City 16

Ways the world didn’t end in 2009: Black hole, asteroid, Rapture, nuclear attack, biological attack, Shaq attack, Sarah Palin, Gerard Butler.

2008 had Braid and World of Goo. 2009, however, didn’t seem to have the big indie hits championed by all. Maybe this means that indie gaming has finally been accepted by the mainstream gaming sites; that we’ve moved beyond needing to pick one sublime sample of the form and instead sites can say, ‘you know these are good, that they’re just as valid as that £40 Activision game being advertised on telly. What about this one, is it any good?’

Of course, as far as I can tell, some sites are regressing back to the attitude of, ‘sure those indie games are still out there, but covering them won’t give us as much page views as covering Hobo Carnage 3, so they’re on their own.’

I don’t know, it’s early and I’ve not had any coffee yet… It probably doesn’t matter. Does anyone even read IGN or Gamespot these days? Probably the type of person who visits N4G.com. Seriously, I can’t even visit that site without wanting to kill myself. I wonder what drives these people to spend more time arguing about how shit/amazing Final Fantasy XIII is going to be than actually finding some new and interesting little game hidden somewhere on the web… Or just going outside for a bit to calm down.

Wait, what? This whole introduction’s been terribly tangential and pointless. Frankly, I’m just looking for some words that’ll lead into this sentence,

The 5th best game of 2009 is:

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity

Of course, now I remember the point I wanted to make. Even with indie games seemingly getting more attention than ever AaaaaA! seemed to get the shitty end of the stick. Some initial pre-release press soon disappeared as everyone forgot about it. I can only actually think of one website that really recognised how good it was post-release.

That’s a shame because AaaaaA! is one of the most exciting releases for a long time. For once I don’t mean exciting in the sense of important or in any way meaningful to the industry as a whole. What I mean is a tense, heart-racing, thrill of an arcade game that bombards you with visual information and asks you to translate its cues to navigate a path through each level, all while hurtling downwards at a ridiculous speed. It’s rare that a game is quite so aptly named.

The number of things you need to process as you BASE jump through the world of floating buildings is astonishing. You get points for going near buildings, points for staying close to buildings, points for smashing score plates, points for graffitiing government buildings, points for giving the thumps up to fans, points for flipping off protesters and even points for hitting birds. Assuming you can land safely at the bottom the game then gives you a rating out of 5, which you look at in disgust and think, ‘I can do better than that’ and promptly restart and try a different route through a slightly more densely packed area of buildings. At which point you probably break both your legs.

Not that you have to. Just a meagre rating gives enough in game currency (teeth, for some reason) to unlock more of the surprisingly large number of levels. It’s just that, while AaaaaA! is very much a game of pursuing perfection, it does it better than, say, Trials 2: The Trialening or Trackmania United because finding the perfect line through the level is just as important as perfecting it. The game is all about judging your speed (and the sensation of speed is an area it excels at) and weighing up the risk/reward of trying to thread through a tricky section of buildings.

Dejobaan Games‘ previous game, The Wonderful End of The World, while full of character was, essentially, a Katamari Damacy clone. This wasn’t a problem in itself, as the Katamari games have never made it to the PC, but meant that any character the studio put into the game was constantly seen in comparison to the charm of Keita Takahashi’s masterpiece. Tackling a more original concept here, the developers are free to run with the concept and insert as much of themselves as possible. Take the videos: sprinkled through the level menu are various skits, from meditation methods, to grandma’s cooking recipe, to how to survive time travel. At various points an in-game news presenter will deliver an absurd newscast in his monotone, stoner voice. Pictures of the developers even pop up in various levels, complete with bizarre descriptions. This ramshackle, anarchic charm persists throughout and lends great character to the game.

I tried to capture a couple of videos for this post to show the game in motion. It’s something of a testament to just how busy the levels are that the video encoder could only process them at a couple of frames per-second. Instead I’ll throw up the games trailer, as it also includes the wonderfully bizarre ‘story’.

Yikes, we’re over half-way through. Only four games to be revealed. You’ve probably worked out for yourself that tomorrow’s post will concentrate on number 4.

The problem with doing a post a day? It’s relentless, just a few short hours and you have to write another one. Take now: I’m more than a little hungover yet must still find some words to write about a game – why do I put myself through these things?

Enough self pity, damn it, we’re talking about the 6th best game of 2009. If I can’t find a few words to praise it then I may as well just bloody give up. Some Kinickie will help… Ah, that’s better.

So, about game #6:

Time Gentlemen, Please!

I’d rather not get Hitler’s bloody shit all over my map, thanks.

The year saw something of an adventure game resurgence. Despite new offerings from Telltale and even Lucas Arts remembering that they used to make good games, the best new entry into this once great genre was a small indie game from Zombie Cow Studios. It’s an unashamed love letter to the Lucas Arts adventure games of old featuring a verb wheel control system, childishly vulgar humour, an irreverent plot and as much fourth-wall breaking self-references that could comfortably fit into a script.

Wait, a comedy game featuring a vulgar, irreverent script? At this point alarm bells should be ringing for anyone who’s experienced games that have attempted to be funny. Fortunately Time Gentlemen, Please! has such a crude charm to it, along with enough genuinely funny lines, that it completely gets away with it. Take the plot set-up: the events of the game’s predecessor, Ben There, Dan That, lead to a Magnum P.I. marathon on the BBC that wipes out the entire population of the planet. Ben and Dan decide the only way for them to save humanity is to travel back in time and prevent the coathanger ever being invented (just go with it, ok). Typically this ends with the duo falling foul of Hitler.

Its not all silly narrative though, there’s silly character development as well. Not content any more with just doing “lightswitches and Chuckie Egg” Dan has decided he needs to increase his adventuring role. This doesn’t sit well with Ben who feels his partner could take the limelight away from his adventuring skill. It also leads to a brilliant moment in which Dan is left on his own to solve a puzzle, panicking that he won’t combine the right items.

I’m not touching the right-hand filing cabinet. It might be cursed!

Yes, item combining. This is a homage to early adventuring after all, so combining items and finding their application within the world is very much the name of the game. At times the puzzles are fiendish, succumbing to the all too familiar adventure logic in which you spend more time trying to work out what the designer was thinking rather than taking clues from the environment. Fortunately almost every item combination in the game has a unique line to at least keep you amused while you try clicking on absolutely everything. Not that it’s all frustration, some of the puzzles are inspired. Throughout the game you can make use of time rips that have opened up throughout 1940s London, a machine that ages or de-ages objects placed in it, an arm covered in Hitler’s bloody shit and, of course, a roomful of dead cats. There’s some really memorable solutions to the majority of the puzzles; the one involving two old-school adventure games (one text based, one an old graphic adventure featuring Hitler) is a genuinely clever and inventive piece of puzzle design.

I seem to have forgotten one important detail: It costs £2.99 and its predecessor is free. It should be a crime to not at least give it a go at that price.

Also, if you’re a deus ex machina fan: the game ends on a blatant deus ex machina.

24 hours to write about the 5th best release of 2006. That’s called a ticking clock… works great in the movies.

As we end this uncomfortably named decade some professional review sites have been trying to run down the best games of the last 10 years. What sort of madness is that? Sure, I attempted to gather a list of people’s favourite games of all time but they were implicitly the views of a single person, done with the proviso that one person can’t possibly have played every release and that their choices will be heavily influenced by personal taste.

Trying to create a list of the best, or most important, games of the last decade, with all the weight of expectation, the tricky distorter of hindsight and the venomous ire of internet dwelling gamers? Fuck. That. I’ll stick with sharing my favourite releases of the last 12 months.

Speaking of which, my submission for #7 is:

Battlefield 1943

Hey look, it’s not all indie-obsessed naval-gazing. I enjoy pretending to shoot people on an island during the second world war too!

2009: The year in which Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize for, essentially, doing fuck all. As far as anyone can tell the main reason for awarding him the prize was to congratulate the US President for going the entire year without being George W. Bush. As glad as I am to have someone in the White House be not George W. Bush I can’t help but feel that the world hasn’t become so warmongering that the winning conditions for a major accolade celebrating world peace are so low. I mean I also spent all of 2009 not being George W. Bush and haven’t had so much as a thank you. What gives Alf?

Maybe I’m being unfair, I mean Obama did also invite a racist and a history professor to the White House for a beer. Could there be a more poignant symbol of harmony than that?

2009: Also the year in which my 8th favourite game was:

Zeno Clash

The best way to get me interested in your First Person game? Try and do something a little different. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy shooting virtual nasties in the face as much as the next man, but there seems an annoying aversion to toying with the accepted FPS genre formula. Not that I can really blame developers. Just take Zeno Clash’s core mechanic. It’s a First Person Brawler, focusing primarily on melee combat. Given the state of melee in most FPS games it could have gone so horribly wrong.

The Year of Our Lord 2009 is coming to a close. Hopefully this will mark the end of having to say ‘two-thousand-and’ as a prefix to the year name and we’ll move to the more sensible ‘twenty’ . Sure we’d only be saving two syllables but over the course of the remaining 990 years of the millennium those two syllables will start to add up.

By which I mean to say the 9th best game of 2009 is:

Flower

If you read any gaming blog around the start of the year you couldn’t escape the talk of Flower, thatgamingcompany’s follow up to flOw. Chances are, however, it won’t be appearing on many Top 10′s around the internet because, inevitably, just as suddenly as the buzz surrounding the game came, it disappeared again. To be honest I was a little worried when I decided to include it on this list. Was the game really as good as we all thought it was back then? Did we all just get carried along by the hype and general feeling that this game was important?

No. It turns out that Flower is still brilliant. The game asks you to take control of a breeze within the dream of a flower, bringing life and restoring nature to the world by collecting petals as you travel past flowers, making them bloom. Needless to say it drew praise from critics and ‘games-as-art’ bloggers and criticism from the legions of forum-ites who, so upset with the lack of anything to kill, dismissed it as pretentious arty bollocks.

That’s a shame because Flower’s essential genius is that, aside from its ideas and themes, it is a really well made and enjoyable game. Three things deserve highlighting. Firstly, it looks beautiful. Surprisingly, given the theme, the visuals don’t look natural but are instead stylised with a hyper-colourful flair with each level having a distinctive look with a different colour palette to accompany it. Secondly the sound design is excellent. Every flower you bloom explodes in an orchestral flurry that, no matter when you trigger it, fits in with the background music. Essentially it does for orchestral ambiance what Rez did for Japanese electronica. Thirdly, and perhaps most impressively, the controls feel both natural and responsive. This was somewhat of a surprise because Flower exclusively uses the Playstation 3′s near universally terrible Sixaxis motion controls. To date it’s the only game that uses a motion controller that didn’t have me fighting against the control system to play it, and I include the Wii in that.

Of course, as is true with all great games, the overall experience is far more than the sum of its parts. Frustratingly, and I realise I’m not helping here, the weight of discussion behind it detracts from the actual product: simply a well made and relaxing little indie game. With that in mind I’ll finish with a video.

What could be better than blowing some petals around the place? Find out my 8th favourite game of the year tomorrow.

Ah, the hallowed tradition of the end of year Top 10. These lists are meant to be a considered reflection of the very best the year had to offer. What they’re not meant to be is a hasty collection assembled by me frantically checking the copyright date on the back of game boxes to remember what actually came out this past 12 months… Try and pretend I didn’t do that.

Over the next 10 days I’ll be counting down the results of my ‘considered reflections’. Calender fans will have noticed this will put the number 1 reveal on the 25th December. It’s almost like I planned this! (I didn’t.) A quick note: Two games that would have otherwise made it don’t get included because I’d simply not played them enough. These are, predictably, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassin’s Creed 2. Technically I’ve probably played enough AC2 to warrant including it, but its predecessor turned into a shit pile for its last couple of levels so I’m not going to risk it.

So, was 2009 the greatest gaming year yet? In short, no. Publisher’s crippling fear of Modern Warfare 2 seems to have pushed many of the big releases to March of next year. The big exception to this rule was Sony, who seem unable to release a game without previewing it for 5 years before hand and, as such, were unable to release most of their big titles anyway. What 2009 did bring was a great variety of smaller downloadable titles that, thanks to the big dogs running for the hills, managed to get some attention. The shortlist was surprisingly large and surprisingly difficult to cut down with some of the year’s big AAA releases losing out to low-budget indie titles.

Except ignore all of that because at number 10 is:

inFamous

With spots 1 through 9 decided I finally had to face up and decide whether I liked Infamous or Prototype the most (um, yeah… Spoiler: Prototype doesn’t make it. I’m rubbish at this suspense thing.) My flatmate offered up that Prototype looked more fun, but that doesn’t help unless I decide to do a ‘Top 10 Games That Look Fun’ and I’m not that desperate for content. Yet. Certainly Prototype offered more scope for joyful and aimless dicking about but was pretty flawed elsewhere. All things considered, and looked at as a cohesive whole, Infamous was simply the better game.

As a game Infamous has hints of the original Mafia, in that its open world setting doesn’t actually have a whole lot to do outside of the main missions; rather the space and freedom lend credence to the story being told. Of course Infamous’ goals are much less lofty than that of Mafia. Despite the main character’s melodramatic moodiness the truth is that Infamous is a silly game and it’s silly by design. The true aim of the game is to create the feeling of being a comic book superhero, something it captures perfectly. It helps that the main character, Cole, is an original creation not burdened to the rules and stipulations of comic book publishers protecting the image of their heroes. The people who criticised Infamous for only allowing the player to grow in power by being cartoonishly heroic or villainous seemed to entirely miss that that was the whole point.

The other criticism lobbied against the game was far more valid, namely that the electrical powers of Cole were essentially a superpowered re-skin of typical shooter controls. It’s true that many of the powers were substitutes of the gun, the grenade, the shield, the melee et al. That said, this gave the combat a familiarity in the initial stages while it also set up gradual unlocks of more fantastical powers to give the game a proper sense of progression and growing power. Also, as I’ve written about before, the act of moving your character through the world was satisfying as all hell.

Coming tomorrow: Number 9 of this numerically predictable countdown.

With Friday afternoon off work I sat down for a bit of light gaming and ended up flitting between most of the games I’m currently actively playing. Here’s what occupied my time:

16:00 – Torchlight

Goddamn, I really need to remember to turn off the framerate overlay in screenshots.

I finally relented and bought Torchlight after the overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback about the game. I was initially hesitant because, having not played action RPGs like Diablo before, Torchlight appeared to be a seriously grindy click-fest. It turns out that Torchlight is a seriously grindy click-fest. I’m a little worried for the future condition of my mouse to be honest. Still, having my fears justified showed me that my fears weren’t really justified; Torchlight has a lot going on to keep you invested. Primarily this is done with loot, of which you come across a ridiculous amount: my inventory was filled before the completion of the first level of the dungeon.

There are other touches that keep things interesting. Your character’s pet is especially useful. Not only can you load up his inventory with unwanted goods and send him back to the town to sell them but you can actually get him to learn spells which he’ll automatically cast in battle (mine currently summons skeletons). Also, if you feed him fish, he turns into different monsters for a limited time: both useful and batshit crazy.

I would have probably played this for a few hours but a Steam notification of a PC Gamer event (I don’t even own Killing Floor Steam, damn you) caused the thing to crash out, so it was probably time to move on.

17:00 – MAG

This is why I don't usually take my own screenshots for console games.

It’s always a pain to figure out exactly what you can talk about when it comes to beta testing. From what I understand we’re now free to talk about MAG, Sony’s upcoming 256 player online FPS, since the public beta opened but are still under NDA for anything from the private beta. I hadn’t actually played this since the first phase of the private beta but with the newest public phase arriving with a host of changes and, most importantly, 24 hour servers I thought I’d give it another try.

The concept is well executed. 256 people is clearly a ridiculous number for one online match but the game does a good job of assigning squads to different missions. This means that, while you often aren’t directly aware of the sheer scale of the battle as you focus on your specific task, your job can often be made easier or much harder based on the performance of the rest of the team. This is all good stuff but the game is let down, for me, by its pace. Dying is particularly painful because of the long wait to respawn and the trek from the spawn point to the objective. Thanks to the people who seem to have been testing it continuously for months this happened to me a lot. Part of the problem also seems to be the controls, which are slightly less responsive then I’d have liked. They fall just the wrong side of that almost imperceptible line in which you go from blaming yourself for dying to blaming the game.

Eventually I tired of being killed by someone named X_K1lla_X and moved onto a multiplayer game that gets it right.

18:10 – Modern Warfare 2

The AC-130 is much less creepy here than in the first game due to the fact you're helping out a friend.

I was avoiding the single player campaign because I was approaching That Level and listening to Ivor Cutler, as I was at the time, wasn’t really conducive to fully appreciating it. Instead I switched between the multiplayer and the special-ops missions.

Multiplayer remains pretty much unchanged from the first Modern Warfare. This isn’t a criticism, as its one of the most playable online shooters around. Rounds are fast paced and frantic and the control system is not only tight and responsive but also well tuned. This is most notable with the console auto aim: its good enough to compensate for the weaknesses of using a controller in an FPS without being so accurate that all battles turn into a simple quick-draw event won by whoever started shooting first.

The special-ops missions would turn out to be the revelation of the night. Essentially they’re a series of mini-games and set pieces that reward you with stars for completing certain challenges. More importantly they’re playable in split-screen. As people filtered into the house throughout the night we’d spend much of it passing the controller round and playing through different missions. A particular favourite became the missions requiring one person to get to a particular point on the map while the other player provided air support from an AC-130 gunship. Co-operation is the key; as is shouting at your gunman for bombing you on the ground, or at your ground soldier for getting themselves killed in a house where you’re powerless to help.

19:50 – Borderlands

I’ve not posted about Borderlands before, which is surprising given just how much I’ve played it over the last few weeks. At this point I’ve completed the campaign once and am now on my second playthrough, essentially a New Game + option that starts all the enemies at a much higher level to mirror your character’s progression. Normally I wouldn’t replay a game for months after the first completion, but Borderlands follows the model of the action-RPG grind fest (see Torchlight) so closely (and the story is so ludicrously pointless) that as far as I’m concerned I’ve still not completed it as my character’s not hit the level cap and there’s still loot to be found. Borderlands’ gimmick to cover up the grind and repetition is to be a really good, tactile shooter. Not a bad gimmick all said and done.

This time I decided to re-spec my character’s special moves. A complete skill reset can be purchased which lets you try out different customisation paths. I put most of my points in elemental effects which cause damage-over-time to enemies. Between that and a couple of ridiculously overpowered weapons the game has pretty much ceased to be challenging but remains great fun.

I picked off a couple of missions throughout the hour or so I played it, mostly the ones involving boss versions of regular monsters, killing Skagzilla and Mothrakk with relative ease. I was particularly pleased to note that, with my new multiple types of elemental damage, enemies would bleed multi-coloured numbers before they eventually died. It’s like they were repeatedly being beaten over the head with a tricky tax-return.

Past Everyone’s Bedtime – Elefunk

Seeing as you’re probably wondering: Elefunk is a PS3 physics based puzzler that requires you to build a bridge to allow an elephant to cross from one side of the level to another. Despite its cutesy appearance the game is brutally difficult.

I’ve no idea why we returned to this Friday night (more accurately Saturday morning). When we first went through the game, always three to four of us heavily drunk, we got stuck on a particular level and didn’t return to the game for over a year. Tonight, inexplicably, was the night we came back and beat that damn level and, with renewed vigour, progressed further into the game.

I like playing puzzle games communally. It’s a true reflection of team-work, with nobody jostling for position or kudos, just building upon each others ideas until you collectively reach a solution. Elefunk is perfect for this atmosphere due to its trial and error nature. After your first attempt at building a structure you can send the elephant on his way, nervously looking for all the weaknesses that appear, so when he inevitably falls into the chasm below you know where start strengthening. Its also, fortunately, a good game to play when you’ve been drinking; there are no leaps of logic to take, the game works purely off architecture and engineering.

So these are just some of the games that have been occupying my time. Feel free to share your current gaming playlist in the comments, although God knows I’ve got enough to keep me occupied for a while to come.

It was with some sense of occasion that I finally loaded up Dragon Age: Origins with the intention of playing it earlier today. This was marked by having beer and pretzels within arms reach of my desk (for that is how I mark occasion.)

What Is It?

The new RPG from genre stalwarts Bioware. This time they’re going back to their roots with an epic high-fantasy setting billed as a spiritual successor to the classic Baldur’s Gate series. Dragon Age, however, is free from the Dungeons & Dragons licence of that series. Disappointingly this means that the manual is also free of pages upon pages of tables and stat-charts.

Why Did You Buy It?

This is the first of these that isn’t for a game that I bought as an impulse during some weekend sale. In fact, short of the game turning out to be a fantasy RPG remake of the webgame Don’t Shit Your Pants, there is almost no scenario that could have led to me not buying this game.

The Playtest

0:05 – Few games impress me within the first five seconds, but the EA splash videos at the start of the game have finally removed all traces of This Is The New Shit by Marilyn Manson making me both happy and relieved.

1:30 – Ok this game’s doing some serious loading right now.

3:00 – Still loading! I’m starting to worry that it’s crashed…

3:05 – No, we start finally. Time for the intro video. “The hubris of men bought the Darkspawn into the world.” Damn our hubris.

5:10 – The intro story is all a bit Icewind Dale. Evil happens and terrorises individual races until the Grey Wardens create a force made up of them all. Victory ensues. The game apparently takes place around 4 centuries after the Darkspawn’s initial appearance… At least I think it does; my handwriting’s a little hard to read at this point in the notes but I don’t think ‘cunturies’ is a word so it’s a safe assumption.

7:00 – At this point I miss the rest of the video because my flatmate comes in to show me a job posting he thinks I might be interested in. At a guess the intro’s ending probably had something to do with the Darkspawn rising up again… or something.

7:30 – I’d already created a character with the previously released character creator. Still I can’t help going back and tweaking the cheekbones and jaw width.

A note on my character: After watching the origin stories videos I decided to go with a female city elf as their origin seemed the most interesting. Typically I’ve gone with a rogue class because my primary interest is in stealing things. Points have been spent on the cunning and strength modifiers. Her name is Mara (my naming conventions draw from a very narrow range of source material) and she is viewable here.

9:00 – I now have some skill points to spend – I spend a while deliberating between stealing and improved coercion but eventually settle on the coercion because the chances are there’ll be very little to actually steal in the starting area and I’m far more likely to need to bullshit my way out of situations.

11:30 – Okay, we’re finally getting into the game itself. A short origin intro explains that the elves were previously slaves and now, despite having been freed, they are treated as second class citizens. SUBTEXT!

13:00 – Huh, apparently I’m getting married today. Surprisingly my character needed to be told this by her friend. The conversation mechanic works in much the same way as the Baldur’s Gate games, with your character mute throughout and you selecting their dialogue options from a list. It’s a little strange at first, especially after Mass Effect put so much emphasis on the player character’s voicework. It does, however, explain why all the voice options during character creation are so terrible.

Wait, wedding?

15:00 – Small tutorial on movement. This is the gaming equivalent to slipping back into a old and comfortable pair of shoes. While the top-down view is a brilliant option to have the game works surprisingly well in the third-person view (even if the WASD controls take some getting used to.) More importantly the space bar is back to its job of pausing the game allowing for tactical planning of battles. Not really much point in pausing the game yet as I’m just wandering around on my wedding day, but its nice to know its there.

20:00 – My father has revealed that this is an arranged marriage. I’ve decided to not be happy about being forced into wedlock with a man I don’t know but, even with my improved coercion skills, dad’s not listening to my concerns.

23:00 – Outside in the city itself I’m approached by some friends of my late mother. I’m not shy about revealing my disdain for this whole marriage business and that I plan to escape. I’m not as forthcoming with what the details of this plan might be.

25:00 – I’ve met up with my cousin, who is also getting married today (not to me, I should point out.) He actually seems more interested in marrying my fiancee than his wife-to-be, which is slightly worrying. Still he drops in as a party member giving me a chance to look at the tactics menu. This essentially allows you to set up macros which will automate your party members behaviour in certain situations and, holy shit, it’s complicated. Again, there’s not much I can actually do without anyone to fight, but it appears to have some impressive depth.

28:00 – I’m speaking to the most melodramatic beggar ever. If I had any money I’d give him some for theatricality alone.

32:00 – I’ve decided to put off the wedding bells by getting involved in other people’s business. A family are moving to a garrison of human soldiers and the daughter is, unsurprisingly, fearful of being in proximity to women-starved soldiers. Today I shall stand up for all women forced into situations beyond their control!

35:00 – Okay, so that didn’t work. My attempt at lying to the father about an anonymous suitor for the daughter was, admittedly, rubbish.

36:00 – Humans have arrived! Randy humans at that. I could play this cool. Diplomacy would probably be the sensible option. Instead I start threatening people.

38:00 – The human has used the classic “do you know who I am” line. Fittingly I have no idea who the hell he is but, when my friend smashes him over the head with a bottle, I’m told that he might actually be quite important.

40:00 – Oh God, my husband looks like a complete tool. Worse still he’s a nervous tool. I’m rarely rude to people in RPGs, certainly less so than in real life for some reason. Still, here I have little problem telling my husband-to-be that the idea of getting married to him makes me nauseous.

You want me to spend the rest of my life with him!?

42:00 – The arrival of the Grey Warden provides another fitting distraction from the ceremony. Note: There are cats everywhere in this city. Hopefully this’ll mean I’ll not have to fight any rats.

45:00 – The Grey Warden is called Duncan, possibly the least heroic name known to man. My tactic in dealing with Duncan is to pretend I haven’t seen the hundreds of trailers that make note of how he’s a Grey Warden and treat him like another troublemaking human.

47:00 – Duncan’s made a fairly good point: He’s wearing armour and has a sword; I’m wearing basic clothes and have no sword. My threats are probably not going to work.

49:00 – An elf Elder has intervened in our little showdown. Apparently he’s the leader of the Grey Wardens. I’m meant to take seriously an organisation that lets their leader be called Duncan? This is going to take some serious suspension of disbelief.

53:00 – At this point the ceremony seems unavoidable. I’m delighted to see my husband is pretty pissed at me as I arrive. I take the opportunity to make mention of running away to my cousin. It’s at this point the humans return. They’re here to collect some ‘whores’ for their party. For all my big talk and threats I go down pretty easily with a fairly weak slap (although it’s a cutscene slap so it doesn’t count.) On the plus side: the wedding’s been cancelled.

58:00 – I wake up in a cell with some pretty hysterical women. My suggestion that we kill everyone in sight doesn’t quite get the reaction I’d hoped for. This is the point some guards come in and kill the most hysterical of the women, which is something of a relief to be honest. It’s at this point my cousin comes in and throws me a sword.

Okay, this looks bad... I promise I didn't kill her.

1:00:00 – The guards are dead. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this but it was only halfway into the battle that I remembered to go into the inventory and actually equip my sword. With my pilfered gear freshly equipped these humans had better watch out.

Conclusion

So I’ve not even finished the origin story yet and have only had one brief taste of battle so its far too early to judge the game’s potential. Still it seemed nicely adaptive to my chosen brand of bitchy psychosis and the way NPCs moods shift based on your previous conversations seems to be natural and fairly deep. My normal tact for these conclusions is to say whether I plan to keep playing the game. In this case the answer’s pretty obvious. In fact I’m off to do so right now.

I seem unable to start a new feature without first explaining its exact nature and limitations, and it remains so here. Match 3 posts are designed to highlight interesting elements of different genres. How good they are in relation to other examples from those genres will depend on my familiarity of them. With interactive fiction, or text adventures for the more plain-speaking, I’m not even close to experiencing the majority of classics that have been emerging over recent years. Instead I’ll be highlighting three games that serve as a good introduction to the genre.

Here are a few of the reasons why IF should be celebrated as a genre:

1. They are definitive proof that genres don’t die. Graphic adventures were meant to have killed off the text adventure and, in turn, the graphic adventure game was supposedly killed off. Instead text adventures survive as a niche of people interested in discovering and sharing just what can be done with the genre.
2. When done well they are some of the most inventive games you can play. Every example in this list does something different and has a different primary mechanic.
3. You can play them. Every game listed here is available for free and can be played in-browser. The graphics aren’t going to tax even the most basic machine either.
4. Typing words gives the impression you’re working! If you have inattentive colleagues you can probably get away with playing these at work.

Convinced? Then try these:

Aisle

The other two games in this list are from the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition so starting with a game from 1999 might seem like an odd choice. Not so, Aisle is not only a great IF game in its own right, but its primary mechanic also makes it a great place to start getting used to the text parser.

Aisle takes place in a supermarket aisle. You’re given an opening paragraph, which is always the same, and asked to make your move. Assuming the parser understands what you want to do you’ll be given a closing description of you carrying out that action and the game is over. Congratulations, you won! Well not quite. There’s a surprisingly deep story lurking within Aisle. Actually, if memory serves me correctly, there are at least three different story paths and any action you choose might fit into one of these, or just be a generic standalone event. The trick to uncovering the story is to make your move and then go back and try something else. Each action will reveal a little bit more and give you more ideas as to further actions you can try.

This means that while every move is an ending, there is no complete ending. The non-linearity of it also means its hard to predict how cohesive of an experience you will have with the game. My first experience was an afternoon in work trying to get the character to unlock his memory of what happened in Rome. After a while I finally noticed a phrase in one ending that led to another that, eventually, led to quite a touching recollection of the trip. It was only later, looking at a discussion of the game, that I realised there were many other, completely contradictory, recollections that branched out in different ways.

• Play Aisle online
• Download Aisle from IFDB

Everybody Dies

Pictures! Everybody dies, the 3rd place finalist of the 2008 IF Comp, features a few illustrations to highlight its narrative. They’re pretty integral to the story, which I really don’t want to spoil, so I’ll only say a few brief things about the game.

Everybody dies probably has the strongest linear narrative of all the games here. It’s not a difficult game, most of the actions are very natural and require you to go to a place and perform an action to move the story along. The key to progression is not in finding out what you should be doing but noticing the characters’ reaction to what it is you’re doing.

As a short game with multiple viewpoints it also does a good job of differentiating the characters personalities in the time that you spend with each one. I thought Graham’s colloquialisms were over-egged a little, but I’m probably just being unfair to people who do still genuinely say “Whatev”.

• Play Everybody Dies online (Requires Java)
• Download Everybody Dies from IFDB

Violet

My favourite game on the list and the most puzzle based of all these entries. This was the winner of last years IF Comp, and with good reason.

A couple of things set it apart from the somewhat mechanical nature of most IF games. Firstly, the text parser narration is done in the second person by the protagonists girlfriend Violet, or, more accurately, by the protagonist imagining how his girlfriend would respond to the situations he is in. Secondly the game concerns a situation I’d imagine most people have faced at one time or another: The protagonist must write 1000 words of his dissertation by the end of the day.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s already noon and the room in which he is working is filled with distractions. The number of times, through the course of the game, in which you’ll sit the character at his desk and type ‘write’ only for him to be distracted by something else after a few words is both frustrating and brilliantly true to life. Violet’s exasperation at the characters penchant for procrastination and the ridiculous lengths that are needed to solve it (you can’t just unplug an internet cable to stop him from browsing the internet, as he’ll just plug it in again after you tell him to write) give the game a charming humour.

• Play Violet online
• Download Violet from IFDB

Notable Mention: Galatea

Galatea could well turn out to be your favourite IF game, even your favourite game. It takes place as an interaction between an art critic and an installation, with multiple endings depending on your actions and questions toward Galatea throughout the game. Personally I found that at every stage I was battling with the limitations of the text parser and just couldn’t get drawn into the story.

• Play Galatea online

The 2009 IF Comp is nearly underway. When the results are announced I may do a piece looking at the winners. In the meantime if you’ve got any IF favourites not mentioned then post them in the comments.