TOM FRANCIS
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Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

My review of Call of Duty 4 is up, and so far it looks like the lowest score it’s got. Woo! I choose to believe the comments on the roundup of other reviews on Voodoo Extreme are representative of the prevailing fan reaction to the demo, and they’re a lot less enthusiastic than the other reviewers so far.

In the context of a completely arbitrary conflict, the repetitive bits of a Call of Duty game start to get really repetitive. But it’s a brilliant game nonetheless, and worth buying and playing for the Pripyat stealth section alone, and there are a handful of other extraordinary moments.

I’m Not Allowed To Do This

But if you fancy spending a lazy Sunday morning burning through a bunch of custom Portal maps, I’ve put all the ones I’ve found in the right subfolders and zipped them up, so you can just extract it to your Portal folder and type “map ” at the console to browse through them. I don’t even remotely have permission to do that and it’s actually pretty immoral, so I’ll probably take it down Monday. EDIT: Taken down now, attack of conscience. Most of them came from here or here.

If you also want to cut out the hassle of playing shitty, misorganized maps, try station1 and ren_test2 first.

station1 is really nicely made, and doesn’t feel the need to be hopelessly difficult in order to show you how awesome its author must be at the game. It’s got its own visual style, which is nice, but the completely black material it introduces sometimes makes it hard to make out shapes and distances. The top of the central column, for example, in the middle of that screenshot – is it a platform or hole with a thick rim? My favourite thing about it is that it shows you your goal as soon as you spawn, so the adventure to achieve it feels very neatly self-contained, and it’s really satisfying to get back to where you started and finally get through that door.

ren_test2 is difficult. It’s more complicated and intellectually demanding than any of Portal’s Advanced maps, or getting Gold in every Least Portals Challenge. But it’s also geniunely ingenious. I won’t spoil the centrepiece of the map, but suffice to say there’s a switch that does something really, really cool when you press it. It’s simultaneously the smallest and the longest map I’ve played so far, simply because I had to sit there with a cup of tea and think the living shit out of it before I knew what to do. Even then, my absurdly convoluted solution had to go through several iterations before it worked, and I’ll admit that phase is actually just frustrating. It revolves around a bouncing energy orb, and I fucking hate those things. But most of the time and most of the fun is spent just staring at this one room, working out how to fix it.

If you do play it, know that the first switch you press unlocks that door you can see. It took me a long time to figure that out, because in Portal there’s not normally a concept of ‘locked’ and ‘unlocked’, only closed and open – and the switch doesn’t open the door.

Update! Ha! I must admit I was feeling slightly envious of the ren_test2 guy for thinking up such a great central mechanic for his level before me. I had an idea for something similar, but unless it comes off spectacularly it’s probably not as clever. Some consolation, then, to discover that he’s actually a level designer for a little company called Bethesda Softworks.

One of the reasons I’m playing everything anyone makes for Portal is that I am, very intermittently, very slowly and very ineptly, working on my own Portal map. It’s one room with one puzzle at the moment, and even that may be scrapped to fit into the bigger picture. So far all my puzzle ideas are things that require special coding or advanced mapping skills, so now I’m trying to come up with some more basic stuff I can make to learn the engine first.

I’m on the lookout for people to test this, if I actually get anywhere. If you just want to play it, don’t sign up – it’ll be better if you wait till it’s done. But if you want to help me out, drop me an e-mail and I’ll cc you on the next build.

I Played Through The Crysis Demo Holding A Surprised Korean Guy

There’s no achievement for this, but as a nod to the two and a half thousand people who came for the gnome post and stayed, I gave it a go. It’s much, much harder.

This is Surprised Korean Guy in his natural habitat, roaming the beaches for things to find surprising.

An invisible dude came out of nowhere and picked him up by the windpipe. He found this pretty surprising.

I was surprised at how high I could dial up the pixel shaders, specular mapping and high dynamic range lighting without the framerate dropping unplayably low on my fairly old PC. If Surprised Korean Guy was surprised by this, it didn’t show over his normal level of surprisedness.

Oh God, they’re firing at me! They’ve gone crazy! They’re going to hit their surprised comrade!

Hang on Surprised Korean Guy, I’m going to have to hold you behind this tree for a sec while I save you from these psychos.

I’ve been told, too late, that Half-Life 2’s garden gnome can be jammed between the back of the seats and the roof. After extensive, noisy experimentation, I have concluded that Suprised Korean Guy cannot safely be jammed in any part of this car.

Oh God, he’s blacking out. Maybe I can set him down on this bed for a second, and he’ll be surprised all over again when I pick him up?

Oh right, Strength mode.

Er, this one must be from a different album, I don’t know how that got in there.

I think I actually got through about five Surprised Korean Guys in the end, mostly because their friends love to shoot them, and you can’t duck or go invisible while you’re carrying one. But in a strange way his ceaselessly alarmed face is a more comforting presence than the gnome’s smug grin. Anyway, five things about Crysis!

1. Some of the graphics settings eat your framerate. Post-processing isn’t a particularly good thing anyway, so lots of free frames per second turning that off. Shaders is the big one, both in terms of performance cost and visual fidelity. No use having it high if you can’t afford high-res textures, but having both on high is worth turning everything else down for – it’s truly beautiful. Shadows are the other big hit, and look virtually the same on Medium as on High. Objects is the one you want to crank up to minimise the pop-up of rocks and the like as you approach them.

2. Pretty much all the DirectX 10 stuff works in DirectX 9 under XP. Crysis was the only thing that seemed like it might justify Vista and DX10, but its exclusivity turns out to be just another big ball of sellotape and lies. Just renaming the Very High configuration to High means it’s no longer locked off in the Options when playing under DirectX 9, and lo, it works fine and looks amazing and, by most accounts, runs better than it does under DirectX 10. The tweak is easy to do, but it’s even easier to just download the modded config files and dump them in your Crysis/Game/Config folder.

This was the one game that truly was designed for DX10 and Vista from the ground up, famously so, and even it can’t offer a single compelling benefit of either. It’d be funny, if millions of people hadn’t paid four hundred dollars for it.

On a more positive note:

3. Holy shit this is incredibly good. Despite the above screenshots, I’ve spent very little time shooting trees and throwing tyres at chickens. I was expecting Crysis to be a messy playground, but it’s far too good a stealth shooter to spend your time just screwing around. With only one silenced weapon and a couple of night levels, Far Cry was still one of the best stealth shooters ever. This time they’ve had the sense to take that aspect and run with it, and the result is like the game of Predator.

I also expected it to be a little drab – we’ve seen some very washed out dense jungle scenes that just look a bit too realistic. But this level, at least, is gorgeously exotic and exciting. It has such a profound sense of place, I just want to hang out in these coastal shacks and swim to sandy little islands, climb mountains and admire the view. Just like Far Cry at the time, Crysis is a free holiday.

4. Play on Delta difficulty. Regardless of your skill level. It’s a fun game on Normal, but on Delta it’s truly extraordinary. It’s not about nerfing all the damage you do, they’ve actually done difficulty modes right. There’s no crosshair so you have to use iron sights aiming, enemies speak entirely in Korean so you can’t comprehend their tactics talk, there’s no grenade warning or enemy glow, the AI is more perceptive and dramatically more accurate, and health regen in Armour is slowed from a sprint to a crawl. Oh, and bullets kill you. They really, really kill you.

So the game becomes entirely about engineering the situation, stalking your prey in Cloak mode, waiting for one man to stray far enough from the pack that you can abduct him and toss him quietly off a cliff. It actually requires less twitch skill than playing normally, because you simply can’t win uneven firefights. You’re forced to strategise around them, and the interestingness of your options goes up dramatically as a result.

Going back to Normal afterwards is just embarrassing – the enemies are like comedy B-movie goons, the red glow on enemies who’ve shot you is like putting stabilisiers on a bicycle, and Armour mode might as well be called Invulnerability. Worst of all, it encourages just hanging back and taking pot-shots at long range, which completely misses the point of the game and all the really fun stuff.

Plus, Craig tells me that in the game’s config files this is referred to as ‘Bauer’ mode. Are you really going to play on something other than Bauer Mode?

5. It’s nothing like Far Cry.

More shots up here.

The Greatest Spy In Team Fortress 2

This is the closest I’ve come to actually feeling sorry for a Spy’s victim. But also the hardest I’ve ever laughed at one.

Until today I honestly thought I was the biggest asshole playing this class. I see now that I have been thoroughly out-assholed, and I doff my balaclava to, er, MrCuddles100. He’s kindly uploaded the spray here so you can try it yourself. Even if using it just gets you killed, it’s still comedy gold like no other game. This sort of stuff is exactly why I love TF2 and The Spy so much.

Hellgate London Thoughts

It might not have been Bill Roper, but there was someone who worked on the Diablo games who had a direct line to the pleasure center of my brain. World of Warcraft suggested to me that he had either left, or was working on something else now: it could hook me with its grind, but never excite or enthrall me the way a few tiny gold letters could in the Diablo games. Hellgate London clinches it: he must have left Blizzard and gone to Flagship. And started drinking heavily.

The exciting stuff is there, it’s just adrift in a very messy, empty, grey game. A very repetitive one, too – this is only the demo, and even in the short time it took me to exhaust its sliver of content, I got incredibly tired of the identical warehousey tunnels.

It’s a myth that Diablo was about grind. The environments and enemies were diverse, even in the first game, and though you repeated interactions, they were interactions you wanted to repeat. The comedy clunk of a blunt object stoving in a zombie’s skull, nailing a scampering monster with a single arrow at twenty paces, pulling fire from the Earth and streaming it through your hands. It wasn’t grind, it was caress.

Hellgate is rather vague – nothing has to connect to hit, and though the sounds are satisfying, the interactions aren’t clear or physical. One-hit kills still feel right, because the soft ragdoll enacts an appropriate response to your blow. But against tougher enemies, you’re either waving your sword back and forth or holding down fire to make a health bar go down, and there’s no other visible response to your attacks. It’s not an interaction I want to repeat, and that’s fatal for this type of game.

The exciting stuff is that it’s clear they’ve developed the best concepts nascent in Diablo 2: slotting and Horadric Cube recipes. Slotting is more sophisticated, and integrated with a crafting system, and the Horadric Cube’s magical recombinatorics have evolved into a device that can keep re-enchanting your favourite weapon to keep it up to your level.

But the loot harvest is made a lot less interesting by the abundance of class-exclusive items, something Diablo 1 & 2 had no concept of whatsoever, and even Lord of Destruction had the good sense to hold off on until later levels. Most of what I find is junk that I can neither use nor understand, and again, that’s fatal to this type of game. The loot harvest is the intravenous drip of dopamine here, you can’t afford to stem anything like as much as this.

So Diablo is dead forever, I fear. The genius who can tweak the equations to make me smile has left to join a team that don’t have the art talent, coding precision or design focus to let him shine. And the people who can still do that at Blizzard don’t seem to appreciate what it was that endlessly delighted me about Diablo, only what addicted me to it.

Has anyone played and liked this yet? I’m interested to know if it has charms I’m missing – I’m entirely guilty of not taking it on its own terms.

Beautiful Piano Rendition Of The Portal Song

I haven’t talked about Portal much here yet – except to gasp that she says my words – and I will. But for now, here’s a soothing, brilliant and relatively spoiler-free fan performance of what has become its theme.

The criminal thing about embedding, of course, is that it robs the linkee – or ‘victim’ – of any interest generated. So do swing by Jeremy’s blog if you like the cut of his micro.

If you haven’t played Portal, don’t click through to the video’s page on YouTube – even the title is a spoiler of sorts, and the related videos doubly so. Also avoid this post by the writer of the song, Jonathan Coulton, blaming its brilliance on Valve.

I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome

Halfway through reviewing Half-Life 2: Episode Two for PC Gamer about a month ago, Valve PR Doug Lombardi asks me if I know about the gnome achievement.

“No?”
“Did you find the gnome near the start?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to put him in the rocket before it launches.”
“But isn’t that right near the end of the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that mean you have to-”
“Yeah.”
“Oh I’m so doing that.”

A month or so later, I have. Continued

Ten Minutes To Go

We’re all in the office right now, having got up stupidly early, and there’s almost exactly ten minutes to go before the Orange Box attempts to unlock. I think I just about have time to make coffee.

Life Complete

In the TV ad for Valve’s Orange Box, the robo-voice from Portal – who you will eventually discover is called GLaDOS – uses journo quotes to summarise each game in the package. One of them is mine! To reiterate, the GLaDOS reads out my words. It will be on American telly. I’ve had a quote in foot-high letters on buses before, but now I can truly die happy. This basically makes me a writer at Valve.

Oh yeah, and I guess the issue with my three Orange Box reviews is on-sale now. It comes in a pretty awesome orange box, but the cover inside is even plus awesome.

For once I’m almost completely happy with my reviews, particularly the insane diagram in the Team Fortress 2 one. Tim deserves the credit for making sure that happened, and our Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton for turning my hilariously rubbish notepad scribble into what you see on the page. I also offer mad props to Valve’s super-artist Dhabih Eng, for painstakingly posing the beautiful lineup that opens the review. It makes me smile every time I look at it.

The Team Fortress 2 review is now online, sans diagram and awesome opening spread, and the other two reviews will go up when the Orange Box itself is live.

This Just In: The Scout Is A Dick

As a Spy, there’s a very tense moment after you’ve ‘sapped’ an enemy Engineer’s sentry, dispenser and teleporters. You retain your perfect disguise, but the Engineer knows there’s a Spy around. It’s not always possible to get far from the scene of the crime before the Engineer comes running, so sometimes you have to rely on a good choice of disguise and some subtle sidling to defer suspicion onto an innocent target.

Dressed as a Scout, I had the best possible chance of getting away with it – Spies rarely disguise as Scouts because they can’t move as fast as a real one, so it looks suspicious if you move around a lot. But I was staying perfectly still, facing the other way, waiting with impressive restraint for the sappers to finish their work, the sentry to kersplode and the crime to be complete.

Sometimes, your character utters a line appropriate to what he’s done. “You’ve got blood on my suit,” if you’ve just revealed yourself and backstabbed someone, for example. Other characters have special lines for if they manage to destroy an Engineer’s structures. The Spy doesn’t have these, of course, because it would of course blow his cover to talk like a Spy amongst enemies.

But Valve may have overlooked, or intentionally ignored, a quirk of the Spy’s deception – he will perfectly mimic his assumed class’s vocal responses. After a pregnant pause as my Sappers fizzled quietly away and the Engineer ran in front of me, glaring wildly for any signs of suspicion, his Sentry finally exploded. And my Spy, in a perfect impression of an asshole Scout, immediately shouted, “I broke your stupid crap, moron!”

Three things happened at once – I slapped my forehead, the Engineer blew me away with a point-blank blast, and the Scout became my favourite personality – narrowly beating the Kenny-esque Pyro.

Not Being A Spy

Some people seem to really enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 as a Heavy, or a Medic. Me, I just like not being a Spy. Pretty much anyone but the Spy. It’s nothing personal, he’s just not for me. Not my kind of class, you know? I’m a straightforward type. A straightforward, red-blooded, red team type. Love that red team.

For example, I really like just sitting here, next to your turret. I’ve got it. You can go off and build teleporters or something. Oh, my name? Yeah, that’s just a coincidence. I guess you and I think alike – after all, we’re both straightforward types, on the red team, the best team of them all.

I also really like being healed. So that I can better kill all the blues. That’s why their bullets don’t look like they’re hurting me, by the way – because of your excellent healing. Thanks, red team medic. You and I are on the same side; the red team. Just regular joes, fighting the good fight against the blue team, who are the enemy of us both.

No, I’m not going to fire just yet. Why don’t you go ahead? Maybe you can lure them with your Syringe Gun. I’ll mop them up just as soon as you walk ahead of me. Go, red team!

Boy, it’s good being a Sniper too. Just us two Snipers, up here on the battlements. It’s a great view. I particularly like how we shoot at things, like blue guys, who we hate, because of the way in which we’re on the red team. I shoot at things all the time. Not right now, but usually.

I also turned off my laser sight. I didn’t like it. You know what I find helps? If you stand just a little way away from the wall, your aim improves loads. The wall really cramps your style sometimes. I don’t know if it’s an elbow thing or what, but just taking a few steps forwards does the trick. And staying scoped. Always stay scoped.

Sometimes things go wrong. Like this one time, all my turrets and dispensers fell apart one after the other for no reason. There were no enemies around, except this one dead guy who looked like a good ol’ red Engineer, but he had my name so I guess he must have been a Spy. Spies, eurgh. Who’d have them?

It’s the same when I dress up as and really am the Medic, on the red team, as always. For some reason my medigun never really works properly, and pretty soon my Heavy falls over. I’m kind of new at this, but I enjoy it all the same. It’s kind of fun, despite the tragic loss to the red team; the best team, and the one that I’m genuinely on.

Whatever class I play, the maps have some spots I love to hang out. Under bridges and stuff. There’s a few backrooms in Well that are just cool to stand around in, then wander back out into the fight like nothing happened, which it of course didn’t. Yay red!

The only thing I’m not wild about in Team Fortress 2 is when my own team – the reds, my favourite team – shoot me. It doesn’t hurt, because I’m on their team, the red team, and there’s no friendly fire. But it hurts inside. Just the idea that my friends think I’m a Spy. A Spy! I hate those jerks.

In fact, here come the Blue team right now. I might just show them what I think of them by going over there. I think I can break into their Resupply room and get some health, which I don’t need. I found a powerup that lets me do that. BRB.

SO… MUCH… BLOOD…

Eight years and thirty-five minutes late, but I’ve never played a game where I spend more time laughing or less time checking the scoreboard.

Structurally Superfluous

My editor, earlier tonight: “I really like that Valve can just do whatever the fuck they want.” And that was before this:

Or this:

And this:

I can’t believe these character movies are getting better. The facial animation reflects the voice and mentality in all of them so exquisitely, and never more so than in this one. It just makes me melt. And I love that he’s playing guitar with giant rubber gloves.

They’re planning to do all nine eventually, and retrofit them into the game as character bios in class selection. I’m sort of dreading the Sniper, because he’s my favourite class but a (knowing) travesty of an Australian. But I can’t wait for the Pyro. Everything he does is inherently funny, even burning people to death.

As for me, I like that the most professional company in the industry can be so wildly unprofessional when they feel like it, or just when it’s funny.

Top of GameTab: Wikipedia Edits From Sony IP

The most-clicked story in gaming right now is that someone from an IP address registered to Sony is editing Wikipedia to claim that Halo 3 will look no better than Halo 2. I love that these guys attribute everything everyone at a company ever does to one imaginary person named Sony, and take its every action as company policy. But they’re missing a much better story – check the IP’s edit history, this one‘s his finest hour:

Revision as of 14:26, 1 April 2007
*”[[Tomb Raider: Anniversary]]” – for PlayStation 2, PC and PSP. Not on the Xbox 360, IN YOUR FACE MIKE!