Dragon Age far from flawless

I’m finding Dragon Age: Origins to be more than a little hard to swallow.  According to the in-game ‘heroic accomplishments’ character screen, I’m no more than 25% through the game, and that’s after having spent a significant (for me) 45 hours playing it.  Compare that with a total of 48 hours immersed in the thoroughly addictive Batman: Arkham Asylum, accounting for nearly two completions of the main campaign (I say “nearly” after having had my will broken by Poison Ivy on hard difficulty the second time round) and who knows how many spare hours honing my arm and leg breaking skills against thugs in the challenge mode.

Arkham Asylum’s thrilling combination of well paced story, stunning graphics, and above all perhaps the finest stealth and melee combat mechanics of all time, had me addicted from the moment I escorted the Joker through the asylum gates, so 48 hours spent is no surprise.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, I’m now having to force myself to return to Dragon Age, and it’s pretty clear to me why this is the case.

Most reviewers have commented on Dragon Age’s ball crushing difficulty—that while some fights are certainly doable, some are a slither away from impossible.  This is true, but I would say of my own experience that, if anything, the doable encounters are few and far between, and that the majority either tax me to the upper extent of my skill (honed in Bioware’s spiritual predecessor Baldur’s Gate II) or venture far beyond it.

The fact is that I’m struggling to cope with most battles on normal difficulty (the setting which Bioware describe in-game as “the recommended setting for players familiar with role-playing games”).  And when things get too tough for me to handle (which they frequently do), I find myself forced to switch over to easy difficulty on the fly.  Of course this means that in an instant, all my enemies are left crippled shambling wrecks of their former selves, unable to withstand any of my attacks and incapable of causing me any lasting harm.  I annihilate them in short order.  Normal in Dragon Age is more or less equivalent to veteran (inducing spasms of rage) in Call of Duty 4, and easy is akin to recruit (shooting blind one-legged ducks with a lascannon).

I’ve no doubt that you’ll find plenty of support amongst the loyal fanbase for the simple philosophy that if you’re finding a game too difficult, taking the difficulty down a notch is the correct and obvious way to go.  With respect to most games I would certainly agree, but in Dragon Age I think we can all identify something more than a simple case of players (myself included) trying to punch above their weight.  The divide between the two settings is colossal.  I don’t need an easy setting that caters to Bioware RPG virgins; I need an easy setting that shaves some of the ridiculous punishment off of normal, or a normal which has a somewhat less psychotic effect.  As it is, I’m left feeling unsure about what I’m achieving whenever I switch—did I really beat that elf mage, or am I just a slimy cheater?  And of course this is a huge immersion breaker—you can forget about feeling like an inspiring hero battling the oncoming blight when you’re exiting to the options menu every five minutes.

Furthermore, comparisons between Dragon Age and its futuristic brother, Mass Effect, are inevitable. And in this I can identify only a few areas, mostly unimportant, where Dragon Age does a better (or at least better suited for my palette) job.  The interface—more specifically, the inventory screen—is light years ahead of Mass Effect’s clumsy, console-ported mess.  Some item type filter options and radial buttons go a long way toward making organisation of loot (of which there is a metric crap tonne) less irritating.

Control over your party is also infinitely more precise.  Whereas Mass Effect’s combat revolves around the player character in a more frenetic shooter mode (your other two NPC party members in tow), Dragon Age takes the more strategic high road with an emphasis on command of the individual actions of the whole group.  This is, admittedly, about how one chooses to play the games—Dragon Age has a sophisticated engine for AI tactics built in, so you don’t necessarily have to bother with micro management—but the strengths and weaknesses of the gameplay mechanics in each game certainly steer the player down one way or the other.

Gameplay aside, Mass Effect clearly has the edge for me when it boils down to the core story, characters, and dialogue.  The cultural atmosphere of Ferelden—Dragon Age’s high fantasy setting—is almost surreal compared with the more familiar (or at least more identifiable) politically charged galaxy in its sci-fi cousin.  Much of this is accounted for by an awkward schism between the main quest line and the wealth of less important side quests that run along side – sadly an estabished RPG trope.

From the outset, the message that the oncoming darkspawn (orc) invasion is a threat to all humanity is made very clear, but apart from a select few, no one in the world seems to care much about their doom.  Travel to the capital city, Denerim, and instead of a medieval metropolis alive with activity, you’re greeted by a quaint little market and no more than a dozen merchants, all chiefly concerned with the running of their paltry excuses for businesses.  Most of the other citizens are absorbed in petty social occurrences and other assorted matters of no importance at all.  And all this takes place amidst a constant bombardment of religious and superstitious prattle.  Mass Effect largely dodged this awkwardness by minimizing the number of side quests and making the main threat secretive rather than overt – an ancient enemy biding its time to strike.

A strong cast, in tune with the demands of voice acting for a fantasy RPG, might have helped a great deal, but for whatever reason personal conversations with members of your party are rarely anything but dull.  Most of the banter ranges from general background topics, such as “How did you become a Grey Warden?”, to more particular reminiscences along the lines of “Why did you want to leave the Crows, exactly?”  These almost always yield very little genuinely interesting backstory, which is a symptom of how shallow and lacking in emotional depth the personalities of the NPCs are.

The stunningly lackluster Leliana, a bard of Orlesian (Dragon Age’s French) origin, is a perfect example of Bioware’s failure in this area.  Half of her conversation paths are merely vehicles for her to ramble on about specific items of lore – an activity which, she chirps, she loves too much not to do.  And when she’s not waffling about the origins of the darkspawn or some other boring topic, she’ll blather on at painful length about the Maker (God) and how he fell in love with a woman called Andraste—a cliche of a tale which she naturally adores.  I would like her to die, but I’ve invested too much time in her now and she’s the only rogue in my party I know how to use.

Some witty interjections and more natural, less serious remarks from Alistair, a faithful companion who joins your cause early on in the main story, are among the few exceptions to the rule.  Contrast this with a consistently higher level of writing quality in Mass Effect, exemplified by Urdnot Wrex’s tragic tale of the genocide of his species, or Tali’s personal doubts about her pilgrimage away from the Quorian flotilla—some of the game’s most engrossing dialogue, some of the best of the genre, and spoken in a way that constantly reminds you of the characters’ emotional baggage.  There is no contest.

But for me, one difference in particular defines both games more than any other.  Whereas Dragon Age requires the player to imprint their own personality on the player character (who has no spoken dialogue), Mass Effect places you in the gravity boots of a fully voice acted hero and asks only that you direct his moral compass.  Sure, you can change the surface appearance and there’s a choice of classes, but apart from the gender choice, Shephard is in essence the same person.  You don’t get to imagine (as you do in a pen and paper game) what he sounds like, or what his mannerisms are, because that dimension has been taken care of by the writers and the actor.

Being incapable of the kind of sprawling and vivid imagination required for something like a serious game of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, the task of inventing a voice for my character in my head is daunting to say the least.  While I coped with, or rather worked around this in the Baldur’s Gate series, the fact is I didn’t know any better at the time. Now that I’ve tasted something richer, it’s very difficult for me to click dialogue options in Dragon Age and not receive that instant vocal feedback.  I’m like some sort of conversational crack whore.  Watching my character stand completely silent, his arms folded, moustache twitching at random, with zero facial expression, while I choose assertive and often violent responses to the character I’m speaking to feels very odd.

I’m sure I can find it within myself to say some positive things about Dragon Age, in time.  It’s not as if I haven’t had some fine role playing experiences in some of the chapters.  But at the moment, I’m stuck working (and I mean working) my way through the bowels of an underground system of caverns, serving as a lacky under one of the noble houses vying for control of the dwarven city of Orzammar.  I don’t exactly feel like I’m playing a pivotal role, and that’s something I never stopped feeling as Commander Shephard, the first (known) human spectre and ultimately the saviour of all civilization.  Ferelden had better start offering up some seriously juicy stuff, because Mass Effect 2 is coming to dinner, and it’s looking a hell of a lot more appetising.

Why WoW?

Why do people continue to subscribe to World of Warcraft?  This is surely the question that defines the present chapter in human history.  I won’t bother to answer it, but I will go as far as to ponder a version of the question on a smaller scale; why do I continue to subscribe to World of Warcraft?

It’s not as if I can’t see the game’s faults. First and foremost, it is devoid of any kind of soul. I can’t recall a time when I’ve felt connected (in a positive way) to in-game events. My most memorable emotional experiences playing WoW have been of an odd sort of giddy rage (brought on by player versus player in battlegrounds), bottomless despair (a direct consequence of gather quests), disgust (again, gather quests, as well as mind-bogglingly poor quest design in general), and crippling mental lethargy. This final symptom invariably sets in an hour or two after questing begins; often sooner.

Why, only a few nights ago I found myself gathering bog lord tendrils from—yes you guessed right—bog lords. Let me tell you that although this may sound like an appealing prospect to the uninitiated, it rapidly descends into an apocalyptically brainless and time consuming struggle, now known to all who have survived it as the age of strife. It suffers from a common flaw of gather quests in WoW, namely a poor drop rate, which is another way of saying that you don’t get the shit you need. It came to the point, a full half an hour after beginning at least, that murmurs of discontent spread through the party, and we came close to abandoning the whole thing. Shortly thereafter fortune smiled on us, the drop rate ramped up, and the bog tendrils materialised.

Graham the boglord opens his arms wide in consolation

A friendly warning: the quest is ‘Natural Enemies’; if you’re unfortunate enough to venture into Zangarmarsh expecting a good time, and you pick this unrelenting son of a bitch up, abandon it immediately. Do not hesitate—there are plenty of other, customarily mediocre quests available.

And in my experience, mediocre really is as good as the quests, and by extension the gameplay, get in WoW.  Sure, there’s some entertaining and moderately engrossing content in the dungeons. Scholomance, which we attempted recently, is a good example of this. But it’s a rare occasion when I’m not simply going through the motions. Most of the time the quests require little more than rhythmic clicking. It’s robotic—something to do while I listen to some music and chill out.

And yet I still subscribe. I pay £8 a month for something to occupy the section of my brain left idle while I relax on Spotify. By all accounts, I should end this debacle. But I have an answer. I have an answer to the question. It’s quite a depressing answer, but here it is: I take some measure of satisfaction from having completed Natural Enemies. Farming bog lord tendrils was pure hell, but now it’s done, and I’m glad it’s done. I’ve got some XP—I leveled up shortly afterward in fact—and I can move on to pastures new. It’s exactly the kind of satisfaction one feels after concluding a section of a dissertation (not that I ever wrote a dissertation), or after a good spot of weeding.

In fact, weeding is perhaps the most apt analogy; everything I achieve in WoW is essentially meaningless.  I’m having as hard a time now at level 65 as I was at level 35.  There’s been no tangible shift in the gameplay.  The mobs get bigger and tougher, but so do I in tandem; as my powers and range of abilities increase, so does the damage dealing potential of my enemies.  I spend an hour yanking weeds of all shapes and sizes out of flowerbeds, but I know that the blighters will inevitably return.  I’m working against the grain in an eternal battle against the encroaching forces of nature.  A somewhat melodramatic description of a mundane gardening task, admittedly, but you get the point.  Though repetitive, ultimately futile and frankly dull, I just get something out of both these activities.  They fill a void in my spare time, and that void will always need filling.

All out of buffout in Fallout

I’ve just conquered a nasty addiction to mentats and buffout pills. A few days ago, I had reached the location of the source of a distress signal sent out by Reilly’s Rangers – a rag tag mercenary group – who had got themselves in a serious tangle on the roof of the Statesman Hotel. Gangs of super mutants had forced the Rangers up several flights of stairs and through countless burned out rooms, until they had nowhere else to run.

The Rangers’ backs were up against the edge of the roof. They were low on ammunition and medical supplies, and the mutants were still coming in droves. It was then that I arrived, just in the nick of time, having carved a bloody and explodey swathe through the mutant ranks.

As I reached the roof and scaled the stairs to rendevous with the desperate Rangers, I found myself walking over a trail of mutant corpses. The Rangers had made one hell of a stand. And the aptly named Brick, their main gunner, had undoubtedly done the lion’s share of the slaying. She, no doubt a homage of sorts to Vasquez from James Cameron’s Aliens, casually introduced me to her minigun, Eugene, and thanked me for my timely arrival.

In case you were wondering, this (mutant killing, rescue missions, and drug taking included) isn’t what I do on a typical weekday. I’ve been playing Fallout 3, and rather excessively I might add.

I had quite a bit of trouble getting the game running smoothly. A series of crashes and freezes had disrupted my post apocalyptic experience in the first week or so after installation. And the numerous fixes suggested in forum threads online failed to yield results. I had tried everything: restarting, downloading and installing latest graphics card drivers, switching various graphical settings on and off in an effort to troubleshoot – all to no avail. I was at the point of losing my remaining enthusiasm for the game when I took one last stab in the dark – returning all settings to their defaults – which (shockingly) dealt a killing blow to the game-breaking instability.

With the crashes at an end, I finally had a chance to engross myself in the nightmare world of Fallout, at once following the main quest line – bolstered by the dulcet tones of Liam Neeson, indulging in surprisingly well-realised side missions, and by extension, exploring the enormous ruinous expanse of Washington DC, post catastrophic atomic cluster fuck.

It’s a grey expanse, with the occasional hint of baked brown, charcoal black, and icky, slimey green, occasionally beautiful when you’re looking out from a high point, but otherwise pretty depressing, which is, I think, more or less what you would expect of a nuclear wasteland. What Bethesda have done, and this is the really ingenious part, is scatter (in amongst this sea of arse) the occasional mutated scorpion, colony of giant fire breathing ants, bloodthirsty band of raiders (imagine something akin to Firefly’s Reavers here if you can), and super mutant enclave. This is brilliant for maintaining a pretty relentless pace in the gameplay, but also bloody unforgiving on the player.

And that’s about where the drug addiction comes in. You see, in every RPG up until this point, I’ve been comfortable swallowing health potions, mana potions, potions of agility, strength, vitality, and intelligence – effectively ingesting anything and everything I need to get by in the game world. What I didn’t realise is that Fallout 3 does things differently. Like every other RPG to date, it has these items, but using them comes at a price.

So, shortly after butchering half an army of mutants, imagining myself high-fiving the Rangers (sadly, emotes are thin on the ground), and storming our way out of the hotel (unfortunately losing Brick to mutant gunfire in the process, but what can you do?), I headed back to the Ranger compound in eastern DC, only to find that I was having trouble walking at normal speed. It was as if I was encumbered, but I wasn’t carrying that much in my pack. It turned out that those stat boosting items which I’d been relying upon (a lot) to plow my way through all those mutants were in fact addictive substances. I hadn’t taken my scheduled dose of buffout in a while, and my body was consequently taking a breather.

I staggered out of the compound, dumped a few heavy items to move at decent speed, and fast travelled (a necessary feature wisely carried over from Oblivion) to the friendly town of Megaton. The local doctor offered to cure my addiction by injecting me with some “pre-war stuff” which, he promised, would “flush out my system”. Thankfully it flushed well, and I’m now sober. I sold all my Class A and B substances to the nearest vendor and resolved never to touch buffout, mentats, ‘jet’ or ‘psycho’ (all equally evil) again.

Life is hard in post apocalyptia, but I think I’ll pull through. If you happen to see me clutching a pack of pills with a hungry look in my eye, smack me around the face though won’t you?

Loving Trine

Despite a rare unpleasant and frustrating experience just now, Trine has met and exceeded my expectations from the demo.  It sits firmly in that category of games which have been perfected and polished to an uncommon degree, but which also have a unique and refreshing central gameplay mechanic.  Zeno Clash is its brother.  Portal is its sister.

Judging by my progression across the campaign map, a mottled parchment presented at the end of each level, I am nearing the end of my journey.  And it is a journey that’s been marked by a learning curve as smooth as a baby’s arse.  Although I’ve now hit a point where I’m leaping over bottomless chasms and spikey pits while dodging arrows and skeleton warriors from all directions, twas not always thus.  The game started at a reassuring but exciting pace, and the increase in difficulty up to this point has been barely noticeable.

Trine is a platformer, but it’s special in two respects.  First, it has a joyous physics engine which you’re encouraged, nay required, to exploit at every turn, levitating boxes and platforms to reach new areas using the wizard, grappling spinning wheels to reach high areas with the thief’s multi-purpose bow, and well… smashing stuff with the knight.

Second, as I’ve already partially revealed, you get to control three characters at once.  This is a treat, and it’s accomplished beautifully via the game’s namesake, the Trine, an artifact with the power to combine the ’souls’ of three individuals into one body.  The result is that you can instantly switch from one character to another, bringing each of their skill-sets to bear as you please.

Of course, handing the player this level of freedom is only viable when you’ve put as much effort into level design as Frozenbyte, Trine’s developers, so evidently have.  They’ve created the perfect balance between sections where you can enter into free-running mode, pretending you’re Indiana Jones on steroids by swinging from platform to platform with abandon, and others where you’re forced to stop and think, then experiment with the distinct and varied puzzle-solving abilities of the three adventurers.

Throw in some fantastically vibrant graphics, gloriously drawn environments to take advantage of them, and a charmingly simple narrative as a backdrop, and you have a surprise masterpiece that’s taken its place as my game of the month.

I give it three out of three.

Crysis Warhead

If Crysis Warhead has taught me one thing, it is that I should avoid playing on a game’s hardest difficulty setting at all costs. I’ve been taught this lesson before, more sternly than I was taught this time in fact, by Call of Duty 4, where Veteran difficulty brought me no end of stress and frustration. Alas, I am a forgetful fool, and so it was that on a Saturday morning whim many weeks ago, with Warhead installed on Steam, I set aside that lesson, and chose instead to (pigheadedly) play on ‘Delta’.

How I have come to regret that decision—though not immediately at the start of the game as one might have expected. Warhead is a deceptive mistress, in that it starts at a light but brisk pace, once again dumping the player on a tropical island occupied by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in the year 2020. The player character Michael ‘Psycho’ Sykes, is as effortlessly detestable as he is tediously dull—if you’re like me you’ll take against him instantly. But as was the case playing as ‘Nomad’ (a far more agreeable silent-but-deadly type) in Crysis, what sets you strides ahead of the low-ranking Koreans in combat isn’t your badly conceived one-liners; it’s your ultra high-tech nanosuit.

Up until about half-way through the game, things are peachy. The nanosuit’s cocktail of maximum strength, speed, and armour, in addition to the cloak mode, is lethal. The suit’s batteries still drain rapidly (though less rapidly than with Nomad’s suit), but there’s more than enough power to cruise through enemy encampments with ease. Many’s the time I’ve decloaked into strength mode (thereby lessening recoil on my weapon) for five second bursts, dispatching entire squads of soldiers before they’re able to react, then cloaking again and recovering my power while hidden behind the nearest available cover.

That’s just my style though—I’m much like Jack Bauer or Batman, if I do say so myself. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Crysis games is that they let you imprint your style of play on the game; rather than the other way around. So, if you’re more comfortable deploying the less sophisticated, but no less effective, tactics of John Rambo or the Terminator, you can forego stealth in favour of rockets, grenades and incendiary rounds, and the enemy will be none the wiser, not least because they’ll all be dead.

Warhead presents a playground of epic proportions. The enormous jungles and mountainous snowscapes (occasionally interrupted by concrete military bases) that completed Crysis’ limited but quite wondrous environmental palette return with hardly a single noticeable change. And the nanosuit only enhances the joyous sandbox-lite theme. But when the better trained quarter of the KPA (including a regiment wearing their own suits) turns up at that half-way point, the shit begins to drift gracefully toward the proverbial fan. The game’s deceptive nature is revealed.

And you might think this was because of an increase in the complexity of the artifical intelligence, but I’m not so sure. Warhead’s AI is a curious specimen. On the one hand, there’s no doubt it can tax the health meter—there were plenty of stages during and in the run up to the end game where I struggled to survive, having to reload from quick saves time and again. But on the other hand, it almost always looks incredibly stupid.

The enemy are programmed with the fundamentals of locating a target, closing in on that target, and aiming to fire, but there’s no evidence of any form of squad cohesion or coordination. Squads of KPA will happily bunch-up in tight formations, making themselves more vulnerable to well-placed grenades. They rush immediately to the source of any disturbance, exposing their flanks and losing any semblance of a defensive position in the process. And they apparently have no regard whatsoever for the importance of concealment, merrily prancing out from behind solid cover (presumably for a clearer view) and straight into the line of fire, or charging like lunatic jihadists toward my mounted chaingun.

Simplistic AI was a thorn in the side of Crysis, and it hasn’t been addressed in any major way by Warhead. And it presents what at first seems a paradox: how can enemies be so punishing while simultaneously exhibiting behaviour so suggestive of imbecility? I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the AI that lies behind the punishment at all, rather, the increasing number of enemies on screen, and the increasing potency (and in many cases, size) of their weapons simply ramps up the damage taken per hit. The enemy just gets bigger and badder, inevitably resulting in an increased frequency of player death—a crude and not at all praiseworthy design approach by Crytek.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only area where Warhead fails to meet the benchmark set by its more glamorous peers. It also fails to deliver in a big way in terms of plot, which might not have been worth mentioning if we were discussing Crysis (where narrative complexity was never on the menu to begin with), but Warhead opens itself up to criticism when it attempts, between firefights, to tell a story.

The central problem with the story is well illustrated by the fact that if you were to ask me to summarise it for you, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. It’s told chiefly through in-game cutscenes, which range in quality and description from nonsensical to dull, and from poorly acted to badly shot. It has something to do with a past relationship between Psycho and a fellow soldier of his by the name of O’Neill, or at least I think it does. You see, I can’t even tell you with certainty what the subject matter is, let alone go into any detail.

Frankly it reeks of Crytek trying to make Warhead into something more than a plain sequel, and falling down in the process. And it’s odd that they’ve even made the attempt, considering that every other element of the game is entirely by the numbers, sticking religiously to the enjoyable but ultimately shallow gameplay formula of the previous outing.

True, some good work has been done on the technical side of things—I’ve spoken before of my appreciation for Warhead’s improved optimization on lower-end PCs—but I can’t think of any other features that would count as even slightly innovative.

With all that said, Warhead’s greatest flaw is its mediocrity. It never grabbed me. It belongs in that cursed category of games that I have difficulty playing for more than half an hour at a time, another recent example being Prey. There is something to be said for giving the player more freedom than they’re accustomed to by opening up the battlefield in the way that Crysis and Warhead have done, but it’s a thin line to tread.

What Crytek have failed to achieve is a balance between creating that openness and building meaningful connections between the player and the game world. The few characters that there are in Warhead are emotionally barren. For instance, the bare minimum of effort was put into portraying Psycho (who you’d think Crytek might’ve wanted to concentrate on) as someone who’s torn between getting a bit angry sometimes (the outer limit of his psychosis) and upholding the Geneva Conventions.

There’s a scene three quarters of the way through where he kills a KPA soldier and then sits down on a rock to cry; incredibly poignant when acted by Kiefer Sutherland in the third season of 24, but pitifully unengaging in Warhead, where the essential preceding character development never gets off the ground.

It’s not just the characters that are impossible to relate to either. There’s also zero emotion invested in the combat, which may sound confused to a less demanding “I just wanna have fun” shooter fan, but it’s a lingering concern for someone (like myself) who experienced something quite profound in the electrifying battles of the Call of Duty series.

Firing your weapon and being able to recognise the resulting impact on your target (albeit in a multitude of ways, some more explosive than others) is one thing, but if the significance of critical events in an engagement doesn’t resonate with the player, those events are demoted to white noise. How can I possibly immerse myself in a combat scenario when the environment so perfectly resembles a playground, when the friendlies around me start opening fire on an enemy I can’t even see, and when I feel absolutely no need to protect my men? It is fun, but it’s not enough for a connoisseur.

And that pretty much summarises my opinion of Warhead. It’s the quintessential action gaming romp, with a twist we’ve come to expect: you get to attack camps from different directions, in different ways, and occasionally avoid them altogether, rather than being funneled into them in a fashion typical of a genre so persistently unwilling to escape from its ubiquitous linearity.

Do I regret my purchase? Not a great deal. Let’s not forget that Crysis Wars, an offering for which I’ve already expressed my moderately high regard, comes bundled with Warhead. And let’s not lose sight of the enduring fact that, though I probably won’t revisit Warhead in future, it is a relatively solid FPS. It’s just not in the same league as a Half-Life 2, a Call of Duty 4, or a Bioshock. Give it a go if my report hasn’t discouraged you, but don’t expect anything spectacular.

70%

Infected

Left 4 Dead!  If you haven’t played it yet, get on Steam right now and download the demo, then come back … if you can!  That is, if you somehow manage to tear yourself away from what is almost certainly going to be one of the best shooters of the year, and probably the greatest coop experience in gaming history.

The full game arrives on Tuesday (18th Nov), and will consist of four campaigns, aptly referred to as ‘movies’.  The demo, now available to all Steam users, is of the opening chapters of the first movie ‘No Mercy’.  It’s the level we’ve all seen in preview footage already, but no amount of passive viewing can prepare you for the intense bombardment on your senses when a horde of fifteen or twenty infected turn the corner, charging blindly toward you in an unrelenting torrent.

I’ll restrain myself from talking about the game any longer—I don’t want to take anything away from my review—but it suffices to say that, barring an unprecedented and staggering decline in gameplay quality from the demo to the game proper, I won’t be scoring it any lower than 90%.

Apart from L4D, my playlist is in a state of flux.  I completed another run-through of Call of Duty 4 this morning on regular difficulty, sacrificing the challenge of higher settings for a more enjoyable thrill ride, which was nice.  Another game of Civilization IV has just got underway, this time with MozzerV12 and PigMental.  We’re in a team of three against six computer players, split into two teams.  There’s nothing to report yet—I’ve only just booted-up my fourth city—but the cluttered archipelago map type ought to facilitate some exciting developments.

In retrospect, our attempt to play Company of Heroes against other players online was rather premature.  Finding a stable game was trying enough, with an assortment of connectivity issues and a scarcity of willing players with suitably low pings resulting in arduous waiting periods.

What immediately hit home in our first game was that we weren’t always going to be able to select to play as the Allies.  With some games already set up and with the Allied slots taken, we were inevitably going to have to fill the significantly less comfortable shoes of the Axis.  And as Axis, we met with disaster—utterly out-classed and with no concept of how to command a German army.

We practiced against computer opponents for a couple of weeks, but both CoH and Dawn of War have been on ice for a while now, though they’re still on the cards for casual play.  Civ IV and L4D should provide plenty of multiplayer sustenance for the holiday period, and the late release of GTA IV will provide a backup in December, if we need one.

What I need is a good single player replacement, and the question I need to answer is whether I replay a reliable classic (either Bioshock or Deus Ex) or get myself something new and fancy in the form of Far Cry 2 or Fallout 3.  I want them on Steam, but this blasted ‘credit crunch’ is screwing with the exchange rates!  I’m looking at £35+ on Steam versus £25 for a hard copy on Amazon—another unfortunate no-brainer from my perspective.

The only other title I’m considering is Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One.  I was pleasantly surpised by the demo when I played it recently, impressed not only by the trademark Penny Arcade wit, but by the level of polish, and the delightfully simple turn-based combat mode.  With Episode Two now available, I’m very tempted to dive in.

Work on my Crysis Warhead review continues apace, and with oodles of time booked off from work in the coming weeks I’m aiming to have it finished soon.

Meanwhile, play L4D! But do be on the lookout for a boomer won’t you?

It’s war!

The past few weeks have seen me playing far more multiplayer than single player.  In the gaming vacuum that followed the end of my Vampire Bloodlines playthrough, I landed myself in the harsh but welcoming bosom of Dawn of War (with the Winter Assault and Dark Crusade expansions installed).  I played with buddy MozzerV12, skirmishing with AI opponents, honing our collective skill in preparation for a step up to the online scene.

When we eventually plucked up the courage to play matches against human opponents, we had surprisingly mixed success.  I say surprisingly in that I think we both expected repeated and uninterrupted dismal failures.  What actually came to pass was that we managed to pull off several victories, some won through daring blitz attacks I previously thought were beyond our combined strategic ability to orchestrate.  Often we risked the security of our bases or sacrificed outposts, throwing our Space Marine and Imperial Guard armies at the enemy in the hope that we would permanently break them while maintaining enough of our infastructure to survive.

Prior to having just consulted my profile statistics, I would have estimated that my losses outnumbered my wins; as it turns out my win/loss ratio has levelled out at a perfect 50%—nothing to write home about (if I were away from home) but good enough to satisfy my meager pride.  Something tells me that if we played more games though, that ratio might slowly start to sink.  We suffered some horrific defeats it has to be said, mainly at the hands of the nigh-unstoppable Necrons, their most devastating tactic being to deep-strike (teleport) in squad after squad of Flayed Ones, terrifying cyborgs with the skins of their kills stitched to their exoskeletons—a real bummer for morale.  DoW can be a tough bitch.

After a week or so of hardcore strategy I was very much in the mood for a meat and potatoes first person shooter.  Bioshock and Call of Duty 4 were the only two contenders for my spare time, and given that I see Bioshock as more of a light, delicate cheesecake than a fine steak, I opted for a spot of modern warfare.  I’d not been enjoying COD 4 for more than a couple of days when Crysis Warhead—a title that up until that point had not been on my wish list—was released on Steam.

My interest in buying Warhead was piqued not just by its being on Steam, which by itself is reason enough to consider a game in a more favourable light, but because MozzerV12 (who had bought the game himself a day or so beforehand) was warbling on about a fresh, fast paced and generally spiffy multiplayer component, dubbed Crysis Wars and bundled with any purchase of Warhead.  I advanced swiftly to the checkout process.

What ensued the following evening, with Warhead successfully downloaded and installed, was one hell of thrill ride of a multiplayer experience.  I gave the Power Struggle game mode, which I had a bad time with in Crysis’ multiplayer, another go, but was once again disappointed.  It was only when I dived into Team Instant Action (a fairly naff label for Crysis Wars’ team deathmatch) that I got the real buzz.

I hadn’t had as much intoxicating fun in a multiplayer game since the Team Fortress 2 beta.  With one or two exceptions the maps are compact treasures, designed with frantic close-to-medium range gunfights in mind.  There’s almost no room at all for complex thought; tactical instinct is the name of the game, with moments of teamwork arising spontaneously, at intervals, and lasting for a few minutes at most.  It won’t be for everyone, but for me it hits the spot, much like spaghetti bolognese hits the spot when I’m famished.  Kudos also to Crytek for the work they’ve done on optimisation: on low ‘mainstream’ settings, it looks as good as Crysis if not better, and runs quite significantly more smoothly on my now-ageing GeForce 8800 machine.

Just as I was getting comfortable with DoW and Crysis Wars, fellow gamer Pigmental—resident scumbag and Gladiator/Russell Crowe hater (if those traits aren’t one and the same)—persuaded me to return to World War II RTS Company of Heroes—DoW’s successor in all but name.  Having bought a copy of the expansion Opposing Fronts many months ago, and not having had anyone to play it with, the transition was a welcome one.  Though I’m a big fan of DoW’s classic Warhammer 40k setting, CoH exists on a higher level in terms of the gameplay mechanics it has on offer.  The importance of cover and flanking maneuvers, the bread and butter of modern warfare, is incredibly well realised, and the authentic WWII environments are brought vividly to life by the stunning physics engine.  Where DoW can tend to feel a bit toyish, CoH feels like a real war, and that’s why it excels above the rest of the competition as well.

With a week or so of matches against AI under our belt—some of which having been more difficult to win than others, some of which we tragically lost—we’re now on the verge of another ascent to human vs human play.  Besides my flagrant cowardice and lingering pessimism, our main concern is how much lag we’re going to get in a 3v3 game.  I’ll report on my experience at a later date.

In other news, I’m beginning to get in the right mood to write a review, and I’ve little doubt now that it will be of Warhead.  The review of Sins of a Solar Empire, which I promised long ago, is henceforth postponed until the release of the third and final expansion, on track for a release sometime next year.  I’m looking forward to the first, Entrenchment, due before Christmas.

For now, bon chance!

Screw this for a game of vampires!

I will get on to my multiplayer exploits soon, but first I must relay a sudden turn for the worse in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.  Last week I reported that I had reached Chinatown, and that despite the constant glitches, I was having a good time.  That was the status quo up until a couple of days ago.  I was being assigned some highly original quests (one involving me fetching an eye from the corpse of an enemy of a deranged chinese shop owner) and taking part in the usual engrossing dialogue—the highlight being a fascinating conversation with Beckett, a vampire scholar (and also my favourite character in the game), in which he divulges his private thoughts on Gehenna (vampire armageddon) and a little of his own history.

The tragedy occurred when I returned to the main plot quest (there’s always one), first infiltrating a family gathering of the Giovanni for Lacroix, the vampire prince of Los Angeles.  The mission started very well, with a number of options available to the player as to how to gain entry to the Giovanni mansion, and thence to the inner sanctum in search of the mission objective (which I won’t describe here for fear of a spoiler overdose).

Naturally your clan (class) choice has a confining influence on those options, so for me (a Toreador) the straight-up assault approach was out of the question.  I got in by tricking a drunk couple (well I say drunk couple—it was in fact just the wife who had had one too many vodkas) out of their tickets to the gathering.  Once inside the mansion I once again went to work with my supernatural charm on the guests, currying favour, experience points, and, most importantly, access to the basement.

All superb RPG fare so far, but all good things must come to an end, and this good thing came to an end very quickly, at the mission’s conclusion.  Having gained access to the mansion depths entirely through subterfuge, I was forced to fight through a limitless reserve of zombies, and then engage in a dull and repetitive boss battle of the kind you’d expect to find in an old genre progenitor like Duke Nukem.  And that was only the beginning of my woes.

Next up was a mission impossible scenario—rescue an archaeologist from a fortress of the Society of Leopold (vampire hunters).  My well honed skills were useless.  Faced with a legion of trained killers aware of an impending assault my only option was to sneak my way in.  Sadly the stealth system in Bloodlines is a shambles.  The standard awareness meter, famously implemented in the Thief series, is what determines whether you’re spotted or not, but it works in such a retarded way that I could, with just one or two experience points spent in stealth, crawl past the hunters with them staring straight at me.  You have to see it to believe it.

Being someone who sinks into boredom and despair rather easily, I surprised myself by striving through the mission, and the next one, and the next, hoping for a return to some more satisfying and involving gameplay, an injection of riveting dialogue—some relief from the monotony of endless combat.  Grievously, nothing of the sort ever came.

Now I’m at another boss battle in the basement of the Sabbat headquarters, having gunned my way through three or four sprawling floors crammed with generic enemies.  It turns out I simply don’t have the hit points and firepower I need to get through the confrontation, and so I’ve decided to stop playing.  Having experienced the end-game twice before I know that things only go further downhill from now on anyway, so I won’t be missing much.

The fact that I will almost certainly return to Bloodlines at a later date despite all its low points is testimony to how unusual a case it really is.  I’ve only ever played as two of the seven clans—Toreador and Tremere (vampire mages)—and I’ve heard amazing things about some of the others. Malkavians are supposed to be particularly interesting, having been driven mad by their vampirism to the extent that they hear voices emanating from inanimate objects and persons alike.  I’ve no doubt there’s plenty of replay value to come.

Apart from its replayability though, I recommend Bloodlines to an RPG fan for its core brilliance.  I won’t repeat what I’ve said in my previous post, suffice to say that it’s a game that scores highly where an RPG most needs to.  It lets down its guard at times, with poor AI, frankly rubbish combat mechanics, and a platter full of bugs and unfinished content (neither of which taste very nice), but it’s still one of the best ’serious’ games out there.  What’s more, it’s now on a Steam for an incredibly low price. Give it a whirl.

You call this a patch?

Who wants to know what I’ve been playing recently?  No one?  Pah!  The absence of interest does not discourage me in the slightest!

These days there are four games on my playlist. My first single player experience of choice is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, an RPG oddity that I’ve blogged about once or twice before on Imperium.

I’m playing as a Toreador, the “pretty boy” vampire breed in pen and paper RPG maker White Wolf’s campaign setting. My weapons are my seductive charm, my dazzling charisma, and my preternatural presence.  I also carry a Colt Anaconda in the rare case that my words fail me and I require a different kind of stopping power.

This is my third play through of Bloodlines, but the first time I’ve played with the unnofficial community patch installed, now at version 5.6.  I have to say I’m entirely unimpressed by the patch, having noticed no impact at all so far on the game’s stability or completeness.  I get prolonged stutter from the moment I try to load my save game, and glitching in facial animation, audio cutting short, horrendous crashes, and all sorts of other technical blips and immersion-breaking moments ensue thereafter.  I’m not just starting out either – I’m now into the closing chapters of the game in Chinatown, one of the four hubs constituting the backbone of the game world.

What sparkles underneath all that muck, and what makes Bloodlines a curious anomaly in its genre rather than a total failure, is the remarkable attention to quality in the dialogue, and a small (compared to shambling behemoth The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) group of superbly realised NPCs to interact with in a world that, at least at times, pulsates with heavy neo-gothic atmosphere.  When Bloodlines is good, it can stand proudly at the side of Planescape: Torment or Deus Ex; when its bad… well let’s not dwell on the bad.

Second in single player is a long campaign in Medieval II: Total War, with me playing as England (like you had to ask).  Having attempted and failed at this campaign before I know the dangers of lingering and not expanding.  The goal is to capture 45 settlements, including Jerusalem, before the time is up.

I was quick to remove the taint of rebels and Scots from the British Isles, having left them to develop in my previous game, much to my detriment.  I’ve still got problems-a-plenty though.  The inevitable war with the French is in full swing, and their allies, the Danes, are presently dominating my navy (for shame) with a fleet of longboats.

My greatest frustration remains the Pope and his twisted sense of justice.  On paper, the policy of the Papal States is that all catholic factions ought to get along swimmingly, march together into the Middle East and put the muslims out of their misery.  The way it works out is that the Pope picks favourites from among his flock—in my case the French (how I rejoiced)—allows them to wage war against as many catholic factions as they want, and punishes their victims (me) for daring to counter-attack.

The Pope is so talented at alienating catholics that I’m now on my way to join a crusade to capture Tunis, not held by African muslims as you might think, but by Sicily, whom the Pope has kindly excommunicated.  As long as none of the other factions capture the city before me, I should slip back into the Pope’s good books, at least for a while.  If not I’ll call my own crusade against the silly bugger.  No, that’s a bad idea – wouldn’t want all of Europe trying to murder me now would I?

I won’t keep you any longer.  Return here in days to come and I’ll tell you all about my multiplayer escapades in Team Fortress 2 and Civilization IV. Cheerio!

Inspirational Inauguration Speech

My friends, we observe today not a victory of one blogging platform over another, but a celebration of freedom – symbolising an end, as well as a beginning – signifying renewal, as well as change.  For I have sworn before you and Almighty Whedon the same solemn oath that we observed those many years ago when the great cultural pillars called Lack of Faith and Imperium were founded.

The world is very different now.  Then-unimagined treasures are now within the grasp of man.  No Country For Old Men, and Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog have graced our DVD players and hard drives.  And yet the same principles and beliefs that we have always fought to defend and uphold are still at issue around the internet – the belief that the value of entertainment stems not from marketing or advertising, but from the opinions of fans.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that revolution.  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to fan and Hollywood Studio alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of blogger – born in radness, tempered by Company of Heroes, disciplined by Portal, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those consumer rights to which the blogosphere has always been committed.

The old ways now are behind us.  No longer can we be separated by petty differences of genre or media.  Let this new blog be a symbol that the realms of gaming and film, television and literature will from this day be made one.  For united there is little we cannot achieve.  Divided, there is little we can – for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

And so the trumpet summons us to blog again.  With good writing our only sure reward, with our readers the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth and review the films and games we love in hopes of honoring the great critics and fans that have gone before us, and of inspiring those that we will leave behind.