City 16

Prince of Persia is not a good game. It is also not a bad game. If I had to review it, and assuming I was scoring on scale that actually made sense, it would get a clear 5/10. Not because it’s average but because for every great thing in the game there is something equally as frustrating. Perfect example: There are four types of power plates to be found throughout the game which serve to propel you long distances via some magical guff. Of them, two are passive; pressing triangle activates them and you’ll automatically travel to the end destination. The other two are active and require a certain amount of user interaction. One of them, the wall-running plate, is sublime. Gravity shifts and you run continuously along the wall in a single direction making adjustments left or right to avoid obstacles in your way. The other sees you flying along a set path and forces you to dodge buildings and structures. That one is truly awful due to the fact that the continual swooping of the characters makes it impossible to predict if you should be avoiding to your right or left when they finally straighten out. Good thing balances bad thing.

A Guide to Power Plates: Red - Automatic. Blue - Automatic. Green - Great. Yellow - Fucking Harrowing.

The game is like this for everything: Stunning visuals vs. generic enemy design (the achievements even refer to them as ‘generic enemies’); moments of fluid platforming vs. the black goo along walls that insta-kills you and forces you to redo the entire section; God-awful combat vs tediously drawn out puzzling. Wait, both of those last two were annoying. It may actually be possible that the bad things actually outweigh the good. 3/10. And yet, thinking back to the time I spent playing it, I enjoyed the game. Even this isn’t a simple assessment because I hate the fact I enjoyed the game for the reason I did.

The thing I keep telling myself is that I was a victim of my own success.

I played Prince of Persia on the Playstation 3, a machine that has its now seemingly obligatory rip-off of Microsoft’s Achievement system. The twist with Sony’s version, called trophies, is that if you collect all of the achievements tied to the game you get a Platinum Trophy as a reward. Now I don’t hate the shift into achievements like some seem to but I’m also not enamoured with it. At their best they make you think about the way you play a game and encourage you to try new things. At their very best they make you carry a gnome through the entirity of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. At their worst they get lazy and just tell you to find all of a certain collectable. My experience of Trophies generally involved looking at the list and going for the ones that pretty much match up with the way I’d play the game anyway. I certainly wouldn’t actively go for a platinum as there is always something on a game’s trophy list that I either don’t have the skill or don’t have the patience to achieve.

This combat move, throwing a magical girl into your enemies, is not recommended until the third date.

For Prince of Persia that thing was completing the game having Elika save you fewer than 100 times. Elika ‘saves’ you when you mistime a platforming section or screw up a fight. She’ll fly down and reset you to the beginning of that platforming section. It’s basically the game’s replacement for death. I was ‘saved’ what seemed like a ridiculous number of times and I knew that I’d never complete the game under the limit so you can probably imagine my surprise when it turned out that I had. That in itself wasn’t a good enough reason to actively try and get that platinum trophy. What was a good enough reason, for me, was the fact that I was only borrowing a friends copy of the game and he was nowhere near achieving all the trophies. I’m competitive like that… Also petty.

So I loaded up a save from just before the final boss and started collecting the remaining trophies. Unfortunately some of these came from the worst school of achievement design: find all of the pointless collectables, in this case 1001 light seeds. I hate collectables in games. There are always far too many of them and, now they are tied to achievements, they don’t even offer unlockable rewards any more. This would clearly be the most frustrating 4-5 hours of an already pretty damn frustrating game.

Actually it was the best few hours I had with it.

A note on the light seeds. They only appear in an area once you’ve cleansed it of corruption. At the point in which all 1001 are accessible to you, every area is free of the corruption. This means no annoying black goo, no insta-death and, most importantly, no enemies whatsoever. Instead what you get is pure platforming, which, when you’re given the chance to actually focus on it, is a surprisingly robust and enjoyable system. Essentially it works like a more rigid version of the old Tony Hawk’s games. Once you’ve activated the first jump you are constantly in motion until you reach the next piece of flat land. Whether you are climbing, sliding or jumping between walls you are always moving forward and timing your next press of the face button to activate the jump, climb or power plate animation at just the right moment. The fun, again as with early Tony Hawk iterations, comes from being able to chain a huge run of jumps and acrobatics together.

The placement of the light seeds also proved to be important. The game is divided into multiple hubs, or ‘fertile grounds’, from which there are multiple paths. Each hub is relatively small and contains 45 light seeds. They are big, bright and stand out against the backdrops. There are relatively few occasions in which you find yourself wondering where the final light seed is hidden in an area. Most of the challenge comes from spotting a row of two or three and working out which route will take you to them.

By my 1000th light seed I was feeling pretty good about the game. If I hadn’t got stuck in a wall during the terrible last boss fight that I needed to re-complete to access light seed #1001, thus earning my last trophy, I’d probably look back even more fondly at it. That’s Prince of Persia’s curse: It’s more than the sum of its parts, but only because its parts are terrible. The combat is bad, the difficulty is artificial, the story isn’t interesting, the characters are jarring and collecting things is stupid.

If anything my petty little meta-quest completely sums up what I found throughout the whole game: something brilliant born out of something awful. 6/10?

Everyone has their wishlist of the ideas they would love to see in a game. In this irregular feature I’ll be exploring mine. I say irregular for three reasons:

1. I’m not arrogant enough to tell game developers what they should be doing on a regular basis. I wouldn’t have the first clue about how to make a game so continually saying that they’re doing it wrong is probably something I should not do.
2. Generally speaking, every time someone suggests an idea for a game on the internet someone else pops up and says that it’s already been done, usually as a Flash game on some obscure website… Or by Russians.
3. Thinking up ideas that are under-utilised in games is hard.

With this in mind I’ll begin the first, and possibly only, post in this series with an idea I thought of about an hour ago while outlining a potential post about Fallout 3. An hour later it’s still awesome so obviously I should share it with the world, right? I’m going to need you to bear with me on this one as it’ll take me a while to get to the point.

Game saves are an incongruous thing. They are inherently revisionist: if you die in a game, then reload to your last save point and go on to complete the section properly you have wiped out the previous timeline. There is no internal consistency for this within the parameters of the game because at the point of death you are forced into the menu. Game Over, do it properly next time. There are a variety of different ways games tend to handle this:

1. Ignore it. To be honest this method works perfectly well as it’s what we’re use to. To be perfectly clear here, this is the method I’m happy with for most games and it makes much more sense that method 2.
2. Incorporate savegames into the fiction. The Metal Gear Solid approach is, perhaps, the most ridiculous example. To save a game you have to call one of your support team and save your ‘mission data’. This would be all well and good if it wasn’t for the fact that in reality when you actually do reload a save it just reverts back to method 1. Why bother having in-game characters mention saving if you aren’t going to do anything with it?
3. Get rid of the death. This is the Prince of Persia method utilised, in the most recent of the series (more on which soon), by having a magical girl come and fly you out of danger whenever you mistime a jump. This is perfectly fine except that when it’s tied into a narrative it raises the question of why the bloody hell Elika couldn’t just fly me to where I should be in the first place.

My idea incorporates all three of the above methods through the medium of time-travel. If you give the main character a time-travel device then when he or she dies the device can revert back to the last save. It even becomes logical that the character would be anticipating certain attack patterns from enemies because they are learning from past mistakes just like the player. So far that’s methods 1 and 2 covered: An in-narrative system that fits in with the outer shell of menu-based savegames. At this point, if you’ve been paying attention, you should be thinking “Well done Phil, you’ve just invented Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’s time reversal mechanic (an example of method 3) and then made it more fiddly by necessitating the use of manual saves. What a pointless endeavour”. This is true, but only because I’ve not revealed phase 2 of my idea.

Phase 2: Where Things Get Awesome. Let’s use Fallout 3 as an example. Say I receive a mission in the game to track down and kill a specific person. Now say that I’d met that person earlier in the game. Using the time-travel savegame mechanic I could reload the previous save from when I met that person, kill them and revert back to the most recent save. The game would track how the timeline had been altered and the mission would be complete. I’ll just give you a second to let the brilliance sink in.

We could make loading screens awesome!

In reality this wouldn’t work in many current games. Fallout 3, as the example used, is so open ended and huge that you’d need to save constantly, or at least have an autosave working overtime. Even then the sheer number of people that you meet means that you’d never remember who was around in what stage of your game. Where the system would work is in opening up avenues for some interesting takes on existing genres. An example would be an RPG set in a country being invaded by an occupying force. Each location has a set amount of time before it is invaded. Certain NPCs may want a friend or relative rescuing from a location that has fallen to the enemy and, instead of risking your life by going into the occupied territory, you could reload to a point before the invasion, travel to that city, persuade the relative to flee and revert back to claim your reward.

I’d been getting a constant stream of income, mostly from the marigolds. I’d buy a bunch of newly planted ones from Crazy Dave, grow them to full height and sell them back to him at a slightly inflated price. It was working well up until I’d decided to buy some new types of seeds. Crazy Dave doesn’t sell them cheap, so to fund them I sold him back more marigolds than usual. The seeds are useful, but on reflection I shouldn’t have bought so many. My garden’s bare and I’ve not got the funds to buy enough marigold stems to get back to my old rotation. I need to buy some food for the tree as well. There are no options left, I’ll have to fight the zombies again and hope there’s some change on their corpses.

Recently, for the first time in months, my Steam rating hit 10. This meant that I had logged over 32 hours of play time on Steam in the last 2 weeks. There were two reasons for this:

1. I didn’t realise you could save Plants vs. Zombies mid-level. This meant if I was playing it and a friend popped over I tended to leave the game on pause to go and get drunk and watch 24.
2. I played a genuine fuck-tonne of Plants vs. Zombies.

It's surprising how long I've spent in the Zen Garden given my hatred for real gardening.

Popcap are arguably the kings of casual gaming. Certainly games like Bejeweled and Bookworm Adventures exemplify the simple rulesets and short bursts of gaming that the term supposedly signifies. However, they also seem to have crossed over into the ‘hardcore’ gaming market making them one of the few casual games developers that don’t incur the derision of the traditional gaming userbase. The PC version of The Orange Box came complete with Peggle Extreme, a version of Peggle using Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 backdrops. More recently Peggle was incorporated into World of Warcraft, a combination more dangerously addictive than heroin-flavoured Haribo Stripes.

While Peggle was a game that I enjoyed, it was always in short bursts while waiting for Extreme Headshot Shooter 2: Cranial Destruction, or similar, to install. Popcap had an answer for this; they had Plants vs. Zombies. PvZ tasks you with keeping zombies away from your house. As they cross your lawn, travelling down one of 6 rows, you must take into consideration which types of zombies you are facing on a particular level and plant your defence accordingly. The game adheres to the very definition of casual: The gameplay is simple and you can finish a couple of levels in a matter of minutes. Of course you can collect a couple of bits of loot in games like Diablo in a couple of minutes, that doesn’t mean that’s where you’ll stop.

Cat-tails are a force to be reckoned with. This is clearly overkill.

In fact, the Diablo comparison is surprisingly apt. It’s a simple gameplay system wrapped up in excellent presentation, a surprising amount of tactical depth beneath the surface and, most importantly, a reward system that always keeps you looking to progress that little bit further. This isn’t a casual game, it’s the most hardcore of old-school systems made easier and more accessible. These people are dangerous. At my current point in the game everything I do unlocks something new. New plants for my Zen Garden, new mini-games and puzzle levels, new survival modes and even just more chocolate for my snail. In every round played I gather slightly more money drawing me tantalisingly closer to being able to buy a new type of plant to use in the levels or a bag of food for my Tree of Wisdom, which at certain points of its growth will inform me of a cheat code, such as the one that gives all of the zombies futuristic glasses. The most surprising thing about this point of the game? It starts after you complete the main campaign.

My favourite of the two puzzle modes. This is the 'Oh Fuck' point of the round.

The truly irresistible thing about PvZ is the level of consistency throughout. From the artstyle to the rock, paper, scissors dynamic between the different types of plants and zombies, everything is made with a clear singular vision that’s probably difficult to obtain on a larger budget release. Even something as simple as the descriptions of your plants is done with a charmingly irreverent humour:

Everybody likes and respects Torchwood. They like him for his integrity, for his steadfast friendship, for his ability to greatly maximise pea damage. But Torchwood has a secret: he can’t read.

It seems that ‘casual’ games is another in a long string of terribly inaccurate descriptions within gaming. I have no idea how much time I’ve actually put into Plants vs. Zombies, but I’d wager it was more than I have done for any AAA big-budget release in a long while. Don’t call it an addiction though; I’ve simply not seen everything that this fantastic game has to offer.

With City 16′s first extended feature wrapped up I thought it would be useful to talk more generally about what I’ve learned from this project. It was created out of a rather simple desire to get some early impressions on a bunch of games that I hadn’t got round to playing yet so I could focus on the one I enjoyed the most. In practice it became something else entirely, something that focused on why I play games in the first place. First, some thoughts on the games themselves:

Day 1, King’s Bounty: The Legend – A massive, and clearly quite insane, tactical RPG. Its size still leaves me wary of this one. I’ve also heard that it has a terrible end game. This could prove problematic as I have a strange compulsion to complete the games I’ve started. I may need to prepare myself to drop this one when it starts to drag.

Day 2, Empire: Total War – I’d have struggled to pick a game less suited to revealing itself within a single hour. With that said, despite how completely out of my depth I was throughout, I was left with a desire to learn the systems and rules of the game’s strategy.

Day 3, Penumbra: Overture – A methodical and slow adventure game. Its pace is slightly at odds with the first-person viewpoint, normally reserved for games involving running around and shooting men in the face but that difference is enough to intrigue. I’ll be continuing with this, but as I’m pretty sure I’ve not really discovered the core of the gameplay yet, it is probably too early to tell just how good it will turn out to be.

Day 4, Jade Empire – This action RPG is the only game picked in this series that doesn’t have a colon in its title. It’s also the only game that I’ll not be returning to. Equal parts insipid and frustrating, I’ll be waiting for the release of Mass Effect 2 for my next Bioware fix.

Day 5, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – This stripped down RTS was probably the biggest revelation of the series. Initially the game I was most apprehensive about, it turned out to be the most immediately enjoyable and accessible.

You may have noticed that at no point have I picked a ‘winner’. In fact this series has revealed a flaw in the way I look for a single game to focus on through to completion. After all, re-reading the notes I jotted down while playing these games only makes it clear that the thing I look for, above graphical fidelity or amazingly rendered cutscenes or exquisite storytelling, is the discovery and mastering of unique mechanics. Focusing on one game above all others may lead to a greater immersion but also limits the moments at which these mechanics are revealed and, in the worst case, ends up leaving me resenting the game for the time it takes to work through.

So which game won? They all did, and they’ll all find themselves booted up for a few hours at a time over the coming weeks. Except for Jade Empire; that gets to be uninstalled.

I hope you enjoyed this feature (and, incidentally, if you did, why not consider telling a few people that we’re here?) There should be more of these hour long impressions popping up every now and again and, if I find another topic that justifies it, maybe another extended week-long feature will appear.

…And so we come to the end of my week long series of first-hour impressions of the games I should have played long ago but didn’t. From the start I’ve had a rough idea of which games I’d play and on what day. This was mostly based on two factors: pick games that had the potential to produce interesting results and try to increase variety by picking games from different genres. For some reason I had Dawn of War II, the Real Time Strategy of the series, pegged as the last game I’d write about from the offset but, as I walked home from work this afternoon, I began to have doubts. Would the game, the genre even, really have enough variety to keep an hour long arc interesting? Maybe I should pick something else. I’d played some Far Cry 2 but certainly not an hours worth. Would that be a better fit? How about Time Gentleman, Please; the new adventure game from indie studio Zombie Cow that I bought last night? Then there’s Red Alert 3, also an RTS, but one I know from the promotional campaign at least has a batshit crazy storyline to write about. In the end as I sat down in front of my PC and scrolled the list of installed games I knew I was lying to myself about the source of my concerns. It was time to face up to my fears…

What is it?

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is an RTS from Relic, developers of both the original Dawn of War and the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes. It is, as the title may suggest, set in the Warhammer universe.

Why’d you buy it?

It’s the only game of the series that I actually bought in a box from an honest to God shop. It was also the only game that wasn’t bought in a sale, although I think whichever shop I did buy it from had deigned it old enough to justify a price drop. The reason I bought it? Good reviews and a fondness for the RTS genre as a whole, I guess.

The Playtest:

0:01 – As the never-ending list of creator and sponsor splash screens play in front of me, it’s probably wise to start with a disclaimer: I know nothing at all about Warhammer. I know of it; as a child I remember a friend of mine had a large table with figures spread out all over it. He tried to explain to me what it was about but he was wasting his time: it wasn’t electronic, it featured little models that had to be painted and it most definitely wasn’t Sonic the Hedgehog… Boring! I’m vaguely aware that there is a difference between Warhammer and Warhammer 40k but even then all I really know is that one features orcs and the other features orks, which in itself probably isn’t enough to base an entire splinter game on. If you really pressed me to make an educated guess as to what the series was all about I’d go out on a limb just enough to hazard that both probably centred around war… and hammers?

1:30 – If that last paragraph proved anything it’s that I should probably watch this intro. Okay, we’ve got blokes in massive armour. I mean really massive – we’re getting into Cliffy B wet-dream territory here. Stuff is happening.

2:30 – Giant robot! Electricity! Confusion!

5:00 – I’m being asked to name my Force Commander. Unfortunately I’ve only got 10 characters to do so meaning my first choice of ‘Basil Carnage’ is out.

6:00 – Oh God, it’s throwing out planet names at me. I hope this stuff isn’t important because I’ve got no chance at remembering it. It’s possible that I’m playing as a group called the Blood Ravens but it’s hard to be sure.

7:30 – Fraps is telling me that this loading screen is running at 965 frames per second. It’s true that I bought this PC primarily to kick the ass out of static pictures.

9:30 – “You have dropped right into the combat zone. Move north.” I’ve seen war films and if there’s one thing you don’t do it’s wait until your squad has touched down on the LZ to issue commands. If this is the level of professionalism displayed throughout our army then we could be in for trouble.

11:30 – Yellow spots mean light cover; green spots mean heavy cover. *Sigh* I suppose I should have been expecting this. Okay people, sit tight and prepare for a chunk of exposition. It’s time to delve into some backstory:

I mentioned that Company of Heroes was the previous game by Dawn of War II developer Relic Entertainment. I also mentioned that it was critically acclaimed. What I left out was that Company of Heroes is the reason that this week-long feature exists. That was the game I had moved on to. I figured it would take a couple of weeks to complete before I even got to the expansions. I figured I had time to weigh up which game would get picked next for attention while I was working through it. What I hadn’t counted on was that I would absolutely hate it. I’d always assumed I liked RTS games but looking back that all came down to my love of the Command & Conquer series. From the original through to Tiberian Sun and incorporating the Red Alert series and even bloody Generals (which was the newest game that my university laptop could handle and so where my experience of PC gaming held, in static). The problem is that while Command & Conquer games may be in real-time, they can only be counted as ‘strategy’ if your idea of strategy is to build 20 more tanks than your opponent. Company of Heroes, which everyone seemed to think was the future of the modern RTS, was just too fiddly for my tastes. You had to sit and micro-manage units like the preposterously temperamental tank, dealing with the fiddly command system, while in the meantime the macro-management of your overall strategy on any given map went completely to hell. I couldn’t even get used to right-clicking in order to move units. I’d bought Dawn of War II long before this realisation and I was genuinely worried that it would confirm that I just didn’t like the genre. It seems a strange thing to be care about, but the idea of a whole segment of gaming not appealing to me is one I’ve not really had to deal with before.

11:45 – I move my units into cover and tell them to target an enemy. My Force Commander leaves cover to charge at them in a way that was all too reminiscent of my biggest problem with Company of Heroes: the divide between what I wanted a unit to do and how they interpreted that command. Leaving cover to charge at the enemy was tantamount to suicide and it made no sense to me that they would do that when what I really wanted was for those units to stay back and fire from cover. My Force Commander reached the first orc and his chainsaw rips him to shreds. Then he moves to the next orc, and the next one, and the next one. As the final green skinned unit collapses, defeated, I feel the wave of relief wash over me.

15:00 – Click: select man. Click: kill enemy. Click: pick up loot. This is Company of Heroes meets Diablo… This is what I wanted!

20:00 – Click, boom. Click, eviscerate. Click, new item. The smile that is currently playing over my face is embarrassing.

Palpable relief. Also innards.

21:00 – I’ve been ordered to collapse a mine entrance using the tropy-est of all gaming tropes: the exploding fuel barrel. I pause the game and go into the graphical settings menu. Effects density is set to ‘Ultra’. Good, this should be fun!

22:30 – Mission complete. Stat increases are marked by a percussive punctuation. This game wants to do everything in its power to appear over the top, ridiculous and stupid fun. It’s working.

31:00 – I’ve been given an Infiltrator Squad. They can turn invisible and sneak past enemies. It’s just a moments work to set up suppressing fire from the other units, sneak the Infiltrators past and surprise the enemy with a sneak flank attack. The game has revealed itself to have a surprisingly deep strategic system. It’s heavily based on micro-management, there are no resources or overall battle tactics to worry about, but it works because they’ve made the actual execution of the strategies as simple as possible.

37:00 – I have heavy units with fields of fire, beacons that need capturing and encampments to take out with explosives. All of these seem directly ported from Company of Heroes, and yet I’m having fun in a way that I never did with that game; even before I realised I actively disliked it.

45:00 – Bloody hell, I’m using hotkeys. I never use hotkeys. I could be getting into the swing of this.

52:00 – My Force Commander’s down. I’m on a small map that contains loads of orc squads with what would seem to be a boss fight right at the end. Click: Select secondary unit. Click: Heal Force Commander. With that I’m back in the game and ready to take on the next wave. I’m reaching an understanding with the game. Instead of being punished by having to restart and reply a large section I’m being warned that blindly charging into the fray isn’t always the right option.

1:00:00 – The timer signals it’s time to stop as the boss character speaks his dying last words. I ignore them; they’re not important. The important point is that I’m down to one quarter of my original troops and yet I’m not worrying about the difficulty of future confrontations. The great thing about the stat increases and the loot drops is that I know my characters will get better as the levels become more challenging.

Conclusion

I’m a little blown away. Not just by how much I enjoyed Dawn of War II, but by the way it took so many elements from Company of Heroes and perverted them in a way that led to exactly the type of real time strategy game that I wanted. It’s the first RTS I’ve played that has made me think there is more about the genre that I can appreciate than is offered by the C&C games.

It’s day four of my quest to play an hour of a game that has been sitting untouched on my hard drive each day this week. Going into this I had a vague idea of how much I’d enjoy each game being sampled, mostly based around their genre and history and, so far, I’ve not been too wrong. My suspicion has always been that Jade Empire, today’s choice, would be my personal favourite.

What is it?

An action-RPG set in an ancient China inspired locale. It was made by Bioware.

Why’d you buy it?

Re-read that last sentence: it was made by Bioware. Baldur’s Gate is my all-time favourite series of games, maybe next to Little Big Adventure; and, unlike LBA, I know that Baldur’s Gate is a good game even without the nostalgia specs on. Mass Effect was also enjoyable, if far from flawless. It was bought during the force-of-nature that is the Steam sale.

The Playtest:

0:01 – I’ve been forced to make a detour to the system config on the off chance that there isn’t one in the main game. I know that many people balk at the idea of standardised settings for PC gaming but it would be bloody useful if we could all agree on one system for configuring our stuff.

The least exciting screenshot of this entire series. Excepting Empire: Total War's naval battles, of course.

2:00 – A Bioware character creation screen. I spent hours constantly re-rolling my Baldur’s Gate character to get the perfect set up with as many creation points as possible (18/100 strength with enough spare points to plough into the rest) so I’m going to risk one of the default characters. I pick the one with the main skill of “fast” as, you know, I’ve not got time to be waiting around.

4:00 – Ah, my old friend the training arena. I’m always nice in role playing games, perhaps as a counterpoint to my day-to-day self. This time I might try to be as much of a bitch (I’m playing a female character) as possible. I accuse my opponent of having the grace of a cow and get complimented on my ‘acid wit’. This is a culture that knew no Oscar Wilde.

7:00 – I’ve just been informed that Master Li wants to see me but that I can take my time about it. This is the most casual dojo in existence. I’m not sure what good taking my time would serve though; there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to actually do yet.

10:00 – “You are my best pupil, though you came to me an orphan.” That is quality dialogue. The way he managed to integrate my character’s backstory so seamlessly into the topic at hand was truly the sign of a script writing team at the top of their game. I see it as a testament to my own abilities that I was able to detect it, though I had spaghetti for tea last night.

11:30 – Important destiny… Fate of the world… You know they could have cut this entire chunk of dialogue and just hung up a sign that said “You are in a Bioware game. Mind the fate of the world on your way out.”

15:00 – It seems everyone in this game is an arsehole. It’s seriously undermining my own attempts at being an arsehole. In fact I’ve reverted to being nice to people in an effort to stand out from all the pissy NPCs.

16:30 – Ah, I’ve met my first NPC party member, Dawn Star. She’s also the only person I’ve met who has a name that isn’t completely tied to their physical appearance. To be fair the only person I’ve really talked to through choice so far has been Smiling Mountain, but he was a jolly fat man so my point stands. As is par for the course in my playthroughs of Bioware games I’ve started laying the foundations for a lesbian tryst.

22:00 – Oh God, the weapons master doesn’t speak English but everyone else does. It’s basically the reverse of the time I watched Ichi the Killer while stoned and thought I could speak Japanese when the one character who insists on speaking English started talking.

27:00 – Dawn Star is stuck behind a tree. Her attempts at rolling through it are being performed with some gusto but ultimately it seems an act destined to fail.

That's Dawn Star on the left stuck in her own personal battle against a tree. I'm not sure whether to admonish her stupidity or admire her perseverance.

30:00 – Ugh, the combat is somewhat ropey. The main attack goes on slightly longer than you expect it to making it impossible to have any flow or finesse.

31:00 – Bugger, I’m dead. I’ve been killed by ghosts that were immune to all my attacks. That was a dick move Bioware, for shame.

33:00 – Dead again. This time I didn’t even get to the ghosts.

34:00 – Oh look, it’s my friend the “You are dead” screen. The cannons are not making this easy.

37:00 – FOR THE LOVE OF ALL FUCKING CHRIST!

40:00 – You know, I always forget the secret to winning fights in these games: turn the combat down to easy. It’s a lesson I should pay more heed to.

45:00 – Gorion! Nooooooo- Oh, wait Master Li’s not been killed. Jesus, Master Li is kicking ass. Why didn’t he do this earlier, like all those times I was getting my ass handed to me? Maybe he just likes seeing young girls being brutally killed. Pervert.

49:00 – Master Li has told me to come see him, at which point he walked off. Wouldn’t it have been easier to- you know what, never mind. I’m sure this is just some dojo master bullshit that I’m not getting. I don’t remember Mr. Miyagi ever being this bad though.

50:00 – Oh my God! The forward roll works outside of combat! I shall endeavour to use it for all motion henceforth!

The forward roll: My favourite thing about this game.

53:00 – I’ve got to go to the spirit caves for what I’m sure will turn out to be a spirit quest. Sounds enthralling. With any luck it won’t happen for about seven minutes.

57:00 – So… Much… Exposition…

1:00:00 – Oh you’ve opened the door to the spirit caves. I’d love to go, really I would, but you see the timer on my phone is going off.

Conclusion:

Wow, was I wrong. I like Bioware games and I’m interested in Chinese mythology so I figured this one would be laser-targeted to my tastes. Instead the game gave me sloppy combat, uninteresting characters and the most generic saviour of the world plot I’ve seen in a while (and I played Ghostbusters last weekend). This might seem like sour grapes after I was so spectacularly shite at the combat but dying at the hands of ghosts that I can’t hurt while I wait for my support character, who inexplicably can harm them, to actually get close enough to kill them off doesn’t strike me as my fault. It’s just plain bad design.

It was a somewhat hungover me that staggered out of bed this morning. After a botched attempt at making a cup of tea I decided that I should go easy on myself with something a bit simpler than the top-down tactical battles of the last two days. Still, I’m not sure Penumbra: Overture was the best place to go in my fragile state.

What is it?

Penumbra: Overture is the first part of a trilogy of first-person horror games with adventure game style leanings to them. Physics are the name of the game when it comes to puzzles and combat as there are no guns available to your lead character.

Why’d you buy it?

I honestly have no idea. All three games were available as a package sale on Steam. I may have been drunk.

The Playtest:

1:30 – Ah, the familiar gamma correction check. Change the settings until the picture in the box is barely visible. How else would we know that it’s a horror game? Unfortunately none of these changes seem to be possible through the software and I’m sure as hell not playing about with my monitor’s settings. This could be a little bright but perhaps that’s no bad thing.

4:30 – Introduction. Why is it that the type of person that sends a letter to you after they die is also always the type of person that will have set up a safety deposit box within a bank that was taken out in your name?

5:00 – From the sounds of the main character’s narration he is going to die. This takes the pressure off a bit. If the aim of the game is to get the main character killed then I’m your man.

5:30 – And into the main game proper. I’m on a ship. “Finally, we’re almost docked, I’d better stow my gear. I may be far from home, but chances are I can still pick things up using ‘Left-Mouse.’” Good to know that use of the left mouse button isn’t tied to your proximity from home. I’ve never understood why developers include tutorials within a character’s speech or writing. Do they think it’s immersive to have an in-game character tell you what you should press to perform an action? It isn’t. In fact it reminds me that I’m sat in front of a keyboard being talked to by a game character. That’s the opposite of immersion.

9:00 – Ooh! If you want to open a draw or a chest you have to click the mouse to grab the handle and drag it open. Okay so it’s a blatant gimmick but it’s really tactile and satisfying when coupled with what seems to be a fairly robust physics engine. I’m impressed.

11:30 – “So cold… don’t know where I am… need shelter soon. I’ve jotted down a note just in case.” In case of what? In case you forget that you’re freezing to death and need shelter? Is that really likely?

15:00 – So far the combat is a little like using the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2. Except instead of the Gravity Gun you use you hands. Also, instead of enemies I’ve only defeated some ice so far.

20:00 – I’m currently wandering through a series of caves with rooms built into them. I’m using a hammer I picked up to smash open crates in case there are goodies within. This game is turning into Oblivion with hammers.

Well obviously I'll be wanting to go to the explosives room.

21:30 – Going around in circles. Absolutely no idea what I’m meant to be doing or where I’m meant to be going. This is an adventure game after all.

25:00 – Nuts. Looks like our hero is a bit emo. “Our entire society is a network of safety nets: emergency services at the end of a phoneline, health and safety in the workplace, friends, family, lovers. All there if something goes wrong, part of a carefully designed structure to prevent all but the most mundane of emotions.” I might have found it easier to sympathise with his half-baked sociological guff if it wasn’t so obvious that he’d never walked home from Manchester at 3 in the morning.

32:00 – Looks like the gameplay is going to be heavily stealth based. No guns means that throwing barrels is the name of the game. Not that I’ve found any enemies yet, but I can at least throw the barrels into other barrels.

35:00 – Mind altering chemicals and high suicide rates… The plot thickens. I do have a question about the plot actually: What the fuck is up with the plot? So Philip K. Grumpypants gets a letter from his dead father telling him to go to a safety deposit box and destroy the contents. Inside is a book that proves to be untranslatable and a map pointing to an area of Greenland. For absolutely no good reason our boy travels to Greenland on his own to look for God only knows what. I hope the rest of this game brought some Polyfilla along, because we’ve got some serious plot holes to be sorted out.

40:00 – The key to the chest was in the same room as the chest? Guys, that’s not how an adventure game works!

45:00 – The first enemy has appeared. It seems to be a dog. A little disappointing perhaps, but I think I’ll keep out of his way all the same.

50:00 – Well I’ve picked up a Zippo so this trip may have been worthwhile after all. Also I’m not sure if that breathing sound is my character or something else.

I've always followed the school of algebra that asserts Zippo + Fuel = Dead Spider + Happy Face.

53:00 – As far as I can see the only purpose of the artifacts I keep finding is to give me trippy little sepia flashes. This probably means they’re important… Also annoying.

54:00 – Despite the character’s continuing assertion that these barrels could contain anything, so far every single one of them, without exception, has contained precisely nothing.

1:00:00 – I’ve entered the spider tunnels. Some research notes lying on the floor tell me that the spiders in this cave are delicious. That sounds like a claim worth investigating, but I’m out of time.

Conclusion:

Strangely this game reminded me a lot of the Half-Life 2 mod Dear Esther: atmospheric, sinister and also quite slow. Of course Penumbra actually has some gameplay to it as well and that’s where the whole experience could fall down. So far the exploration seems intriguing enough and, although the puzzles are a little easy, at least the mechanic of having to move the objects using some approximation of that motion is tactile and surprisingly enjoyable. I have a feeling the combat is going to be bobbins but I also don’t see this as being a particularly long game (it was originally meant to be episodic) so I’ll probably stick it out. The biggest flaw seem to be the main character, who is just unlikable and whiny, but it looks like he’ll be dead by the conclusion of this story so that’s something to look forward to.

My plan to go through the untouched depths of my gaming collection one day at a time; one hour at a time continues. Today is the turn of Creative Assembly’s Empire: Total War.

What is it?

A continuation of Creative Assembly’s Total War series, a group of strategy games that focus on real world times of historical combat and world building. Empire focuses on the 18th Century.

Why’d you buy it?

It was always on my list of games that interested me. I’d previously played the original game in the series, Shogun: Total War and now I was back in the fold of PC gaming it seemed like the right time to check back in with the series. When a half price sale on Steam came along it seemed like a no-brainer.

The Playtest:

0:01 – First Steam wants to install a couple of things. You know, Steam, I’ve already got Direct X installed but whatever, do your thing. There’s something wrong with a world in which I’m thanking the gods that I decided to choose PC games for this series because if I used the PS3 then I’d spend half of my allocated time waiting for the initial install to finish. Do consoles not even remember what their point is anymore?

3:00 – Choices. Do I pick the Road to Independence mode or start a Grand Campaign? Road to Independence would make sense based on what I’ve heard about it being basically a tutorial for the main campaigns. On the other hand the point of this wasn’t to spend my hour getting to grips with a tutorial. Grand Campaign it is. My one concession to be being sensible is selecting easy mode.

5:00 – Holy Shit! The world map is huge. It’s basically the world, which, it turns out, is huge. In Shogun I only had to deal with Japan but here I’ve got the whole of Europe, the Americas and India to deal with. I’m playing as Britain and I’ve currently got a woman running down a list of my allies, enemies and countries I should invest time with. It’s becoming pretty apparent that I’m out of my depth.

10:00 – Isaac Newton’s on my map. Apparently he’s one of my ‘gentleman’ units. Wait, does this mean I get to order Isaac Newton about? That’s another thing I can check off my list of life long ambitions.

12:00 – Jesus, a turn takes forever to end. There are loads of factions. Who the hell are the Iroquous Confederation? Or the Huron Confederacy? I’m guessing native American factions but my knowledge of this century is apparently severely lacking.

13:00 – Pirates have attacked a ship sat outside a port in the Bahamas. This highlights two things that I should have realised but didn’t: Firstly that there are pirates in this game and secondly that I’m an Empire and I own places like the Bahamas. Anyway it looks like its time for some of Total War’s new naval battles.

23:00 – Lots of clicking is happening. Battles in Total War games take place in real time. What this means, in essence, is I’m having to click on a ship, click on a direction I need it to (slowly) sail to and then click on the port or starboard cannons to charge them up and again to fire them. My poor mouse is working overtime.

26:00 – My ships are dead. That was a wasted 13 minutes.

32:00 – Its becoming quite clear that without a strategy or any real idea of what’s going on I’m going to get nowhere with this playthrough. I’m reverting to my tried and tested tactic for strategy games when I’ve run our of ideas for what to do: Constantly click on End Turn until something happens that I’m forced to react to. Hopefully it will happen quickly because, unlike say GalCiv 2, it takes over a minute for the computer to complete each turn.

37:00 – More pirates. Bugger.

45:00 – These take forever! It’s also becoming quite apparant that I’m going to lose this one as well. Instead of dragging it out I order my troops to withdraw. Immediately the stern woman from the start of the game tells me my country is losing faith in me. Annoyingly there doesn’t seem to be a ‘Shoot the Messenger’ option.

50:00 – I had a look at all the status screens available and recoiled in horror at the masses of options and things that I should be doing but aren’t. Instead I’m going to focus on my agent units and, specifically, on Isaac Newton.

51:30 – I’ve sent Isaac into France and got him to start a fight (or Duel as he calls it because he is, as I keep being reminded, a gentleman) with some Frenchman. I’m probably setting the course of scientific discovery back by a couple of hundred years by doing this but at least its personally satisfying.

51:45 – Isaac lost his duel. The stupid speccy bookworm needs to man the fuck up.

58:00 – The world’s just gone mad. Everyone seems to have declared war on everyone. Due to a series of alliances I wasn’t even  aware of I seem to have been dragged into the middle of it all. Guys, the First World War isn’t due for nearly 200 years so knock it off okay? I’ve also discovered I can order my troops to attack ships along certain trade routes. This probably isn’t the most sensible thing to do from a public relations standpoint but it makes a satisfying noise and the ship’s captain sounds so happy to be doing it.

1:00:00 – Declare war on France, thus fulfilling another lifelong ambition. My army takes their port and, surprisingly, they don’t instantly surrender but send ships after me to retaliate. Luckily I’ve discovered the secret to success in naval combat: You click on the auto-resolve button and the computer tells you you’ve won.

Conclusion:

This is definitely a game I’ll be spending a lot of time with. I kind of knew I’d be out of my depth in this one. I was well aware the map would be bigger than Shogun but had no idea just how much bigger and just how many new options and tactics had been added over the series. When I go back and start on the Road to Independence mode to actually learn the ropes I could see this becoming my new favourite strategy fix. The naval battles really are a bit tedious though.

Digital Distribution’s become a competitive market. What this means is that we now see regular weekend sales from the main distribution platforms. For most people this would be a good thing but I, it turns out, like to spend a lot of my weekend drunk and am somewhat suggestible because of it. The upshot of all this is a large list of games that are sat on my hard drive, mostly untouched. So, in an effort to figure out just what I should devote my time to next, every day this week I’ll be giving a different game exactly one hour to prove its worth. First on the podium is King’s Bounty: The Legend.

What is it?

King’s Bounty is a ‘spiritual successor’ to Heroes of Might and Magic. Developed by Russian studio Katauri Interactive it is a tactical RPG set in a medieval fantasy kingdom.

Why’d you buy it?

I blame two people for this. Firstly GamersGate for having it on sale in the first place. Secondly Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun who held it up as his favourite game of 2008.

The Playtest:

1:50 – Okay, character creation ho! My normal course of action in these things is to agonisingly pour over all the class choices before browsing forum posts and creation guides in order to come up with a build that both feels personally catered to me but at the same time not so gimped as to make the game unwinnable. Then, of course, I have to decide if his, or her, eyebrows are too wide, how high the cheekbones should be and which hairstyle looks the least ridiculous. All that, however, usually takes well over an hour and I’ve simply not got the time to waste. Luckily King’s Bounty’s character creation screen is liberatingly meagre. You get to choose one of three classes and pick a name. The classes are the Warrior, who biffs; the Mage, who sizzles; and the Paladin, who has commitment issues. I pick the Warrior, name him Cornelius Bicep and we’re away!

3:00 – Except we’re not, first there’s an intro to deal with. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t pay much attention to the intro story partly because it was delivered by a bland ‘I am a fantasy game narrator’ type and partly because it was predictably generic drivel. There’s an Empire, King Carl abdicates, King Mark takes the throne, there’s possibly some evil rising somewhere, yada, yada and so on. The only question that really stands out is what Empire worth there salt allows people called Carl and Mark to be kings?

3:30 – Main game time! I’m in a castle on horse back. This raises some questions, like who exactly is training these horses to deal with stairs? Apparently I have to perform three final initiation tests at which point my instructor will pick me a career. First test: rescue a damsel in distress from a dragon. Time to get my heroing on.

7:00 – Shit my bears are dead. Combat is a tactical turn based affair on a hex grid while the rest of the game is real time point and clickery in the style of Baldur’s Gate. Actually it’s probably closer in style to hundreds of other RPGs but as the loading screen for this game is the mirror of Baldur’s Gate II I’m allowing myself the comparison. Back to the combat and I’m starting to wonder what the point of choosing a class was considering my character doesn’t actually fight on screen but orders troops about instead. Among those troops were three bears that the dragon took an immediate dislike to. When I finally take it down I’ve lost numerous troops to its wrath, but it’s the bears I mourn the most.

9:00 – I get that you’d just use a training doll instead of a real damsel for an initiation test but that was a real dragon and the instructor mentioned two more initiate tests that day. So where are they getting all the big scalies from?

15:00 – Final one of my three tests and I’m searching for a buried pair of boots. This strikes me as a cop out after the dragon and the necromancer but at least I can’t get any more bears killed – they’re already all dead.

20:00 – TREASURE SEARCHER?! You’ve evaluated me and decided I should be a treasure searcher? Fuck, this is because I got all the bears killed isn’t it? Apparently I’ve also some divine power that lets me locate buried booty. That’s really going to inspire my army when I keep getting distracted from the battle in hand because someone has buried a few coins nearby.

21:00 – My first meeting with King Mark. It’s nice of him to make out that being the Royal Treasure Searcher is a big deal. We both know it isn’t but at least he’s making an effort. Also: I’ve been given more bears. I’ll try to look after them this time.

22:00 – Hur hur, your currency is called Plugens. What kind of lame-ass Empire are you running here exactly?

30:00 – First proper fight in the outside world and my army gets decimated. On learning this the King gives me 1,200 gold pieces. I should probably be pleased he expects so little of his Treasure Searcher.

33:30 – Over half way through and I’ve just found the equipment screen. I finally equip some of the stuff I’ve picked up over the last half hour, including a cart wheel which I’m using as a shield. I don’t know how me equipping a makeshift shield helps the rest of my army, the ones who do the actual fighting, but best not to dwell. I’ve also realise that I can buy additional troops for my army. The only unit I can command on mass however seems to be peasants. Apparently a treasure hunter with a penchant for getting bears killed just doesn’t have the leadership skills to lead soldiers with training and sense.

This dwarf loves to fly. He owns an airship. You can see that the games charaterisation is pretty damn strong.

34:00 – Have my first conversation with the King’s daughter. It was a little creepy. I think she was flirting with me. I’ve not got time to go and have a shower but God do I want one.

37:00 – Bees? It would seem the combat grids have random events in them. This one has what seems to be bees attacking whoever is closest at the end of the turn. Annoyingly this means I’ve lost a fair few peasants who are currently my most powerful unit due to the sheer number of them.

50:00 – My mission from the king was to bring to justice (which is fantasy game talk for ‘murder’) to a bunch of robbers and recover the 400 Plugens (*snigger*) that they stole. The robbers are dead thanks to my bears, who are awesome, but I’ve only recovered 300 Plugens from them. Time to wonder the map searchin’ for Plugens.

There's an inverse correlation between the awesomeness of the bears and the length of time I can keep them alive.

1:00:00 – The hour mark hits as I recover my 400th Plugen. Another enemy had spotted me, however, so I turn on the auto-combat and go about the important business of rolling a cigarette. The computer loses me two bears which is a little annoying but I can’t dwell on the past as I rush to the king to finish my first quest only slightly behind my self-made schedule. He pays me some gold that, on top of the extra gold I received for getting all my troops murdered earlier on, probably means it cost more money to retrieve the Plugens than just chalking the robbery up to experience. Oh well, as the say around the Empire: You pay Plugens; you get dead bears.

Conclusion:

The story may be clearly hokum and the setting generic fantasy tosh, but overall this was an engagingly tactical game that scores points for not taking itself in the least bit seriously (yet). By the time I’d finished I’d already amassed a fair bit of gold, upgraded my character and taken on some new sidequests. In fact the most worrying thing here is that it could be an enormously addictive time sink. By all accounts the game is going to be huge and if I want any chance of seeing the light of day in the next month then I’m probably best just focusing my energy elsewhere and giving this an hour or two every once in a while.

If you find yourself in Manchester before the September 20, and have £3 to spare, there are a number of options open to you. You could give it to the Market Street busker who seems to exclusively play Santana’s Black Magic Woman or you could look at anything supposedly on sale at HMV, carefully count your money, shake your head and walk out.

Alternatively you could visit the Urbis centre to check out their Videogame Nation exhibition, which charts British game development over the last 30 years from Elite through to GTA IV. The exhibition contains brief summaries of the featured developers and games as well as design documents and concept art but most importantly, and uniquely thanks to the subject matter, there are playable versions of every game featured. This means you get to spend 5 minutes trying to remember how to get the BBC Micro to boot up Elite only to press the wrong button once you do causing you to exit the game again. More of my highlights included being reminded of how bastard hard Jet Set Willy was, having dormant instincts kick in during a competitive match of Micro Machines thanks to days upon days of playing it with friends as a kid, taking photos of the complete display map of Fantastic Dizzy so the next time I have a retro binge and dig it out I have a fighting chance of actually completing the thing, and playing Darwinia before getting guilty about the fact that I’ve not bothered with the copy I have at home yet.

It’s not the most in depth look but there are a lot of things to get nostalgic about and it’s a great reminder of how the medium has progressed for better, and worse, over the last few decades. Plus you get to watch an episode of Gamesmaster.

As always, watching people enjoy LittleBigPlanet is a far more successful way of making me want to play it than simply owning it.

The Master System II in the corner still gives me a warm feeling of joy.

You're mine now Dizzy!