TOM FRANCIS
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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: 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.

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.

Fallout Girl: The Road To Tenpenny Towers

There isn’t one. There’s a cracked blasted rockscape crawling with spitting bloatflies, ravenous hounds and mutant scorpions. It took me the entire freaking night to cross it, so when I arrived at dawn and found someone ahead of me in the queue to get in, I stoved his head in with a tire iron and took over the intercom. Yes, hello, I’m here to see your boss.

I was delighted to find Tenpenny an insular society of bigots, a place oblivious to the suffering of others. I wasn’t wild about Megaton, but the Wasteland was even worse, so I was glad to find a place that had nothing to do with either. I bought a dress only mildly stained with the blood of the dead, a magnificent bonnet to shade my emotionless murderer’s eyes, then pickpocketed my money back and headed up to the penthouse for some light genocide.

On the balcony, I was presented with a big, shiny red button. I gave it a tentative prod.

And now we are all sons of bitches.

Actually I guess we’ve been sons of bitches for about two-hundred years at the point Fallout 3 is set. We’re great great great great grandsons of bitches.

This felt like the most destructive thing I’ve ever done in a videogame. I’ve killed billions in DEFCON, but they weren’t unique people things. Megaton is full of carefully crafted stories, characters, homes, secrets, even a whole religion found nowhere else. And less than an hour after I first set eyes on it, it was ash.

It’s probably not much consolation to the citizens of Megaton, but I got a sweet penthouse apartment out of the deal. I picked out a new outfit, had my housebot make me a blond, and bought a house theme: Love Machine.

Oh dear God, it’s like a disastrous episode of a post-apocalyptic Changing Rooms. But the nightwear that comes with the heart-shaped bed does go well with my welding mask.

Dressed and rested, I headed back out to the balcony to join Alistair Tenpenny for an afternoon of shooting poor people from our ivory tower.

And I was all set to live a long, peaceful and sheltered life at Tenpenny Tower, until I noticed Tenpenny had a better Sniper Rifle than me.

Fallout Girl: Striking Out

At some point during my peaceful reign over Tenpenny Towers, I found myself chainsawing an old man in the neck. In his office, which for some reason he’d kitted out like a doctor’s surgery, I found an old tape of someone talking about androids. Specifically, an escaped android who’s looking for a doctor to have a little work done. Ah, that’s probably it – he was a doctor. I knew there had to be some explanation.

I’ll be honest, I don’t much care where my dad’s gone. He was a nice enough chap to have around when I was growiing up, but I’m sure he’s got a good reason for striking out on his own. Jesus, I’m what, twenty eight? I’ve been living with my parents long enough. Besides, he’s quest-critical. The worst that could happen is that he falls over for a while.

So I didn’t have much interest in Fallout 3’s main quest. But I had a lot of interest in an escaped android. The tape wasn’t much of a lead, but I headed out from the safety of Tenpenny to investigate it all the same.

What I found, almost immediately, was a raider camp. Slipping down a mountainside I sniped a lookout’s arm off with Tenpenny’s rifle, then ploughed through the two entrance guards with my baseball bat. Inside it was a fairly small warehouse, but a hole in the wall lead to a huge cave complex beneath. Decked out like a nightclub. I snuck around it smashing people with a sledgehammer and planting landmines in their pockets until I came to a friendly man named Smiling Jack. Jack wasn’t a bandit like the others, he was a weapons merchant with an enormous arsenal who didn’t much care who he sold to. I put a landmine in his pocket and took it all from his corpse.

Tenpenny’s rifle was immediately obsolete. I had laser rifles, laser pistols, grenades, missile launchers, flame throwers, and something called The Terrible Shotgun. But it was on my way out that I found the jackpot: The Fat Man. A handheld nuclear warhead launcher. Handheld, but not light – its weight tipped my haul over the humanly haulable limit, and I was slowed to a crawl. Usually this would be irrelevant – I could just fast-travel home and ditch some stuff. But I’d slipped in with a minimum of fuss, which left a maximum of enemies still roaming the camp. No fast travel till they’re dead.

With a sadness I set the Fat Man down on a step and set about disintegrating the camp’s inhabitants. It turned out they had a Goliath caged up, which I left well alone, as well as some slaves. Since I was going to have to kill all their captors anyway, it seemed rude not to set them free, so I unlocked the pen. See? I can be nice.

Slaves don’t have any weapons, of course, but they’ll snatch any they find on the ground as they run, so they might be of use against the last few guards too. One nabbed a Chinese Assault Rifle from the nearest pile of radioactive ash, and the rest ran gratefully off in the direction I’d just come from. The direction I’d just come from after dropping the Fat Man. Fuck.

Am I really going to have to do this?

I shot the armed one first, figuring he’d turn on me when I started gunning down his pen-pals. I caught the next one in the back with a critical laser blast, atomising him as he ran. The third exploded entirely of his own accord – either a landmine I hadn’t seen, or a missile launcher lurking behind the shacks. But the final slave was too far away to hit with my fancy new rifle. I had to pull out Tenpenny’s Sniper for its superior accuracy. Three feet from the Fat Man, 40% chance to hit.

The shot ripped his right leg off at the knee, sending him pitching forward in a sprinkler-spurt of blood face-first into the dirt. All was still. The Fat Man was safe.

I’ll be nice tomorrow.

Fallout Girl: Little Lamplight

1 Nobody’s Vault: “I looked up to find all the other students staring at me, and a trail of blood smattered across the walls leading to the limp body at my feet. I lowered my guard, and talked to the examiner. He agreed I should probably just skip the exam.”

4 Striking Out: “The shot ripped his right leg off at the knee, sending him pitching forward in a sprinkler-spurt of blood face-first into the dirt. All was still. The Fat Man was safe. I’ll be nice tomorrow.”

I decided to travel as far West as I could, as much to find out what would stop me as any reason to believe clues might lie this way.

I found a cave. It was called Lamplight Cavern. I went in. A twelve year-old boy told me to fuck off.

I wasn’t going to be nice today.

There’s a perk you can choose in Fallout 3 that makes you more persuasive to children. I’m serious, that’s its sole purpose. I don’t have that perk, and frankly I worry about those who do. Certainly situations do arise, like this one, where persuading a child is useful to your quest, but it’s the pre-meditation that makes this such a creepy thing to want. “Yeah, I’m probably going to need to convince some kids to do something they don’t wanna do. I’ll take it.”

I relied on raw charisma to get in. It was a society full of kids, which didn’t make a lot of sense given that they got here two hundred years ago, and they have a policy of kicking people out long before they reach child-bearing age. Luckily, though, one of the magic kids happened to know something about the android I’d made it my mission to hunt. She had a recording that confirmed the thing had acquired one of the two devices it was after.

As I’d arrived in Lamplight, someone else was leaving. Sticky. On my way out, I agreed to take him to Big Town because, well, he knew where Big Town was and I didn’t and I like places that are big.

Sticky tells randomly generated stories from modular – stupid – components. No two are ever quite the same, or interesting. He also runs off a lot. He’s one of those characters who was clearly designed to be annoying. While you can’t help but admire the developer’s resounding success, it’s hard to deduce why this was something they felt they had to achieve.

Tired not so much of Sticky wandering off – the break from his chatter was welcome – but of trying to find him again, I tried making him wear a variety of outfits before settling on a radiation suit. We weren’t headed towards any more than the normal amount of radiation, but the suit is bright yellow, and therefore easy to spot.

I had a good feeling about Big Town. Which was probably one reason it went so hideously wrong that the game actually stopped to produce a dialogue box calling me a sick bastard.

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

Failing Fast In GTA V, Parts 1-10

About me: I am a bad driver, I don’t know any modern colloquialisms, and I just want everyone to be nice. In this video series, I attempt to play Grand Theft Auto V: Angry Jerks Steal Cars And Money And Yell At Each Other. It goes wrong in what might be record time.

We’re up to Part 10 now, click the listy button in the top left to skip to an episode.

Fail Dogs

It turns out dogs aren’t very good at stuff. Most of these are funnier if you don’t think about how their owners put them in these situations, whereupon they become kind of disturbing. Except the chess one, which just gets funnier the more you think about it. I’m pretty sure that’s the fewest possible moves you can get checkmated in. (Thanks Ross.)

Fahrenheit

Okay, I have five draft posts accumulated here, and I came on to write something about the gigs I’ve been going to this month, and even that isn’t the most important thing to say here right now – which is that you should go and see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang before it disappears from the cinema, it’s one of the funniest and cleverest films I’ve seen in years – and even that isn’t what I want to write, because I’m burning to gush about City Of Heroes (pointedly not Villains) because that’s what I’ve been doing in my week off. But it’s twenty to three in the morning, and this ancient draft post looks finished to me, so I’ll just post it. More, different, better stuff tomorrow.

Great Things About Fahrenheit

• You Do Stuff: It’s amazing the difference between walking up to something and pressing ‘use’, and walking up to something and performing a small mouse gesture which very abstractly represents the motion you want your character to perform. That tiny trace of logic, that faint connection between what you do and what your character does, makes it a tactile experience that gets you into your character’s life in a profound way. Fahrenheit also takes every oppourtunity to make you do things, automating nothing and sometimes breaking actions down into almost painstakingly small parts, each performed in sequence. But the effort and intention that requires from you gives you a connection to your character that’s beyond normal control.
   
• Private Lives: Since you have mental health rather than regular health to worry about, Fahrenheit has to let you do things that aren’t stressful (for your characters) to get it back up. So you play their lives, deciding what they do in their down time, manually performing comfortingly humdrum activities or basic life maintenance. Or swallowing the Little Book Of Calm. They’re welcome punctuation between the furious action bits, and that you decide how to while away the time means they’re frequently more fun. While bits like this work best as a backdrop to a dramatic story, it’s these you end up looking forward to more than what actually happens next. You get to see how every major character lives, talk to their friends or partners, know their apartment, sleep in their beds. It even gets unpleasantly intimate if you play your cards exactly right with the love interests in their lives, but apparently the American version spares you this realistically awkward fumbling.
   
• Atmosphere: Fahrenheit depicts New York in a blizzard with loving artistry. The snow defines every scene, making indoors cosy and comfortable; the streets lonely or chaotic. It makes wonderful escapism, and means you don’t have to care about the plot to want to go back to this world when you’re away from it.
   
• Music: Whoa, it’s like they got professionals to do it or something. It’s got both perfectly pitched incidental music, ramping up the spookiness or tension massively where appropriate, and actual songs for fun or quiet scenes. Carla’s apartment in particular is brought to life as much by the song playing on her hi-fi as the actual design of the place. Usually games fumble an awkward hybrid of incidental music and songs – it’s too featureless and watery to be songs, but it just plays mindlessly on a loop, rendering it irrelevant to what’s going on on-screen. That Fahrenheit does it the movie way, and gets it right, is a huge boost to your emotional engagement with it – one that dwarfs any excitement the actual mini-games might hope to introduce.

Awful Things About Fahrenheit

• The Flashing Colours Minigames: Walkthroughs – which yes, I have used – refer to them as the Simon Says type; it tells you what to do, then you have to do it. In fact, you have to do it or it’ll kill you. That’s not a game, not even a mini-game, that’s slavery. Unlike the mouse gestures, it’s frequently at odds with the nature of the action, simply because they use the same system for every damn thing. It even ruins some of the Private Lives appeal, because as Lucas the most relaxing thing you can do – sitting down and playing your guitar – is made a galling chore. In the action sequences, Simon Says becomes a case of ‘keep pressing the right thing to keep watching the cut-scene’. But it’s even worse than that – they require you to concentrate intently on the colours, meaning you actually miss the cut-scene going on behind them almost completely. It’s like being forced to read a book in the middle of an action film or get kicked out of the cinema. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad at them – and I’m good now – they’re an ugly, pathetic, demeaning placeholder for a real game. They try some neat tricks to try to make up for it – matching the rhythm to that of the action, throwing some curveball colour combinations when your character does new things – but these are icing on an absent cake. There is no game here.
   
• The Left/Right Minigames: These are actually worse than the Simon Says ones, but they’re not the game’s staple so they don’t take top spot. They are, however, crippling difficulty bottlenecks for anyone who doesn’t specialise in PRESSING TWO KEYS in rapid alternation. It’s the kind of thing an ape would refuse to do on principle. I love games, so I’ll do demeaning stuff to see the next bit of one I’m interested in, but it’s when these get harder that the insult becomes too much to bear. You fail, and have to start again, because the game finds your PRESSING TWO KEYS skill lacking. Worse, the metre conceals a secret time limit that has no relevance to the actual situation, so overcoming the natural decline of the energy bar you’re mashing up isn’t enough – you have to make it hit maximum before an imaginary countdown finishes, or it’ll act as if you let the bar hit zero. Worse again, that dirty trick isn’t understood by the game’s difficulty system, so it’s as annoying on Easy as on Hard. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am not good at these bits, because I do not take particular pride in my ability to PRESS TWO KEYS. The game’s guff about representing the physical exertion of your character would be a lot more convincing if what they were doing ever had anything to do with PRESSING TWO KEYS. The difficulty of these doesn’t increase the physical exertion anyway, and it’s their difficulty that makes them a problem.

Your Points Are Very Informative, Tom, But Is It Actually A Good Game?
No. There’s so much out there that’s a joy to play, and this is so often a pain. Doing something interesting and new is commendable, but Fahrenheit screws up so much of the basic stuff (like making the game part fun) that its novelties only outweigh its frustrations if you’re desperate for something new. More simply, if you hate games, you’ll love this. If you actually like games, and play good ones a lot, Fahrenheit grates. It’s still worth playing for the interest factor, or as a glimpse of what a good Revolution game might be like, but it’s potential rather than fun to me.

Extra Mirror’s Edge Levels Blocky, Unrealistic

They’re time-trial levels, where you can race against your own or presumably other people’s ghosts to complete them as quickly as possible. That’s where they evidently think the longevity will be, rather than in extending the plot episodically. But I’m not sure speed-running is for me.

The main basis for my excitement over Mirror’s Edge, apart from the fantastic art, is N. It’s absurdly difficult and endlessly frustrating, but you can retry quickly and there’s enormous scope for finesse. It seems like Mirror’s Edge has a similar process, but I hope speed isn’t the only type of finesse it permits. I never enjoyed trying to maximise my time remaining in N, or speed-run any other game. It was purely about elegance and style.

I tried a speed-run of the first level of Deus Ex once. It went so badly that I actually lost my left leg before I got inside the statue, and I still beat the contemporary fastest time on the Speed Demo Archive.

The bar’s risen quite a bit since then, thankfully, and there’s now a magnificently clever 43 minute run. It turns out grenade-jumping in Deus Ex doesn’t mean what it means in other games, and nano-augmented bunny-hopping is a thing of curious elegance.

This guy has a spectacular way of exiting Maggie Chow’s penthouse suite at maximum speed, never bothers to get his Kill Switch removed, gasses most of UNATCO to get them to open doors for him in their panic, stabs Tracer Tong to shut him up, assassinates Tiffany Savage to save time rescuing her, and pulls off the most laughably improbable escape from the swiftly scuttled Wallcloud. Deus Ex had scope for finesse.

Update: He also survives the most awkward lift ride ever, and there’s something of a surprise ending. I accidentally the whole thing.

Hupdate: Direct download of the super-crisp high quality version of that Mirror’s Edge clip for aesthetes.

Exploring Eldritch, Parts 1 & 2

I’m playing Eldritch, a first-person horror/shooter/Roguelike with randomly generated levels and Lovecraft monsters.

The game completely changes after book 1 (above). I thought it was some kind of lite action game, then suddenly the enemies get so much harder that it’s more like a stealth horror game (below). Continued

Event-Inspired Idea: Cellphone Breathalizer

My first post to a long-time favourite site, the Halfbakery:

Build a breathalizer into the mic section of a cell-phone, and have it measure the alcohol content of your breath as you start to speak, or breathe into it while waiting to be connected. If it detects mild levels of intoxication, it mutes the mic for a second and plays a pre-recorded message to the recipient of your call to the effect of:

“I’m sorry, but the caller you are talking to is inebriated. Please disregard anything they may say.”

If it detects extreme levels of intoxication, it disconnects you, dials a taxi firm, retrieves your location from a GPS component, relates it to a street via the Google Maps API, then text-to-speeches that info into a pre-recorded message to the effect of:

“I would like a taxi from [place name] to [home address]… yes, it’s [surname]”

So far four people have found the idea croissant-worthy, while two have inexplicably deigned to fishbone it. Weak.

EVE’s Assassins And The Kill That Shocked A Galaxy

“The simultaneous ambush and galaxy-wide hangar theft inflicted financial damage upwards of 30 billion ISK – $16,500 US dollars at IGE.com’s prices. The value of the stolen assets utterly dwarfed the original fee for the job. And yet the only item the Guiding Hand’s anonymous client requested for himself was the cold, dead body of the target. It’s safe to say this was personal.” Continued