TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Doing Your Job In Metal Gear Solid V

This post is part of a series. I mention abilities and tools but no story spoilers.

A lot of the time, MGS V is just a very good stealth game. You have lots of tools to distract, evade or take down your enemies, and they’re all very satisfying to use – just like Deus Ex 3. Its levels are encampments dotted seamlessly around a huge open world – just like Far Cries 2-4. Its layered systems turn failures into new challenges rather than end points – just like Invisible Inc. But none of those things are new, and MGS V sometimes feels like something that is.

Those times, for me, are not during some particularly great mission, or when some unexpected chain of events creates a cool story. They’re after: when the guards lie sleeping or dead, the cargo containers are ballooning skyward, I’m scampering out with the target (too weak to be similarly ballooned) slung over my shoulders. Continued

Distance: A Visual Short Story For The Space Cowboy Game Jam

Natalie Hanke, Jukio Kallio and I have just released Distance, a short, semi-interactive, mostly visual piece for the Space Cowboy game jam. Natalie wrote, designed and arted it, Jukio did the sound and music, and I was the programmer. Continued

Dispensing Justice

Some of these crack me up. I’d always wondered if the last one was viable. It probably isn’t in practise, but I can die happy now that I’ve seen it done.

Dishonored

I like Dishonored quite a lot. Here’s my review.

If you’re playing it now, you might want to know what counts as a kill, what the threshold for ‘low chaos’ is, and whether dogs seeing you mean you’re not a ghost. Here’s a guide. Continued

Discovered In 2011: Boss

Boss is the evil West Wing: a political drama about a powerful figure concealing a degenerative illness, but one in which no-one is likeable or trying to do the right thing. It’s still about smart people working hard to do their job well, they’re just terrible, terrible people with horrible, horrible jobs. Continued

Disappointing Results

9 people found this site, last month, by searching for the word ‘disappointed’. I’m not sure they found what they were looking for, but in a sense, doesn’t that mean they did? Is it logically coherent to be disappointed by the results for the word ‘disappointed’? In fact, is it even logically coherent not to be?

I decided, once, that all logical paradoxes were solvable. If a barber can only cut the hair of men who cannot cut their own, can he cut his own? No. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg. Whatever the immediate evolutionary ancestor of the chicken – i.e. the parent of the first creature that would satisfactorily meet our definition of a chicken – it laid a chicken egg, even though it was not itself a chicken. The type of an egg is determined by its contents rather than its parent.

In this case I think yes, you could be disappointed by your results, and have found what you were looking for – disappointment.

Hey, I had a mind-expanding adventure in a virtual world last night – one so fascinating that I had the (missed) oppourtunity to say “Do you want to blog this or shall I?” Although the person I was talking to doesn’t have a blog per se. Details, naturally, later.

Diablo 2

The Basics
Absurdly slick isometric action-RPG with real-time combat (clicking) and a bewildering array of spells (right-clicking).

The Appeal
It’s clear that the guys designing Diablo 2 were world experts on how to make character progression exciting, satisfying and an inspiring driving force to a game rather than a miserable dragging one. It’s also clear that they left Blizzard before World Of Warcraft. In Diablo every level-up brings a paralysingly tricky decision – every new skill is carefully hand-crafted to sound wildly exciting in text and have real use in combat. And you only get one per level.

Having whittled down the nonsense trappings of the RPG – story, quests, NPCs and the like – to virtually nothing, it proved that ‘grind’ is only a problem when your levelling system sucks. You suddenly realise other games are just trying to distract you from their uninspired mechanics when they ply you with a rich plot and a fascinating world. If your game’s actually good, you don’t need any of that – no-one feels like they’re grinding because they’re actually looking forward to getting that next level, and they’ll get there, and when they get it they’ll get something they want, and when they try it out it’ll be fun. All of this is achieved with the simple combat system, brilliant sound-effects, and perfectly judged skills. Roll on Hellgate London.

The Essential Experience
Corpse Explosion chain-reaction. The central dynamic here is that blowing up a corpse usually kills people, since it’s an extraordinarily powerful spell (the blast is proportional to the creature’s hitpoints), and that means more corpses. It gets to the stage at which the first casualty triggers a staggered apocalypse of bloody showers that annihilates everything on-screen. I remember in the blurb for the Necromancer class used in the manual – which I read about six months before release on a website – it said “While many shun the Necromancer for his ghoulish appearence and strange ways, all fear his power – for it is the stuff of nightmares.” You never really believe sales blurb until you’re blowing up corpses three times a second.

My highest-level character in Diablo 2, and functionally my favourite character in any game, was Pentadact the Necromancer. I started him with Bitchard the Barbarian (flatmate) and we played through the whole game and expansion pack over the course of a weekend. By the time we were finished, Pentadact was genuinely the stuff of nightmares. Skip past the giant skull he wore over his face, he was accompanied at all times by a hulk of rotting flesh and exposed bones, and carried a long, undulating, bright orange dagger called Pentadact’s Screaming Cinquedeas Of Pestilence – a single stab from which would send huge enemies scrambling away in fear, but infected with a poison so virulent that even if they escaped the inevitable corpse explosions, Poison Novas and Bone Spears, they faced certain death. I lost him and my characters in all games beginning with letters earlier than ‘q’ in the great ChkDsk error of 2005, so if you ever read about Microsoft employees being stabbed to death with a knife matching the above description, by a man holding a mop adorned with butcher’s offcuts, remember that I was always a quiet boy who kept himself to himself.

Dexter: Series One

It’s over. Did sir care for it? Would sir grace us with his comments? Then might I direct sir to the spoilerific discussion following the original post? Very well.

 

Dexter Series Five

Ow, this was hard going. If you’ve seen all of season four, the John Lithgow series and the best yet, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, don’t read any more of this. I’m pretty sure I’ve already ruined it for both the people adjacent to me on the plane when I watched it. “Whose funeral was that?” “Uh…” Continued

Dexter Again

Yes!

Hopefully a facial expression can’t be considered a spoiler, but if you’re not keeping up with Dexter this ought to tell you enough to realise that you should be. If you are, you’ll recognise it as one of the best reaction shots in the history of man.

Dexter

Plenty of awesome things starting on US TV at the moment, and plenty of awesome things returning, so I missed that an intriguing show I read about in the paper months back had started – until Graham supplied the pilot. Played by best-thing-about Six Feet Under Michael Hall, Dexter’s a sociopathic compulsive serial killer with a day job as a forensic analyst for the Miami police, specialising in blood-splatters. And killing murderers. It’s not about him taking out the guys the police can’t prove their case against, it’s about him desperately needing to sate his bloodlust and deciding to at least restrict himself to the more deserving victims. And it is, of course, superb.

Dexter fakes normal, happy life with aplomb, making the atmosphere absurdly sunny and upbeat. His boss fancies him, his sister depends on him, and he has a doting rape-victim girlfriend he dates because neither of them are interested in sex. Forensic science is a world in which everyone has to be ghoulishly indifferent to murder just to get through the day, joking about corpses over donuts, so Dexter’s bona fide ghoulishness blends in seamlessly. Only one cop thinks Dexter’s a sick freak barely attempting to hide it, and loathes him violently and openly. Dexter is relentlessly nice in response, and inwardly slightly saddened that only one person seems to have noticed.

The joke, of course, is that Dexter has a superb insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind, and has to actively try not to catch them in his official capacity in order to keep himself in potential victims. In the pilot, he comes across an ongoing case in which all victims are found neatly dismembered and entirely drained of blood, a style Dexter admires so breathlessly that he has trouble maintaining a professional veneer when he first sees the body – “Why didn’t I think of that?”. His usual distaste for the killers he kills is completely eclipsed by his awe at this man’s style, and the two of them are starting to become fixated with one another – the killer stalking Dexter in the most chilling way, which Dexter takes as a friendly hello.

Really the remarkable thing about him is not that he’s a serial killer, it’s that he’s a well-written sociopath. Like Highsmith’s Ripley he fakes his civilised persona so well that even you are won over by it, and like Ellroy’s Terror his compulsion is so compellingly depicted that you empathise with it almost as much as Monk’s OCD. It proves that a protagonist can be sympathetic irrespective of his crimes if his personality is appealing enough, and you couldn’t ask for a more delicious twist on the traditional ace-detective archetype.

The comments hereafter may be spoilerific for anyone not up to date with the latest episode aired in the States.

Deus Fucking Ex Fucking 3

I should briefly explain what this truncated latin phrase refers to, for anyone who doesn’t know: it’s a game released in the year 2000 which, for a lot of people, holds the same status within games as the Beatles do in music, Citizen Kane does in film, Shakespeare does in literature.

It’s a bit ugly. The writing is never particularly remarkable. The guns aren’t that much fun to shoot people with. If you’re wondering how it can, then, be broadly considered the greatest game ever made, it’s possible you don’t understand games as distinct from videogames, as distinct from arcade games, as distinct from art, from cinema, from toys, from fucking Halo. This is understandable. There haven’t been many that really take this medium for a spin yet, but Deus Ex was one.

I was quite excited when the third was first hinted back in May – to be made by Eidos Montreal, with no involvement from the original’s designers Warren Spector and Harvey Smith – and in the intervening time no new information has actually surfaced. But something else has happened: Far Cry 2.

Before real evidence of that game’s content emerged, I was a fierce sceptic of publisher-made sequels to games whose original developers have long since departed. But it’s now clear to me that Ubisoft played the original game for a long weekend, then someone senior took luxuriant toke on a lengthy, substantial joint, a real carrot, and said “Whoa wait! I just thought of something! Oh wait I forgot. Let’s just make it fucking nuts. I’m so hungry.”

If Eidos can at least try that, we’ll either get a beautiful game or a beautiful mistake. I’m resigned to the fact that we’ll never get a worthy tribute to Deus Ex, not from Spector, not from Eidos and certainly not from Smith.

And the most popular story on news-feed aggregator GameTab right now? “Breasts are awesome.” I love geeks, but man, I fucking hate nerds.

Deus Ex 3 Is Amazing

At 4pm today the embargo for talking about hands-on experience with the first ten hours of Deus Ex: Human Revolution passed, so you’ve probably seen a bunch of stuff about how good it is.

It’s very good.

Here is my coverage of how good it is:

1. Exactly how good it is and why
This is what I’ve wanted from every game in the eleven years since Deus Ex.

2. Diary of a psychopath playthrough
“Pritchard,” Jensen radios in, as he stabs both fist-chisels through a woman’s ribcage. “I’ve found the hostages.”

3. Podcast: The Deus Ex special
Release the pheromones!

Deus Ex 2

The Basics
Far-future this time, and you’re a mercenary nano-augmented agent with ‘biomods’ right from the start. You’re constantly given conflicting objectives by two parties, and who you obey will have major consequences for absolutely nothing. There will also be REVELATIONS and ALLEGORY.

The Appeal
Mostly the Strength Biomod – it meant you could pick up a chair and throw it at someone so hard that they died. Actually that’s not really it, but before I get to it I should add that this is the first game in this list to have serious flaws. Whatever anyone might dislike about any of the above games, these people are wrong and ugly. But Invisible War was a bit stupid. Factions simply didn’t care if you stabbed them in the back again and again, so the only meaningful choice you actually had in the game was which cut-scene to watch at the end. The head of the Illuminati seemed irritated at worst if you stabbed the love of his life to death and blew up her corpse. And combat was only fun if you quadrupled the damage multipliers in the [Difficulty] section of the Default.ini file.

So what’s it doing so high up? To quote myself, “It’s not that there isn’t a huge ‘greatness’ chasm between Deus Ex 1 and 2, it’s just that nothing else is in that gap.” Not quite true, idiot, but there is a part of me that feels like Deus Ex 1 and 2 are the only games in the world – everyone else is just coming up with briefly amusing little toys.

2, like 1, is extraordinary because you genuinely invent your ways of tackling situations using the tools you’ve collected – rather than doing what the game designers intended, or choosing from a few set paths. And unlike 1, 2 had the visceral joy of tossing the bodies into a dumpster afterwards. The weapon mod system was vastly more meaningful, to the extent that one of my characters went through the game with four pistols – each modded to serve completely different functions. And while we’re at it, the biomods were much more useful – you could easily get by without them in the original, but here you wouldn’t want to. They all do cool things like take over bots, turn things off when you hit them, eat corpses or shoot enemies for you.

The Essential Experience
Punching someone in the face with the baton then flinging their unconscious form gracelessly into a skip. The baton was another little area in which 2 hugely improved on 1 (with its sluggish telescopic number), and once you’ve made the damage tweaks mentioned above, it knocks people out with a single sharp punch to the face. This doesn’t make the game too easy, since getting to everyone’s face before they shoot (and hence kill) you is extremely hard. But possible. This is the thrill – you can take out a whole room full of armed opponents before any one of them can fire, without making a noise other than a rapid series of dull thuds. It takes N-like mastery of your character’s movement, but you couldn’t feel more like a super-agent in anything else.

Deus Ex

The Basics
Open-ended near-future FPS RPG hybrid. You’re a nano-augmented super-agent working for an international anti-terrorist organisation, and conspiracy is afoot. You have ways of killing people, incapacitating them and sneaking past them, and you can gain access to places by hacking, lockpicking, explosives and stacking objects. The levels are huge, open, real-world environments and your route to your objective is something you have to come up with yourself rather than following the ‘path’ of the level.

The Appeal
It’s not about the parts where you make meaningful choices about whose side you’re on and who lives and dies. It’s about lateral thinking and improvisation – moving in the kind of possibility space created by the huge variety of tools at your disposal. In that environment, you win or lose on your ideas – and it’s gloriously satisfying to win, and invariably hilarious to lose. When you’re crawling across the floor with no legs, through a cloud of tear gas, surrounded by enemies and with no ammo – all because you didn’t think your idea through properly – then you’re having fun. And when you survive, kill three grown men better armed and legged than you, and destroy the whole facility – just by out-thinking them – then you are as a God, and will finally understand why this is the best game ever.

The Essential Experience
What springs to mind at the mention of its name is the standard pistol, close enough to an NSF’s head that I know the shot will kill. It’s symbolic because while there are guns, killing someone with them requires you some kind of tactical thought in terms of getting close enough to hit them in the head.

Without training your pistol skill to Master, that’s very difficult to guarantee at any kind of range. And so the game is not about aiming, it’s about thinking tactically about how to get close enough with the tools you’ve got that you won’t need to rely on your aim.

The reason this resonates with me is that I couldn’t fire a gun to save my life, and in Deus Ex I can actually play a skilless character who wins because of the intelligence in what he does – which is all mine.