Kieron Gillen = Kieron Gillen.
Tom = Tom Francis = Pentadact = the author of this site.
James = this site. Heavily paraphrased from memory: “I was going to give this one of those pretentious names like ‘Unconnected Lucidity’ or something, but then I decided that since a blog never has a fixed topic anyway, it may as well have a proper name. So welcome to James.”

To think a games reviewer is using browser hijacking to trick innocent blog readers – dastardly? Positively fiendish.

Then on August 14th they linked to Kieron Gillen’s blog, posting: “Long standing Introversion fans will remember Kieron as the writer of the original PC Gamer review of Uplink, as well as the PC Format review and Eurogamer review of Darwinia…Recently he delivered a Keynote speech…titled ‘How to use and abuse the gaming press’, and Introversion Software is featured heavily as his case study.”

So we’ve got two Darwinia reviewers, both conceptually linked to PCG[UK] and both linked via their blogs. I just thought you might be curious as to the reason for that little confusion.

Although missions are only a small element of the game, they can be all encompassing (at least they seem to be to me, six weeks in) in terms of getting some decent combat down me before I venture into PVP. I’m with Kieron, in that a bit of PVP-lite NPC activity would be an ever better primer, and notable by its absence

I actually think the combat is great in Eve, I’d love missions to join an NPC raiding party to take down a battleship, or hunt down an Interceptor using jamming stuff.

Recently in Eve, I had a humdinger of a mission, blasting baddies, wrecking their base and freeing some slaves – just the kind of space captaincy for which I had signed onto CCP’s dotted line.

So, the agents learn that I’m a combat ace, responsive to their needs, quick to complete and fastidious. What’s next for me, I wonder? A dozen bloody fetch and carry missions of course, causing me to feel more bike messenger than Han Solo. Just what I needed after a rubbish day in the office. Grrrr.

“If I’ve done a mission, Eve, City Of Heroes, it goes on my permanent record. This guy has done that. That information is as precious as what level I am, what items I own.”

I particularly agree with that bit. Can’t believe WoW didn’t have a log of completed missions at launch, so I had to install a bloomin’ UI modification thing to add one. Hey, thanks for belittling my accomplishments even *more*, Blizzard. Are they so irrelevant they’re not even worth remembering on my *own* computer?

What’s worse is that other single player games do the same thing a lot of the time. Don’t they realise that the experiences a game provides are experiences while they’re happening, but stories in hindsight? I’d like to be able to check up on those stories later – to re-live in my brain those lofty achievements of bygone days. This is why my mum keeps photograph albums, but many of my favourite experiences happened on the digital plane. Why don’t more games keep ridiculously large amounts of statistics that I can pour over while browsing my millions of screenshots?

I think it’s one of the reasons I love(d) Championship Manager. It was awesome to play a career of CM2 Italia and be able to watch the progress of players across time. Managing Juventus, releasing Vialli from his contract so he can go be the player-manager of some lower league team, and then five years later watching as he got the Italy national job while I missed it because I was foolish enough to put “Scottish” as my nationality when I started the game. Damn you to hell, Luca!

My actions shouldn’t just have consequence. The consequences should merit remembering.

And quests suck too!