TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Oh My God What The Fuck Barbecue

Everyone’s playing the Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 at the moment, because Valve just added loads of Pyro-specific Achievements and new weapons that are unlocked when you earn enough of them. Some of these are things we’ve probably already done, but there’s one that no-one had: OMGWTFBBQ: Kill an enemy with a taunt.

In a rare act of trust, Valve told Craig and I back in February that they’d be lethalising the Pyro’s Street Fighter ‘Hadouken!’ taunt. We were asked to keep shtum, so that players would have to work it out for themselves when they saw there was an achievement for it. And in a rare act of journalistic nondickishness, we did.

But once the cat was out of the bag, I had to have it. The moment the new Pyro content went live, I arranged to meet up with my friend Al for a Hadouken duel – may the winner let the loser fireball him next time. But in the blazing madness of Pyro Night, where 10 of our 12-man teams were playing as the gasmasked deviant, all plans were forgotten. And in the course of joining in with that mayhem, I kept finding myself in situations where it might just legitimately work. Where I could actually Hadouken an enemy.

I failed. Again and again and again. But I’d got the bug now: I had to get this legitimately. No willing victims, no bots, no achievement-clinic maps or grinding servers: real, life-or-death play on maximum-population servers.

My first proper attempt was instinct, when I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a Heavy and Medic. I had a Medic friend healing me, and I happened to know a horde of my team-mates were right behind, so I jabbed the taunt button hoping that he’d be swamped by them long enough for my fireball to connect. When a Pyro friend did round the corner, he ran to my side and joined me in the taunt. I don’t know whether he was after the achievement or just thought this was a game, but the pair of us were shredded like so many kittens in a woodchipper.

The difficulty, obviously, is that the taunt takes some seconds to perform – during which, you’re rooted to the spot, unable to defend yourself or even cancel the action, and all but the slowest of wits can calmly stroll out of your way or murder you.

Later that round – on Gold Rush – I started doing pretty well. A Medic friend latched on to me, possibly Arq, and we had a good enough run that he earnt his Ubercharge healing the damage I took – and chose to use it on me. He timed it well, as we rounded a nest of Sentries and strong enemy presence on the final checkpoint of the second map, but when I bumped into an Engineer just standing there, I couldn’t resist. It was too perfect. I taunted.

Four, maybe six times. Every time the incoming fire bashed me back too far to hit anything with the resulting fireball, interrupting the animation, and every time I became more convinced I could get him this time. Before that faith was vindicated, our uber flickered off and my poor undeserving Medic and I were blown into the stratosphere. Sorry Medic.

Anyone will tell you the OMGWTFBBQ achievement is easy. It’s the first one they got. Right away they ran into an unwitting Sniper, and he just stood there and let them do it. I know. I’ve been in those situations as every class and their granma, up against people who don’t move or realise I’m there even after two seconds of being beaten about the head. It’s just that since this Pyro update, those people seem to be joining different servers to me. For days, I don’t think I met a stupid player.

The next time I played, I had a masterstroke. I was defending Gold Rush this time, and the attackers had progressed far enough that they’d set up teleporters to take them from their spawn-room to the front line. I’d made it all the way there with relatively little trouble, and now found myself camped outside their home base staring at the telepad they’d each jump on every time they spawned.

I tucked myself into a dark corner on a route no-one takes – even if they’re not going to take the teleporter – and waited. Soon, a Medic trundled out of the iron gates and set himself on the telepad. I charged, hit the taunt button once I was in range, and he stood staring dumbly forwards – right up until he vanished in a constellation of teleporter sparkles. My flaming fists passed uselessly through where he’d been.

If I lurked any closer or approached any sooner they’d see me, so I’d always be too late. But when the next person – a Soldier, a rougher customer – stepped up to the pad before it had recharged. I pounced again, and hit taunt long before the pad was ready to displace him. And gloriously, the whole animation played out in full. To no effect. The flames licked ineffectually at his sleeves, centimeters out of range, and the noise caused him to spin round, spot me with a flinch of astonishment, and fire a single, wildly inaccurate rocket of surprise before he was zapped halfway across the map by the teleporter. God freaking damn it.

It happened on Badlands: I’d just sneakily won the game by camping their final capture point. As their defeated team scurried from our super-critting weapons, I taunted vaguely at a group of them, and my fireball connected with a Medic. He drifted feathery and aflame across the room, and slumped against the wall. No achievement – it doesn’t count in the post-victory humiliation phase. And to add insult to injury, my victim messaged me: “Did you get the achievement? :)” He’d let me do it. My feat was doubly worthless.

It’s been four days now, and I’ve come to expect failure. I waited at the enemy gates, timed a taunt perfectly to flourish just as they opened, and their entire team made an executive decision to pause for exactly a second before charging past my immobilised, useless form and setting fire to me with critical flame from the unlockable Backburner I will probably never earn.

I found the perfect Sniper – utterly oblivious, utterly stationary, utterly alone. And I made sure I was virtually touching him before I started, and he didn’t flinch throughout the whole process. I, however, was blown to bits by a critical Demoman grenade to the back of the head just as my hands would have hit him. Without looking up from his scope, he continued to snipe from a room full of my blood.

Tonight I found an enemy Heavy blasting our team from a high window. I was coming up behind him, from inside the building, with no enemies around to intercept me or friends to steal the kill. Surely, I thought. Heavies are reknown for their lack of situational awareness when firing – it’s like a trance. I ran directly for him, and parked myself indecently close. Surely, I thought. I taunted. He kept firing. SURELY, I thought. His face broke into a manic cackle as his spinning gun tore through my team below – then fell, as a magical Street Fighter 2 reference hit him in the small of his back, set him on fire and ended his life. His bloated, burning, bent-backwards body flew spectacularly through the window, sailed over the battle below, and crunched into a fat-sizzling heap in the ditch below.

[PCG] Pentadact has earned the achievement: OMGWTFBBQ. At fucking, stupid last, it might have added.

The sense of triumph is ridiculous – even more so than the last utterly moronic thing Valve made me do by calling it an ‘achievement’. Perhaps because this victory was unique, and over a real person, and I really, really suck.

Of course, not halfway through writing this – and long before I got the achievement – Chris beat me to it with a post about exactly the same thing. Also, he got the achievement legitimately long before me, and he has 22 others, and all the unlockable weapons. Have I mentioned I’m never linking him or his stupid fat Frohman face ever again?

Cube In Memoriam

Multiwinia pays tribute.

Pyro Flare Pistol Thingy Shown In Meet The Sniper

Chris spotted one of the two remaining unannounced Pyro unlocks in the new Meet The Sniper video. Which is awesome, by the way. For the Demoman’s reaction, the slowly filling jars (also featured on the title card, I notice), and “Yes, yes he did.”

You see the gun fire once, but the muzzle flash is unspecific. There’s a better pic of it over at Chris’s. The shape resembles a flare pistol, but then there are plenty of more exotic devices that you’d probably make like a flare pistol if you had to model them in-game.

Update! clever people were right, it’s a Flare Gun! Full unlockable details and the shocking truth about the big Pyro change blogged over at PC Gamer, plus a few tidbits from Robin Walker on how it’ll all work. I rudely interrupted his game of Defense of the Ancients before breakfast this morning, intending just to say “This sounds ace!” but ended up asking a lot of annoying questions.

Field Studies 3: My Pretties

With a game as flexible as Spore, experimental gamers like me have a really hard time getting past the stage of “Ooh, can I do this? What do you do about it if I do that? Won’t it break if I try this?”

Spore endures this process with increasing weariness: “Yes, you can do that. If you do that it will look weird. Yes, you can break me. Yes, if you really try, you can make a creature that clips through itself and can barely walk. Are you happy now?”

Then the question becomes, “What’s the most unusual thing I can make without breaking it?” Leafing through other people’s creations is a good cure for that: some of them are so inventive and ingenious that you start to realise you’re probably never going to be recognised as the Da Vinci of Spore, the game’s defining renaissance God whose creatures display a perfect fusion of art and science.

So my creatures start out defiantly unconventional but rather lacking in personality, and gradually the emphasis shifts from freakish limb structures to more expressive faces, configurations that animate interestingly, and pretty colours.

Palm Face

Who says limbs have to be on the body and facial features on the face? After making the Palm Face, an ambulatory tree that grows features instead of leaves, I do. To strangers in the street I say it, shaking their shoulders and frothing.

To try any of these in-game, right-click the small image and save it to your My Documents\My Spore Creations\Creatures folder.

Loomosaur

Let’s try a really thin body! No, boring, let’s try a really fat one! No, boring. Okay, how about fat, then thin, then fat, then thin. Then each fat lump could have a single, giant feature dangling from it. And the whole thing could bend dangerously forwards, and be supported by a million increasingly huge legs.

Horncrested Bristlefrog

What happens if you make a creature with a spiral spine? And distribute its face across disparate lengths of the curl? Then add a load of spikes? This guy didn’t really come together until I made his front paws hand-like, which gives him a puppyish scampering gait. It’s quite hard to give non upright creatures arms that look like they’re part of them, and that didn’t really work until I made his biceps as thick as his back leg thigh, so that the three limbs look like trunks from the same stem. The ‘stripe’ pattern option in Spore’s paint mode really did me proud, too.

Eyestalker

This time I wanted to make something jungle tribes might have legends about, and which sort of stalked about the place like a walking bat. It didn’t really look imposing enough until I discovered you can have really fucking huge spikes, and once Eyestalker was done that inspired a flurry of aborted creatures who had nothing going on conceptually except a lot of really fucking huge spikes. None, predictably, were worth saving.

Malevolent Stomptrunk

This started when I tried just inflating a thigh until it resembled an epic banana, then wondered if it was possible to make a creature that would suit. I also wanted something that never smiled, frowned or laughed; that would only survey all before it with a nameless besnouted malice. This pose doesn’t really show that off.

Once I’d finished, I was suddenly struck by the fear that I might have subconsciously copied a creature I’d seen somewhere before to a shameless extent. Does anyone recognise it? I’m thinking something from Star Wars or Futurama, but it’s not coming.

Goggleshark

The eyes-as-hands notion didn’t really work with the Eyestalker, but I thought I’d see if it worked better as the whole focus of a creature. Finding the slider that created that enormous drooping rictus of dismay immediately made the face work, but I actually abandoned the whole thing when I couldn’t come up with an inventive leg system. I only just came back to it, now more or less relieved of my fixation with making pointless overcomplications of conventional limb structures, and tried just giving him comically puny legs at the base of his lean abdomen. The resulting gait is hilarious and fits his excitable face exactly.

Like Malfunctioning Eddie, Gogglesharks are easily astonished.

Previously: Sporepedia, Best creations.

Field Studies 1: Sporegasm

No-one seems to have noticed except Eurogamer, who failed to link it, but Sporepedia is already publicly accessible. This is the online field guide to all the creatures people have created with Spore, and the source from which the game will eventually populate the planets you play in with AI-controlled versions of the races people have made.

Right now it’s mostly Maxis folks and a few journos creating, and I think we can conclusively say Maxis are better at it. If you stumble on a Horncrested Bristlefrog up there, though, that’s my first proper stab.

The incredible thing about Sporepedia is that those thumbnail images you see are the creature files. Drag that image right from your browser to the game window, and it loads that creature in all its scampering glory. The creature’s DNA is actually coded into the metadata of a 25 kilobyte PNG image.

It takes a long, long time to get the test-the-limits urge out of your system – which is probably why they’re releasing the editor so far ahead of the game. Because you don’t really appreciate how exciting a prospect Spore is until you get past the “Can I break it?” phase (yes, oh God yes) and create something you truly love. The more personal a protagonist is to you the greater your invest in its plight, and it doesn’t get much more personal than a species you’ve hand-built from clay and vertebrae.

Next: Best creations, My creations.

Muxed Feelings

Muxtape has provided my working soundtrack almost exclusively the last week or so. It’s a Super-Simple Service that lets you upload twelve songs, lets anyone listen to them, and ‘favourite’ them. I only just discovered the latter. I was highly enjoying this tape and thinking to myself “I love that this whole site is so laser-focused on what it does, but I do wish there was a way to bookmark the ones you like. Oh, there it is.”

After a long quest to get Seedling’s The Upshot in MP3 format (alas, no OGGs on Mux), mine is complete. Here’s what’s on it and why:

Cat Power – Willie
There’s a lot of classy, soulful, plonking ballads to pick from on The Greatest, but this one just seems to make everything okay. Something about its expansive confidence and nonchalant pace.

Mates of State – Goods (All In Your Head)
This was just written for late summer sunsets, turning from giddily exciting to wistful and almost sad with no audible seam.

Seedling – The Upshot
There’s something beautifully emphatic about the cut-down arrangement of this, the forcefully plucked strings behind her resigned voice. Disastrously, the band split years ago, and they’re obscure enough that they don’t even have a Wikipedia page. My only consolation is that I got to hug them all at their final gig.

New Pornographers – Chump Change
By rights I should have gone with The Laws Have Changed, but I think I over-listened to it. Skimming through my shortlist, the opening bars of Chump Change just elicit a smile like no other track.

Architecture In Helsinki – Debbie
Clever, rhythmic, curling and bizarre. It says something for the propulsive blithering of the chorus that I can tell you, without checking, that it goes, “Hey there, hey there, let me down down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie Debbie down down Debbie down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie down down down down.”

Decemberists – The Legionnaire’s Lament
This is the one track of theirs I can listen to endlessly without ever tiring of its neat lyricism and heartfelt botch of authenticity. Any song whose narrator’s camel is in disrepair gets extra credit.

Sparks – Dick Around
Manic, preposterous, majestic rock opera epic, without even the slightest wink or nod to the absurdity of penning such a thing with ‘dick’ in the title.

M̼m РGreen Grass of Tunnel
I don’t think there’s another track during which you could scientifically measure the increase in my body temperature as it starts. It’s warm and enveloping in a way a sound alone surely cannot be.

Low – Canada
The slowcore king and queen of sinister are actually at their most impressive when they veer into other moods and sounds. Canada isn’t exactly upbeat, but it rocks extraordinarily.

Delgados – Favours
Booming, crashing and beautiful. The churning chorus reaches such an exhaustingly elevated pitch and holds it for so long that you finish half-wanting to gasp for breath on Emma Pollock’s behalf.

Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs
Quite apart from being ridiculous fun, it’s time I acknowledged the genius who unwittingly wrote the ‘About’ section of James for me. As musically worthwhile satire goes, I don’t think any other song so utterly annihilates this many hateful songwriters with its first two lines.

M83 – Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun
You’ll know if you’re going to hate this in the first thirty seconds – and the chance that you will is the reason it’s at the end. But if you don’t, everything you do for the next nine minutes of your life will be unaccountably profound. This is normal.

There’s also MuxFind, which lets you search for Muxtapes featuring music ‘similar to’ a band or song you search for. Since there are a lot of Muxtapes, that tends to mean you find the song you’re looking for. And can play it free. Clearly there’s a legal explosive ticking away beneath this, but for now it remains an awesome way to find lovingly compiled collections of stuff you’ve never heard but which bears a spiritual connection to what you’ve searched for. It’s a much stronger and more effective form of recommendation than automated social aggregation like Last.fm or comparitive content analysis like Pandora.

You Don’t Have To Be An Engy To Work Here But You Do

If you don’t habitually read six thousand words of comments after a scrollbar-breakingly long post, you may have missed that Cloak Raider’s put together an awesome comic strip of my suggestions for the Engineer unlockables, using Garry’s Mod. The portable Sentry in particular is winsome to the max: I picture the Engy pushing it round like a trolley. The wheels are even little Team Fortress 2 logos, although that might just be coincidence. Click through for the full thing:

Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.

Someone Already Made An Ubersaw

Who? I’ll give you a clue: it was one of these two:

Check also out this one:

By she:

Ow.

Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Weapon Ideas

Update: This post was written in May 2008, when only the Medic had new weapons. Since then, some weapons have been added that have similar concepts to these. Valve even gave me a special sparkly Equalizer (similar to the Last Ditch Digger here) and a lovely shoutout in the Solider update.

Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Sorry. Continued

A Riposte To Valve’s Defense Of PC Gaming

For when Deus Ex runs at double-speed on your dual-core processor, Assassin’s Creed adds compulsory black bars to your 4:3 monitor, Crysis locks off options you know your graphics card can handle, or your newly installed Mass Effect refuses to run because your broadband is down, bookmark this image. Come back here, watch it a few more times, and feel the flappy-limbed catharsis. I know I will.

I feel like this all the time.

Via this awesome thread Tim found in his Google Blogs RSS feed for the term ‘PC Gamer’. What say you to that, O champions of the medium?

Sire, My Regard For You Is This Big

I promise not to become someone who links everything they ever do anywhere, as if the mere fact of their involvement is reason enough for you to care. But I happen to have posted two things that fit within James’ remit on the PC Gamer blog recently. Jim mentioned today that he’d tried to look it up online with no luck, to which my mental reaction was “Dear God, he’s right! The world needs to know about Thedret the Exaggerator!”

As far as I know, the steps described in this article should let anyone create their own Exaggerator, but I’ve never tried to repeat the phenomenon. It would seem to undermine it, somehow.

Crysis Suit Modes Revisited

Just got round to revisiting Crysis on my new machine – the torture-test for high-end hardware. And it’s good news: everything on maximum at 1600×1200 purs along at 30fps. I say maximum, I haven’t tried the hack to enable all the DX10 stuff under DX9 yet – I will do.

After I first played it, I wrote a post about how I’d change all the Nanosuit’s augmentation modes if it were up to me, but it was lost in the great hard drive failure of recently. Replaying now, I find that I agree with myself entirely, and repeat my thoughts here for your amusement:

Cloak: the problem with Cloak as it stands is that it provides an extremely effective but rather tedious way to play. Cloak, run forwards ten metres, lie down in the nearest bush, decloak and wait for it to recharge. That’s fine in the middle of tense combat against multiple enemies, but most of your time is spent exploring a new, densely forested area where you don’t know if there are enemies are not. You instinctively want to approach cautiously, as you should, but the cautious option just takes a really long time and often turns out to have been pointless because there was no-one around anyway.

I’d like a Cloak mode that drains suit power at a rate proportional to how visible you are. I.e. how much work it has to do to keep you hidden. If no-one’s actually nearby and looking in your direction, it drains no power because it doesn’t have to do anything. But if you’re right in front of someone and they’re looking right at you, it drains rapidly because it’s having to render you entirely invisible. Your suit already knows how clearly you’re being seen by enemies – there’s a meter for it in the bottom left of your HUD.

It’d let you explore safely when you don’t know if there are enemies around, and when your suit power starts to drain, you find cover and look out for enemies. But if you’re in the middle of a firefight and want to slip by your enemies, you only have a small window to do so. Right now, I can just walk away from any firefight at any time, which makes them all a little easy.

Speed: at the moment this makes you go a little faster, makes your sprint speed preposterously fast, and then has a third, in-between speed for when you’ve run out of energy but are still sprinting. Your super-fast sprint exhausts all your suit energy in a second or two, which makes you feel a bit like you’re running on five year-old Duracell batteries. It’s one of those design decisions where they wanted to give you an extreme ability, but couldn’t find a way to balance it without an extreme nerf, and the result is rather awkward.

I’d want that third fast-but-not-crazy-fast speed to be the normal movement speed in Speed mode. Speed. The super-jumping of Strength mode should be part of Speed mode instead, and I really liked Jedi Knight’s system of being able to charge a jump by holding the key before releasing – so that you can still do small hops. None of this should drain your suit energy, but it also shouldn’t regenerate unless you’re standing still.

Holding the Sprint key wouldn’t make you go any faster, it’d slow down the world around you instead. The only games that don’t need slow-mo are the ones that already have it.

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Armour: here the problem is that if I know I’m about to be taking fire, the absolute last mode I want to be in is Armour. Because it’s the only mode in which shots drain your suit energy, which deprives you of the only two effective ways to escape a sticky situation: cloaking or super-sprinting.

Clearly, it shouldn’t. Instead of absorbing damage like an extra health bar, it should work the way armour normally does: full energy means you only take half-damage, no energy means you take full. Energy neither regenerates nor drains when in armour mode.

Except when you press Sprint. This would render you completely invulnerable until you run out of energy, but you move like the walking tank that you are: slowly. It’d let you pull stunts like cloaking to the middle of the road when you see an enemy Humvee coming, then switching to Armour and going invuln to make them crash into you. Or similarly, surviving a head-on vehicular collision that results in an explosion fatal to everyone else involved. Or throwing yourself off a huge drop and surviving. Or wading towards an angry tank, planting a detpack on it, and blowing it up right in your own face.

Strength: so the problem with Strength mode right now is that it outright fucking sucks. It should be the coolest mode, but everything you do in it drains nearly all your energy, and is woefully less effective than simply shooting people. Also, shooting people drains your energy. Jesus.

As I say, jumping has no place in this mode, it shouldn’t be about mobility, it should be about hitting stuff. A Strength-mode punch or melee attack should always kill, obviously, and furthermore should flip a Humvee like it ain’t no thing. Hell, you should be able to flip a tank if you can get right up to it and hold ‘Pick up’ long enough. I have no objection to Strength mode steadying your grip with weapons, as it currently does, but causing that to rapidly drain your vital suit-juice is just the most despicable and moronic form of the Limit Everything design philosophy.

Sprint mode would be a kind of murderous charge, barreling forth shoulder-first and canoning anything you hit flying out of your way – including vehicles and walls.

Don’t Make Me Play Football Manager

“Portrait? I don’t have a photo ready for this, but I’ll see what I’ve got in My Documents. Ah yes, an animated GIF Tim sent me of David Hasselhoff wearing David Hasselhoff briefs, which zooms into his crotch recursively, forever. Perfect.”

Over at the PC Gamer blog today, the full story of my doomed attempt to play the one game I know for sure I’ll hate: Football Manager. It doesn’t go well.

What A Shame

People being a chaotic, belligerent, vicious lot, it’s rare for anything publicly defacable to remain pure. But the comments section for this video is just such an oasis of uniform brilliance, some 238 random people all being genuinely funny rather than trying to stand out or one-up each other. What little rebellion there is among the commenters – the few that add smileys or add incorrect punctuation – is quickly Thumbs-Downed by dilligent voters, and will soon fall below the default viewing threshold.

If you’re signed in to your YouTube account when you click this, by the way, I’d love it if you could help preserve this rare and beautiful social event by contributing, or showing the Smiley Rebels the business end of your virtual thumb. They are a dangerous and subversive splinter faction that must be stopped.

Update: God damn it! I hope the dribbling hicks who just broke this didn’t come from here. Jesus, has that meme ever been funny? Since, like, the nineties? What a shame. We need two more people to thumb the dunces down and they’ll disappear from public view. Can you help?

I just discovered today that the User Reviews for a gallon of Tuscan milk sold by Amazon.com is a similarly superb collaborative work of a straight-faced communal sense of humour. I hope there are loads of these Everyone’s In On It havens dotted around the net. And I hope that some day Andy Baio bags and tags the phenomenon like the Attenboroughesque social-tech naturalist he has become. I leave you a milk review by Buster Foyt:

“This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn’t hold a charge. I called their customer service department and, I don’t know if it’s in Bangalor or Ireland, but I couldn’t understand a word that they said and they began to scream at me.

“It’s a bit heavy, too, to wear on your belt. The good news is that it keeps your hip cool during this sultry summer weather – for a while.”

The City That Rarely Enters Sleep Mode

I’m wrapping up this triplet of GTA posts with the one I should have started with: why it’s worth talking about in the first place. I can’t agree with its most frequent criticism – that it’s merely the same game tweaked – because none of the three things that keep bringing me back to it were present in any meaningful sense in its predecessors. Those would be:

Online

Right now I have raw ache in the back of my throat, from laughing. Earlier this evening Tim actually cried. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time three or more of us have piled into the Free Mode map – just GTA sans missions, optionally sans police, and plus de joueurs. And so far it seems like our vocal chords will wear thin before the game mode does.

The objective-based modes are fine, but they’re just fun missions in which you can also do ridiculous stuff. Free mode is based around our own objectives. They don’t have to be particularly well-conceived ones. Tim wanted to know if a bike could jump through the doors of a helicopter. Rob wanted to know how many of us – each with varying Wanted levels – could ride together in a bus. I wondered if we could accurately bail from maximum-altitude helicopters above Central Park and land safely in the lake.

No, all of us, and no. What we did discover was that a helicopter propellor will swat an airbourne moped far enough that, even after the laughter had died down, I was able to truthfully say “Guys, I still haven’t landed.” And that while a bus makes a forceful and hardy getaway vehicle, there’s only so long it can wait for me to fumble with its diabolical automatic door under a monsoon of gunfire and a barrage of unbraking black-and-whites before it really ought to get going. And that, on a breezy day, ensuring your helicopter is geostationary over a large body of water is no guarantee that you’ll land in it when you bail.

New York

Liberty City – this Liberty City – is faithful to New York on a level GTA has never tried before. As well as the structure and detail, it captures the character and subtlety of a real place that games struggle to make up.

New York is my favourite place, and having a digital replica lets me explore it in ways I couldn’t even if I lived there. I don’t like to call these things too soon, but I don’t think I’ll ever actually find myself superbiking through Times Square in a thousand dollar suit. I hope I’ll never have to snipe Union workers down by Pier 45. And though the urge to throw myself off the Empire State enters my mind every time I top it, I can’t imagine it would really be as fun as it was in GTA IV. Doing these things gives me a feel for New York I couldn’t get otherwise, even if I spent significantly more on a trip there than I did on this console. It’s a new, cheap, bloody form of holiday.

So Rockstar can’t take all the credit for its exquisite sense of place, looming scale, gently fading ambience, but we get the full effect. It’s a city you can almost smell. So many different parts of it are beautiful in so many different ways, at so many different times. The runway lights at Francis bleeding blindingly into the mist on a foggy morning, Central Park blushing amber at sundown, rain-slick midtown Manhattan festive with red brake lights reflected in the wet tarmac, Times Square mall-bright in the dead of night, and the lazy, immobilising heat buzzing off the cracked streets of Broker on a dazzling day.

Next to the majesty of the city they built to set it in, GTA’s actual game seems puerile and sad. You could write an epic in this place, it could have a force and resonance we’re not used to. Violence could mean something here, it could be shocking again, and provoke something from us. That’s partly why I can’t join the chorus praising Rockstar’s storytelling; an arbitrary variety-show of charicatures, taking turns to step up on a non-interactive stage to tell a meandering story so apparently slave to the episodic mission structure that it’s impossible to believe in. It’s not that it’s worse than a typical game story – nothing is – it’s just unworthy of this setting.

Euphoria

Traditionally, people in games are acting out pre-recorded animations until they’re killed, whereupon a simple mechanical physics system takes over to simulate how their limp body falls and how it reacts to what it hits on the way down. That means any time a game character collides with something his pre-defined animations didn’t account for, the developers have to decide whether he should fail to react to it at all, or die.

GTA IV is the first major game that can handle the in-between cases. It licenses a piece of witchcraft called Euphoria that can blend physical simulation in with set animations, so that whenever anything hits anyone, they’ll be knocked by it in a physically convincing way, react to it in a humanly convincing way, then return smoothly to one of their normal animations. I have no idea how it works.

Actually, I know almost exactly how it works – anyone who’s thought about this problem for a second since the birth of 3D gaming could tell you how the eventual solution would have to work. The mystery is how the hell it ended up running smoothly on a home console. It’s essentially having to simulate the musculature of the human body in real-time, plug that into a mechanical physiscs system and motion-captured animation, and then make it work on as many interacting bodies as you care to run down in one spree. On a system where some developers won’t use ragdoll because it’s too processor-intensive.

The upshot for the player is the most reactive game I’ve ever seen, and a proper milestone in the progress of game ‘feel’. Both of my other obsessions in this game – our suicidal crash-tests and the intense impression of existing within this city – draw their power from the physicality Euphoria lends to every interaction in the game.

Achievement unlocked: wrote about GTA IV for one thousand words without mentioning the phrases ‘American Dream’, ‘fresh off the boat’, or ‘living breathing city’.