TOM FRANCIS
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Risk Of Rain: Acrid And The Mystery Boss

More of the randomised RPG-shootery thingy, this time as my favourite class: acid beast Acrid. And I meet a boss I’ve never seen before.

Risk Of Rain

Risk of Rain is kind of an action Roguelike: no saving, death means starting from scratch, and it’s all about combat. You’ve got four skills in an RPG-like hotbar, with RPG-like cooldowns, but it feels more like a shooter. You pump out damage rapidly and accurately, and you’re physically dodging enemy attacks to survive.

I really didn’t like it, and almost entirely because of a weird little message on the New Game screen. Continued

Right To Live

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

Résumé

2000-2003: University of Southampton

Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, First Class

Doing maths and philosophy at the same time made sense to me, but then in a Relativity module I found out that simultaneity depends on your inertial frame, so now I’m not even sure I did.

My dissertation was on the ethics of teleportation by replication: scan, clone, destroy the original. Like in that movie I can’t mention, because it’s a spoiler for that movie.

2004-present: writer and editor at PC Gamer

Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer in Print

I was assembling skateboards in a warehouse when a staff writer job opened up at PC Gamer. I didn’t get it. But later I got a job doing their coverdiscs, and successfully got myself demoted to writer a year or two in.

2012-present: director, Suspicious Developments

Finalist, Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Design

I entered Gunpoint into the IGF mainly to get feedback from the judges. Becoming a finalist was an extremely expensive accident: I tragically had to fly to San Francisco to attend the swanky awards ceremony and related parties.

The winner of the Excellence in Design category was Spelunky, the game that spurred me to make games in the first place. Even I would have voted for it.

Rewarding Creative Play Styles In Hitman

They’re releasing the new Hitman game bit by bit: one mission a month, set in a new and sprawling location. Good Hitman missions have always been replayable, but this time the whole game is built around it: a Challenges list tells you of the dozens of different ways to take out the target, an Opportunities system highlights little tricks they’ve designed to let you get the target alone, and a Contracts system lets players challenge each other to take out other targets in particular ways.

And it’s great. It takes a bit of getting used to: the levels are much higher security than Blood Money’s, so you pretty much have to use the Opportunities provided to get your targets alone, but there’s still lots of scope to mix that in to your own evil plans, and the levels are so much bigger, richer, and more complex.

But each of the big systems I mentioned does have some shortcomings, and their strengths suggest an even better way to embrace what makes replaying Hitman missions so enduringly fun. So first off, here’s where I think they fall a little short: Continued

Review: Soulstorm (Fire Indeed Hot)

Soulstorm’s developers, Iron Lore, have shut down since they made this game. Which seems ridiculous, given the spectacular number of copies it’s going to sell.

It’s also sad, because while this wasn’t as brave or interesting as Dark Crusade, Iron Lore were talented guys who had a rare gift: they could see what made another game great, and mimic it.

Even if that wasn’t their intention, they were one of the only developers who gave the impression that they truly knew the nuts and bolts of what made games fun. I had plenty of complaints about Soulstorm, but for weeks I couldn’t stop playing it.

Now I’ve moved on to their previous game, Titan Quest, and it’s far better than I’d been led to believe. It’s convinced me that we really have lost a great team in Iron Lore, and if you’re interested in an insider’s perspective on why, and how, a THQ guy has posted his thoughts over at Quarter to Three.

Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

My review of Call of Duty 4 is up, and so far it looks like the lowest score it’s got. Woo! I choose to believe the comments on the roundup of other reviews on Voodoo Extreme are representative of the prevailing fan reaction to the demo, and they’re a lot less enthusiastic than the other reviewers so far.

In the context of a completely arbitrary conflict, the repetitive bits of a Call of Duty game start to get really repetitive. But it’s a brilliant game nonetheless, and worth buying and playing for the Pripyat stealth section alone, and there are a handful of other extraordinary moments.

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.

Retro Team Fortress 2

James commenter Mr. Brit comments on 1Fort to point to Ubercharged.net’s coverage of mrfredman’s remake of Team Fortress 2 in significantly fewer colours, pixels and audio fidelity. It touches my soul inappropriately.

Details and download.

Res Gestae

This is my face when coding resolution menus.

And this will probably be the last time I whine about how screen settings stuff is harder than relativity, because I think I’ve done it. Continued

Replaying Oblivion, Kinda Glad They’re Redoing The Faces For Skyrim

Relic Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

It takes a lot to make me completely forget about TF2 at time like this, but this’ll do it:

The Tyranids are in, they’re beautiful and they’re huge:

As I said back when no-one believed me, the last trailer completely gave it away: the explanations for that descending cloud of spores the pessimists came up with were just hilarious. It’s a cloud of orks. It’s a warp storm, only lower, and brown, and made of spores. Gamers seem to have a limitless capacity to believe the worst.

The reason Tyranids are a big deal, at least the reason they were always my favourite Warhammer 40,000 race, is what they’re made of. They’re not glistening pus like other aliens, or tissue paper insects. They’re clean pale bone, hard and sharp as diamond, acting as one conscious many-bladed machine.

In other news, Valve Announce That Tom Francis Was Right To Say That The SomethingAwful Secrecy-Impaired Testers Were Right About The Sandvich, And That Tim Edwards Was Right About The New Video.

Regarding Matt’s Location

This is one of those things I avoided writing about because I assumed everyone had seen it, but a quick poll reveals that very few of my friends have. It’s best watched without preconception or explanation, so first off, here it is (click the four arrows for full-screen):

It’s fascinating to read the comments on this, over at Digg or Vimeo. Those that respond most strongly to it often have no idea why – some find it hilarious but aren’t sure what the joke is, others cry and have no idea if it’s happy or sad. A few of us have been talking lately about how every time you travel, you come back slightly dismayed at how small and repetitive your normal life is. This is a sharp smack of that, but I consider it a good thing. If it makes us feel bad, it’s a bad feeling we need. It’s a spur for change, experimentation, or just a cool holiday.

It’s a particularly good thing for America, where supposedly 23% of the populace have a passport. Matt Harding doesn’t evangelise about it much, he just says “it’s important to know what the world looks like.”

That’s in a series of talks he did about the 2006 video (the one embedded is his third). Listening to a lecture given by a man whose claim to fame is dancing badly in a multitude of countries sounds unappealing, but I did it anyway and was riveted. It’s a travel diary, mostly – turns out five seconds of bad dancing isn’t the whole story of his visits to each of these countries. And the notion of getting paid – as he was the last two times – to tour the world and jig like a six year-old is magnficent.

Matt was a game designer. He wanted to make a game about animals in balls that smack into each other, but Microsoft shifted their focus to games about killing people. He said they could make a game where you’re aliens trying to wipe out the human race. His publishers said “Yes!” He said “I was kidding.” His publishers green-lit the game. Matt left a while after. That game is Destroy All Humans; it came out in 2005 and got 9/10 in Stuff magazine.

Red Versus White

I like any oppourtunity I get to keep talking about TF2 stuff without necessarily boring non-TF2 players. Surely anyone can enjoy this:

Except, like, white people.

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!