TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Postcards From Point Lookout

I’ve been playing the inbred-hick themed Fallout 3 downloadable expansion. It’s the only one of them I’ve liked so far, but I haven’t tried Mothership Zeta yet – and it looks awful pretty.

Full set is here, full set as fullscreenable slideshow is here.

Abandoning The Main Quest In Oblivion

Oblivion’s main quest wasn’t unusually long, bad, or difficult, but it’s rare to actually find someone who bothered with it. The overbearing waffle of the introduction didn’t help, but I think it’s mostly that we just don’t want a single, long main questline in open world games. A primary story that’s the same for every player sits awkwardly in a game about freedom and customisation, and Oblivion’s sits more awkwardly still if you attempt it as the wrong class or at the wrong level.

You could have no main quest, but that might feel aimless or trivial. Even if we don’t do it, the existence of a main quest gives purpose to the world.

So what if the main quest was split up and woven into the guild questlines? People actually do those, because you can pick one that makes sense for your character and suits your style of play. In the case of Oblivion’s demons-invade main plot, each questline could have three key missions where the guild business brings you into contact with the invasion:

• One in which you first discover the demons in the course of your work.
• One in which the escalating invasion directly affects the guild and becomes a priority.
• One in which you find and kill a Daedric Prince and end the invasion.

Luckily, the guild questlines are already structured into three neat groups of quests. These special missions could come between each group, like this:

Fighter’s Guild

• Five quests for Burz gro-Khash in Cheydinhal.
• Main Quest 1: you’re hired to investigate the disappearence of a small expedition of travellers. You find them all slaughtered, and follow the trail of blood to encounter a single Dremora, who you kill. The guild are disturbed, but want more info.
• Five quests for Azzan in Anvil.
• Main Quest 2: a portal opens near Chorrol, and the overwhelmed city guard enlist the Fighter’s Guild to help their defense. In the aftermath of the battle, the Blackwood Company move in and exploit the lack of Imperial presence to take over the town and extort its citizens.
• Five quests for Modryn Oreyn in Chorrol against the Blackwood Company, culminating in their termination.
• Main Quest 3: a portal opens outside the Imperial City and you, as guildmaster of the Fighters’ Guild, are called to deal with it. You lead a team of the key guild characters through to face a Daedric Prince. It’s almost impervious to your attacks, but Modryn has brought some confiscated Blackwood Company Hist Sap for you as a last resort. Drugged up, you’re strong enough to kill it and end the invasion.

If you haven’t got far enough in any other guild questlines at that point to have encountered invasions during them, it’s not made clear to you at this point that you’ve only truly quelled a quarter of the demonic forces about to break through to this realm.

Once you have, you’re sent to see Raminus Polus at the Arcane University who explains their mystic types had feared as much: that the prince you vanquished was one of many. From there, the other guild questlines would unfold as if they were your first, each woven into a demon invasion of a different part of Cyrodiil, each of which is ultimately stopped in a style befitting that guild’s unique talents. It’s a bit redundant to say things like that in vague terms, so specifically:

Thieves’ Guild

• Four quests for Armande Christophe in the Imperial City.
• Main Quest 1: a wealthy home is found half-destroyed, its valuables ripe for the picking. During your escape, you brush witht he daedric forces that destroyed it.
• Three quests for S’Krivva in Bravil.
• Main Quest 2: creatures start appearing near Anvil, a prelude to a portal opening. You have to get Hieronymus Lex and his best guards reassigned to that city to better protect it. (This is the same as S’Krivva’s fourth quest, only the context and motive are different.)
• Four quests for the Gray Fox, gathering esoteric artifacts to use in the theft of an Elder Scroll.
• Main Quest 3: The Scroll details how to close an Oblivion portal, but the Empire were refusing to consult because it involves dark magic. The method requires a filled Black Soul Gem to be brought to the heart of the Oblivion plane, so you have to locate and steal one, then sneak your way into hell itself to collapse that realm, killing the Daedric Prince inside.

Mage’s Guild:

• Seven ‘recommendation’ quests.
• Main Quest 1: Your final recommendation quest involves a summoning spell that unexpectedly brings forth a Dremora. It slaughters a guild member before you can bring it down.
• Four quests for Raminus Polus.
• Main Quest 2: Your research for Raminus on Black Soul Gems suggest they might have caused the Dremora’s appearence. You’re tasked with replicating the event, which backfires and briefly sucks you into Oblivion.
• Seven quests for Hannibal Travern further investigating Black Soul Gems and Necromancy.
• Main Quest 3: The Necromancer King you kill at the end of Hannibal’s quests was responsible for the dimensional breach. You use his staff to intentionally summon a Daedra Prince to this realm and take him on, with your guildmates.

Dark Brotherhood:

• Four quests for Vicente Valtieri.
• Main Quest 1: an early target turns out to be a Mythic Dawn member, and Daedric creatures spill forth as he dies.
• Four quests for Ocheeva.
• Main Quest 2: Lucien believes the Mythic Dawn have infiltrated the Brotherhood, and charges you with rooting out their agent the only sure way, as in The Purification.
• Seven dead-drop quests after Lucien sends you into hiding.
• Main Quest 3: The Mythic Dawn agent is alive and has been tampering with your orders. When you’ve rooted him out, you’re made Listener and entrusted with what the agent was after: a perfect blade capable of slaying even a Daedric Prince. The Night Mother can transport you to his realm, but he can only be killed if caught unawares.

Dedicated players may ultimately do all four questlines, and a final Main Quest chunk ought to wrap them up and confer a final reward. But most people would probably play the same amount of Oblivion as they already do. The point is not to try to make players see more of the game’s content, but to turn missed content from a negative thing to a positive thing.

Right now it’s a negative thing because people get bored with the long linear quest, or struggle with it because it’s not for their class, or don’t want to do the standard thing. They don’t know how much they’re missing, and they feel indifferent or even guilty about missing it.

If it were split, the stuff you don’t end up playing is just paths not taken, and the more of them there are the more meaningful and personal your choice feels. Spending masses of time and money on content most players will never see is inevitable when making an open-world game. But if it’s structured in many strands rather than one long line, unplayed content can have a positive effect on even the players who don’t play it.

Prototype Revised

Prototype’s a game about having absurd powers – here I am surfing a man’s corpse – and you earn a steady stream of new ones until the end of the game. Those powers are what makes it fun. But the sheer number you have access to by the end of the game turns the controls into a finger-breakingly awkward mess of accidental stunts misfiring while you desperately will your hoodied twat to do what that combination of buttons used to or should do.

There’s also a redundant level of redundant redundancy: there are about seven powers that deal damage to everyone around you, and no reason to use any but the one that deals the most. The best powers are good against both large infected like Hunters and armoured vehicles like Tanks, and the only other type of enemy, crowds of zombies or soldiers, are never a threat. You fall into a pattern of using the most powerful for every situation, and your brain disengages.

I’d trim the powers dramatically and give each set a narrower range of uses, so there’s a reason to switch between them. I’d also make each upgradable three times, so that you still have loads of options for what to spend your experience on.

I’d also want dangerous enemies among the crowds: military deathsquads with guns customised to seriously hurt you, and proto-zombies with claws like yours that really sting if they reach you in one piece. It’d give power sets one more thing to be good or bad at, and coupled with stronger differentiation could require that you actually think about which to use and upgrade. Here’s how it’d work:

Musclemass

This power doesn’t let you do anything new, just increases the damage of all your basic combat moves. There’s no point in using it until you upgrade it to be more damaging than your proper powers, when it becomes so powerful that there’s no point in using anything else. In both cases, it poses no interesting decisions. I’d scrap it completely.

Claws

Primary attack: slash while running. Lets you plough through crowds hardly breaking pace, is okay against Hunters, bad against tanks. Upgrades increase the speed you move while attacking, up to full sprint.
Secondary attack: digs one hand into the ground to stop dead and swing the round in a wide arc, doing damage proportional to your speed when used. Decent against everything.
Jumping attack: lunges claws-first at a target, skewering fleshy ones or latching onto vehicles for a hijack. Upgades increase how far you can lunge.

Currently, since claws are less damaging and no faster than other powers, they’re just flat out worse. I’d make this the only mode in which you can pick up and throw large objects. Picking up the wrong thing is the number 2 cause of death among prototypes, a recent study revealed, so assigning one mode to be the chuck-stuff mode means you’re never going to grab a taxi instead of an army sergeant in any other mode. In a similar vein, you should be able to pick up weapons in any power mode, only when you’re a normal human.

The previous Claws secondary attack was cool but had little to do with claws – I’d keep it as a Devastator move instead.

Hammerfist

Primary attack: pounds slowly directly ahead, no splash damage. Slow against crowds, okay against Hunters, great against tanks.
Secondary attack: flings yourself at targeted enemy rocky fist first, as in the Hammertoss. Upgrades increase damage and range.
Jumping attack: elbow drop, as current, damage increases with height.

The idea is that this mode should be all about flinging your enormous weight about, dropping on stuff and knocking choppers out of the air. Right now this is an anti-tank mode that’s not as good against tanks as Blade or Musclemass, and its star move is an elbow drop that’s not as good as the Musclemass Bullet Dive, so it’s utterly redundant.

Whipfist

Primary attack: Whips ahead, killing things in a long but narrow cone. Meek against everything, but potentially hits more stuff at once. Upgrades increase length of whip and hence size of cone.
Secondary attack: pulls a single target towards you and puts your fist through them. Upgrades increase pulling force: down a chopper or skewer a Hunter at level 3.
Jumping attack: swings your whip arm down beneath you like a giant deadly skipping rope, batting everything beneath away. Upgrades increase the area it covers.

This mode would still be for when you’re concentrating on a specific target, whether to hijack it, eliminate it quickly or keep damaging it while staying away from it.

Blade

Primary attack: slashes and moves forwards at a decent rate. Okay for crowds, great for Hunters, not great for tanks. Upgrades increase speed.
Secondary attack: dashes forwards with blade vertical, splitting anyone in your way. Upgrades increase how far this dash takes you.
Jumping attack: as current.

The only trouble with Blade as it stands is that it’s great against tanks too, which makes everything else except Musclemass obsolete. And Musclemass makes Blade obsolete.

Human Mode

All moves scrapped except punch, kick, flying kick and bodysurf. Anything that doesn’t require a specific keypress can stay in as an automatic flourish. And as mentioned, this is now the only mode in which you can pick up and use weapons.

Vision Modes

Useless, all scrapped for simplicity.

Defense Modes

Shield: as current, but upgradable to increase the amount of damage it can take before breaking.
Dodge: new mode – automatically dashes you out of the way of incoming projectiles and blows. Upgrades increase how soon after dashing the power is ready to save you again.
Armour: as current, but upgradable to decrease the damage taken while wearing it.

I like the current ones, but I’d like even more the ability to specialise, find cool combos of Defense and Offense powers, then upgrade the bejesus out of them.

Movement

Free running is already fun, but it’s reliant on using this very artificial airdash that shoots you forwards in a not very physically convincing way. It also really hurts my fingers to do it a lot. I’d like it if, once you were airbourne, there was only one control:

Glide: press jump while airborne to toggle. All your velocity, downward and otherwise, is translated into forward velocity, letting you get enormous speeds by jumping from a great height and activating it at the last minute. Once gliding, you can angle it up to gain height and lose a bit of speed, or down to lose height and gain speed. The idea is to combine it with wall-runs along skyscrapers to gain height without losing speed, then spend that height on an extra boost by diving.

Currently, Prototype has over fifty distinct powers that require different button combinations. This would be a little over twenty, all told; none that require simultaneous button presses and none with overlapping controls. But the hope is that it’d make it a more complex game, because the fifty powers it currently has don’t have even twenty meaningfully diffrent uses – they have about six.

Fallout Girl: Little Lamplight

Previously, on Fallout Girl:

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

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

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

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

This post contains mild Little Lamplight spoilers.

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

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

I wasn’t going to be nice today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homelessness In The Sims 3

Clever creative type roBurky has just put up the significant first chunk of an in-game diary/experiment/story he’s been working on: Alice and Kev. He’s made a father and daughter in the Sims 3 mismatched, homeless and destitute, then tried to manage their sad lives as best he can.

He’s updating it pretty rapidly, so subscribe to mainline it through your RSS vein.

Naturally it’s funny. But the grim honesty with which the Sims 3 ends up modelling the self-perpetuating consequences of being dispossessed in a dysfunctional family is actually quite affecting. That’s not something you often get in a game diary, and Robin’s quiet observational tone brings it out well.

Also pants.

Old! Defibrillate This

I’m going to start pulling a few things out of the old James that seem to belong here. They’re a bit tucked away in that giganto-document: for those who never saw it, I manually wrote every post of my last site one after the other in a vast HTML file using a text editor, in a sort of misguided show of geek bravado. This one’s about Battlefield 2, and the little kill reports that tell you who killed who with what.

Locutus [SVD] mrbuzzard

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

“Clear!” Tzz.

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

mrbuzzard is no more.

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

“Clear!” Tzz.

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

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

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

Pentadact [M4] pHk

I get BlueBall-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-and tOMMy-

“Clear!” Tzz.

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

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

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

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

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

Pentadact [Beretta] ^^andy^^05

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

Mr0 [Artillery] BlueBall
Mr0 [Artillery] wpmike

-two more and-

Mr0 [Teamkills] th0ry

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

“Clear!” Tzz.

-defibrillating. He gets up and-

neurax [AK74U] easydog

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Clear!” Tzz.

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

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

“Clear!” Tzz.

Pentadact [Shock Pads] FaR2SiNiSTeR

YES.

The Team Fortress 2 Experience

Needle Exchange

Skulch.

Schlunk.

Whunk.

Thunk.

Sklunch.

Ptow.

Nom.

Fwoosh.

Snick.

I appear to have been punctured.

Much as I suck with it, I’m still liking The Huntsman.

The Prime Minister Of Sinister

The new unlock system -whereby players are awarded a random weapon they may or may not already have every few hours – is terrible. I love it. Because very suddenly, it awarded me the Huntsman. I certainly lust more fiercely after some of the Spy unlocks, but the bow and arrow is probably the newest thing in this update. I punctured a few Scouts on Arena: Sawmill before a friendly Pyro happened to run past flaming wildly, and caught my arrow on fire. Ace! I shot a Scout with it. Ace! He caught light. Ace! He burned to death. Ace!

The Huntsman taunt involves thrusting an arrow rather nastily upside an imaginary victim’s guts. I plan to engineer a situation in which this victim is not imaginary.

It really grates not being able to work my way towards the unlocks I want, though. It undermines the main driving force unlocks bring to the game: progression. Since it came up in the comments to the last post, my ideal system would let players pick an unlock to work towards, and tell them how many points they have to score to earn it – 500 for the Huntsman, say. Then there’d be a little toggleable bar on the HUD showing their cumulative progress towards achieving it.

The sneaky Spy buffs in this update make him worth spamming even without the new unlocks: dressing as an enemy Spy, now that you appear to be wearing a mask, genuinely fools most players right now. It won’t last to that extent, but it’s nice that only one of his disguises is truly fallible now. Even their health is beyond suspicion, now: he appears as injured as the person he’s pretending to be, so no more blasting team-mates for being conspicuously half-dead.

I’m looking forward to using enemy teleporters, though I’d still love an unlock that let me use them in reverse: jaunt from the exit to the entrance. Speaking of which, Doctor Disaster’s Spurious Sentry Spraypaint is still better than anything Valve came up with for the Spy.

It is a source of sadness to me that the Spy’s killing joke – his fatal taunt animation – is the swishy knife fencing one. I’d suggested his flicked cigarette should permanently ignite anyone it hits, because it just seems classier. It is a source of some glee, though, that his murderous fencing can be performed invisibly: I taunt-stabbed a Sentry, then its Engineer, without being revealed.

This, too, makes me beam. Taunt a few times with your disguise kit out.

It’s early to judge, but I’ve taken a powerful enough dislike to Pipeline that I’m actively avoiding servers running it. It seems to have some uncircumnavigable chokepoints and the open areas don’t inspire me somehow.

Arena, on the other hand, is not as hateful as I remember. I can still never forgive a system that asks anyone, ever, to sit out a round. But it’s only happened once, and so far I’m really liking the two new maps: Sawmill and Nucleus. As I said before Arena first revealed itself to be terrible, the map format fundamentally appeals to me: last man standing deathmatch, with a single time-release capture point to bring things to a head if they drag on. The server we played on at lunch permitted teams of at least 11, so no whole team had to sit out, but individual players still did, and the next time that’s me, my renewed tolerance for this nonsense will end.

Red Pyro Lost Dracula Again, Smells Depressed

Checking now, it doesn’t look like you can read the text of this wall at the start of Meet The Spy in the early YouTube leak:

Which makes me wonder if they added one of these afterwards:

Lots more fun ones in there – stringing them together is the Team Fortress 2 equivalent of fridge magnet poetry.

Spoiler for the video: one of the characters in it turns out to be a Spy in disguise all along!

Scenes From Last Night’s Apocalypse

Six of us piled into Killing Floor. There were no survivors.

Martin is in trouble. This was our first game, before we’d actually found a stable server or invited anyone else to join. We survived the pistol round, albeit with no ammo, then met variously sticky ends out in the dark of the fields. Lesson learned: stay near the light.

The B is in trouble. He actually went on to survive this horror and complete the wave, which meant Martin and I – long since dead – were resurrected for the next.

The B is, once again, in trouble. Being the last man left alive is similar in pressure to Counter-Strike – you know your team are watching you in spectator mode – but more so, since their lives and the continuation of the game hinge on your survival.

This is a type of zombie that seems to have ripped off one of its arms and stitched it to the other, creating a weird sort of double-hand, between which he’s wedged a large blade. Or, you could just hold it.

CloakRaider likes knives. I didn’t realise he, Hypnotoad and Macca had joined us and were watching in spectator mode, until the wave ended and they were able to spawn in the game. We suddenly started doing a lot better with six guns firing.

“Dude, dude, dude, wait up, I wanna show you something.” After most of us had died, Hypnotoad was chased by this thing all around the map, ammoless, about three times, trying to lead him to the other remaining survivor to help.

It doesn’t hold them forever. A lot of good hole-up spots, though, have two main entrances. Welding one shut to deal with the influx from the other works well. It also leads to a tense moment when the first stream is exhausted, and all the remaining specimens are banging against the door, and you have to just wait ten seconds or so for them to breach it before everyone opens fire.

I was dead by this stage, almost certainly from a Flesh Pound.

Far too early to use a grenade, but there were just so many of them, in so small a space.

Oh God Flesh Pound. Flesh Pounds get angry when you shoot them, which makes them ultra-fast. They’re already ultra-deadly and ultra-tough, so this can rapidly ruin your day. I think the idea is for everyone to hold their fire until they’ve all got their main weapons out and fully loaded, then unleash at once. It’s rarely played out that way for me, and most of the ways it has played out involve me getting my flesh pounded by an angry Flesh Pound.

Gentlemen

When it looked like Valve’s next Team Fortress 2 update would be the Spy’s unlockable weapons back in September last year, I said the prospect filled me with dread. Now that they’ve ambushed us with info on two of his new tools, and the whole thing is much more imminent that anyone realised, I am filled with a dark and terrible glee.

I’m not usually a fan of feigning death in multiplayer games, except as an entertaining way to fuck with ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 3. But the Dead Ringer dodges the two problems I usually have with fake-outs like this: 1) Trying to time your phony death to convincingly coincide with an enemy shot, which is fiddly at best and impossible with any degree of lag, and b) Having to shoot every damn corpse to make sure it’s not just pining for the fjords.

Here, the timing is automatic: when you’re holding it (presumably) the first hit you take appears to have killed you. And corpses are never going to get up: the uncertainty is just “Should he really have gone down that easily? Is he cloaked somewhere around here now?” It still might lead to a tedious amount of speculative firing, but we’ll see.

The Cloak and Dagger is more exciting to me. Being able to remain invisible indefinitely, staying still to recharge, suits my style: I’ve tired of sprinting to the front line and sap-spamming sentries or hoping I slip through a crossfire by sheer luck. My most interesting lives as a Spy have involved taking impractically long routes around and stalking the enemy team from deep within their base, seeing how long I can prey on them uncaught rather than how rapidly I can score. Currently this is only viable on certain maps, like Well, that have high alternative routes and gloomy corners to recharge in. I’m hoping Cloak and Dagger will let me be this much of a dick in every match.

It’s safe to assume that a) the Sniper update is still coming at the same time, b) these two are mutually exclusive alternatives to the conventional Cloak, and c) the Dead Ringer provides some immunity to being revealed by stray shots, or it might not be terribly useful.

Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved

Plants Vs Zombies is now out, and £7 on Steam. In it, you plant plants to stop zombies. It will enslave you like a delicious drug.

I’ve spent about forty hours of my life defending that little house from the undead through the craft of horticulture, and I liked it so much I’m actually quoted on that Steam page. Here are a few of the gardens I’ve landscaped in that time of which I happen to have screenshots on this machine.

Yes, this works. There’s a twist when you replay Plants Vs Zombies that encourages you to try stupid experiments like The Frozen Field Of Unending Spikeweeds here. The silvery ones are Spike-Rocks, secretly the most useful upgrade in the game, but for a reason that won’t be obvious at first.

Wedge formation! Largely pointless. But Kernel-paults are so brilliant – “There’s butter on my head” – and so cheap that you can afford to try ultra-reinforced meshes of Tallnuts and Chompers on these levels.

AAAAAAH! Man, you should have seen this place before Flag 24. It was a work of art. It was a machine. And yet, it was a lawn.

Now it is ate.

Truly, your garden has not known horror until you get to the mid-twenties in Survival: Endless. That, and the mini-game that lets you play as the zombies, are responsible for most of that horrific play-time figure I quoted earlier.

PvZ takes its time to get going, but the stream of new wonders throughout that time is steady and thick. Do not play it if there are things on this Earth you still hope to achieve.

A Different Idea For Ending BioShock

BioShock Spoilers

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

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

Continued

PC Gamer Podcast: PCs Vs Ponsoles

Haven’t had this much fun doing one of these in a while, so I hope the result is of amusement. I can finally talk about two exciting games I’ve been gagged about until now: Plants Vs Zombies and BioShock 2. We also try a new thing where we read out and answer questions from anyone on Twitter who cares to throw them at us, and we got a highly entertaining selection. And I do two impressions, one of which only Battleforge players will know is rubbish.

Our new issue on sale in the UK is our 200th special edition, which has, among its many items of note:

• My Star Trek Online preview – I’m suddenly hugely excited about this after seeing it played: they’re fulfilling my all-time geekiest fantasies, and that’s really saying something.
• Jim explaining how the massive Band of Brothers betrayal happened in EVE Online, and what it’s meant for the galaxy.
• My eight-page BioShock 2 preview, with an entire boxout about the ways in which your drill fist is like a penis. Some great quotes from two hours of interviews with the devs, all of whom took one dig or another at the original game.
• Kieron’s breakdown of the last 200 years of PC gaming, which features a picture of me as Adolf Hitler.
• My reviews of Plants Vs Zombies and Red Alert 3: Uprising. One is unbelievably good and the other is barely fun.