TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Brain Storm’s New Clothes

Brain Storm is back, in a sleek new costume and with three burly ghost men bodyguards. She’s now in her mid-twenties, and openly superheroinic. You might remember shots of her in a previous post looking rather ordinary – the original concept was a heroine who just looked like a normal person – albeit with a bandana to hold her radioactive brain in. It worked well at early levels, beating up thugs and using her brain-snapping powers to do favours for the city, looking like a minor vigilante. But then she was blinding everyone in the room with a gesture, summoning spectral armies and rendering herself completely invisible. She was acting way too much like a superheroine not to look like one. At level 20 you get a second costume slot – a chance to design a completely new costume, but still be able to go back to the old one when you like. So it was time for a redesign.

This second generation of your hero is a fantastic idea – even though your costume has no bearing on your abilities, it’s a far more integral part of your character than the latest piece of armour you’re wearing for the stat bonuses in WoW. Making a new one is a chance to redefine your hero’s personality. Brain Storm started out as a woman with the unusual ability to make people imagine they’re more and more horribly mutilated until they black out from the trauma. She was generally a nice person, but if you were trying to wrestle a young woman’s handbag from her in broad daylight, you could expect to find your skin bursting open in septic lesions until you fell unconscious with the pain. Now that her abilities were more spectacular, more diverse and frequently more cruel and unusual, she needed a look that would announce her awesomeness, but also reflect her not entirely serious personality and avoid the machismo or pomp of heroes who can take or dish damage – she does neither. Thus, this:

I agonised over it for nearly an hour. I’d hit a huge problem in that the bandana, the previous costume’s only distinctive feature, came with long hair that you couldn’t change. All long hair – about half of the female hair styles – conflicts with having a cape; the two move freely through each other and it looks deeply wrong. When I’d finally got around it and finished the costume, I worried that it was too generic – black and white are not terribly adventurous colours, and essentially what I’d created was a woman in a standard superhero costume – she even had an Incredibles-style black eyemask. I needn’t have worried – the first person to see me when I came out of the costume shop immediately said “Holy shit, nice costume!” He was a giant in a blue and yellow leotard, which reminded me: no-one wears black and white in City Of Heroes. No-one wears sensibly cut trousers, a simple eyemask or a cape with subtly different patterning on each side. I stood out more as a hero with an unexuberant costume than I did as a normal-looking person.

The point of the new costume is to look imposing (for a small lady), smart (everyone I team with looks good bashng goons, but I’m the only one who could attend a post-goon-bashing soirée without having to change), tasteful (to distinguish myself from the many scantily clad heroines created by their male players for their own ‘entertainment’), and yet very subtly casual (because I’m no square). Hence the shoulder pads, the black, the full-body-coverage and the white boots that look like trainers under the trousers – respectively.

That’s the look. The changes in Brain Storm’s abilities since her vigilante beginings mean that she’s now an extraordinary crowd-controller, a mistress of chaos. Her opening moves on any given mob leave them freezing, terrified and set upon by powerful, indestructable yet entirely imaginary assailants. Actually killing them after that is a trivial matter, best left to the menial executioners of other classes. Also she is invisible and can punch people in the stomach or head.

They say City Of Heroes is shallow, but your heroes certainly aren’t. Every level mine becomes more complex, more distinctive and gains a little more backstory and personality. Now let me tell you about my World Of Warcraft character:

It’s a level 33 Warlock.

Fahrenheit

Okay, I have five draft posts accumulated here, and I came on to write something about the gigs I’ve been going to this month, and even that isn’t the most important thing to say here right now – which is that you should go and see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang before it disappears from the cinema, it’s one of the funniest and cleverest films I’ve seen in years – and even that isn’t what I want to write, because I’m burning to gush about City Of Heroes (pointedly not Villains) because that’s what I’ve been doing in my week off. But it’s twenty to three in the morning, and this ancient draft post looks finished to me, so I’ll just post it. More, different, better stuff tomorrow.

Great Things About Fahrenheit

• You Do Stuff: It’s amazing the difference between walking up to something and pressing ‘use’, and walking up to something and performing a small mouse gesture which very abstractly represents the motion you want your character to perform. That tiny trace of logic, that faint connection between what you do and what your character does, makes it a tactile experience that gets you into your character’s life in a profound way. Fahrenheit also takes every oppourtunity to make you do things, automating nothing and sometimes breaking actions down into almost painstakingly small parts, each performed in sequence. But the effort and intention that requires from you gives you a connection to your character that’s beyond normal control.
   
• Private Lives: Since you have mental health rather than regular health to worry about, Fahrenheit has to let you do things that aren’t stressful (for your characters) to get it back up. So you play their lives, deciding what they do in their down time, manually performing comfortingly humdrum activities or basic life maintenance. Or swallowing the Little Book Of Calm. They’re welcome punctuation between the furious action bits, and that you decide how to while away the time means they’re frequently more fun. While bits like this work best as a backdrop to a dramatic story, it’s these you end up looking forward to more than what actually happens next. You get to see how every major character lives, talk to their friends or partners, know their apartment, sleep in their beds. It even gets unpleasantly intimate if you play your cards exactly right with the love interests in their lives, but apparently the American version spares you this realistically awkward fumbling.
   
• Atmosphere: Fahrenheit depicts New York in a blizzard with loving artistry. The snow defines every scene, making indoors cosy and comfortable; the streets lonely or chaotic. It makes wonderful escapism, and means you don’t have to care about the plot to want to go back to this world when you’re away from it.
   
• Music: Whoa, it’s like they got professionals to do it or something. It’s got both perfectly pitched incidental music, ramping up the spookiness or tension massively where appropriate, and actual songs for fun or quiet scenes. Carla’s apartment in particular is brought to life as much by the song playing on her hi-fi as the actual design of the place. Usually games fumble an awkward hybrid of incidental music and songs – it’s too featureless and watery to be songs, but it just plays mindlessly on a loop, rendering it irrelevant to what’s going on on-screen. That Fahrenheit does it the movie way, and gets it right, is a huge boost to your emotional engagement with it – one that dwarfs any excitement the actual mini-games might hope to introduce.

Awful Things About Fahrenheit

• The Flashing Colours Minigames: Walkthroughs – which yes, I have used – refer to them as the Simon Says type; it tells you what to do, then you have to do it. In fact, you have to do it or it’ll kill you. That’s not a game, not even a mini-game, that’s slavery. Unlike the mouse gestures, it’s frequently at odds with the nature of the action, simply because they use the same system for every damn thing. It even ruins some of the Private Lives appeal, because as Lucas the most relaxing thing you can do – sitting down and playing your guitar – is made a galling chore. In the action sequences, Simon Says becomes a case of ‘keep pressing the right thing to keep watching the cut-scene’. But it’s even worse than that – they require you to concentrate intently on the colours, meaning you actually miss the cut-scene going on behind them almost completely. It’s like being forced to read a book in the middle of an action film or get kicked out of the cinema. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad at them – and I’m good now – they’re an ugly, pathetic, demeaning placeholder for a real game. They try some neat tricks to try to make up for it – matching the rhythm to that of the action, throwing some curveball colour combinations when your character does new things – but these are icing on an absent cake. There is no game here.
   
• The Left/Right Minigames: These are actually worse than the Simon Says ones, but they’re not the game’s staple so they don’t take top spot. They are, however, crippling difficulty bottlenecks for anyone who doesn’t specialise in PRESSING TWO KEYS in rapid alternation. It’s the kind of thing an ape would refuse to do on principle. I love games, so I’ll do demeaning stuff to see the next bit of one I’m interested in, but it’s when these get harder that the insult becomes too much to bear. You fail, and have to start again, because the game finds your PRESSING TWO KEYS skill lacking. Worse, the metre conceals a secret time limit that has no relevance to the actual situation, so overcoming the natural decline of the energy bar you’re mashing up isn’t enough – you have to make it hit maximum before an imaginary countdown finishes, or it’ll act as if you let the bar hit zero. Worse again, that dirty trick isn’t understood by the game’s difficulty system, so it’s as annoying on Easy as on Hard. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am not good at these bits, because I do not take particular pride in my ability to PRESS TWO KEYS. The game’s guff about representing the physical exertion of your character would be a lot more convincing if what they were doing ever had anything to do with PRESSING TWO KEYS. The difficulty of these doesn’t increase the physical exertion anyway, and it’s their difficulty that makes them a problem.

Your Points Are Very Informative, Tom, But Is It Actually A Good Game?
No. There’s so much out there that’s a joy to play, and this is so often a pain. Doing something interesting and new is commendable, but Fahrenheit screws up so much of the basic stuff (like making the game part fun) that its novelties only outweigh its frustrations if you’re desperate for something new. More simply, if you hate games, you’ll love this. If you actually like games, and play good ones a lot, Fahrenheit grates. It’s still worth playing for the interest factor, or as a glimpse of what a good Revolution game might be like, but it’s potential rather than fun to me.

Sorry

For a while there NaNoWriMo was consuming my spare writing time, starving this blog, but then I stopped doing that too, and now the less creative pass-times that I engage in to avoid Wri-ing my No-vel are replacing posting here. Shame, because I enjoy posting here, and I don’t enjoy writing my NaNoWriMo book. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

Meaning, I no longer have novelist ambitions. I fundamentally disagree with the format. I don’t read many books myself. The only thing that excites me about the form is that anyone can do it on their own, but now I realise I can’t. Most of all, I don’t like it. I feel like a fraud, covering for the fact I don’t have any real ideas, I don’t honestly care what this character looks like or how he phrases things, I’m just making stuff up to get the story over. I haven’t decided whether to give up entirely or just try truncating it dramatically – I still like the idea behind my novel, but it no longer seems novel-worthy. It could become a short story, though I’m too late for WriAShorStorWe.

Anyway, I am a bit late with this news, but I’m now officially a professional writer. The new disc ed, James commenter Graham, is settling in well, and I am making words from magical brain waves instead. It is very cool. More than the change in the type of work, what I’m looking forward to most is being able to pitch ideas for features and the like without the grim dread of involuntarily volunteering to write them, thereby neglecting the disc for just long enough to create a chronic crunch period out of thin air. One random idea I had this week – last weekend, actually, in preparation for my first day as a writer – just paid off dramatically today. I have fantastic new information on the next games of two of my favourite developers of all time that no-one else in the world has. I keep studying the screenshots of one of them, gleaning new joy out of tiny figures or details that hint at wonderful aspects of the game. The other, by N creators Metanet, is less specific and unillustrated, but will feature at its heart a mechanic I have loved since almost the start of my gaming life, and only ever seen attempted twice before – both with brilliant results. Metanet are more talented and intelligent than the developers of either of those games, so this is going to be something super-special.

I can say absolutely nothing revealing of either, so I apologise for teasing, but my excitement is desperately seeking an outlet here. The full skinny, also known as the straight dope, will be in our next-but-one issue (the next to hit the shelves has already gone to press).

Also in Awesome this month, I was visible on the BBC six o’clock news last night, in the background of an interview with the Deputy Editor of Edge magazine, for some reason conducted at a PC Gamer desk. Mr Walker theorises that this is because the story would otherwise be largely true, so some form of misleading element had to be manufactured. We propped up our latest issue and plastered stickers all over the desk beforehand, so we ‘pushed the brand’ appropriately. You can watch it here – I do have a link for a better quality video that doesn’t require the hateful RealPlayer, but it’s at work at the moment. If anyone has it, could they comment?

The BBC are bravely covering games more and more, but this report rather suggested that they should attempt to grasp the English language first. If Hugh Pym’s last few sentences made sense to anyone, could they draw me a diagram? And has anyone ever seen an ‘internet site’ that was made of cardboard bushes in a physical room? I know it’s easy to get your language in a twist when talking about the metaverse, but shouldn’t their reporters at least be told what a website is before they go on the air? Anyway, I’m not really complaining, except in the sense that I am. My forehead was on TV. Someone even recognised me and e-mailed us.

First Night, Second Life

Second Life is a Massively Multiplayer Online… Place. There’s no goal, so it’s not a game, but it lets you create things – potentially of enormous complexity. People make games within it. Somewhere, I’m told, there’s a hangar in which people are still playing a World War II MMOG they recreated in SL after the real one got scrapped. A basic Second Life account is free, and with that you get a few hundred virtual dollars to buy and make stuff – on top of which, a lot of groovy players give away copies of the stuff they’ve made for free. Continued

Google Oozes Connectivity

Google are always doing interesting things, and one of the reasons I get excited about our current era is that a company distinguishing themselves by not being evil do so well. In fact, they’re the defining architects of the internet itself, and the internet is a big enough deal that history will look upon the computer itself as a footnote to the revolution it enabled. Google are the largest part of a change that isn’t merely technological, cultural, societal or domestic – it’s a milestone in the evolution of the species. There’s ‘can use tools’, ‘brain has well-developed speech centre’ then ‘Googles’.

The new thing is that they’re giving free wireless internet access to the whole of San Francisco. If they move into banking, expect them to drop free money from planes.

It’s hard for me not to imagine a huge translucent blob of connectivity enveloping the city now. There is something wildly futuristic about the idea of free wireless access everywhere – didn’t dialling up, paying per month and plugging things in always feel a little archaic? But more than that, the scary and exciting thing to me is that the internet itself now has an enormous, incredibly rich and powerful agent in the physical world. Google just want the internet everywhere, so much so that they’ll bring it about at their own expense. Until now it’s been a force of nature, growing according to a mess of conflicting interests of parties fighting it out, using the net as a battleground. Now its growth is going to be directed and encouraged by an apparently benevolent corporate super-power. It has become a thing trying to take us over, rather than one waiting for us to realise we want it.

Maybe the story sounds more trivial than that, but to me there is something huge about the idea of giving a free connection to everyone in a city. Not a voucher to have one installed, just free connectivity hanging in the air itself, waiting to be picked up by a wireless network card. Suddenly that city is super-connected – the barrier to being online in a serious way having plummeted from an expensive subscription and installation to a simple $20 component – and the implications of that could be vast. It doesn’t take a visionary to see the city-wide radius increasing, or at least being copied elsewhere, and in the very long term it could actually accentuate the developed/developing country divide – education, information skills and even which parts of the brain and body are more developed are going to get more and more significantly different between super-connected countries and offline ones. It’s the stuff of sci-fi, but in fiction this kind of schism has always been characterised as dystopian. Reality looks more positive, however ugly that divide might get, it’s sharper for one side being raised, not the other lowered.

Flying

I’ve got to level 14 before, with another character, and since he was agility-oriented and I like to be different, I went for Super Jumping. It now turns out that’s widely considered the best all-round transport power – fast, obstacles are no obstacle, and great for escaping tricky situations. Screw those guys. I chose Super Jump because I thought it’d be cool, and it really, really was. But Flying is cooler.

I’ve no regrets – the transport power you pick is a hugely important decision, and it has to make sense for your character. Jump was perfect for The Defenestrator, the man who could dodge anything. For a while Brain Storm was going to have Teleport – she’d already gone for Recall Friend as a pre-requisite to it. But the only connection between storms and teleportation is that Teleport and Phasing come under the Lightning skill tree in Diablo 2, so I realised I wasn’t bound to that. And that I might never get to level 14 again, and Flying is kind of an essential experience for a superhero. Besides which, what could be more storm-related than hanging out in the clouds?

It’s unbelievable. I was standing with Ms Liberty when I got it, as I am when I get any skill, so the backdrop to my revelation was the extraordinary Atlas Plaza – dominated by a statue so huge it defines the sky of the place. I spied a blimp soaring as high as the skyscrapers, and instinctively took off.

There’s a reason we humans keep dreaming about this – it feels amazing. Flying is not a means to the end of feeling like a superhero – being a superhero is a means to the end of flying. That’s the real fantasy. Screw saving people, having power, making a difference or facing odds. Taking off is what it’s all about. That wonderful ambiguity of the action – is she being lifted by some invisible force? Does it pull on all her body equally? It doesn’t look as though there is a gravity-strength force acting on her, she looks serene. Is she simply lighter than air? How then would she be controlling it? Is it like swimming? She’s hardly moving, she just zooms. That she flies where she intends to is immediately apparent in her movements, but how the thought becomes action is utterly occluded. No bird can match this, there’s no mistaking Brain Storm for a plane. That is a person who is freaking flying.

I soared to the blimp. I soared past the blimp. I landed on a skyscraper – switching off my fliability just as I approached its surface, knowing without ever having done or seen it before that my upward momentum would continue to carry me those last thirty centimetres to land elegantly, at a gentle trot, on its tarmac surface. I looked down at the blimp – which ought to be branded ‘Cloud Nine’ by the way – then threw myself at it. I slipped, of course, on its rubbery dome, and plummeted unspeakably towards the city below. Again, the activation didn’t seem to involve a keypress – I wished to slow my fall, and it just happened. My downward velocity arced beautifully into a swoop, came up into a steady rise, which became a magnificent soar.

I still haven’t played City Of Villains – the beta is on, but I’m not in yet. It hardly seems relevant at this point. I guess I shouldn’t recommend CoH with the new game around the corner (which will include Flying too), but the new one’s an unknown and this one is definitely great. You can reach 14 in two weeks without trying too hard – sooner if you get lost in it over a weekend as I’m prone to do. I maintain that the game would have 50% more players if you got your transport power at 10. So many people stop short of fourteen, and none of them would stop if they could fly.

Introducing: Brain Storm

She’s an Illusion/Storm Controller, meaning she gives people headaches then makes it rain. Actually her powers are bizarre and extraordinary, the kind of wonderful exuberance you’d never find in World Of Warcraft. Long before she was even in double-digits, level-wise, she could turn any enemy – even ones a level above her – against his friends, from a huge range, without aggro’ing him or the mob, even if it misses and even once it wears off. Before that she already had the Gale power, which sends a whole mob flying backwards to land on their respective asses. To this day it remains the perfect escape skill, and also the most impressive and quickest way to save a civilian from a gang of muggers too low level to be worth killing. Her main attack, though, is probably the most satisfying of all: Spectral Wounds. It makes the enemy think they’ve been seriously wounded, and for reasons the description never adequately addresses, if they believe they’ve been fatally wounded, they die. Since the damage is so high, to compensate for the fact that it eventually wears off, most enemies simply expire immediately – meaning the damage never wears off. Best of all, the animation for the power is a dismissive wave of the right hand. I simply gesture to a thug and he hits the ground dead, clutching at his chest. Magic.

Oh yeah, I’ve started playing City Of Heroes again. It was partly the new Issue (whose effects I have yet to spot), partly the imminent Villains beta (not sure why that’s a reason – seems like I should hold off since I’m going to have to start again anyway), and partly Jim’s feature in the latest PC Gamer. Irregardless, it’s probably my favourite MMORPG. Eve dizzies me with its potential, but I still feel like I’m cut off from it, unable to get at the good stuff without phenomenal effort and organisation on my part – not things I enjoy. City Of Heroes is sometimes called unambitious, but I think people under-estimate the audacity of the ambition “Make a Massively Multiplayer game where you really feel like a hero and combat is incredibly fun.” A goal is only modest if someone else has actually achieved it before.

So Brain Storm is a heroine, and fighting with her is incredibly good fun. Her bio, which I wrote while drunk, refers to a degree of ‘sass’ – it’s actually more like bravado. Most of her powers are long-range, and as a Controller she’s weak and ought to stay back. But over the last few levels I’ve given her powers from the Combat pool – basic melee abilities any hero can choose past level eight. Although the infighting ability doesn’t draw any aggro, it does mean I’m usually the furthest forward in my party when someone blows it and opens fire. However it happens, I end up scampering back down the tunnel we came through with a horde on my tail. I turn around and Gale them, of course, and then the other heroes sink their weapons in, freeze them in blocks of ice, smash them with fireballs. But there’s always one still on me, and as I cast my mind-altering hallucinogenics, I always needed just one more thing I could do to them while my main powers recharge, or one quick move to shave off that last sliver of health once I’ve Spectrally Wounded them. The answer: Kick. It’s called Kick. You kick them. Kick!

It sounds feeble, but the simple addition of this ability to her powers changes the feel of the character completely – there’s suddenly attitude there. I intentionally designed her appearence to be just a woman – an especially fragile one, in fact. When she uses her extraordinary mental powers to decimate a horde of rock monsters and the survivors all come charging toward her, it’s absolutely brilliant that she can give the nearest one a good hard kick, usually knocking it back several meters. It says “Fuck you. I am not a wuss.”

The combat was always brilliant, as was the powers system. I actually had trouble getting my head around the idiocy of World Of Warcraft’s after CoH – why doesn’t my level 3 Shadowbolt just replace my level 2 Shadowbolt? Why have the upgrades for the skills I actually liked suddenly dried up? What always sucked, unequivocally and indebatably, was the moronic concept of XP debt. It’s still there, but it’s halved. That makes a huge difference, it’s still reprehensible, appalling, pathetic that the system exists at all, but ‘huge’ doesn’t even cover it. It makes all the difference. If XP debt was still full, the fun I had tonight – during which I died three times – wouldn’t have brought me out of the red and I would be irritated by the game, the joy sapped out by the grind, and preparing to go back to my System Shock 2 replay tomorrow. Instead, I’m buzzing, bursting to tell you about it, and looking forward to getting lost in it all weekend.

Concerned

Concerned satirises Half-Life 2 with affection, though. The title refers to the protagonist’s pen-name – he’s the author of one of the letters Breen reads out on his compulsory telecast at the start of the game. That strip is probably my favourite of the many tie-ins with the experiences of Gordon Freeman, who presumably arrives a week or so later.

Probably not intentionally, the positive outlook of the main character also plays to my own subconscious desires to live in City 17. It says something about a game’s artists when they create a dystopia so beautifully it undermines the dystopian bit.

This Month In Awesome

1st: New PC Gamer Out

My contribution to this one was the Long Play on Darwinia, in which I essentially beg people to buy it. The weird thing is, it seems to be working. I still play Darwinia regularly and it remains my favourite strategy game of all time, and it genuinely hurt to find out hardly anyone bought it. I’m happy to discover that plenty of them just needed a bit of friendly cajoling from someone with strong feelings on the matter. It also feels surreal and wonderful to have an effect – it’s not good to get used to the idea of having your words in print, and realising that people actually read them and pay attention jars you out of that nicely.

I’ve had a chance to play the new Darwinia demo they’re working on – a level not seen in the game – and it’s incredible stuff. Doesn’t just blow the last demo out of the water, it’s actually one of my favourite levels ever. I’ll link it as soon as it’s finished and up properly.

3rd: Tim’s Birthday

This one’s in the past now, and it was great. I discovered Chicken Tikka Taka Tak, sang Dandy Warhols in some kind of demonic kareoke console game (I believe the game scathingly classified me as a ‘hopeful’. Jon Hicks, however, said only my “Woo ooh ooh”s needed work – my baritone lounge crooning was fine. Damn straight) , dehatted a Nintendog and swung another around the room on the end of a rope. It seems there may have been other people present too.

8th: The OC

Yeah, everyone is straight out of an advert for one thing or another, but Seth is wittier than some of the best Whedon characters, and the constant sunshine is oddly addictive. It’s melodrama, it’s trash, but it’s frequently very funny and prominently features astoundingly good music. I am genuinely looking forward to its return.

9th: Discs Finished

Sweet, sweet release. The monthly deadline gives this job a kind of rhythm that builds to a kind of wild panic right up until the envelope containing the masters leaves my hands. Then I suddenly lose thirty kilograms and go and have a Carrot Cake Milkshake. I’m actually going to miss that when I stop being a Disc Editor. The pains of being wholly responsible for a big, important thing do pay off when it’s finally over.

12th: City Of Villains Beta

Some months back now, I accumulated so much experience debt from repeatedly dying on my way through a high-level area between me and my mission that I realised it would be quicker to start a new character than continue with this one. Experience debt is a huge, hideous, gaping wound in the otherwise unbroken awesomeness of City Of Heroes, and I felt pretty okay about giving it up until someone told me they’ve halved it now. Issue Five just went live, and now I’m longing to get back in and see what else has changed. Unfortunately my account has expired, so I’m not sure if I should re-register so soon before getting to play what is in effect the sequel.

Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty excited about City Of Villains now. I’m not expecting it to be massively different to CoH, I’m just expecting it to work.

Sometime: Fahrenheit

I can’t imagine I’m going to like this as much as its reviewers have so far, but there’s no doubting its perfectly pitched atmosphere and tactile control tricks. I intend to enjoy it as pulp – a sort of scienceless CSI.

21st: Lost

Will we find out a damn thing about anything? Craig says he heard we will, but it seems almost too much to ask. My main hope from the new series is that The Others will regain the sinisterness they had when all we knew of them was the super-human, super-unsettling Ethan. The last glimpse we had of them was too ordinary – we need to find out something namelessly horrifying about them to make them scary again.

I’m also hoping for more on the response to Boone’s call for help just before he tumbled off that cliff. If you haven’t listened to it carefully yet, do so now. It is interesting stuff.

23rd: Winter Assault

Dawn Of War was great. This will have new stuff. It will be great. END PREVIEW.

23rd: Fable

People keep telling me I’ll find this interesting, so I will play it. The voice-acting seriously risks ruining it for me, though – I found it unbearable in Black And White, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same mockingly insincere stuff here. In other respects, too, it looks a bit like a child’s drawing of an RPG rather than one made by RPG lovers. I don’t mind some streamlining, but it looks like it’s lost all the character of an RPG, leaving everything generic and placeholderish. I haven’t played it for even a second, so this is just scepticism.

Various Times: Other Birthdays

Mark, Ross and Beast all have birthdays (apparently on the same day) this month, as do at least two friends from outside of work and my gran. Literally fifty percent of everyone I know was born in September.

28th: My Birthday

I might like to go up in a balloon. Seems like a birthdayish thing to do. I also like the idea of silent flight. Engine noises ruin travel for me.

30th: Kieron‘s Birthday

I am quietly hoping to just do whatever other people are doing for this, instead of doing something sociable with lovely Gamer people for my birthday (short of working with them, if I go to work). You’re kind of responsible for people’s enjoyment if they’re out because of you, and that’s the kind of pressure for which mere Disc Editing cannot prepare you. I’d feel better if I wasn’t the main event, more of a niche side-show.

30th: Serenity

The spectacular finalé to what is sure to be the best September ever. If you haven’t seen Firefly, see this. If you have, you’re already going to see this. If you’ve already seen it through ‘connections’, I hate your face.

SWAT 4: The Movie Script

OFFICER DOWN, OFFICER ANDAGENTLEMAN, OFFICER DIBBLE and HANK stand in a rain washed street, weapons at the ready. HANK plants a breaching charge on the back door to a building. OFFICER DOWN takes out a gun-shaped camera device. Continued

On Bringing It

We were on Gulf Of Oman, a map with which I now have Demo Level Syndrome – it’s my favourite by a clear margin because I know it inside out. The coast is the hotspot, unless we (the MEC – they’re at a disadvantage on this map so they usually lose, and that means I get auto-assigned to them) are losing already. When it’s fought on the beaches, and this time it was, it’s raw chaos, constant death.

I was lucky enough to have an enemy run straight in front of the tiny side-window I was looking glumly out of as the driver of my APC executed an agonising three-point turn. I perked up and mowed him down. It was a good omen. We quickly capped an otherwise deserted flag, I jumped in a jeep and sped immediately to the next one, running straight over a sniper on the way and bailing out without breaking when I arrived, crushing another enemy between my abandoned car and their sandbags.

I managed to get out to the back of the base without dying, thanks to my medbag, and considered lying in the sweet spot – a little dark corner behind the flag, out of view from most of the base, but easily close enough to capture it when no enemies are. Then I realised that the two-story bunker I was hiding behind was the same type as one I played around with on another map. I discovered you can jump up onto one ledge, then jump and prone (dive) through the window on the second floor. Best of all, this one was close enough to the flag that, in the back right corner of the second floor, I was in a position to capture.

Except, of course, that it was swarming with enemies. The capture bar stayed firmly red, horribly outnumbered as I was, until someone came up the ladder. I was, of course, lying down with an automatic weapon pointed at exactly where his head appeared, looking through the scope even though the range was about thirty centimetres. As my bullets hammered him out into mid-air, his foot caught in a ladder rung and – while the rest of him disappeared below – stayed sticking up unpleasantly in front of me. I didn’t make much progress before reinforcements arrived, and the heat was off me enough to shoot people in the back of the head as they fought off the invaders. To the next flag!

I travelled by jeep again. This time I only got to run one guy down when I arrived, but an important guy since I hit him just as he was about to fire his SRAW rocket at me. I ducked round the back of the base and hit the deck as a bad guy came round the corner. I got a couple of hits in but the killing blow came from behind him – a friend had creeped in from the opposite side. As I whipped out my medbag to heal up from my new wounds, my friend was flung thirty feet into the air by a torrent of explosions. An attack chopper swooped in angrily, then stopped. I stared into the big glassy eyes of the beast as it hung there, wobbling, three feet from the ground and six feet from my face, apparently unsure of its next move. I guessed the pilot was worried his missiles would blow him up at this range, but what he tried instead was even more suicidal. You know that dumb thing they do in films where the chopper tilts and comes towards its victim, slowly, attempting to mince them with its blades? You know the three, maybe five reasons why it wouldn’t work in real life? Battlefield 2 models all the basic laws of physics those problems stem from.

I survived the blast – the medbag turns you into a kind of supersoldier – but naturally enough the pilot didn’t. I scrambled out from under the wreckage before it blew up again, and found myself in the middle of the base. The only cover was the sandbag bunker – identical to the one at the last base – but I only had time to make it to the front entrance. I brought my L8A5 to bear on one unsuspecting Assault troop before getting inside, and took few enough hits that I didn’t have to switch back to the medbag for long before I could be ready for the inevitable inrush of enemies looking for cover themselves.

After a minute of this not happening, I peered out and found one standing directly outside, facing away from me. Once his body toppled over the sandbags, his friend rushed over to investigate and went down just as easily – though I fancied there was a glimmer of recognition when his view passed me in a panicky search for his assailant before he died.

At that point, it was officially on as far as the US Marine Corps were concerned. They flooded in, even as I frantically reloaded and emptied clip after clip at marine after marine. It was miraculous – I barely took a scratch. By the time I ran out of ammo the entrance to my abattoir was strewn with the bodies of servicemen and I was crazy on adrenaline. I got one more in the face with my pistol, but didn’t have time to reload it before the next came in. He shot me three times before he succumbed to my blade, and as I clutched it menacingly at the door, crouching over his body, drenched in imaginary blood and willing, daring anyone else to try it, a little black object bounced up to me with a barely audible ‘chink’.

I took my hands off the controls and sat back. It was like that British guy in Event Horizon when he finds the bomb on the ship with three seconds left on the timer – there’s no way you can stop it, there’s no way you can escape it, and all that remains is to say “Fuck.”

I quit out after that – I couldn’t top that round even at my best, we’d lost anyway so my team essentially sucked, and I was utterly exhausted – shaking, even. When I quit out I discovered I’d only been playing for just over ten minutes. Battlefield 2 might be a shoddy program, and probably the most demanding game commercially available at the moment, but it’s what a PC is for. As with Half-Life 2, the astonishing fidelity of the world, the physics, the kinetics of it all plug your nerve endings straight into the world, hardwire you to it in a way that can shake you to the core of your being in ten minutes.

More impressively, I’m going to put it above N in the list on the left because frankly that’s pissing me off a little right now. It doesn’t handle curved surfaces well, and uses that as a challenge on a couple of levels. That’s a sin.

State Of Things

I’d just like to say, this comments thing has been awesome. Thanks to everyone who’s added words to this page – they’ve been consistently clever and well-spelt. I knew you were all awesome, of course – I looked at my stats very carefully before deciding to have comments on the main page. According to the percentage of you using Firefox, James readers are approximately 1800% cooler than the general populace.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

Quest Ideas

1. The Invincible Hero

You are ein superhero – perhaps of your own design. One super-power that wouldn’t be up to you, though, is invincibility. You cannot die.

But wait! Where would the challenge be?

I put it to you, sir, that you cannot die in any game. Termination of your current existence leads to reloading of an old savegame, or respawning in a different location. In the first case, the death is erased from history and never happened, and the second is not death by any sane definition of the word. Death, look it up, is pretty permanent.

Currently, games punish you for your character expiring. A huge problem with all games is that they don’t know by how much – the inconvenience may be a matter of replaying the last few seconds, or trundling down the road from the respawn point (not just deathmatch games – WoW and San Andreas both use this). Or it could be hours of work, or a huge, utterly dull journey back to where you were. This is disastrous. It’s enormously off-putting to new gamers, incredibly frustrating for existing ones, and any dissatisfaction you felt with the game – particularly if it’s related to the reason for your character’s demise – is magnified tenfold. Modern games like Half-Life 2 do a good job at trying to limit this, with both frequent auto-saves and unlimited quicksaves (of which, by the way, it stores your last two – an achingly sensible precaution I’ve been begging for for years). I’d like to see time-based autosaves (every five minutes, keeps the latest two of these) in tandem with crucial event autosaves (so you can go back and make an important decision differently hours later) and manual quicksaves (for the personal touch). But let’s see what happens if you can’t die.

Superheroes don’t die a lot anyway – hardly ever. The risk is never their own demise, it’s that they might fail. And the objective they might fail at is almost always saving someone.

But wait! Failing is just like dying, only worse because you don’t see why you should have to restart when you’re not dead.

Yeah. Let’s do away with that too.

So you can’t fail?

The exact opposite: you can fail. It’s okay. You carry on. Lives were lost, it was partially your fault, but there’s no reason to force you to erase that part of your life and save everyone.

What’s to stop people reloading and making sure they do save everyone?

There’s no overwhelming reason to stop this, but I will anyway just because it ought to be interesting: you can’t save. You can pause the game, in case the phone rings or whatever, and when you quit the game it auto-saves before it exits, but when you start it back up it loads that save and deletes it. Short of restarting the game completely, you have to live with your mistakes.

So how do enemies stop you from saving people?

By killing them, duh. There are three ways for this to work:

a) The hostage situation. Easily the best excuse for stealth in any game – you have to take out the hostage-takers before they realise an attempt to do so is even underway. If they smell a rat, they’ll do it. Sometimes you’ll save one but in doing so alert another HT and lose the corresponding H or Hs. Sometimes you’ll do it perfectly, an artwork of silent takedowns, goon avoidance and lateral thinking. Sometimes you’ll screw it up and everyone will die, and however many goons you beat up in vengeance, you’ll still feel empty inside and you’ll still know it was your fault. This is what games should be all about – making you feel bad.

b) The time limit. There’s nothing stopping you, but bullets will slow you, enemies will wrestle you to the ground and powerful blows will knock you down. And if you don’t get to the bomb before it detonates – the psycho before he reaches the victims – the controls before the plane crashes – hundreds of people will die. Being fast means dodging bullets, incapacitating nasty bad guys swiftly and dashing by the rest.

c) The villain. He’s as fast as you, as strong as you and also completely invincible. He’ll pounce on you as you try to get to the innocents or the weapon of mass destruction and throw you to the floor, fling you across the room, grab you by the neck, smash you to the ground. Sometimes it’ll be the other way around – he’s trying to get to the objective and you’re trying to stop him. In both cases it’s a case of administering a blow that causes your opponent enough grief to give you time to get to the objective and do what you need to do before they catch you up. I’d love to see a system whereby prone-time is proportional to the force in newtons administered to your head – so if you use the physics system perfectly and drop the corner of a concrete block on his eye, he’s down for the count.

Naturally any mission could be a combination of these – you only have a certain time after the goons discover you to get to the hostages before the villain does, and if you meet each other first it’s the fight that’ll determine the winner. It should also go without saying that we’ll need a ragdoll recovery system, whereby someone flung across the room with ragdoll physics knows how to get back up and into normal animations without too big a glitch. No small feat, but I’ve heard it’s now possible. Knocking a villain down will allow you to drag him into a position to be victim to an even more devastating attack – chuck him under a falling block of masonry, throw him into a meat-grinder. And being invincible shouldn’t mean this stuff doesn’t hurt – getting shot in the face should be a blackout as well as a knockdown, and when you awake in a second’s time, you’re groggy and weak. A good punch causes vision blurring, and sometimes you’ll be taking so many hits you can hardly see or run in a straight line.

Success would mean feeling like a real hero, genuinely making a meaningful difference and feeling cool. Failure would be tragedy rather than irritation – no chore, no inconvenience, just irreplacable loss and anger at yourself. Sadness is something other mediums relish in making you feel, but games aren’t very good at yet. It is – like fear on a rollercoaster – a good thing. Irritation is never good, and games are extraordinarily adept at inspiring it at the moment.

Quest Que C’est?

The missions are rubbish in San Andreas. I’m sure there are good ones, it’s just that they are, on the whole, as I say, rubbish. They seem blissfully unaware that the AI is egregious, and repeatedly force you to rely on NPCs whose incompetence is so complete that it often seems like suicidal depression.

The quests in World Of Warcraft are rubbish. Again, some stand-outs, but 97.3% of them are utterly mindless, even if they are prefaced by some awkwardly strained attempt to dress the brain-killingly monotonous formula in some kind of fantasy trappings.

But those are easy targets – two games I’ve played a lot but have no great love for. Let’s stab closer to my heart: Eve’s agent missions are rubbish. I enjoyed one once, but in Eve it’s not even a case of similar or formulaic ones. You get the same mission, word-for-word, time and time again.

City Of Heroes has the best missions of any MMOG I’ve played. They are, nevertheless, rubbish.

/cry

Back in the days when the denominations of our time were ‘levels’, bad ones were things you hit and got stuck on – they were chips on a smooth surface. With MMOGs and GTA games, we occasionally run into good ones. And we have this sad little thrill of pleasure, and like the game more for it. We’re being- what’s the opposite of spoilt? Unspoilt? Things suck.

The First Rule Of A Positive Blog

I’m not allowed to complain about anything except as a precursor to saying what we should be doing instead. I only let myself bitch about Elite Force 2 and Jedi Academy because I was leading into describing the ideal Star Trek and Star Wars games. Additionally, I must keep the solution very short, specific about alternatives, and universally applicable. This is the checklist for good quests. Every quest must be a good one, since quests are 91.2% of what we do in these games.

1. Why The Hell Should I?

Guild Wars was a revelation for me. It’s not a MMOG, but if it was I couldn’t have said what I said about City Of Heroes. I loved the missions. I hungered for them, completed them with relish, happily retried if they proved too tough. Were they better missions? A little, not enough to account for this difference in attitude. I loved them because they said “Primary Quest” in green next to them. I was saving the world. Remember that? The thing we do, in all games? When you step down from “Because the world depends on it, man! Save us!” to “Because an irritating prick told you to,” or “For 10 copper pieces and a piece of cheese,” excuse us for pressing Alt+F4 and having a cup of tea if at first we don’t succeed.

In World Of Warcraft, you have absolutely no goal. It is a completely aimless game. You just trundle around talking to people to see if you can do favours for cheese, or a sword you can’t use. It’s not a deal-breaker if the quests are good, but whenever you’re on one you don’t like or find frustrating – which for me was all of them – you’re seconds from giving up. It’s just cheese. You don’t have to do it. Find someone else to do a favour for.

The lesson: tell me what to do. Give me a million sidequests and let me roam the world at will, but give me a categorical imperative, a meaning to my life, something to work towards. In WoW it could be as simple as highlighting one quest-giver in green and saying that’s your guy, make sure you do all his misions eventually.

2. I Do Not Care That Jeffrey Is Dead. Jeffrey Was A Moron Who Got What He Fucking Deserved.

If Jeffrey can’t fucking hack the mission, why doesn’t Jeffrey stay at fucking home and let someone with actual fucking cognitive abilities do the fucking mission? And if he won’t, when Jeffrey dies, it is not my fucking fault. I’m sick, sick to death – we are all sick to fucking death – of babysitting digital idiots. Sick to fucking death. Death. Sick. Fucking. Cut these missions. If they’re central to your game, kill yourself. We hate you.

But wait! In Guild Wars a quest-giver will frequently accompany you on the quest! Yes. It was brilliant. I loved all these missions, and I never got frustrated with them. It helped that the AI was good, the NPCs tough and effective, but the lion’s share of the difference was that I could resurrect them if they did die. If their good AI and high hitpoints failed them, it still wasn’t mission failed. A masterstroke. If you’re thinking this couldn’t be carried across to GTA, perhaps you’ve never died in GTA. In fact, none of us have. You can’t. You’re incapacitated, and you get revived in hospital. Why not give me that revive ability? I don’t even need defibrillators or a medkit, I could do CPR or even just help the guy up. The mission is only lost if I can’t do that, because I failed.

3. Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself.

If I’ve done a mission, Eve, City Of Heroes, it goes on my permanent record. This guy has done that. That information is as precious as what level I am, what items I own. Never, ever ask me to do it again. GTA – your new travel skip feature is a baby step in the right direction, but falls woefully short of eliminating the repetition that makes your missions such a chore. What you fail to realise is that the huge drag is not driving from the quest-giver to the quest, it’s driving back to the quest-giver to ‘get’ the quest again before you can retry it. If I die, let me drive from the hospital to the mission. Let the mission be as I left it. If I fail – and I strongly advise against missions with fail conditions – reset the location and start me just outside it. That is, if you’re not going to let me save. MMOGs have an excuse for that, you don’t. Not even console memory limitations – you’ll let me save, but not when it would actually save me some time. You also force me to spend ten thousand dollars on a nearby house just so I can save the game when I need to quit – which is usually because I’m so fucking sick of repeating myself.

That’s it, actually. Quests already have ideas, content, characters – they only need to avoid three things that make them dull and frustrating, and they’ve made it to goodness. We could be spoiled again. It’s all obvious stuff, but I and every angry forumite around aren’t going to shut up about it until they are recognised as rules, not suggestions to try on one or two.

Still to come: I have totally had some awesome ideas for interesting new types of quests that someone should try.

Diablo 2

The Basics
Absurdly slick isometric action-RPG with real-time combat (clicking) and a bewildering array of spells (right-clicking).

The Appeal
It’s clear that the guys designing Diablo 2 were world experts on how to make character progression exciting, satisfying and an inspiring driving force to a game rather than a miserable dragging one. It’s also clear that they left Blizzard before World Of Warcraft. In Diablo every level-up brings a paralysingly tricky decision – every new skill is carefully hand-crafted to sound wildly exciting in text and have real use in combat. And you only get one per level.

Having whittled down the nonsense trappings of the RPG – story, quests, NPCs and the like – to virtually nothing, it proved that ‘grind’ is only a problem when your levelling system sucks. You suddenly realise other games are just trying to distract you from their uninspired mechanics when they ply you with a rich plot and a fascinating world. If your game’s actually good, you don’t need any of that – no-one feels like they’re grinding because they’re actually looking forward to getting that next level, and they’ll get there, and when they get it they’ll get something they want, and when they try it out it’ll be fun. All of this is achieved with the simple combat system, brilliant sound-effects, and perfectly judged skills. Roll on Hellgate London.

The Essential Experience
Corpse Explosion chain-reaction. The central dynamic here is that blowing up a corpse usually kills people, since it’s an extraordinarily powerful spell (the blast is proportional to the creature’s hitpoints), and that means more corpses. It gets to the stage at which the first casualty triggers a staggered apocalypse of bloody showers that annihilates everything on-screen. I remember in the blurb for the Necromancer class used in the manual – which I read about six months before release on a website – it said “While many shun the Necromancer for his ghoulish appearence and strange ways, all fear his power – for it is the stuff of nightmares.” You never really believe sales blurb until you’re blowing up corpses three times a second.

My highest-level character in Diablo 2, and functionally my favourite character in any game, was Pentadact the Necromancer. I started him with Bitchard the Barbarian (flatmate) and we played through the whole game and expansion pack over the course of a weekend. By the time we were finished, Pentadact was genuinely the stuff of nightmares. Skip past the giant skull he wore over his face, he was accompanied at all times by a hulk of rotting flesh and exposed bones, and carried a long, undulating, bright orange dagger called Pentadact’s Screaming Cinquedeas Of Pestilence – a single stab from which would send huge enemies scrambling away in fear, but infected with a poison so virulent that even if they escaped the inevitable corpse explosions, Poison Novas and Bone Spears, they faced certain death. I lost him and my characters in all games beginning with letters earlier than ‘q’ in the great ChkDsk error of 2005, so if you ever read about Microsoft employees being stabbed to death with a knife matching the above description, by a man holding a mop adorned with butcher’s offcuts, remember that I was always a quiet boy who kept himself to himself.