TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

A Different Way To Level Up

Levelling up is pretty much the heart of RPGs, because it does these cool things:

• Makes you feel like you’re achieving something by playing.
• Gives you new abilities to try at well-paced intervals.
• Lets you enjoy feeling more powerful than you used to be.

All this makes repetitive tasks feel worthwhile and even fun, which is particularly useful in a massively multiplayer game, because you don’t want players to get through all your content quickly, get bored and stop paying you a monthly fee. Continued

A Different Idea For Ending BioShock

BioShock Spoilers

This is my idea, in ten steps, for how BioShock could have unfolded after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office. It was written in 2009, but coming back to it in 2020, I feel like I should clarify a couple of things at the top:

• Although I did vaguely try to limit myself to stuff that’s not too outlandish, I actually have no idea what it’s like to make a game of this kind so I don’t claim my version is practical in scope.
• It obviously comes from dissatisfactions with BioShock’s actual ending, but I’m not imagining those were down to a lack of ideas. I know games are made under unseen constraints, triple-A games triply so. It’s very easy to sit back and do armchair game design, and it’s also very fun, and you also can’t stop me, so here we are.

Continued

A Day’s Experimentation With Heat Signature’s Nebula Generation

John recently did some new sprites for us to construct nebulae out of, and I couldn’t help tinkering with the way we randomly generate your galaxy to make use of them. The ‘galaxy’ is what I call the entire game world, and a single clump of gas clouds within that is a ‘region’. I started with generating a single region from these sprites, combining two colours, then tried generating a bunch of those to make a galaxy. The latter part turns out to look awful if you use more than a couple of colours, so for now they each have a definite theme. Continued

A Couple Of Things!

• I’m in one of those swamp months, where everything seems to take five times longer than it ever possibly could, and usually go dramatically wrong at three different points. This is why I was in the office until nine tonight, despite working on a section for the issue after the one whose deadline the others were crunching to. Also there was free junk food and liquor, by way of Ross’s efficient repurposing of the bribes we receive to incentivise and energise overtimers.
   
• The one thing that did go swiftly and without hitches was a short story I wrote to submit to the Machine Of Death collection, a set of short stories based around the concept put forth in this comic:
  

  I’m going to put it up here in a day or two, once I’ve tinkered with it a bit. It’s a little over six-thousand words, divided into five short chapters, and covering a lot more time and events than my 50,000 word novel was ever going to. I’m not trying anything of book-length again until I’ve done a few more of these – it’s gratifying and intoxicating to fly through something like this without sweating it. I’m not keen to go back to a vast mess of ideas without enough narrative string to tie them together, no matter how I re-squish them.

• Lastly, Heroes was excellent. I hope they don’t do too many of these single-story episodes or it could become Lost (there is not a scale by which I could measure how little I cared about anyone or anything in the last episode of that), but Glasses Guy is one of the few characters who can carry one with ease. The actor has always been superb, taking a very tough role to make interesting and managing to give him an uneasy mix of creepiness, likeability and mystique. All while wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even better without them, though, and he’s convincing enough as both a loving father and a demon that even towards the end, you’re not 100% sure which side he’s going to come down on. And ultimately it’s the one you believed in slightly more, which is itself a feat. Not just to act each well, but to know exactly how well you’re doing it and stop short of perfection on the one your character’s heart wouldn’t quite be in. 24, Lost and Studio 60 are all losing it at the moment, I’m so pleased to see the most flawed show of the lot outshining them all.

A Cheating Supreme Commander AI’s Base

If you saw our final assault on the red base in the last big PCG game, imagine that being crushed. It didn’t even take them long to rebuild. Hopefully we’ll have time to make a video of this one too.

A Big List Of Music I Like

The New Pornographers
The Laws Have Changed; A Testament To Youth In Verse; Chump Change
Genre: dazzling, explosive power-pop

Belle And Sebastian
Sleep The Clock Around; I’m A Cuckoo; Seymour Stein
Genre: meek, fey indie-pop

The Delgados
Favours; The Light Before We Land; Witness
Genre: majestic, orchestral indie-pop

Arcade Fire
Tunnels; Lies; In The Back Seat

Architecture In Helsinki
What’s In Store; The Cemetary; Wishbone

Clinic
The Magician; Welcome; Thank You For Living

Decemberists
July, July; Angel Won’t You Call Me?; The Soldiering Life

Gomez
Do One; Catch Me Up; Rex Kramer

Low
Step; Canada; California

Mates Of State
Goods (All In Your Head); Whiner’s Bio; Ha Ha

Radar Brothers
You And The Father; Shifty Lies; Rock Of The Lake

Seedling
The Upshot; Endora; High On The Downside

Sleater-Kinney
Let’s Call It Love; The Fox; What’s Mine Is Yours

Smog
Feather By Feather; Lazy Rain; River Guard

Stereolab
Speedy Car; Cybele’s Reverie; Metronomic Underground

Yo La Tengo
Moonrock Mambo; Damage; Autumn Sweater

AC Newman
The Town Halo; Miracle Drug; On The Table

Add N To (X)
Party Bag; Hit For Cheese; Metal Fingers In My Body

Air Miami
Dolphin Expressway; I Hate Milk; Sweet Little Heartbreaker

Aluminum Group
A Blur In Your Vision; Two Lights; Rrose Salivy’s Valise

At The Drive-In
One-Armed Scissor; Alpha Centauri; Pattern Against User

Ballboy
Nobody Really Knows Anything; Where Do The Nights Of Sleep Go To When They Do Not Come To Me?; I’ve Got Pictures Of You In Your Underwear

Belly
Super-Connected; Untitled And Unsung; Now They’ll Sleep

Ben Folds
Landed; Rockin’ The Suburbs; Not The Same

Ben Folds’ Five
Army; One Angry Dwarf And Two-Hundred Solemn Faces; Narcolepsy

Black Box Recorder
Girl Singing In The Wreckage; Goodnight Kiss; Weekend

Camera Obscura
Lunar Sea; Eighties Fan; Teenager

Cat Power
Nude As The News; Maybe Not; Speak For Me

Cinerama
Health And Efficiency; Love; Superman

Clint Boon Experience!
Comet Theme Number One; Only One Way I Can Go; Seventeen And Over

Cuban Boys
Cuban Boy 2000; Disco Boy; Kenny

Dirty Three
No Stranger Than That; Sea Above, Sky Below; Hope

Flaming Lips
Race For The Prize; Slow Motion; The Gash

French
Porn Shoes; Canada Water; The Stars, The Moon, The Sun And The Clouds

Go! Team
The Power Is On; Bottle Rocket; Panther Dash

Godspeed, You Black Emperor! *
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!**; Moya; Blaise Bailey Finnegan III

Goldfrapp
Tiptoe; Lovely Head; Horse Tears

Hefner
The Sweetness Lies Within; The Sad Witch; Wicker Girl

Interpol
One; Obstacle One; Obstacle Two

Jeffrey Lewis
The East River; The Chelsea Hotel; Springtime

Jim O’Rourke
Movie On The Way Down; Something Big; Through The Night Softly

Ladybug Transistor
A Burial At Sea; Choking On Air; Song For The Ending Day

Ladytron
He Took Her To A Movie; Flicking Your Switch; The Way That I Found You

M83
Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun; On A White Lake Near A Green Mountain; Teen Angst

Modest Mouse
Float On; Life Like Weeds; Doing The Cockroach

Múm
Green Grass Of Tunnel; Weeping-Rock Rock; I’m Nine Today

Nena
?; Just A Dream; Rette Mich

Pavement
Roll With The Wind; Elevate Me Later; Unfair

Pernice Brothers
Number Two; Seven Thirty; Weakest Shade Of Blue

Pram
Penny Arcade; Mother Of Pearl; Track Of The Cat

Primitives
Laughing Up My Sleeve; Nothing Left To Say; I Almost Touched You

Prolapse
One Illness; The Government Of Spain; Cacophony Number A

Quasi
Better Luck Next Time; I Never Want To See You Again; A Case Of No Way Out

Radiohead
Sit Down, Stand Up; Fog; Dollars And Cents

Sigur Rós
Svefn-G-Englar; 01; Vidrar Vel Til Lofturasa

Ted Leo And The Pharmacists
Me And Mia; Walking To Do; Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?

Telstar Ponies
A Little Cloud; The Fall Of Little Summer; Sail Her On

Trembling Blue Stars
St Paul’s Cathedral At Night; The Ghost Of An Unkissed Kiss; Haunted Days

Ugly Casanova
Hotcha Girls; Barnacles; Parasites

Virgin-Whore Complex
Wise And Mighty Emperor; Unrequited Love; I See More

Wilco
Jesus, Etc; Theologians; Company In My Back

Suspicious Developments unveils legitimate rebranding exercise

BATH, UNITED KINGDOM – June 8, 2012 – Suspicious Developments, acclaimed developer of nothing so far, today announced a comprehensive overhaul of its brand and image. The centrepiece of the radical new look is a bold logo update that dramatically refreshes its January 2012 predecessor, designed by experimental UK startup m.bezl for a reported £1.3 million. Continued

Suspicious Developments headquarters broken into

BATH, UNITED KINGDOM – January 21, 2012 – The headquarters of UK game developer Suspicious Developments were broken into last night by the company’s own director, Tom Francis.

Continued

Suspicious Developments announces existence

BATH, UNITED KINGDOM – January 24, 2012 – UK game developer Suspicious Developments today announced that it exists. The news marks a major upturn in the firm’s previously disappointing existence results, and a year-on-year existence increase of divide by zero error.

“No-one could have foreseen this,” said company director Tom Francis, shortly before the result. Francis controls 100% of the company’s shares, beating its second largest stakeholder Sylvester McCoy, who controls 0% and is not aware the company exists.

“I don’t know who you are,” McCoy said.

25th Hour

I inflicted both Die Hard 2 and Legends Of The Fall on myself this weekend, both abysmal wastes of time. I would like to suggest that Die Hard 2 is to Die Hard what The Phantom Menace is to The Empire Strikes Back. I would further put it to you that most of the relentless misfortunes of the imbecilic characters in Legends Of The Fall might have been averted if there had been more than one woman in the film’s universe. I was forced to watch both because I was too tired to move once they had started, and the remote was way over there.

But! Bank holiday weekend films can end on a high note! 25th Hour, 10pm, on BBC Two. Profoundly worth watching, primarily for the hilarious DEA agent duo. But also because of Ed Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and The Other Guy as horrifically mismatched friends. It’s mildly well-known for Ed Norton’s character’s reflection’s racist rant about New Yorkers, which is riveting in the same way as a car accident.

I have to stop writing now, or the film will actually start before I post this, and the one person who would otherwise have seen this between now and it being too late would not in fact see it at all, and it would be too late.

Edit: That DEA Agent search in full:

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Maybe it’s your posture. Posture’s very important.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
No, it’s this Castro convertible. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s kinda… kinda lumpy.

MONTY
Get it over with.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
I just don’t understand. It looks like such a nice sofa. How much did you pay for this sofa, Ms Riviera?
…
Maybe it’s the padding.

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Ho yeah, could be the padding.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
Probably the padding. Yeah, there’s something lumpy in here, Mr. Brogan.
…
Sheeeeeeeit.
You know, it’s a good thing I found this? It’ll make your sofa much more comfortable to sit on.

24: Drink When…

• Someone annoying is kidnapped.
• A terrorist informs another terrorist that “Everything is proceeding as planned.”
• A terrorist assumes Jack is dead.
• The person in charge of CTU makes a bad call.
• Jack goes rogue.
• Jack is fired.
• Jack is arrested.
• Jack breaks out of CTU.
• Jack is reinstated to CTU.
• “Protocol.”
• Someone gives a hopelessly vague order (“Take precautions.” “Make something happen.”)
• Someone gives a redundant order (“Proceed as planned.” “Execute the next stage.”)
• The president screws up a common phrase (“Keep me closely posted.” “We’ll cross that bridge when the situation presents itself.”)
• Someone at CTU has to go behind their boss’s back to help Jack.
• “We don’t have time!”

24

I didn’t like 24 at first – it was exciting for a few episodes, but after three hours of excitement you start to lose interest a bit. There’s also something rather comic about the this guy having ordeals that last precisely 24 hours every few years, so I watched a bit of series five last time I was in the States to laugh at it. The show has a formula that’s easy to mock, because there are only a certain number of things that can happen within its parameters, and over one-hundred hours of programming they tend to happen quite a few times each. There’s a mole inside CTU! The boss of CTU is being a dick! Jack’s gone rogue! There’s a mole in the government! That terrorist plot was just a cover for a much larger one, involving nukes! The least interesting character’s been kidnapped! Oh no, a bomb!

But there’s a fairly smooth gradient from mocking something to enjoying its silliness without laughing, and from there to just enjoying it. And by that time, something truly extraordinary has usually happened. Every series of 24 has a handful of moments that make you take your tongue out of your cheek and just gape. They come from the fact that terrorist thrillers generally revolve around forcing the good guys to make impossible decisions, and in Jack Bauer they’ve lumped themselves with a good guy so unflinchingly logical and ruthlessly dedicated that such decisions are trivial. So to create the pivotal moments, the writers have to put him in absurdly difficult situations, in which he has to do everything short of shooting his own daughter for just the slimmest hope of stopping a terrorist plot that could kill thousands more.

Jack’s now so used to sacrificing himself or innocent lives for the greater good that he usually saves people the bother of asking him to do it by jumping in there and volunteering. At one point a terrorist leader calls an Amnesty lawyer to protect an accomplice CTU have in custody from the torturous methods they need to use to get the information they need from him in time to stop a warhead headed towards- I forget, probably Los Angeles. Jack’s solution is to release the prisoner, immediately resign, then break his fingers in the parking lot as a private citizen in order to protect CTU from liability. This has been read as advocacy of torture as an interrogation method in general, of course, but that’s over-simplifying. The reason not to legalise these methods is that you can never be certain that their use will save lives in any given circumstance. Jack is always certain, to an extent that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The truly horrible calls don’t come up too often, but that’s part of what makes them so much fun to watch. You’ve been watching Jack be almost effortlessly ruthless about so many tough decisions that seeing something make him hesitate – even if only for a few seconds – is incredibly powerful. There’s a moment at the very end of season three, which involves some of the nastiest thing’s Jack’s had to do (including one with a fire-axe and a close friend) when he’s sitting alone in his car, with no urgent mission for the first time in twenty-four hours, and just sobs.

This new series is off to a good start: he’s already had to do something that made him both throw up and cry, and- well, the thing that happens while he’s doing that, for those who’ve seen it. The aforementioned silliness of one man getting caught up in this many twenty-four-hour ordeals probably puts people off, but I’m hoping they’ll keep going for another five seasons. As it progresses it gets both darker and more absurd, making it more entertaining in diametrically opposing ways. Jack gets more interesting as he loses more of his humanity and his family feature less, and I have a feeling Kim’s going to cop it this series. The plots get more intricate as they try to avoid repetition and simultaneously up the stakes – though neither very hard; this is American primetime after all.

Season six also has one of my favourite actors: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi – whom they somehow thought would be able to play a middle-Eastern character convincingly – normally speaks English with a perfect Received Pronounciation accent, so it’s always rather weird watching him pretend to wrestle with the language in his Arab roles. But he’s the main reason I like Star Trek – his Dr Bashir was the first truly likeable character I’d seen in any sci-fi, and the reason I gave it a chance. Here his role isn’t a terribly likeable one – he just has to look angry all the time – but I still find him endlessly watchable. If he turns out to be the series arch-villain I’ll be especially happy.

2013

This has obviously been the best year of my life. When working on Gunpoint got tough towards the end, and the amount of sustained effort required exceeded my intrinsic determination, I made a guilty little list of all the things that releasing a game might improve about my life in the best-case scenario: Gunpoint motivation.txt. Nothing on it was anything like as good as the reality. Continued

2010: The Year In Forty Photos

You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse. Continued

2008 In Games That Were Better Than Other Games

I like those gaming-moments-of-the-year lists, but they don’t always tell you what the best games were or even what they were like. So mine’s a games-of-the-year list, but with defining moments instead of descriptions. There’s often a particular experience in a game that exemplifies its appeal, usually the one that springs to mind when you fancy playing it. I’m talking about those rather than highlights or secrets – though often they coincide. This’ll be spoiler-free – indeed, it will at times say nothing meaningful at all – and in descending order: best first.
 

It’s: a huge open-world action RPG set in Washington two hundred years after a global thermonuclear apocalypse. Wilted fifties chic mixed with zombies being decapitated in slow-motion.

Defining experience: The Oasis

I’m not going to say anything about where or what Oasis is, and the screenshot above isn’t from it. Most people probably complete Fallout 3 without ever finding it – I know I did, first time through. Oasis is just the crowning example of what made Fallout 3 my favourite game this year, and the main thing it has over Oblivion.

I’d heard of it, but I wasn’t looking when I found it. I was just investigating some interesting rocks, as one likes to do on a Sunday. The wasteland is generally pretty flat, but I’d found a complex network of valleys and crags that looked like they might contain something interesting. They did.

Despite its size, and despite is apparent barreness, every interesting-looking place actually is interesting. It doesn’t have Guilds like Oblivion, so its content isn’t organised into neat little mini-careers your character can systematically complete. It’s sown evenly throughout its blasted landscape, leaving little pockets of story, character, treats, secrets and unique treasures.

It’s a brave choice. More people will miss more of Fallout 3’s most extraordinary moments than they did with Oblivion. But once you realise it, once your pessimism about this next house, cave or Vault being a generic one has been disproved often enough, it evokes an explorer’s excitement that I don’t get anywhere else.

But I wish: the skills were more fairly balanced. Small Guns and Repair are just flat out more effective than the others. Melee and Unarmed are crippled because you can’t target bodyparts, and Lockpicking gets its arse kicked by Science because most locked things have a hackable terminal to unlock them.
 

It’s: a co-operative horror shooter for four people, in which the tide of zombies and superzombies intensifies towards the end of each hour-long campaign.

Defining experience: “TANK!”
“I’ll throw a-”
“Oh God, I’m on fire!”
“So am I!”
“So am I!”
“Hunter!”
“So’s the Hunter!”
“I’ve got him. Look out for the Smo- ack!”
“I’m coming!”
“Help!”
“I’m coming!”
“Aaaargh!”
“I can’t move right now, and I’m still very much on fire, but I am coming!”
“Aaaargh! Look out for the-”
“Aaaaaaargh!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAHHH!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAAAAAAHH!”
“Heheh. Again?”

But I wish: there was a difficulty mode where the first four levels are frantic, but the finale isn’t impossible. And that Versus mode was just the latter two maps of a campaign, and the Director would give the losing side the Tank earlier or at the same time as it did the winning side.
 

It’s: a squishy building game in which you conjoin sentient goo-balls with different physical properties to reach your goal.

Defining experience: A Blustery Day

Not my favourite level – that’s Red Carpet – but Blustery Day is more typical of World of Goo. A new style of art that the level’s theme exquisitely, a booming score far too stirring for a physics game, and a smart new kind of puzzle that seems impossible until it occurs to you, obvious thereafter.

But I wish: there were fewer simple levels. Early on this makes sense, but later there are one or two where the task is simple but daunting – building a very long bridge, or a very tall tower. I never hit a difficulty spike in World of Goo – it’s eerily close to flawless – but on these few the challenge felt fussy rather than creative.
 

It’s: a creative adventure in which you play every phase of a species’ life, from the microscopic to the interstellar, designing how it evolves along the way.

Defining experience: “Holy shit, what’s that?”

Spore’s riddled with Star Trek references, but there’s a more profound one that’s not explicit: here’s the game where you seek out new life. There’s an actual galaxy to explore, and you’ll meet species that perhaps one other human has ever seen: their creator.

I know a lot of people got pretty hung up on what they expected from Spore, or what else Spore could have been – and that is an interesting discussion. But I hope it didn’t blind anyone to what Spore actually is: an extraordinary exploration of human creativity, and the home of the most astonishing creatures I’ve ever seen.

But I wish: the other stages were integrated into the Space stage: fight an eco disaster by designing an anti-virus that you then control in the Cell game, impress a warlike race by beating their champion in the Creature game, claim a planet without a colony module by beaming down and starting a Tribe, or mind-control an enemy leader from orbit and take his planet by winning a Civilization game.
 

It’s: a sci-fi action RPG with guns and science-magic in which you captain a spaceship to search for a single evil alien.

Defining experience: “I’ve had enough of your snide insinuations.”

Actually that’s not the defining experience, but anyone who’s played it and said that line knows why it springs to mind whenever you try to nail down why Mass Effect is so much better than ordinary RPGs. For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, be sure to say it if you ever get the chance.

For me the defining experience was when I’d landed on a new planet, and was asked by security to surrender my weapons. I wasn’t going to do it. Thinking like a gamer, I’d assume the designers would never kill me while I’m defenseless. But I’d become so wrapped up in the character that BioWare’s writers, my decisions, and Jennifer Hale’s exemplary voice acting had collaborated to produce that I wasn’t thinking like a gamer anymore. I was thinking go to hell. You want my weapons? Come and fucking take them, see what happens.

I won’t spoil what the outcome was, but the moral of the story is this: trust Mass Effect. It’s so well written and exciting that you’ll find yourself slipping into a role that’s very much your own – stick with it, and you’ll find the story moulds around it beautifully.

But I wish: exploring a new planet felt a bit more like exploring a new planet. The Mako fun-bus was jarringly at odds with the serious tone of the game, I’d much rather have beamed down on foot.