1. Settling

I’m Morocco. I spend a while exploring in opposite directions with my starting warrior and a scout-type unit. 15 years in, I notice I don’t have a city. This is also when I notice that my scout is called a ‘Settler’ and that I was meant to use him to found a city almost immediately. I should mention that I’ve only ever played one game of Civ V before this.

2. Producing

Desperate to catch up with the other civs, who I presume are way ahead of me now, my city’s first project is to train a new Settler. It’s almost complete when I discover that a new rule prevents your population from growing while training a Settler, even if you have plenty of food.

3. Expanding

I meet the other civs, who aren’t as far ahead as I feared, and frantically grab all the unclaimed land around them with new cities. I focus on researching and building culturey stuff, and I’m told that to win a culture victory you need tourism, and to generate tourism you need a great writer to write something great. This is not my understanding of tourism, but OK.

4. Diplomacy

The other two civs on my island are both Friendly towards me, so I haven’t built any military. The other two civs on my island notice this and declare war on me.

5. Economics

The only things I have a lot of are cities, because I got paranoid about being behind, and money, because I haven’t figured out what money is for. You can use it to buy units instantly instead of waiting to train them, but this is limited to one per city each turn. That said, I have a lot of cities.

6. War

– I buy a dozen squads of the best archers I can.
– I wipe out both their militaries in a few turns.
– Portugal pleas for peace after I take the first city – I decline.
– Indonesia offers me money, gems and a whole city to spare them – I decline.
– As I take each city, I’m told I can occupy it or make it a puppet – I decline.
– I burn them to the ground.

When Indonesia is gone and Portugal loses her last city, the queen opens a dialogue.
“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.”

7. Exploring

The whole island is mine now, so I build new cities in the ashes and focus on culture again. When I get the technology to travel overseas, I tell all of my military units to go exploring, and they spread out in all directions to find out what the world looks like.

It turns out to be two big islands. The other island is occupied by three civs, suggesting that none of them tried skipping military to build culturey stuff.

8. Tourism

I’ve trained a few great writers and now artists, but I’m still not seeing how I’m going to crush three other civilisations with the pathetic amount of tourism they’ve generated. Looking further down the tech tree, though, I see that Archeology lets you find Artefacts that also generate tourism – in fact, they seem to be the only other thing that does.

9. Archeology

Once I’ve researched it, I stop everything. Every city in my empire is now only allowed to produce archeologists to find artefacts and Museums to house them. As the archeologists pop out of their universities in their Indiana Jones hats, I send them on epic journeys to each of the 27 ruins scattered all across the world.

10. Ruins

Archeology turns out to be really cool. The sites aren’t placed arbitrarily: they’re the locations of actual battles or important events from earlier in the game. So the sites on my island are all rusty Portugese swords and Moroccan breastplates from that time I had to kill all those jerks.

I’m a reformed military power now 100% devoted to studying and cataloging its own bloody history.

11. Foreign Digs

When my fleets of archeologists reach other island, I have to ply the other leaders with spices and cotton to persuade them to let me move through their territory. The artefacts I dig up there are traces of their early clashes with Barbarians when they first settled their lands.

When I dig them up and put them in my museums, the leaders are furious. “I meant no offense by stealing your heritage,” is one of my options, so I take it and everyone calms down.

12. Shelf Space

Very quickly I hit a very big problem. If you don’t have enough space in your museums to display an artefact when you dig it up, the option to keep it isn’t available. You’re stuck with the other one, which is to leave it in place and make a Historical Site, which for some reason loses you the artefact and generates no tourism, casting serious doubts on the competence of whoever’s in charge of setting up these Historical Sites.

Civ never lets you defer a decision: you’re not allowed to click ‘next turn’ until you’ve made all your choices. I have a LOT of digs going on, so I have to sell all my trade goods to the other civs, sack my entire army and sell off a valuable building just to buy one museum, and I still end up losing 4 or 5 artefacts forever.

13. Influence

When I’ve finally found and housed every interesting thing in the world, I have to play a weird little minigame where you rearrange your artefacts and paintings to create special themed exhibitions for bonus points, which is not how I imagined my life as a world leader.

My tourism is now close to eclipsing one of the other civ’s Culture score, which’ll mean I become Influential over them, like on Klout. Also like Klout, this has absolutely no effect, except that once I’ve done it to everyone I win the game.

14. Music

Some of my culture buildings start producing Great Musicians, which turn out to be the other way to boost Tourism. You can march them into enemy lands and have them perform a concert there, which deals a boost to your Tourism, and a blow to my understanding of what this game means by the word Tourism. This consumes the Musician.

15. Concerts

One good concert is all it takes to win over the least cultured civ. Shortly after, the next one succumbs just from all those excellently themed museums I have. The last civ has a higher Culture score, but I’m outpacing them, and my Great Musicians are getting Greater with each one I produce. The closest piece of their territory to me is an empty wheat field on the West coast. My latest and Greatest musician clambers out of the sea, a little Mozart looking fella, plays three jaunty notes on his violin in the empty wheat field, then abruptly vanishes.

The concert works, the last civilisation finds me Influential, and I have, in a sense that seems increasingly abstract, conquered the world.

Analysis

I loved the story of my civ, but I have to say I spent most of the game disengaged. This took 10 hours, and it’s only taken me a thousand words to tell you everything of interest that happened in it. The last time I played Galactic Civilizations 2, I literally wrote a book.

There’s just so much faffing. The actual decisions I make, like “Let’s make loads of archeologists”, take a dozen or more turns to enact, and each of those turns involves five or six mandatory micro-decisions that aren’t individually interesting.

You have to choose a new project for this city. You have to pick a policy. You have to propose a resolution to congress. You have to tell this unit where to move. You have to tell this unit where to move. You have to tell this unit where to move. That blocked where the first unit was going to move, so now you have to tell the first unit where to move.

In each case, there’s only one course of action that makes sense for your larger-scale objective, like increasing Culture. So these aren’t really decisions, they’re just work.

It’s still addictive, because each little system is ticking down to some reward or accomplishment that feels sort of good. But the part I really enjoy is the high level decision making, and the overall story of my civilisation’s journey that results from it. And that’s so sparsely spread among thousands of uninteresting micro-decisions that doing it all again seems daunting.

“Half an hour later, for reasons I won’t go into, I’m ramming a metal gear into a man’s eye socket until blood geysers all over my face. I’m drenched. Everyone’s screaming. Four more men are coming for me, and this blunt steel prong is all I have to kill them with.”

My preview and interview is up now.

I have to get to those stairs. The guard will shoot me if he sees me. I can’t open the building’s other entrance from the outside.

But if I Crosslink this lightswitch to the door, and I can get to it fast enough, I might be able to shut it before the guard shoots me.

A ground-level jump won’t do it: I have to hit the ground under the door going so fast that the momentum lets me skid all the way to the lightswitch faster than I could run. But from up here…

I jump. I skid. The guard draws his gun. I hit the switch. The door slams shut. I’m a genius!

The guard runs towards the door. I can’t take the stairs yet – there’s a guard up there watching the exit. I did not think this through.

I switch to Crosslink mode in a panic, and try to disconnect the handscanner he’s going to use to open the door. In my frantic rush, though, I manage to wire the door to the other handscanner – the wrong connection, the wrong way round, created instead of cut.

The guard’s at the door. I hear the handscanner check his identity. I do the only thing I can think of: hit the light switch again.

The door opened. The guard shot me just as I hit the lightswitch. The lightswitch shut the door. The door triggered the handscanner on my side. The handscanner opened the door. The door swung into the guard and knocked him out.

What I’m Working On

On my Gunpoint development to-do list, my current task is: “Do a quick run through to establish par times for levels.” Instead, in a fairly typical example of why finishing a game takes a long time, I’ve spent three solid days fixing all the things that have fundamentally broken in the first four levels since I last played them. Still, only 16 more to check!

My diary of an illusionist in Skyrim is now all online. Start from the first entry, or if you’re up to date, here’s the final one.

Hope you enjoy/enjoyed it. It totally reinvented the game for me, made the world feel dangerous in a way it hadn’t since I first started. And something about having no weapons or armour makes the experience more convincing – I found myself appreciating the scenery more, being happy to trudge through the sparkling snow on a sunny day.

It makes me really want a Skyrim Survival Mode. One where you remain realistically vulnerable at all times, and leaving a town is heart-thumpingly tense. You’d need to eat before you could sleep, and sleep once a day to stay sharp. The only impetus to risk the wilderness would be to hunt animals, gather ingredients, or hope to find something valuable enough to sell for food before you find something too fast to run from.

It’s a network of shops where, if you haven’t angered any shopkeeps thus far, you can buy almost every item in the game, and one that’s available nowhere else: the Ankh. The Ankh gives you a second life, and costs $50,000. It’s hard to earn $50,000. I have $120,000.

Before I get it, I want all the other equipment I’ll need. Most of it’s on the middle floor, but there are enemies: two boomerang tribesmen watch over the entrance to the shops, and a snail blows acid bubbles up the ladder that could help me bypass them.

I buy a shotgun from the top floor, then drop down to blow all the tribesmen away in one shot. I miss. A boomerang knocks me out of the air, nailbitingly close to a fatal pitcher plant below, and onto the snail. The snail is crushed, but the tribesmen are wild: by the time I pick myself up, one has thrown himself to his death and the other has jumped into the shops. Now he prowls them slowly, looking for me.

This is tense. I’m dying to shoot him, but it’s madness to fire in the direction of a shopkeeper. I just have to tail him at a safe distance and buy the items I need as I pass them. I’m reasonably confident he won’t turn round – and even if he does, he dropped his boomerang outside.

There’s a boomerang on sale in this shop actually. The tribesman walks up to it. He picks it up.

For a split second, I am amused. He’s going to buy a new boomerang! Silly tribesman, you don’t own material wealth!

Then my internal simulation of Spelunky’s interacting systems kicks in, and I see the next few seconds flash before my eyes with pure horror.

I run.

I jump onto the ladder, scramble up, dive away from the top floor shops, duck behind a mound of earth and cling to the ground. Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Christ.

For a second, nothing happens.

Then the Black Market explodes.

All nine shopkeepers hurl themselves into the air and start firing their shotguns in random directions. They kill the tribesman. They kill two other tribesmen. They kill frogs, pitchers, snails. One kills the slave he was selling, another kills his own dog. Two of them throw themselves to their deaths in the fury. Four of them throw themselves into a pit, where their bursts of buckshot cut each other to ribbons.

What happened was: the Tribesman walked out of the shop. He walked out of the shop with the shopkeeper’s boomerang in his hand, and he walked out of the shop without paying for it.

Shopkeepers don’t know, much less understand, who stole from them or damaged their store. Any crime, of any kind, is cause for an indiscriminate rampage that kills everything in line of sight, and a lot more besides. When that happens in the Black Market, there’s a term for it. It’s the shopstorm.

When the blasts quiet down, I crawl slowly out of my hiding place and walk carefully through the empty shops, collecting everything for free.

I find one surviving shopkeeper hopping madly around the Ankh, bouncing on the bodies of the colleagues he’s killed. I throw one of the 35 sticky bombs I’ve shoplifted at him, and he detonates a second later. I take the Ankh and the heaps of gold the shopkeepers dropped.

In four levels’ time, I’ll use the climbing gloves I stole to cling to a wall in the ice caves, directly below a collapsing platform that will fall onto me and hit the jetpack I stole, causing it to explode and kill me, wasting the Ankh I stole. But all I’m thinking right now is wow, I’m still incredibly rich.

I didn’t realise the recent Red Faction game was by the guys who made the excellent Saints Row 2, and I didn’t even realise Saints Row 2 was by the original Red Faction guys. I just rather childishly thought “Ugh, Red Faction” and ignored it. I didn’t expect it to be the first game to claim freeform destructibility and not actually be lying. And I certainly didn’t expect it to be one of my favourite games this year. Anyway, here’s a thing that happened:

I’m sandwiched between a GDF building and the compound’s armoured walls, angry APCs swarming the roads outside, when the crash happens. The cab of a large cargo truck bursts through the thick black wall in a fountain of rubble, run off the road by the careening GDF cars. The civilian driver bolts out, giving me both an opening and a free vehicle to drive through it. I clamber in and reverse out.

There’s already a similar truck parked in the garage back at the rebel base when I arrive, and I’m not entirely sure my heavier number is going to fit. I decide to find out full speed, so I not only crash headfirst into the other truck, but actually drive up its crumpled chassis and punch through the roof of the garage.

I flop limply out of the driver side door onto what remains of the roof, pick myself up and assess the damage. I figure I can make it slightly less obvious if I can just push my truck back down through ceiling, so I start pounding on its roof with my sledgehammer.

When the blast clears, I’m on a rock twenty meters away, black smoke billowing up from where the garage used to be. There’s a second detonation as the fire reaches the truck below, and the last few struts and girders clank to the floor. I back quietly away and talk to my boss.

I’ve unlocked something called The Grinder, so main plot be damned, I’m spending my salvage on making one of those. I have a little left over to buy the ability to teleport to any safehouse, so I zip to the furthest one to try it out.

It’s like a different planet, closer to Cumbria than Mars. It’s green, for one thing, and the cars are all differenty. One is a beautifully idealised designer vision of a future-car, impractically low, wide and sleek. I love it so much that I run directly towards it, am hit in the shins by a hubless hoverwheel, and somersault onto my back, beaming. I get up and hijack it – the doors open upwards! Of course they do! – and its one careful owner just says “Good luck!”

I speed off across the Martian countryside to the hostage rescue mission I picked up on arrival. The setting turns out to be a municipal building across a huge open plaza, and there’s a taxi in the parking lot so cool that I’m going to have to come back to admiring it later or no-one’s gonna get rescued today.

The guards let me stroll all the way up to the building itself before they get angry, at which point I finally try the Grinder on a live target. It charges for a second and then FOOSH! A razorblade the size of a dinnerplate has buried itself in the guard’s duodenum. Holy shit! I’m keeping this.

The Grinder swiftly clears out the ground floor – I can take little credit – but no hostages; they must be upstairs. FOOSH! One guard staggers back through a first-floor window with a blade in his diaphgragm. I have time to untie one of the three hostages before FOOSH! Another guard crashes over a balcony into the foyer, landing face-first on the razor in his skull. This is brilliant. This is every sci-fi fantasy I’ve ever had. FOOSH! A guard tries to high-kick me and finds a foreign object the size of an LP in her thigh.

Outside is an army, which I instinctively try to electrocute with the Arc-Welder before realising we’re going to have to double back. I hammer out a new backdoor to the building and lead my charges through the hole, on a painful dash to the cover of the next brick wall. FOOSH! FOOSH! FOOSH! I can’t razorblade them all, but they’re so pervasive that even in the quiet shade of a cafe I have to cut a few down to buy us a moment’s peace.

My friends make it round the quiet corner one by one, but the third girl lingers too long at the threshold to take pot-shots at the encroaching squadrons, and she’s felled. The survivors need no cajoling, we scarper for the carpark almost in unison. On arrival, we have a problem: futuro-car’s a two-seater. No wonder that bastard said ‘good luck’.

The taxi! It’s doors are portholes how cool is that? Once we’ve all climbed in, the discs of glass slide back into place and I speed off in a light drizzle of gunfire, my two fares looking completely unmoved by our plight. I’m having the time of my life.

1 Nobody’s Vault: “I looked up to find all the other students staring at me, and a trail of blood smattered across the walls leading to the limp body at my feet. I lowered my guard, and talked to the examiner. He agreed I should probably just skip the exam.”

2 Anywhere But Megaton: “I chose to exit the conversation, wait for him to turn round, then put a rusty kitchen knife I found in a toilet between his eleventh and twelfth vertebrae.”

3 The Road To Tenpenny: “I bought a dress only mildly stained with the blood of the dead, a magnificent bonnet to shade my emotionless murderer’s eyes, then pickpocketed my money back and headed up to the penthouse for some light genocide.”

4 Striking Out: “The shot ripped his right leg off at the knee, sending him pitching forward in a sprinkler-spurt of blood face-first into the dirt. All was still. The Fat Man was safe. I’ll be nice tomorrow.”

I decided to travel as far West as I could, as much to find out what would stop me as any reason to believe clues might lie this way.

I found a cave. It was called Lamplight Cavern. I went in. A twelve year-old boy told me to fuck off.

I wasn’t going to be nice today.

There’s a perk you can choose in Fallout 3 that makes you more persuasive to children. I’m serious, that’s its sole purpose. I don’t have that perk, and frankly I worry about those who do. Certainly situations do arise, like this one, where persuading a child is useful to your quest, but it’s the pre-meditation that makes this such a creepy thing to want. “Yeah, I’m probably going to need to convince some kids to do something they don’t wanna do. I’ll take it.”

I relied on raw charisma to get in. It was a society full of kids, which didn’t make a lot of sense given that they got here two hundred years ago, and they have a policy of kicking people out long before they reach child-bearing age. Luckily, though, one of the magic kids happened to know something about the android I’d made it my mission to hunt. She had a recording that confirmed the thing had acquired one of the two devices it was after.

As I’d arrived in Lamplight, someone else was leaving. Sticky. On my way out, I agreed to take him to Big Town because, well, he knew where Big Town was and I didn’t and I like places that are big.

Sticky tells randomly generated stories from modular – stupid – components. No two are ever quite the same, or interesting. He also runs off a lot. He’s one of those characters who was clearly designed to be annoying. While you can’t help but admire the developer’s resounding success, it’s hard to deduce why this was something they felt they had to achieve.

Tired not so much of Sticky wandering off – the break from his chatter was welcome – but of trying to find him again, I tried making him wear a variety of outfits before settling on a radiation suit. We weren’t headed towards any more than the normal amount of radiation, but the suit is bright yellow, and therefore easy to spot.

I had a good feeling about Big Town. Which was probably one reason it went so hideously wrong that the game actually stopped to produce a dialogue box calling me a sick bastard.

Locutus [SVD] mrbuzzard

Fuck. They’re swarming us. This beachhead strategic point looked safe, but they’re pouring in now and that guy just got it in the face. I sprint over to him and whip out the defibrillators. I’m a medic, you see.

“Clear!” Tzz.

He gets back up and I chuck him a medikit for good measure. “You’re gonna be okay buddy,” my character automatically says. “Thanks man, I owe you one,” his automatically replies. The tank we’re standing next to explodes.

mrbuzzard is no more.

Fuck! The concussion from the blast is so strong I can barely see, but as a medic you See Dead People regardless. I stagger over to his body and-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-shock some life into it. I don’t have time to patch him up before the ground explodes again and the troops pour in.

^^andy^^05 [AK-101] BlueBall
^^andy^^05 [AK-101] $uper_Gang$ta
hammi [T-90] tOMMy

Jesus Christ. I make a beeline for the bodies and an enemy troop rounds the sandbags ahead of me. I hit the deck and spray him with M4 fire, and he goes down before he can hit me.

Pentadact [M4] pHk

I get BlueBall-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-and tOMMy-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-fixed up, but $uper_Gang$ta fades away before I can get to him. God damn it, I hate it when I lose one. “You’ll be fine, get back to the fight.” I wish I could believe or stop myself saying that.

nofear [T-90] Squire
nofear [T-90] tOMMy

Shit! The tanks have rolled in, and I’m-

Mr0 [Artillery] mrbuzzard
Mr0 [Artillery] easydog
Mr0 [Artillery] Sigmax

Everything explodes. You hear it before you see it, but not by much. Then you can’t see anything at all, and pretty soon you can’t hear anything either. The dust-clouds a blast like that kicks up would blind you even if you weren’t in shock, and your ears just hum a monotonous song instead of reporting the outside world. When my senses return it’s to a beige world of loud noises. Through the smoke I can still make out the gleaming white trails of more artillery shells slamming down into us. I know with a grim certainty that almost everyone will die before I can get to them, and before I even make it to the first one I’m shot three times and hit the deck. I have no idea where the shots came from, or even if there’s any cover nearby – all I can see is the corpse bar on my singularly selfless HUD. Biting the dust seems to have saved me, and I’m on the mend all the time my medikit is out, but I’m not any closer to the bodies and I’m not going to hold this post on my own. I get up and immediately come face to face with the guy who shot me. I throw myself backwards over some sandbags and frantically hammer the number keys. My Beretta 9mm comes up and I shoot him three times in the face.

Pentadact [Beretta] ^^andy^^05

In retrospect he was probably more surprised to see me than I was him – it was a fair bet I was dead. More fire rains in, either a Support troop or a tank judging by the sheer fire rate. Shots thwack into the sand all around, and a final artillery explosion kills-

Mr0 [Artillery] BlueBall
Mr0 [Artillery] wpmike

-two more and-

Mr0 [Teamkills] th0ry

-ha! One of their own. I’m hit again but I’m not ducking this time. I pelt straight for the very patient body of my patient, dive through the smoke over an ammo box and land prone on top of him, immediately-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-defibrillating. He gets up and-

neurax [AK74U] easydog

God damn it! I shock him back to life. He’s learnt his lesson and stays down with me, but by this time I’ve lost everyone else for good. I chuck him a medikit and we scramble to the bunker by the flag.

easydog [M16A2] Bleak
easydog [M16A2] neurax
Pentadact [M4] Parliuus
easydog [M16A2] Monterto

He might be stupid but he’s a good shot. But there’s still the APC, and when its not scattering heavy fire at our little window on the world, it’s smashing up our empty vehicles with guided rockets. Worse, an enemy chopper I thought was just flying by has come around for another pass.

But something’s not right about it. I don’t know anything about anything, really, but consciously or otherwise most of the Western world now knows a Black Hawk when they see it. Black Hawks are ours. I focus on it and sure enough, friendly nametags pop up – green ones, in fact: my squad. Then, inevitably yet surprisingly, gloriously and loudly-

D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] nofear
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] hammi
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] DanMM
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] Jage

It’s their turn to explode. The much-killed idiot and I sprint out to meet them. There’s still a body out here I can res, which I promptly-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-do. Half my squaddies throw themselves out of the chopper and parachute down to meet us, while the pilot takes it to a safer landing just outside the base.

It’s a fantastic sight, but I don’t have time to admire it – I’m seeing more Dead People. Scampering around the wreckage of the base rubbing my shock-pads together gleefully at the prospect of more life-saving fun, I suddenly discover where these fresh corpses are coming from. An enemy Spec Ops commando an inch from my face, silenced pistol raised to my neck. I don’t have time to think.

“Clear!” Tzz.

Pentadact [Shock Pads] FaR2SiNiSTeR

YES.

At some point during my peaceful reign over Tenpenny Towers, I found myself chainsawing an old man in the neck. In his office, which for some reason he’d kitted out like a doctor’s surgery, I found an old tape of someone talking about androids. Specifically, an escaped android who’s looking for a doctor to have a little work done. Ah, that’s probably it – he was a doctor. I knew there had to be some explanation.

I’ll be honest, I don’t much care where my dad’s gone. He was a nice enough chap to have around when I was growiing up, but I’m sure he’s got a good reason for striking out on his own. Jesus, I’m what, twenty eight? I’ve been living with my parents long enough. Besides, he’s quest-critical. The worst that could happen is that he falls over for a while.

So I didn’t have much interest in Fallout 3’s main quest. But I had a lot of interest in an escaped android. The tape wasn’t much of a lead, but I headed out from the safety of Tenpenny to investigate it all the same.

What I found, almost immediately, was a raider camp. Slipping down a mountainside I sniped a lookout’s arm off with Tenpenny’s rifle, then ploughed through the two entrance guards with my baseball bat. Inside it was a fairly small warehouse, but a hole in the wall lead to a huge cave complex beneath. Decked out like a nightclub. I snuck around it smashing people with a sledgehammer and planting landmines in their pockets until I came to a friendly man named Smiling Jack. Jack wasn’t a bandit like the others, he was a weapons merchant with an enormous arsenal who didn’t much care who he sold to. I put a landmine in his pocket and took it all from his corpse.

Tenpenny’s rifle was immediately obsolete. I had laser rifles, laser pistols, grenades, missile launchers, flame throwers, and something called The Terrible Shotgun. But it was on my way out that I found the jackpot: The Fat Man. A handheld nuclear warhead launcher. Handheld, but not light – its weight tipped my haul over the humanly haulable limit, and I was slowed to a crawl. Usually this would be irrelevant – I could just fast-travel home and ditch some stuff. But I’d slipped in with a minimum of fuss, which left a maximum of enemies still roaming the camp. No fast travel till they’re dead.

With a sadness I set the Fat Man down on a step and set about disintegrating the camp’s inhabitants. It turned out they had a Goliath caged up, which I left well alone, as well as some slaves. Since I was going to have to kill all their captors anyway, it seemed rude not to set them free, so I unlocked the pen. See? I can be nice.

Slaves don’t have any weapons, of course, but they’ll snatch any they find on the ground as they run, so they might be of use against the last few guards too. One nabbed a Chinese Assault Rifle from the nearest pile of radioactive ash, and the rest ran gratefully off in the direction I’d just come from. The direction I’d just come from after dropping the Fat Man. Fuck.

Am I really going to have to do this?

I shot the armed one first, figuring he’d turn on me when I started gunning down his pen-pals. I caught the next one in the back with a critical laser blast, atomising him as he ran. The third exploded entirely of his own accord – either a landmine I hadn’t seen, or a missile launcher lurking behind the shacks. But the final slave was too far away to hit with my fancy new rifle. I had to pull out Tenpenny’s Sniper for its superior accuracy. Three feet from the Fat Man, 40% chance to hit.

The shot ripped his right leg off at the knee, sending him pitching forward in a sprinkler-spurt of blood face-first into the dirt. All was still. The Fat Man was safe.

I’ll be nice tomorrow.

There isn’t one. There’s a cracked blasted rockscape crawling with spitting bloatflies, ravenous hounds and mutant scorpions. It took me the entire freaking night to cross it, so when I arrived at dawn and found someone ahead of me in the queue to get in, I stoved his head in with a tire iron and took over the intercom. Yes, hello, I’m here to see your boss.

I was delighted to find Tenpenny an insular society of bigots, a place oblivious to the suffering of others. I wasn’t wild about Megaton, but the Wasteland was even worse, so I was glad to find a place that had nothing to do with either. I bought a dress only mildly stained with the blood of the dead, a magnificent bonnet to shade my emotionless murderer’s eyes, then pickpocketed my money back and headed up to the penthouse for some light genocide.

On the balcony, I was presented with a big, shiny red button. I gave it a tentative prod.

And now we are all sons of bitches.

Actually I guess we’ve been sons of bitches for about two-hundred years at the point Fallout 3 is set. We’re great great great great grandsons of bitches.

This felt like the most destructive thing I’ve ever done in a videogame. I’ve killed billions in DEFCON, but they weren’t unique people things. Megaton is full of carefully crafted stories, characters, homes, secrets, even a whole religion found nowhere else. And less than an hour after I first set eyes on it, it was ash.

It’s probably not much consolation to the citizens of Megaton, but I got a sweet penthouse apartment out of the deal. I picked out a new outfit, had my housebot make me a blond, and bought a house theme: Love Machine.

Oh dear God, it’s like a disastrous episode of a post-apocalyptic Changing Rooms. But the nightwear that comes with the heart-shaped bed does go well with my welding mask.

Dressed and rested, I headed back out to the balcony to join Alistair Tenpenny for an afternoon of shooting poor people from our ivory tower.

And I was all set to live a long, peaceful and sheltered life at Tenpenny Tower, until I noticed Tenpenny had a better Sniper Rifle than me.

You can tell a lot about people by the armour they wear, and the stuff I prised off the cold bat-battered bodies of the first people I met outside the Vault was classified as ‘Painspike’. The outside world is not hospitable.

Still, I was determined not to just head straight to the town of Megaton like everyone else. All anyone seems to talk about is Megaton this, Sheriff that. I wanted my experience to be different, so I doubled back and headed in the opposite direction. After being shot at by flies (?) and mauled by molerats (!), I finally came to a sheer wall, hopefully some trace of civilisation. I circled it until I came to the entrance. It was Megaton.

I took immediately against the place. The Sheriff was annoying and made no sense – apparently he doesn’t trust me, and the reason no-one’s ever defused the bomb is that he doesn’t trust any of the locals, but he invites me to try. I find this guy’s Vault Loyalty lacking.

I ignore him and head to the bar, where I’m told the proprietor has some information I need. I run into him on the balcony outside. He’ll tell me what I need to know for 100 bottlecaps. I tell him to fuck off. He’ll tell me what I need to know if I do a job for him. I tell him to fuck off. He’ll tell me what I need to know for 300 caps.

There’s an option, at this point, to ask him what happened to the 100 cap deal. I didn’t take that option. I chose to exit the conversation, wait for him to turn round, then put a rusty kitchen knife I found in a toilet between his eleventh and twelfth vertebrae.

His body spasmed a little, and I had time to snatch his computer password from his pocket before it slipped off the threshold and plummeted to the city below. If you’re going to be a dick, don’t do it on a balcony.

On my way out from breaking into the barkeeper’s office for the info, I run into a man who wants me to blow up the entire town of Megaton.

Hm. Okay.

I’m going to location-tag these spoilers, so if you’re playing right now, or you plan to, you can skip the sections about any areas you haven’t visited. I’m not doing the main plot, so I won’t be spoiling anything about that. I ended up picking a different main quest.

Starting the player as a baby is genius, not least because players, first plunged into a new game world, act like babies.

Remember that guy in the opposite cell to you when you start Oblivion? What did he see you do? Bat the manacles like a kitten, hold them and wave them around, knock a bottle over, bump into your cell bars, pick everything up and try to eat or use it.

Before I took my first steps towards dad, I picked up teddy, swung him around my head and threw him across the room. Then I took all the toys out of my toy box and tossed them randomly around. Then I threw one at dad. Then I jumped up high to pull down the Nuka Cola truck from the shelf and play with that. Then, when dad had gone, I felt bad and tidied up all my toys into the box again.

I grew up to be kind of a difficult kid. At sixteen, I beat a man unconscious seven consecutive times in a GOAT exam. It started as a scuffle, but I got carried away and kept hitting him after he’d put his guard down. And after he’d passed out. And after he’d come to again. And for some time after that.

When I finally stopped, I looked up to find all the other students staring at me, and a trail of blood smattered across the walls leading to the limp body at my feet. I lowered my guard, and talked to the examiner. He agreed I should probably just skip the exam. He suggested I become a Vault Loyalty Inspector.

So when chaos breaks out in the vault, I’m in the middle of bludgeoning a man to death with a baseball bat. I forget who started it, but his face isn’t in a good way anymore. Or there. Mid-combat, my body’s forcibly twisted around and my face sucked in towards Butch, my bully, my victim. As you might expect after the beating I gave him three years ago, he’s a gibbering wreck. His mother’s in trouble.

I’m actually not against helping his mother – I don’t know her – but I head the wrong way to get into her room, and by the time I get there mutant cockroaches were already eating her dead face off, so I strip her naked, steal her clothes and most of her booze, drink quite a lot of it and beat her son to death with a baseball bat. His Vault Loyalty was lacking.

I am now addicted to vodka.

I also found my own Vault Loyalty lacking, so I slipped past the overseer and staggered blinking into the outside world. At that point, a man in a welding mask sprinted up to me and started hitting me in the head with a pool-cue. Ah, the great outdoors.

Over at the PC Gamer blog today, the full story of my doomed attempt to play the one game I know for sure I’ll hate: Football Manager. It doesn’t go well.

Long ago, I tried playing the biggest possible match of it, with the most possible alien races, and wrote up how it went in bite-sized entries.

Update!

CVG, the site I wrote this diary on, is gone forever. But the diary is now back up on PC Gamer’s site! It starts here.

Snow Crash gets referenced a lot when talking about Second Life. Snow Crash was a sci-fi novel in which the internet was a single coherent 3D world, and everyone had a single character to represent them in that world. Sites became places that you travelled to, and you’d see the other people there when you visited it. Second Life is the closest we’ve come to such a thing, because the things in it are player-created places and services, rather than a simulation of some fantasy world designed by the developers. The comparison is obvious and complimentary enough for the developers to include ‘Protagonist’ as one of the surnames you can select for your character, a nod to Snow Crash’s legendary Hiro Protagonist.

The Black Library is a building in Second Life created (with help) by Always Black, a games writer responsible for some great articles that have appeared in our magazine. I mentioned his series of ‘_black’-prefixed sites and services a few posts back, because it was one of them that inspired me to sign up for the Novel Writing Month thing. The Black Library has articles by AB or submitted to his site, and also some more adventurous exhibits that use the nature of the world in which it exists. Another writer publishing stuff within Second Life is Cory Doctorow, one of the Boing Boing guys, who released a sci-fi novel in-game.

Lastly, it may also be useful to know that the film The Life Aquatic features a great scene where they’re in a submarine deep underwater, a Sigur Rós track is playing, and the enormous Tiger Shark they’ve been searching for all along passes serenely and prettily over their sub.

Right, I apologise for the amount of background knowledge necessary to understand this story, and will attempt to call upon it all in the next sentence to show just how necessary it was. I was downstairs at the Black Library. Okay, not to worry, the rest will come in later.

The downstairs bit is a rather classy bar, and it’s named after the forum part of AB’s site. I was sitting on a pleather sofa looking at some blue text. It said I was 11m away, the guys I was just talking to upstairs were a bit further than that, and between the two was Wandering Yaffle. Neat, a proximity detector! Wandering Yaffle came down the stairs, as if to demonstrate that it worked. He is, I knew, Always Black – or less exotically Ian. There’s a hologram of him in the lobby to greet visitors. He sat down in a chair that automatically puts you into a relaxed pose, which made me look incredibly tense.

I am hugely impressed by the Black Library, especially the bar of the forum, and I said so. It’s a sleek, sparse, attractive modern building, more like a trendy art gallery than a library. This fits well with the fact that it isn’t primarily a library – the articles that lie on the shelves upstairs, each with their own stylish 1-bit cover, aren’t positioned or seen as the main exhibit. They’re essentially just links to the articles online, and Ian realises that makes little use of the potential of this place. He’s been setting up some more progressive attractions around the building, and has already incorporated an interesting object not of his own design.

Wandering Yaffle: Have you seen the Infonet?
Pentadact Kipling: I think I sat on it earlier, yes.
Wandering Yaffle: Did you try clicking anything?
Pentadact Kipling: Yeah, but I couldn’t see what it was doing with my legs in the way.

He took me up to show it to me properly. It’s a sleek chrome laptop computer sitting on a desk in the corner of the lobby, and it shows a series of options like ‘log in’ on the main screen. When you do, you get access to Second Life news (both official and from the unofficial Second Life Herald), useful archives like little scripts you can use on the stuff you create to change the way they work, and tips for cool places to go. It’s cool. It’s a bit like the info terminals in games like City Of Heroes.

Actually, it turns out it isn’t. Second Life doesn’t have info terminals like City Of Heroes. This object was made by a player called Squagmire Stravinsky. The screen is a custom texture, and when you ‘touch’ a part of it, the script she wrote detects which part, works out which button you were pointing at, and retrieves the appropriate new texture to replace the old one.

Wandering Yaffle: I mean, there’s emergent gameplay, and then there’s…
Pentadact Kipling: Making an internet?
Wandering Yaffle: Making an internet. It gets the info from a server farm within Second Life.
Pentadact Kipling: Wow. So is the information actually stored there, or is it just a technical requirement?
Wandering Yaffle: Do you want to go there?

If this were an adventure game, my dialogue options would have been:

1. YES.
2. Do I!
3. Duh.

I chose one at random, and we teleported.

It’s hard to believe that the places in Second Life are made by players. The Black Library is amazing enough, but in some areas it seems every building is a masterpiece of design. Where are the rubbish houses? Why aren’t these just white cubes with badly drawn windows painted on, like the dregs of the mapping community for other games? Squagmire Stravinsky’s central server complex is a spacious office with glass walls and hardwood floors, dotted with glowing blue signs, and even colourful posters for Second Life educational programmes.

I love that this place exists, I love that it looks like this, and I love that I can go here. Most of all, though, I love the hovering blue head telling me that it’s authorised personnel only beyond this point, because we’re at the door to the server room itself.

Wandering Yaffle: Okay, I’ve never done this before, so bear with me. If Squag’s security systems hammer me, tell my wife I always loved her.
Pentadact Kipling: You know, I’ve always wanted to be told this by a floating blue head.
Wandering Yaffle: Now, where did I put that walk-through-walls thingy?
Pentadact Kipling: Wait, what?

After a few moments’ fumbling, he stepped through the locked door. Then he stepped back, handed me an object called Phase Shield and told me to put it on. After equipping, you go into chat and type /1 phase on. I tried it, and walked forwards.

Pentadact Kipling: Whoa!
Pentadact Kipling: I’m not that familiar with this world, but something about that felt immediately wrong.

We were in a kind of private lounge – sixties-style curved beige benches, slot machines and an aquarium. To the right, another locked door labelled Squagmire Stravinsky, Owner, CEO. We stepped through.

After sitting in her chair with a steaming mug of coffee, admiring her movie posters and wandering around the office, I was about to leave when I caught sight of a nametag floating past the glass door on the other side. Shit.

Pentadact Kipling: There’s someone in the corridor.
Wandering Yaffle: Don’t worry, Squag’s cool.
Pentadact Kipling: This didn’t look like Squag, it looked like a tiny waddling robot called Jackal Ennui.

We stepped out. In the corridor, going about its business, was a tiny waddling robot called Jackal Ennui. It stopped and looked at us.

It wasn’t a long pause, but one of the strangest in my life.

Tiny Waddling Robot Called Jackal Ennui: hey guys
Wandering Yaffle: Hi Jack.

It turns out the tiny waddling robot called Jackal Ennui is a reporter for g.Net, Squagmire’s media company. He was perfectly personable, even if not, technically, a person.

Wandering Yaffle: Is it okay if we have a look at the server room?
Tiny Waddling Robot Called Jackal Ennui: i just started here so i have no idea what’s okay
Tiny Waddling Robot Called Jackal Ennui: have fun

He waddled off, and we stepped through the final locked door, into the inner sanctum.

Pentadact Kipling: Holy shit.

A suspended walkway led out to a single console, overlooking bank after bank of server machines on the floor below. The view was dominated, though, by a screen of statistics that took up the entire far wall of the hall, updated in real time as traffic and server status changes. Rather brilliantly, it turns out that the console overlooking this is just a regular Infonet laptop, so presumably Squagmire stands there and test things while watching the behind the scenes working on the giant screen behind it.

A stroll around the server room floor, a forest of monolithic machines, turned up a more puzzling part of what goes on in this room. It appeared to be a bungalow. Inside, there was a single chair lit moodily by two lamps, then empty space before a small marble table surrounded by floral chairs. I sat down in the spooky seat, and Wandering Yaffle wandered in.

Wandering Yaffle: What the hell?
Pentadact Kipling: I automatically go for the most unusual seat I can find.
Wandering Yaffle: No, I mean, what is this place?
Pentadact Kipling: Maybe a super-private meeting room? Whoever usually sits here must have a sinister job.
Wandering Yaffle: It looks domestic, though.

He was right, it did. We sat down at the domestic looking table, a small lamp between us, and talked for a bit. A phrase that comes up almost as often as Snow Crash or ‘metaverse’ when talking about Second Life is ‘glorified chat room’. I think the ability to create anything you can imagine probably counts for a bit more than glory, but it’s fair to say that this is how a lot of people actually use it. The glorification is great, though – nothing fills an awkward lapse in conversation like suddenly donning a giant white spherical head and setting yourself on fire. But even more glorious, to me, is the wandering. Ian was telling me that Squags, like many before her, is seriously looking at ditching her real job and making Second Life’s internet her primary source of income – it’s free to use, but she makes money selling the laptop terminals to people like Ian looking to enhance their virtual space. It’s an interesting enough conversation in any context, but that we were talking about it in floral chairs in a mysterious bungalow in the main server room of that very venture made it extraordinary.

Wandering Yaffle: I’ve got it.
Wandering Yaffle: I know what this place is.
Wandering Yaffle: Shadows.

Buh?

Wandering Yaffle: She’s practising her shadows.

I’d noticed the room was moodily lit when I walked in, but what I hadn’t realised was that the ‘lit’ part was more remarkable than the ‘moody’. Second Life doesn’t really have lighting – sure, things are visible in the day and darker at night, but everything is uniform, there aren’t normally any true light sources or shadows. As with virtually everything, you have to make them yourself. Squags, it seems, was getting pretty good.

Later on, Walker Spaight joined us in these secret backrooms of g.Net. This was my first night in Second Life, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I knew the man only as Mark Wallace, yet another great games writer with a great blog – one whose 19th most followed link is to this very site, I have just accidentally discovered. It turns out he’s actually something of a celebrity in Second Life, being the Editorial Director of The Second Life Herald – which I think I’m right in saying is the most popular Second Life journal out there.

We’d slipped into another locked office belonging to someone called Venya Salome, and were sat on the nice sofas, talking about the State Of Play conference (at which Walker spoke, on a panel about games writing, and which is available to watch online as a webcast. Walker’s appearence is in the first video on that page). Some extraordinary ideas come up in the conference, and it’s so forward thinking that when you finish watching it, you have to remind yourself that the humdrum World Of Warcraft is the prevailent MMOG in reality, and these notions have yet to catch on outside of Second Life’s tiny yet extraordinarily rich community.

Venya Salome walked in. She was a tall, smartly dressed woman with silvery hair, the words g.Net Admin above her name, and black fingerless gloves. In another of the evening’s now characteristic awkward pauses, I reflected that she looked awfully serious for a game character, and that she was probably wondering what three games writers were doing in her office in the middle of the night.

Venya Salome: Hello.
Pentadact Kipling: Awkward!
Wandering Yaffle: Hi, we’re just, uh, borrowing your office.

Feeling pretty bad about that, we left. I think the others just teleported out, but I didn’t see because for my part, I activated my phase shield and threw myself through the window.

Okay, so ultimately I didn’t get around to the part where that Life Aquatic scene becomes relevant, but I promise you, that snippet of information will serve you well some day.