TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

My Goatee

My choice for Game Of The Year just went up over at the PC Gamer part of CVG. I’m ashamed to say the master of stealth in the shot above is not me – though I did take it. For a while I changed my Steam ID to “i was a spy all along lol” to accentuate the frustration my victims presumably feel when the friend next to them turns out not to be called what they thought they were called and not in fact a friend of any kind. Since your real name is never displayed to your enemies while in disguise, my choice makes more sense, but I have to admit this guy’s has the edge in screenshots.

The gist of my justification is this: The Spy. Although I myself have never played the class, I hear it’s a lot of fun.

Things I Forgot To Talk About Round-Up

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: if you’ve seen Score and felt that it’s a little heavy on the fan-service – hi. I’m one of those fans it was servicing, and it did it very well. I didn’t need that much Leeloo, and the songs were needless and clumsy, but other than that it was joyous.

I’m the sort of fan who gets an enormous kick out of the new theme tune, the triumph of bureaucracy, the explanation for how Gore lost the election, the obsessive retconning of the pilot episode’s pivotal moment, the cyclic timeline mathematics and the titular payoff at the very end. Speaking of the theme tune, have you heard the 1967 original? It’s surprisingly awesome.

“Are you free?”
“You have no idea.”

Dexter Season Finale: the only thing wrong with this season of Dexter (apart from the unaccountable soap-opera interlude that was Rita’s mother) is a certain character lapsing into a hideous crazy-stalker stereotype. But the finale got so much mileage out of the mess this created that I can almost forgive it. The scene with three people and a large black bag was almost unbearable to watch. More spoilerific discussion should probably go in the original comments thread.

But yes, fantastic. The leadup to this over the last handful of episodes is the best Dexter has ever been, and Dexter is itself near-perfect television.

“Let’s see if the best bed in Kaer Morhen can hold us!”

The Witcher: broken sexist porno that’s coming up in a lot of game-of-the-year lists, and got huge review scores everywhere but with us. You play a badly scarred grey-haired old man in leather trousers, to whom a procession of identically-shaped redheads surrender themselves sexually after three lines of astonishingly bad dialogue. Post-deed, you are awarded an achievement souvenir card showing the girl naked, just in case you didn’t already feel like a pathetic mysognist.

Somehow it’s even more wretched than the despicable Leisure Suit Larry games – the last of which revolved around date rape. The fact that Larry’s love interests even needed to be date-raped before they’d sleep with the idiot hero automatically makes them stronger characters than the Witcher’s.

It’s not that I can’t imagine what people see in the Witcher – I haven’t played it through, maybe it gets amazing after four hours of insufferable dross. I’m just appalled at what they can ignore. The huge script cutbacks before release have been achieved by simply deleting swathes of lines, so conversations are riddled with bizarre, glaring holes that not just make for abysmal fiction, but in many cases render events truly incomprehensible.

“Laurent ran guns for the resistance.”
“Which resistance?”
“He won’t say – apparently they didn’t win.”

Ratatouille: I hate to be down on such a sweet film, but I’m so tired of that nervous kid cliché and the angry boss who’s supposed to be funny because he’s short. Brad Bird has uncharacteristically little to add to those grating, ancient stereotypes, and the central conceit is just surreal.

The premise is a rat who can cook, and a kitchen boy who cannot, but the film has no workable idea for how the two can collaborate. It ends up inventing a physiological mechanic so utterly nonsensical that it’s downright creepy to watch.

The rat and dough physics modelling is fantastic, and it made me laugh perhaps twice, but it’s so far from the spark of The Incredibles.

Duke Nukem Forever Trailer: after ten years of development, the first movie of the incarnation that’s actually likely to be released has come out. It features no dialogue until, at the end, protagonist Nukem stands up and says, essentially, “I want to shit on you.”

I am at a loss.

GalCiv2: Still Genius

Analysing Team Fortress 2

One of my only criticisms of Team Fortress 2 was that the Medic isn’t as fun to play as the other classes – a particular shame when he’s so critical to success. Some people objected to this, because they really enjoy the Medic, so I’d just like to make sure these people don’t miss the Team Fortress 2 stats: cold, hard evidence that I am right and they are wrong. The Medic, for anyone not motivated to click the link, is the least-played class by a head.

Obviously the THIRTY-SIX achievements they’re adding just for Medics is an attempt to redress that imbalance, but I wonder if that’s the way to fix this.

You never had to bribe people to play Medic in Battlefield 2, partly because they were effective combatants, but I think mostly because the medicking part of their job was extraordinary fun. When I’m holding my healing ray on a Heavy while he mows people down in TF2, I feel like I’m serving him. When I sprint through thwacking gunfire and dive defibrillators-first onto the unconscious body of my squad leader in BF2, I feel like I’m saving him.

What’s surprising about those stats- well, okay, there are lots of surprising things about those stats.

1. The first surprising thing is the very first fact: the Scout is the most-played class? He’s the only class which, for the majority of any given round, is almost entirely useless. The second the enemy have a single sentry up in any sensible location, he has no way of getting to their objective and is too weak to effectively defend his own. It must just be that, like me, a lot of people always play him for their first life on 2fort, well and granary. But when I do, can I persuade the rest of my team to get a decent Scout rush going? Can I testicles.

2. Speaking of those three maps – the three perfectly symmetrical ones – here’s the most remarkable stat of the lot: the Blue team is almost twice as likely to win on any of these. Even 2fort. These are maps in which each team’s base is a mirror of their enemy’s, and the game’s teams have no inherent differences. If you played in black and white, you wouldn’t even be able to tell which team you were playing on.

I can think of only two explanations for this, and the first one is stupid. Perhaps the Red team are just slightly easier to see? This would be a perfectly reasonable theory in a game with large maps or camouflaged players, but Team Fortress 2 is depicted with unprecedented clarity. It’s the one game in which you can always spot enemies and even tell which class they are, at any range. Perhaps Snipers, through the smallest and darkest of windows, sometimes go unnoticed for a moment, but you’d think Blue Snipers would stand out more strikingly against the warm wood buildings of well, and that’s the map with the the strongest pro-Blue bias of all.

The other possibility is that for whatever reason, better players pick Blue. It’s not often you get to choose your team, since one usually outnumbers the other when you join, but the times when you do could account for this difference. It would have to be an overwhelming trend, to show through the auto-balance and playercount restrictions, but it’s possible. I pick Blue when I can – maybe I’m just that good.

The real answer is probably the counterpart to this: it seems possible that new or inexperienced players might automatically pick Red, since it’s first on the team-choice menu.

3. My other criticism of TF2 was that hydro didn’t quite work. It’s the map that changes shape every round, in complicated ways, in order to keep it fresh for years. As far as I’d played when I reviewed it, this just seemed to keep it confusing for years, but I said I was prepared to bear with Valve’s experiment to see how it played out.

Three months later, I have a more conclusive answer: sucks! hydro is awful. But looking at the stats, Valve must be delighted: apparently hydro sees the longest rounds of any map, and never results in a stalemate. That’s funny, because around fifty percent of all stalemates I’ve ever had and my ten shortest rounds have all been on that very map.

The problem is that they don’t count the fight over two control points – before the map reconfigulates – as a round. They count the entire, tedious push through each arbitrary mess of blocked-off routes towards the enemy’s final base – at least four separate games – as one round. This cleverly conceals the two main ways in which hydro sucks: if one team is even slightly better than they other, they utterly storm the enemy control point in a matter of seconds, and no-one has any hope of mounting a comeback or even having an influence on the battle. And if the teams are even in skill, every damn game ends with two nests of Sentry Guns sitting vigilantly at their own bases, waiting for the Sudden Death timer to run out.

4. As you can see from the ugly grey lumps in that graph, Stalemates are all too common on the maps where they can occur. Amazingly the solution to this is so simple the community have already implimented it in places: a fantastic server-side mod causes everyone to spawn as the same class when entering Sudden Death, and restricts them to melee. When I last played on such a server, this meant twenty-four Heavy Weapons guys punching each other to death, but pretty much any class is as funny.

It completely transforms the dark, paranoid, defensive atmosphere of Sudden Death into a glorious burst of humour and madness at the end of the round. Instead of saying “You’ve failed to complete a game of Team Fortress 2, now you must play Counter-Strike until everyone gets bored and leaves or the game tells everyone they suck”, it says “Eh, you guys are about as good as each other. Fist fight! Woo!” Then it spins around with its arms out until it falls over from the giddiness. In other words, it’s silly and friendly and hilarious in just the way TF2 is everywhere else. You actually come away from it feeling almost like friends, instead of hating the enemy team’s stupid camping guts and your own team’s stupid non-Medic faces.

But if I were Valve, I wouldn’t be working on any of these issues yet. In fact, I’d be doing absolutely nothing to the game until I’d come up with the perfect auto-balancing/team-reshuffling algorithm. I think they ended up maximising almost every other factor that positively contributes to the percentage of time you spend enjoying a multiplayer game, but left alone the biggest one: engineering a fair fight.

If it were up to me, no-one would get to pick a team. Everyone’s auto-assigned according to their skill level, keeping Friends together and players who prefer the same class apart, in that order of priority. After every round, the highest-scoring player from the winning team, along with the third best, fifth best, seventh, etc, are switched with the second best from the losing team, and the fourth, and sixth, respectively. In other words, maximum rejiggling with a slight bias towards the losing team, giving the best players a challenge and the worst players a break.

The reason you couldn’t do most of this stuff in older games, like the original Team Fortress, was that the game simply didn’t have access to that sort of information about players. Steam now has all this and more, and if they’re only using that for playtesting, they’re missing the real value of this kind of data. They’ve got everything they need here to rig a multiplayer game to be fun every time, and that could be a hell of a thing.

Deus Fucking Ex Fucking 3

I should briefly explain what this truncated latin phrase refers to, for anyone who doesn’t know: it’s a game released in the year 2000 which, for a lot of people, holds the same status within games as the Beatles do in music, Citizen Kane does in film, Shakespeare does in literature.

It’s a bit ugly. The writing is never particularly remarkable. The guns aren’t that much fun to shoot people with. If you’re wondering how it can, then, be broadly considered the greatest game ever made, it’s possible you don’t understand games as distinct from videogames, as distinct from arcade games, as distinct from art, from cinema, from toys, from fucking Halo. This is understandable. There haven’t been many that really take this medium for a spin yet, but Deus Ex was one.

I was quite excited when the third was first hinted back in May – to be made by Eidos Montreal, with no involvement from the original’s designers Warren Spector and Harvey Smith – and in the intervening time no new information has actually surfaced. But something else has happened: Far Cry 2.

Before real evidence of that game’s content emerged, I was a fierce sceptic of publisher-made sequels to games whose original developers have long since departed. But it’s now clear to me that Ubisoft played the original game for a long weekend, then someone senior took luxuriant toke on a lengthy, substantial joint, a real carrot, and said “Whoa wait! I just thought of something! Oh wait I forgot. Let’s just make it fucking nuts. I’m so hungry.”

If Eidos can at least try that, we’ll either get a beautiful game or a beautiful mistake. I’m resigned to the fact that we’ll never get a worthy tribute to Deus Ex, not from Spector, not from Eidos and certainly not from Smith.

And the most popular story on news-feed aggregator GameTab right now? “Breasts are awesome.” I love geeks, but man, I fucking hate nerds.

Crysis Week: The Endingening

The last few games I’ve been really excited about I’ve also had the good fortune to review, so it’s been a long time since I’ve been sat at home, house to myself, supplies stacked up, lights off, with a sparkly, exotic new game to dive into. Particularly one as momentous as Crysis.

70cl Sycamore Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon (2006 – a memorable vintage for Californian reds, I think we can all agree)
1 packet chilli & coriander Walkers Sensations
6x chocolate mousses (it’s okay! They’re Be Good To Yourself, and therefore a meaningless smidgen less lethal)
70cl dark Jamaican Rum (for the tropical ambience)
2x cinnamon danish swirls (not sure where these came from)
1 packet mixed sour cream and chive potato snacks
1 litre Tropicana orange juice (‘with juicy bits’ I’m assured)
1 Fox’s Favourites variety pack of biscuits (‘perfect for sharing?’ the packaging optimistically suggests)
1 large bowl of popcorn, with banoffee syrup
227 grams of Viennese fig-seasoned filter coffee grounds (purchased on the basis of the impossibly romantic photo of a presumably Viennese bistro-cafe on the packet)
1 Crysis-capable PC

To the South China sea! Further report when I take my first rum-and-danish break.

Things I’d forgotten:

• Far Cry tactics (drive a jeep at them) don’t work on Delta difficulty.
• I can happily take freaking hours over one group of enemies.
• Cloak mode makes the world sound muted and distant. I’m not sure I forgot this, I don’t think it happened in the demo.
• The soundscape is as remarkable as the graphics, and everything sounds better super loud.
• Boats are dicks.
• Alert enemies can hear you reload while cloaked if you’re standing right next to them.
• Psycho is a psycho, but Jester isn’t funny and Prophet isn’t very good at predicting things. Aztec may have been from Central America.
• In every cut-scene, the characters re-state their point three times before the other person replies to it. Three times.
  
   
• Rum goes well with cinnamon.

Wow, Crysis escalates quickly. I took a leisurely hour and a bit replaying the demo section, but even that is a startlingly short time to get into the groove of the basics before they start throwing tanks and helicopters at you. Far Cry spent a long time avoiding the subject of what more it could do, beyond shooting mercenaries on an island, and it didn’t have a very good answer when it got there. Crysis seems confident it’s got plenty more than preying on frightened North Korean troops in a jungle, and it’s keen to introduce it quickly. Risky! Observations, in order:

1. Holy shit, this next level is huge.
   
    
2. Holy shit, this level is around twice the size I thought it was when I called it ‘huge’.
3. Is there supposed to be a helicopter chasing me the whole time, which can insta-kill me with explosives even when I’m cloaked? Because it’s making my life kind of difficult.
   
    
4. Wow, this level is huge.
   
    
5. OH GOD TANKS. I’d been wondering how Crysis would ever get hard if I can always cloak for huge periods of time. Tanks, coupled with swarms of inquisitve NK troops, really work. The tank just KEEPS… ON… FIRING at where it last saw me, forever, and there are so many troops that it’s hard to slip around to a new vantage point without bumping into them. It’s doing a really good job of fucking up my plans and forcing me to improvise.
6. I’m calling the North Korean president you keep seeing on posters Kim Yong-Yerli. Here’s why:
   
   Eternal President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Yong-il

   
   Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli

   
   Kim Yong-Yerli

   
    
7. My character confidently informs command that the landing zone is ‘hot’, but I can’t see anyone, and I am him. After a few minutes of searching, I think of a better way to locate enemies: firing my shotgun in the air like a redneck.
8. OH GOD NANOSUITS. They’re everywhere. They’re invisible. They’re jumping over rocks. They have sniper rifles. They’re super-tough. This is fucking brilliant.

The whole game up until this point – even the tank and helicopter bits – were me using my unfair advantage to prey on people. Sometimes it took a while to work out how my suit functions gave me the upper hand, but they always did. Finally they don’t, and it’s a weird and wonderful feeling. There are four or so of these guys, and they can do everything I can. I’m suddenly being asked to outwit not just an equal, but a squadron of equals. The game expects me to completely rock – I appreciate that.

WAR WERE DECLARED. This is new – sort of. Far Cry had that Rebellion level that tried to be a nocturnal warzone, but the trigens didn’t make a very good side. And it was obvious that no-one fought until you turned up, so the best tactic was to creep into activation range, creep back out and wait for them to kill each other. This is a lot more dynamic, and a very different feel to anything we saw of Crysis before release.

The atmosphere is awesome here, volatile and thrilling in a way that Call of Duty 4 never was for me. I always knew what was going on in CoD – there’s no point trying to make it past that barbed wire coil before the marines pull it across the street, because I know there’ll be an invisible barrier there; there’s no point worrying about the enemies seeing me in this sniper section because they’re hardcoded not to; there’s no point trying to clear that building because the enemies are on an infinite respawn; etc. I don’t know Crysis very well yet, but it doesn’t seem to be constructed of such binary, artificial rules. There’s no-one I’m safe from, no-one who’s safe from me, and that feels more like war to me.

The transition from a night-time warzone mission based around a large bay area, to an assault on a heavily guarded city port by morning light, is amazing. This is the point of the Crysis engine – the sheer scale it can cope with lets it chain together disparate adventures into one enormous, calamitous and intensely personal narrative. Level transitions never felt like they were disrupting the experience in other games, but this just demonstrates how much more absorbing, exciting and unique your journey becomes when it’s unbroken.

PS. The missile launcher is so fucking great. In most games that mix vehicles and infantry, the armour’s a chore to take down because even when you’re hitting its weakspot for massive damage, it just takes a long time. The noobtube in Crysis lets you appear out of thin air and get nail anything with two rockets to kerplode it. This war zone level was pure cathartic revenge on dick-boats. The slight heat-seeking is a godsend, too. It’s like they actually looked at what wasn’t fun about anti-vehicle combat and… took it out? So few designers think like that.

– lol i has a tank
– lol it broke
– lol

I actually rather enjoyed this. The scale is just so staggering, it looks like some of those vast open valleys that made Lost so escapist. It’s a strange decision to make the first time you get a tank the absolute worst time to be in a tank, but once you leave it you start to see where one might be useful, and by the time I’d hijacked my second I was quite enjoying the speed and power.

Like Graham, when that mountain started to crumble I physically got out of my tank to gawp. God damn.

I think this might be my favourite so far. It’s not that different from the early jungle levels, but much more intense. There are so many goddamn troops, and stalking the nanos amongst them is thrilling. I replayed the section where you have to clear the landing zone for the VTOLs, just before the Quarry proper, three or four times. It always ended with my decloaking behind a nano to do this to him with the minigun:

The entrance to the quarry was the first bit that’s been pretty tricky on Delta – apart from when I alerted that helicopter a bit early and it followed me for half an hour before I found my first missile launcher. Tricky in a good way though – it’s a proper, volatile warzone with you in the enemy trenches and friendly fire raining down around you.

The boss-fight inside was hilarious. I wasn’t really paying attention, so when I got control of my body I just kind of ambled up some stairs, found a guy there who looked familiar and kept punching him until he fell into a pile of crates and died. He never fired a shot or said a word. I don’t know what that fight’s like if you let him get an attack in, but I wasn’t trying very hard to stop him.

 

Inside The Thing

Whoa! I didn’t expect this so soon. I thought the alien ship would be the climax of the game, so that they could lead you gradually from the familiar (jungle) to the unfamiliar (frozen jungle) and then the entirely alien. Nope. Alien right here.

I was really looking forward to some mind-bending stuff here, but there’s not a lot to it. It’s not truly directionless 3D like Descent, it sort of auto-rotates you to a predefined notion of down for each locality.

It’s very, very pretty and such a clean break from the environments until now, but there’s nothing to do here. The enemies aren’t at all scary or fun to fight, because they’re terrified of your bullets and strangely reluctant to use their own. The best tactic is to sit and take pot-shots, during which you’re completely safe.

When they do get to you their melee attack is powerful, but it’s not really clear what it is. Are they just slapping me with their wibbly hands? I’ll try to avoid that, since it clearly kills me, but it’s hard to work up any kind of primal fear over that kind of threat. Wibble hands, I mean.

Things I would have liked:

• A baffling ‘there is no down’ design.
• Ferocious enemies that act like they’re at home in this enviroment you’re struggling with.
• Bigger, stranger enemies – this has the potential to be as scary as swimming with sharks, but these things are just wibbly dudes.
• More functional features to the enviroment – there’s only one thing in this whole world: fragile generators. I wanted to be fascinated by this place, but I quickly grokked there was nothing functional in it.
• Less wibble.

The Scouts: ooh! They’re like angry metal space frogs! Last time I saw these dudes, at a preview event, they just floated around vaguely, firing. This exotic, fierce pattern of movement makes them much more threatening and entertaining to fight.

At first I thought their extreme mobility rendered most of Crysis’ most interesting tactics – i.e. stealth – unviable. But now that I’ve played around with them for a while, I realise that’s not true. It’s quite possible to cloak and kidnap these dudes, or nail them with a hurled trashcan mid-air, and even find refuge from them to recharge your cloak. It’s just a little trickier on all fronts than it is with the Koreans.

What is missing is the ability to plan your attack from afar, since these things are always sprung on you. And the actual missions throughout, here, are time-sensitive and ally-oriented, which really does render all but the shootiest of approaches pointless. Which brings me to:

Prophet: this guy gets a section of his own because OH MY GOD HE’S A TWAT. He stands there, dying, screeching at me to get him out of there when there IS no exit to this arena. My objective is to defend him, but no-one’s attacking him. I eventually find there’s a Scout stuck on a jeep in the corner of the clearing, and I have to kill him before the next wave will spawn, and kill those super-fast to trigger the next wave, which inexplicably causes an unrelated scripted sequence in which a wall of the arena is blown open.

So Prophet follows, whining endlessly about cover and his suit energy – neither of which seems like my problem. After refusing to follow me and standing in the middle of an empty canyon until he dropped dead of exposure, Prophet – in his next life when I reload – finally decides to tell me that he needs to linger near a fire. By which he means, he needs me to linger near a fire – because there’s no way he could see or move to one by himself, since blazing car wrecks are invisible.

There’s also no way he can stay near one – he wanders off a few metres and stands there, waiting to die, while shouting at me to find some cover, and by cover he means fire, which is right there, and by me he means him, a guy standing next to some fire.

This is dismal.

In which you’re fighting off the stuff with the guys outside the cold thing, but in a place which is still pretty cold.

I just love the look of this place – a tropical shack frozen inside and out, every surface sparkling with frost and smudged with glove or bootprints.

I quite like the game, too. It forgets about the nanosuit and the notion of freedom, but the aliens are almost interesting enough to fight in a straight action-game way that they make up for it. Almost.

The frosty version of the Gauss Rifle is one of the most beautiful weapon models I’ve ever seen, and the gun is supremely satisfying to nail aliens with.

This is the first time you fight a Big Thing. It’s called a Hunter, I think, and they really fudge its introduction. The thing is just absolutely no threat to you, your first impression of the most visually spectacular enemy in the game is that it’s mostly harmless.

It’s a total non-fight – you don’t shoot at it because you know you probably can’t hurt it yet, and it doesn’t shoot at you presumably because they thought that would be too punishing on the player. They’ve wasted the moment when I inevitably do get to fight it, because I’ll no longer be impressed by the thing.

When you think of all the hard work the artists and coders put into making that thing look and move this way, it makes you want to slap the game designer in his stupid face.

Major Strickland isn’t impressed either.

Sucks. It’s not very long and it’s not very difficult, and it might have made a nice break in between two actually good missions, but placed where it is it’s just another shallow, uninspired and badly-made novelty section in a long line of shallow, uninspired and badly-made novelty sections that are rapidly exhausting my interest in playing this at all.

There’s not much point in making faces this detailed if you still don’t have the technology to animate them convincingly. It’s also just not worth putting much effort into characters in a game like Crysis. Two things are brilliant in this section, though:

1. The scientist in the Armoury has just upgraded Prophet’s suit, whereupon Prophet goes crazy and declares that he’s going to hijack US military equipment to fly straight into the target area of a tactical nuke, wrestles Psycho out of his way and storms off to his radioactive death. And the scientist turns to you and says, “So, what can I do for you?”

I can’t type in this suit, and sometimes that makes me sad.

2. When the general angrily hammers his finger on the LCD map in the control room, little digital ripples bend around the pressure point just like they do on a real screen. Dear person at Crytek who thought of that: I love you.

Oh look, the Hunter’s back, and he sucks. We’ve seen him before, he’s not very dangerous, and the solution to this fight is to just shoot at him a lot when you’re told to.

If they work out how to attack more than three at a time, we’re screwed.

The second boss’s entrance is fantastic – potently cinematic and genuinely unsettling. But when he’s fully emerged, the craft itself is rubbish – it has no particular features, just a vague lump of alien stuff. The battle is worse still – shoot the turrets? Really? You’re going with that?

A good boss ought to challenge the skills you’ve learned playing the game – in Crysis, that’s using the nanosuit. The Korean general could have been a great one, done right – you have no weapons, you both have nanosuits, you’ve got to outwit him by using yours better to compensate for being outgunned. A big floating lump of metal that you just have to shoot a lot? Not so much.

I don’t mind a hint that there’s more to be done, but it’s a bit much when your character gears up for a very specific and exciting-sounding mission, and then the credits roll. But Crysis does start with an advert – even after the six compulsory sponsor promos – so it’s fitting that it essentially ends with one, too.

Most of the varied post-Quarry sections, as banal and ineptly made as they are, would have made appreciated breaks from the real meat of Crysis: time-consuming open-ended stealth combat in huge forested areas. That type of play could actually do with some dumb variety to punctuate it – it’s almost exhausting.

But Crysis’ contents have settled during transit, and all the big chunks of freeform goodness are clustered in a dauntingly weighty lump at the start, while the sugary tack of the brainless sections has congealed in a sickly mess toward the end.

It’s guilty of the very thing people unfairly kicked Far Cry for: going permanently off the rails halfway through. Or more accurately, going permanently on them.

One of the infamously linear, Trigen-riddled later levels of Far Cry.

• That Helena Rosenthal is played by Aeryn Sun from Farscape? It’s true!

• That the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer – or perhaps just someone with the same name – is in Crysis? ‘Female scientist’, apparently – I remember no such person.
• That having heard the Crysis credits were absurdly long, I inexplicably decided to sit through them all? NOW YOU DO!
• That the game artificially limits the number of enemies allowed to fire at you at once? On Hard, it’s 5. On Delta, it’s 20.
• That, more importantly, one of the localisation team is called ‘Jazz Wang’?

Episode Two Death Maps

No-one seems to be reporting it, but Valve have now released stats for how players behaved in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. This time they’re more in-depth, and my favourite part is the Death Maps. They’re heat-map visualisations of where most player deaths occured in each level. This is the Death Map for the huge freeform Strider battle near the end of the game:

Loads of people died trying to defend the Sawmill, and the place to the East with the antiques, but very few near the Westernmost building. Whether that’s because it’s easy to defend or because no-one bothered to save it isn’t clear to me, but I remember it being one of the easier ones. I never managed to save the Sawmill – I’m always busy with the Hunters when the Strider takes his shot. But it’s always worth losing it just to hear the rebel shout “Oh God, not the Sawmill! Is nothing sacred?”

Soberingly the stats again reveal that less than half of all players completed the episode – 44%. That’s a slight improvement over the shorter Episode One, which confirms my feeling that Valve were much more wary of difficulty spikes here than in previous games – perhaps because of the Ep1 stats.

Because Valve are the only guys making their stats public, we may never know how this compares to the number of people who completed, say, BioShock. But you’ve got to figure games so short, so propulsively scripted and balanced for new and casual players have better completion ratios than almost anything else. So you can see why a lot of major games last less than ten hours these days.

This is my other favourite Death Map. It’s the place where you get the car – the car itself is on the upper right there. Looks like lots and lots and lots of people didn’t make the jump.

Update: just noticed there’s also an ‘Achievements’ tab. 1.1% of us got the Gnome one, making it officially the second hardest. Top is, of course, Get Some Grub – the 0.4% of players who actually earned that one probably see phosphorescent maggots when they close their eyes now.

Masq

My tale of betrayal, lust, exploitation and character portrayal in the fifth dimension is up, and it’s about a freeware Flash game.

What I don’t mention in my discussion of its lofty artistic accomplishments is that Masq is incredibly accessible, fun and addictive. Everyone I told about it wanted to play it, and everyone who played it loved it – to the extent that there’s an “I’m addicted to Masq” group on Facebook and I didn’t create it. If you’re convinced but haven’t read the piece yet, play the game first and read my waffle later.

Bonus points if you can solve the murder on your first time through, and special bonus points if you can get yourself arrested for it.

SO… MUCH… CAKE…

And other TF2 Garry’s Mod frivolities.

On Rock

Okay, you know – perhaps you don’t – how I hate all console games and don’t even really play Guitar Hero unless someone makes me? And how I’m more resistent to SingStar than anyone who isn’t Scottish? I am now officially excited about Rock Band. From Wikipedia’s soundtrack list:

The New Pornographers – The Electric Version
Jet – Are You Gonna Be My Girl

So Electric Version is kind of a weird choice since it’s probably the worst song they’ve ever done, but that’s still better than pretty much everything else the human race will ever achieve. The New freaking Pornographers are in a mainstream game! I think this is the first time I’ve ever been able to check both the “Games” and “Music” categories in my WordPress dashboard.

The Jet song is just hott, and it takes a lot to make me spell that with two t’s. If it had Maxi Geil’s Makin’ Love In The Sunshine I would buy the goddamn console for it. And a TV.

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.