TOM FRANCIS
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A Weak Russian Sunset

It’s Sunday night, but I’m on holiday! I am spared that awful Sunday night feeling, somehow so much worse than Monday morning, when I realise that I actually like my job. I wasted the first two days of my holiday sleeping ten hours a night to recover from my three-week binge of sub-five-hour nights and an inescapable drowning feeling. The only upside of that sorry cycle is that I get the wholly wonderful song Feather By Feather stuck in my head, by the increasingly wonderful Smog, largely thanks to the gallingly wonderful opening verse:

The reason I’m telling you of all people this is that losing an irreplacable chunk of the next day – particularly in winter – gives things a weird, sad atmosphere. I’m waking up to weak yellow sunsets, a beautiful but incredibly bleak light that seemed to last all day in Moscow. Hang in there a little longer, we’re approaching the point now. There’s a map in Battlefield 2142 set in Minsk, Belarus, and the sky texture captures this exact sight, light and feel magnificently. I find myself loading it up, alone, and flying a futuristic airlift craft to the top of a skyscraper to get out and admire the view. It’s built for forty-eight players, but the testers have stopped playing so there are no multiplayer games going on. Not that I’d want gunfire spoiling the mood.

By divine coincidence I only just this week realised how much I like Two Dots On A Map by the Russian Futurists, another gem from the Fluxblog mines. Not only does it have ‘Russian’ in the band name, but it’s also magnificent, majestic, sweeping and unbearably sad. I don’t know what the backing vocals are saying, but the last lines are:

I choose to hear “If we knew we were” as implying that we are, but aren’t facing it. Which is true, and awful.

I actually thought this mopey wistfulness might be a sign of age, but I just now found a text file on my hard drive describing exactly the same thing, written by me in 2002. So I’m just repeating myself, which is worse.

So… I think I was trying to lead in to the subject of game-music associations, which are brilliant. My favourites:

Half-Life 2 and The Great Destroyer, by Low: two of the best things about planet Earth released at the same time – it was a good November. To this day I’ve never actually listened to Low while playing Half-Life 2, because I like Half-Life 2’s in-game music, but I alternated between the two so reliably that the connection forged nonetheless, and now I can’t stop at those weathered, deserted seaside shacks overlooking the glassy sargasso without hearing the exultant Walk Into The Sea, nor whack that childless dangling tyre with a crowbar and not hum a few bars of California. This is another sad one, isn’t it?

System Shock 2 and Cobra And Phases Groop Play Voltage In The Milky Night, by Stereolab: ba-ba b’dow b’dah. Bubbly futuristic electro-pop played over paranoid dystopian futuristic action RPG. I subconsciously reconciled the two by identifying this album’s off-kilter jauntiness with the hollow optimisim of Xerxes’ pre-recorded broadcasts to the long-dead crew of the Von Braun. Good save, subconscious!

Deus Ex and Voodoo Wop, by Clinic: itchy stompy scary medical drone punk played over a nocturnal interactive conspiracy theory? Well, they’re both uneasy, inaccessible and dark.

Hitman: Blood Money and Deep Cuts, by The Knife: sheer coincidence, I assure you, that I got into these at the same time and that the last screenshot I posted of Hitman was of cutting someone deeply with a knife. There’s no connection between music and game beyond the violent overtones – The Knife aren’t even that sinister, a lot of the songs are upbeat or simmeringly sexy.

Yeah, so they’re a little sinister.

A Varied Gaming Diet

The posts I’m vaguely writing in my dashboard here are getting very long and game-designy, and I’ve done a lot of that lately. So now I’m just going to tell you about everything I’m playing at the moment.

Osmos: You are a blob, propelled by firing tiny chunks of yourself behind you. Hit a smaller blob and you absorb it, hit a larger one and it absorbs you. It’s a serene, slow and hypnotic game-ification of some of the most fundamental principles of physics, which at first makes it boring, but later transforms it into something beautiful. One branch of levels involves blobs with gravitational pull, and once you’ve got four of those bouncing around and you turn on orbit prediction, watching the curve of your future motion flex, curl and invert as you drift through the gamespace is an extraordinary glimpse of pure mathematics at its most disarming.

Civilization IV: Having played Civilization Revolution on the Nintendo DS enough to a) get Civ and b) get that this was a travesty of it, I finally felt less daunted by the full game. So far I’m getting the same absorbing satisfaction from it that I get from Galactic Civilizations, but it feels somehow watered down. It’s just as complex, sometimes more so, but potential sites for cities don’t seem to vary in quality anything like as much as planets do in Gal Civ, and so I’m less inclined to bicker over them. No-one really has anything I want in Civ, and I’m only really crushing them because winning by cultural influence is too dull.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: Can’t talk about this, since I’m playing on PC and have reviewed it for PC Gamer. As a tip, though, I’ll say that everyone should try Hard mode once.

Half-Life 2: Synergy: Graham and I are playing through the whole game in co-op with this – a co-op mod. It also supports Episode One and Two, which we’re hoping to complete around the time Valve at least say something about Episode Three. We just finished Nova Prospekt today.

AI War: Preposterous co-op space conquest game in which tens of thousands of ships clash over vast networks of up to eighty planets, each of which is as large as a conventional RTS map. I’m still in the tutorials, but the tutorials are good.

Gratuitous Space Battles: Sort of like ‘Space Battle Manager 2080’: you design the ships and fleets but the battles are hands off. I like the concept, but the tutorial is five hundred and sixteen text-box interrupts that I am not even close to having the patience to read, so I have no idea how to play.

Team Fortress 2: In which I play a class I like right up until we need to win, when I switch to Soldier. Every now and then, though, you hamstring a Scout mid-air and all is right with the world.

Spelunky: I am always playing Spelunky. I’ve now completed it twice in my 1,000 attempts. It’s coming to Xbox Live Arcade.

Champions Online: I’m a level 16 Gadgeteer called Angel of Beth. The game is like City of Heroes after a design-flaw epidemic, and it’s a testament to City of Heroes that it’s still not half bad. I have a more specific post brewing about those two games, and a third imaginary one.

A Two Hour Patch For My Two Day Game

I’ve just put up a new version of the game I made last weekend, Scanno Domini. You encounter randomly generated enemy robots, scan them to unlock their parts, then kill them and take all their guns, shields and engines for yourself. Grab the new version here.

If you do play it, I’d love to know what you thought of it – I’ve been really surprised by the feedback so far.

This version fixes a few significant bugs I didn’t have time to test during the compo – the competition version will stay as it is for judging purposes, of course, I’m just putting this up for anyone who wants to have fun with it. The key changes are:

• Choice of resolutions – anything up to 1920×1200. The game will remember your choice and not ask you again.
• Fixed a crash relating to being able to fire while dead. Duhhh.
• Fixed a bug preventing enemies from sensing when you shoot or touch them – they now turn to try and find you.
• Fixed a lot of erratic behaviour with the scanner – it’ll now scan all the new tech the bot has in one go.
• Fixed a problem with bot behaviour that made The Ominous Event extremely hard to recover from – they’ll wander off on their own once you’re down now.
• Fixed a bug causing some bots to spawn ‘blind’, with no vision cone. It was kind of cute, but causing problems down the line.

Sometime after Christmas, I think I may try a 48 hour sprint with Gunpoint. Getting so much done in such a short time is exhilarating, and it could really use a burst of progress to get it to a point where it makes sense.

A Tale Of Arabian Nights

I just played my first full game of Tales of Arabian Nights, with my friends Chris and Pip. It’s a board game that’s very story driven: each turn you have an ‘encounter’, and choose a vague verb for how to deal with it: aid, pray, rob, follow, avoid, etc. Then another player looks up and reads out a more detailed account of what happened, and how it affects you. These chain together into a journey, and you win by accumulating Story points and Destiny ones. This was my character’s story: Continued

A Successful Spelunky Run

After 223 failed attempts, I have completed the Xbox version of Spelunky. Here’s what happened. I’ll name some enemies and items involved, but won’t spoil how I defeated the final boss. Continued

A Story Of Plane Seats And Class

I think stand up comics do a lot of plane food material because they travel a lot for their work, and travel is boring, and boredom gets you thinking. This is how I’ve come back from a trip with 3,000 words about my seat. I’ll put it up in parts, and since I don’t have any photos of most of it, I’m going to illustrate it with pictures from an unrelated adventure. Continued

A Story Of Heroism In Alien Swarm

This is great, people keep linking me to things I wrote ages ago and forgot about, so I can link them here. Snowskeeper Ferenczy points out this, something I wrote very fast after a game of Alien Swarm one night that seemed necessary to report.

“Our main gunner, a Special Weapons guy with the Minigun I coveted, ran ahead and got himself infested. I had my medic gun out, but he panicked, ran away, bumped into a door and exploded in a shower of slithering facehuggers. We all just kind of looked at each other.”

A Snowy Ramble On What Makes Games ‘Different Every Time’

It’s snowing, and I have a mic that make me audible outdoors!

So I got mildly snowed on while I rambled about board games as roguelikes, what matters when making games ‘different every time’, and how Dune Imperium pulls it off so well.

A Snoop At Gunpoint’s Labs

Last week I added two new gadgets to Gunpoint and added test levels for eight of them, to give you a custom-built space to try them out and learn how they work. At the same time, coincidentally, John finished the level art for the labs of the company who make these things. I wanted them to have functional-but-trendy offices above ground, and straight up supervillain labs beneath. The stuff he’s actually produced is way cooler than I’d imagined. Click this for big: Continued

A Slice Of Fried Gold Rush

Having played about ten rounds on TF2’s shiny new map today, it remains enormous fun. It’s mostly the game-mode rather than this specific map I love: that your progress is so plainly visible, and related to a physical object in the world, gives it a drama and immediacy that control points and capture tallies don’t come close to.

Splitting it into sub-maps like Dustbowl is also very smart: the map is cleverly designed to make that very last stretch to the final checkpoint of each map mercilessly exposed and close to the defenders’ spawn, and fighting for that last stretch makes the match feel close, even when it’s really not. A few times as attackers it’s felt like we were inches from victory just because we had the cart so close to the final checkpoint on the first of the three map segments. In truth, even if we’d made it we’d have been utterly screwed on the next two much tougher legs without any spare time in the bank.

Which raises the other main point: we’re really not very good at attacking. The game mode sounds like it would be impossibly hard for the attackers, but our playtests at Valve showed almost the opposite: more often than not the cart tipped into the final cap and blew the shit out of the place. The game was harder for attackers back then, too – the cart gave neither ammo nor health to those near it.

This leads me to the conclusion that it’s going to get progressively easier to attack and harder to defend, until it’s about even. I’ve learnt from experience – if I hadn’t already predicted it – that initial “omg so imbalanced” reactions to Valve stuff are generally disproved with time. I was dead wrong about the last cap on Badlands – now that players have learnt to defend it well, it’s a mercy that it’s so fast to capture if you do manage to break through. Hopefully once we all know the routes better, formulate counters to killer Sentry positions and learn to have fewer than nine medics per team, attackers are going to have a chance. For now, though, I’d just like to see that cinematic physics explosion once.

Update: After some disastrous Demomanning this lunchtime, I gave up trying to be a team player and went back to Spy. When you’re a defender disguised as an attacker, the cart heals you, so you can actually survive as much spy-checking as the attackers are likely to be able to put on you with all the fire they’re taking elsewhere. Then if they reach it, you can reveal instantly to block the push.

In my experience so far, they tend to be extremely surprised by this and take several revolver bullets to the eyes before they competently react to the situation. Since their life-span is usually limited at this point, what damage you take from the encounter is then regenerated by the cart when you re-don your disguise. At one point I stood on top of the cart, disguised as an enemy Heavy, yelling abuse at my ostensible team: “ENTIRE TEAM IS BABIES!”. It’s not really applicable versus concentrated attacks, but it lets one player completely halt the trickle of lucky breaks that can otherwise inch the thing forwards and prevent rollback.

Once things heat up, of course, I go rogue and surgically remove the Medics from the team. More than most maps, Gold Rush has a very clear frontline, which lets Medics hang safely back round the corner from their patients. That’s a bitch for the damage-dealing classes to deal with.

A Short Script For An Animated 60s Heist Movie

A Disney animator named James Lopez once posted some character concepts for a 60s heist movie he wanted to make, and I just found them the other day, via Charlie Czechowski.

When you look at them, you immediately want to see it. I wanted to see it so much I wrote it. Continued

A Riposte To Valve’s Defense Of PC Gaming

For when Deus Ex runs at double-speed on your dual-core processor, Assassin’s Creed adds compulsory black bars to your 4:3 monitor, Crysis locks off options you know your graphics card can handle, or your newly installed Mass Effect refuses to run because your broadband is down, bookmark this image. Come back here, watch it a few more times, and feel the flappy-limbed catharsis. I know I will.

I feel like this all the time.

Via this awesome thread Tim found in his Google Blogs RSS feed for the term ‘PC Gamer’. What say you to that, O champions of the medium?

A Minecraft Diary And My Black Ops Review

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Continued

A Leftfield Solution To An XCOM Disaster

This story starts exactly like the last great mission I had in an XCOM game: I kinda took on two missions at once. And everyone got tired from the first one, so we had to send our B-team on the other: to rescue a VIP. Continued

A Hollow Victory In MGS V

Just pulled off the most amazing performance in a timed destruction mission in Metal Gear Solid V, galloping from one tank convoy to the next, destroying them and calling in supply drops at my next position with perfect efficiency for 13 minutes straight.

2 minutes left, sprinted to put myself between two tanks and a guard-infested checkpoint they were trying to reach. De-roaded one, nearly killed by the other. Scrambled to cover, lay on my back headshotting 8 incoming dudes through choking smoke, then, close to death, pulse pounding and soaked in my own blood, crawled back out into the crashed tank’s line of fire to finish it off with the last of my rockets – and destroyed it with 15 seconds to spare.

Spent them lying in the grass, praying no-one else would find me, listening to my character gasp for air through her own blood.

Game’s grade for my performance: C
Video: came out with a black screen throughout