TOM FRANCIS
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Witch’s On First

Me: Huh. I just got an achievement.
Graham: Which.
Me: Pharm-Assist. Oh shit, Witch!

2008 In Games That Were Better Than Other Games

I like those gaming-moments-of-the-year lists, but they don’t always tell you what the best games were or even what they were like. So mine’s a games-of-the-year list, but with defining moments instead of descriptions. There’s often a particular experience in a game that exemplifies its appeal, usually the one that springs to mind when you fancy playing it. I’m talking about those rather than highlights or secrets – though often they coincide. This’ll be spoiler-free – indeed, it will at times say nothing meaningful at all – and in descending order: best first.
 

It’s: a huge open-world action RPG set in Washington two hundred years after a global thermonuclear apocalypse. Wilted fifties chic mixed with zombies being decapitated in slow-motion.

Defining experience: The Oasis

I’m not going to say anything about where or what Oasis is, and the screenshot above isn’t from it. Most people probably complete Fallout 3 without ever finding it – I know I did, first time through. Oasis is just the crowning example of what made Fallout 3 my favourite game this year, and the main thing it has over Oblivion.

I’d heard of it, but I wasn’t looking when I found it. I was just investigating some interesting rocks, as one likes to do on a Sunday. The wasteland is generally pretty flat, but I’d found a complex network of valleys and crags that looked like they might contain something interesting. They did.

Despite its size, and despite is apparent barreness, every interesting-looking place actually is interesting. It doesn’t have Guilds like Oblivion, so its content isn’t organised into neat little mini-careers your character can systematically complete. It’s sown evenly throughout its blasted landscape, leaving little pockets of story, character, treats, secrets and unique treasures.

It’s a brave choice. More people will miss more of Fallout 3’s most extraordinary moments than they did with Oblivion. But once you realise it, once your pessimism about this next house, cave or Vault being a generic one has been disproved often enough, it evokes an explorer’s excitement that I don’t get anywhere else.

But I wish: the skills were more fairly balanced. Small Guns and Repair are just flat out more effective than the others. Melee and Unarmed are crippled because you can’t target bodyparts, and Lockpicking gets its arse kicked by Science because most locked things have a hackable terminal to unlock them.
 

It’s: a co-operative horror shooter for four people, in which the tide of zombies and superzombies intensifies towards the end of each hour-long campaign.

Defining experience: “TANK!”
“I’ll throw a-”
“Oh God, I’m on fire!”
“So am I!”
“So am I!”
“Hunter!”
“So’s the Hunter!”
“I’ve got him. Look out for the Smo- ack!”
“I’m coming!”
“Help!”
“I’m coming!”
“Aaaargh!”
“I can’t move right now, and I’m still very much on fire, but I am coming!”
“Aaaargh! Look out for the-”
“Aaaaaaargh!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAHHH!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAAAAAAHH!”
“Heheh. Again?”

But I wish: there was a difficulty mode where the first four levels are frantic, but the finale isn’t impossible. And that Versus mode was just the latter two maps of a campaign, and the Director would give the losing side the Tank earlier or at the same time as it did the winning side.
 

It’s: a squishy building game in which you conjoin sentient goo-balls with different physical properties to reach your goal.

Defining experience: A Blustery Day

Not my favourite level – that’s Red Carpet – but Blustery Day is more typical of World of Goo. A new style of art that the level’s theme exquisitely, a booming score far too stirring for a physics game, and a smart new kind of puzzle that seems impossible until it occurs to you, obvious thereafter.

But I wish: there were fewer simple levels. Early on this makes sense, but later there are one or two where the task is simple but daunting – building a very long bridge, or a very tall tower. I never hit a difficulty spike in World of Goo – it’s eerily close to flawless – but on these few the challenge felt fussy rather than creative.
 

It’s: a creative adventure in which you play every phase of a species’ life, from the microscopic to the interstellar, designing how it evolves along the way.

Defining experience: “Holy shit, what’s that?”

Spore’s riddled with Star Trek references, but there’s a more profound one that’s not explicit: here’s the game where you seek out new life. There’s an actual galaxy to explore, and you’ll meet species that perhaps one other human has ever seen: their creator.

I know a lot of people got pretty hung up on what they expected from Spore, or what else Spore could have been – and that is an interesting discussion. But I hope it didn’t blind anyone to what Spore actually is: an extraordinary exploration of human creativity, and the home of the most astonishing creatures I’ve ever seen.

But I wish: the other stages were integrated into the Space stage: fight an eco disaster by designing an anti-virus that you then control in the Cell game, impress a warlike race by beating their champion in the Creature game, claim a planet without a colony module by beaming down and starting a Tribe, or mind-control an enemy leader from orbit and take his planet by winning a Civilization game.
 

It’s: a sci-fi action RPG with guns and science-magic in which you captain a spaceship to search for a single evil alien.

Defining experience: “I’ve had enough of your snide insinuations.”

Actually that’s not the defining experience, but anyone who’s played it and said that line knows why it springs to mind whenever you try to nail down why Mass Effect is so much better than ordinary RPGs. For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, be sure to say it if you ever get the chance.

For me the defining experience was when I’d landed on a new planet, and was asked by security to surrender my weapons. I wasn’t going to do it. Thinking like a gamer, I’d assume the designers would never kill me while I’m defenseless. But I’d become so wrapped up in the character that BioWare’s writers, my decisions, and Jennifer Hale’s exemplary voice acting had collaborated to produce that I wasn’t thinking like a gamer anymore. I was thinking go to hell. You want my weapons? Come and fucking take them, see what happens.

I won’t spoil what the outcome was, but the moral of the story is this: trust Mass Effect. It’s so well written and exciting that you’ll find yourself slipping into a role that’s very much your own – stick with it, and you’ll find the story moulds around it beautifully.

But I wish: exploring a new planet felt a bit more like exploring a new planet. The Mako fun-bus was jarringly at odds with the serious tone of the game, I’d much rather have beamed down on foot.

I’m Not Making The Plan Next Time

Thomas Paine in the comments over at 1Fort points out the Leeroy Jenkins of Left 4 Dead.

I love the sheer speed and force with which his plan fails.

HERO CLOSET

After a Tank fight, on Expert. This was pretty much the last time we saw each other alive.

Update: title changed because it turns out Craig picked exactly the same quote for the strapline in his review. This post is now named in honour of the dark room we hid in for ten minutes last night to survive the finalé of Blood Harvest.

The first version of Left 4 Dead that isn’t pointlessly and inexplicably butchered is in the wild now, and by in I mean on and by the wild I mean Steam. If you’ve had the chance to play through to a finalé and you hadn’t before, I hope you see why I thought it bizarre that they would leave that out of a demo. If they feared that giving away something substantial for free might harm sales rather than drive them, I would cough in such a way that the sound could be construed as the words ‘Counter’ and ‘Strike’ one after the other.

The downside for me as a player is that half the public games I’ve joined are trying to play on Expert, emboldened by the trivial ease of the demo on Normal. This is folly.

Tensions rise on the PC Gamer quartet when it becomes clear that most of us are either
stupid or crazy.

The finalés are really something. The reason I think they’re the point of Left 4 Dead is that they showcase its most surprising and profound accomplishment: difficulty. Sin Episodes, like many before it, focused entirely on that problem. It not only failed, it did so with such aplomb that the players’ primary complaint about the game was the wonky difficulty.

Left 4 Dead’s campaigns, on Normal, always run to the final map, and are always close. In our game at lunch, Tim was being so utterly pummeled by the time rescue arrived that he actually commanded us to leave without him.
“Graham’s gone too, leave him, just run for it!”
“I’m not gone! Save me!”
So I did. Except that his main problem turned out not be a pesky Hunter so much as thrity-six zombies and a Tank. I think I got the Tank, but by the time I did I was being mauled from so many directions that I couldn’t move to save Graham, and we both died there.

In our first game after work, Graham, Tim and I made it to the boat but Craig got pinned in the water. I jumped in and managed to get him on his feet, but he was knocked down again on the pier before he could get to the boat. I’d badly hurt myself with the first attempt, so I jumped onto the boat just as it pulled away – and just as Graham jumped off to come to Craig’s aid.

Then in our last game, on Dead Air, through canny use of distractionary pipe bombs, sustained high vantage-point fire from Graham and Craig, emplaced heavy weapons support from Tim and shotgun-powered back-covering from me, we all piled into the back of the cargo plane and made it to safety.

So you see his tongue has been wrapped around several objects, twisted almost, to the
point at which he can no longer clearly speak. I guess you could say it was quite a mouthful.

I’m actually not a huge fan of the raw ingredients of Left 4 Dead: I love the animation of the zombies, but they always feel slightly hollow and insubstantial to kill, your weapons rattly and unexciting. But difficulty is such a hugely important variable, and the game nails it so utterly, that the final result is an endless thrill.

Left 4 De-

The Left 4 Dead demo is out for pre-orderererers, and it just sort of… stops.

The four campaigns are usually four missions long each, and the demo only gives you the first two sections of one of them. It’s like releasing the first half of a song as a single to promote your forthcoming album. You can tell from the first half of this campaign that it’s going to be a good campaign, but the first half isn’t one by itself.

I am baffled and saddened by this. To me the point of Left 4 Dead is that “just made it!” moment, the way the Director expertly builds difficulty, tension and drama over the four levels to an incredible climax. Even when you die, that finalé is the highlight of the game. I can’t think why, after spending more than two years years perfecting an extraordinary new system that masters the eternal design problems of pacing and balance, you’d release a demo that does neither well.

This demo is only for people who’ve already committed to buying the game at the moment, but it’s the same one going live to the public next Tuesday, and it’s the one from which the first player impressions will be posted on forums. Playing it earlier tonight was the first time in my five sessions with Left 4 Dead that we’ve survived easily, and the first time the answer to “Do you want to play again?” has been “Not really.”

It’ll do till the full thing comes along, of course, and it’s still great fun. Just don’t assume from the demo that the full game lacks drama, variety or a satisfying climax.

Right To Live

My guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse over at the PC Gamer blog.