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Chris Livingston Stops Considering A TF2 Comic

Our fiendish plan to get our hopes up so much that he couldn’t bear to let us down has failed. Chris, author of the enormous and excellent Half-Life 2 comic Concerned, has decided against doing one in TF2 for various annoyingly valid reasons. He doesn’t mention this one, but Jesus Christ have you ever tried posing something exactly the way you want it in Garry’s Mod? It’s like balancing a kitchen knife on an oiled marble.

I find that I am not disappointed at all. I’ve no doubt it would have been great, but a twice-weekly giggle doesn’t seem like such a big deal compared to the fantastic source of entertainment 1Blog has become. Without this procrastinating placeholder for the vapourware TF2 comic, Living In Oblivion, one of my favourite pieces of games writing in years, might have stayed a still-born non-blog.

1Fort has also provided me with news of the man who is only invisible while performing a forward roll, the real Team Fortress 2 stats system, the best screenshot ever, and an actual Team Fortress 2 comic: Red Spy.

Plus, I’ve always kind of wanted a place where “Tom Francis Ruins Team Fortress 2” is a real headline. Somewhere other than the Tom Francis Sucks newsletter, anyway.

Here’s to a long future of non-adventure, experimental side-projects and TF2 commentary.

Seriously, Buy Braid

Braid is a Mario clone with a time-rewinding gimmick that lets you go back as far as you like to rectify any mistakes. Actually, scratch that.

Braid is an homage to Mario that uses the reversal of time as a central game mechanic to remove the frustrations of platform gaming. Well, no.

Braid is puzzle game that starts from the basic concepts of Mario – most prominently jumping on enemies’ heads – but uses this merely as the basic medium for puzzles that require you to manipulate the flow of time.

And although in its 1st chapter this only amounts to reversing time to correct mistakes, from the 2nd chapter onwards you encounter enemies and objects that don’t go back to how they were when you rewind everything else. On the one hand, these elements are harder to deal with because they keep on going while you’re backtracking.

Braid is a platform puzzler in which you have the power to reverse time, but each of its six chapters interferes with, subverts or adds to this ability to completely reinvent the way you play.

On the other, it allows you manipulate how they synch up with the rest of the world, which actually gives you greater control over them. If there’s a rewind-immune door, for example, you can use up a key unlocking it, then rewind time to before you did so. The door will stay open, but you won’t have used up the key.

 

The 3rd chapter links the flow of time to your position in space, so you have to keep moving to the right for time to progress. If you move to the left, time goes backwards. While you’re standing still, the whole world is frozen. This is madness, because it means that if a patrolling monster is in your way as you climb up a ladder, you can’t wait for him to move out of the way. He will always be at that point in time when you’re at that point in space.

 

The 4th chapter allows you to use your rewind ability to co-operate with another copy of yourself. Yeah, the copy is created when you stop rewinding: he runs off and does what you did the first time, while you’re free to do something different simultaneously. Exactly. So if a switch needs to be held to keep a door open, go and hold it, then rewind time and walk over to the door… …and Mr Unoriginal will run off obediently and pull the switch just like you did.

One time I had to put this guy into position to pull a switch that wouldn’t be there until he came to replay my actions. So when I was standing where the switch would be, I just hammered the Use button to make sure my copy would get it. Then when I rewound and stood on the platform it was supposed to raise, the thing just gibbered spastically up and down – that idiot was hammering his Use button, and each press was reversing the lift’s direction. Dick.

The 5th chapter lets you drop a ring that slows time intensely for things near to it, and slightly for those further away.

With it, you can re-synchronise every clockwork element of Braid’s complex levels.

It’s the most

Flexible

Your toolset gets.

There’s one puzzle where three or four of us discovered we’d all approached it in different ways.

Mine involved killing myself over and over again by repeatedly headbutting monsters in the ass to keep them locked up in a cubby hole until I was ready to kill them.

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Braid Is Out On Filthy Consoles

As Mike Gapper on Xbox World puts it: get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, GET IT!

Disclaimer: I haven’t got it, but I’ve played the PC version – which is coming later this year – at various stages of development. I’ll update this post once I’ve had a moment to try the finished thing on filthy Xbox.

James regular Jason L deserves profound thanks for putting me onto this, long, long before it was cool, and I hope he and anyone else who plays it will take a sec to weigh in on the end product here.

It’s a platform game in which you can rewind time as far as you like, and each chapter layers another mechanic on top of that. The best creates a shadow-you each time you stop rewinding, and the shadow-you runs off and does what you did the first time while you try to co-operate with him. You. Scle.

It’s been getting maximum scores (it got 9/10 in Edge, but Edge only give 10s when they’re wrong, so 9 is the maximum possible correct score), and will likely continue to do so. Those places will use words like “ingenious”, “astonishing”, “staggering”, “masterpiece”, so I don’t have to. Some will mention art, triggering a thousand irritated sighs. One of them insists it is just like The Watchmen, though in what sense is still unclear after a paragraph of strenuous explanation.

My thing is, this is unlike anything we’ve played before, it’s a constant delight, and the second best puzzle game I’ve ever played. It’s $15 or £10, and if you think this is too much you are a small and boring man or maness.

Update: I should say, though, that it has a some problematic bits. The full thing, now that I’ve played it, is effectively identical to the early PC version I’d had a go with, but this time through I’m not moving on from each world until I’ve got all the puzzle-pieces. Which means I’m solving a lot of puzzles I just skipped over last time – you don’t need to get any of them to actually progress, until the very end.

There’s one puzzle in World 2 that can’t be solved when you first reach the level it’s on. And it uses a counter-intuitive mechanic that’s never used before or since without explaining it.

There’s another in World 3 where a problem at the start of the level can’t be solved until you ignore it, leave the area, and then encounter another one-off unexplained mechanic that renders it irrelevant.

These two bits are problems because there are lots of seemingly impossible puzzles in Braid with brilliantly clever solutions. So having a couple that actually are impossible with the current apparatus betrays the player’s confidence that there is a solution to the harder puzzles, that he won’t be wasting his time if he sits there and really thinks about it. Because of these two, sometimes, he is.

World 4 is the only one where the new mechanic isn’t a bonus ability, but a restriction. At times it’s very clever, and it’s probably the most unusual of them all, but just as often the solution comes down to a very fiddly matter of whether you were facing left or right at the time you did something.

The last of these levels has some real inconsistencies in the way certain objects behave when you’re rewinding – the game has two concepts of what ‘six seconds ago’ means, and it shows one of them while rewinding, then switches to the other when you stop.

I still suggest avoiding walkthroughs – these are just three puzzles among seveal hundred – but if you’re really stuck on something, it’s worth moving on and coming back to it. Even if it’s not one of these, it’s funny how thinking in a completely new way for the next level will usefully reorient your brain to go back and tackle the last.

Update: And yes, my favourite puzzle game ever is Portal. Partly because it doesn’t make mistakes like this.

I will say, though, that Braid has two advantages over Portal: each of the five worlds (and I think there may be a sixth I haven’t found yet) is profoundly unlike all the others, each as inventive in itself as Portal’s one mechanic. Portal’s length isn’t a reason for me to rank it below bigger but messier games like Deus Ex, but its scope is.

And Braid is genuinely tough. Fast and intuitive puzzling is great for telling a story, as Portal does expertly, but I wanted more head-scratching from its Advanced maps. They weren’t actually any harder than the later levels of the main game, and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be.

Update: Just finished it.

Whoa.

Tweak Fortress

Not for the first time, a post I was writing – a sort of ideal TF2 patch notes – appeared on 1Blog before I could finish it. In fact, this time Chris even wrote a sequel before I was done with mine.

I agree with all the ideas Chris and his commenters propose. There are lots of small, uncontroversial improvements you could make to TF2, and I know Valve agree with at least a couple of the ones mentioned on 1Blog. The reason they haven’t been done yet is not that they’re potentially problematic, it’s just a question of time and priorities.

But I say these perfectly reasonable ideas don’t go too far enough! I got thinking seriously about my ideal patch notes when Valve admitted the Demoman is “a little out of whack”, then I finally got Kritzed under ideal circumstances, and later started to come up against more teams that field four or five Engineers on Defense.

This is an attempt to fix all the main things that bother me in TF2 with five changes. The last one’s just a good idea I stole from the Steam forums.

• Backburner: +50 health bonus removed.

  Update! They just did this!

  – Two sub-classes that look almost identical but have crucially different health values violates the clarity and immediacy that is the soul of TF2.

  – The Airblast ability is fun. You shouldn’t bribe players not to use it.

  – Pyros with this unlock automatically beat Pyros without it, even in a straight fight. That’s bad Unlockology.

• Sticky Bombs: Cannot be detonated until shortly after they affix to a surface. Neutralised if they take damage before arming.

  – The Sticky Launcher shouldn’t be an effective direct-combat weapon – it’s already superb for traps, jumps and defense.

  – The Demoman’s role shouldn’t overlap with the Soldier’s.

  – Engies should be able to defend their stuff from Stickies if they’re only coming in once every couple of seconds.

  – I hate that there’s no visual or audio indication of when you’re allowed to detonate a Sticky you just fired. They should light up and go bling! whether this change is made or not.

• Sentry: Will not attack a target if another Sentry is closer.

  – Most frustrating rounds result from impenetrable nests of three or more Sentries.

  – Sentry counter-tactics aren’t effective when other Sentries are covering the first.

  – Sentry clustering makes Engineers more viable the more of them there are.

  – Currently a computer-controlled class does more of the killing than most of the player-controlled ones.

  – This is silly.

Best shot ever, by Joe of Massive Crits, via Chris.

• Kritzkrieg: When activated, charge does not drain over time, but is instead drained by each shot the target fires.

  – Time-based charge drain encourages a rush mentality, which isn’t effective when the charge offers no protection.

  – It also penalises reloading classes, leaving only the same two who also make the best Ubercharge targets.

  – Currently an Ubercharge is more effective in almost every possible situation, and the 10% faster charge rate is insignificant.

• Heavy: No longer knocked back by Sentry fire.

  – The Heavy is unpopular despite being both powerful and fun, because he’s useless against Sentries at most ranges.

  – Even when Ubered.

• Wrench: Swinging with right mouse button will repair a Sentry, but never upgrade it.

  – Father_G on the Steam forums had this idea.

  – I like it.

Field Studies 4: Vu To A Thorough Game Demonstration

They’ve finally put together a trailer that explains the game, lightly blows the mind and is friendly to people who don’t yet know why they should care.

Will Wright also gave a typically smart, funny talk about what people have done with the Creature Creator so far, measuring their creativity in God Units with sacrilicious results.

Then Gamasutra interviewed Civ IV designer Soren Johnson, on his role trying to ensure Spore will satisfy the hardcore gamers. At length. It’s like one of my interviews before I have to cut 90% of it.

But most excitingly to those of us who already know everything it’s possible to know about the game, is a bunch of stuff we didn’t know about the game. Producer Thomas Vu falteringly reveals that Spore has eighteen different editors, including one for music.

The game footage is fantastic too. On his way to befriend a village of dinosaurs, he passes a tribe of big ugly black critters being terrorised by a single enormous Cthulhu in the background. Then the dinosaurs give him a ten! When Spore’s art style took a turn for the cutesy (a shift which Soren talks about in the Gamasutra interview), I don’t think my fears took into account the possibility that I might actually find it cute.

I’m now counting the days till I can play this properly, which happily, even the Grumblegut (above) could do on the fingers of one foot.

Mirror’s Edge

I don’t often dribble about unreleased games here, except when they’re by Valve or a cool part of them has just been released or I’ve played them and can’t tell you anything useful. But I am in love with Mirror’s Edge.

The first trailer is a thing of wordless and tinglingly scored beauty. The DICE team have shown only hints of this artistic muscle before – both of the last Battlefield games were crisply depicted, but even 2142 only had a few properly striking scenes. Mirror’s Edge is fearlessly clear in its art direction, dazzingly stark and bleach-clean throughout. Like only the best oppressive dystopias, I want to live there.

It makes me laugh, and then feel sad, when people say that Gears of War 2 looks good. It looks like an ashtray.

GameTrailers did an uncharacteristically excellent recut of that first footage, halting to extrapolate the implications of every detail shown. I hope they eventually do the same for the new Leap of Faith footage (which isn’t the same as the stuff shown in the developer talkthrough).

Together, the three suggest an energetically tactile, flexible and powerful mode of movement. I love, love the notion of being able to cling onto something, then look freely around behind me and leap in the direction of my choice. It’s the antithesis of the hopelessly vague dictionary of airy, hands-free movement verbs we have access to in every other first-person game.

All three show combat in some form, and for the most part I really like the quick, linked series of light blows you can use to disarm or incapacitate people. But I don’t see how you get to them. In the demos, the player simply lets herself get shot to hell – they’ve got God mode on, so it has no effect, but it raises a pretty big question.

My answer to it, which they clearly haven’t gone for, would be a system of automatically triggered bullet-time. For the most part, you’re dashing around in real-time and bullets ping around you – your enemies should have Stormtrooper Aiming Syndrome, of course.

But whenever a bullet is fired that’s on track to hit you, extreme slow-mo is activated and a line of air-ripples shows the path the bullet is on. The more accurate the shot, and the closer the range, the further you’ve got to move your body in the shorter the space of time. Realtime resumes the second you’ve moved yourself out of danger.

It would be redundant to argue that the game would be better off without a plot; no-one could put that argument more eloquently or forcefully than the first trailer itself – especially in light of the groan-worthy second. Look at her:

She doesn’t have a sister. She’s too cool to be born.

Valve Completely Out Of Weapon Ideas, Beg For Help

In a thinly disguised plea for inspiration, Robin Walker’s new post over at the official TF2 blog I carefully avoided mentioning here so you don’t leave and never come back sets out the criteria for a good unlockable weapon for the Heavy – whose achievement/weapon pack is next, by the way. We are then encouraged to put forward our own ideas, although since the official TF2 blog doesn’t actually allow comments, you’re pretty much stuck with James, 1Fort and the Steam forums to vent those.

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.

I Know The Commander Because He’s My Pal

Over at the PCG blog again, a Mr Half Loaf 2 sent this in, and I spent the remaining ten minutes of my lunch insensible with hysterics. And it’s four minutes long.

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.

Blizzard Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

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.

Oh My God What The Fuck Barbecue

Everyone’s playing the Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 at the moment, because Valve just added loads of Pyro-specific Achievements and new weapons that are unlocked when you earn enough of them. Some of these are things we’ve probably already done, but there’s one that no-one had: OMGWTFBBQ: Kill an enemy with a taunt.

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?

Cube In Memoriam

Multiwinia pays tribute.

Pyro Flare Pistol Thingy Shown In Meet The Sniper

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.

Field Studies 3: My Pretties

With a game as flexible as Spore, experimental gamers like me have a really hard time getting past the stage of “Ooh, can I do this? What do you do about it if I do that? Won’t it break if I try this?”

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.

Field Studies 1: Sporegasm

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.

You Don’t Have To Be An Engy To Work Here But You Do

If you don’t habitually read six thousand words of comments after a scrollbar-breakingly long post, you may have missed that Cloak Raider’s put together an awesome comic strip of my suggestions for the Engineer unlockables, using Garry’s Mod. The portable Sentry in particular is winsome to the max: I picture the Engy pushing it round like a trolley. The wheels are even little Team Fortress 2 logos, although that might just be coincidence. Click through for the full thing:

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.