TOM FRANCIS
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Team Fortress 2 Updates In Perspective

There’s only one class left for Valve to update in Team Fortress 2, the Engineer. One by one, Valve have given each of the other eight characters a set of alternative weapons, and with each release there’s been a batch of new maps, game modes and features to play with. The amount of free stuff we’ve had since I wrote up the first details of the unlocks system at the start of 2008 is obscene.

When the inventory system went down briefly before the latest update, we were temporarily stuck with TF2 much as it was in 2007. The feeling was, “Where did the game go?” Compare that to something like Halo 3, released around the same time, which has functionally barely changed and charged a total of £20 ($30) for its new maps.

One thing that hasn’t changed since that article (funny to read in light of how much has) is the spirit of the updates, framed there: “The unlockables aren’t just beefed up versions of the weapons, they balance major advantages and disadvantages to fundamentally alter the role of that class.” While Steam forumites have turned that ethos into an imperative law to be screechingly enforced by the limp fist of internet tantrums, the gist is basically universal: the unlocks are supposed to change the way the class plays in a meaningful way. How successful have they been?

Medic (April 08): decent – the Kritzkrieg is a nice idea but badly needed the large charge-rate boost it later got. The Ubersaw set the standard for awesome new melee weapon ideas with negligible drawbacks that would continue to enrage weird forumites for twenty more months without ever actually making the game less fun.

Pyro (June 08): great – the Backburner turns the Pyro into the ambush class he was always meant to be, but they also added the airblast ability to the standard flamethrower to make the trade-off more interesting. To this day there are two distinct breeds of Pyro playing properly different roles. Also, the Axtinguisher is the second best idea Valve ever stole from me (and somehow implimented in 19 days).

Heavy (August 08): weak – the Heavy was one of the least played classes at the time, today he’s dead last. It’s not because he’s underpowered; he’s the second highest scoring class and the most deadly by a head. It’s just a very rocky experience getting those kills, because everyone seems to have an easy way of doing something horrible to you, and you don’t seem to have a way of avoiding any of it. He needed unlocks that would give him some flexibility, some get-outs or workarounds. Instead he got a gun that’s good against Scouts (rarely a problem in my experience), the admittedly neat Sandvich and some fun but impractical gloves. Needs a revisit.

Scout (Feb 09): mixed – the Force-A-Nature and Sandman get changed, patched and bitched about so much that I have to assume they haven’t been totally successful yet, but I can’t get a handle on them myself. People can do things with the Force that I don’t even understand – suck me towards them or one-shot me – and yet it’s utterly useless in my hands. Bonk tackles the main problem with the class, survivability against Sentries, but it’s still not useful enough that I ever want to play the class once turrets crop up.

Sniper (May 09): superb – the Huntsman transformed him from a stay-at-home trouncing twat to a roaming predator, powerful but vulnerable. Its viability at medium and near range leads to so many breathsnatching life-or-death snap shot moments against guys who’d kill him in a second if they didn’t have an arrow in their face. Jarate lets him help friends take care of threats he’s not suited to, or just insult his killer before an inevitable death. I don’t really see the point of the Razorback in a world where Spies can headshot, but whatever.

Spy (May 09): superb – the Dead Ringer creates an Action Spy subclass the likes of which we’ve never seen, and the Cloak and Dagger lets him be the methodical, oppourtunistic infiltrator his abilities always hinted at. Some clever thought about which kind of cloaks should recharge from ammo makes the choice a tough one, and better still, situational. Now that people have cottoned onto it the Dead Ringer noise is a little too loud – it might be fun if he masked it by calling out a random line of the class he’s dressed as: suspicious, but not conclusive. The Ambassador is effective but, if you ask me, too much of an overlap with the Sniper and pretty horrible-sounding.

Soldier (Dec 09): great – the Direct Hit finally makes rocket combat feel like a mindgame rather than a spamgame, and the Equaliser is way better than my idea: it’s the speed increase at low health that really makes it. It’s the one weapon I love to hear people complain about, because having been that Soldier who one-shotted them, I know how terrifyingly close to death he was. Bugle: indifferent.

Demoman (Dec 09): good – the sword and shield don’t make a new subclass of Demoman, they make the tenth class. His massive resilience to explosions demands proper restrategising, and I love the way the Heads mechanic makes him one of the few classes with something to lose. The more lives you take, the faster and tougher you are, so the more you want to preserve your advantage and therefore life. Charging is hilarious. I do think the sound and feel of melee combat in TF2 isn’t quite up to doing a big sword justice, though: it feels wrong for its blows to be met with a quiet crunch, for its swings to connect in much the same way as a bottle’s, and to be able to whack a Pyro three times without killing him. I also think it’s a crime not to have provided a Grenade Launcher alternative: is sucks for all the reasons regular grenades suck.

It’s an excellent track record. The mis-steps haven’t made those classes worse, just failed to improve them – a failure that’s default in other games. The way these unlocks are earned has also changed, but strangely. For the sake of the scrollbar, I’ll save what’s wrong with that and how to fix it for another post.

This Week

Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.

War Were Declared

So the Demoman and Solider are getting three unlockables each next week, and there’s a seventh weapon that will go to whoever kills the other one more. They racked up 2.7 million kills of each other in the first sixteen hours of this competition, and currently the Soldier’s in the lead. I was trying to remember what I hoped the Demoman and Soldier unlockables might be, a year and a half ago, so I dug it out of the archive.

Both my suggestions for replacement melee weapons encourage and reward mid-air whacking after propelling yourself at the enemy with your explosives. I strongly suspect this seventh unlockable weapon, the one that could go to either class, is a melee weapon that critical-hits if used during or shortly after a rocket- or sticky-jump: it’s niche enough not to give the class it goes to a large advantage, and it’s one of the few areas of common ground between them.

My only suggestion for the Grenade Launcher at the time was its complete and permanent removal. I still hate it, but if I had to take a guess at a viable replacement, it’d be kind of cool to have one whose charges stuck to players and walls, detonating after a short delay regardless of enemy contact. Less useful for direct hits, but more useful for injuring pursuers while retreating. Here’s the others:

Wee Creepers: sticky-bombs that roll slowly towards nearby enemies, faster the closer they are. If an enemy’s close enough, they’ll follow him at Demoman walking-speed (very slightly slower than most classes). He can only lay four at a time, and they stop for a while if shot.

Why? Almost every situation involving these conjours an entertaining mental image.

Why not? This would allow players on your own team to screw you over by luring stickies towards you. It’s hard to say how much of a problem that would be, because to an extent it would require the enemy Demoman’s co-operation. If you’re close enough to them to lead them at walking speed, he’s probably just going to blow you up straight away.

The Good Stuff: alternate whiskey bottle which, if not yet smashed, temporarily adds 50 health when doing the drinking taunt – even if it takes him above his usual maximum. The boost decays over fifteen seconds, during which time the Demoman is also immune to fall-damage. The bottle always crits while the Demoman has been airbourne for more than a second.

Why? Bracing yourself for a good sticky-jump, whacking people at the end of it.

Why not… that swingy dynamite he had in the first trailer! I’m only guessing, but I would think that made it too easy to take out an Engy, all his kit and everyone defending him without actually entering line-of-sight. The swinging charge-up animation was interesting, though – I wonder if you had to stay still during that.

Last Ditch Digger: broken trench-shovel whose damage and attack-rate are proportional to the amount of health the Soldier has lost.

Why? Apart from encouraging unlikely comebacks, it makes rocket-jumping spade-attacks more effective. And fun things should always be made more effective.

Imploder: rocket launcher whose blasts suck people in rather than knocking them away. The actual damage radius is smaller than a standard rocket, but the ‘suck’ radius is larger than either.

Why? Lets the Soldier cluster large groups of people into a tight space for maximum damage, but sacrifices his ability to juggle enemies, keep them at bay or rocket-jump – though some wall-climbing and ceiling-sucking is doable by firing the rockets above you.

Skeet Shooter: shotgun which only and always crits on airbourne opponents. Can be drawn, fired and holstered by pressing Right Mouse, whichever weapon the Soldier is currently holding.

Why? If you manage that, you deserve a crit.

Why not… grenades! Hey, good idea! It looks like Valve completely forgot to put these in TF2, despite how fun it is to get killed by speculatively flung munitions bouncing arbitrarily around corners by trigger-spamming morons! Thank God we reminded them!

Why not… heat-seeking rockets! Because aiming highly explosive projectiles to hit within a few meters of a target is still too hard! Not only should the modicum of skill required to play a Soldier successfully be removed, but it should be removed by an unlockable weapon that only the most skillful players will earn. Perfect!

Why not… a rocket-launcher that’s more powerful but has to be reloaded more often? Reloading all the damn time is the least fun part about playing as a Soldier, and dying in one hit is the least fun part about fighting one. Let’s not exacerbate either.

The rest of that post was here. War Were Declared is from, apologies for shakeycam, this.

I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome

In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it.

By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (“stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go.

The gnome in his prize box: you have to score over 750 points in a shooting gallery game to win him, which isn’t actually easy in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

When I finally did win him, I discovered that he has something of a violent side:

Smokers want him:

He doesn’t like to look at zombie guts:

He’s afraid of rollercoasters:

He’s calm under pressure:

And while he doesn’t see dead people – or indeed anything – dead people see him:

It took several runs to even get to the finale. Twice I ran out of time in real life, and when I did have an evening free, I got so caught up apologising for accidentally setting everyone on fire that I played through a whole level before realising that I’d lost him.

Once I got into a few games that worked, with people willing to help, we found that Rochelle hates him:

Ellis worries about him:

Coach is serious about him:

And Nick doesn’t fucking trust him:

But through it all, the gnome is serene, the gnome is beatiffic, the gnome is- is the gnome strangling Rochelle?

It looks like the gnome is strangling Rochelle.

She seemed to like carrying him even less after that, but she did it anyway.

It eventually became apparent that my quest was under some kind of curse. I got into so many bad games that I eventually settled for playing with one quiet European stranger, who played virtually the entire campaign using only the katana, and showed no interest in the gnome. His businesslike dispatching of the slavering hordes seemed to say “I have more important things to do.”

He was good, though, and at last we made it to the finale.

(In case anyone mistakes this for a screenshot that doesn’t involve a gnome, he’s in the bottom right.)

In all my cursing of attempts cut short or failed through distraction, I never really considered that I might just not be able to do it. But Quimby and I immediately hit real problems with the final battle.

On our best run, we lasted until the rescue helicopter arrived, with enough time to spare for me to truly panic: where’s the gnome? I’d left him in the mosh pit, but all I saw were corpses. Dying I could live with, but succeeding? Without the gnome? Unthinkable.

Suddenly, over voice chat, the previously silent, previously gnome indifferent Quimby stated in an unplacable accent: “I have the gernome!”

He did, but he fell. And though I snatched the gernome from his body, a Tank barreled into me on my last hitpoint, and I lay dying, alone, inches from the helicopter, that ceramic asshole beaming obliviously by my side.

We needed help.

Happily, that’s about when freelancer Will Porter showed up:

Along with Craig:

And even the gnome seemed unusually pleased.

The fight that followed was still tonguey.

Sometimes crushy.

Sometimes not far off an actual nightmare.

But after three or four attempts, and an appallingly timed crash, we made it. I climbed aboard the chopper, gnome tightly in arms, and watched guiltily as the other three struggled to survive. I couldn’t provide covering fire with the gnome in hand, and I wasn’t about to try setting him down inside a moving helicopter with no doors after coming all this way. Craig made it, as did late joiner Dark Wolf, but Will was too fat or crazy to escape the fray.

Sorry lady, the class where your head stays intact is all booked up.

We might have something in economy though.

My prize. It’s over. I’m exhausted. The added stake of all the work it takes to get the gnome to that final battle charges it with a terrifying pressure, which triggers a wildly inappropriate surge of adrenaline. The very real possibility of losing him in the chaos at the last minute is horrible to contemplate.

Now that I’m finally done with it, I just want to relax. But I have a nasty feeling that chipped-hatted twat is going to drop from the skybox ten minutes into Episode Three, and I’ll be forced by my own idiocy to go through this dark ritual once again.

Dragon Age Unclear On The Use Of Swords

My Rogue Elf (below) uses swords and crossbows, but the game’s starting to get them mixed up. It’ll probably right itself if I ever get a new crossbow, which seems like a good reason not to.

You’re stuck with the surname ‘Tabris’, so I eventually went with ‘Altris’ for my first.

If you’re playing it this weekend too, which Origin did you pick? Was it any good? The Female City Elf story is quite compelling, which is actually sort of a problem: the main story is nothing like as involving. I keep feeling like this is a slightly dreary sidequest I have to do before I can get back to the cause that interests me, so I’m feigning concern for the fate of the world.

Despite the weird lack of good shots before release, it’s actually super photogenic thanks to a remove-interface key.

I’m enjoying it mechanically, but the five or so hours I’ve played are a textbook example of BioWare trying so hard to be epic that they’ve failed to make it personal. I hope and half expect that something I give a shit about will happen soon.

Update: Just discovered you can not only see my character online, but read a bullet point summary of all the plot developments and major decisions I’ve made (spoilers for up to level 9) – they’re even time stamped. Scary.

I don’t want to talk about this quest.

Reasons To Look Forward To Just Cause 2, No. 13

Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About Borderlands

The stuff you can buy at the shop is sometimes too high level for you to use.
There is actually a minimum level bar, and it turns red to warn you of this, but a) it’s tiny and b) the whole weapons shop interface is also red. Any time you’re getting excited about something’s stats, just make sure you check for this before you spend your life savings. Often it’s still worth buying: I bought a level 23 shield at level 21 because it could take 560 points of damage – at level 36, I’d still never seen anything that good again.

The quoted damage for weapons with elemental effects is misleading.
That’s the base, conventional damage – the elemental damage is added to that. Precisely how much it adds varies, but I’ve found a 110 damage revolver with explosive shots significantly more effective than a 150 damage one without.

Repeater Pistols aren’t worth it.
They’re sort of like weaker sub-machineguns with smaller clips, but worse than that, they make the most appallingly puny sounds. Almost every other weapon type sounds and feels good in your virtual hands, repeater pistols really don’t. I suggest avoiding them entirely.

Grenade mods of the same type can do different amounts of damage.
I didn’t notice this for ages – I took ‘explosive sticky’ and never wanted to change types, so never switched for any of the others I found. I’d been selling a bunch of Explosive Stickies that would have quadrupled my damage.

Don’t join a game with a much higher level player than you.
Unless something’s changed since the code I played, you inherit all of their quests automatically, and you can’t get rid fo them. This makes your quest log an unmanagable mess of irrelevant text, and can sometimes cause you to stumble into impossibly difficult enemies.

There are two types of combat rifles.
One fires in three-round bursts, the other puts out a steady stream of bullets. I can’t see an easy way to tell between them on paper, except that three-round burst rifles tend to have small clip sizes that are a multiple of three (some of them actually are three), whereas steady stream ones have larger clips that are multiples of five.

Inventory expansions and elemental artifacts just get dumped in your inventory.
You have to actually click on them there to get the benefit.

It’s really cheap to completely re-spec your character.
At level 25 it cost me about $5,000, which is the kind of chump change you’re making on single trash loot sales by that point. So don’t sweat too much about the path not taken when levelling up. You can get a full refund at any time, try out a different branch, and even switch back for the same price if you don’t like it.

Class mods only boost skills you already have.
If you don’t have any points in Girl Power, +3 Girl Power on a class mod does nothing. If you have 5 points in Girl Power, though, +3 will actually take you past that maximum and up to 8.

Once you kill someone called Flynt, you can pretty much stop playing.
Unless you want to play through the game again with your levelled-up character, which you can do after completion, it’s not worth playing past that point. It becomes a thoughtless corridor shooter leading to a completely irrelevant boss fight with dismal rewards and no plot closure.

This guy. This guy here.

The Left 4 Dead 2 Demo Is Here, And Subpar

Setting aside that Valve have gone back to the bad old days of seeming as surprised as anyone when their stated release dates come and go without event, now that Left 4 Dead 2 is playable I sort of wish it wasn’t.

I stayed up late for the grand, long delayed unlocking on Steam because it’s a Valve game, and Valve games are automatically Events. That’s partly because of the communal sense of excitement as they unlock all over the world at precisely the same time, and partly because they’ve established a level of quality that almost guarantees I’m going to love anything they deem worthy of release. It’s why they can get away with restricting access to this demo, for the time being, to people who’ve already paid for the game.

I don’t doubt Left 4 Dead 2 will be obscenely successful, and I don’t doubt that the full game is far better than what they’ve put out here. But this is the first time since the advent of Steam that getting to play a new Valve game has been a disappointment. It’s the first thing they’ve released in that time that doesn’t have that special Valve feeling: the sense that this is not only something new, but something exquisitely well crafted in every aspect. It’s probably not a coincidence that it’s also the first thing in that time that they’ve developed quickly.

I loved Left 4 Dead’s structure and systems and look, but was never entirely satisfied with its rattly, insubstantial feel. My hope was that Left 4 Dead 2’s dismemberment and frying pans would fix that.

Instead, dismemberment adds little – I wouldn’t notice if a server had it disabled. Melee weapons are unconvincing: swift swipes that pass through everything, and vague staggers from the zombies inconsistent with the hit. And the new guns, which is basically all of them, are worse than the old ones. Almost comically so, in some cases. I had the urge to video some of their puny rasps and feeble gibbers to demonstrate how wrong they’d gone, until I reminded myself everyone would see them.

It’s also truly shoddy, in its current state. After the three hour delay, the first thing that happened on starting it was a command prompt that closed itself. When it finally got as far as the highly cinematic intro, it quit to desktop at the end to announce “Installation complete!”. In-game, the matchmaking ditched me on a 200 ping server at the very end of a map. The engine locked up every few steps for five to ten seconds, looping sounds angrily until I switched to windowed mode. Melee hits frequently make no noise, several zombies forgot where ladders ended and kept climbing into the sky, my character got stuck with his hand protruding gropily as if he longed only to fondle the hordes – as you’ve seen – and then the game crashed my PC completely.

I’d love to say whether the disgusting new infected types add anything to the actual mechanics of the game, but since they’ve repeated the bizarre mistake of the original Left 4 Dead demo and only included half a campaign, there’s nothing approaching a finale to judge them on. In regular play, all three new types seem trivial to deal with – as of course are Hunters, Smokers and Boomers at that stage in a campaign. As I said before, this is as stupid and obtuse as releasing half of a song to promote an album – it doesn’t condemn the full experience, but it marks it with the sour taste of irritation and anticlimax while completely failing to communicate its presumed strengths.

I am baffled by what they’re doing with this. What they show here doesn’t suggest a bad game by any means, but it’s making it look like a clumsy step in the wrong direction. I’m just going to write as much of it off as lag, rushing and a terrible choice of demo as I possibly can.

What’s Wrong With Just Cause?

I don’t think I wrote about it here much at the time, because it wasn’t publicly out when I was really into it, but Just Cause is one of my favourite games. Open world games don’t seem to have much trouble making a great open world – most of the big ones like Oblivion, Far Cry 2, World of Warcraft and GTA IV are all wonderful places I want to spend time in. The difference with the islands of Just Cause, which are as pretty and inviting as any of those, is that you can fling yourself at them.

I’d just finished a mission, one which left me exhausted and bleeding on a beach miles from anywhere. The next place I needed to get to was on another island entirely, and there were no boats or choppers nearby to hijack. So I called the agency to have them drop me off a motorbike.

When it came, airdropped unceremoniously in a heavy wooden crate, I ignored it and fired my grappling hook at the agency helicopter that had dropped it off. It’s one of the only things in the game you can’t hijack, but there’s no rule against hanging on to it. I reeled in and took hold of a tailfin as it thundered off – in completely the wrong direction.

It lifted me all the way over an inland mountain range, through a lashing storm, up through the cloud layer (the clouds you see in the sky can all be reached), and into a grey limbo where the island below was just a dark smudge. I let go.

Just Cause is the only game I know with a key for “I’m not falling fast enough, make me fall faster”. The heights involved are so sickeningly vast that even freefall can take minutes to drop you. So you can make yourself more streamlined, steer with your body, and choose when to open – and when to suck back in – your parachute. Mixing them to toy with your momentum vector gives you a wonderful freedom in that massive cold space, and I had so much height to work with that I was able to steer all the way back to the coast, then over it, then to the next island, and finally to my objective.

I like to come in fast: chute open, but angled downwards to drop through the air; then pull up at the very last minute and spin 180, toes whipping the shrubs. Finally I cut the chute and land in a commando roll, stand up and punch my boss in the face. This may be why he goes AWOL in the sequel.

People really didn’t take to it, not even most reviewers. EGM complained that it was ‘unrealistic’ (…), Eurogamer said the terrain was ‘uninteresting’ (!), and GameSpy claimed Saints Row 1 gave it ‘a wedgie in graphics’ (;). Other than the glitches (which seem minor on PC) and the rudimentary shooting (which would be a problem if it were a hard or large part of the game), most complaints seem to stem from the assumption that open world games are obliged to provide five to twenty times as much hand-scripted content as linear ones. Certainly some of them do, but the sense of entitlement baffles me. They don’t cost more, and they seem if anything to be more replayable rather than less.

I’m writing this because I’ve stopped playing it, and I’ve stopped playing it because a mission was pissing me off. It has some sublime ones, and the last may be the greatest final mission I’ve ever played, but quite a few fall into obvious scripting pitfalls. My excitement about the sequel due next year is getting me thinking about what precisely they need to fix, because it’s not the weird quibbles its press critics decided to mewl about.

Infinite helicopters. No good can come of infinite helicopters. If I try to concentrate on the objective, I’m constantly being shot at or rocketed and thinking “Fuck, I need to stop concentrating on the objective and do something about these infinite helicopters!” If I’m concentrating on the infinite helicopters, even perfect one-shot kills with a stash of limitless ammo doesn’t let me take them down faster than new ones arrive. Worse, it cheapens the value and significance of the most sacred bit of military hardware.

Health. When fighting infantry, a trivial task for which you rarely need healing, healthpacks spew from them like medicinal pinatas. When fighting vehicles, which rip through your health mercilessly, there’s no reprieve. In multi-stage missions getting too worn down on an early objective can leave you incapable of proceeding from the checkpoint immediately afterwards. The risible regeneration system takes nearly a minute of utter tranquility to restore a useless 10% of your total health, and will never nudge it beyond that.

Get on the gun, Rico! Hardly the only game to be guilty of these sections, but seriously, they’re so easy to avoid. It’d be great fun to grab a mounted weapon and tear through a huge army of pursuers if it were an option. When it’s forced, and the pursuers triggered by stage queues to show up in a convenient place for you to shoot, it starts to feel too much like a fairground ride.

Get the truck to the waypoint in one piece! No.

I’ll probably be back here adding to this list once I’ve got a few missions further in, but for the most part I’m having even more fun than I remember. If you’re tempted, it’s £9 on Steam and a Universal Resolution Changer lets you run it widescreen.

Red Faction Guerilla Tales: Fully Destructible Integrity

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.

PC Gamer, November 09

The issue of PC Gamer that’s just come out is one I’m uncommonly pleased with. In it, I get to:

Recount my horrible, agonising quest for a bent spade covered in shit in Fallout 3: Point Lookout (Now Playing)

Champion about thirty of my favourite mods in a feature by me, Graham and John, and take what must be among the most inherently comic zombie dismemberment shots of my career (50 Essential Mods)

Finally vent my mounting exasperation with multiplayer games for being rubbish 50% of the time, and propose a few ways people could keep killing each other without anyone having to lose (Devil’s Advocate)

Geek out about game engines, celebrating their increasing failure to look significantly better (Special Report).

Use the word ‘bat’ ten times in a single sentence about Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I liked for three reasons and resented for one (Review)

Turn ninjas into forest animals by stabbing and beating them in Mini Ninjas, which has absolutely wonderful character profile videos and lets you use your hat as a boat (Review)

Write a script for the pilot episode of CSI: Azeroth, which was supposed to be about figuring out how wild animals came to possess money and forks, but went off the rails and turned into something else entirely (It’s All Over)

It’s buyable (in Europe and the US now, it seems?) here.

Section 8, District 9, Station 10

Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives. Continued

A Different Way To Level Up

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

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

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

A Varied Gaming Diet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team Fortress 2: Classless Update Night

The new TF2 update is a bigger deal than expected: today Valve suddenly announced a huge list of balance changes and fun new touches, and also that the update was, like, out. We played around with it tonight, and the highlight by far is the new set of animations for the losing team running around after the match is won. At one point I broke into the enemy supply room and found a Scout, on his knees, just sobbing.

The new mode, King of the Hill, is excellent – exactly what I wanted Arena to turn into. One cap point, quick rounds, normal respawning. More than half the matches I’ve played, both on Nucleus and the snowy new map, Viaduct, have been preposterously close. The control point sometimes changes hands two or three times after both teams’ countdowns are at zero, just because it keeps getting retaken during overtime. This, or some other glitch, is causing the histrionic announcer to declare “Overtime! OVER time! OVERTIME! Oooover time!” frantically for the duration.

Oh, and I got my Shafted achievement for the Sniper – the one for killing someone with the taunt animation for the Huntsman bow. I’d cleverly fooled myself into thinking I already had it, because I have a screenshot of me stabbing a Medic through the neck with an arrow, but of course that was during the humiliation stage so it doesn’t count. Usually my quests for the taunt kills are more epic, but the Spy’s I got while cloaked – killing an Engy while his dispenser kept me invisible – and this one was just a spur of the moment decision. Terrifying nevertheless: sacrificing that gleeful certainty of killing someone who hasn’t seen you for the ridiculous risk of making yourself vulnerable, deep in enemy ranks, to achieve the same result in a more flamboyant way. Sorry VokKz.

More scenes from update night:

Also, holy shit, I’ve been nominated for another Games Media Award. I don’t have to nag you to vote for me this time, since it’s not a public vote anymore: this year it’s decided by a ‘panel’ of a hundred odd industry judges. Evidentally one or more of this mysterious cabal nominated me, and Graham, and PC Gamer, so if you’re reading this: holy shit, thanks!

If only I knew someone on this panel so I could show them an unrepresentative selection of my work and beg for their vote. Not whoring myself is weird, I don’t feel seedy enough.

Oh, that was the other thing, I’ve been made a Games Media Award judge. Anyone want to trade votes?

Ah, that’s better.