Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is my ideal Christmas game, because this time of the year, I fantasize a lot about stabbing people in the neck. Far Cry 3 delivers in the neck stabbing department, and it has all the other markings of a great game, but its flaws reduce the final score noticeably

Island helladise 
Far Cry is as sandboxy as it gets. You get a huge tropical island to play with, and it is filled with pirates and tigers. The rest of the fauna is equally impressive. There are mountains and streams (full of pirates), lots of palms, ancient temples and Japanese bunkers (which are also full of pirates). But everything comes across as samey-same after a while. There are only a few distinctive landmarks which give you a sense of place. Other sandbox games give you strong visual cues were you are, but here, it all drowns in the same jungle green, so you are going around at high speeds, but you never have the feeling of arriving at a special place.
Nonetheless, Rook Island is beautifully realized, breathing a heavy mixture of undiscovered island paradise and third world hellhole: the rusty cars, the dwellings right between upscale alternative tourist destination and leper colony, and many, many micro-junkyards between the palms. And AK-47s for everyone. Ubisoft really can do tropical islands. It's just not very variable and comes across a bit bland.

Unreliable narrator
This game has a strangely weak and somewhat offensive plot. You are Jason, a douchy American tourist. You and your douchy friends went to this unspoiled island, were a lesson in skydiving suddenly became an exercise in surprise adoption (kidnapping is such a harsh word).  You got away, the nice (black) islanders crowned you their warrior king just because, and you are off fighting (black) pirates and freeing your friends.
"Colonialist subtext" is a rather mild word for what appears to be happening here. So you are the great white dope who has to set things right? And it involves shooting so many black guys that the whole American police force shakes with impotent envy? There have been attempts to color the whole experience as the view of an unreliable narrator, i.e. that the protagonist is subverting or hiding the "objective truth" of the narrative from the recipient, making the whole game a delicious puzzle, as we try to ferret out what Jason really did and why. The problem is: I don't buy it.
This is mainly a problem of the medium. A first person shooter offers a strangely unmediated access to the narrative, even more so then a first person narrator in a novel. The medium is also based upon a contract between the player and the game: You as the player are directly able to influence the world according to the rules of the game. These rules might be changed, and control might be yanked away from you for short periods of time (e.g. cut scenes), but basically you are able to do stuff, and your actions have direct consequences which are "real" in the game.
Thus it is easily possible to posit an unreliable first person narrator in a novel who boasts about liberating this island paradise from pirates while still leaving enough markers to appear unreliable, it appears far more difficult in the medium of the FPS.
Secondly, Jason lives through various hallucinatory experiences which are clearly marked as such. While his normal stay on the island is depicted in the highly realistic and physical glory that a high-end PC can render, the dream sequences stand out as such - strange colors, milky vistas, dreamlike visions, gravity twists and so on. This is also true for their beginnings and their ends: Thus, after the dream sequences, we are explicitly put back into the "normal" reality of the game. This makes it more difficult to ascertain a third, additional level, where Jason experiences Rook Island differently from "subjective reality" or where he makes up a reality of his own.
There are a lot of nice small touches which could elevate the narrative from FPS boiler plate, but some of them fall flat. Jason starts out as a whingy bro with a bro haircut: In the starting mission he is a bag of nerves and close to a breakdown because of all the violence, but the game mechanics undercut a slow evolution from nervous wreck to apex predator. The whinginess returns in some of the later cutscenes, but it feels false then, because I have been killing bears with rocket launchers for hours when that cutscene arrives.
But as said before, some subversive touches remain: Glimpses in Jason's recent past show some unsettling potential for violence and create a very unflattering image of white tourists in the Far East. The "bad" ending is apt to twist the whole perception of Jason's role on the island and the islanders who made him "king", but many players won't get that far, or will choose differently. The scavenger hunt for Japanese war letters, the communications of a drug ring and the tribal relics insinuate that Rook Island has always been a place of violence, and replacing all your starting gear with the pelts of all the animals you have slain is nicely atavistic. On this note: I think I have driven the leopard past extinction into reality deletion. I have shot so many of the big cats. I am sorry. Speaking of which:

Fun parts
Hijacking a patrol boat, going around the whole island and peppering every pirate stronghold with the turret machine gun. Running a machete-wielding pirate over with a quad bike, after the seventeenth attempt. Becoming neck-stabbing king of stabneck mountain. Running over bull sharks with a jet ski. Shooting a bear with a RPG-7. Driving a two-ton truck off a cliff. Burning down a football field of ganja plants and inhaling the fumes. Cleaning out one pirate outpost all stealthy-like, the next from really afar, and the third one by just walking up and hosing it down. Note: You can do nearly all this without entering into the plot - a real strength of the game.

Little stories
The effects of the ecosystem and the sandbox: So I drive up to river where I see a small, cozy hut and a fence between me and the river. One of the nice islander stands at the river, partly hidden by the fence. I get out of the car to say hello and look at the hut, when the islander suddenly says "ack!" and disappears behind the fence. I run up to the fence, look down on the river and see a fat crocodile. "So that's where the islander went" I think, but then there is no more fence and my screen is full of crocodile jaw. And that was the first time I died.
Or: I am busy crafting healing drugs by the road (you take so many drugs in this game) when a jeep full of pirates  rolls up. They get out, but then two cassowaries join the party and peck the shit out of them. After that, I shoot the cassowaries and turn them into a nice new wallet matching my leopard leather case for all the needles I've been using. Other players will have completely different stories to tell.

Mandatory instafail stealth mission
This game has it. One full point automatically deducted.

Vaas Montenegro
My favority madman in gaming right now. Excellent voiceacting, this guy really steals the show every time he turns up. I would like to have seen more of him. The next deathdealer hordeboss is going to be Vaas, with some new grotty paint on.

4 of 5 stabbed necks, -1 for mandatory instafail stealth mission, for an effective score of 3

Dishonored

The mark of a good game? Simple - shutting down the computer at five in the morning. I like Dishonored very much, and there are only minor quibbles. You should try it. Spoilers abound.

The Dickensian aspect

You play Corvo, a supernatural assassin, in this first person stealth game/ shooter. Your playground is the city of Dunwall: Imagine two-thirds Victorian London and one third Blitz era London, add a large spoon of leper colony and garnish with steampunk walkers. Corvo is in service of a conspiracy hunting the conspirators who killed the Empress, so that they can be brought to justice or crown the Empress' daughter, as the case may be. There is also a plague, the whale oil powering the trains and walkers is running out, and premonitions of capital-D-doom are everywhere.  If you think this will end well, you are as naive as Corvo, a professional assassin who will suck down any drink handed to him.

The city of Dunwall is a delight to explore. While this is not a sandbox game, the single missions take place in sprawling levels which make the most of Corvo's ability to jump nearly everywhere, and every bit of location oozes atmosphere. The missions function as a kind of Gin Lane for single aspects of an imperial metropolis in final decay. So one of the first missions leads you into a large, bureaucratic institution, a nice mix between the Vatican and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. The artwork is spot on, as in all levels, creating a strong quasi-Victorian flair, with lots of brilliant details bringing the world to life, although every household seems to have the same two-by-four meter oil painting of the regent. As this is a stealth game, you get to eavesdrop and watch little scenes playing out between religious fanatics, and after you ganked them, you get to read their correspondence. Leaving the level, you have been the witness to some splendid world building, and each of the "topic" levels enforces this effect - at the end, I really thought I "knew" the society of Dunwall. There are lots of tantalizing hints about why Dunwall is in dire straits, although these are not expressly explored, and their moral (The Empire kills magic whales to power their war machines) is quite heavy handed. Regrettably, the grand finale of the game does not use this foundation, leaving you in an impressive location that, regrettably, seems quite divorced from Dunwall.

I think this is the greatest strength of Dishonored - Dunwall sure leaves an impression, on par with Rapture, and that is saying something.

The story itself is not that strong, with a big honking twist visible even behind the horizon.

Now you see me, now you don't

Dishonored is a stealth game, and normally I am not great fan of those, especially if you instafail a mission if a single guard notices you. If a stealth game is unforgiving, I unforgive right back. The stealth-aspect is very strong here, but there are always many different approaches available to you. This is not only true for the possible ways to reach a target, but also for the level of violence you want to employ. The levels are riddled with rooftops, canals and secret approaches: The careful examination a plaza from a rooftop may uncover surprising ways to get into the arch overseer's office, and all the while you get to listen to small dialogues, and the insidious artwork drips into you brain...And even if you fail the stealth, you can mostly fight your way free. A mission might become more challenging after an alarm, but if you really hate nosy guards, there is nothing here to keep you from slaughtering them all.

And there are many many ways of slaughter. Dishonored is basically like Bioshock, in that you have various weapons and powers, but here truly all powers have their uses in that you can build your style of play around them. If you liked the mechanics of Bioshock, you will feel right at home. You even heal by gulping down food, like potted whale meat  The weapons and magic powers (not gained from gene-tonics, but awarded by the benevolent Prince of Darkness, who has taken a liking to Corvo) are steeped black magic or steampunk, and although I have a bit of a dislike for this genre, playing around with the various tools handed to you is great fun.

Consequences, schmonsequences

And there is a moral choice system. There are two endings based on how much of the Dunwall police force you cut to ribbons. One is all sweetness and light (hard to believe in a city that just lost a third of its population to the plague), the other is rather dark, and, concerning the endings, there is nothing in between. This is a bit weak. But the missions also change a bit with regard to your previous exploits. If you kill with gay abandon, the street with fill with voracious rat swarms, aggressive plague victims (basically zombies) will be everywhere and City Watch will step up security. This not only changes the tone of the game, but also adapts  the missions to your play style. An aggressive player will have that much more enemies to play with, while a stealthy player can go for a playthrough without a single character killed (although this defeats the purpose in my opinion, I mean, you get all these nice toys, and you can stick a razor wire mine to a guy while you stopped time, so that he explodes into bloody chunks when time starts up again and you are twenty feet off on a rooftop, scratching your chin and going hmmm...why would you want to miss out on that?). I like it it that even the weepers, the half-zombified victims of the plague, are integrated into the moral choice system. The game counts them as people, and if you want a happy Dunwall, then you should too.

Too short

this game is.

I really like Bioshock

Yes, I do.

Four and a half tins of Pratchett's Jellied Eels

A Golden Age of Gaming

Robert Brockway thinks it's a great time to be playing computer games. I concur, mostly, but I find it strange that he returns again and again to his ten-year old self. Most kids are easy to impress (next time someone brings their brats over just tell them about the twelve-fingered man living under their beds if you want to check this statement) and I stopped listening to the views of people who can be fitted into an empty dishwasher. Still, he has many good points and it was about time somebody said it - we may not have our rocket backpacks, and neo-feudalism is just around the corner, but the gaming in this timeline is great.

Skyrim - again

I hope for the sake of my well-being that these are the closing comments on Skyrim - at least for the time being. Two days ago I finally ended the main quest, and while the game graciously allows you to go on playing with your character, I feel spent and see this as a good point to to put Skyrim on the back burner. Still, I want to correct my earlier assumptions, and while Skyrim still is a very strong game, and definitely worthy to be admitted into my personal Valhalla of gaming, a full play-through still showed some points which appear as weaknesses.

Non-optional upgrades

I feel that Skyrim - contrasted with, e.g., Fallout New Vegas - has only limited replay value (which is a good thing in a very tangible way, with just having wasted half a month on the game). A replay of an RPG is often motivated by trying out a different character type, and the best RPGs allow very different approaches to plot and gameplay. I don't see that possibility in Skyrim: While the whole setting screams for a barbarian character - a Conan, if you will - who abhors the unnatural magecraft, and this would be a nice choice for a replay, I would always end up playing a character with at least moderate magical abilities, as the gameplay forces you to use magics to deal with your opponents - especially the dragons. As your figure becomes better at what he does, and as only a handful of tactics seem to work, the pool of possible characters seems rather limited, even if you have some ten fantasy races to chose from. But a fighter-mage is a fighter-mage, whatever his ear size. And your character will get good at lockpicking, seems no way around it. At the moment I don't plan a replay (again, this is a thinly veiled blessing) because I already know how my character would develop.

A nagging sense of familiarity

Atmosphere is Skyrim's strong suit - even after dozens of hours the environment appears beautiful, and you are regularly surprised with epic views and vistas. This atmosphere (and the fact that Skyrim does not fall into the theme park trap - or structures its theme park in such a subtile way that it never becomes an issue) was my main motivation for going out an exploring. And while exploring, you find the dungeons - their symbols pop up on your compass, conveniently divided into nord barrows, nord crypts, dwemer ruins, armed camps, unspecified caves and so on.

Once inside, the feeling of being in a strictly linear haunted house ride becomes stronger with each dungeon you pass. After a dozen or so you find yourself looking for the sliding wall section close to the entrance where your treasure-laden ass will be deposited after dealing with the boss fight, and that's not a sign of full immersion. I'd rather have complex cave systems where you could get completely lost while your supplies and assets dwindle, but other players told me they where very happy with this haunted house dungeon design - getting lost is not for everyone, and it's nice to know that you don't have to walk back all those crypts, some of us have work to do etc. And the visual appeal and distinctiveness of the dungeons makes up for the linear design.

So there you have it: two minor niggles, one of which is purely subjective, while the other allows me to leave the house again. I see no need to correct my earlier rating.

5 of 5 cute little rabbits soul-trapped and fireballed

Skyrim

This is - for me - the most involving game of 2011. Already, I have sunk at least 40 hours into it, and it has completely replaced Fallout New Vegas. I also have the feeling that I have barely scratched the surface.

It is a classic open-world RPG, part of the Elder Scrolls series. Skyrim, a northerly province that appears to have been blended from equal parts Scandinavia and Scotland, is beset by the return of dragons and divided by a bitter civil war. You play the big damn hero who will have to set things right.

I could look at this for hours

Skyrim is realized beautifully. While longer play will show some rough edges, the visuals pull you into this wintry realm. Frost covers the mountains, snow drifts by, and at night, the aurora borealis plays across the starry skies. For the ultimate in atmosphere, play it on a winter's night with wide open windows, clothed in a wet t-shirt or just a loincloth and a handful of bear fat.

Nearly everything else supports this northerly flair, from the design of the villages and towns, to the creatures you encounter. There are only some minor fractures, like the lizardmen and catpeople that turn up once in a while, but they were probably necessary to retain the furry segment of the customer base.

Deep history

Skyrim shares a history with Tamriel and all the older (elder?) parts of the Elder Scrolls - which I haven't played. Sorry, I had to spend my time acquiring a near-encyclopedic knowledge of Fallout's universe. At times, this made me feel like the kid who didn't pay attention in history class and now has to ask everybody about this strange "First World War" everyone is still upset about. I think that people who have played the other parts will have a very deep experience.

Also, there are tons of books lying about, and you could use them to read up on Tamriel's history, peoples, beliefs and customs, but spending time in a pc-game to read a book appears to me as a singularly twisted way to waste my time. So I (and my character) stays an uninformed oaf - luckily, everybody seems to share my hatred of the snooty high elves, so I don't stand out too much.

You are what you do

In contrast to most other RPGs, you don't get to create your character in depth. You may select a race, which may or may not support the role you want to play, the appearance of you character is heavily customizable (as is usual by now), but you don't get to put all your skill points into chess boxing and take it from there. Instead, your character gets good at the things you make him do - do a lot of sneaking and shooting guards in the throat with a bow, and your character will turn into a sniper. This means, that your preferred style of play defines your character, and if you want to deviate from that, you will have to watch your tactics carefully.

I watched my first character, whom I wanted to play as a mage out to rip Skyrim's secrets from its tombs, degenerate into just such a bowman. At level 15, I tearfully shouted "look what you have become!" and left him on an isolated savegame for a more coherent practitioner of the dark arts.

Feeling forced

I haven't finished the main plot yet, but some of the side quests appear to force you down certain roads. At one point, some goddess of decay asked me to lure a priest into a temple, where he was to be sacrificed and eaten. I returned to the priest, hoping that there would be an opportunity to warn him or at least to send him away before the trap sprung. No such luck - after you talk him into following you, the only way to get rid of him is to put him into the big disemboweling machine. So this priest is still following me, and every time I turn to him he assures me that his god's protection is absolute and everything is going to be just dandy. On the other hand, he is a quite competent spellcaster, and I have cleared out the second Nord catacomb with his support. And he doesn't seem to count as an official follower, so I still get to keep my housecarl to lug around my stuff and beat those draugr into submission which get past my fireballs...

You will find plots and adventure hooks all over the place. If you see an interesting ruin in the distance, be assured that it is not just scenery - there is an adventure to be had there, so walk up and check it out. But (at least up to now) don't expect to be able to make many choices. The dungeon design supports this: Mostly long, winding series of chambers and caves (but so very pretty, awe-inspiring caves) which lead in a loop close to the entrance, a bit like a roller coaster or a haunted house ride. You won't get lost, but on the other hand, you can't get lost. Still, it is very enticing dungeoneering.

Yes: a very involving, very deep game. If you are into this stuff, be warned that you might spend an inordinate amount of time on it. The wife might not approve.

5 of 5 of the restless dead, the draugr, the ancient Nord traitors who had truck with the dragons and were punished for it with eternal hunger, sealed in their crypts, gnawing their own shrouds - forever, in darkness. Is that a weak, wickering torch in the distance?

The most homoerotic tale ever created in any medium

At least, that's Charlie Brooker's take on Modern Warfare 3. I didn't play that game, and I would like to point out that some FPS-protagonists exist that don't look and act like overcompensating machos - Doctor Freeman from Half-Life and the mute from BioShock come to mind. But Brooker has a point and he brings it across convincingly and amusingly.

Thoughts on Rage

Of course I got Rage as soon as I could - it is a post-apocalyptic shooter (and racing game...with RPG elements, also, there are RPGs involved, and we like those). It's by id Software, and I remember Doom one to three with great fondness. Especially Doom 3, which we tore down during one epic weekend. We pulled down the blinds, stored up on snacks with enough food preservatives to mummify our bodies for centuries, and put the sucker on a large screen, making those imps about two meters tall. Good times.

So I waited for Rage with bated breath as soon as the first screenshots were out. And now I am done with it, and sad to say, it won't earn a place in the pantheon together with Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout. This is really a shame as the seed of greatness is surely present. So, what went wrong, when so much went right? Spoilers may occur.

Ooh, shiny

The first visual impression of the game is overwhelming - I do hope that a coffee table book with the concept art and the loading screens is in the works. One of the first levels of the game (and those are levels, even when they are labelled quests) takes place in the ruins of a large hotel occupied by the ghost clan, a occult-minded band of raiders. Their signs and graffitis are everywhere, and they really set the mood and showcase the gang as something special and distinctive. Hunting through that hotel, I thought that this was what I wanted to bring across as a gamemaster describing the more unsavory feral tribes in my campaign world. As the game progresses, you tend to look for the gangs-signs of other clans to see in whose territory you are trespassing. All figures are beautifully animated (this is especially true for your quest givers), and the AI of your opponents is astoundingly good. If you want to see what a GURPS dodge 15 looks like, just have a gander at the mutants in Dead City. They weave and duck, use any kind of obstacles for cover, jump to the ceiling to climb along pipes to get close to you, and they will get close to you... The whole world is depicted with astounding visual detail, up to the point of oversaturation.

Wasteland theme park

But after some hours of playing, I found that the levels and outdoor areas were completely illogical as settings. One of the mainstays of the post-apocalyptic genre is the change of a setting of the past into the post-apocalyptic present: A destroyed city re-settled, a hotel turned into a gang hideout, an oil tanker changed into a floating circus. This means that the internal logic and believability of a setting has to hold water on two levels - as the thing that it was (an oil tanker, a hotel) and the thing it is now (a hideout, a circus). Here, Rage's settings fail completely: Looking at the surroundings it becomes clear that they could never have worked in the past - there is, for instance, an outdoor area much abused during your car fights, which is obviously an interchange and a large collecting basin at the same time. These were not dealbreakers, as the beautiful execution of these settings drew the attention from these flaws, but I always had the feeling that this world was a jumbles even before the catastrophe - and this broke immersion for me.

Also, the world suffers from theme park syndrome - every cliche of the genre has its nice little niche where it waits for your visit. I am not against cliches per se: Used in moderation and with thought they are a powerful tool. But to stay believable, they need some grounding in the story itself - in Rage, they just exist with no backstory.

"Maybe some kind of super-soldier, " she coily said

For me, the main weakness of RAGE is the flatness of the plot itself. You are a survivor from the past, put into suspended animation to awaken after the catastrophic event (this time, it's a meteor strike) and to give humanity a second chance. From the beginning, there is talk of the so-called Authority, which hounds survivors like you. So basically, I smelled a pot-boiler from second one, and this feeling didn't abate, when nearly every other figure pronounced the word "authority" like something that ate kittens and shat court injunctions. Okay, I get it, they are evil. Then, about one third into the game, I ran across a poster in the Dead City level: The Crescent City Transit Authority, promising a better life through its sophisticated metro system. Hm, this could be a hint that the Authority is based on the remnants of the organisation responsible for public transportation. Maybe even a sentient computer, a la Paranoia. Any minute, I'll start finding subway stubs, and I won't sell them, ever.

This looked promising, but basically, I fooled myself. The Authority are basically Nazis in powered armors, and their flag design has Hitler formulating a complaint for trademark violation at this very moment. They are led by some evil general whom we never see, there is a Resistance, which counts among its numbers a Hot Chick, and you will help this Resistance to end the Authority's stranglehold...At some point you are told by the Hot Chick that the mutants have been experimented upon by the Authority, in order to make them stronger, faster, basically, to weaponize them, and, for the lack of a better word, to turn them into super... what did you say girl? I just nodded off there for a second. So, like a midget corpse stuffed into a broken refrigerator, Rage's plot is stale, stinks and is also surprisingly short.

So what? You didn't play this for the story, but for the shootin', and drivin' and the junk collectin', and the gameplay is quite good, isn't it? Although all the levels are basically long corridors, in id-Software's well-known haunted-house tradition. And it looks really great (once the issues with the graphics driver are resolved). All those different bandit tribes, the mayors of the three settlements you frequent, the quirky bartenders and mechanics, they ooze personality, don't they? And yet, the main plot is what makes you take the next mission, and it is tremendously weak, casting a pall over the whole experience. In its details, this is truly a great game. As a whole, it appears a bit shoddy.

3 of 5 hand-built Fat Mamma handcannon shells

Yahtzee's little dictionary

This week, the incomparable Yahtzee of zeropunctuation fame delineates some terms in his column at the escapist. There exist some very good scholarly treatises about computer gaming and how it relates to other narrative forms, but most gamers don't have the time or inclination to read them. So rather have a look at this: It is short, sweet and grounded on knowledge one can only acquire with a lifetime wasted on games.

Fallout New Vegas

Fallout New Vegas is out and it has kept me very busy. It's far too early for a in-depth review, but from where I am standing, it is at least as good as Fallout 3. Also, the first good mods are out. FOOK has made a return, as have Blackwolf's backpacks - both are heartily recommended. As a small redress for my long absence, I present to you the ballad of Digger Omar - the adventures of my FNV character, which I plan to present here on a weekly basis.

The Ballad of Digger Omar, First Canto

Digger Omar worked for Mojave Express
That much you should know before I digress

The face of a demon, the beard of a prophet,
The hands of a strangler, much feared in his outfit

He kept a bloody sharp kukri in a blood caked sheath
And his soul was as black as the back of his teeth

Now Omar, he worked for Mojave Express
And one day he met with bad luck in excess

Four men came to kill poor old Omar
And, cautiously, wisely, shot him from afar

Down went Omar, for ages he went down
Down to the hot place, in fire to drown

But Satan got scared when he looked from his throne
“By my grannies’ eyes, he’s not one to stay prone”

“He’s the worst, this Omar, this evil old digger,
He’ll rule hell in short time, this much I figure.”

And thus Satan, the pussy, thought it was fit
To inflict Omar on the living, at least for a bit

Up from hell went Omar, up always up
til he woke on a bed, as weak as a pup

There sat an old coot who called himself Mitch
Who put Omar back together stitch for stitch

Who took the digger for some tests and some screenings
And discovered with dismay Omar’s violent leanings

“You are strong, you are swift, you are hardy,
Neither fast in the brain-box, nor overly tardy”

“Too ugly and uncouth to be a town greeter,
that much I see with my old vigour-meter”

“Now let’s take a glance at your psychical health.”
And Doc Mitch diagnosed: melee weapons, stealth.

With a shiver he returned the digger’s gear
The armor, the kukri, one cut-off ear

Some coin, an old shotgun, a handful of shells
a bottle of poison for spear tips and wells

“I patched you” said Mitch “and I now ask a favor.”
“And to some this favor might have a strange flavor.”

“Goodsprings is peaceful and no place for grief.”
“And thus I just ask you, dear digger, to leave.”

The digger, he grinned, with teeth black as ice,
with a soul like a grave, no man to play nice.

“I like you, old doc, and I’ll do you this favor.
I’m not ungrateful to one who’s my savior.”

“Just a small, tiny thing, before I must fade,”
“My gear is all there, but I miss my old spade.”

A tear in his eye, with trembling finger,
Mitch indexed the shop to the grim harbinger.

Omar went in and the air grew a bit colder.
Omar went out with his spade on his shoulder.

“Thanks, Doc Mitch, for restoring my vim.”
“If someone should ask: I’m going to Primm.”

A regretful doctor, a shop cleared of things,
That’s how Omar left the town of Goodsprings.

Lots of work

Work has me in its clutches like a huge, slightly odiferous teddy bear: It's nice that he's there, but all that love is also a bit...smothering. So there won't be any writeup of the scorched earth campaign for the time being.
But there are good news; at least for me, the insufferable Bioshock fanboy. A third part of Bioshock is in the making - it's scheduled for 2012. Here is the first trailer. More information about it can be found on io9.

So I got this great idea for a game, right?

This is a post about the failure of the FPS to try something new, and a look at one way to return some spice to the genre.

I played around with Singularity (here is a good review) and was thus able to pinpoint the exact moment in which I would lose interest in super soldier projects going tragically awry. I was poking around in a ruined Soviet laboratory and found this old note, which said that the rats treated with E-99 showed exponential muscle growth and that one should attempt and then my eyes glazed over.

First person shooters have been used before, similar to horror films, to convey the social fears of their audience. It is often a subtext, but it is nonetheless present and shapes the gaming experiences. Doom 3 dealt with the pressures of the modern corporate workplace, the scattered audio logs and e-mails conveying the fears and frustrations of the common office drone. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were angry and rousing indictments of the treatment commonly suffered by doctoral and postdoctoral students, with Dr. Breen standing in for a thesis supervisor everyone could recognize. Resident Evil 4 gave voice to the half-conscious dread everyone feels in the presence of people speaking Spanish. The list goes on.

But looking at the central plot of many shooters, one would be forced that the main fear of our age is super soldiers. Future cultural historians will think that we feared nothing so much as military experiments about bulky fighters with low self-preservation instincts when they do their studies from their levitating reclining chairs. As they twiddle their dayglo tresses and stroke their pheromone lapdogs, they will say: “The old civilization fell due to an influx of super soldiers with miniguns, as long predicted by the dominant idiom in their cultural record. Tragically, even as they trained their youth in simulations to deal with this threat, it was not enough to stave of the inevitable, the inevitable being partly-invisible super soldiers which jumped from wall to wall while small lightings crackled all over their armor.” And then they will take a sip from their genesplice cocktails and sigh with the sighs of people being right.

Another thing strikes me as conspicuous: Apart from large, evil corporations (f.i. UAC) and the Nazis nobody is in the business of villains. The soviets have entered this small club, mainly because the swastika seems to be sucked dry as a symbol of evil, while Stalin’s portrait and the hammer and sickle still create a kind of frisson, and the USSR appears as a suitable sponsor for crazy science, while Belgium, for example, does not.

So this is my idea: Make a cool company the villain. A company the gamer knows firsthand, because he uses its product every day. A company that the player cannot live without – and most players can live without corporations creating viral zombies. And let’s make a subtext that everyone can recognize and get queasy about – privacy.

Let us call this company Bongle, for the moment. Or until the lawyers tear down the front door. In the world built for this game, Bongle is the dominant search engine. It is crazy good, having eliminated all competitors two years after its introduction. They present the ideal repository of all possible knowledge. Your term paper, your nuclear research, the speech at your daughter’s wedding: They are unthinkable without Bongle. You use it, your mother uses it, the grocer at the corner uses it. And everybody uses it every day. If you are not findable by Bongle, then you must be nonexistent. And it is a cool company. Everybody likes them, they make cool gadgets and they are obviously a force of good in the world.

You play a visitor to Bongle’s headquarters. You start out as the customary cipher we all know and love from shooters (basically because they keep their mouth shut). You have a name, something like “Dave Webster”, and looking in a mirror you see a nondescript hipster with a funny t-shirt. You are Dr. Gordon Freeman without the powered suit and the PhD. You don’t say much.

Something goes horrible wrong as you enter the HQ. Not satisfied in knowing and describing the world in the tiniest detail, but bent on changing it according to its whim, Bongle has found the algorithm to transforming the world itself, and the changes wrought are bizarre and inimical to human life, to say the least. It is upon you to put things right.

Yawn. Right? Wrong!

- There is no Gate to Hell, no Citadel or volcano base. The algorithm is everywhere; it suffuses the reality completely and changes it. All the Dave can hope for is to master it and force a reality into being that he can live with.
- There will be e-mails, databases and audio logs: Apart from information about the algorithm and Bongle, they will contain all kinds of information about Dave Webster. One of the themes would be Bongle’s power to know everything about a person. All of Dave’s surfing habits, downloads (legal and illegal) and other personal information will become available to the player. Step by step, the figure you are playing will be filled out. He is no mass murderer or secret operative, but the level of info you get on him is astounding: especially private stuff, making this an r-rated game – his ex made some pictures and put them online. At the end of the game he will be one of the most fully realized characters in a game ever, with the player in the position of a voyeur.
- Bongle’s HQ is the coolest and nicest office environment you will ever see. It presents the right mixture between the ideal, funky workplace and advanced techniques to squeeze the last drop of performance from the office plankton. As the reality becomes dominated by the algorithm, this ideal office becomes a surreal labyrinth of distorted hallways and cubicles, peopled by crazed office drones and the wandering “effects” of the algorithm.
And I’m thinking demons. Yes, definitely demons. Not the Doom kind, but some really crazy, M C Escher stuff with a bad attitude and heavy use of high-end graphics to make it tick. Think Hound of Tindalos and go from there. Also, changing gravity.
- The player finds a journal early on that allows him to effect changes using the algorithm: It is basically Half-Life’s gravgun, the Portal gun, plus Singularity’s time manipulation device and a few other crazy powers rolled into a block of yellowing paper. The journal looks like a small moleskine, full of mad scribblings and strange geometric drawings. The source of the algorithm can be anything. At the moment, I’m going with an Assyrian kind of metamathematics, which uses sympathetic magic – but it could be anything, apart from a super soldier program, of course. So, more riddles, and less shooting. But still a bit of shooting. It’s a shooter, you know?
- One of the powers uses the algorithm to access the luxurious beach house of Bongle’s founder, now a crazed hermit, deeply desperate about the damage his garage-project has done. It serves as kind of base – a very Mies van der Rohe kind of base. You use the algorithm to change the founder’s personal history and personality, and change the beach house as well. If you want to gun up, you make him an arms collector and plunder his private museum of rare firearms. If you need further information on the “weaponized memes” running amok, you make him a hobby philosopher and hope that he can answer your questions. But with every visit, the possible changes for the beach house narrow down…
- The Game Options are designed like an official Wikipedia-page. You choose the entry “the game was lauded for its friendliness towards beginners” instead of “The game is thought to be one of the hardest shooters in existence”, and the game difficulty goes from “very difficult” to "easy".
- And the end? Well, what will a hipster named Dave Webster with 45.000 illegal downloads do with the power to change the world in whatever kind he chooses?

So, there you have it: a shooter with a new villain, a new environment, a new subtext and nary a super soldier in sight. Any Russian oligarch with a billion to spare and no fear of litigation may pick up this idea, as long as the resulting game is good.

Bioshock 2

Yahtzee tore this game a new asshole, and I can't figure why. After reading the first reviews I expected a rerun, basically an expansion pack, and I would have been fine with that. Yes, my standards are appallingly low, but then Bioshock is a game that I replay about once a year - not to fret, I can do the thing on a short weekend now. Yes, I like it that much and I think it is one of the all-time greats.
Bioshock 2 plays a decade after your exploits as Fontaine's sockpuppet-assassin. Now you are playing as a big daddy, a big daddy who can use plasmids and has some sense of self-preservation. You have to find your little sister in a dilapidated Rapture. It's the same city, but different: The years have taken their toll, corals have bloomed in the courts and ballrooms, the ocean has taken over big time. Sometimes, you walk through completely flooded sections of Rapture, surrounded by silence. At first it seems that after slamming objectivism, this game is about the sins of collectivism: A psychoanalyst named Lamb has created a cult which swore off the sins of Ryan's utopia, made a u-turn and ran about 20 miles too far into the opposite direction. For this cult, the "Family", you are a dangerous remnant, a monster. Your moral compass will be sorely tested. You are, again, able to decide whether to save or harvest the little sisters for a short term gain in power. But at times you will also meet "semibosses", for want of a better name, and it's in your hand to kill them, or to leave them be. While there are some game effects based on your decision, they are generally removed from the cost-benefit analysis of the shooter, leaving you with your role in the tale. Everyone calls you a monster: Do you act like one? How do you treat those who would use you like a tool? Do you take revenge, if opportunity permits? There's at least one figure that keeps score. I never had the feeling of just re-playing the first game, but being immersed in a story that took up some elements of the first game's treatment of personal ambition and utopia gone wrong and presented a different angle on these things - Lamb's megalomania, couched in high-minded worry about the human race and painting every new atrocity as a necessary act of love, a broken Ryan being defeated by someone using his principles against him, and the splicers, the saddest monsters I've ever encountered as a gamer.
The mechanics of the game have kept the best parts of the first, streamlined a few bits that could use some streamlining, like the plumber's hack minigame. Some stuff is new, but it never distracts from the ambiance of Rapture. Some of the voice-acting is a bit over the top, but at least Lamb's voice acting hits the nail on the head - you've heard this voice before, from the mouths of psychology-majors, self-important lecturers and other callous pricks the world over: Lamb just knows she is right, she feels your pain and she just wants the best for everyone and if you suffer, she will feel really bad about it - probably even worse than you. See, she is even better at suffering than you are.
I do not think that this game degrades the experience of the first Bioshock. I'm sure I will return to this game like I did to it's predecessor - maybe once a year, for half a weekend.

Fallout New Vegas

Can't wait for summer. Because after summer comes fall, and then there'll be Fallout.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

This is my second foray into reviewing a PC game, and, somehow, I end up writing about a game that is basically the twin brother of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky. But you know how brothers turn out: One becomes a quite competent used-car salesman, while the other becomes a professional knife fighter who is married to a brain surgeon and studies Russian literature in his spare time. And that knife-wielding maniac would be S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat.

The third installment of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is a straight sequel to the first. You play as a member of the Ukrainian secret service who is sent into the Zone to find out why a flight of military choppers vanished from the screens and why stuff is happening in the Zone that nobody can explain.

The game is much better that its direct predecessor, for many reasons: If you liked the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R. installments, you will love this game. The best parts of the two earlier games are allowed to shine. For example, you can hire mechanics to upgrade your weapons and armor and thus acquire heavily personalized equipment geared to your tactical style, just like in Clear Sky. Guides reappear who will get you to different places for a fee so you don’t have to slog it all on foot if you do not want to.

Artifacts are difficult to find in the earlier stages of the game, but worth having. Stashes do not have to be marked on your map to exist, but even with a marker they are hard to find - so if you go about your business with open eyes you might find them without plundering any old PDAs. Weapons sell for a decent price if they are in good condition – in fact, about a third into the game, money stops being a problem. The grinding is reduced, and the game is more immersive for it.

The game can be hard on higher difficulty levels, and the AI is quite accomplished. Enemies try to encircle you and flush you out with grenades, but this also means that your allies are not completely useless. There are two short sequences where you are railroaded along, but apart from that, you will be free to explore. And there is a lot to explore – while there are only three maps, they are the size of about three maps of Clear Sky each. The city of Pripyat makes a return, but no maps from the earlier games are recycled, so you are not traipsing along the Cordon again. As always, the atmosphere is striking, although the second map suffers a bit from theme park syndrome. Some of the places are eerily beautiful, and where the anomalies work their influence, the landscape can become quite surreal, without losing the bleakness that characterizes all S.T.A.L.K.E.R. installments.

Factions return, but not in the capture-the-flag mode that marred Clear Sky. But you will surely make some interesting friends and enemies. Some of the characters now have distinct faces, and what faces they are. My favorite mechanic looks like Vladimir Putin with anorexia and a silver earring. And if a character is named “Sultan”, well, you can bet he has a sultan’s face. The common aesthetic of protagonists in PC-games does not apply - these guys look like desperadoes and treasure hunters who don't mind braving the radioactivity for a handful of rubles. Each of these figures has his own story and motives. For this reason, this game is more of a RPG than Fallout 3 in some respects: You don't level up, you don't get to select skills and stats. But the interaction with the various figures in the Zone is believable: Characters like Sultan or Zulu seem much more realistic than their counterparts in normal RPGs. Some of them are assholes, but they are fascinating assholes. If you want to join a faction, you are free to do so, but the plot does not force you to. In retrospect, a lot less people start to shoot you on sight, but at least one of them pissed me off in a way that made me ambush him when he left the local sanctuary, which made his colleagues mad at me. There are also a few brand new breeds of mutants infest the Zone and some of them are really nasty.

So there you are, with very basic equipment and weaponry as well as 2500 rubles cash, at the edge of the Zone, and the world is your oyster.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

A short time ago I visited an old favorite of mine: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. A few days later, I rebooted S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. Both are great, but I want to talk about why I think that Shadows is better than Clear Sky. Clear Sky is the second game in the series and the prequel to Shadows: You play a stalker, a treasure hunter infiltrating into the forbidden zone around Chernobyl, where a strange, second incident after the meltdown in 1986 created physical anomalies, deadly radioactive eruptions and weird creatures. You haunt this desolate landscape, hoping to find a way of ending the eruptions in the zone, which become more frequent and violent. During the game, you set off the events which will take place in Shadow. And you shoot other denizens of the Zone. A lot. Also, it is mandatory to mention the following when talking about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Strugatsky, Tarkowsky, Roadside Picknick...Let's just say that this game is rooted in Russian culture, and it shows.
In comparison to other shooters, both games offer a very dense and remarkably bleak atmosphere: The levels are vast and often you spend an inordinate amount of time wandering through the ruins and forests without meeting anyone or anything else. The levels looks gorgeous and make the most of current graphics engines. This pervasive sense of solitude informs the games and makes them unique. At times it feels more like a very well implemented simulation of urban exploration than a standard shooter. The plot supports this bleakness: There is no Dr. Gordon Freeman in the ruins of Prypiat.
The first part of Clear Sky plays a lot like Shadow, but with one difference that appears like a weakness to me. To progress the plot, you are forced to conquer various bases in a large swamp for your faction, the scientists of clear sky. This feels a bit like a large capture-the-flag scenario. Instead of carefully exploring the swamp (which is a very well designed level), you are rushing about, trying to help your buddies. This hectic style of gameplay reduces the atmosphere somewhat, and if you try to visit the swamp later on, the game will try to get you back on the rails of its plot by plastering you with eruptions: The sky turns red, a counter appears, and off you go, running for your life to gain some kind of shelter. And hopefully you learn your lesson and gratefully return to the next stop in the plot which the game has prepared for you.
The middle part of the game is very well designed, although you are forced on lots of fetch quests, and revisiting some places featuring prominently in the first game is great fun and creates the feeling that the Zone is indeed a living, changing place. Again, the main plot features much stronger than in Shadow, and thus the most attractive point of the game, exploring the large, rambling levels creating the Zone, suffers. Also, you will be running back and forth a lot if you want to maintain and upgrade your gear: Selling loot to the Zone's merchants is the definition of slaving for The Man - they'll pay you in pennies for the stuff you lug around, and demand premium prices for their services. This means scooping up every piece of equipment you find and dragging it to some base or other if you do not want to run around in thin slices of kevlar grouped around large holes. So you will move around alot but not necessarily to new places.
It's the final part of Clear Sky which bugs me the most. Suddenly, the game becomes a complete rail shooter. You travel through a vast, deserted city, but unlike the corresponding level in Shadow - the brilliant recreation of Prypiat - you are taken firmly by the hand. There are scenes where an infinite number of opponents spawn until you have solved some tactical problem. I did not like that at all - it destroys the feeling of moving in a desolate and barren zone of exclusion.
Those who know Shadow may contend that this is not quite different from the last hour of the first game, where you are also set on rails and shown around the Chernobyl reactor, while passing an interminable number of jump gates and ambushes. But this was after the point where many first-time gamers of Shadow would be confronted with the bleak endings of the game: If you bet your fate on the wish granter, the rails a thankfully rather short.
Clear Sky is a great game: But by comparing it with its predecessor (which still looks very good on high-end machines), it becomes clear that it sacrificed some unique qualities. The Zone is a unique setting and begs to be explored on its own terms - putting the player on rails to follow a plot detracts from this experience, as is the attempt to bind the player to a faction. I think the story that Clear Sky has to tell is quite good, especially as it foreshadows (ahem) Shadow. But in this case, atmosphere trumps plot.