TOM FRANCIS
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First Steps In Skyrim

One cool thing about having been a games journalist is that there’s a detailed public record of some of your favourite personal gaming experiences. I came across my write-up of the first time I played Skyrim, at a preview event, and re-read the whole thing. I’d forgotten what exactly happened, and reading the story of my adventure like this actually captured more of its magic than just firing up the game again. The game no longer has what I got from it that day, but the story does.

I’d forgotten how amazing the first 10-20 hours with an Elder Scrolls game are. Such a sense of adventure, freedom, a beautiful country to explore, a personal journey where the little stories you encounter get tangled up in the systems of the world as they react to your reckless decisions. Waiting for a storm to pass. Holing up in a shack for the night. Finding something amazing.

That build skipped the intro, and I start by turning 180 in an attempt to explore off the beaten track – it’s funny to realise the walled-off town I ‘discover’ up the hill was Helgen.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim preview – PC Gamer

First Screenshots Of Introversion’s Next Game

Introversion have just blown the lid off their previously mysterious next project Subversion. From these shocking new shots and Chris’s revealing vision for the game, it’s clear that it will be a single and multiplayer office espionage sim in which you bring down a multinational corporation from the inside, using information warfare and optionally working together with your friends via the game’s rich social networking features. It will score 87 or 88 percent and be released at 9am GMT on the 5th of September, 2008.

First Night, Second Life

Second Life is a Massively Multiplayer Online… Place. There’s no goal, so it’s not a game, but it lets you create things – potentially of enormous complexity. People make games within it. Somewhere, I’m told, there’s a hangar in which people are still playing a World War II MMOG they recreated in SL after the real one got scrapped. A basic Second Life account is free, and with that you get a few hundred virtual dollars to buy and make stuff – on top of which, a lot of groovy players give away copies of the stuff they’ve made for free. Continued

Firefly

The opening spiel summarises the background rather concisely, so I’ll quote it for anyone who’s never seen it (which is potentially a high percentage, because it’s only in the first run of its first series in the US, and has never been aired in the UK):

Narrator: The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed ourselves a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and plush with the new technologies, others not so much. The central planets, them's formed the Alliance, fought a war to bring all the worlds under their control. Some idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself.

Notice no mention of aliens. There are no aliens. This is a stroke of brilliance – one that I’ve always been poised to paint myself, were I ever spontaneously commissioned to write a sci-fi series. The new galaxy is comprised of countless planets – the human population must be hundreds of billions – but no aliens, and not even anything in the way of separate evolutionary lines taken by remote cultures (it’s only three hundred years in the future). Who needs aliens? In other sci-fi shows, they all play human roles with a few crudely applied trends common to each species, which could as easily occur as traditions within a cut-off human society, of which Firefly’s universe has plenty. And you don’t have to lamely pretend a human in elaborate but wholly superficial make-up is from an alien race whose evolution shares nothing with that of ours.

Another piece of intelligent sci-fi on the part of the creator is that there are no sound effects for the space-scenes. I keep wanting to say they take place in perfect silence, but in fact gentle guitar music usually plays over them, but the point is that this makes sense – even when giant laser cannons destroy a whole ship in a massive fiery explosion, no-one who wasn’t aboard the target vessel would hear a thing – no air in space! No sound! Listen to a space-scene in Star Trek, and you’ll notice even the noise of the Enterprise drifting by is a deafening roar.

This intelligence is carried to every part of the vision, but there are other things that make Firefly great. The characters and their relationships in particular are wonderful – Mal is a funny and inoffensive captain (sounds like mild praise, but it takes some doing), the enigmatic preacher manages to be witty about being a Christian, and tough-guy Jayne (yeah) manages to be stupid, evil and arrogant in an enormously likeable way. The doctor, like virtually every sci-fi doctor, is brilliant, but it’s hard to characterise why – he’s just inappropriately civilised and doesn’t like Jayne. The pilot Wash is the true star, though – one of those meek, witty characters Joss Whedon always crafts more lovingly than the rest, like the blond geek from Buffy. This was meant as a list of my favourite characters for people who knew them, but it’s about 80% of the crew, so it might have been easier to specify the few I don’t find especially interesting. I’m not wild about Inara. That’s it. Oh, and the mysterious ‘hands are blue’ guys are easily the freakiest, most unsettling bad guys in TV. I hope that even if we find out what The Alliance did to River, we never get told why their hands are blue.

Lastly, it tries to be funny and is. This – and the captain’s slight resemblance to Angel* – is the only link I can see between it and Buffy: Firefly is firmly funnier, but the humour is kind of the same vein, and I have to admit it’s a vein to which I’m receptive.

* I now find out that he was actually considered for the part of Angel in Buffy, and in a series that hasn’t been on in this country yet, plays some other guy. In other cast notes, Zoe is a bad guy in Alias.

Series Notes: there’s only one series, and the last three episodes were never aired. Also, the two-part pilot was aired after the rest of the series, or rather what of the rest of the series they aired, and however much we all may despise Fox for this and all their other many, horrible crimes, I think we have to admit that the people responsible for all the fantastic programmes Fox has inexplicably cancelled would have gone with a different network if they could. In other words, they are the only ones prepared to show this stuff in the first place, so they’re doing something, they’re just doing it very badly. Anyway, more importantly the whole series, unaired episodes and everything, is now available on DVD, and hence on file-sharing programs. The DVD is around £20, $35, which is a total steal in my books, so I actually bought it.

Oh My Fucking God

There’s a film, the trailer is here, and it’s out on 30/09/2005. I’ve never been this excited about a film.

Quotes:

(Mal has inadvertantly been given a wife as part of a trade, and she wants to sleep with him)
Preacher: If you take advantage of her in any way whatsoever, you are going to a very special hell reserved for child-molesters and people who talk in theatres.
(Later)
Caylee: Hi shepherd. Captain was just telling us about his kiss with Saffron.
Preacher: Oh, how… special.

Preacher: I just feel such a fool.
Jayne: Yeah, all those years of priest training… taken out by one bounty hunter.

Finally, On Lost

Man, there was a time when Lost was so exciting I’d blog about it here. When a series loses its way, as pretty much all of them have to in the merciless American format of multiple seventeen-hour seasons, it’s amazing how quickly it wipes your memory of how good it used to be. I was a Heroes fanboy, once. Continued

Filming Super Game Jam

The last few days I’ve been doing a game jam with Liselore Goedhart, being filmed as a documentary series called Super Game Jam. It’s been loads of fun, surprisingly chilled, and we’re really happy with the game we made. We finished it yesterday and let people play it at the London Game Space last night – fantastic to see people laughing so much at something that didn’t exist two days before. Continued

Film Catch-Up

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You? Continued

Field Studies 6: The PC Gamer Sporecast

Update: I’m a complete fucking idiot. The image that was the whole freaking point of this post was still set to Private on my Flickr account, so I’m guessing no-one saw it. Here goes:

The PC Gamer Sporecast

If you’re playing Spore this weekend, I made a thing you can subscribe to to get awesome stuff showing up in your game. Sporecasts are hand-picked collections of content, and they’ll take priority over random stuff when Spore is populating the galaxy.

I don’t really gain anything from people subscribing to this – if it were fame, love and comments I were after, I’ve already got those by making a pathetic toaster as my first ever building.

Sporecasts are just a way for uncreatives like me to feel like they’re contributing to the Spore community. Unfortunately the tool for making them is terrible right now, and flat-out refuses to acknowledge the existence of most buildings, vehicles and spacecraft, so I’ll have to add some of my favourites of those later. This is also why the vast majority of Sporecasts out there are just three or four shit monsters.

Not in the PC Gamer Sporecast, or any Sporecast, because Spore’s Sporecaster sucks.

ZomBuster’s behatted Antlion is in there, and I ran into him at the Space stage yesterday. I struck up a trade route with their race, but then one of my allies – the moustache bananas – started invading Antlion worlds. Naturally, their whole race had to die. I roped an Antlion ship into helping me – they’re nasty black Piranhas in my game – and went on a rapid bombing run to systematically exterminate every city on every planet in their empire. They surrendered pretty early on – I’m playing as the Stompwings, who achieved Galactic God status long ago – but I kept on bombing. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I really like bombing.

Tip: get the Shield module for your ship as early as possible. It’s not some shitty 20% defense for 10 seconds, it renders you completely invulnerable for several minutes, enough to lay waste to an entire planet.

Field Studies 5: My Spore Review

After some dillying, my Spore review for PC Gamer UK went up today. I went at it with more or less the opposite mindset to most of the reviewers I’ve read. Not:

“Okay, this is supposed to be a big deal, but does it really provide a long-term challenge as a serious game?”

But:

“Ooh, what’s this?”

I didn’t give it a special license to not be a game, in fact I’m pretty hard on the ways in which it fails as one, but I bore with it as much as any other game that isn’t trying to scratch the normal itches. It seems mad to me to compare it to Civ, Diablo, Warcraft or any other Platonic form of the genres it borrows, because it’s so obviously not about those mechanics. The point of comparison, if you really had to make one, would be Second Life. And it fares rather well.

We have a little piece of page furniture in PC Gamer reviews that is widely resented among the writers, and often a pain to do: the Thumbnail Review. I thought Spore would be a particularly daunting one to summarise in a few words, but it turned out to fit easily:

“Simplified and misbalanced, but a jaw-dropping safari through the human imagination.”

I knew some mags and sites would damn it with the mild praise of a score in the seventies – in fact I thought more would than have. But to me, anything under ninety percent seems criminal and absurd. How could you possibly suggest this experience is optional, or merely decent? It is unprecedented, wild, hilarious and compulsory.

A lot of people have the game now, so footage is cheap. But here are a couple of things not many people are likely to have yet:

Field Studies 4: Vu To A Thorough Game Demonstration

They’ve finally put together a trailer that explains the game, lightly blows the mind and is friendly to people who don’t yet know why they should care.

Will Wright also gave a typically smart, funny talk about what people have done with the Creature Creator so far, measuring their creativity in God Units with sacrilicious results.

Then Gamasutra interviewed Civ IV designer Soren Johnson, on his role trying to ensure Spore will satisfy the hardcore gamers. At length. It’s like one of my interviews before I have to cut 90% of it.

But most excitingly to those of us who already know everything it’s possible to know about the game, is a bunch of stuff we didn’t know about the game. Producer Thomas Vu falteringly reveals that Spore has eighteen different editors, including one for music.

The game footage is fantastic too. On his way to befriend a village of dinosaurs, he passes a tribe of big ugly black critters being terrorised by a single enormous Cthulhu in the background. Then the dinosaurs give him a ten! When Spore’s art style took a turn for the cutesy (a shift which Soren talks about in the Gamasutra interview), I don’t think my fears took into account the possibility that I might actually find it cute.

I’m now counting the days till I can play this properly, which happily, even the Grumblegut (above) could do on the fingers of one foot.

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.

FEAR

Wrote this back when it was relevant. I hope enough time has now passed that I can post it without pretensions of currency.

Central to FEAR is this idea of being surrounded by armoured grunts in a classy office, bullet trails streaking in all directions in slow motion, dust and sparks exploding all around, then blowing one of them in half with the shotgun and launching into a flying kick at another while he shouts a slow-mo deepened “Fuck!” They got that exactly right, and it’s one of the all-time top ten essential gaming experiences everyone should have before they die.

But it sometimes feels like they didn’t know what to do around that. Their attempts to deviate from that formula for variety’s sake – excluding the horror sections – are all rather awkward. The extra-tough enemies are dull, the turrets are a chore to destroy, the flying robots are desperately incongruous and almost impossible to defeat stylishly, and the psychic demons that can hurt you and be shot are a catastrophic midjudgement. Instead of being scary and fun to fight, they’re neither – that they’re vulnerable to bullets makes them mundane, and that they zoom mindlessly towards you makes them insultingly poor opponents.

The one exception is the stealth troop type – they’re both genuinely different and great fun. But even that gives rise to a further frustration – they’re horribly under-used. Especially given that they are both scary and fun to fight, and that’s clearly what they wanted from the later levels. Instead, they’re replaced by the aforementioned physical demon things in the last levels, and then and there FEAR drops from one of the best games ever made to merely something with a lot of potential. All other quibbles are barely that – quirks, more like; blemishes in a beautiful skin.

It still feels like a 90% game to me, despite everything, so I shall specify some of the things it does better than anyone else ever before. I hearby give FEAR the following awards:

• Best FPS Combat – a big one, but well-earned.
• Best Enemy ‘Barks’ – for ‘Fuck!’, “Shit!’, “Fuck, shit!”, “Shut the fuck up!” and “No fucking way!”. I honestly never thought I’d have to take this award away from Far Cry’s mercenaries with their twin classics “Yeah yeah!” and “I’m going to shoot you in the face!”
• Best Costume Design – the grunts are all functionally identical, but they sport a range of genuinely stunning uniforms. They’re sleek, they’re formal, they come in tasteful colours (particularly the crimson/white/black one later on) and yet they look like they mean business. Sadly there isn’t a specific credit for costume design in games, since technically they’re not costumes (“These clothes are my skin!” – prize for placing the (mis)quote), but I’m inclined to credit these outfits to John Turner, Senior Character and Weapon artist.
• Best Shotgun – sorry Half-Life 2, but holy shit this is a good shotgun.
• Best AI – I know it has its flaws, but the deciding factor is that these are the only enemies that continually surprise me.
• Best Explosion – and I mean ever. I’m not even restricting this to games. This beats Akira.
• Most Arbitrary Plot Twist – for the one after the credits. “Er, okay.” I’m willing to be corrected on this one – I know there’s a lot of hot competition.
• Best Enemy – for the grunts. If I have to be specific, let’s say one in a blue-grey/white uniform, using a shotgun. Cool, challenging and incredibly satisfying to beat up.
• Best Enemy In A Supporting Role – for the stealth dudes. Creepy, cunning and brilliantly acrobatic.
• The Sands Of Time Award For Worth-Copying Contribution To The Genre – for the melee combat. Take note, everyone: we need melee moves, they need to be powerful and we need to be able to do them without switching away from our regular weapon.

Favourites

Putting together the fireworks post reminded me how amazing Flickr is, and also led to an addition to my very elite, frequently pruned Favourites collection. Click through to get to the large versions:

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.