TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

GTA IV Shorts: Cut Off

PC Gamer Podcast: The Future’s Dim

Ross is still away, so the start is kind of a shambles again. In his absence, myself, Tim Edwards, Craig Pearson and special guest Steve Williams discuss why Prince of Persia sucks so profoundly, why GTA IV’s video editor wins so profoundly, what got cut from World of Goo, and what Valve could call a Left 4 Dead sequel. Stream or download below, or Really Simply Syndicate that bad boy here.

Thoughts On The Team Fortress 2 Christmas Changes

Disclaimer: this expression does not faithfully represent my feelings on these changes.

Left 4 Dead has ceased to be a regular fixture in my schedule, but it somehow made TF2 feel old, or overfamiliar. So I’m mega-, perhaps even ultra-pleased with the timing of the pretty dramatic overhaul that just went live.

Also, Scout update is next, thank God. I was wrong about the Spy hint in the previous TF2 blog post title. I asked Robin about it a while back – he was amused by the extreme scrutiny speculators subjected his wording to. He just has the TF2 script doc open and selects a line at random.

• The Engineer’s teleporters can now be upgraded to level three. It will recharge faster the higher level it is
  Great news. They pretty much confirmed this ages ago, but it wasn’t clear if they’d work it into the Engy pack or release it as a separate tweak. It seems like this has to add more variety to viable engy tactics, and just as importantly, more variety to the litany of complaints we can level against our Engies when they inevitably ignore this new ability and hunker down behind their ill-positioned Sentry.
   
• The Engineer’s dispensers can now be upgraded to level three. It will give out metal and heal faster as it is upgraded
  Yay. But I’m guessing this still means placing it right behind you and your Sentry is still the only logical position. One of the main Engy changes I’d like to see is making it viable to place your dispenser where your team most needs it without crippling your own ability to keep yourself and your Sentry alive.
   
• Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground or from health cabinets
  The health cabinets thing has been suggested three times a day since the dawn of time, though I can’t say I’ve ever wanted it. When I run out of Cloak, I’m in the enemy base. Because I used my Cloak. You know, to get past enemies. Gobbling up ammo to replenish it is much more interesting to me, because it means less waiting around without encouraging me to walk all the way back to base.
   
• Some changes to the second part of the first stage of Goldrush to give the attackers more of an advantage
  Okay, but I can’t say this is the stage that usually gives me trouble as an attacker. It’s always, always stage 2 cap 2, and trying to assault a good defense of that point is the most miserably futile experience you can have with TF2.
   
• Any weapons that fire bullets (shotguns, sniper’s machine gun, heavy’s minigun, etc.) can now break apart the Demoman’s stickybombs
  Wow, okay, yes. Anything that’s bad for Demomen is fine by me, even when I’m playing Demoman. I didn’t expect them to do this particular nerf, though. One of the few things I like about Demomen right now is they don’t over-abuse their ability to place stickies where it’s impossible to see them before they kill you – more often they use them out in the open for area denial, warning people off a cap. If everyone can destroy them now, I’m a little worried that Demomen are going to learn to always put them in hidden places, and I’ve never discovered any way to anticipate or counter that tactic. Even if you’re looking in exactly the right direction as you round a corner, you’re surely not going to be able to destroy them all before the Demoman can right-click to kill you.
   
• The icon on the HUD for a person calling for Medic will now give more information to the medic (if the target is low on health, on fire, etc.)
  At freaking last! This seemed like such an obvious thing, I thought there must be some complicated technical reason why they didn’t do it in the first place.
   
• Added an achievement tracker that will allow people to choose specific achievements that they are trying to get
  omg tf2=wow ffs valve gay ferrets tldr. Actually this’ll be quite useful. But I’m still not doing most of those Medic ones.
   
• There is now a custom icon for death messages when the player was killed from a critical hit
  GOOD. Now the world shall see that not only am I killed by a critical hit every time I die, but it’s always in a situation and with an amount of health that would guarantee I survive an equivalent non-critical hit and Valve will realise their game is entirely random, sob for a little while, then remove crits forever and issue a public apology. (Hey guys, let’s get into a discussion about whether crits are a good thing.)
   
• Added a new particle effect for when a player enters the water
  +5% to review score.
   
• Added smoke to the feet of a rocket jumping soldier
  +10% to review score.
   
• Players will now have some particles swirling around them so other players can see when they are overhealed
  I heartily endorse this. I think everything mechanically important should be visually apparent (except Cloaked Spies). Now they just need a way to show how hurt players are.
   
• Attempts by player Pentadact to connect to any servers now result in immediate timeouts, ensuring he can no longer play the game at all
  This is the only one I’m not crazy about. I realise I’m inevitably biased, but it just seems unlike Valve to make such a specific tweak. And personally, it’s starting to diminish my enjoyment of the game.
   

Dear Sir

Ever since it got popular, Spore players have got a little squabbly over getting their stuff into our Sporecast. I have to delete most of the comments I get on my own creations because they’re just people begging.

I’ve also started getting mail from people who’ve found a knock-off of one of their creations in there. Usually I’m happy to add the original and – if I can find it – remove the copy. But somehow one message I got yesterday wasn’t entirely convincing:

“I am requesting that you please remove the mysterious blue box from your sporecast.

This is a blatant theft of my original tardis created 9/5/08 (blue box create date is 9/8/08)… original can be found:”

Extra Mirror’s Edge Levels Blocky, Unrealistic

They’re time-trial levels, where you can race against your own or presumably other people’s ghosts to complete them as quickly as possible. That’s where they evidently think the longevity will be, rather than in extending the plot episodically. But I’m not sure speed-running is for me.

The main basis for my excitement over Mirror’s Edge, apart from the fantastic art, is N. It’s absurdly difficult and endlessly frustrating, but you can retry quickly and there’s enormous scope for finesse. It seems like Mirror’s Edge has a similar process, but I hope speed isn’t the only type of finesse it permits. I never enjoyed trying to maximise my time remaining in N, or speed-run any other game. It was purely about elegance and style.

I tried a speed-run of the first level of Deus Ex once. It went so badly that I actually lost my left leg before I got inside the statue, and I still beat the contemporary fastest time on the Speed Demo Archive.

The bar’s risen quite a bit since then, thankfully, and there’s now a magnificently clever 43 minute run. It turns out grenade-jumping in Deus Ex doesn’t mean what it means in other games, and nano-augmented bunny-hopping is a thing of curious elegance.

This guy has a spectacular way of exiting Maggie Chow’s penthouse suite at maximum speed, never bothers to get his Kill Switch removed, gasses most of UNATCO to get them to open doors for him in their panic, stabs Tracer Tong to shut him up, assassinates Tiffany Savage to save time rescuing her, and pulls off the most laughably improbable escape from the swiftly scuttled Wallcloud. Deus Ex had scope for finesse.

Update: He also survives the most awkward lift ride ever, and there’s something of a surprise ending. I accidentally the whole thing.

Hupdate: Direct download of the super-crisp high quality version of that Mirror’s Edge clip for aesthetes.

Dead Space: The Right-Hand Side Of A Good Game

In it, you play a man who is unable to see anything to the left of his nose. Dead Space doesn’t make monsters appear behind you as often as Doom 3 did, but it doesn’t have to: the half who happen to be on your left are just as much of a shock. I have no idea how this camera angle was ever supposed to work.

It’s also obsessed with avoiding any kind of fixed HUD, which means you can’t see your health if you’re near a wall, you can’t see your total ammo in combat, you can’t see part of the map because your own head is in the way, and you have to take your gun out to jump – so that the game can use its LCD screen to tell you whether you’re looking at a surface you’re allowed to jump to. Given that none of these are problems you would face in reality, and assuming the point of avoiding a fixed HUD is to enhance immersion, I’m prepared to call this one a failure.

I used to be fiercely anti-HUD, but now that a few developers have done their best to do away with them, I’m a convert. I still think they can be eradicated eventually, but you’ve made your point guys: none of you are anywhere near figuring out how to do it without profoundly irritating the player. Now for God’s sake have some shame and put your HUDs back. Make them skimpy, see-through and revealing, but please put something on.

The reason it’s not the right-hand side of a bad or boring game has a lot to do with the monsters. Their concept is only a whisker away from the Generosaurus Meh – I seem to recall we’ve seen badly mutated humans once or twice before – but their more delerious design takes it to uneasy new lows. One of the most common enemies has what look like a child’s forearms protruding below its main claws.

They’d be even more unsettling if this was, as it always should have been, first-person; but you can see just about enough from your ParrotCam to powerfully want these things away from you.

But it’s not so much their look that makes them interesting or fun to fight, it’s what you can do to them. That’s always what gives enemies their ‘feel’ – we can’t really touch the stuff we fight in games, but we quickly acquire near-total knowledge of how they react to almost anything you can do to them, and that’s the way in which we come to know their consistency, resilience and structure.

In Dead Space the primary form of interaction is dismemberment: cutting, blasting or burning whole limbs off at a time, while your enemy is still alive, and then trying to figure out if it has enough functioning fleshsticks left to drag its way towards you and gnash off your own. There’s even a type of zombie that can never die, so the only consideration is how you want to prune it before you turn and run.

Oh, well here’s where this place went wrong. Gold is enormously conductive.

That makes it satisfying and grisly, and the availability of a remotely guided circular sawblade weapon makes it more so. There’s a very potent and expensive upgrade system that works well, slowmo and a Gravity Gun are thrown in almost as afterthoughts, and stepping out into the vacuum every now and then is a blast of fresh no-air – even if your movement isn’t interestingly different.

The interface and camera angle keep finding new ways to screw you over, but Dead Space scores positively on the simplest metric: I’m glad I bought it, even at a time when Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead are still new.

So My Vesper Became Your Chariot

I have a special weak spot for songs that make me laugh with their opening couplet, and I have a special weak spot for spies, and I have a special weak spot for The Decemberists. So this song (via The World Forgot) was always going to win my heart – it didn’t need to be as catchy and fun as it is.

If, like me, you barely understood the basics of the Plame affair at the time, I suggest having it explained to you by Matthew Baldwin while you listen to this. It’s one of those rare occasions when you realise that thing you kept hearing about in the news was actually hugely exciting if you get the right person to tell you about it.

Fallout Girl: The Road To Tenpenny Towers

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.

Revenge Of The Psycho Graverobber

Tomb Raider Underworld just went live on Steam. There’s some absurd fuss kicking up about review scores that you can look up if you care, but one of the many reasons it’s absurd is that the game is extremely good. John Walker did it for us and gave it 86%, I did it for PC Format and gave it 89%.

It’s my favourite of the entire series, and the first Tomb Raider game that suggests its creators have some idea of what they’re good at. No bosses, no quick-time events, few traps, and combat that’s brief, sparsely spaced and often actual fun.

I’m not saying buy it – Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead make everything else an opulence at the moment – I’m saying ask for it for Christmas.

Format only needed three screenshots, but the game is exquisitely detailed and Lara’s face is one of the most smoothly expressive crafted outside of Valve, so I took several hundred. Here are some of the offcuts, click through to the full size ones to see what I mean.

I’m Not Making The Plan Next Time

Thomas Paine in the comments over at 1Fort points out the Leeroy Jenkins of Left 4 Dead.

I love the sheer speed and force with which his plan fails.

HERO CLOSET

After a Tank fight, on Expert. This was pretty much the last time we saw each other alive.

Update: title changed because it turns out Craig picked exactly the same quote for the strapline in his review. This post is now named in honour of the dark room we hid in for ten minutes last night to survive the finalé of Blood Harvest.

The first version of Left 4 Dead that isn’t pointlessly and inexplicably butchered is in the wild now, and by in I mean on and by the wild I mean Steam. If you’ve had the chance to play through to a finalé and you hadn’t before, I hope you see why I thought it bizarre that they would leave that out of a demo. If they feared that giving away something substantial for free might harm sales rather than drive them, I would cough in such a way that the sound could be construed as the words ‘Counter’ and ‘Strike’ one after the other.

The downside for me as a player is that half the public games I’ve joined are trying to play on Expert, emboldened by the trivial ease of the demo on Normal. This is folly.

Tensions rise on the PC Gamer quartet when it becomes clear that most of us are either
stupid or crazy.

The finalés are really something. The reason I think they’re the point of Left 4 Dead is that they showcase its most surprising and profound accomplishment: difficulty. Sin Episodes, like many before it, focused entirely on that problem. It not only failed, it did so with such aplomb that the players’ primary complaint about the game was the wonky difficulty.

Left 4 Dead’s campaigns, on Normal, always run to the final map, and are always close. In our game at lunch, Tim was being so utterly pummeled by the time rescue arrived that he actually commanded us to leave without him.
“Graham’s gone too, leave him, just run for it!”
“I’m not gone! Save me!”
So I did. Except that his main problem turned out not be a pesky Hunter so much as thrity-six zombies and a Tank. I think I got the Tank, but by the time I did I was being mauled from so many directions that I couldn’t move to save Graham, and we both died there.

In our first game after work, Graham, Tim and I made it to the boat but Craig got pinned in the water. I jumped in and managed to get him on his feet, but he was knocked down again on the pier before he could get to the boat. I’d badly hurt myself with the first attempt, so I jumped onto the boat just as it pulled away – and just as Graham jumped off to come to Craig’s aid.

Then in our last game, on Dead Air, through canny use of distractionary pipe bombs, sustained high vantage-point fire from Graham and Craig, emplaced heavy weapons support from Tim and shotgun-powered back-covering from me, we all piled into the back of the cargo plane and made it to safety.

So you see his tongue has been wrapped around several objects, twisted almost, to the
point at which he can no longer clearly speak. I guess you could say it was quite a mouthful.

I’m actually not a huge fan of the raw ingredients of Left 4 Dead: I love the animation of the zombies, but they always feel slightly hollow and insubstantial to kill, your weapons rattly and unexciting. But difficulty is such a hugely important variable, and the game nails it so utterly, that the final result is an endless thrill.

Fallout Girl: Anywhere But Megaton

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.

Fallout Girl, A Diary

My name is Sophie, because the way in which Fallout 3 asks you to pick your name is a way that makes silly names, or obtuse ones like Pentadact, seem rather cruel. I’m not going to spoil what that is right now, but I will in the following entry.

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. Continued

Left 4 De-

The Left 4 Dead demo is out for pre-orderererers, and it just sort of… stops.

The four campaigns are usually four missions long each, and the demo only gives you the first two sections of one of them. It’s like releasing the first half of a song as a single to promote your forthcoming album. You can tell from the first half of this campaign that it’s going to be a good campaign, but the first half isn’t one by itself.

I am baffled and saddened by this. To me the point of Left 4 Dead is that “just made it!” moment, the way the Director expertly builds difficulty, tension and drama over the four levels to an incredible climax. Even when you die, that finalé is the highlight of the game. I can’t think why, after spending more than two years years perfecting an extraordinary new system that masters the eternal design problems of pacing and balance, you’d release a demo that does neither well.

This demo is only for people who’ve already committed to buying the game at the moment, but it’s the same one going live to the public next Tuesday, and it’s the one from which the first player impressions will be posted on forums. Playing it earlier tonight was the first time in my five sessions with Left 4 Dead that we’ve survived easily, and the first time the answer to “Do you want to play again?” has been “Not really.”

It’ll do till the full thing comes along, of course, and it’s still great fun. Just don’t assume from the demo that the full game lacks drama, variety or a satisfying climax.

Right To Live

My guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse over at the PC Gamer blog.