TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

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.

Plan B Is Live

The first entries of my new GalCiv2 diary are now online, and new ones will go up three times a week from now until the heat death of the universe. You can read the whole thing if you’re able and willing to get the UK edition of PC Gamer, which subscribers are receiving nowish and shops are getting in on Thursday.

It comes as a pocket-sized book for convenient reading on trains, planes and buses, to leave lying around on tiny coffee tables, or, since it is nearly black, for giving the impression that you have 15,000 words’ worth of ex-girlfriends’ contact details on file. In fact, because the cover bears the title “PLAN B”, particularly credulous observers may conclude that this is your second of two such books, containing only your deprioritised relapse hookup candidates.

In fact it is a story about me trying to bring a vast galaxy to peace, despite my slightly hot-headed approach to interstellar diplomacy and a chronic lack of patience. The species I created for this are distantly related to the angry warmongers I played as for the last one, since they are both essentially me and I haven’t mellowed particularly in the last year.

Update!

CVG, the site I wrote this diary on, is gone forever. PC Gamer have all the text and images, and are gonna put them back up at some point, don’t know when though.

Plan B Is Complete

Thirty-five hours of play, six hundred and fifty billion people dead, sixteen game-years passed, fifteen thousand words written, a month and ten days in the uploading, and it is done.

The game did right by me again, generating a story worth writing about, creating drama, and saving the toughest problem – and hence my most obtuse solution – till the end. The final clash really did last exactly seven turns, too, letting me add a Half-Life 2 reference to the Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Iain M Banks, Futurama, Douglas Adams, Eddie Izzard, Team Fortress 2 and Penny Arcade references.

The first thing I wanted to do after finishing that preposterous game was to play a nice and small one – just a couple of races, a dozen or so stars, only a few billion dead, no hard feelings. Playing on the Immense scale is like a mental gymnasium: there’s really no limit to how much there is to think about or how hard you want to go at it, except your own willingness to work your brain muscles out. Playing on a small scale after that, I felt like my ears were still ringing from the data noise of the galactic apocalypse.

It was kind of nice.

Plan B Chapter One Is Complete

LaZodiac asked if I’d update here when a new entry of my game diary for Galactic Civilizations 2 goes up. They’re going up every weekday these days, so that might flood James somewhat, but the Days do group loosely into chapters. I’ve just reached the end of the first of those, so now’s a good time to start if you haven’t already. If you’ve already read it all in the book, a) you are attractive, and b) it now has a Digg button, perhaps you’d care to swing by and click it?

On a similarly autoprostitutional note, I have a reminder here for the four people who intended to vote for me in the Games Media Awards and forgot to actually do so. It just says, “Do it do it do it do it!” I think it’s written in blood. At this stage you should vote for me even if you actively dislike my writing, because all the other candidates were killed in a freak sporkstorm and the only other nominees are now Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot.

The reason I bring this up now, apart from that surprisingly under-reported tragedy, is that I just realised today that I forgot to vote for myself.

Pitch: Tactical Breach Wizards

I’ve been tweeting GIFs of a game I’m prototyping in Unity for a while now, codenamed Tiny Ex-Cons, and recently did a video blog about the core elements I’m hoping to combine if I go ahead with it.

It’s too early to know if this is my next big project or not – my prototype doesn’t have enough to prove the concept yet – but I do want to start showing more of it. And I’ve been holding back part of the concept, and indeed the name. It’s not hard to describe, but it’ll only really work with the right art, so I didn’t want to talk about it until I was sure that side of things would work.

And hey, you know who’s good at art? Gunpoint and Heat Signature artist John Roberts! So he’s joined me again and sketched out some ideas for this new concept. Which is… Continued

Pilot: Terriers

Opens on a conversation between two unappealing men in a pickup. A few lines into it, I know I’m going to love this show. Nothing about the premise is interesting or original, and the plot of the pilot is so over-familiar it could have been traced. But smart writing shows instantly, shows constantly, and never stops being a pleasure. Continued

Pilot: Boardwalk Empire

Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.

Phineas And Ferb

This made me laugh.

Povenmire and Marsh still found themselves fighting for some of their more surreal material. In several episodes, for instance, a character named Major Monogram interjects—apropos of nothing—the phrase “Ever since… the Academy.” A Disney executive quickly flagged the line, arguing (correctly) that it was utter nonsense. Povenmire assured him that it was exactly the kind of nonsense kids would parrot to one another at school. In fact, he felt so confident, he told the executive he expected to one day hear children repeat the line. The skeptical exec pledged to give Povenmire $100 for every time Povenmire heard it (unsolicited, of course). Continued

Phew

Turns out the last item on my Redesign To-Do List – “Shoehorn old text into new template” – was the hardest. I still have bits to add to the Film and Television sections, but they’re bits I don’t care an awful lot about, so it’s debatable that I should waste your time with them.

Checklist for the new design:

• Fills screen
• Co-opts ‘trendy’ rounded corners
• Mutilates WordPress to own evil ends
• Heavy Flickr exploitation
• Comments over-promoted

I think that’s most of it. The last one means that your comments appear on the front page, letting you graffiti and deface this site as you please. The main purpose of this drawn-out conversion to WordPress was to enable comments, so please scrawl on everything, especially the ‘Best X’ type pages. You don’t need to log in, all fields are optional and comments are unmoderated so they’ll appear right away.

If I could also direct your attention to the rewritten Games section, the three new Philosophy sections, and the new Comics and Blogs links. The free MP3s linked in the top right there will get updated (in fact, they already have been before this went up, so I’ll switch the old ones in after a while). Brace yourself for the odd broken link there, because I’m pointing you to other people who’ve uploaded them, and they may get scared. To my knowledge they’re legally free tracks, but you never know.

I discovered there’s been a new trailer for the Firefly film, Serenity, since the one I saw. Head over to Television for a link. I could paste it here, of course, but I’m trying to get rid of you.

Apologies to anyone who disliked the crazy-long nature of the old design – I honestly thought WordPress would automatically curtail the main page and archive old posts, but it doesn’t seem to. I’ll work out how to do it manually before it gets too long.

Lastly, the reason all the posts here are about specific things is just that I’ve been posting and reposting the content for the media sections – normally it’ll be mostly more traditional blog-style posts here.

Pedestrian-Cyclist Tensions Reach A Flashpoint On The Canal Path

Today I cycled along the canal, which is neither a cycle path nor a footpath but a Resentment Path: one where both types of traffic are permitted but each feels the other is rather overstepping its bounds. Pedestrians resent the bike’s speed, its hard metal frame, and act like making way for it is a much bigger imposition than yielding to a jogger of equal pace and width. Cyclists resent the habit of pedestrians to expand – like a gas – to fill whatever sized vessel they find themselves in. In this way two people can entirely block a four-person-wide path, and even when they grudgingly accept the need to compress to allow something to pass, will immediately re-expand thereafter, maximising the number of times this huffy dance is necessary. Continued

PC Gamer: Spelunky And The Robot Apocalypse

The issue of PC Gamer out today – which I’m pleased to report you can now buy anywhere in the world with cheap or free postage – has a six page feature about Spelunky in it, by me.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for months: the game possessed me, and no matter how many pieces I read on it I’m never happy that its appeal has been conveyed. I always feel if I’d read this stuff without playing the game, I’d have no inkling of the hilarious, ridiculous and terrifying situations it gets you into on a regular basis. My stab at this, as usual, was to just write some of them down.

Thanks to Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton and Spelunky’s level editor, we put together one of my favourite opening spreads:

It’s spliced with some great quotes creator Derek Yu gave me when I interviewed him, as well as the story of my obsessive search for Spelunky’s deepest secret: the lost City of Gold. It took me over a thousand attempts to find it, and stepping into that low-res treasure trove is one of the most spine-tingling moments of my gaming life. The opening to this feature is what I wrote about it minutes later.

It doesn’t feature a robot apocalypse, though. That’s in a report Rich and I did about a match of Supreme Commander 2:

It ends in with a bizarre twist that took us both by surprise, one I’ve never even heard of happening in this type of match before.

The other thing I want to highlight here is that Chris Livingston, who once blogged about what it’s like to play Oblivion as an ordinary citizen, writes a great mini spin-off to that in our Now Playing section this issue. In it, he attempts to be completely law-abiding in Grand Theft Auto IV. I am not prepared to confirm at this time whether or not hijinks ensue.

More on the issue here.

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.

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.

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.

PC Gamer Podcast: March

Tim calls this episode 11, because it’s the 12th, and I call it March, because it’s out in February. I’ve numbered the file 185, after the issue of PC Gamer that’s coming out this week.

In it, I do an impression of the bartender from the Witcher, we discuss the worst games of the year, gasmasks, some new information on the Team Fortress 2 changes, pleasing pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire, and our crack legal team’s advice on how to say things we’re not allowed to say.

Editor Ross Atherton is the smooth-talking host, Deputy Editor Tim is the one with the emphatic voice, I’m the low drone, and News Editor Craig is the Scot.