TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Section 8, District 9, Station 10

Section 8

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.

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.

Moon

Best not to know much about this film going in, so I’ll be vague. Continued

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Seven

A regular feature in which I attempt to share the mystifying, alarming process of digging through my unhelpfully named MP3s by uploading one of the files I found that way and not telling you what it is.

In this case, while you can tell pretty quickly what it is, I still have no idea where I got it, who it’s by, or why I would have such a thing. I think I’ll try moving the logo to beneath the text to impair eye-drift to potential spoilers in the comments.

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.

I’ve Got Confessions To Make

The silence here lately has been down to a dangerous daily routine of falling asleep in front of Star Trek: The Next Generation, waking up at 5am and playing Prototype until work. Dangerous, but not unpleasant.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew. Continued

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.

Burglary Aftermath

A while back I got burglarated, triggering lots of people to be very nice to me and my insurance company to give me – after some wrangling – a large sum of money. At first they’d tried to offer me vouchers to buy inferior replacements from a rather loathesome overpriced appliance chain. When I explained in the politest possible terms that Comet’s lines constituted a sort of unfunny parody of actual electronics, they offered me a cheque for the total sticker price of their suggested replacements. The fact that these were vastly inferior items was seemingly not a factor in Comet’s near-criminal pricing of them, so I did the maths and took the cash.

Since James commenters were actually a deciding factor in my buying some of this stuff in the first place, and since I was going to blog oozingly about a lot of these black digital delicacies before I lost them anyway, here’s what I was robbed of and what I got back:

 

Netbook: EEE 1000
Replaced for the same price with an EEE 1000HE, with 300% larger storage capacity, 50% longer battery life and a 500% nicer keyboard.

The main things I wanted my EEE 1000 for were the battery life – six hours, more if you disable stuff – and the 40GB solid-state drive. It’s since been discontinued, and nothing worth buying has gone down the solid-state route since. The 1000 HE might have a hard drive, but it evidentally hasn’t hurt the battery life: this motherfucker lasts nine and a half hours. There are days I don’t last nine and a half hours.

I’ve been totally in love with both netbooks. It turns out the only surefire way to lure me away from my computer for any length of time is to give me another, smaller computer, on which I can write, browse, watch video and play Dice Wars, Spelunky and Deus Ex.

The new one fixes my only real irritation with the last: an akwardly placed shift key. I didn’t realise how much that was bothering me until I started seriously typing on the new one – I’m as fast and accurate on this as a full-size ergonomic.

 

TVs: Two 32 inch DGM Active Matrix panels
Replaced with the same and an equivalent model with a £200 profit.

Nominally two TVs, functionally one TV and one monitor. I was happy with my 19″ Cathode Ray Tube monitor for years after everyone else had moved on to widescreen, and might have been for years more if I hadn’t reviewed Mirror’s Edge for PC Format. Despicably, it letterboxes the viewing area on non-widescreen displays, so I had to at least try it widescreen for the sake of the review. The only one I had was my cheap (£270) yet suspiciously good 32″ LCD TV, so I hauled it to the bedroom and rigged it up. You could say I never went back, except that I did, and the dismal sight of that gloomy square portal on the digital world is what made me buy a second 32″ TV.

The impulse to buy something called a ‘monitor’ for your PC, rather than making do with a ‘TV’, is a bit of an anachronism. There used to be a difference when both were made out of magic ray guns, but these days it’s just that LCD monitors use a cheap and nasty panel technology, are eight inches smaller, and have feebler colour reproduction than the equivalently priced telly.

I would have happily bought them both back full price, since they were already stupidly cheap, but they’ve since been discontinued. The only way I could get them semi-first-hand was to go for Warranty Replacement units from Dabs. I don’t really know what that means, except £160ish instead of £270 and no remote control. Both appear to be brand new and work perfectly.

Things that look amazing on a star-bright 32″ monitor a foot from your face: Team Fortress 2, Mirror’s Edge, Unreal Tournament 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, BioShock.

 

Console And Games: 360 Premium with Left 4 Dead and Fable 2
Replaced with a £160 profit.

These you actually can buy at Comet, but by insisting on the money rather than vouchers to do so, I got to buy them from Play.com for spectacularly less. It wasn’t easy to persuade my insurance company, Direct Line, to give me money rather than Comet funbux, and I had to do so at a time when I really didn’t feel like arguing. So by the time I did, I was determined to fleece them for every penny I could. I bear them a keen and savage ill-will I cannot muster for the guys who took my stuff. Their professions are equally amoral, but my thieves were at least swift and courteous.

 

Bike: Specialized Hardrock Sport
Replaced with an improved model and £110 profit.

It was my own stupid fault this got nicked – it was in my shed, which has a frickin’ window, and while the shed was notionally locked the bike was not.

Happily, it was nicked just before Future brought back a cycle-to-work initiative that gets you 40% off a new bike by deducting its cost from your gross pay – a nimble tax dodge. My friend Owen was also looking into getting a bike, which saved me the trouble of re-researching which is the best one to get these days. He’d learnt exactly what I did when I first bought mine: get a Specialized Hardrock Sport. It’s actually been redesigned since I got mine the first time, so my new one uses a lighter alloy and, frankly, looks cooler.

 

Locks
Replaced, upgraded and added to for free.

It turns out that when you’re robbed, the local council here pay not only to replace the broken lock, but replace all the locks in your house with ultra tough high-security deadbolts with five free-spinning cylinders inside that make them impossible to saw through, install new bolts inside the wood of your door so they can’t be kicked in, and upgrade the latch you shouldn’t have been using as a lock in the first place. What the hell, local council? Aren’t you supposed to be lazy, bureaucratic and heartless?

If anyone’s been totting up the numbers, they’ll have spotted I made quite a lot of money from being robbed. It’s not as much as it sounds, after paying three different ‘excesses’ to the insurance pricks for the crime of being victimised in three different ways, but certainly a net positive.

Usually the real cost is that your life is just a bit rubbish for a while as you go through the hassle of replacing all this stuff. But one person in particular was very nice to me when I lost all this, and she’s continued to be nicer to me since than I really seem to warrant. So instead, the last two months have been the best in years.

I give this burglary nine out of ten.

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.

All Books Found To Be Reasonably Or Very Good

The latest twenty book reviews on The Onion’s AV Club:

And people think games journalists don’t use the whole scale.