Game Theory

Halflife 2: Episode 2 (HUGE FUCKING SPOILER ALERT)

2007-10-16T00:28:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm glad to say Valve didn't jump the shark. And yet I'm still not quite sure how to feel about the next instalment in the saga of Gordon Freeman.

Ok, seriously. Spoilers will follow.

I mean it.

Really. I have screenshots and everything.

SRSLY U GUYS

Ok.

So, the whole cliffhanger that was hinted at in the video, namely Alyx clinging to a wrecked rail bridge above a dizzying drop, didn't really happen. First time you see Alyx, she's doing this:

OH HAI I FIXD UR DOOR WIT UR ZEERO PWNT NRG FEILD MANIPULAT0rz!!!!!1

So, this leads to a rather nice bit of cinematic physics where an entire bridge collapses. Anyhow, after the obligatory plot exposition (this time: "Seriously, what the fuck is taking you so long, meet up with the rest of the resistance already") the whole Alyx nearly dying thing is hit home like....well...

A BIT LIKE BEING STABBED IN THE CHEST BY A HUNTER!!!!!

So, kudos to Valve for really having us going there. (Incidentally, the previous screenshot taken about half a second prior to this looks suspiciously like Alyx was enjoying some surprise buttsecks)

The first task of the game, therefore, is to raid an antlion's nest in order to retrieve some kind of LSD so the vortigaunts can trip out and heal Alyx in the process. This part of the game did get a little tedious. I suspect this part of the game is to showcase all the trippy lighting effects but seeing as the best lighting effect my tired old Nvidia Go FX 5200 can come up with these days is turning the fucking screen on the antlion tunnels for all intents and purposes looked like the tunnels on Xen all over again. Poison antlions are more difficult to beat but just seem to be there to drag out the overall experience, and the boss poison antlion just looks like a regular antlion guard except the poison one probably gets regular questions about his sexual orientation from the other antlions as he's glowing luminous green. On the plus side, you do get to fight through some of it with a Vortigaunt at your side, and you do also get to take part in the first ever turret defence battle in Halflife 2 that isn't a complete chore.

After that, you then have to fight yet more hordes of headcrab zombies to get to your car, the last step of which is a truly impressive cinematic physics puzzle - playing seesaw with an entire bridge. Not long after this, you get to fight your first hunters (think ministriders), which, as enemies in the Halflife universe go, these guys are probably my favourite. They're the exact same size as you, and their luminous timed-explosive darts means there's lots of physically accurate explosions going on as you fight them. Probably one of the best fights in the game is being trapped in an old inn while Combine soldiers and hunters fight side by side to lay siege to the place and gradually force their way in.

I've expressed my misgivings already about the vehicle sequences in Halflife 2, but to their credit Valve have at least tried to make this one interesting. The first improvement is you have Alyx riding shotgun, and she can shoot at zombies as your barrel through some very impressive scenery. The car eventually gets upgraded with a radar tracker that beeps everytime a cache of weapons is nearby. I have to say, this was probably the best idea for a vehicle sequence as it meant you always knew when to stop and hunt for goodies and when to keep driving. It kept the whole vehicle sequence flowing beautifully.

Eventually, you come across your first Combine Advisor. Considering that you rarely lose direct control of Gordon in a Halflife game unless its for a bloody good reason (usually the reason is something incredibly bad is about to happen), the Advisor's telekinesis attacks allow for some truly hair-raising suspense as they carefully probe (for probe read eviscerate) nearby humans while holding any nearby threats with their backs to the wall, literally:
These guys know how to make a good entrance/exit - in this case, this one ripped the entire wooden roof off a building and escaped in a whirlwind of planks.

The rest of the game is defending a rocket facility from Combine attacks. The final battle is, unusually for a Halflife game, very satisfying, as you hold off against waves of Striders and hunters. Disappointingly, this is made somehow a little too easy. The forest you're fighting in is full of comparatively light logs, designed to act as shields from the hunter's explosive darts, and then for flinging back at them in order to inflict damage. It's a very good idea, and an excellent way of seeing physics in combat. However, the easier way to see physics in combat is to drive straight at the hunters in the car and watch them slide off your hood. I'm not sure if this is what Valve intended. All I know is I tried winning the fight without using that trick and it's a hell of a lot more tricky and exhilarating trying to stay alive.

And then there's the ending. This is proving slightly controversial. The area is saved from further combine invasion, and then

I'M CHARGIN MA LASER

Valve then decided to have Eli Vance killed off. And I've gotta be honest, I did not see this coming at all. I knew something bad was coming, but nothing like this. And it's mainly made so shocking thanks to Merle Dandridge, who voices Alyx - hearing a computer game character act so convincingly in a situation like this is both rare and unnerving and you hear her sobs and screams well after the screen has faded to black.

From the looks of things, the next game will be yet another location change. I don't want to give any more away, but it will take place in the Arctic, so hopefully we'll see the same creativity with the new locations as we've seen with the new forested locations in Episode 2.

Get a hold of the Orange Box. A cluster of games this good doesn't come around often.

Team Fortress 2

2007-10-15T23:58:00.000+01:00

I was never a fan of the original Team Fortress, I had a look at it once and thought (probably incorrectly) that it was a gaudy, "l4me" version of Counterstrike trying to be a military style shooter and failing. How glad I am that I've grown up considerably since then, because Team Fortress 2 is about the most fun I've had online since discovering pornography.

Well, perhaps not that mature (and I'm not referring to the pornography joke), in that I was still a little perturbed to begin with when I realised that this is what players look like:
Yes, it's a bit The Incredibles, but the practical advantage of having these outrageous skins is you can instantly identify what class everyone is as soon as they enter your line of sight. No more of those "Wow, that terrorist looked suspiciously similar to the CTs" moments in this game.

So, I'm going to run through each of these classes in turn and give you my impressions. From left to right:

Pyro: My least played class, mainly because you have to get right up close in order to hurt people and I'm pretty shy in that way in online games, especially shooters. However, on the plus side, if you do hit someone with your flamethrower, they will be half-blinded and on fire. His gas mask makes him the Kenny of the game: everything he says is muffled, including cursing out the other team.

Engineer: These guys are the unsung heroes. A well placed turret kept alive long enough for full upgrades usually takes out a dozen or so enemies before succumbing. If these guys manage to set up a teleporter in a choke point, you're fucked.

Spy: My FUCKING word, I hate these guys. Can't tell who they are, right up until they knife you in the back of the head. They can disguise themselves as any other class, and they don't bleed when shot by enemies, so you can't tell them apart from your teammates. They're also armed with scrambler devices that depower base defences and eventually destroy them if left unchecked. They can even cloak for ten seconds. Oh, and when they disguise themselves, the other team sees the name of one of their teammates floating above the enemy spy. This can sometimes lead to existential crises, usually going something like:

Me: You're Oirish_Martin? But I'M Oirish_Ma....
*slice*
-Oirish_Martin has been killed by 1337Spynewb-

Heavy: Ah, my favourite. Mainly because I suck. These guys have a large target area, but tons of hit points. Fire at an area far away, and anyone nearby will be forced to look for cover. Fire at an area close by, and everyone nearby will be forced to look for a new head. For this reason, they tend to attract a lot of enemy flak, not to mention being outrun by every spy and scout in a 500 metre radius. However, when teamed up with a smart medic, they're very hard to stop.

Sniper: Well, someone's gotta do it...these guys are fairly unremarkable, except the longer they look through their scope the more powerful their shot becomes; however, everyone can see where you're looking due to your very large and unsubtle laser sight. I still can't snipe, so I don't really bother, unless it's to piss off a better sniper.

Scout: These guys are very good fun. Their special ability, apart from being fucking fast, is double jumping. It's a lot of fun parcouring your way around a level and then running circles around a heavy beating the shit out of him with a baseball bat. They also capture control points twice as quickly.

Soldier: Doesn't do much except fire rockets from a rocket launcher. Surprising fun to do every now and again though, and the splash damage can make for an uncomfortable surprise to your target.

Demoman: A whisky swilling Scot, who has, rather unhelpfully, two very similar looking guns. One drops grenades, the other drops....remote controlled sticky grenades. Incredibly good at laying waste to a confined area, and the class most likely to beat the Heavy given enough cover.

Medic: A generally thankless job, or so you'd think, however, I'd like to say that as a fulltime heavy, I appreciate these guys so much when they could be playing as a different class. They have a couple of average-power weapons, but their main use is firing a healing beam, that can also boost you to 150% health. After they've healed 1000 hp, they can use an "ubercharge" that renders them and their target (usually a heavy) invulnerable for ten seconds.

I strongly recommend giving this a go. There aren't many maps, but this is a beta, and it's a lot more fun than Counterstrike....

Now you're thinking with Portals (SPOILERS)

2007-10-13T01:50:00.001+01:00

(Apologies in advance for lack of pictures - had to delete Portal and HL2 and reinstall. When my internet connection finally stopped procrastinating and decided to download them it cleverly forgot to download half the textures)

A sequel to the lesser known Narbacular Drop, Portal has you, the protagonist, in a sinister gleaming white facility testing one of the coolest FPS weapons ever created - the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Simply put, the left and right mouse buttons place portals down that can be travelled instantly between at will. The plot is short and sweet: you, the test subject must test out the portal device by using it to travel through 19 interconnected testing rooms. You are the only person apparently present in this entire facility, and the only other presence is that of an unusually helpful computer whose promises of "sweet cake" are not all they seem.....

*spoiler hat on*

Seriously, the next few reviews are going to be pretty spoiler heavy.

*Spoiler hat off*

So, what can be said about the game that's accompanying the next instalment of the almighty Half-Life 2? Well, quite a lot, actually. For a game that for the most part relies on only two "gimmicks" - the portal gun and a sinister AI, it does very well, at least for the first part. The first few testing levels are simple enough. Then come the rooms with only acid vats to break your fall. Then come the rooms which have machine-gun turrets firing live ammo. Then come the hidden rooms which previous test subjects have sheltered in warning you that "the cake is a lie."

At the completion of the 19th room, the AI orders you to throw the portal gun into an incinerator - an incinerator which you are being led to on a moving platform so that you may also be disposed of. Using the portal gun to escape, you start making your way through the underbelly of the facility. The change of tone here is excellent - no longer are you strolling through pristine white corridors. Instead, you are crawling through rusty vents and jumping over maintenance pipes and breaking into the offices of Aperture Science, and in doing so find a startling plot twist (which I will speak of in later posts).

It's at this point that using the portal gun seems to take a bit of a dive, although granted I am playing on a touchpad mouse so forgive me for only being able to turn around as quickly as the London Eye. Some of the rooms in the middle of the game are often so full of surfaces you can't place portals on, the level degenerated into firing wildly with the portal gun until you succeeded and then jumped out of the room as fast as humanly possible. But this is a temporary hitch only, there then follows some truly convoluted puzzle followed by one of the most sinister and yet downright hilarious boss fights I've ever encountered.

What struck me most about Portal is the tone of its humour. It's been a long time since we've had a game this intelligent and this silly without the word "Monkey" and "Island" appearing in the title, and I for one am glad it's one of Valve's Source games. As a maths geek, I have to appreciate a game that has a computer say to itself, "Two plus two is ten....IN BASE FOUR! HAHA, I'M FINE!"

The most intriguing part of Portal is about two thirds of the way through the game: the discovery that Aperture Science were the biggest rivals of the Black Mesa Facility.......

Apologies for the absence, I was caught up in an Orange Box.

2007-10-13T01:46:00.000+01:00

Apologies for not posting in a while - I unfortunately managed to break all my USB ports and gaming is next to impossible with a touchpad mouse! Plenty of reviews to follow, including Portal, Team Fortress 2 Beta, N and Half-Life 2 Episode 2!
Complete shit.

Square peggle

2007-09-28T13:44:00.000+01:00

I was going to write you a piece on Quake 4, but after seeing the Zero Punctuation review of Peggle, I stupidly decided to go and try it.

Peggle is a "casual game." Casual gaming makes me think of casual sex, which I suppose is a rather useful comparison - they both sound like a great idea at first and then reality kicks in and you feel dirty and shameful afterwards, although at least the only conceivable way you can catch an STI from playing computer games is by using someone else's sticky keyboard.

I probably could have finished some better games with three dimensions instead of two by now, but Peggle is unfortunately rather addictive. It's like a average Christmas present wrapped in the most amazing wrapping paper ever. The premise of the game is to launch a ball and use it to hit all the orange "pegs" on the screen. The ball falls from top to bottom and once it's left the launcher is pretty much entirely governed by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. Nothing new there, really, except its bright colours and smooth interface are annoyingly enticing.

The two things that do really piss me off are:

The annoying animal characters who watch from the ball launcher, who frequently get themselves cross-eyed trying to watch both the ball and your mouse cursor at the same time
The ascending chromatic notes played every time the ball hits a peg. Because of this, the first few hits sound like the ball's about to play to the intro to the pink panther theme. Seeing as you have at least 10 balls per level and there are about 100 levels in this game, I'M A BIT FUCKING SICK OF THINKING ABOUT INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU THANK YOU VERY MUCH POPCAP

And while we're on the subject, "Popcap" sounds very much like a invitation from the game developers to shoot them in the ass for making this incredibly addictive game-for-your-mum.

Damn you freshers and your flu...

2007-09-28T12:57:00.000+01:00

..so, while I'm laid up in bed, I may as well tell you what I've been playing inbetween dosing myself up with meds and consuming fruit and water at a rate that would scare a bulimic elephant.

I removed a small amount of dust from my laptop, including one impressively huge dustbunny from my GPU fan. For reasons as yet unexplained by modern science, now my laptop seems to be able to run without stuttering nearly as much but now quiesces at a much higher temperature than normal.

Violations to laws of thermodynamics aside, I immediately seized on the opportunity to replay Halflife 2 and Episode 1. So glad I put the extra gig of RAM in my laptop, now I can run them on high detail at 1024x768. Not to mention with the all-important shaders set to high (as far as I know, not only does this make forcefields in HL2 look very spiffy, this is the setting for Portal that makes your portals all nice and seethroughable, otherwise they're just two very large unsubtle monochrome ellipsoids)

I played Episode 1 first, mainly because it's shorter. Maybe my installation is glitchy, but this time through Alyx didn't seem to be quite as capable of interestingly kicking zombie arse. By this I mean her fighting animations didn't seem to be triggering as much as I thought they should, or maybe I was looking for them too often and the game just can't pull them off that much. That aside, I was rather disappointed to see her just run into zombies while constantly plugging away at them with her machine pistol, rather than pull her amazing CQC stuff that Valve are so proud of.
Despite this, Episode 1 is pretty much in all ways a paragon of all gaming virtues (except length, but hooray more episodes are due to come out). It's a visual feast and is pure entertainment from start to finish. Yes, I know like all Halflife games it seems a bit crudely blocked, this time around having:

Citadel puzzle level -> scary dark underground tunnel zombie fighting -> yet more city 17 fighting -> hospital -> train station -> YET ANOTHER FUCKING CLIFFHANGER

But hey, at least they're giving us what we've always wanted, which is variety. Hell, the variety in just one of these sections is fantastic, and a game which crams all this into 5ish hours of gameplay while maintaining both your attention levels and a capable NPC sidekick throughout is incredible. I'm both excited and scared for Episode 2 to come out, because although I want the next game more than anything I'm always terrified that every new Valve game is going to be the one where they drop the ball / jump the shark / verb the noun.

Halflife 2 itself has still got it, although I have to honest here and say that I find the vehicle sections unnecessarily long. In the original Halflife, "On a Rail" was good but I wouldn't want it to be any longer, or do it twice. I feel the buggy sequence is about the right length and varied enough to make it interesting. Crossing the railway bridge is one of my favourite moments in the game. However the boat sequence feels a lot more repetitive...although it does have that awesome physics moment where an entire chimney falls into the canal and shatters. And Black Mesa East + Gravity Gun are your reward for completing it. Whereas your reward for completing the buggy section is ant lions, gunships and Nova Prospekt. Charming.

OH, SHI-

Either way, any complaints levelled at either of these games are futile. Valve are achieving something truly incredible here - they're making linear gameplay interesting and compelling. Halflife 2 is one of the few games that really sucks me in - the attention to detail, both in the appearance and behaviour, of the game world is unsurpassed. Let's hope they keep it up.

C&C 3: Tiberium Wars

2007-09-20T16:18:00.001+01:00

Since recovering my copy of C&C 3 from a certain lovely house in St Andrews, I've been playing my way through the Nod campaign. Or at least, I was, until the game decides to crash just before the next mission starts. Which means I have to restart my PC, load up the last save on the previous mission as the autosave doesn't kick in until after the mission starts. Never mind it tends to crash a hell of a lot during the cutscenes. It's not HD or anything like that, and I do worry when my craptop has trouble playing a video.

So anyhoo, while the patch is downloading, I figured I may as well contribute my two cents to the mix. C&C 3 is the first Electronic Arts C&C game in the original C&C universe (the one with all the Tiberium)

Eeeeeexcellent.

By original C&C universe I also mean the most interesting C&C universe - Generals was far too close to real life for comfort and Red Alert 2, while a good game, was a complete joke in terms of storyline (thank you very much EA). So now that C&C has long since been out of the hands of its original creators, how does it shape up?

I personally think - not too badly. I have to admit, I was originally rather bemused as to:

Kane is, apparently, alive again, and as usual, no effort at all is made to explain how the fuck does he do it. This is pretty standard by now, and fair enough - Kane needs about as much exposition as Gordon Freeman and the G-Man do. What bothered me more is that at least in Tiberian Sun there was a bit of a "FUCK YEAH KANE'S ALIVE" moment. In C&C3 Kane gives you your first mission briefing after emerging from a shadowy corner. Is that where he's been hiding for 17 years? For all we know he has been....

CABAL is nowhere to be seen. This is an even bigger travesty in my book. Being insulted by a bald human is one thing. Being insulted by a bald AI is fucking AWESOME.

The Forgotten/tiberium mutants were a big part of Tiberian Sun, and despite some physical mutations, were quite enlightened and intelligent warriors, so why do the single remaining class of mutant sound a bit like they have Down's Syndrome?

However, one of these niggling questions was actually resolved in-game. The Mammoth Mark 2 (you remember, the huge four legged walker with rail guns that was incredibly slow and the one prototype that was built in Britain during Tiberian Sun got the stuffing knocked out of it within about 5 minutes of it being switched on), as well as many of the walkers from TS, were retired in order to return to treaded vehicles. Cynically, you could say that EA wanted their game to be so well balanced they gave each side one walker type unit, which meant most of GDI's walker units (i.e most of their army) have been replaced with fucking tanks. However, in one of the little tidbits of story you find during missions, the "real" reason for this was because Nod commandos had gotten so skilled at getting up close to a walker's legs and C4ing them off. You can still do this with your commando to the three walker units in the game.

It's funny how a small detail like that can change your opinion of a game. C&C3 is still lots of fun, but to be playing with tanks that look like every other tank in every other C&C game is a bit annoying. However, I'm a geek at heart, and a bit of extra thought put into the story like that will let you get away with a lot where I'm concerned. And I was similarly glad to hear that Kane's Wrath (expansion pack) is around the corner, which covers some of the period between Tiberian Sun and Tiberium Wars (not least what happens to CABAL and his cyborgs), as well as continuing off after the end of C&C 3 with the Scrin invasion of Earth slowed but not stopped.

Here's hoping EA, while maybe not having the exact same desires for this series and its story as Westwood might have, won't drop the ball nonetheless and give the fans something really enthralling for the next instalment.

Ho hum, it's busy this week

2007-09-16T03:10:00.001+01:00

Two snippets:

Firstly, my new favourite person in the world goes by the handle of Yahtzee, the new reviewer for escapistmagazine.com. He talks fast, his macros flick past equally fast. Funny as fuck. Here's his latest. Watch now. Be sure to look for his other contributions on the site.

Zero Punctuation: Tomb Raider Anniversary Review

On a very very positive note, Steam has just put the Orange Box up for preorder. Which I will probably get. Despite the fact that I need to avoid playing games this academic year in order to not fuck my degree up, I'm allowing myself this one.

Because it has Half-Life 2 Episode 2 in it. And Portal.

Half-Life 2 is quite possibly, the shit. And Episode 1, while short, was also mindblowingly better than its forbear. Episode 2 will hopefully ~~run on my craptop~~ continue to impress the gaming world.

Portal....well, I'm a physicist, so I should enjoy that one.....

So anyhoo, because the Orange Box contains not only the games I want but two games I already have (HL2 and HL2:Ep 1) I'll be giving them away, so give me a shout if you want a free copy of one of the greatest games ever made.

Renegade Alert

2007-09-13T04:37:00.001+01:00

Time for a piece on mods for C&C Renegade. Well, one in particular!

The original game was developed inhouse by Westwood - for those of you that don't know what sort of FPSs a games company who specialises in RTSs makes, the answer is really shite ones. As FPSs go, Renegade was a clunky, ugly, garish frankenstein of a game, but it still held a certain charm as you were able to wander among the buildings, terrain and units of the original C&C. Where Renegade is still the king is in its multiplayer mode - "C&C Mode" if you will - a standard half hour game pits a GDI team and a NOD team against each other. Each side is given a fully functioning base with a barracks, refinery, weapons factory/airstrip, power plant and base defence. Each player obtains credits when the AI controlled Harvester makes a successful Tiberium run. These credits can then change your infantry class, buy vehicles, or purchase a superweapon beacon.

However, instead of including all the vehicles (the two funnest vehicles, Recon Bikes and SSM launchers, were left out for balance) we instead had to put up with new infantry types, which often made the game kinda frustrating. Stealth infantry just seems terribly unfair, particularly when they insist on repeatedly dropping nuclear strike beacons right next to your weapons factory. And personally, giving the top sniper infantry class a fucking Barrett antitank rifle was annoying as hell - sniping campers are bad enough but when they can ping a large chunk of health off your VEHICLE........

*twitch*twitch*

Anyway, rants about the ramjet rifle (or n00bjet rifel LOL) aside, Renegade was a mixed bag. A few patches improved it, giving a trio of maps where aircraft could be used. A couple of these maps now allow Recon Bikes. However, the basic style has stayed the same for a long time.

About a year ago, I remembered that a mod called Renegade Alert, a Red Alert version of Renegade, was in the works. However, due to the joys of having dialup only I neglected to take part in it - but by then university was happening and decent broadband was a reality. After tracking down the mod again (it's now known as Red Alert: A Path Beyond) I dove into the game server.

I find it difficult to convey how much better APB is over Renegade. It rejuvenates the C&C mode formula and then gives it a kick in the backside for good measure. All of the infantry and vehicles types are taken directly from Red Alert and its expansion packs, indeed, many of the weapons sounds have also been taken from it.

The three reasons why, for me, APB is so amazing:

- You can buy your own ore truck. No longer do you have to worry about the AI inevitably driving the one weak link in your resource chain out in a field patrolled by 60 mammoth tanks. You can, for a price, purchase your own and take control of when you want to make a run for some cash. More importantly, the AI truck doesn't usually go for the gem patches.....

- The buildings are fricking HUGE. No one-room wonders here. Infantry rushes become a bit more plausible when you have to actually hunt for that lone rifleman in the control room of your ore refinery.

- Everything, in particular the vehicles, are recreated with a degree of faithfulness to the original that surpasses even Renegade. It's the little things like the warhead sitting in the back of the demo truck, or the huge whooshing rockets from the V2 rocket launcher. The most enjoyable moment for me is the A-bomb launch - not only do you see it fly out of the silo building, you also see it slowly fall from the sky onto it's target - it may look unrealistic but it's a hell of a lot more realistic than Renegade's *nuclear explosion THEN missile falling* event.

So bearing those three awesome things in mind, the beta for the new version of APB hit the intarwebs a few days ago, and is already proving even more fun than its previous iteration.

Soviets don't get a huge amount of new stuff (however, the Volkov infantry class is now more powerful than before, capable of taking out several vehicles and infantry if used well), but Allies are now able to completely feck the Soviets over with the inclusion of some awesomely animated Gap Generators (fixed and mobile), the Phase transport (weak stealth missile platform) and Spies (traitorous bastards).

Add to the mix a generous graphics overhaul for those lucky bastards with a decent rig, a redesigned HUD and best of all, independence from C&C Renegade.

That's right. You don't need Renegade to join in the fun.

Stop reading.

Go here now.

www.apathbeyond.com

Commanding Keen

2007-08-29T17:55:00.000+01:00

Going for a piece of retro gaming here.

Hands up who remembers Commander Keen?
Yay for Id Software before every game they made involved shooting hellspawn / Strogg!

Yes, the plucky little kid genius from Wisconsin, who somehow made a spaceship (propelled by a vacuum cleaner that he borrowed from his mom) and ended up saving the Earth and then the galaxy respectively. He starred in one of the first sidescrolling platformers for the PC, the original game created by the guys from ID was a reproduction of Mario (in all but name) designed to run in DOS.

Shame then, that game 3, Keen Must Die, which was the ultimate episode in the series' initial trilogy, can be completed in three levels:
Let's just remind ourselves of the blurb for this game:

"Keen blasts through a hyperspace gate and arrives on Vorticon VI,
landing on the island of Vortiville.  Here he faces mind numbing
horrors of suburban life.  Then he will travel to New Vorticon,
where life is a dark, dangerous enterprise.  He will also have to
face the violent forces massed in the Vorticon military installation.
After this, he will face the impossible maze of the Caves of Oblivion.
If he passes this barrier, he will finally reach the castle of the Grand
Intellect, where all his beliefs and fears come together in a titanic,
shocking finale!  Don't miss the incredible shattering conclusion to
the Commander Keen trilogy!"

Well, actually, you don't really have to face that much... just one of the Vortiville cities, then you can pretty much bypass the entire game and go straight to the end. The only mind numbing horrors of suburban life that can be found are unimaginatively designed, blocky buildings that ironically can also be bypassed most of the time.

The Caves of Oblivion is literally an impossible maze, if you enter it, none of the passages will lead to an exit, the only way to beat it is to pogo over the bloody thing. I'm not sure what the developers were thinking...the Gordian knot style puzzles only really pay off for you if you're Alexander the Great.

And then there's the ending - considering that Commander Keen can only jump, pogo and fire bolts from a pistol sized raygun boss battles really don't cut it in this game - but they tried to and came up with this monstrosity:

IT SHITS BRICKS LOL

Yes, somehow this "Mangling Machine" has meeps (the green thingies) trapped inside it. Considering the limited memory PCs had at the time this wasn't half bad but at the same time, a bunch of animated terrain blocks that could crush you didn't have half as much pull as Mario kicking the shit out of Bowser.

Don't get me wrong, I still loved this game, it's just that for a trilogy with awesome parts one and two, it's just a shame that part three is this terribly designed. If all the levels were compulsory it would have been epic.

Oh well, good job episodes 4 and 5 were fraggin' awesome by comparison!

Re: Something you REALLY NEED TO LEARN for your next GTA game

2007-08-28T23:18:00.000+01:00

Dear Rockstar,

Please please PLEASE put in some method of replaying concluded missions. Maybe it's just me, but you actually do a good job of doing missions. Getting a load of weapons and causing havoc became boring as soon as killing people and blowing up vehicles stopped giving you cash. That, just to remind you, was three games back. Once the storyline is over, I really won't be arsed hunting oysters in bloody San Fierro to get 100% completion.
I mean seriously, have you seen how fucking HUGE this place is?!?!?!?!

That aside, thank you very much for being Scottish and effectively telling Jack Thompson to fuck the hell off every time he opens his mouth.

Yours,

Oirish_Martin

Actually, not that shocked.

2007-08-28T02:46:00.000+01:00

Just finished System Shock 2 - feel pretty underwhelmed. It didn't deliver what everyone else claimed to be experiencing. The following will contain spoilers for SS2.

First off, the Dark engine was severely underused, you can't sneak around when there are few dark places, can you? Secondly, the last few levels were incredibly short (albeit with a couple of challenging shootouts and plot twists thrown in). I do disagree with popular opinion however that the Rickenbacker levels were too short and visually too similar to the Von Braun levels - they are required to be shorter due to the (smaller??) size of the Rickenbacker, and the technological style of it was much darker and functional than that of the VB. Thirdly, while the audio logs of the dying and mutating crewmembers were a great way of exposition, etc, the infrequent use of the "ghosts" was somewhat distracting - it was like they forgot to include any after the VB. Fourthly - a relatively minor niggle - even after the ship AI XERXES is taken offline his image and voice still linger within the game. I personally feel they should have had a visual change in the ship's computer system once SHODAN ousts him. Fifthly, a major niggle, unless I missed something, no explanation was made of what happened to Diego! I saw his body, but how does a dead person send you messages?!

Aspects of the game I do like are the range of character development options - I went Navy and ended up having a mix of decent tech skills (specialising in hacking, research and modding) and still managed to have two high weapons abilities (heavy and exotic). I managed to go through the entire game without using a single psionic power. If I ever can be bothered going through the technical nightmare that is running SS2 (start game, load game (huge likelihood of failure), turn off hyperthreading, try to progress without doing anything that requires a menuscreen (dying, saving, loading, jumping and instinctively pressing esc) I'm gonna try and be a pure psicorp soldier.

The other neat aspect is that this game never really allows you to rest - even if you go all the way back to the starting point of the game (which is possible!) through areas you think you cleared out, the game will replace occasional enemies in certain areas. It's little touches like that one that make this game more than just an FPS with a complicated inventory system.

My favourite aspect of the game? SHODAN.

Waah. Yes, her. By far the best aspect of this game is your constant manipulation at the hands of this insane AI. To begin with, you don't even know she's there. She sends you messages using the name of a dead crewmember. Then you open her office door to find her decaying corpse while SHODAN starts screaming at you from a monitor. The rest of the game is you following her fanatical desire to exact revenge on one of her failed experiments that killed off most of the crews of the two ships.

Which is why it's such a shame that there's only one level where it's you versus SHODAN, and it's a typical end-of-game boss game. After being used by her and then betrayed by her, to just have a turkey shoot to settle a four-decade old score is a bit anticlamactic.

Anyway, hopefully enough ranting about that game for now. It's still worth a play if you enjoyed Deus Ex.

I've been living in the US for about three months now, and I have to return home soon. This trip's been a great one for firsts - first time working at an international physics lab, first time in Chicago, first time in an IMAX theatre (Order of the Phoenix yay!), first time queueing for a book release (Deathly Hallows YAY!), first time at a rock concert (Lollapalooza), first time on a rollercoaster (Six Flags, The Viper). My latest first was first time at a casino - a friend put my girlfriend and I up in the Borgata in Atlantic City.
Shiny. That aside, I've decided that casinos are horrible soul-destroying places. Any place that gives you free drinks while you're sitting at their money-eating machines just makes my skin crawl. The more you spend, the nicer they treat you, so they can chew you up and spit you out even quicker.

Great swimming pool though.

My system is shocked. Doomed, even.

2007-08-23T20:31:00.001+01:00

So, figured I'd get straight in there....

Recently, I've been playing quite a few FPS/horror games. Which is great, because the more I play the further distanced I feel from the scared little boy I used to be. I couldn't even play Tomb Raider without getting scared of the friggin' wolves. Half Life nearly put me into therapy.

I spent the last week replaying Doom 3 + Resurrection of Evil. Doom 3 is an interesting game - a halfway house between the mindless shooting and painfully obvious ambush zones of the original and the flashy story driven complex modern FPSs. No matter how many times I hear other people bitch about how "there's no duct tape on Mars tahts y they cant put a flashlite on a gun rofl" I just roll my eyes and think - if they managed to end up with chainsaws on Mars, then not having any tape is child's play by comparison.

It does play remarkably like the original. Whether by accident or design, you usually pick one weapon and use it repeatedly until its ammo is gone. Also, I think I can recall about two curved corridors in the entire game. However, the atmosphere is definitely different. Doom 3 keeps you feeling isolated and two seconds away from being immolated and eviscerated for about 95% of the game time. It's completely different from, say, Quake 4, which is very much an America-fuck-yeah style of squaddie shooter.

Let it be known that Cherubs and Trites still scare the living crap out of me.I mean come on. Upsidedown walking heads and psychotic insect babies. That bite. Who comes up with this shit?

Anyhow, after spending about 4 hours fruitlessly trying to download, install, run and fix the Bioshock demo (fucking useless DirectX 8 graphics card - never EVER buying a craptop again) I decided, fuck it, I'll download System Shock 2. For those of you who haven't heard, System Shock 2 is a spiritual ancestor to Bioshock. Both involve isolated scientific communities doing silly things and destroying themselves - except where Bioshock is set underwater in the 1960s, System Shock is set in a spaceship in the 2010s.

I'd like to take a moment to rant at Microsoft in the form of a conversation.
Microsoft: Hey guys, with Service Pack 1 you can play lots of old games, including ones that run on the Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2, etc)
Gamers: Holy shit, we can! Nice one! w00t ZOMG LOL
*Time passes*
Gamers: So, yeah, that Service Pack 2 you guys just made...
Microsoft: Yeah?
Gamers: It's only gone and rendered all our old games unplayable again.

Fucktards.

Anyway, when System Shock 2 isn't crashing to the desktop, I've been wandering about the Von Braun starship trying not to die. It's a tough game. A very tough game. Weapons degrade and break, ammo is scarce, the security systems can wipe you out very quickly. Running round a cargo hold dodging blasts from 3 heavy security robots just to get a door code was never part of Deus Ex. Or having a bunch of transport pods burst open to reveal a ton of kamikaze protocol droids.

Then there's the whole RPG side of things (I've gotta be honest, I suck at RPGs. Too many variables to keep track of.) Your RPG skills are what you need to repair and modify your weapons, use psychic attacks, hack computers, and use different weaponry as well as your usual strength/endurance/agility stats.

Right now, I have barely any ammo or nanites (help you resurrect). Or health for that matter. And all I can wield is a pistol (that's almost broken) and a wrench. Wonderful.
Yes, as you've guessed, it's every bit as tough as I'd imagined. What isn't as I expected was it's scariness. So far I've jumped about once. I'm hoping it gets scarier. What with the constant crashing, this game will have to deliver the goods to keep me playing it. Something's got to keep me happy until I have a system capable of playing Bioshock.