TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

HERO CLOSET

After a Tank fight, on Expert. This was pretty much the last time we saw each other alive.

Update: title changed because it turns out Craig picked exactly the same quote for the strapline in his review. This post is now named in honour of the dark room we hid in for ten minutes last night to survive the finalé of Blood Harvest.

The first version of Left 4 Dead that isn’t pointlessly and inexplicably butchered is in the wild now, and by in I mean on and by the wild I mean Steam. If you’ve had the chance to play through to a finalé and you hadn’t before, I hope you see why I thought it bizarre that they would leave that out of a demo. If they feared that giving away something substantial for free might harm sales rather than drive them, I would cough in such a way that the sound could be construed as the words ‘Counter’ and ‘Strike’ one after the other.

The downside for me as a player is that half the public games I’ve joined are trying to play on Expert, emboldened by the trivial ease of the demo on Normal. This is folly.

Tensions rise on the PC Gamer quartet when it becomes clear that most of us are either
stupid or crazy.

The finalés are really something. The reason I think they’re the point of Left 4 Dead is that they showcase its most surprising and profound accomplishment: difficulty. Sin Episodes, like many before it, focused entirely on that problem. It not only failed, it did so with such aplomb that the players’ primary complaint about the game was the wonky difficulty.

Left 4 Dead’s campaigns, on Normal, always run to the final map, and are always close. In our game at lunch, Tim was being so utterly pummeled by the time rescue arrived that he actually commanded us to leave without him.
“Graham’s gone too, leave him, just run for it!”
“I’m not gone! Save me!”
So I did. Except that his main problem turned out not be a pesky Hunter so much as thrity-six zombies and a Tank. I think I got the Tank, but by the time I did I was being mauled from so many directions that I couldn’t move to save Graham, and we both died there.

In our first game after work, Graham, Tim and I made it to the boat but Craig got pinned in the water. I jumped in and managed to get him on his feet, but he was knocked down again on the pier before he could get to the boat. I’d badly hurt myself with the first attempt, so I jumped onto the boat just as it pulled away – and just as Graham jumped off to come to Craig’s aid.

Then in our last game, on Dead Air, through canny use of distractionary pipe bombs, sustained high vantage-point fire from Graham and Craig, emplaced heavy weapons support from Tim and shotgun-powered back-covering from me, we all piled into the back of the cargo plane and made it to safety.

So you see his tongue has been wrapped around several objects, twisted almost, to the
point at which he can no longer clearly speak. I guess you could say it was quite a mouthful.

I’m actually not a huge fan of the raw ingredients of Left 4 Dead: I love the animation of the zombies, but they always feel slightly hollow and insubstantial to kill, your weapons rattly and unexciting. But difficulty is such a hugely important variable, and the game nails it so utterly, that the final result is an endless thrill.

Fallout Girl: Anywhere But Megaton

You can tell a lot about people by the armour they wear, and the stuff I prised off the cold bat-battered bodies of the first people I met outside the Vault was classified as ‘Painspike’. The outside world is not hospitable.

Still, I was determined not to just head straight to the town of Megaton like everyone else. All anyone seems to talk about is Megaton this, Sheriff that. I wanted my experience to be different, so I doubled back and headed in the opposite direction. After being shot at by flies (?) and mauled by molerats (!), I finally came to a sheer wall, hopefully some trace of civilisation. I circled it until I came to the entrance. It was Megaton.

I took immediately against the place. The Sheriff was annoying and made no sense – apparently he doesn’t trust me, and the reason no-one’s ever defused the bomb is that he doesn’t trust any of the locals, but he invites me to try. I find this guy’s Vault Loyalty lacking.

I ignore him and head to the bar, where I’m told the proprietor has some information I need. I run into him on the balcony outside. He’ll tell me what I need to know for 100 bottlecaps. I tell him to fuck off. He’ll tell me what I need to know if I do a job for him. I tell him to fuck off. He’ll tell me what I need to know for 300 caps.

There’s an option, at this point, to ask him what happened to the 100 cap deal. I didn’t take that option. 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.

His body spasmed a little, and I had time to snatch his computer password from his pocket before it slipped off the threshold and plummeted to the city below. If you’re going to be a dick, don’t do it on a balcony.

On my way out from breaking into the barkeeper’s office for the info, I run into a man who wants me to blow up the entire town of Megaton.

Hm. Okay.

Fallout Girl, A Diary

My name is Sophie, because the way in which Fallout 3 asks you to pick your name is a way that makes silly names, or obtuse ones like Pentadact, seem rather cruel. I’m not going to spoil what that is right now, but I will in the following entry.

I’m going to location-tag these spoilers, so if you’re playing right now, or you plan to, you can skip the sections about any areas you haven’t visited. I’m not doing the main plot, so I won’t be spoiling anything about that. I ended up picking a different main quest. Continued

Left 4 De-

The Left 4 Dead demo is out for pre-orderererers, and it just sort of… stops.

The four campaigns are usually four missions long each, and the demo only gives you the first two sections of one of them. It’s like releasing the first half of a song as a single to promote your forthcoming album. You can tell from the first half of this campaign that it’s going to be a good campaign, but the first half isn’t one by itself.

I am baffled and saddened by this. To me the point of Left 4 Dead is that “just made it!” moment, the way the Director expertly builds difficulty, tension and drama over the four levels to an incredible climax. Even when you die, that finalé is the highlight of the game. I can’t think why, after spending more than two years years perfecting an extraordinary new system that masters the eternal design problems of pacing and balance, you’d release a demo that does neither well.

This demo is only for people who’ve already committed to buying the game at the moment, but it’s the same one going live to the public next Tuesday, and it’s the one from which the first player impressions will be posted on forums. Playing it earlier tonight was the first time in my five sessions with Left 4 Dead that we’ve survived easily, and the first time the answer to “Do you want to play again?” has been “Not really.”

It’ll do till the full thing comes along, of course, and it’s still great fun. Just don’t assume from the demo that the full game lacks drama, variety or a satisfying climax.

Right To Live

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

Far Cry 2: What I Do Like

Last one of these, I promise. For those who don’t follow the comments, something pretty remarkable happened in the Impersonation Of A Buddy post. The guy who actually made Far Cry 2, Clint Hocking, showed up to explain how some of this stuff works and how it came to be. I say he made it – more specifically he was the creative director of this vast team of people.

He was also a designer, writer and level-designer on the original Splinter Cell, and the designer, writer and level-designer of the best Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. For that reason, and for his excellent talks, I am a fanboy of his. So this is very exciting. I can’t even conceive of the good grace it takes to read criticism of a game you made and say something other than “Fuck off.”

Anyway, I started this post first but it’s taken longer to finish because praise is always harder to nail down than criticism, and I’ve had no spare time lately. So here are the things I like next to screenshots that have nothing to do with them:

These could happily be the entire game as far as I’m concerned. Screw Far Cry 2, they could have made Convoy Intercept 2. There’d be convoys of thirty cars, convoys with tanks, convoys you have to steal without destroying, convoys where you have to kill one guy but not the other, convoys you have to scout without being seen.

I’m happy to just keep intercepting these easy three-car convoys the arms dealers ask you to, I’m just saying, I’m up for that extra Convoy Interceptin’ challenge should it arise. I like to make roadblocks, find vantage points where they won’t see me until it’s too late, or vantage points where I’ll see them from far enough away to snipe the drivers, or vantage points far enough away from the IEDs I’ve laid that I’ll survive the blast with most of my limbs.

Of course, a single hand-grenade can complete any of these missions with ease, but I like to make life difficult for myself. One time I found a tree that leant over the road I knew the convoy would pass through, and stood atop it to snipe at the drivers. I failed wretchedly because I’m what I call a Parkinson’s sniper, but I discovered on the fly that a well-aimed petrol bomb will burn out a van’s driver even if it doesn’t come close to destroying the van.

Tim describes an amazing moment in his review where his best buddy is wounded, and he’s used up all his syrettes on himself, and so she all but begs him to shoot her – which he does. I was cocky that this would never happen to me – I started out on the hardest possible difficulty mode, then switched to Medium because stealth wasn’t working. So I’ve always got 4 more syrettes than I’m counting on.

Then, yesterday, my usually reliable friend Paul had already sent up a distress flare by the time I got to him. I sniped everyone quickly, hurried to him, and injected him with a syrette. Nothing happened. “It’s.. not enough…” he moaned. I used another. “I need another…” I used another. He didn’t say anything this time. I used another. My character, without my consent, stroked Paul’s unfocusing eyes closed, and laid him down. I… I had another! I could have saved him, damn it!

This part of the buddy system really works. I didn’t even like the guy, and it certainly wasn’t my fault he got himself killed, but the moment’s rendered so physically and handled with such a gentle and unexpected “Fuck you” from the designers that it managed to affect me regardless.

I’m not talking about blowing stuff up, that’s great in every game. Every time a car explodes a little piece of me does a happy jig. I’m not even talking about when you blow something up, and that starts a fire, and that fire blows something else up. I’m talking about when, after setting that chain of events in motion, you throw three more grenades, then fire a rocket launcher at a three-car pile-up and petrolbomb a gunpowder cache. Not BOOM, but BOOM BOOM BOOM Ker-THOOM KRAKAKAAKAKA-KOOOOM phwooosh SKANG! That’s new.

This started out as a point about the scenery, but I realised I actually don’t have much to say about the scenery – it’s the baking, blazing, dazzling sun that makes it special. I’ve spent some time in Zimbabwe, and the sun in African countries is a different one. Far Cry 2 isn’t exaggerating: every time it sets, a spectacular explosion of orange light floods the world. And when it’s high, it’s all you can see, feel or think about. Somehow their tech guys have found a way to render this ubersun, it actually feels brighter, hotter, harsher than the sun in other games – especially Crysis’ feeble Maglite-in-the-sky.

There’s a river that runs through a mountain, steep rock on both sides, and every time I pass through it in the game, a part of me feels the blissful cool of the shade – the way coldness seems to radiate from wet stone in hot countries. I think one of the reasons I’m so often fawning about a game’s art and harsh on its design is that I truly don’t understand how it works. I don’t know how they made me feel that coolness, what arcane renderers or filters triggered that sense memory. But whatever they’re doing, Ubisoft, pay them to keep doing it.

I’m always in awe of design decisions that solve a problem by not solving it. How could anyone build an underwater city, Ken Levine? “It was not impossible to build Rapture under the sea, it was impossible to build it anywhere else.” Wow. Doesn’t even attempt to answer the question, but it sure shut me up.

How does my guy survive bullet after bullet, explosion after explosion, burn after burn? Well, sometimes he has to stop to pull the bullets out, cauterise the wound or, in the case below, yank a rebar out of his own stomach. Doesn’t even attempt to explain my survival, but it sure shuts me up.

Far Cry 2: What I’d Like

Fewer enemies (but not fewer people – some of the existing ones just need to calm down), more serious injuries (I’d like to perform awesome Jack Bauer self-surgery any time I take a major hit – right now it’s only in the rare event that I’m probably dead anyway), a stealth indicator (just an eye icon when I’m in good cover, and a faint one when I’m partially obscured), monocular tagging (of people – best thing about Far Cry, and your realtime map is already an omniscient piece of science fiction anyway), different mission rewards (intel on the Jackal), better buddy rewards (you help them, they’ll help you for a while), different briefcase rewards (something unique – perhaps weapons), a buddy who’s in some way helpful (man the gun!), a buddy who’s in some way likeable, a buddy who’s in some way tolerable (not trying to get me killed would be a start), and an ongoing mission to find and kill some guy.

Currently your ongoing mission is to repeatedly commit the atrocities you’re here to exact vengeance for, perpetuating the war you’re here to stop, while waiting for the man you’re supposed to find to instead find you, whereupon you will fail to attack or even pursue him and he will fail to neutralise or even discourage you. It’s not exactly the manhunt I had in mind.

I’d love to just be dropped in some fictional African nation with nothing more than a machete and a name. I’m talking about a game in which the Jackal would actually physically exist somewhere in the game world at all times, and the challenge is to find him. All those icons on your map, instead of being different locations from which to get the same boilerplate mission re-runs, would be unique leads.

A guy at the airport you can bribe or threaten for a list of all passengers coming in or out of the country in the last month. The owner of a run-down hotel who might know one of the Jackal’s aliases. The car-hire guy who can tell you what he’s driving, but only if you can show him a photo. The journalist who has such a photo, but won’t hand his notes over. Local police headquarters that would have intel on where the arms shipments come in to. And the untouchable gang leaders who deal with him on a monthly basis, but who won’t talk unless you can terrify them more than the Jackal does.

Each has only a scrap of knowledge about your target, each has people they’re afraid of if this gets back to them, or jobs they need doing in return, or they just want money that you can only raise by working for someone unsavory. Some have bodyguards, some travel in motorcades, some only pass through the region at 10am each day. If an irreplacable character with essential intel dies, the game invisibly adapts to keep your main goal viable: the journalist died? The car-hire guy doesn’t need a photo, he knows what the guy looks like. The airfield official died? The passenger logs are in his desk. The hotelier died? The police HQ has records of your target’s aliases.

Right now the missions follow one after another in a very long line, all received from two buildings in the same town (and later one other). It gives you no real choice of which mission to do next, and it gives the impression that there is no story, life or interest outside of those two tiny safe zones. Everything out there is just mindlessly firing generic bad guys.

This would be a more civilian world: open fighting between factions only where they clash, not everywhere and solely against you. If you’re working for them or in their vehicle, a faction will let you pass and their enemies will attack on sight. Both factions will let civilian cars pass unless there’s been an attack on their forces nearby – in which case they’ll want to stop you and see your papers, which you don’t have.

Getting to missions wouldn’t be the repetitious series of battles it currently is if you picked the right car and the right route, but if you’re on your way out from fucking over a faction, every checkpoint in the area is going to be on the lookout for someone like you coming that way.

In truth I don’t need a buddy system, I don’t need to be able to choose a silent protagonist from a lineup of Who Cares, I don’t need bonus objectives, I don’t need realtime weapon degradation, I don’t need a whole other game world right after the first one, I don’t need fifty hours of filler-rich main quest missions, and I don’t need malaria. Particularly not if it’s going to be Disney malaria that just makes you feel queasy until you pop a panacea from your magic pillbottle.

I just need a little more life outside the 2Fort township, and a little less death interrupting me when I try to explore the blazingly gorgeous world around it.

On the plus side: the M79 Grenade Launcher. It sits inexplicably in your pistol slot, and makes dealing with pursuing jeeps significantly less of a chore. Park, disembark, turn, fire at their tires. I’ve lost count of the number of times this thing has exploded an oncoming car at just the right moment for its flaming wreck to somersault over my head.

Also: it’s out on Steam in Europe too now.

Today’s screenshot theme: StabCam! What crazy face did YOU pull when I ended your suffering? You won’t believe the results! 7″ x 9″ prints available at the gift shop 3-4 hours after time of death. I added a new one to yesterday’s collection, to.

Far Cry 2: Impersonation Of A Buddy

“Who are you thanks for saving me you look ill you have malaria you should see Reuben at Mike’s bar but let’s leave separately it’ll be faster bye.”

Is how I met Buddy 1.

“How’s it going buddy in times like these you need a guy like me man of action okay see you there.”

Is how I met Buddy 2.

*ring ring*
*ring ring*
*bleep!*

“Hey, I just had a weird tingling in my pituitary gland – did you just accept a mission? If you did, say nothing. Okay, I sense from your silence that your mission is to blow up a generator in the North-West airfield to cripple APR operations in the area. Drive five-hundred miles in the opposite direction, through nine heavily guarded enemy checkpoints, come into my bedroom, and I’ll give you some important information that for some reason I can’t tell you right now, then stand there for six hours wordlessly watching you sleep. If you don’t, I’ll hate you.”

“Hey, about time. It’s been forty-five seconds since I demanded you cross half the breadth of Africa to hear me say something I could have easily said down the phone. So, the UFLL want you to blow up that generator, right? I’ve heard that the police chief’s cousin’s step son is carrying a piece of paper with the location of a magic radio that will summon a whole battallion of enemy troops to your objective, pointlessly making your mission much, much harder for no extra reward.

“Intimidate him, steal the radio, lure the troops through a hostile village by performing a flamboyant jig, then defeat them all while being shot at by two other armies that you would have otherwise easily avoided. Then blow up the generator. Then save me because I’ll be in life-threatening danger by then. If you don’t do this, I will forget you saved my life and phone you up just to insult you.”

The idea of setting up an ambush, Michelle, is that the enemy should get ambushed. Not me, twice.

There will now be a short interlude for a joke.

Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking walks into a bar. A man he’s never seen before, leaning against the wall, announces that he is Clint’s second-best buddy in the world and will one day save his life. When Clint returns home that night, he finds the man standing in his bedroom, trying to get cellphone reception. Clint goes to bed and dreams of the game he will make at work the next day.

I’m missing something fundamental about the buddy missions. Why do they want to hurt the APR/UFLL much more seriously at enormous risk to my health and for no extra reward? And why do they think I will want to? It can’t be that they’re die-hard UFLL or APR supporters, because my next mission will be against that faction and they will again demand that I take enormous, preposterous detours to commit mass murders.

Some of these missions are to destroy medicine. Some are to ruin farms or sever water supplies. I’ve had five buddies, and each one’s sole motivation seemed to be to cause as much indiscriminate human suffering as possible, even – in fact especially – mine.

On the plus side: Did you know you can slide? I didn’t know you could slide. It’s awesome. You tap duck while sprinting, and you skim smoothly along the ground into a crouch.

Today’s screenshot theme: Car Crashes I Would Later Be Unable To Satisfactorily Explain To The Authorities.

New PC Gamer Podcast: Eau De Toilette Radioactifs

This month, Ross Atherton, John Walker, Craig Pearson and myself discuss what Ross will do for a drink, how much John hates Fallout 3, and what’s wrong with my radar. Find out what the lead designer of Deus Ex 3 said to make me equate the original to the Mona Lisa, why a fifteen year-old reader is having a mid-life crisis, and WHAT GOES INTO A MAGAZINE.

Sign up here, download here, or listen here:

This, by the way, is the Zombuster creation to which I refer towards the end:

Far Cry 2 Released, Forest Fires Up 8000%

Far Cry 2 is out! I’m not wild about it.

I like it a lot, I just don’t love it. I love open-world games, and I love shooters, but I’m still waiting for someone to succesfully combine the two. In Morrowind and Oblivion, I couldn’t summarise what was in those worlds in less than a few hundred words. With Far Cry 2, I can do it in one: enemies.

The factions and backstory and war-torn mood all hint at something I want to play, but bear no relation to what’s actually in the game: an entire nation of people whose sole objective in life is to hunt and murder you. You’re an unknown foreigner, and neither of the factions have uniforms, but they’ll shoot you on sight from a hundred meters away, abandon the posts they’re supposed to be guarding to hunt you halfway across the country, and even abandon a mounted gun to chase your M60-equipped deathjeep in their rusty sedan.

It’s not the realism issue that bothers me, nor the respawning enemies, jamming guns, blurted voice acting, nonsense plot, or even how damn hard it is to see the people firing at you in this much undergrowth. All those things have bothered me, but I’d happily overlook them if I could see anything interesting beyond.

Far Cry 2’s world is alluring beyond belief, glorious escapism to a place we rarely get to visit, visualised by a properly revolutionary engine. But its contents are uniform, angry, and ultimately dull to me. And I can’t entirely avoid them, because the same five guys and the same jeep are at the same damn checkpoint every 42 seconds along every road. The missions themselves provide plenty of fun combat, and if I wasn’t so sick of fighting by the time I got to them, I might be enjoying it a lot more.

On the plus side: fire lol.

I have some other things I want to mention about Far Cry 2, some of them more positive, but I think I’ll split this up into a series of daily posts to avoid wall-o’-text syndrome, and as an excuse to post more screenshots. Today’s theme was Things I Set On Fire Then Wondered If It Had Really Been The Right Thing To Do.

!

Some questions I’m getting asked a lot:

Tom, have you won any large perspex awards lately?

No, I- wait! Yes, there was one! The Games Media Award for best Specialist Games Writer in Print. Would you like to see it?

If I say yes, will you uncuff me?

‘Specialist’ Games Writer?

A writer for a publication solely about games, as opposed to someone who does the games bit in a general mag or paper. Those guys had an award that night too, but we didn’t know any of them and I’ve forgotten who won.

This was an actual awards ceremony?

An actual awards ceremony. I didn’t go last year, so I took the precaution of getting drunk with PC Zone on a barge beforehand to be ready for any eventuality. It was an extremely dense concentration of people I knew and liked in a medium-sized comedy joint, with tables somehow arranged so that more than half the guests had to twist and shuffle to see the stage.

Sponsor Deep Silver barged us down the Thames from Paddington to Camden, via London Zoo. Most agreeable.

Who else won stuff?

I was really happy to see Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson get the online version of my award – we go way back, but I voted for her because of this. Sadly Rock Paper Shotgun didn’t get the Best Website nod they were up for – Eurogamer did. I consider it impolite of Ellie to win an individual and a group award in the same night. Edge beat us to Best Magazine, and I’m happy for them largely because their own Alex Wiltshire, who was up for my award, seemed so genuinely happy for me.

The single, twitching claret pupil of Edge magazine, nameless and livid. That’s me on the left, but I’m so hideous I had to cut my own face off.

The people there were overwhelmingly nice to me. I was overwhelmed. If I hadn’t recently become an Insufferable Prick, I may have wept. Alex was lovely, Log was lovely, Will and Steve from PC Zone were lovely, my editors Tim and Ross were lovely, my publishers James and Richard were lovely, even when I started shouting at one of them about online strategy (Insufferable Prick), Kieron and Alec from RPS were lovely, Ryan and Jonty from Official Xbox World were lovely, and Matt and Rick from Games TM – with whom I’d hoped to strike up an aggressive rivalry – were too lovely for me to do so. It was a whole evening of people sincerely overestimating my talent and worth.

Rock Paper Shotgun, and a guy I don’t know, tear up the dance floor.

You’re not actually that good. How were you able to win this?

Obviously a lack of shame, integrity and humility helped me a great deal here. This blog is not game-changingly popular, compared to the many higher-profile places the GMAs were mentioned with a nod to a different candidate, but it appears to be frequented by profoundly decent chaps and chapettes. I’ve never seen a site with comment threads this long that’s so entirely free of howling douchesatchels.

On top of that, 1Fort is, I think, game-changingly popular, and without prompting Chris wrote me an amazing endorsement there that convinced even me to vote for myself. I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect a post like this from a guy like Chris does more than an offhanded link from a site with ten times the daily uniques. Thanks, Chris. Please don’t DVORAK my keyboard.

Thanks in particular to Octaeder, John Walker, The_B, ImperialCreed, Chris Livingston, Seniath, J-Man, Mr Brit, Pod, Chris Evans, TooNu, Chijts, LaZodiac, spuzman00, Lack_26, Alex Holland, Alex Holland’s mother, and anyone who voted for me but didn’t specifically say so here.

My acceptance speech on the night was glib, ungrateful, nonsensical, misspoken and possibly inaudible due to nerves, alcohol and shock. But this is what I meant to say.

Deadly Toads Of Death

Planet Diablo’s hands-on with Diablo 3. On the plus side:

On the down side:

Jesus Christ, really? Why even have stats? This, and the fact that you could just buy all possible skills at every level, were the most despiritingly grindy things about World of Warcraft.

Meanwhile, back on the plus side:

Unrelatedly: This popped up last night, but I’m still not seeing a lot of linkage this morning – Eurogamer have reviewed Little Big Planet. Not quite the score I was expecting. Oli has an interesting thing to say about how it compares to Spore towards the end.

Updatedly: I no longer care about the stat stuff. The Skill Runes sound like they’re a much more meaningful way to customise your character.

You can slot skills with runes, the way you slot items with gems. There are just five or so different types, but any can be slotted into any skill, and they genuinely seem to subvert the skill’s effect rather than just altering its stats.

World Of Goo Is Coming To Steam, Gentlepersons

Upupdatedate! Caleb points out that 2D Boy have now confirmed that pre-ordererers will be able to use their magic code to register the game on Steam and receive it there too. Fine job, Valve! I guess I forgot I got a magic code.

It’s also coming to Greenhouse and Direct2Drive – we care less about that here at James, but it’s great to hear they’re getting so much distribution-love.

Update: It’s coming to Steam, with eight achievements, and it only took ten months of me badgering them to sign it! Person-who-signs-things, Jason Holtman, notes in the announcement that “More people have told us to get World of Goo on Steam than any other title coming this year.” Possibly that IP-spoofing spam campaign was a step too far.

I’m buying it again. Direct from the developers is a good way to buy things, because they get all the money, but Steam is a good way to own things – on any PC, automatically updated, and nothing to lose.

Original post:

World of Goo (out Monday, £10/$20, 3-4 hours long, DRM free) is made by people for whom a level must have a point, and that’s strange to modern eyes and fingers. We’ve come to expect that games have a format, and a steady stream of content that fits it. This set of weapons, these possible enemies, plot delivered to you through this earpiece, progress implied by an increase in that stat, and all future experiences will be variations on those seen thus far.

World of Goo doesn’t have a fixed format; it is squishy. Whatever world it wants to take you to, the fundamentals of the game bend to realise it. Whatever engineering concept it wants to play with, old mechanics are plucked out and new ones glopped on to explore it. And whatever conceit of modern life the game chooses to mock, the entire visual grammar of the world inverts to caricature it with dreamlike brilliance.

It makes absolutely no sense that the art, writing, design, levels and music could all be done by the same guy.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Three

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. This one should be interesting – for some people one part of it is going to be very obvious, for some the other part is going to be very obvious, a few will immediately recognise both, and a few will have no idea about either.

As ever, listen before reading any comments if you don’t want it spoiled, and speculate away if you have an idea.

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.