TOM FRANCIS
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Field Studies 6: The PC Gamer Sporecast

Update: I’m a complete fucking idiot. The image that was the whole freaking point of this post was still set to Private on my Flickr account, so I’m guessing no-one saw it. Here goes:

The PC Gamer Sporecast

If you’re playing Spore this weekend, I made a thing you can subscribe to to get awesome stuff showing up in your game. Sporecasts are hand-picked collections of content, and they’ll take priority over random stuff when Spore is populating the galaxy.

I don’t really gain anything from people subscribing to this – if it were fame, love and comments I were after, I’ve already got those by making a pathetic toaster as my first ever building.

Sporecasts are just a way for uncreatives like me to feel like they’re contributing to the Spore community. Unfortunately the tool for making them is terrible right now, and flat-out refuses to acknowledge the existence of most buildings, vehicles and spacecraft, so I’ll have to add some of my favourites of those later. This is also why the vast majority of Sporecasts out there are just three or four shit monsters.

Not in the PC Gamer Sporecast, or any Sporecast, because Spore’s Sporecaster sucks.

ZomBuster’s behatted Antlion is in there, and I ran into him at the Space stage yesterday. I struck up a trade route with their race, but then one of my allies – the moustache bananas – started invading Antlion worlds. Naturally, their whole race had to die. I roped an Antlion ship into helping me – they’re nasty black Piranhas in my game – and went on a rapid bombing run to systematically exterminate every city on every planet in their empire. They surrendered pretty early on – I’m playing as the Stompwings, who achieved Galactic God status long ago – but I kept on bombing. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I really like bombing.

Tip: get the Shield module for your ship as early as possible. It’s not some shitty 20% defense for 10 seconds, it renders you completely invulnerable for several minutes, enough to lay waste to an entire planet.

Plan B Chapter One Is Complete

LaZodiac asked if I’d update here when a new entry of my game diary for Galactic Civilizations 2 goes up. They’re going up every weekday these days, so that might flood James somewhat, but the Days do group loosely into chapters. I’ve just reached the end of the first of those, so now’s a good time to start if you haven’t already. If you’ve already read it all in the book, a) you are attractive, and b) it now has a Digg button, perhaps you’d care to swing by and click it?

On a similarly autoprostitutional note, I have a reminder here for the four people who intended to vote for me in the Games Media Awards and forgot to actually do so. It just says, “Do it do it do it do it!” I think it’s written in blood. At this stage you should vote for me even if you actively dislike my writing, because all the other candidates were killed in a freak sporkstorm and the only other nominees are now Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot.

The reason I bring this up now, apart from that surprisingly under-reported tragedy, is that I just realised today that I forgot to vote for myself.

Field Studies 5: My Spore Review

After some dillying, my Spore review for PC Gamer UK went up today. I went at it with more or less the opposite mindset to most of the reviewers I’ve read. Not:

“Okay, this is supposed to be a big deal, but does it really provide a long-term challenge as a serious game?”

But:

“Ooh, what’s this?”

I didn’t give it a special license to not be a game, in fact I’m pretty hard on the ways in which it fails as one, but I bore with it as much as any other game that isn’t trying to scratch the normal itches. It seems mad to me to compare it to Civ, Diablo, Warcraft or any other Platonic form of the genres it borrows, because it’s so obviously not about those mechanics. The point of comparison, if you really had to make one, would be Second Life. And it fares rather well.

We have a little piece of page furniture in PC Gamer reviews that is widely resented among the writers, and often a pain to do: the Thumbnail Review. I thought Spore would be a particularly daunting one to summarise in a few words, but it turned out to fit easily:

“Simplified and misbalanced, but a jaw-dropping safari through the human imagination.”

I knew some mags and sites would damn it with the mild praise of a score in the seventies – in fact I thought more would than have. But to me, anything under ninety percent seems criminal and absurd. How could you possibly suggest this experience is optional, or merely decent? It is unprecedented, wild, hilarious and compulsory.

A lot of people have the game now, so footage is cheap. But here are a couple of things not many people are likely to have yet:

Heroes Of Medicine

I usually play a class to whom Medics are little more than helpless witnesses to my crimes. But now that Valve have successfully bribed me to play more Heavy, I have a newfound appreciation for the power of a good physician. I’m not a talented Heavy, but any time one of these chaps stuck with me, it was over for the entire enemy team. We never lost.

So while it is not in a simple Heavy’s power to grant a medical degree, I can thank you by taking screenshots that make you look awesome. And with a hearty YOU DID WELL.

[PCG] Tim

Tim is a Kritzer, and responsible for my first proper Uberkritz combo. We only killed a few people during it, we three, but the sight so terrified the enemy that they huddled into their spawn room. A further five of them were cut down there after the charge wore off, thanks largely to the high crit chance our recent massacre had given Natascha.

[PCG] Graham

Graham and I stormed back and forth so rapidly on Badwater Basin one lunchtime that the 12-strong enemy team seemed to be immaterial. For one round we never left the cart or died, breaking my all-time points record and dominating many.

roBurky

roBurky is a combat Medic, which means if he ever does run off to pursue some meandering foe, you can relax in the knowledge that he can work a dark magic with that Blutsauger and resolve the situation faster than if you gave waddling chase yourself.

Donkey For President

I don’t know who this chap is, but he chose to stick with me for more than one round. This tends to be the secret to Heavy-Medic dominance – waiting for each other when you spawn. If your respawn cycles get out of sync, it’s rare to reunite because of the abundance of needy injured and juicy minigun targets scattered all over the map. WE MAKE GOOD TEAM.

Lack_26

James regular Lack is also ein Kritzkrieger, a profession that’s become markedly more potent since the charge time was significantly reduced. I was spewing sparkleslugs frequently enough that Supreme Soviet, for being Ubered 50 times, was one of the first Heavy achievements I earned.

My Sandvich

My chewy friend doesn’t really help me survive situations that would otherwise kill me, he just saves the time it takes to trundle over to a medkit or wait for a small one to respawn. It probably annoys Medics, but I’ve found it effective to chomp him while being healed if I’m seriously injured, since the restoration rate stacks with the relatively slow post-damage heal of the Medigun.

His main virtue, however, is that he replaces the shotgun. Technically this is a disadvantage, but it makes it so abundantly clear that the class should never have had one in the first place. Valve were so nearly fearless in making the classes utterly distinct, common shotguns were their only timid choice. The Heavy’s much more interesting to play when he has no instant-fire mid-range weaponry, and only his fists as a backup weapon.

Post-script: I think I may have fixed the CPU overload errors that have been screwing with James intermittently recently, with a little help from Bluehost. If they’ve now stopped, the problem was the spectacular size of my comment spam folder. If you have a notion of how much disk space raw text takes up, you’ll understand my full meaning when I say that Spam Karma had caught seventy megabytes of robo-comments. I hadn’t told it to delete old ones entirely, so every time any php script queries the comments SQL table – well, my logs state that one query yesterday afternoon took 1,014 seconds to complete.

If they persist: fuck.

Red Versus White

I like any oppourtunity I get to keep talking about TF2 stuff without necessarily boring non-TF2 players. Surely anyone can enjoy this:

Watch more TF2 Videos

Except, like, white people.

Soviet Power

As is traditional for this point in the Class Update timeline, Chris and I have both got our taunt kills, and again he beat me to the blog brag. For the unfamiliar, the Heavy class has always been able to point his fingers like a gun and say “Pow! Haha!” But until the recent updates to the class, that wouldn’t kill a man stone dead if he stood in the way of it. Now it does, and there’s an achievement for it.

This is how it went down:

There was a lot of missing completely.

One or two completely wasted ubercharges.

One instance of “I’ve Landed On Your Medic’s Head And This Taunt Doesn’t Fire Down.”

A great many foiled by knockback.

One that goddamn should have worked, he walked right through my finger during this.

And then, on my very next life, the very same guy, emboldened by his apparent immunity to the taunt in our last encounter, impaled himself on my middle- and fore-finger and flew back in a spray of SO MUCH BLOOD.

This is what happened while I blew the imaginary smoke from my imaginary gun barrel.

And these were the spoils. All Heavies become pathologically silly when they unlock these, serious tactics are out the window.

Soon after I jumped back to Badwater Basin and won by a) riding on top of the cart doing the KGB taunt, b) standing in front of the cart doing the KGB taunt, and c) standing actually in the blast hole doing the KGB taunt, and miraculously surviving.

Getting this was a lot more fun than my more gruelling quest for the Hadouken Kill. I was about to call it a night on Sunday, but when browsing achievement progress I noticed I was one Sandvich away from Konspicuous Konsumption, one WE MUST STOP LITTLE CART! away from Stalin The Cart, and only three achievements away from unlocking the Killing Gloves of Boxing, which I had actually started to lust after since giving up my shotgun for the Sandvich.

I joined a Badwater Basin server and munched a Sandvich, stopped the TINY LEETLE MEN from Pushkin the cart the requisite one time, then noticed that everyone else on the server was in the same clan, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate me wasting the slot I was taking up by repeatedly trying to Pow! everyone I met.

So I ended up in purgatory: instant respawn 2fort 24/7. roBurky joined me there, but I soon got autobalanced to the other team. Usually I refuse to fight my friends and Spectate until there’s a slot on their team, but since I wasn’t playing properly anyway I didn’t object.

It was hilarious. Before long most people on the enemy team knew me, and knew that I wouldn’t attempt to shoot them or in any way be effective when attacked. So a lot of them would draw their own melee weapons and take great pleasure in beating me to death as I was frozen to the spot, pointing my fingers impotently at where they used to be. roBurky took this one step further: he was playing Pyro, so would circle me after I started taunting, switch to shotgun and perform his own killing taunt, which takes rather less time to get to the lethal bit.

Not only did he succeed, but this was his fourth Pentadact-killing in a row, so it earned him a Domination. He tried it again the next time we ran into each other, so this time I sidestepped and killed him back with a critical uppercut.

Once I’d earned the gloves, I stuck around for a while to try them out. Long enough to discover that if you can get behind a Heavy Medic pair, you can punch out the Medic and use the crits time to KO the Heavy before he can take you out, even if he’s pretty on-the-ball.

Plan B Is Live

The first entries of my new GalCiv2 diary are now online, and new ones will go up three times a week from now until the heat death of the universe. You can read the whole thing if you’re able and willing to get the UK edition of PC Gamer, which subscribers are receiving nowish and shops are getting in on Thursday.

It comes as a pocket-sized book for convenient reading on trains, planes and buses, to leave lying around on tiny coffee tables, or, since it is nearly black, for giving the impression that you have 15,000 words’ worth of ex-girlfriends’ contact details on file. In fact, because the cover bears the title “PLAN B”, particularly credulous observers may conclude that this is your second of two such books, containing only your deprioritised relapse hookup candidates.

In fact it is a story about me trying to bring a vast galaxy to peace, despite my slightly hot-headed approach to interstellar diplomacy and a chronic lack of patience. The species I created for this are distantly related to the angry warmongers I played as for the last one, since they are both essentially me and I haven’t mellowed particularly in the last year.

Update!

CVG, the site I wrote this diary on, is gone forever. PC Gamer have all the text and images, and are gonna put them back up at some point, don’t know when though.

He Looks Truly Mortified

Sorry Peanut, I know you were in the middle of your own taunty thing. But I had to try the Heavy’s kill-o-taunt.

I’ve also been punching people’s blood out a lot more lately, and can now see the point of the KGB. If you’re not familiar with Team Fortress 2 and its unlockables, that sentence may have sounded strange.

Having the Sandvich cleverly lures you into the business of punching, because your fists are now your only backup weapon. That in turn makes you realise it’s more viable than you’d expect, and suddenly the idea of getting a bonus for doing it is rather tempting. Five seconds is a long time in 100% critsville – switching to Natascha and spinning up probably only takes one and a halfish.

Lumber Yard Wallpapers

Want to feel like you’re in Valve’s new alpine vistas without actually having to play Arena mode? Then sir, I can save you seconds of effort. Click for big.

Edit: That big blue space looked like it needed some banner text to me, so I knocked up an alternate version for those of us whose cup of tea the new mode is not:

If Valve would like my permission to use this poster in their marketing materials or to otherwise promote the game, they are most welcome.

Heavy Update Thoughts So Far

Badwater Basin
Love it.

I know it’s just because it’s early days, but I haven’t hit a single impenetrable Sentry nest, and the alternate routes are deliciously labyrinthine. It feels teeming with nooks and crannies to hide out in, recharge and take an unexpected angle from. And I love having a section of track that runs underneath the main play area. Tim and I skewered the enemy team repeatedly as they tried to escort the cart through that underground tunnel, he as a Sniper from the front, I as a Spy from the back.

I thought at first it was just a superior Spy map, but I played it solely as Heavy for some time today, and it was among the most fun I’ve ever had as that class. In fact, for the first time in ten months, I broke my all-time score record. 36 points from 16 kills as a Spy defending stage 3 of Dustbowl, replaced by 37 points and 16 kills assaulting Badwater Basin as a Heavy with incalculable aid from Doctor Graham Smith. I think we survived the entire round, and were with the cart almost every metre of the way. Cap score grind plus plus.

I know, I know, you’ve got 48 kills as an Engineer and 39 as a Demo – shut up.

Arena Mode
Hate it.

Chris sums up a lot of what saddens me about this mode very eloquently at 1Fort – the lows are as low as Sudden Death, but the highs aren’t nearly as high because a two-minute victory doesn’t feel significant.

I’m not yet clear on the precise conditions that cause it to occur, but the system whereby a third of the players must sit out every round is bizarre and disastrous. I’m just not interested in spending my free time that way; impotently watching two teams of strangers blunder awkwardly into one another.

I don’t see why there can’t be two full teams. What is the presumably monumental problem that’s worth paying the exorbitant cost of boring a third of your players to solve?

If you want lower player counts, lower the player counts. If you want to scramble the teams, scramble them whenever one side wins three times in a row. Use the rescrambling to separate the highest scorers, and prefer to keep friends together unless they’re dominating.

With that system, Arena would be worthwhile to me because its format undermines the feasibility of Sentry nests, the biggest drain on my fun with TF2. Without it, I’m just not playing.

Heavy Unlocks
Funny, don’t want ’em.

I am, of course, reserving judgement on all of them until I actually try them out. The Sandvich is a lovely idea, but the prospect doesn’t entice me particularly. I don’t die because I enter a fight with partial health, I die because I take more than 300 damage before I can retreat.

Likewise, the other unlocks don’t attempt to solve any of the reasons I avoid the Heavy, and don’t add possibilities that excite me on paper. The reason I avoid him is that his slowness and similar weapons make him tactically inflexible: he can only deal with one kind of situation, and he doesn’t have the tools to engineer it. If he encounters something unexpected and undesirable, he has no options. Boxing gloves, a slow-gun and a snack don’t sound like they give me more options, and I thrive on options.

I’ll update this if that impression is mistaken, but I think unlockables need to entice as much as perform, and this is the first time they haven’t done that for me. For others, too – I’ve only seen one Natascha and no boxing gloves, and there are rarely more than four Heavies per team. It’s nothing like the mono-class unlock fever that gripped Pyro and Medic week.

Timberyard
Pretty, hate Arena.

“The goal was to establish a clear difference between the two sides of the map. One side climbs up toward a large mountain peak, and the other dips down into a vast valley.”

Reading that, I pictured a glorious mountain-climb of a map, something Tim is always saying would add some much-needed drama to TF2’s struggles. The reality is a truly lovely place that I long to spend time in, but it looks to me an awful lot like a perfectly symmetrical square of entirely flat land around big square building. I guess he’s talking about the background.

Regardless, like a lot of people I’m in love with this new style and I can’t wait for them to make a map in it that I actually want to play.

Relic Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

Tyranids Are In Dawn Of War II, And There Are Screenshots

It takes a lot to make me completely forget about TF2 at time like this, but this’ll do it:

The Tyranids are in, they’re beautiful and they’re huge:

As I said back when no-one believed me, the last trailer completely gave it away: the explanations for that descending cloud of spores the pessimists came up with were just hilarious. It’s a cloud of orks. It’s a warp storm, only lower, and brown, and made of spores. Gamers seem to have a limitless capacity to believe the worst.

The reason Tyranids are a big deal, at least the reason they were always my favourite Warhammer 40,000 race, is what they’re made of. They’re not glistening pus like other aliens, or tissue paper insects. They’re clean pale bone, hard and sharp as diamond, acting as one conscious many-bladed machine.

In other news, Valve Announce That Tom Francis Was Right To Say That The SomethingAwful Secrecy-Impaired Testers Were Right About The Sandvich, And That Tim Edwards Was Right About The New Video.

Team Fortress 2 Goes To The Rockies

And Valve Make A Game Mode Out Of The Worst Part Of TF2

So the new game mode is a sudden-death single-control point mini-match, suited to fewer players. More like suited to no players! Because of how it might suck! Lol!

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the presence of a single control point negates what does suck about Sudden Death: the tendency for both teams to hole up at their base and wait until stalemate is announced. If you turtle up at the point, you can cap it and win rather than waiting for the enemy to come to you. If you turtle up before the point, the enemy can cap it and win rather than coming to you. I’m optimistic.

But The Real News Is: Shit, Look At That!

A delicious new environment for the chaps and Pyro! It’s quite, quite lovely – in some ways, even more stylised than the canyon motif we’ve been stuck with until now. The backdrop in this shot is just a few colours:

I’m a big fan of game environments that can feel cold without just blanketing the whole place in unconvincing snow. This definitely qualifies – can’t you just smell how brisk and bracing that mountain air is?

That set of tips from the SomethingAwful testers has now been proven so right that it’s had to be deleted from the Steam forums. In Arena’s case, knowing the broad picture wasn’t very helpful: the details that there’s a single control point, and it can have any number of players, completely change the prospect to a rather exciting one.

But if you still doubt that the last Heavy unlock will be a health-restoring munchable named the Sandvich that replaces the Shotgun, you are now officially delusional.

Steel Yourself

The grand Team Fortress 2 update goes live tomorrow night, and there’ll be more details on what it contains tonight and tomorrow. I doubt the new community map, cp_steel, will be top of your trying-out priority list, but I hope you’ll get to it eventually. It’s an intriguing, ever-changing map, in a player-driven way rather than a random way like Hydro. It’s no less puzzling than Hydro though (I’m hoping some extra signposts are added in the ‘official’ version), so this clear, simple diagram by Ankich should make everything apparent right away.

In theory:

In practise:

Wait, wait, that diagram is actually helpful. Obviously you need to see it full size. An awesome Valve-style video explains the basics when you first play the map, but what you really need to know is how to play it well. How many of the map-changing points should you try for until you make a dash for the final, game-winning one?

I’ve been playing it whenever I can, and I’m really enjoying it so far. At the moment it feels weighted towards the attackers: we had a perfect round on Blu this lunchtime, where it went into overtime as we were capping C, we got shot off C, all our progress towards capturing C was undone, and just as it hit zero a cheeky Scout lept on E: the only cap that matters. We couldn’t even hold that consistently, but I kept as many of them as I could busy at C and eventually our forces at E won out, and we won with zero seconds on the clock.

Then the teams switched and we got destroyed. So I think we were actually sucking on offense, it’s just an offense-friendly map. But blasting Scouts off that final cap in the middle of a chasm feels like what the Soldier was born to do, so defense is still fun.

Vote Tom Francis In The Games Media Awards

Holy shit, apparently I’m a finalist in the Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer – Print. The winner’s decided solely by votes, and “Voting is open to all MCV readers”, so just by reading that sentence I quoted from MCV, you qualify. If you want to be extra-qualified, go and read www.mcvuk.com for a sec, then vote (gma@intentmedia.com).

You can also vote for PC Gamer for Best Games Magazine, and a bunch of PC Gamer contributors who apparently call themselves Rock Paper Shotgun these days, for Best Games Website. In fact, you could vote for the whole of Team Awesome, as we’re called when we fight crime together on the streets of Bath at night.

If you actually want to read something I wrote for PC Gamer, I reported on those virtual assassins, kept a war diary, failed monumentally at Football Manager, and investigated the effectiveness of awkward flirting in MMORPGs. The SWAT 4 movie script I wrote here was also used in the mag.

The other finalists in my category are Rick Porter, who has long hair and one of those not-quite-a-moustache moustaches, Joel Snape who must work right next to me but I can’t remember which one he is, Jon Blyth, who once killed a seventy-two year-old man right in front of me for no reason, Ben Talbot who I don’t know at all, and Alex Wiltshire, who is lovely but works anonymously for the Edge collective, so it’s impossible to actually know what he wrote. Except when you’re both reviewing the same game and he WILDLY OVER-RATES IT and you don’t.

Also, they all just e-mailed me to say they think you’re a jive sucker. They told me not to tell you they said that, but I thought you should know.

Heavy Update: Sandwiches And Fresh Green Grass

WHAT YOU SAY!!

The ongoing story here is that Valve pronounced their expected batch of unlockable weapons for the Heavy would also include an unexpected fan-made map, cp_steel, a brand new Payload map, Badwater Basin, a whole new game mode, still unnamed, and five new maps ‘arenas’ for that mode.

They’re revealing these elements day by day until the whole thing goes live on Tuesday (probably around 8pm BST, I’d guess). The latest is that the replacement minigun, Natascha, slows enemies ‘for an instant’ when they’re hit. But the real news is the image of the thing: not the gun itself, but that the blurred scenery the Heavy is standing in is green grass and grey rocks: a type of terrain so far unseen in any TF2 map.

Mess of original post and updates follows:

Sandwiches: While the names might be enigmatic and the descriptions missing, if you download the icon set for the Heavy achievements Valve have just revealed, the filenames are more explicit about what they’re for. The interesting ones, name then filename:

Konspicuous Konsumption – Eat Sandwiches
To regain health, one assumes. Something Awful hint was “Think PopEye”.

Sypalectical Materialism – Uncover Spies
Combined with the Something Awful hint “Think Ghostbusters” I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a Medigun that did nothing except turn red when used on a Spy. Also, I once said to Robin Walker and Erik Johnson, “You guys should make a Medigun that lights up when it’s used on a Spy” and they said “That’s a good idea”. Then I saw them take notes, then scurry off to their PCs, and make that, and put it in the Heavy update.

More probably, as several commenters say, it’s just an achievement for hitting Spies while they’re cloaked, and nothing to do with seeing through disguises.

And not for nothing, but that Spy has a giant freaking silencer.

0wn The Means Of Production – Clear Stickybombs
The interesting thing here is the icon – that’s not a Sticky being pushed back slightly, it’s breaking. Not also the zero in ‘own’, to emphasise how totally pwnsome the means by which you do this is.

Five Second Plan – Teleport Fast Kill
This is probably just for killing people shortly after you come out of a teleporter, but there could be more to it.

Update! Craig points out that this compilation of the SomethingAwful hints is now two-for-two. The third unlock, according to this, is a minigun that slows people down. If true, a) I will be surprised, b) there will be riots, and c) ha! In your face people who said the Hobbler could never be done because slowing people down is always a bad idea! I may entirely agree with your claim and not even really like my own idea, but if Valve do it it’s automatically right.

Day Two! Click the image for details, and the names of all the achievements. Some of them strongly hint at what the other unlocks might be. Others – Pushkin the Cart, Stalin the Cart and Permanent Revolution – are just genius.

TF2 blog has the official word, the Heavy update site is detailing the changes day by day, and it all goes live one week from today. Holy, holy shit.

Five of the new maps are for the new game mode, all of which is currently mysterious. The sixth new map is a new Payload one focusing on wide-open spaces, and the smart money is on this being the oft-mentioned one where the cart is a platform you can build Sentries on. The seventh is an officialised version of cp_steel, that incredibly awesome-sounding changing map Chris blogged about ages ago and for which I’ve never been able to find a good server running.

Worth mentioning: some goons at Something Awful claimed to have playtested the update and offered enigmatic hints as to its content a while back. One of the three said, against all odds, that the Heavy update would come with a new game mode.

Another says “think Popeye”, but also claims the update will cost money, which is patently false.

The third says “think ghostbusters… it’s really that weird.”

Edit: Seven! Seven new maps! Maths degree, right here!