City 16

There’s a room in VVVVVV, an absolute shit of a room, that tasks your character with getting a shiny collectible trinket on the other side of a small box. It looks a little like this:

After the multiple hours it took to complete this task I grew to be thankful for its existence.

“Really Phil, it took you multiple hours to get to the other side of a small box?”

Yes, it did. Like I said the room is a complete fucking bastard of a twat. As you can see, we still have something of a fractious relationship. You see, in VVVVVV, there is no jump button. Instead you reverse gravity, flying up into the air until you reach the roof, at which point you can revert gravity back and start plummeting to meet the ground. As you can see from the screenshot, this room has no roof. Instead it has this:

Like I said, Bastard. Like I also said, I’m grateful for its existence. Why? Because it reminded me that I don’t just take on ridiculously difficult challenges because there’s an achievement involved. I’m also prepared to do them when there’s absolutely no discernible reward whatsoever.

Death.

That might not sound like much but it’s an important distinction. My previous attempt at a high difficulty/low margin-of-error feat of finger dexterity was completing Trine’s last level on very-hard with no-one dying, a task which nabbed a ‘Better Than Developers!‘ trophy. All well and good, and more than a little satisfying on completion, but that satisfaction is tempered by the question, “did I just go through all that for an achievement?” Despite the number I’ve managed to accumulate I guess I’ve still not decided if I’m OK with the whole achievements thing.

Death.

Veni, Vidi, Vici, which seems to have become the shorthand name for this challenge room in VVVVVV, reminded me that actually I just like these trial and error based high-difficulty challenges. It’s the reason I took to the Skate series of games and the reason I’m currently enjoying the WiiWare game Bit.Trip Runner. Perhaps it took me so long to come to this realisation because you just don’t see this style very often in games today. As the industry becomes more profitable challenge is left behind in favour of accessibility, because God help us if a publisher’s latest AAA title is beyond some perceived key demographic.

Death.

That last sentence probably sounded more vitriolic than intended. More accessible games are a brilliant thing because, for the most part, developers are terrible at difficulty. I’ve been playing Darksiders recently and came close to giving up on it for good after encountering the first proper boss fight. In the tradition of boss fights in games (which incidentally are all terrible and need to just fuck off for good) the key to success was in realising which of my character’s array of offensive and defensive manoeuvres could be combined against the boss’ varying attack patterns. In a way boss design harks back to the worst adventure puzzles and defeating one is reminiscent of figuring out that honey on the cat hair makes a moustache, except if you don’t realise it in 20 seconds a giant demon bat will scorch your bollocks off with fireballs.

Death.

Of course that’s just sudden and inexplicable difficulty spikes. When hidden systems in the game can mean the difference between success and failure the frustration levels go through the roof. Take Split/Second, a game which increases the difficulty of rival racers the better you do. The upshot is there’s no way at actually being good at the game, because early success just sets you up for failure towards the end. The general rule of thumb with Split/Second is that, if you’re doing well, the game will be decided at the last corner at which point an opponent will always – always – overtake you. Unless you’re able to destroy the car at that point you will lose and a poor defenseless controller may lose its life against a wall.

Death.

What Veni, Vidi, Vici, and VVVVVV as a whole – what all games that can successfully capture that addictive one-more-go feel of defeating a seemingly insurmountable obstacle – understand is that to be enjoyable the difficulty should be transparent. It gives you six screens that you have to learn forwards and back – or more accurately upwards and down – and then link together in one glorious and flawless run. That is the sole source of difficulty. There is nothing added that would suggest to the player that failure is anything other than their own fault. It even removes the annoyances of the era of gaming that it evokes; there aren’t limited lives and the checkpointing is generous. With no penalty for death all that remains is the challenge at hand.

Death.

And what a challenge. It’s both a beauty and a bastard. You have to learn each room sequentially, learning just how much to manoeuvre left and right, where the key apex points are to swing to safety and, at times, take seemingly counter intuitive actions to line up for the next screen. After a while your brain understands the route and all that’s left is for muscle memory to kick in and let the fingers learn it. At this point it’s best to let your mind wander while the rest of you gets on with it. While navigating an especially tricky section I drafted this sentence, including this clause here where I mention how I’m mentioning this clause. On reflection it wasn’t a great sentence, but it got me through the top flip down to 5th screen so I’m leaving it in out of respect to my past self.

Each section becomes exponentially harder, as it requires navigation of every preceding screen before you can even practice what’s ahead, but the slightest hint of progression is a joyous occasion that drives you to get even further. In fact, the most soul-destroying moments are when you suddenly lose control of all co-ordination and can’t get past the second screen… dark times. After a couple of hours I was back at the bottom, at which point I killed myself on the right-hand side spikes in a foolish effort to not land on the wrong side. It should have been demoralising, but I was just so happy to be within reach.

Success! Shortly followed by death.

Just be aware that if you try it before you go to sleep you will have that music stuck in your head all night.

Clearly the free game route is the way to go for now, but after the month long Neptune’s Pride betrayal-a-thon it’s probably a good idea for the next community event to be a little (a lot) shorter. We’re in luck.

Alien Swarm is the newly released 4 player top-down shooter from Valve. It’s also completely free, just go to the Steam page to install it. Games are scheduled for tomorrow evening, just find me in game. If you stick something in this posts comments thread then I’ll invite you in when the game’s set up to make the process a little easier.

If you’re wondering how the game plays, imagine a co-op version of Shadowgrounds or one of around 600 million freeware games and you’d be in the right ballpark. Here’s a trailer to give you a taste. Short version: their are aliens, they come in swarms.

If you want to join our Steam community (now up to a dizzying 6 members!) here’s the page.

UPDATE: As an added incentive, if you complete two campaigns in Alien Swarm, you get a hat for Team Fortress 2. Any excuse to add new hats…

It’s all over. We emerge blinking and dazed from the harsh light of the world after 11 (!) days of cheap games. As people all over the world find excuses to not check their bank balance, I ask this simple question: How was it for you?

I have a slightly unnerving 34 extra games in my Steam list, although most of these came through the single purchase of the complete THQ collection.  How much did you buy? Anything you’ve been pleasantly surprised with? Or were there games that, in the cold light of day, you probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have bothered with?

Personally I used it as an excuse to pick up a bunch of games I’d been hesitant to buy in the past: Metro 2033, The Void, Overlord II, Stalker: Clear Sky and Lead and Gold, among others. I also grabbed a few titles that I’d not been a big fan of in the past, like Saints Row II and Kane and Lynch, with the aim of giving them another chance. Then, of course, as is always the way with buying a collection of publisher specific games, there are the games I really have no intention of ever playing. In this case I’m talking about Company of Heroes, which will forever sit inside my games list, silently mocking me. The bastard.

Still, overall a good haul, even if it does mean that, at some point, I will end up playing a game called World of Zoo. How did you fare?

Red Dead Redemption feels like the complete opposite. The world is huge (and feels even bigger because your main method of transportation has exactly 1 horse power) but largely barren. It means the interactions you do come across – and there are plenty of them, from travellers in need of help through to wannabe gunslingers looking to make a name for themselves by duelling the best in the west – feel more meaningful. They’re no less scripted, but the sense of community born out of a place where the environment is deadlier than the inhabitants lends these small world events a degree of authenticity. Even now, after logging about 70 hours with the game, I feel a small pang of guilt when I ignore a man whose wife has been kidnapped to hunt bears.

His survival chance decreased dramatically after I actually learned how to duel.

As I drew closer to my objective I let my guard slip and, without warning, the growl of a cougar and a flashing red screen let me know I’d been careless. Luckily it didn’t land the second, fatal, attack. After I’d killed it I had to pause the game, catch my breath and make a cup of tea. Cougars, man. Fucking cougars.

Seriously: fucking cougars

Elsewhere the story is somewhat of a mixed bag. Each character you can do missions for hangs around a little too long. After your 4th or 5th long horse ride with the same person retelling you their philosophy of the west you start to wish the character didn’t refuse to fire at friendly NPCs. Even Marston himself runs out of interesting ways to tell people he’s trying to save his family far before he stops telling people he’s trying to save his family.

"Hey, John. Have I told you about how I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon trying to bring a little law and order to my town? No, you're probably right, now isn't the time."

More successful than the story missions are the strangers you encounter throughout your travels. These are essentially narrative-vignettes about people trying to make their way in the region; writers looking to capture the romanticism of the era, producers looking to forge a new age of cinema and even just concerned spouses looking for their loved ones. The first ones you come across will all too often result in the stranger turning out to be mental, to the point where you start trying to second guess each person’s particular deviancy, but as the game goes on you’ll find some genuinely interesting characters that you’ll encounter in multiple places throughout the game. Particularly worthy of mention is the ‘I Know You’ strand, featuring an unknown man with a penchant for testing your moral fibre. It’s one of the most intriguing mysteries of the game and its resolution ties-in brilliantly with the final cutscene.

So, a couple of story niggles aside, pretty much perfect then? Not quite. Red Dead Redemption is unusual in recent Rockstar games in that many of the core systems at work are non-diegetic. Take the fast-travel; you just need to set up a camp and with a couple of clicks you can travel instantly to any location you’ve previously visited. Bizarrely the game also includes an in-world fast travel system with coaches that can be hired. Pay for a coach or move a few feet away and travel for free? Unless you’re deliberately trying to preserve the atmosphere it’s not much of a decision.

Marston contemplates the mystery of the fast-travel fire.

Death is handled in a similarly blunt manner with the game displaying a hilariously over-sized DEAD screen and reloading the last auto-save. There are plenty of doctors dwelling in major settlements so why not just have your character wake up there à la GTA? Also, and this is getting really picky, there’s really no excuse for your character to die the moment he steps in a body of water. How much this stuff bothers you is probably dependent on how much you buy into the atmosphere woven by the setting, visuals and audio. In case it’s not clear yet I bought into it a lot, much to the consternation of my flatmate who kept reminding me that I could fast-travel instead of taking 15 minutes to ride my horse into Mexico. I hadn’t forgotten Chris, I was just ignoring it.

TL;DR version: Red Dead Redemption, it’s better than GTA.

That’s right, I’ve been doing this shit for a year now! Hurrah! Actually it’s been 1 year and 18 days, but I always forget birthdays. So while I warm up the Celebratron-3000 for some super-fun-party-times, here’s a rundown of the highlights of the past year… and by highlights I mean “things I can still read without wanting to punch myself in the face.” Self-congratulation, go!

• The second ever post on the site, probably what tipped me over the edge into setting up a dedicated games blog in the first place, was about Braid’s hidden message on obsession.
• Shortly after that I ran out of topics for intelligent analysis, so instead wrote some shit about the first hour of a bunch of games. Here’s Jade Empire, which I hated, and Dawn of War 2, which I quite liked.
• A picture diary of my favourite Fallout 3 sidequest.
• A couple of weeks with Battlefield: Heroes got me thinking about snipers in online games. Conclusion: They’re bastards, but probably necessary bastards.
• Generally I manage to avoid flying into a rant about something I’ve seen on the Internet. Generally, but not always.
• Probably the weirdest game I’ve chosen to do an hour with post about. Pathologic.
• Some thoughts on character creation led to some interesting discussion in the comments thread. God bless you people, you do make the time spent writing this stuff seem worthwhile.
• The Bad Company 2 beta led to some of the tensest moments I’d felt in an online shooter for a long time. Here’s me attempting to capture that feeling.
• Highlight of the last year: Reckless Disregard for Gravity’s developers showing up in this post to say thanks!
• I’m not normally bothered about things like DRM. Ubisoft’s turned out to be an exception.
• Finally, my recent attempt at spending an hour with Red Faction Guerrilla turned out to be a worst-of of things that can wrong with PC gaming. It all turned out good in the end though.

So, it just remains for me to say thanks for reading the site. Here’s to another year!

Previously on An Hour With: ‘“Red Faction Guerrilla recommends you install Raptr.” Red Faction Guerrilla can fuck off. Jesus Christ, it’s actually launched a Raptr installation executable. Red Faction Guerrilla can fuck right off. Still the patch is done. This had better be one hell of a hammer… Runtime error!’

Yes, my last attempt at running this feature had me trying different executables, installing phantom patches and, finally, shutting down my virus scanner before I could even get the game to run, at which point I had absolutely no desire to actually play the game. Two and a half months later, I’m back to try again.

Why Bother?

Good question! A mixture of that experience and Just Cause 2 had pretty much killed off any interest I had in the game. Luckily for RFG, my Playstation died a couple of months back taking JC2 with it. Sony have been apparently unable to rescue the game from its cold, dead hands. I’ve now re-bought it on PC after finding a cheap-o copy on the Internet. It’s downloading now so it’s seriously RFG’s last chance to impress. Why bother at all? Well, when one of PC Gamer’s writers turns up in the comments thread and tells you that, despite all the shit, it’s worth it, you should probably pay attention.

The Preamble

Anti-virus off. Game launching. GfW Live kicking into life. Update needs downloading. Shit. Luckily, this time it’s all sorted in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Probably about 10% of my PC gaming experience revolves around making tea. With that sorted the game decides to work properly.

The Playtest

0:00 – Cutscene! The game seems to be bucking the trend of 98% of games set in space in that your character isn’t a space marine. For a moment I’m fooled into thinking the game will be relatively well written. Why? As your character returns to Mars and meets up with his brother he doesn’t say anything along the lines of “Hi brother,” one of my least favourite pieces of awkward character exposition. Instead the brother asks “How’s mum?” which is marginally less clunky. I soon realise how generous I was being, as the rest of the cutscene is awkward story exposition. The EDF have taken over and seem to be oppressing everyone. I’ve played/watched enough science fiction to make a safe guess that EDF stands for Earth Defence Force (Yup, I’ve just checked the manual which confirms it.)

3:00 – Tutorial time. My character announces that he’s here to mine, not gather scrap metal. I’m not here to do either, I’m here to use this large hammer that I’ve just been given. Luckily there’s a big wall between me and where I need to be.

3:15 – Oh dear God. You know, I was completely ready to intensely dislike this game, or at least not forgive it for all the shit I went through last time. That all changed when I first hit that wall. It’s brilliant! The destruction physics are properly amazing. Before long the wall is completely demolished and I’m giggling to myself like a 15 year old that’s spent a little too long sniffing gas out of a deodorant can.

5:30 – The game’s asking me to switch to remote charges to demolish two towers. Unfortunately, at my screen’s current resolution, I can’t actually make out which key it wants me to press to bring up the weapon select menu. My assumption is the number keys and the mouse wheel, but instead of confirming if I was correct (I was,) I take it as a sign that I should keep using the hammer.

14:00 – Yeah, the hammer works pretty well. In my exuberance the second tower falls on top of me while I’m destroying it from the inside. Luckily the developers had clearly anticipated people were going to be this stupid and the character just clips through the rubble, harmed but alive.

15:00 – Shit, the space cops are here!  Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I was brought here to salvage or mine or something. If the game ever explained why I was knocking the shit out of some towers then I missed it. Anyway, the cops kill the protagonist’s brother (Spoiler!) If I feel any sorrow over this act, it’s only because it’s likely to lead to a lengthy cutscene.

17:30 – Can I hammer something yet?

18:30 – Some posh British woman is further tutorialising me. Apparently I’m working for the resistance now. Extensive research shows me that I can’t smash her in the face with my hammer.

19:00 – In case you’re wondering, the thing that’s covering half the screen in the above screenshot is my character’s coat which, at various points in the game, decided nobody was going to keep it anchored to conventional laws of geometry and started to explore the screen.

28:30 – I’ve spent the last 10 minutes hammering everything in sight in our home base. People, buildings and cars all felt the wrath of my +2 Hammer of Childish Shit. Shortly after the video below was taken somebody got fed up with my destruction and started shooting me. Surprisingly it wasn’t the resistance realising they’d made a huge mistake, but instead the EDF. They feel the full force of Hammer Justice. One of them shouts “We can’t win,” which turns out to be a pretty accurate assessment as the protagonist appears to be a bullet sponge.

30:00 – I’m starting to feel a little embarrassed about my behavior, as well as the fact that population morale is at zero thanks to my actions, so I decide to go and do a mission.

33:00 – Woo! My mission is to go to a place and blow up (hammer) a load of stuff! I happily accept the task and begin driving to the objective.

35:00 – Car controls are typically sandbox in being a little twitchy but also very forgiving of crashing into things, although in Red Faction you don’t so much crash into as crash through. Another feature of the game’s destruction engine is that it fixes a problem that plagues so many action games. It’s impossible to get stuck between two bits of scenery when you can smash one into pieces.

36:00 – I get my first taste of mortality. You’d think years of watching King of the Hill would have taught me basic propane tank safety, but no. As my hammer connects with the tank the game decides it’s had just about enough of my consequence free trail of stupidity and promptly kills me.

37:00 – Okay, let’s try again. This time I might actually use those remote detonators.

43:00 – After a few barely-controlled explosions the space cops are back to stop me. Shooting ensues. It’s all pretty simple stuff and your character is remarkably resilient, even on normal mode. This is actually a good thing, as I made the mistake of playing Just Cause 2 on normal difficulty and, after a while, dealing with the army became a chore. When dicking about is a game’s primary means of fun easy is good.

44:00 – With the mission complete I drive back to base, accidentally parking my vehicle in a wall, and go back to being unhelpful.

45:00 – Colonist: “I wish my parents understood what I was fighting for.” It’s amazing just how po-faced and serious the story is. It’s completely at odds with how any person would ever play the game.

47:00 – As I destroy a skip (which NPCs keep throwing rocks into despite it no longer having sides) the game realises my primary focus up to now and pops up with a text box telling me that if I destroy buildings marked as red on the map, I’ll be lowering EDF control in the area or something. Hidden subtext: if you’re going to be a nuisance, at least be a useful nuisance. This leads to my second death of the game, as the first enemy structure I destroy turns out to be full of fuel.

52:00 – With no immediate objective in sight I check the map and notice a hammer icon. This deserves investigating.

54:00 – Shit! It turns out to be a challenge that requires me to use my pistol and explosive barrels to demolish a building. I can’t even select my hammer! Lying bastards!

57:00 – Oh, I was meant to move the explosive barrels into position before blindly shooting at them. My bad. Restart.

1:00:00 – I fail the mission again, despite having completely destroyed every wall. Seriously, look at the picture above, what the fuck’s holding it up? The ladder? How does that work? As soon as I exit the mission the tower falls over. Then my coat spazzes out again.

Conclusion

The story’s predictably shit and bizarrely serious and the game’s plagued by weird bugs (not just the coat thing, I had plenty of display issues as well.) Still, it seems to be great fun and, despite Just Cause 2 having just finished downloading, will probably see itself getting played a lot more often. Even at this stage, if you can find it going cheap, I can confidently say it’s worth picking up.

Because if I frame it as a competition it’ll hide the fact that I fail at sound financial management!

A story: Once upon a time Runic Games released an action RPG called Torchlight. I bought this game through their website, feeling good about supporting the poor indie developers. I then noticed the kingdom of Steam had a version which included the magical Steam Cloud feature, perfect for a small game that can be played on notebooks and my parents’ PC. “Fuck,” thought I. One day the people at Steam had a sale and started selling Torchlight at a low, low price. I bought the game again.

Skip forward a few months and while exploring the wilderness of the Internet, ever watchful for trolls, I saw a message planted for all passers by. It read, “Torchlight keys now work with Steam.” “Fuck,” thought I. The End.

Yes, it turns out I’m an idiot. Luckily though, this idiocy can directly benefit you because I have a spare copy of Torchlight that can be activated through Steam. If you would like it just comment with something along the lines of, “Yes, I would like to gain rewards from your complete lack of patience and financial restraint you silly bastard.” Closing date is midnight on the 8th June, I’ll randomly pick a winner from any comments left.

If you want to know more about Torchlight then Rock, Paper, Shotgun has you covered.

There’s a problem at the heart of the current generation of Rockstar open world games that is perhaps best summarised in a post on the Gausswerks: Design Reboot blog,

The actions of the player character in GTA4 can best be described as the actions of two separate characters, one who reflects the player’s decisions during normal gameplay (run over a sidewalk full of people, kill a bunch of cops), and one that is unilaterally imposed through scripted sequences. (Look at Niko as he shows that he loves Kate. Look at Niko as he feels bad about crime.) The game privileges the “choices” of the second over the first, even when they’re in direct contradiction.

Essentially the Niko of the game’s narrative – an ex-soldier still haunted by his actions in the war and unhappy that he has to continue to kill and steal for America’s criminal underbelly in order to carve out a peaceful existence for himself and his cousin – doesn’t correspond to the willfully destructive Niko of my time between cutscenes.

Aww, he's a sweety.

It’s unfair to suggest Rockstar are solely responsible for this as a factor in any cutscene-driven narrative game is that, once that cutscene ends, the game has to give control of their protagonist back to the player – an agent of chaos. My Gordon Freeman smacked friendly NPCs in the face with a crowbar in Half-Life 2 just to see their reaction and my Solid Snake (and there’s a phrase you can rarely use innocently in a sentence) tortured guards in Metal Gear Solid 2 because he enjoyed their hobbling animation. Neither of them reconcile with what we’re told about the characters through their respective narratives.

Perhaps, then, the reason the Rockstar examples are so conspicuous is because of how extremely it pushes in both directions. Their recent games have tried to push the depth of the story on offer, rising above parodying movie genres to become their own critique of American culture. Where Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti was an even twattier version of Scarface; GTA4′s Niko Bellic is written to elicit sympathy and understanding from the player in order to tell their (admittedly over-the-top) tale of an immigrant resorting to a life of crime. Conversely this is a Grand Theft Auto game and, while the ridiculously cartoonish nature of the violence has been dialled down a notch, it still enables a cacophony of violence and mayhem. Between cutscenes my player-controlled Niko will plough his car through legions of pedestrians, murder hot-dog vendors that refused to serve him because he’d jostled them and nudged passers-by into the sea because they’re pathetic little ragdoll animations made it funny. He also shows an alarming disregard for his own safety. In fact he acts almost as if he were a videogame character in a digitised playground of guns, cars and explosives.

Don't worry, I'm sure he was really conflicted before he set this petrol station on fire.

Here’s the thing. This protagonist gap never bothered me in GTA4. It was clear where the Niko of story-led narrative ended and the Niko of player-led super fun times began. The tonal shift may have been extremely blatant, but it’s exactly that blatancy that makes it so easy for the player to mentally shift between the two positions. When faced with a late game decision I chose to spare the life of the man Niko had been searching for because it felt like what the story-Niko would have done. The player-Niko would have probably thrown a grenade in between the two of them and then jumped at the point of explosion just to see how far across the road he’d fly.

In Red Dead Redemption, however, a similar disconnect does bother me. It bothers me a lot.

It wouldn’t if I was playing Red Dead Redemption in the same way played GTA. If I happily went about killing, stealing and lassoing characters, suffering the trivial consequences of my anti-social actions, the game would have unfolded with the same disconnect described above. The character: a former outlaw, troubled by his past and with his own personal morality code, blackmailed into bringing his former brothers-in-arms to justice. The player: attempting to create fun through an ever-changing series of events pushing the limit of what the game will allow like a child with ADHD. Bizarre? Sure. A big deal? Not really.

Okay, so I did do this a lot. But otherwise I've been good.

My problem is that I’m not playing the game like that. I’m actually playing the character like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Ostensibly someone who is out for himself yet has a tendency to get embroiled in other people’s problems and usually resolves them in a way that satisfies his own code of honour. For a long while my role-play matched perfectly with the intentions and attitude of the character I was controlling. It was the first time in a Rockstar open-world game since Bully that I felt my actions actually matched with the character shown in the cutscenes.

Then I arrived in Mexico. As part of John Marston, the player character’s, search for his former comrades he starts to work for both the army and the peasant uprising that opposes them. For me it mirrored the set up to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood rides into a town ruled by two warring factions, the Rojos, a local gang, and the Baxters, the Sheriff’s family. Eastwood’s stated plan is “The Rojos on one side of the town, the Baxters on the other, and me right in the middle.” However, it doesn’t take long before he’s clearly siding against the Rojos because of a young mother they kidnapped over a gambling debt they claimed her husband owed them. In Redemption, Marston stays in the middle of the two warring factions of the region throughout the majority of that section of the game.

This is despite the fact that the army is shown to be seemingly taking entire villages of women for the soldiers’ pleasure. Sure, this being a Rockstar game, the rebel leader is shown to be a vain, womanizing, delusional figure but, and this is the key difference, he’s not a fucking rapist. The set up is so ridiculous that in one mission for the army I’m using a gatling gun to cut down hundreds of rebels assaulting a train full of army supplies and then, a couple of missions later, I’m murdering soldiers guarding a train full of army supplies. During one mission, in which I was asked to torch the houses of rebels I thought “no, I don’t want to do this.” It was the opposite of the GTA problem, completely at odds with my envisioned character and, as far as I could tell, the depiction of John Marston throughout the rest of the game. Unfortunately it’s a linear story path. Unless I completed the mission I couldn’t continue the story. I kept waiting for the moment I got to choose to betray one side or another but it never came, the story plays out the same way, without any choice, no matter how you choose to play it.

The Rebel Leader: Twat, not rapist.

Redemption features a rudimentary morality system entitled Honour (or, I suppose, Honor.) The Mexican campaign betrays people on either end of the scale. Those playing the thieving, murderous bastards (the GTA4 method) can’t choose to ultimately side with the army in reward for riches. Those that have chosen to help people and stay on the right side of the law have to do an uncomfortable amount of missions doing dirty work for the army at the expense of the impoverished peasants. The only genuine surprise from these missions is that one side chooses not to turn on you.

I probably helped this soldier two missions ago. Now I will shoot him in the face.

The explanation given for the set-up is that Marston’s family is at risk unless he brings the outlaws he used to run with to justice. Except the game never earns the right to have Marston go to such extremes. The player never sees Marston with his family at the beginning of the game (I’ve not completed the story yet so don’t know if he does later on) so it’s unreasonable to expect the player to care about them throughout when the only connection we have to them is Marston’s exposition to other characters. I’m not saying I need the protagonist to be a Freeman-like blank slate for player insertion, I’m fine with my characters having their own distinct view of events, but using backstory to motivate the character to do things at odds with his own code of honour, as well as the code of honour implemented through the game’s own systems, cheapens the experience for the player.

I’m interested in hearing your take on this, assuming you have one. Many within the games industry seem to now favour the approach of emergent narrative of games such as Just Cause 2 and Far Cry 2 over more traditional stories told through cutscenes. I’m all for this, especially in respect to the ridiculous nature of Just Cause 2, but I don’t think it should completely negate traditional narrative methods especially as Red Dead Redemption is, all things considered, a brilliant game. After all, I wouldn’t have had such a negative reaction to that set of missions if it weren’t.

A couple of months ago I recklessly started a Steam Community for the site. It’s probably about time I tried to set up a few games.

Problem: Of the current members there don’t seem to be many games in common that wouldn’t require many more people than we have.

Solution: Pick a free browser based game that everyone can access.

So I’m planning to set up a game of Neptune’s Pride, a free browser based multiplayer strategy game. The benefit of this particular game, besides the cost, is that it seems to have had most of the complexity of 4X strategy games stripped away in favour of diplomacy (and backstabbing) between players. And if you’re thinking “I don’t really play many strategy games so I’ll probably just be shit,” yeah, me too.

As for time investment: It’s a long form game taking place over weeks/months but because events occur so slowly you’re probably only going to need to drop in once a day for a few minutes to queue up moves and research. Although I am guessing here based on what I’ve read of it.

For a basic overview you can see the site’s introduction page here. For a more detailed look at what you’d be getting yourself involved in by signing up Rock, Paper, Shotgun did a game diary of a playthrough between them and PC Gamer here.

If you’re interested just put your name down in the comments thread of this post. Assuming enough people sign-up we’ll probably get started in a week or so.

1. It’s an adventure game.
2. It’s about a Jewish community in New York.
3. The style is classic film Noir except, instead of playing a cynical Private Eye, your character is a disenchanted Rabbi.
4. Most conversations give the option of a ‘Rabbinical Response,’ which basically turns your next statement into a question.
5. Disenchanted Rabbi would be a great band name.