got the bug now: I had to get this legitimately. No willing victims, no bots, no achievement-clinic maps or grinding servers: real, life-or-death play on maximum-population servers.

My first proper attempt was instinct, when I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a Heavy and Medic. I had a Medic friend healing me, and I happened to know a horde of my team-mates were right behind, so I jabbed the taunt button hoping that he’d be swamped by them long enough for my fireball to connect. When a Pyro friend did round the corner, he ran to my side and joined me in the taunt. I don’t know whether he was after the achievement or just thought this was a game, but the pair of us were shredded like so many kittens in a woodchipper.

The difficulty, obviously, is that the taunt takes some seconds to perform - during which, you’re rooted to the spot, unable to defend yourself or even cancel the action, and all but the slowest of wits can calmly stroll out of your way or murder you.

Later that round - on Gold Rush - I started doing pretty well. A Medic friend latched on to me, possibly Arq, and we had a good enough run that he earnt his Ubercharge healing the damage I took - and chose to use it on me. He timed it well, as we rounded a nest of Sentries and strong enemy presence on the final checkpoint of the second map, but when I bumped into an Engineer just standing there, I couldn’t resist. It was too perfect. I taunted.

Four, maybe six times. Every time the incoming fire bashed me back too far to hit anything with the resulting fireball, interrupting the animation, and every time I became more convinced I could get him this time. Before that faith was vindicated, our uber flickered off and my poor undeserving Medic and I were blown into the stratosphere. Sorry Medic.

Anyone will tell you the OMGWTFBBQ achievement is easy. It’s the first one they got. Right away they ran into an unwitting Sniper, and he just stood there and let them do it. I know. I’ve been in those situations as every class and their granma, up against people who don’t move or realise I’m there even after two seconds of being beaten about the head. It’s just that since this Pyro update, those people seem to be joining different servers to me. For days, I don’t think I met a stupid player.

The next time I played, I had a masterstroke. I was defending Gold Rush this time, and the attackers had progressed far enough that they’d set up teleporters to take them from their spawn-room to the front line. I’d made it all the way there with relatively little trouble, and now found myself camped outside their home base staring at the telepad they’d each jump on every time they spawned.

I tucked myself into a dark corner on a route no-one takes - even if they’re not going to take the teleporter - and waited. Soon, a Medic trundled out of the iron gates and set himself on the telepad. I charged, hit the taunt button once I was in range, and he stood staring dumbly forwards - right up until he vanished in a constellation of teleporter sparkles. My flaming fists passed uselessly through where he’d been.

If I lurked any closer or approached any sooner they’d see me, so I’d always be too late. But when the next person - a Soldier, a rougher customer - stepped up to the pad before it had recharged. I pounced again, and hit taunt long before the pad was ready to displace him. And gloriously, the whole animation played out in full. To no effect. The flames licked ineffectually at his sleeves, centimeters out of range, and the noise caused him to spin round, spot me with a flinch of astonishment, and fire a single, wildly inaccurate rocket of surprise before he was zapped halfway across the map by the teleporter. God freaking damn it.

It happened on Badlands: I’d just sneakily won the game by camping their final capture point. As their defeated team scurried from our super-critting weapons, I taunted vaguely at a group of them, and my fireball connected with a Medic. He drifted feathery and aflame across the room, and slumped against the wall. No achievement - it doesn’t count in the post-victory humiliation phase. And to add insult to injury, my victim messaged me: “Did you get the achievement? :)” He’d let me do it. My feat was doubly worthless.

It’s been four days now, and I’ve come to expect failure. I waited at the enemy gates, timed a taunt perfectly to flourish just as they opened, and their entire team made an executive decision to pause for exactly a second before charging past my immobilised, useless form and setting fire to me with critical flame from the unlockable Backburner I will probably never earn.

I found the perfect Sniper - utterly oblivious, utterly stationary, utterly alone. And I made sure I was virtually touching him before I started, and he didn’t flinch throughout the whole process. I, however, was blown to bits by a critical Demoman grenade to the back of the head just as my hands would have hit him. Without looking up from his scope, he continued to snipe from a room full of my blood.

Tonight I found an enemy Heavy blasting our team from a high window. I was coming up behind him, from inside the building, with no enemies around to intercept me or friends to steal the kill. Surely, I thought. Heavies are reknown for their lack of situational awareness when firing - it’s like a trance. I ran directly for him, and parked myself indecently close. Surely, I thought. I taunted. He kept firing. SURELY, I thought. His face broke into a manic cackle as his spinning gun tore through my team below - then fell, as a magical Street Fighter 2 reference hit him in the small of his back, set him on fire and ended his life. His bloated, burning, bent-backwards body flew spectacularly through the window, sailed over the battle below, and crunched into a fat-sizzling heap in the ditch below.

[PCG] Pentadact has earned the achievement: OMGWTFBBQ. At fucking, stupid last, it might have added.

The sense of triumph is ridiculous - even more so than the last utterly moronic thing Valve made me do by calling it an ‘achievement’. Perhaps because this victory was unique, and over a real person, and I really, really suck.

Of course, not halfway through writing this - and long before I got the achievement - Chris beat me to it with a post about exactly the same thing. Also, he got the achievement legitimately long before me, and he has 22 others, and all the unlockable weapons. Have I mentioned I’m never linking him or his stupid fat Frohman face ever again?

Chris spotted one of the two remaining unannounced Pyro unlocks in the new Meet The Sniper video. Which is awesome, by the way. For the Demoman’s reaction, the slowly filling jars (also featured on the title card, I notice), and “Yes, yes he did.”

You see the gun fire once, but the muzzle flash is unspecific. There’s a better pic of it over at Chris’s. The shape resembles a flare pistol, but then there are plenty of more exotic devices that you’d probably make like a flare pistol if you had to model them in-game.

Update! clever people were right, it’s a Flare Gun! Full unlockable details and the shocking truth about the big Pyro change blogged over at PC Gamer, plus a few tidbits from Robin Walker on how it’ll all work. I rudely interrupted his game of Defense of the Ancients before breakfast this morning, intending just to say “This sounds ace!” but ended up asking a lot of annoying questions.

Spore endures this process with increasing weariness: “Yes, you can do that. If you do that it will look weird. Yes, you can break me. Yes, if you really try, you can make a creature that clips through itself and can barely walk. Are you happy now?”

Then the question becomes, “What’s the most unusual thing I can make without breaking it?” Leafing through other people’s creations is a good cure for that: some of them are so inventive and ingenious that you start to realise you’re probably never going to be recognised as the Da Vinci of Spore, the game’s defining renaissance God whose creatures display a perfect fusion of art and science.

So my creatures start out defiantly unconventional but rather lacking in personality, and gradually the emphasis shifts from freakish limb structures to more expressive faces, configurations that animate interestingly, and pretty colours.

Palm Face

Who says limbs have to be on the body and facial features on the face? After making the Palm Face, an ambulatory tree that grows features instead of leaves, I do. To strangers in the street I say it, shaking their shoulders and frothing.

To try any of these in-game, right-click the small image and save it to your My Documents\My Spore Creations\Creatures folder.

Loomosaur

Let’s try a really thin body! No, boring, let’s try a really fat one! No, boring. Okay, how about fat, then thin, then fat, then thin. Then each fat lump could have a single, giant feature dangling from it. And the whole thing could bend dangerously forwards, and be supported by a million increasingly huge legs.

Horncrested Bristlefrog

What happens if you make a creature with a spiral spine? And distribute its face across disparate lengths of the curl? Then add a load of spikes? This guy didn’t really come together until I made his front paws hand-like, which gives him a puppyish scampering gait. It’s quite hard to give non upright creatures arms that look like they’re part of them, and that didn’t really work until I made his biceps as thick as his back leg thigh, so that the three limbs look like trunks from the same stem. The ’stripe’ pattern option in Spore’s paint mode really did me proud, too.

Eyestalker

This time I wanted to make something jungle tribes might have legends about, and which sort of stalked about the place like a walking bat. It didn’t really look imposing enough until I discovered you can have really fucking huge spikes, and once Eyestalker was done that inspired a flurry of aborted creatures who had nothing going on conceptually except a lot of really fucking huge spikes. None, predictably, were worth saving.

Malevolent Stomptrunk

This started when I tried just inflating a thigh until it resembled an epic banana, then wondered if it was possible to make a creature that would suit. I also wanted something that never smiled, frowned or laughed; that would only survey all before it with a nameless besnouted malice. This pose doesn’t really show that off.

Once I’d finished, I was suddenly struck by the fear that I might have subconsciously copied a creature I’d seen somewhere before to a shameless extent. Does anyone recognise it? I’m thinking something from Star Wars or Futurama, but it’s not coming.

Goggleshark

The eyes-as-hands notion didn’t really work with the Eyestalker, but I thought I’d see if it worked better as the whole focus of a creature. Finding the slider that created that enormous drooping rictus of dismay immediately made the face work, but I actually abandoned the whole thing when I couldn’t come up with an inventive leg system. I only just came back to it, now more or less relieved of my fixation with making pointless overcomplications of conventional limb structures, and tried just giving him comically puny legs at the base of his lean abdomen. The resulting gait is hilarious and fits his excitable face exactly.

Like Malfunctioning Eddie, Gogglesharks are easily astonished.

Previously: Sporepedia, Best creations.

As you browse other people’s Spore creatures, you get harder to impress at a frightening rate. What wowed me at first seems trivial now. At this stage I don’t even stop my scrollbar for anything less than amazing. The merely unique, beautiful, inventive and monstrous are now the chaff of this harvesting operation, and the wheat is something else entirely.

As with any creative endeavour, the most inventive and talented community is also the one that thinks creating a penis creature is funny even after the first five penis creatures. There’s one that’s having permanent anal sex with itself. Another is simply the word ‘FUCK’ with legs.

But amongst them, there’s some awesomeness, and I link it here:

Krang, attempting to do The Robot with hideous results.

Cerebrean Puppeteer

Yep, definitely didn’t think of trying to make a P-38 Lightning.

The Proposesaur

Puts me in mind of the Tentacle from Day of the Tentacle. Someone should make that.

Oh.

Aww.

I dubbed this the Walking Suicide, but in the comments below, Hoborg suggests this image has racist connotations. I checked, and the guy who made it didn’t intend to depict a lynching, he just had to make the guy brown for the tree to be brown. I’m torn. Half of me thinks, “Can’t a black guy hang himself in peace without it automatically being a racist killing?” And the other half does get that it’s a very particular image. I’m leaving it in for now, but if anyone else would rather not have seen it, say so.

Update: I forgot it because I was mostly concentrating on the Something Awful goons contributions, but this one I found on Sporepedia is one of my favourite tribute creatures so far. A Futurama reference? In a game? Oh sir, how deliciously absurd!

Previously: Sporepedia.
Next: My creations.

No-one seems to have noticed except Eurogamer, who failed to link it, but Sporepedia is already publicly accessible. This is the online field guide to all the creatures people have created with Spore, and the source from which the game will eventually populate the planets you play in with AI-controlled versions of the races people have made.

Right now it’s mostly Maxis folks and a few journos creating, and I think we can conclusively say Maxis are better at it. If you stumble on a Horncrested Bristlefrog up there, though, that’s my first proper stab.

The incredible thing about Sporepedia is that those thumbnail images you see are the creature files. Drag that image right from your browser to the game window, and it loads that creature in all its scampering glory. The creature’s DNA is actually coded into the metadata of a 25 kilobyte PNG image.

It takes a long, long time to get the test-the-limits urge out of your system - which is probably why they’re releasing the editor so far ahead of the game. Because you don’t really appreciate how exciting a prospect Spore is until you get past the “Can I break it?” phase (yes, oh God yes) and create something you truly love. The more personal a protagonist is to you the greater your invest in its plight, and it doesn’t get much more personal than a species you’ve hand-built from clay and vertebrae.

Next: Best creations, My creations.

After a long quest to get Seedling’s The Upshot in MP3 format (alas, no OGGs on Mux), mine is complete. Here’s what’s on it and why:

Cat Power - Willie
There’s a lot of classy, soulful, plonking ballads to pick from on The Greatest, but this one just seems to make everything okay. Something about its expansive confidence and nonchalant pace.

Mates of State - Goods (All In Your Head)
This was just written for late summer sunsets, turning from giddily exciting to wistful and almost sad with no audible seam.

Seedling - The Upshot
There’s something beautifully emphatic about the cut-down arrangement of this, the forcefully plucked strings behind her resigned voice. Disastrously, the band split years ago, and they’re obscure enough that they don’t even have a Wikipedia page. My only consolation is that I got to hug them all at their final gig.

New Pornographers - Chump Change
By rights I should have gone with The Laws Have Changed, but I think I over-listened to it. Skimming through my shortlist, the opening bars of Chump Change just elicit a smile like no other track.

Architecture In Helsinki - Debbie
Clever, rhythmic, curling and bizarre. It says something for the propulsive blithering of the chorus that I can tell you, without checking, that it goes, “Hey there, hey there, let me down down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie Debbie down down Debbie down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie down down down down.”

Decemberists - The Legionnaire’s Lament
This is the one track of theirs I can listen to endlessly without ever tiring of its neat lyricism and heartfelt botch of authenticity. Any song whose narrator’s camel is in disrepair gets extra credit.

Sparks - Dick Around
Manic, preposterous, majestic rock opera epic, without even the slightest wink or nod to the absurdity of penning such a thing with ‘dick’ in the title.

Múm - Green Grass of Tunnel
I don’t think there’s another track during which you could scientifically measure the increase in my body temperature as it starts. It’s warm and enveloping in a way a sound alone surely cannot be.

Low - Canada
The slowcore king and queen of sinister are actually at their most impressive when they veer into other moods and sounds. Canada isn’t exactly upbeat, but it rocks extraordinarily.

Delgados - Favours
Booming, crashing and beautiful. The churning chorus reaches such an exhaustingly elevated pitch and holds it for so long that you finish half-wanting to gasp for breath on Emma Pollock’s behalf.

Ben Folds - Rockin’ The Suburbs
Quite apart from being ridiculous fun, it’s time I acknowledged the genius who unwittingly wrote the ‘About’ section of James for me. As musically worthwhile satire goes, I don’t think any other song so utterly annihilates this many hateful songwriters with its first two lines.

M83 - Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun
You’ll know if you’re going to hate this in the first thirty seconds - and the chance that you will is the reason it’s at the end. But if you don’t, everything you do for the next nine minutes of your life will be unaccountably profound. This is normal.

There’s also MuxFind, which lets you search for Muxtapes featuring music ’similar to’ a band or song you search for. Since there are a lot of Muxtapes, that tends to mean you find the song you’re looking for. And can play it free. Clearly there’s a legal explosive ticking away beneath this, but for now it remains an awesome way to find lovingly compiled collections of stuff you’ve never heard but which bears a spiritual connection to what you’ve searched for. It’s a much stronger and more effective form of recommendation than automated social aggregation like Last.fm or comparitive content analysis like Pandora.

Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.

I’m more interested in ideas that would make you think about and play a class differently, than in trying to ensure everything is perfectly and exactly balanced. Partly because this is more interesting to talk about, and partly because I don’t think you can just intellectualise about balance and call the problem solved. If I’d never played TF2 and you just described it to me, I would have said the Spy’s near-perfect disguise system was absurdly overpowered, but today people groan that it’s virtually useless. They’re wrong, but still: there’s no substitute for trying this stuff.

I also have some ideas about how this stuff should be unlocked, but they tie in to another major change I’d like to see, so that’s for another post.

Shield Spanner: when whacking your own full-health structures, this thing builds up an uber-like protective shield around them that can absorb a few hundred points of damage before the structure itself is damaged at all. The Spanner can repair neither the shield nor your buildings, so once they’re up, there’s no point hanging around. Sappers take a very long time to eat through the shield, and don’t disable the building until they get through it. The Spanner can remove them, but again, not repair the damage. It can also add a much weaker shield to the buildings of friendly Engies.

Why? For fatalistic Engies bored of baby-sitting. Once they’ve set their stuff up, the Engy is free to roam around setting up dispensers elsewhere, helping out other Engies, and flanking those who attack his own stuff. A shielded Sentry is resistant to many of the best ways of taking down an ordinary one (Sticky pile-on, point-blank Heavy, sap-and-stab) but vulnerable to attrition.

Portable Sentry: mini Sentry that can never be upgraded past level 1, but which once built, the Engineer can pick up and carry with him. While carrying the Sentry, the Engy moves at 75% speed and neither he nor the Sentry can fire, but the Sentry is safe from damage. It takes one second to snatch up and three seconds to re-deploy elsewhere. If the Engy is also using the Shield Spanner, the Sentry’s shield is lost when he picks it up, but can be re-applied after deployment.

Why? Lets you play a harrassment Engy: reaping kills by quickly erecting small sentries in unexpected places, and moving them before the enemy has time to strategise around them. This is often more fun to do, and to fight against, than holing up beind a level-three hitting it repeatedly.

Mini Dispensers: Engie can build three smaller dispensers: one that only supplies ammo/metal, one that only heals, and a third that’s a booby-trap. The booby-trap explodes with the force of a crit rocket if sapped or damaged in any way, only damaging enemies. It looks exactly like a healing-only dispenser to enemies (so traditional dispensers are still safe to sap/attack), but to the Engie’s team, it appears as a cardboard box full of dynamite, with dispenser decals drawn on in crayon.

Why? The constant need for metal to take care of your Sentry leads most Engies to put their dispensers directly next to their gun, dissuading them from setting up a useful recharge point for their team’s forward troops. Here, he can do this without sacrificing his vital metal income, and partially protect that forward station against Spies by associating a degree of uncertainty and fear with sapping them.

Telepault: teleporter exit that launches the teleportee forwards and upwards, in the direction the Engy places it. The Engie sees the projected arc before placing, obviously, so he can see where they’ll end up. Teleportees are immune to fall damage until after they land, and trajectories that end in killer chasms like those on Hydro are considered invalid placements and disallowed. The nametag for the entrance pad indicates that it’s a telepault and, in addition to displaying its recharge progress, quotes something like “Safe landings: 3/5″. Players can crouch on the tele entrance to choose to be teleported normally.

Why? I think the virtue of a Heavy being flung over a train is self-evident.

Laser Pointer: replacement for the pistol - switches Sentry to manual mode while equipped, where it will not fire on anyone automatically, but will shoot whatever the Engy points the laser at when he clicks Fire.

Why? Lets the Engy spy-check and prioritise targets better, at the expense of automatically firing on unexpected enemies, and of being ready to repair the sentry when it’s damaged.

Neutraliser: techy shotgun firing sparkly blue electronic charges which defuse Stickies, knock off Sappers and drain enemy ammo - but do no damage at all. Defuses a Sticky in two shots at medium range, one at close (close enough to hurt if it went off). Sappers take four shots at medium, two at close.

Why not… a flame-thrower Sentry! I think the real question is: why?

Why not… an ambulatory Sentry! It kind of removes the strategic element of deciding where to put it. And would be rather costly to impliment.

Hmphalm Hmphs: shotgun that fires napalm globs. They do no damage, but each successive shot slows the target slightly more, adds a few seconds onto their burn duration if you then ignite them with the flamethrower, and renders them unable to put out any flames by jumping in water. Needs reloading after every shot, and this takes a short while.

Why? The Pyro shouldn’t have an effective long-range weapon, but could use a way to catch opponents, slow their escape to safety and force tougher opponents to seek healing rather than waiting for the flames to die.

Hire Hmph: a longer, heavier fire-axe that always critical-hits against burning opponents, but takes twice as long to swing.

Why? The Pyro could do with a satisfying way to end a fight, particularly when there are allies around who usually get the credit for killing those who would have burned to death if left alone. But it shouldn’t be easy - she/he’s got to get even closer than usual, to an opponent who knows he/she’s there.

Hmpherno: flame-thrower with a more fierce but briefer burn, whose forceful stream can be used as a makeshift jetpack if pointed directly down. The force also means he/she cannot move forwards while firing normally, and while firing heat builds up in the weapon that will eventually cause the Pyro to explode in a large and dangerous fireball. Five seconds of uninterrupted fire is enough to blow him/her up. Ten seconds is enough for a nearly-full heat bar to entirely dissipate.

Why? The Pyro needs a little more tactical flexibility, lends him/herself well to comedy, and was born for a firey suicide option. This also means (s)he can propel her/himself into an area quickly by walking into it backwards whilst holding fire - to which the drawback is hopefully obvious.

Why not… a longer range flame-thrower! A class with its defining limitation removed is a class improved, as my grandmother used to say.

Why not… smoke grenades! Not being able to see is fun!

Why not… ignitable oil slicks! You spray an area with oil, then set light to it, and it burns for a while. Leads to exciting wait-around for the enemy team!

Why not… the napalm rocket-launcher from TF! Then we could give the Soldier a flame-thrower, the Spy could have Sasha, and we could save everyone the confusion of having to pick a class!

Luba & Kiska: knuckle-dusters, knock the target flying but never crit.

Why? Pow!

Tatyana: mini-gun with an electromagnetic coil built around its motor which sucks in weapons from fallen enemies (or friends) any time the barrel is spinning. The added weight leaves the Heavy unable to move at all while firing. He can still move while spinning the barrel.

Why? Lets the Heavy perpetuate a winning streak by avoiding running dry on ammo, but hinders his rate of advancement so that it’s not easy to exploit this on offense.

Sonya: very obviously stolen Scout Scattergun to replace the standard shotgun. Obviously in that the Scout’s ripped-off hand and forearm are still danging from the triggerguard.

Why? I don’t have a good justification for this.

Why not… an assault rifle! The most boring weapons in all of first-person-shooterdom! Much of TF2’s design philosophy apparently stemmed from the notion that one guy just firing a lot of bullets at another guy is about the least interesting interaction two players can have.

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.

Not A Grenade Launcher: here’s an idea for the grenade launcher: REMOVE IT. It is a twat. The Demoman’s other weapon, the sticky launcher, is probably the single most devastating weapon in the game, the trade-off ought to be that he has no quick direct attack if an enemy gets past his sticky trap and confronts him. Instead, there’s no trade-off: he’s tough, and if he can aim worth a damn, he’s got a quick to use weapon that’s nearly as powerful as the Soldier’s rocket-launcher and litters the place with deadly spam fire if he misses - or just if he feels like racking up a load of talentless arbitrary murders.

Why? Why would anyone choose to unlock the ability to not have a grenade launcher? That’s the beautiful part; they wouldn’t have to! This excellent upgrade would be automatically applied to all Demomen free of charge.

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 half 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.

Slugger: full-size two-handed baseball bat that does 150% damage, but precludes all other weapons.

Why? It’s clearly an impractical trade-off, but I’d take it.

Freakin’ Crit Magnets: pistol rounds that do no damage, but successively increase the chance that the next hit against the victim - with a weapon that actually deals damage - will be a critical. A full clip of direct hits gives a 100% crit chance. On close inspection, the projectiles stuck into the victim’s body are small nails each skewering a Post-It note with “Crit me” written on it.

Why? It gives the Scout an option to be more of a team player, or to have the satisfaction of running at someone with his bat and knowing the hit will be a crit. It’s also kind of an interesting risk tradeoff to decide when to stop building up your next attack and actually make it.

Nutcracker: leaner Scattergun that always crits when fired directly down on a target from above, but never crits otherwise and has to be reloaded every two shots.

Why? Funny? I should clarify the name, actually, in case it’s a British idiosyncrasy: here, ‘nut’ means head, while ‘nuts’ means testicles. It is the former that this weapon proposes to crack.

Hobbler: sniper rifle that reduces the victim’s movement speed by up to 50% if the shot hits below the waist, but only charges to halfway up the normal charge meter. Partially charged shots to the legs slow by proportionally less than 50%. Healing steadily restores movement speed.

Why? Lets the Sniper be a help to his team in situations where he doesn’t have the time or skill to line up a perfect headshot.

Croc: Larger kukri that always crits against Spies, never otherwise.

Why? Vengeance.

Shooter: a larger and faster-firing revolver than the Spy’s, to replace the SMG.

Why? I’m forever out-gunning Snipers at medium range when I play Spy - I’m hitting them too often for them to snipe effectively, and their SMG has nothing like my damage output at that distance. Much as I love doing this, the poor Aussies could use a break, and some classic Crocodile Dundee one-upmanship ought to do it.

Man-Sapper 3000: useable on human targets - drains them of all ammo in a few seconds, and stays attached for five, or until an Engineer whacks it off. Target doesn’t get his ammo back when the sapper’s removed, he has to find more. Must be placed from behind, but does not break disguise.

Why? Good for disabling whole groups of people without necessarily giving yourself away, can lead to comedy escapes from angry mobs of sparking melee enemies.

Hack-o-Tron 3000: replacement for the revolver, can hack any Sentry in line of sight from 10 metres away. Hacking takes ten secondsish, during which the Spy must remain still, and at the end of it the Sentry will be reprogrammed to only attack its creator. The Engineer sees his Sentry spark green during this time, so he knows someone nearby is a Spy, and he only has to kill the Spy before the process finishes to abort it. The Spy can remain in disguise throughout, but since he can’t move without breaking the hack, he’s conspicuous for that. The Engy can destroy his Sentry at any time during or after the hacking process, the only disadvantage of which is, well, he’s destroyed his own Sentry.

Why? Firstly, I like the idea of seeing your Sentry spark and having to scan everyone nearby to spot who’s not moving. It’s an easier task for an Engy than de-sapping, because he only has one objective, but the danger is more worrying: losing both his Sentry and his life. Secondly, it’d be fun to find a great place to do this from, and watch the Engy scrambling about above or below trying to find you. Thirdly, realising you’re not going to find the Spy and scrambling for the Detonate control panel before it turns on you could be pretty tense. It has to be only the Engy it attacks once hacked, of course, or noob Engies could ruin the whole game for their team by letting a level-3 Sentry get hacked right in their base.

Identity Thief 3000: large knife that, when backstabbing, utterly shreds the victim and causes the Spy to quickly assume his identity. There’s a puff of smoke as usual, but it lasts only a moment rather than the several seconds that donning a disguise usually takes. The Spy cannot attack again with the knife until after this new disguise is assumed, so it’s slower for repeat-attacks.

Why? For situations when you have someone on their own, but don’t know how long you’ve got until his team-mates show up. Disposes of the body and renders you inconspicuous in one quick move.

Ghost-o-matic 3000: replacement cloaking device which, instead of rendering the Spy invisible, allows him to pass through enemies for ten seconds, and absorb incoming damage. During this time he can’t attack or sap, and enemy fire drains his Ghost charge rather than his health - so it won’t last long if he’s under fire. When his Ghost charge runs out, the Spy is vulnerable but still can’t attack for two seconds, and he gives off a suspicious spark - so spy-checking isn’t any harder. Ghost-mode also takes two seconds to activate, and regenerates fairly slowly when not in use.

Why? This lets him slip through very hairy or chaotic situations where enemies don’t have the time to look for Spies thoroughly, but in which he’d be killed in the crossfire if he was merely cloaked. The kind of crossfires this device would let the Spy get past are also the kind where one least needs his Cloak.

Identi-Kit 3000: replacement for the Spytron 3000 cigarette-case: it’s a device in the same housing which, when pointed at an enemy, tells you their name and health. If disguised, the enemy with your name is tagged on-screen at all times, the way Medic-callers are to Medics. The drawback is that you can only disguise by pointing it at an enemy and pressing fire, rather than selecting a class freely with the number keys. You can do this while cloaked, naturally.

Why? Allows the Spy to identify and eliminate injured targets with his pistol, and lets him strategise around his namesake. The loss of the “Am I dressed as him?” ambiguity is more than made up for by the many “Oh shit, that’s the real Duncan Disorderly!” moments.

Why not… a dummy weapon that lets you make it look like you’re firing while in disguise! This would only increase the believability of your disguise for the brief period before people realised that a disguised Spy can now fire like a real team-mate. Thereupon, you’d still get spy-checked, it would just be incredibly arduous and tiresome for everyone else to do so.

Why not… a silenced pistol! There’s actually nothing terribly wrong with this idea, it’s just not very useful. Obviously shooting people from an unexpected angle is a core tactic of the Spy, and I love doing it, but I don’t think people are pinpointing my location using the directional audio of their 7.1 home theatre surround-sound setup. I think they’re just turning around to find out where they’re being shot from, and seeing me with their eyes. If, like the four thousand people who’ve suggested this, you’re proposing a damage decrease as a trade-off, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole.

Why not… a weapon that can be used while cloaked or disguised! Because… just shut up. Just go away and think about what you’ve done.

I feel like this all the time.

Via this awesome thread Tim found in his Google Blogs RSS feed for the term ‘PC Gamer’. What say you to that, O champions of the medium?

I promise not to become someone who links everything they ever do anywhere, as if the mere fact of their involvement is reason enough for you to care. But I happen to have posted two things that fit within James’ remit on the PC Gamer blog recently. Jim mentioned today that he’d tried to look it up online with no luck, to which my mental reaction was “Dear God, he’s right! The world needs to know about Thedret the Exaggerator!”

As far as I know, the steps described in this article should let anyone create their own Exaggerator, but I’ve never tried to repeat the phenomenon. It would seem to undermine it, somehow.

After I first played it, I wrote a post about how I’d change all the Nanosuit’s augmentation modes if it were up to me, but it was lost in the great hard drive failure of recently. Replaying now, I find that I agree with myself entirely, and repeat my thoughts here for your amusement:

Cloak: the problem with Cloak as it stands is that it provides an extremely effective but rather tedious way to play. Cloak, run forwards ten metres, lie down in the nearest bush, decloak and wait for it to recharge. That’s fine in the middle of tense combat against multiple enemies, but most of your time is spent exploring a new, densely forested area where you don’t know if there are enemies are not. You instinctively want to approach cautiously, as you should, but the cautious option just takes a really long time and often turns out to have been pointless because there was no-one around anyway.

I’d like a Cloak mode that drains suit power at a rate proportional to how visible you are. I.e. how much work it has to do to keep you hidden. If no-one’s actually nearby and looking in your direction, it drains no power because it doesn’t have to do anything. But if you’re right in front of someone and they’re looking right at you, it drains rapidly because it’s having to render you entirely invisible. Your suit already knows how clearly you’re being seen by enemies - there’s a meter for it in the bottom left of your HUD.

It’d let you explore safely when you don’t know if there are enemies around, and when your suit power starts to drain, you find cover and look out for enemies. But if you’re in the middle of a firefight and want to slip by your enemies, you only have a small window to do so. Right now, I can just walk away from any firefight at any time, which makes them all a little easy.

Speed: at the moment this makes you go a little faster, makes your sprint speed preposterously fast, and then has a third, in-between speed for when you’ve run out of energy but are still sprinting. Your super-fast sprint exhausts all your suit energy in a second or two, which makes you feel a bit like you’re running on five year-old Duracell batteries. It’s one of those design decisions where they wanted to give you an extreme ability, but couldn’t find a way to balance it without an extreme nerf, and the result is rather awkward.

I’d want that third fast-but-not-crazy-fast speed to be the normal movement speed in Speed mode. Speed. The super-jumping of Strength mode should be part of Speed mode instead, and I really liked Jedi Knight’s system of being able to charge a jump by holding the key before releasing - so that you can still do small hops. None of this should drain your suit energy, but it also shouldn’t regenerate unless you’re standing still.

Holding the Sprint key wouldn’t make you go any faster, it’d slow down the world around you instead. The only games that don’t need slow-mo are the ones that already have it.

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Armour: here the problem is that if I know I’m about to be taking fire, the absolute last mode I want to be in is Armour. Because it’s the only mode in which shots drain your suit energy, which deprives you of the only two effective ways to escape a sticky situation: cloaking or super-sprinting.

Clearly, it shouldn’t. Instead of absorbing damage like an extra health bar, it should work the way armour normally does: full energy means you only take half-damage, no energy means you take full. Energy neither regenerates nor drains when in armour mode.

Except when you press Sprint. This would render you completely invulnerable until you run out of energy, but you move like the walking tank that you are: slowly. It’d let you pull stunts like cloaking to the middle of the road when you see an enemy Humvee coming, then switching to Armour and going invuln to make them crash into you. Or similarly, surviving a head-on vehicular collision that results in an explosion fatal to everyone else involved. Or throwing yourself off a huge drop and surviving. Or wading towards an angry tank, planting a detpack on it, and blowing it up right in your own face.

Strength: so the problem with Strength mode right now is that it outright fucking sucks. It should be the coolest mode, but everything you do in it drains nearly all your energy, and is woefully less effective than simply shooting people. Also, shooting people drains your energy. Jesus.

As I say, jumping has no place in this mode, it shouldn’t be about mobility, it should be about hitting stuff. A Strength-mode punch or melee attack should always kill, obviously, and furthermore should flip a Humvee like it ain’t no thing. Hell, you should be able to flip a tank if you can get right up to it and hold ‘Pick up’ long enough. I have no objection to Strength mode steadying your grip with weapons, as it currently does, but causing that to rapidly drain your vital suit-juice is just the most despicable and moronic form of the Limit Everything design philosophy.

Sprint mode would be a kind of murderous charge, barreling forth shoulder-first and canoning anything you hit flying out of your way - including vehicles and walls.

Over at the PC Gamer blog today, the full story of my doomed attempt to play the one game I know for sure I’ll hate: Football Manager. It doesn’t go well.