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Chris Livingston Stops Considering A TF2 Comic

Our fiendish plan to get our hopes up so much that he couldn’t bear to let us down has failed. Chris, author of the enormous and excellent Half-Life 2 comic Concerned, has decided against doing one in TF2 for various annoyingly valid reasons. He doesn’t mention this one, but Jesus Christ have you ever tried posing something exactly the way you want it in Garry’s Mod? It’s like balancing a kitchen knife on an oiled marble.

I find that I am not disappointed at all. I’ve no doubt it would have been great, but a twice-weekly giggle doesn’t seem like such a big deal compared to the fantastic source of entertainment 1Blog has become. Without this procrastinating placeholder for the vapourware TF2 comic, Living In Oblivion, one of my favourite pieces of games writing in years, might have stayed a still-born non-blog.

1Fort has also provided me with news of the man who is only invisible while performing a forward roll, the real Team Fortress 2 stats system, the best screenshot ever, and an actual Team Fortress 2 comic: Red Spy.

Plus, I’ve always kind of wanted a place where “Tom Francis Ruins Team Fortress 2” is a real headline. Somewhere other than the Tom Francis Sucks newsletter, anyway.

Here’s to a long future of non-adventure, experimental side-projects and TF2 commentary.

Chris Livingston Considering A TF2 Comic

Creator of the brilliant ‘Concerned’ blogging about ‘1Fort’, a possible new project. Let’s all get our hopes up so he can’t bear to let us down by aborting it.

Charity

When Gunpoint did well, in 2013, I thought: “I should give some money to charity. But this might have to last me the rest of my life. So I should wait til I have a second game out, and see how that does.”

When Heat Signature did well in, 2017, I thought: “It’s doing great so far! But how fast will it trail off? This has to cover the budget of the next game. What if Steam’s algorithm changes and all our revenue stops? Maybe after the third game I’ll know more about-”

I see what my brain is doing. There’ll always be enough uncertainty in my life that I can delay a donation in the name of caution. But I don’t think that loop ends on iteration 3 or 4, so I’m cutting it short now. I’m giving $25,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and another $25,000 to GiveDirectly. Continued

Captain Forever

Fshhhhhhh.

Boop boop boop boop boop!

Pkow!

This is Captain Forever, a free web game where you shoot ships, and bolt bits of the debris onto your own. I was put off it before because when people were pimping it, you had to pay to get in on the beta. The other ways Captain Forever tries to persuade you not to play it is by making the game’s site confusing and devoid of information about the game, and releasing a similarly named sequel almost immediately, which isn’t free. It needn’t be so hard, just click this link to play secretly free now forever my lord.

I’ve been playing it secretly free now forever my Lord all day – my new year’s resolution was to design more space ships, so the year is shaping up well already. If you’d crashed your time machine into my Lego space police set when I was a kid and told me that in the year 2010, I’d be able to snap together my own little craft then fly them around and blow bits off other spaceships to make my spaceship bigger, I’d have been all, “What use is that information realistically of to me at this stage?” But it’s cool.

Since space is dangerous and there’s no separate screen for ship design, you don’t always have time to optimally rebuild your ship after a fight to incorporate all the cool new parts you’ve salvaged. Thus, you scoot wonkily away from the fight with a hastily cobbled space hulk like this:

And find a quiet corner of the galaxy to take yourself apart and build something a little more like this:

My logic with that design was to protect my parts: obviously it’s counter-productive to cover your guns entirely, but by giving them ‘barrels’ like that most incoming fire would hit the tough, functionless hull pieces instead of my fragile weapons and engines.

The same logic applies when attacking: you’re trying to destroy their core piece without damaging too much of the rest of them, because anything they have left when they die simply falls off for the taking. It’s glorious when a lucky shot nails their core module and a whole vast battleship made of tier-5 parts just gently disintegrates into a nebula of fatal freebies.

This one… is harder to explain. I made this after buying Captain Successor, esentially the registered version, and as you can see it adds some stuff. The quivering pink lozenges are Blurst Shields: they bounce back enemy fire. The U-shaped piece is a Chrono engine, which accelerates the operating speed of anything attached to it. The circles are all translocators, a weird direction-agnostic propulsion device that lets you strafe and reverse as fast as you move forwards, but is useless for turning sharply. And the big circle is just a bubble shield: it gets taken down easily, but regenerates, meaning small clashes do no lasting damage.

This is the fastest ship I’ve built so far, structured to allow two racks of India-class engines to max out propulsion without making me dangerously wide. When most of it got smashed to bits by a Kilo craft, I downsized to this:

Slight, but my most powerful ship – and also my most musical. It’s the only time I’ve lasted long enough to scavenge some Prismatic Juliets (white guns), the second best in the game, and I’ve backed them up with a chorus of India and Hotel lasers – the next two tiers down. This is significant a) because a laser hotel would be awesome, and b) because your fire in Captain Forever doesn’t sound the same with every shot: the tones progress through a musical sequence, so your selection of guns and their different fire rates combine to make every ship play a different tune. The three-layered rhythm of this one is awesome – if you do get Captain Successor, try it out here.

At the end of a game, you can go back through every form your ship ever took during it, and save any as a link anyone can click and play with. It’s one of the neatest content sharing systems I’ve seen in a game, better in some ways than Spore’s. Most people will only be playing with the free version of course, so here‘s the one design I did save while playing that – the gun barrels one. Slow, but safe.

If you get Successor, which is $20, my others are here, here, here, here, here and here.

Can I Just Say

Before we go any further, that there is not a first time for everything. Some things never happen. That is kind of the point. There is a first time for everything that happens, but the irritating and sophistic catchphrase is generally used to argue against the notion that a given thing may never happen. Some things don’t. There is not a first time for these. They don’t happen. Just to be clear.

Can A Death Knight Walk On Lava?

I was bribed back into World of Warcraft recently by the refer-a-friend perks. You level up three times as fast while with your friend, you can teleport each other across the world, you can give each other free level-ups, and then you both get a unicorn.

So I was storming through Ragefire Chasm with a group of PC Gamer guild-mates on the Steamwheedle Cartel server, one of whom is a Death Knight. Death Knights have a great spell that freezes water around them, making it solid enough for them to run across it rather than having to swim. This one, Cartho, wondered if it would also work on the seas of lava that surround you in Ragefire.

He stripped down to his undergarments, took a generous run-up and bellowed, in the Death Knight’s echoing villain voice: “For Quel’thalas!”

Burglary Aftermath

A while back I got burglarated, triggering lots of people to be very nice to me and my insurance company to give me – after some wrangling – a large sum of money. At first they’d tried to offer me vouchers to buy inferior replacements from a rather loathesome overpriced appliance chain. When I explained in the politest possible terms that Comet’s lines constituted a sort of unfunny parody of actual electronics, they offered me a cheque for the total sticker price of their suggested replacements. The fact that these were vastly inferior items was seemingly not a factor in Comet’s near-criminal pricing of them, so I did the maths and took the cash.

Since James commenters were actually a deciding factor in my buying some of this stuff in the first place, and since I was going to blog oozingly about a lot of these black digital delicacies before I lost them anyway, here’s what I was robbed of and what I got back:

The main things I wanted my EEE 1000 for were the battery life – six hours, more if you disable stuff – and the 40GB solid-state drive. It’s since been discontinued, and nothing worth buying has gone down the solid-state route since. The 1000 HE might have a hard drive, but it evidentally hasn’t hurt the battery life: this motherfucker lasts nine and a half hours. There are days I don’t last nine and a half hours.

I’ve been totally in love with both netbooks. It turns out the only surefire way to lure me away from my computer for any length of time is to give me another, smaller computer, on which I can write, browse, watch video and play Dice Wars, Spelunky and Deus Ex.

The new one fixes my only real irritation with the last: an akwardly placed shift key. I didn’t realise how much that was bothering me until I started seriously typing on the new one – I’m as fast and accurate on this as a full-size ergonomic.

Nominally two TVs, functionally one TV and one monitor. I was happy with my 19″ Cathode Ray Tube monitor for years after everyone else had moved on to widescreen, and might have been for years more if I hadn’t reviewed Mirror’s Edge for PC Format. Despicably, it letterboxes the viewing area on non-widescreen displays, so I had to at least try it widescreen for the sake of the review. The only one I had was my cheap (£270) yet suspiciously good 32″ LCD TV, so I hauled it to the bedroom and rigged it up. You could say I never went back, except that I did, and the dismal sight of that gloomy square portal on the digital world is what made me buy a second 32″ TV.

The impulse to buy something called a ‘monitor’ for your PC, rather than making do with a ‘TV’, is a bit of an anachronism. There used to be a difference when both were made out of magic ray guns, but these days it’s just that LCD monitors use a cheap and nasty panel technology, are eight inches smaller, and have feebler colour reproduction than the equivalently priced telly.

I would have happily bought them both back full price, since they were already stupidly cheap, but they’ve since been discontinued. The only way I could get them semi-first-hand was to go for Warranty Replacement units from Dabs. I don’t really know what that means, except £160ish instead of £270 and no remote control. Both appear to be brand new and work perfectly.

Things that look amazing on a star-bright 32″ monitor a foot from your face: Team Fortress 2, Mirror’s Edge, Unreal Tournament 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, BioShock.

These you actually can buy at Comet, but by insisting on the money rather than vouchers to do so, I got to buy them from Play.com for spectacularly less. It wasn’t easy to persuade my insurance company, Direct Line, to give me money rather than Comet funbux, and I had to do so at a time when I really didn’t feel like arguing. So by the time I did, I was determined to fleece them for every penny I could. I bear them a keen and savage ill-will I cannot muster for the guys who took my stuff. Their professions are equally amoral, but my thieves were at least swift and courteous.

It was my own stupid fault this got nicked – it was in my shed, which has a frickin’ window, and while the shed was notionally locked the bike was not.

Happily, it was nicked just before Future brought back a cycle-to-work initiative that gets you 40% off a new bike by deducting its cost from your gross pay – a nimble tax dodge. My friend Owen was also looking into getting a bike, which saved me the trouble of re-researching which is the best one to get these days. He’d learnt exactly what I did when I first bought mine: get a Specialized Hardrock Sport. It’s actually been redesigned since I got mine the first time, so my new one uses a lighter alloy and, frankly, looks cooler.

It turns out that when you’re robbed, the local council here pay not only to replace the broken lock, but replace all the locks in your house with ultra tough high-security deadbolts with five free-spinning cylinders inside that make them impossible to saw through, install new bolts inside the wood of your door so they can’t be kicked in, and upgrade the latch you shouldn’t have been using as a lock in the first place. What the hell, local council? Aren’t you supposed to be lazy, bureaucratic and heartless?

If anyone’s been totting up the numbers, they’ll have spotted I made quite a lot of money from being robbed. It’s not as much as it sounds, after paying three different ‘excesses’ to the insurance pricks for the crime of being victimised in three different ways, but certainly a net positive.

Usually the real cost is that your life is just a bit rubbish for a while as you go through the hassle of replacing all this stuff. But one person in particular was very nice to me when I lost all this, and she’s continued to be nicer to me since than I really seem to warrant. So instead, the last two months have been the best in years.

I give this burglary nine out of ten.

British Airwaves

You’re supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever, I think, but I’m not sure what you do if you have a cold and a throat so sore that you can’t swallow food without hitting something and saying “Motherfucker!” afterwards. So far I’m dosing Halls, Lockets, Oraldene, 300% of my RDA in Vitamin C and Zinc and 200% of my RDA in sleep – to no avail.

I’m blaming British Airways, this time, for sitting me next to a door. a) Why would you put an Expensive Class seat somewhere too cold for human survival even under a blanket with the heating on maximum, and b) shouldn’t the doors on a plane be, like, airtight? Might my freezing be a symptom of a rather more serious problem at umpteen thousand feet? The two things BA can’t seem to get right are sending your baggage to the same hemisphere as you and an in-flight entertainment system that actually works. If they’re also failing to maintain hull integrity, I’m not sure they even qualify as an airline anymore. ‘Airborne torture wagon’ might be closer.

Are flights in one direction faster than in the other direction because you’re so high up that the air you’re flying through isn’t quite rotating on the Earth’s axis as fast as the ground? Because that’s kind of awesome if it’s true.

Anyway, since actual remedies aren’t working and pretty much everything causes an equal amount of pain now, I’m coiling up with chorizo cheese on toast, a flagon of coffee and a Damages triple-bill. I’m slightly gay for Tate Donovan.

Briefly: The King’s Speech

I liked it a lot. It’s pretty much a comedy, albeit a heavy-hearted one. As a drama, it’d be slightly too simple: we never truly understand the exact nature of Albert’s speech impediment or its causes, since both physical and psychological remedies both help somewhat, so there’s no real narrative to that element. The plot is simply that it becomes increasingly important he be ready to take the throne, and his speech continues to be a problem until it isn’t. Continued

Brevity Week

I keep trying to make time to write properly, but lately the Jack Bauer of responsibility has been growling that I “don’t have time for this dammit!” and shooting me in the kneecaps. So I haven’t written about any of the great new TV starting in the US right now, or the Team Fortress 2 Walletfucker Update, or Death Note, or Dexter, or StarCraft 2, or the trip to Vancouver I just got back from.

So a thought occurs: Brevity Week, in which I rapidly post about these things in as few words as I can manage, possibly not bothering to find images if it’s in any way hard. How was Vancouver? Great.

Brain Storm’s New Clothes

Brain Storm is back, in a sleek new costume and with three burly ghost men bodyguards. She’s now in her mid-twenties, and openly superheroinic. You might remember shots of her in a previous post looking rather ordinary – the original concept was a heroine who just looked like a normal person – albeit with a bandana to hold her radioactive brain in. It worked well at early levels, beating up thugs and using her brain-snapping powers to do favours for the city, looking like a minor vigilante. But then she was blinding everyone in the room with a gesture, summoning spectral armies and rendering herself completely invisible. She was acting way too much like a superheroine not to look like one. At level 20 you get a second costume slot – a chance to design a completely new costume, but still be able to go back to the old one when you like. So it was time for a redesign.

This second generation of your hero is a fantastic idea – even though your costume has no bearing on your abilities, it’s a far more integral part of your character than the latest piece of armour you’re wearing for the stat bonuses in WoW. Making a new one is a chance to redefine your hero’s personality. Brain Storm started out as a woman with the unusual ability to make people imagine they’re more and more horribly mutilated until they black out from the trauma. She was generally a nice person, but if you were trying to wrestle a young woman’s handbag from her in broad daylight, you could expect to find your skin bursting open in septic lesions until you fell unconscious with the pain. Now that her abilities were more spectacular, more diverse and frequently more cruel and unusual, she needed a look that would announce her awesomeness, but also reflect her not entirely serious personality and avoid the machismo or pomp of heroes who can take or dish damage – she does neither. Thus, this:

I agonised over it for nearly an hour. I’d hit a huge problem in that the bandana, the previous costume’s only distinctive feature, came with long hair that you couldn’t change. All long hair – about half of the female hair styles – conflicts with having a cape; the two move freely through each other and it looks deeply wrong. When I’d finally got around it and finished the costume, I worried that it was too generic – black and white are not terribly adventurous colours, and essentially what I’d created was a woman in a standard superhero costume – she even had an Incredibles-style black eyemask. I needn’t have worried – the first person to see me when I came out of the costume shop immediately said “Holy shit, nice costume!” He was a giant in a blue and yellow leotard, which reminded me: no-one wears black and white in City Of Heroes. No-one wears sensibly cut trousers, a simple eyemask or a cape with subtly different patterning on each side. I stood out more as a hero with an unexuberant costume than I did as a normal-looking person.

The point of the new costume is to look imposing (for a small lady), smart (everyone I team with looks good bashng goons, but I’m the only one who could attend a post-goon-bashing soirée without having to change), tasteful (to distinguish myself from the many scantily clad heroines created by their male players for their own ‘entertainment’), and yet very subtly casual (because I’m no square). Hence the shoulder pads, the black, the full-body-coverage and the white boots that look like trainers under the trousers – respectively.

That’s the look. The changes in Brain Storm’s abilities since her vigilante beginings mean that she’s now an extraordinary crowd-controller, a mistress of chaos. Her opening moves on any given mob leave them freezing, terrified and set upon by powerful, indestructable yet entirely imaginary assailants. Actually killing them after that is a trivial matter, best left to the menial executioners of other classes. Also she is invisible and can punch people in the stomach or head.

They say City Of Heroes is shallow, but your heroes certainly aren’t. Every level mine becomes more complex, more distinctive and gains a little more backstory and personality. Now let me tell you about my World Of Warcraft character:

It’s a level 33 Warlock.

Braid Is Out On Filthy Consoles

As Mike Gapper on Xbox World puts it: get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, GET IT!

Disclaimer: I haven’t got it, but I’ve played the PC version – which is coming later this year – at various stages of development. I’ll update this post once I’ve had a moment to try the finished thing on filthy Xbox.

James regular Jason L deserves profound thanks for putting me onto this, long, long before it was cool, and I hope he and anyone else who plays it will take a sec to weigh in on the end product here.

It’s a platform game in which you can rewind time as far as you like, and each chapter layers another mechanic on top of that. The best creates a shadow-you each time you stop rewinding, and the shadow-you runs off and does what you did the first time while you try to co-operate with him. You. Scle.

It’s been getting maximum scores (it got 9/10 in Edge, but Edge only give 10s when they’re wrong, so 9 is the maximum possible correct score), and will likely continue to do so. Those places will use words like “ingenious”, “astonishing”, “staggering”, “masterpiece”, so I don’t have to. Some will mention art, triggering a thousand irritated sighs. One of them insists it is just like The Watchmen, though in what sense is still unclear after a paragraph of strenuous explanation.

My thing is, this is unlike anything we’ve played before, it’s a constant delight, and the second best puzzle game I’ve ever played. It’s $15 or £10, and if you think this is too much you are a small and boring man or maness.

Update: I should say, though, that it has a some problematic bits. The full thing, now that I’ve played it, is effectively identical to the early PC version I’d had a go with, but this time through I’m not moving on from each world until I’ve got all the puzzle-pieces. Which means I’m solving a lot of puzzles I just skipped over last time – you don’t need to get any of them to actually progress, until the very end.

There’s one puzzle in World 2 that can’t be solved when you first reach the level it’s on. And it uses a counter-intuitive mechanic that’s never used before or since without explaining it.

There’s another in World 3 where a problem at the start of the level can’t be solved until you ignore it, leave the area, and then encounter another one-off unexplained mechanic that renders it irrelevant.

These two bits are problems because there are lots of seemingly impossible puzzles in Braid with brilliantly clever solutions. So having a couple that actually are impossible with the current apparatus betrays the player’s confidence that there is a solution to the harder puzzles, that he won’t be wasting his time if he sits there and really thinks about it. Because of these two, sometimes, he is.

World 4 is the only one where the new mechanic isn’t a bonus ability, but a restriction. At times it’s very clever, and it’s probably the most unusual of them all, but just as often the solution comes down to a very fiddly matter of whether you were facing left or right at the time you did something.

The last of these levels has some real inconsistencies in the way certain objects behave when you’re rewinding – the game has two concepts of what ‘six seconds ago’ means, and it shows one of them while rewinding, then switches to the other when you stop.

I still suggest avoiding walkthroughs – these are just three puzzles among seveal hundred – but if you’re really stuck on something, it’s worth moving on and coming back to it. Even if it’s not one of these, it’s funny how thinking in a completely new way for the next level will usefully reorient your brain to go back and tackle the last.

Update: And yes, my favourite puzzle game ever is Portal. Partly because it doesn’t make mistakes like this.

I will say, though, that Braid has two advantages over Portal: each of the five worlds (and I think there may be a sixth I haven’t found yet) is profoundly unlike all the others, each as inventive in itself as Portal’s one mechanic. Portal’s length isn’t a reason for me to rank it below bigger but messier games like Deus Ex, but its scope is.

And Braid is genuinely tough. Fast and intuitive puzzling is great for telling a story, as Portal does expertly, but I wanted more head-scratching from its Advanced maps. They weren’t actually any harder than the later levels of the main game, and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be.

Update: Just finished it.

Whoa.

Bracing Oneself

Both GTA IV and what the common people call an ‘electronic gamer console’ are now waiting patiently with me in the office. I discuss with PC Zone’s Log about how to prepare for this revolution.

Pentadact: Do you have it yet?
Log: Picking it up after work
Log: I want to see to what extent, precisely, it redefines gaming
Log: I’ve pulled up the tent pegs from my existing definitions
Pentadact: Now you’re hovering anxiously over the terrain of possible human experience, looking for some soft ground to plunge them into.
Log: And my tent flaps are moisturised for a thorough stretching <- too far Pentadact: We’re going to need new dictionaries.
Log: I’m going to buy a rule book just so I can watch as the pages shrivel with obsolescence.
Pentadact: I’ve removed the rubber grommets from my paradigm, just in case it needs shifting.
Log: Idiot, you’ll scratch the floor of your preconceptions
Pentadact: Oh, those are due for demolition tonight.
Log: I forgot. You’re absolutely right
Pentadact: I just hope it doesn’t raise the bar. Mine’s already flush against the beading on my kitchen ceiling.
Log: I feel like I’m in the opening sequence to Torchwood

Blundering Into Dead King’s Bluff

Blundered into a board game design lately, and it’s coming together. Here I am talking about it on a cold, sunny, noisy (sorry) day! Will show it in action once some little rules things solidify.

Blood Money And Sex

Update 2016-03-01: Since this post still comes up occasionally, I’ve edited it to be a bit less dickish.

The women in Hitman: Blood Money are grotesquely over-sexualised, which is not unusual for a videogame, but I think the reason for it might be. Blood Money’s vision of the world is stylised to let us see it through the eyes of the hitman: a sociopathic clone completely disconnected from human nature. To make someone see the world the way your character does, make the world the way the character sees it. Continued