TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I Am Here

Hence the quietness.

I Am About To Play One Of These Games

Battlefield 2142 Demo: Yes, I have the full version, and yes, thank you for noticing, I am the very model of a futuristic Major General, with forty unlocks to his name and medals alphabetical (G&S FTW, S60 FTLOL). But they’ve shut down the review servers now, and so I must play with the great unwashed on the terribly unreliable demo servers. Often, the great unwashed shoot me repeatedly in the face, inexplicably disregarding my rank.

Still, I have been mostly holding my own. Battlefield is only fun when you have some success, and one morning this week I destroyed three Titans, got two gold and one silver medal and cut four soldiers’ dog-tags before breakfast. That is the start to a good day. 2142 is also a great way to stay up – win or lose, the sheer concentration of adrenaline in my system from this game makes fatigue seem a distant and absurd concept. Sometimes that adrenaline is causing me to break my mouse in frustration, or splutter in an unmanly high-pitched voice at the injustice of it all. Counter-intuitively this is not the sign of a bad game – it comes up a lot when I’m playing a bad game, but watch closely for the moment shortly after, when it happens again and I just sigh irritatedly. That’s the sign of a bad game. In Battlefield 2 and 2142, my searing, spastic, apoplectic rage never subsides. I always care because I always believe in it, and it’s always “FUCK!” instead of “Oh fuck it then.” That, as N fans will attest, is the sign of a good game.

DEFCON: It’s out! It’s selling! People love it! I cruelly ignore this when reviewing their games, but I have an enormous fondness for Introversion. It’s mainly because of Darwinia. People would sometimes ask me, of that, “Yeah, but is it really good, or do you just like it because it’s indie?” It is really good. It’s one of the ten best games ever made. It’s special in some ways that even Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, and Oblivion are not – it has a coherence of vision, a richness of imagination, a warmth of some kind it’s hard to articulate. Those aren’t the most important things about a game, or it would be better than The Big Three, but it has these things which they do not. More than anything, it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. So I am pleased that everyone is finding DEFCON as much fun as I did, and that they are obeying the Must Buy award I gave it. Even if I am sort of hoping they make something more like Darwinia next.

Until quite recently I was quite good at DEFCON. My first public game with five strangers went appallingly, and I’d just decided I’d been rubbish all along when I noticed that it was fifteen minutes past the end of my lunchbreak and I had won by a staggering margin. Then I tried Diplomacy. In Diplomacy, all the nations of the world start in the same alliance, and the action only starts when one betrays it, or the rest vote to kick him out. I am not good at Diplomacy. I should play the regular mode again now to see if coming dead-last as the strongest territory in the game has ruined my confidence to the extent that my early-game bravado will lack the conviction it needs to convince the other players that I’m an idiot and don’t need to be attacked because I’ve probably spent all my nukes anyway and surely won’t NUKE YOU HARD IN THE CAPITOL the second your silos hit launch mode.

Company Of Heroes: I know, rationally, that this will be very good. I have it right here. It got 94%. I love Relic, I think Dawn Of War is my favourite RTS. And yet that little silver quicklaunch icon never gets any more tempting. I’ve even played enough of Company – at a press event in Hollywood and on this very machine for a few minutes one morning (morning gaming is a habit) – to know that I love it. But oh God, do I really want to go back to World War II? I’ve fought every miserable minute of that wretched struggle from every conceivable angle, and I want to forget it almost as badly as the people who lived through it. This isn’t ennui, it’s shellshock. If I put Company off long enough, maybe they’ll make Dawn Of War 2 with all the stuff that makes it great? I’ve heard it’s similar to Dawn, but to me they couldn’t be more different: one is set in the most exciting universe the human mind has ever dreamed up, the other is set in the most miserable time and place in human history.

UT2004: I suddenly realised why Half-Life 2 Deathmatch was the only multiplayer game I did well in. I liked it. So I played it. You actually improve at something if you do it a lot. So I went back to the other one I liked, UT2004, and played that a lot. And lo! I could beat Adept bots. In fact, I started doing the thing you often see arch villains do: have my minions attack me in absurdly unfair fights, me outnumbered sixteen to one, and see if – okay, to show them – I could take them all on. If you add in the Bullet Time and Ninja Rope mutators, you can crank up the odds to even more absurd levels, and be even more awesome. I call this mode Arch-Villain Arena, and the ability to mess with UT to create things like this is one of the reasons I love it so much. There’s a common mathematical misconception that less is more – I’ve done two modules in advanced number theory, and I can tell you first hand that more is much more than less. In fact, if you research the etymology of the word to the extent that I have, you find that its roots are closely tied to those of ‘more’ itself.

Hitman: Blood Money: I almost feel I’ve talked enough about this, but I’ll just say that the scope for macabre finesse in this game is narcotic.

So: Which? I was hoping writing briefly about all the amazing games on offer right now would somehow clarify the most appealing option, but I still have no idea. Maybe I’ll just watch TV.

I Actually Can’t Stop The Music

I’m trying to talk to someone, I forget who, and the music is just so ridiculously loud that I can’t even hear my own voice. I indicate non-verbally that I’m going to turn off the MP3 player – which I think is theirs – but the thing won’t shut down. It’s a Sansa, like mine, and no matter how long I hold the ‘off’ button it just goes through different shutting down procedures without ever stopping. The music is pounding, unrelentingly repetitive – a few deafening bars and then the vocalist sings, “I’m tired of singing,” – repeated ad nauseam.

Eventually I just tug the wire from the player, and it still doesn’t stop. It’s so loud I feel like my head is bleeding – that the song itself is about the singer being tired of singing seems like a sick joke. “I’m tired of singing.”

I burst into the lounge, where my dad is explaining how a DivX player works to someone, and I ask if this is where the music is coming from. “I’m tired of singing.” My dad doesn’t know, so I borrow a likely-looking remote from him and try everything: volume down, mute, off. Nothing works. “I’m tired of singing.” By this stage the house is full of people, wearing chicken suits, walking slowly around its corridors and stopping every time the song gets to that unbearable “I’m tired of singing” line, whereupon their fake chicken heads flip back so they can sing it unmuffled. “I’m tired of singing.” I wish they wouldn’t. But most of all, I wish this fucking song would stop singing this fucking line again and again every five seconds for two fucking hours. “I’m tired of singing.” Shut up.

Finally I find the source. “I’m tired of singing.” I’m lying down, “I’m tired of singing,” I’m not sure where, “I’m tired of singing,” and there’s a single huge black speaker in front of me, “I’m tired of singing,” volume knob clearly visible. “I’m tired of singing.” I’m paralysed. “I’m tired of singing.” I know this knob will work, “I’m tired of singing,” that I can finally shut this unbearable “I’m tired of singing” twat up, “I’m tired of singing,” but I can’t move. “I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.”

“I’m tired of singing.” Finally I feel my arm start to shift, “I’m tired of singing.” I discover I’m naked, “I’m tired of singing,” but at this stage I don’t care – I can shut this thing up. “I’m tired of singing.” I manage to stagger to my feet and make it to the speaker, and twist the volume knob down for what feels like minutes.

It’s stopped. I see now that the speaker is beneath a monitor, behind a mouse and keyboard, and the track was playing through Winamp. I permanently delete it from the hard drive.

I look at the time – 8.30. I’ve slept through ninety minutes of music at this volume. It wasn’t all “I’m tired of singing” – a song called Running Out by Mates of State, not a single fucking bar of which I ever want to hear again as long as I live – that just happened to be the one that finally woke me up. I guess that means it was playing throughout the final couple of minutes of sleep where my dreams evidently take place.

There’s got to be a better way to wake up than this.

Hyperthreaded Depleted Uranium Turbothanks

To anyone who nominated me for a Games Media Award. I am a finalist! With any other award it’d be corny and false to say the nomination is what counts, but with GMAs that’s actually true. Like last year, the nominations are open to the public but the judging is by a panel of games media types and PRs. I’d love to win this year, but I’ll be honest, I’m not super concerned about my popularity among games media types and PRs. The really nice thing is to have a bunch of people put your name forward out of the blue.

In return, I will try to be slightly less inadequate over the next week about posting stuff, both here and on PCG. Starting with some fun news from Valve about Team Fortress 2 I’ve only just had time to write up, and a short series of stupid posts here that have nothing to do with anything. Yes. This plan makes sense.

If you are a judge, you don’t have to vote for me, but you should definitely vote for:

• PC Gamer for Games Magazine. We’re actually pretty good. The thing I really enjoy about our mag these days is being able to read a preview knowing it’s not just going to be, “This looks like a game that has some classes and some weapons and the graphics seem good”. There’s going to be something mechanically or conceptually interesting and we’re actually going to spend the words telling you about that. Also we do reviews. Oh no! That’s mine! How did that get there?
   
• Rich McCormick for Rising Star. Rich has already established himself in our office as the person capable of the most tortured pun when we’re sitting around coming up with headlines, and this company is the Abu Ghraib of pun torture. Here’s his piece on Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. It’s a crime that Jaz McDougall isn’t also up for this slot, partly because it would lead to hilarious in-office brawling, and partly because his work on PCGamer.com is making me laugh every day.
   
• Christian Donlan for Specialist Writer Online. I’m also a fan of Simon, Ellie and Dave, but I think I’m right in saying this is the first time Christian’s been up for this, and it’s way overdue. His stuff on Eurogamer and in Edge always shines, and he is quite literally The Nicest Man In Games Journalism, a title which I must some day kill him to steal.

Huh. That Looks Interesting

I’m hitting a few inconsistencies in where the game predicts your jump will go, and where it actually goes. “Through walls” and “Face-first into a wall” respectively. So to make sure the prediction algorithm was correctly guessing what pose the player would be in at each point on the arc, I made it show me. It looks like this!

I can’t really figure out a way to use this as the prediction visual that isn’t super intrusive and surreal, but I rather like it.

How To Stop Writing A Fucking Book

Brief out-of-context quote from Blizzard honcho Jeff Kaplan that made Stardock’s Trent Polack – and me – smile:

“We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game.”

Every time someone says something like that, I picture a scripted scene playing out some dramatic event that would otherwise have been communicated in text. But of course, that’s not games. That’s films and plays, which Kaplan rightly cites as other things to avoid imitating – games suck at it. Half-Life 2 is remarkable for coming closest, and I remember getting very carried away about its animation at the time, but the truth is Alyx’s ridiculous canned gesticulations would be scoffable in any film.

Mechanics are the main thing “uniquely video game”: this is the only medium where we can learn about something by experimenting with it, toying with it, seeing how it responds to different inputs. But can you tell a story with that? Art game loons like Rohrer certainly seem to suggest story-like themes with their game mechanics. But those same games set out not to tell any particular story, and the zero-writing approach means they’d struggle to anyway.

The cool thing about games is that books can’t show you exactly how a scene looks, and films can’t ask you to read a huge chunk of background text, and music can’t respond to you. We’re absolutely a mish-mash medium, and perhaps “uniquely video game” doesn’t have to mean pulling one magical trick that nothing else can do. Perhaps it means leveraging all the other mediums games comprise, rather than leaning heavily on any one: whether that’s books in World of Warcraft or movies in Gears of War.

The one game that springs to mind as an exemplary case of telling a story in a way no other medium could is my old favourite Masq. It has text and pictures, but not much of either one: it’s simple-looking, simply written and short. But it offers two uniquely video game experiences.

The first time through, it’s a story that responds to you. It’s only multiple choice, but the choices are extremely multiple, and you genuinely do drive the story to an extent I’ve seen nowhere else. (Though I’m sure plenty of text adventures and simple graphic adventures like this compare favourably).

The second occurs after you’ve played it a few times, and you’re really just experimenting. You get to know the characters in a way linear fiction can’t allow: you get to ask, “What would they have done if…” Dozens and dozens of times. It wouldn’t be remarkable, except that there are fascinating quirks to some of Masq’s characters that only become clear when you know them from multiple playthroughs.

Masq can do this because its content – pictures and dialogue for the various eventualities and decisions – is cheap to make. A decision with four possible outcomes doesn’t take impractically long to flesh out. If Blizzard want to tell their story in a uniquely video game way, they have to swallow a bitter pill: the notion that any given player isn’t likely to see most of what they spend their time on. But after filling a world the size of Azeroth with quests, that’s a pill they’ve swallowed in handfuls.

How To Find An Object’s DrawGUI Co-ordinates In Game Maker Studio With A Rotated View

Update: This was originally a post to ask for help, but now that we’ve solved the problem I’m posting the solution for anyone who needs it, and changing the title to make it more searchable. It’s a function that lets you find where an object appears on-screen, so that you can use the DrawGUI event to draw interface elements over it or annotate it, useful for tutorials. Original post follows, updates and working script at the end! Continued

How Mainstream Games Butchered Themselves, And Why It’s My Fault

Published a long while back, don’t think I ever linked it here. A long-suppressed rant at mainstream action game design.

“The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there’s text on screen, I’m not reading it. If there’s a cut-scene, I’m skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can’t shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won’t do anything. I thought that was normal.

Then, playing Bulletstorm the other night and hating every second of it, I had an awful realisation: this is my fault. I’m the reason games suck now. I’m the lazy, belligerent jerk every mainstream shooter seems to be designed for, and it’s because of gamers like me that they’re built this way.”

The creative director of Bulletstorm responded to me, which led to an interesting discussion.

How It’s Fucking Going

How IndieCade Went For Heat Signature And The Grappling Hook Game

IndieCade East was lovely. It’s a convention in New York, held at the Museum of the Moving Image, consisting mostly of people giving talks about games or showing their games. For example, Zack Johnson talked to Margaret Robertson about the crazy 11-year history of his still actively developed web game Kingdom of Loathing: Continued

How I Feel About Team Fortress 2 In Graph Form

Lately, I’ve been playing and enjoying TF2 a bit. There was a time when I wrote about that game so often this site was virtually a fan blog, but it petered out a bit. It’s a combination of the natural drop off in interest in a competitive online game, and a drop off in the interesting differences the new content adds.

The latest update has bucked the trend a bit, but before I get into why, I want to explain what I’m talking about. I often wonder why my play time with TF2 dropped off even as the stuff in it got much better, so I have expressed the relationship in the only way I know how to articulate any feelings: through the medium of graph.

Basically, I wouldn’t normally like a team-based shooter at all by this point in its life cycle, and that can’t help but have an influence. I don’t like competition because I’m too competitive, and I don’t like team games because I don’t like organising people. It’s a miracle I like TF2 at all.

The chunks of new content flying into the game have kept it fresher than it had any right to be, often because it genuinely made the game better, and the rest of the time just because it was new. That appeal ended with the money update: once they added a way to buy new stuff for cash, they no longer provided an easy route to get it for free. It ceased to be “Ooh, new stuff!” and became “Hmm, purchasing options.”

But the last update does have that kick of novelty: it’s a medieval mode where most classes are useless, since their high tech weapons are gone.

Only the sword-and-shield Demoman and the bow-firing Sniper are great, and a few other classes can work if they happen to unlock certain new items, like gloves that make the Heavy tougher against ranged attacks, or a healing crossbow for the Medic. What I like about it is this:

1. It’s very, very different.
2. It’s so new no-one really cares about winning yet.
3. No-one can bitch at me for going Sniper when we already have five Snipers.
4. The only map for it is small, focused, and channels people into a beautifully designed chokepoint for the finale.
5. No sentries.
6. No stickies.

I’m fine with getting skewered by an arrow, fine with having my head cut off, fine with being battered to death by a Heavy’s metal fists. Almost every other way to die in TF2, particularly by automated sentry fire, is just irritating to me. Nothing to do with the skill involved or lack thereof, it just feels annoying.

This mode pares back all of the ways to die instantly to a distant opponent, and so for the first time, my cause of death isn’t always “Walked round a corner, met three enemies”.

How long it’ll stay fun I don’t know, but variety like this is what I want from this game now. I think there’s as much value in taking things out as putting them in.

How I Am Working

Gunpoint is going amazingly well. I’ve been splitting what’s left to do into little monthly task lists, and I’ve already finished everything I had down for March. I started making the game in May last year, and said I didn’t want it to take more than a year. So my aim is to release it this May. Expect it in July.

I typically only work on it about one weekend a month, and I forgot about it completely for two months last year. The two days I spent on it during the holidays shot it forwards to a really exciting point, and the feedback from testers on that version was amazing. So lately I’ve been spending about a third of my spare time on it – what we in the lazy industry call ‘crunch’. Continued

How Fast Should Stuff Unlock?

The game Magicka unlocks eight different elements in its ten minute playable intro, giving you access to 16,384 spell combinations.

And later, an M60.

Half-Life 1 and 2 don’t give you any abilities in the first ten minutes, and in general only grant you about one new weapon type every hour or two.

Obviously it depends partly on genre, but there’s more than that going on. I think developers fundamentally disagree on the question of “How far through the game should I get access to the main abilities that make it great?”

Every hour before that point, you lose some players who might have liked it if they’d got that far. I’m probably never going to get through Dead Space 2 because I’ve been playing for hours and still only have two weapons, one unexciting and the other impractical.

But every hour after that point, the player has a less exciting sense of progression, and risks getting bored with the same formula. FEAR probably fell victim to that – if you didn’t love the basic combat as much as I did, the fact that it never changed after the first few levels probably killed it.

Personally, I like to get things one at a time, but quickly early on. I will play almost anything if my toolset is changing every ten minutes.

The games that pace their unlocks slower tend to frontload the experience with a lot of scripted or story content, unique stuff that’s hard to make.

I think that’s rarely as compelling and inviting to the player as getting new abilities. I’d rather they saved the unique, story-driven stuff for after I’ve got all my tools, to stop that phase from getting repetitive. By that point I’m probably invested enough to pay more attention to it, whereas early on it’s usually unwanted noise.

What’s your sweet spot? What games do it well, and which ones don’t? I’m asking partly because this is one of the big things I haven’t decided about Gunpoint yet.

Homelessness In The Sims 3

Clever creative type roBurky has just put up the significant first chunk of an in-game diary/experiment/story he’s been working on: Alice and Kev. He’s made a father and daughter in the Sims 3 mismatched, homeless and destitute, then tried to manage their sad lives as best he can.

He’s updating it pretty rapidly, so subscribe to mainline it through your RSS vein.

Naturally it’s funny. But the grim honesty with which the Sims 3 ends up modelling the self-perpetuating consequences of being dispossessed in a dysfunctional family is actually quite affecting. That’s not something you often get in a game diary, and Robin’s quiet observational tone brings it out well.

Also pants.

Highlight Of 2006: Previewing Oblivion

I said I’d tell you what these were that week, by which I meant this month, of which there are now only three days left. So, going chronologically, here’s number one.

Reviewing it was of course the bigger deal, but the four-hour preview event that night in a London hotel was the first time I actually went there, so to speak, and that made it magical in a way that’s tough to communicate to non-gamers. When I say playing a new game is like going to a country you’ve never visited before, it sounds like I mean “almost as good as”, and that’s misleading. It’s much, much better than that. It’s better than going to a planet you’ve never visited before. When the game is good, and you know it, and you have a game-enabled brain, stepping out of your skin and into that screen is a sublime form of physical and psychological transportation to which drugs, love and space travel cannot compare.

And much of that culminated with me punching a rat in the face. Those who had no great pre-release interest in Oblivion found the opening dungeon pretty dull, and certainly it’s one of the weakest parts of the game, but it was designed for me and my kind. We’re the Morrowind obsessives, people who spent longer in this game’s predecessor than on any vacation, and who would delight in every little change as they were introduced to us one by one. And the sensation of cold-cocking a dog-sized rodent mid-air with a conclusive right-hook is something every human needs to feel at some point in their lives. Whunk!

For all the joys out in that enormous and spectacular world, it was how physical it all felt that would captivate me. Plenty of games have worlds as big, plenty of games are open-ended, there are even some now that look as good. But none feel so right, convince so totally, whunk with quite that fidelity.

Tomorrow: snow, heroism, lightning and abdominal pain!