Thursday, 31 December 2009

Best Of...

Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday dear me-eeeee...

Yes indeed, another year of dry humour, wet nappies, sleepless nights, wonderful reviews, shitty reviews, and storming success drags to a close. So long 2009! Nice knowing you. A busy year, for me. I had a baby. I moved from London to Bath. I sold a flat and bought one. I even published another book! With all these good things to celebrate, one wonders why I still feel slightly anxious all the time. It's the modern condition, people!

An end, as well, to another year of blogging. Shall we look back to some of the highlights...?

Most Commented On Blog Post
Storming up the charts with 80 comments was my response to my favourite review of the year "People suck, war is bad, and the world is a bottomless shithole," which included, alongside the trademark apparently self-deprecating while actually being self-glorifying wit, some thoughtful introspection on the subject of ragged and unhappy endings. It even managed to beat last year's 60 comment winner. Proof positive, as if any were needed, that thought-provoking consideration of genre issues CAN be more interesting than being hit over the head with a piece of wood. A score for the intelligentsia. Runners up were an opportunity for you all to bitch about my US cover (always popular), with 55 comments, and my musings on my neighbour's teenage son never having heard of Dungeons & Dragons, with 42. Perhaps if I can think of more worthwhile and thoughtful posts to make I can break the 100 mark next year. No. I don't think so either...

Best Foreign Trip
I might have felt strangely sick the whole time I was there for no apparent reason, but Sweden/Norway your streets is clean, your trains is reasonable yet punctual, your people is friendly and above averagely good-looking, and your sf&f specialist bookstores is excellent. I also remain a committed fan of your modernist minimal design, unassuming royal families, and efficient education, health, and welfare systems.

Best Authorial Bitch-Fight involving me
Was definitely the no-holds-barred grudge match between me and Brent Weeks at the Borders Book Blog wich I totally won. Ask anyone. There's even some talk that we'll be taking this show on the road next year...

Best Authorial Love-In involving me
My thoughtful yet hilarious interview with Patrick Rothfuss on the occasion of his recent charity drive.

Best Authorial Blurb about my Works
Has to be the George RR Martin. I still feel deeply smug about that one.

Best "Best SF&F of 2009" list of 2009
Werthead demonstrates his impeccable good taste by selecting Best Served Cold as his best book of 2009, saying, "a tale of revenge, murder, assassination, war and generally pleasant stuff, with Abercrombie somehow outstripping the first trilogy in terms of mayhem." Graeme demonstrated an equal level of discernment - "It delivered on all fronts and just kept delivering." The redoubtable Dave Bradley, editor of SFX, has also declared Best Served Cold his best book of 2009 calling it a "brilliantly brutal tale of revenge". I note in passing he also had Dragon Age up there. Nice call, Dave. Rob Grant's taste at Sci-Fi London would have been as good if it weren't for that pesky Jesse Bullington and his bleak medieval european stylings...

Best Served Cold has popped up on a few other lists too. Fantasy Book Critic's, Joe Sherry's , even the editor's picks for sf&f at amazon.co.uk, where I stand proudly among such notables as Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen, and Stephanie Meyer. It's a varied crowd over there...

But lest we over-sugar the pudding, Best Served Cold also made Western author Iain Parnam's most disappointing books of 2009. He thought, "everyone is repellent, the story is dreary, nothing matters much, and the wit is missing." I shrug me a river. It's all subjective, people.

Books
I know what you're thinking - who the hell reads books any more? But this year I managed to get through a few, and some of them weren't even written by me. Non-fiction highlight would probably be CV Wedgewood's Thirty Years War. A classic of narrative history. Fiction highlight? Despite some tough competition from the likes of Fritz Leiber, Junot Diaz and Jeff Vandermeer, you'd have to walk a very long way through a post-apocaplyptic wasteland to beat Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Searingly stark and bleak, but somehow still life-affirming. Like a visit to Brooks Nightclub in Lancaster used to be.

Films
Well I must say my socks were quite blown off by Avatar, it may well have been the most jaw-dropping cinema experience for me since Fellowship of the Ring, way back in 1904 when I didn't have kids, but along somewhat more traditional lines District 9 and No Country for Old Men were certainly memorable too. Watchmen ... not so much.

TV
Battlestar Galactica ended more with a whimper than a bang, which left the final season of The Shield as my TV Highlight. That certainly ended with a bang. IN YOUR FACE. Michael Chiklis also stalks off with my coveted "Most Loathsome yet Strangely Sympathetic Bald Character" award. Mad Men continued to be great, second series of Dexter was good but, for my money, not as good as the last. Other things that have variously titillated, intrigued and amused included 30 Rock, True Blood, and, of course, Strictly Come Dancing. What am I going to DO with my Sunday mornings now it's over?

Games
Good year, good year. Despite tough competition from the old-school roleplaying of Dragon Age and the Medici-stabbing thrills of Assassin's Creed II, it has to be the smooth-as-velvet next-generation adventure charms of Uncharted II that gave my boat the most float this year. The importance of PC games seems to be very much dwindling for me, as console games gradually invade the rpg and srategy territory that was traditionally theirs. Medieval:Total War is possibly my favourite game of all time, so I found Empire to be a tad disappointing. I haven't played it a lot since I lack a PC powerful enough to run it well, but the AI seems kind of rubbish to me. It usually takes them a year or two to get those games properly balanced, though, so who knows. Perhaps a future classic...

And there we have it. Let rip the party poppers. Roll on 2010...

Labels: film and tv, games, interviews, reading, reviews

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

Dragon Age

Oooooh, I liked this a lot. Right up my boulevard.

Bioware have been making great RPGs for a long time. I was a huge lover of Baldur's Gate and its sequel when they came out three hundred years ago, and played the arse out of both of them. Neverwinter Nights was good but seemed more limited, more formulaic. Then of late they've drifted in a more arcade-y sort of a direction - unavoidable perhaps in a world where PC games are dying a slow death and you have to design games to run on consoles too, perhaps for a slightly less cerebral audience. Jade Empire was pretty weak. And I wasn't a massive lover of Knights of the Old Republic either. Mass Effect was, well, no better than good for me. I was starting to worry that they'd abandoned serious fantasy RPGing to the Elder Scrolls (cold shivers). But no! For here is Dragon Age, and with it - gah! Oh. I've been splattered with gore again.

I can't remember playing a fantasy RPG that's as dark and nasty as this one. The hubris of mages has led to the poisoning of heaven and the world being tyrranised by occasional erruptions of slavering evil. Magic is fundamentally dangerous, and those who use it are constantly at risk of being posessed by demons, with the result they must be watched over by templars with itchy trigger-fingers. The main religion - the chantry - is sinister and oppressive. Elves have lost most of their ancient technology and either live as semi-savages in the woods, are corralled in ghettoes, or are pressed into slavery by humans. Dwarves are caste-bound, feuding and isolationist and their once great subterranean empire is gradually collapsing under constant onslaught by subterranean darkspawn. And humans are treacherous, greedy, backstabbing slime. I liked the world a lot, you probably won't be surprised to hear, probably more than any other computer game fantasy invention I can think of. There was plenty of detail there, plenty of background and texture, but it wasn't awash with blather to the point where it just looked like a load of repetitive cliched mush to the casual observer (Oblivion, I'm looking at you). It mixed the right amount of trope-y-ness with the right amount of innovation, surprise and darkness.

They've dialled up the blood quite high as well, to add to that 18 certificated grittiness, and proclaim that this is ADULT. Everyone likes a good decapitation, but the obsession with gore is a little distracting at times. Bioware's own logo is splattered onto the screen in blood at the start, and that does rather set the tone. This is particularly noticeable when, just after a fight, you get into conversation with someone, and exchange pleasantries while your character is daubed head to foot in gore.

I've heard people bitch about the graphics, and I don't know, I just didn't have that issue. Sure, it doesn't have the amazing light effects and incredible vistas of Uncharted, but it's a very different type of game. Maybe graphics on games is like prose on books - people tend to say it's good if they like the thing in general. I kind of liked the graphics on Dragon Age, they had personality, they were consistent with the setting, the faces were more varied and expressive than I can remember seeing in other similar games.

The actual game system seems to have moved away from the d&d special abilities once-a-day model towards a timed activation, sustained and activated powers thingy that reminded me of online RPGs like Guild Wars. Seemed as if there was quite a bit of depth to it, though, in the combination of various different powers, spells and equipment, but co-ordinating a four person party on the PS3 is a bit of a ball-ache, so I tended to end up controlling the main character and leaving the others to do their thing. You can set up quite detailed scripted commands for characters, though, a bit like in Final Fantasy 12, which is quite handy. One thing I would say is that as you get towards the end of the game and can make pretty much infinite health and magic potions at relatively low cost, you can just set your characters up to burn through those whenever they need them and it all does become pretty easy. Maybe I should have just dialled up the difficulty, but it did feel like the game slightly lacked the truly immense side-challenges that keep you playing something like Final Fantasy VII for hundreds of hours. Still, it would be a miserly reviewer who complained too much about the size of Dragon Age, because it's a big, big game. Took me about sixty hours to complete, and with various different framing storylines and character types you feel like you could get quite a lot from playing through again. In fact I'm already thinking about what sort of character I'd go for next time, which is usually a very good sign...

The world feels varied. You don't get massive repetition of areas (again, Oblivion, I'm looking at you, and with a disappointed shaking of my head. Go and stand in the corner). A couple of streets and houses start to look familiar, true, but you don't get hundreds of identikit dungeons. And I'm not sure how they pulled off the trick, since in many ways the game is clearly made up of a few distinct areas with very sharply delineated edges, but it feels like a big world in a way that, say, Mass Effect, utterly failed to do for me.

But above all the game just tells a compelling story, and one which kept me interested and playing into the small hours from start to finish. The characters are a bit more interesting and multi-dimensional than you expect in this type of thing. They get annoyed and leave the party. They turn on you. They make surprising suggestions. Some of them are kinda shits. Some of them are occasionally even a bit funny. Voice acting is generally pretty good. And the quests you're sent on rarely turn out to be quite as simple as advertised. Most people have darker sides and hidden agendas. There's some drama to be had. It's very rare for a game of this type to offer difficult choices, but a couple of times towards the end I was left genuinely not sure which way to go with a particular decision.

So overall, despite a couple of flaws, I thought it was a cracking effort and I'm delighted to see Bioware back to doing what they do best. Furthermore I think it can only be a good thing that there's some serious competition for the Elder Scrolls as far as serious fantasy roleplaying goes, for though I had my issues with Oblivion, I'm excited to see what Bethesda can do with a sequel after the excellent Fallout 3.

9/10, though I was close to a ten, I must say, because I haven't straight up enjoyed and felt compelled to play a game so much in a long time. Feels like its been a really good year for games, this. Perhaps the latest generation of consoles are finally coming of age...

Labels: games

Thursday, 5 November 2009

Uncharted 2

It doesn't feel like long ago at all I was talking of Uncharted, speaking of its high qualities and hoping it would be the start of a long and beautiful series. I really liked that game - not spectacularly original, but well implemented across the board, nicely plotted and bursting with charm. It seems like about a week later, and here's the sequel, and man, it's really, really good. Everyone's saying that - finally a reason to own a PS3 and yada, yada.

But it really is good. Really good.

There's the same mixture of exploration and rapid-fire gunplay, of mystery and quality voice acting, but this time around the game is literally packed out with special moments - with collapsing bridges and exploding jeeps, with crawls across speeding trains and climbs up dangling railway carriages. There's constantly stuff going on. The level of detail on characters and environments throughout is breathtaking, I don't think I've seen anything as good graphically, but you're not bludgeoned with it, it's used cleverly to enhance the experience. The interplay between the characters - the cheeky one liners and the humourous asides as you play, are a joy. It's a thrill ride and a half, and the fusion between storytelling and gameplay, the feeling of flow and involvement, is a cut above anything I've ever played before.

One could make criticisms if one was feeling mean (and I usually am). The plot was a bit more of a mess than last time around, and it didn't feel quite so bursting with personality, perhaps because there were more characters involved. The villain was a bit by-the-yardy bullet-headed balkan mercenary from bullet-headed balkan mercenaries-r-us and it all wrapped up rather quickly, with a final boss fight that would probably have been satisfying enough on another game but felt a tad pedestrian after all the amazing sequences packed into the rest of this one. But overall, where the first Uncharted felt like stuff you'd mostly seen before, just very cleverly polished and implemented, this feels like a true leap forward.

10/10

Labels: games

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

What's Dungeons and Dragons?

So an interesting thing happened to me the other day. Well, probably not THAT interesting, of itself, but it got me thinking. Some of our new neighbours came round for a drink, brought their son with them, who I'd guess is about 10 or 11 years old. I forget exactly how it came up, but he was talking about what he was in to (guitar playing and xbox, mainly) and I said something like, oh, you know, all I did at your age was play dungeons and dragons. I was prepared for various responses, such as, "dungeons and dragons sucks ass, man, what I like is getting girls PREGNANT", or, "dungeons and dragons, that's WEAK! I'm into KNIFE CRIME." I was not, however, prepared for what he actually did, which was to give me this baffled look and say:

"What's Dungeons and Dragons?"

Oh, the horror. I was massively into role-playing games as a kid, in fact it was probably my main leisure activity between the ages of about 10 and 14. Alright, 9 and 16. Alright, 8 and 18. Some D&D, early on, then later a lot of MERP (Middle Earth Role Play, noobs) and some Runequest, along with sundry others, and, as a GM (gamesmaster, noobs), Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. All this stuff was a big influence on me, in fact it might be fair to say that fantasy filtered through the lens of roleplaying in the form of endless rather cheesy supplements and adventures was as big an influence as actual written fantasy fiction. Gamesmastering, in particular, has an awful lot in common with storytelling of the fictional sort. It certainly did in my games, where characters were barely presented with the illusion of choice, let alone actual choice.

It's probably not much of a revelation to observe that many of today's leading writers of fantasy share my deep roots in RPGs. Off the top of my head I believe (and forgive my ignorance if I'm wrong) that the worlds in which Ray Feist and Steven Erikson write were both originally gaming worlds. Scott Lynch wrote roleplaying supplements before selling a novel. I do not doubt that many more, if not most, of today's fantasy writers have more than a passing acquaintance with a d20.

Now I guess I'd always assumed that dice and paper roleplaying would gradually wither as computer-based roleplaying games became more and more immersive and effective. But on my recent trip to Scandinavia, where I visited a good few very impressive F&SF bookshops, I was assured that some areas of the old RPG scene are still in rude commercial health. I'm now wondering, though, whether a lot of that stuff gets bought by old soldiers like me, and Scott Lynch, and Ray Feist, wanting to read them while having a poo to see where the games have gone, rather than actually to run them in a proper session with, like, actual players (they always were the most irritating part of RPGs anyway, weren't they, though?).

My neighbours question of "what's D&D?" certainly implies RPGs have nothing like the wide cultural purchase they used to. In my day, there were plenty of kids who wouldn't have touched them with a shitty stick. Who'd have played sports, or played in the garden, or gone out on their bikes or some other Chaotic Evil activity instead. Who'd have thrown stones at kids who played D&D, stole their glasses and laughed when blood came out of their heads. But even if they hated, scorned, and secretly feared it, they knew what it was.

I guess my train of thought creakily goes in this direction - if dice and paper roleplaying dies out, what will be the equivalent influences on the next generation of fantasy writers? Video game equivalents seem the obvious thing. World of Warcraft and the like. Now far be it from me to bemoan the influence of computer games, as I've been a keen fan my whole life, though not necessarily of the online variety. But there's a world of difference between the imaginative effort of summoning up a world and characters out of one's own head (not to mention the social effort of dealing with other players) and a computer-based world where the detail is already coded and can be viewed from every angle (not to mention that the social involvement rarely goes further than OMG YOU ******* NOOB PUSH THE ******* BUTTON YOU ******* NOOB **** **** NOOB **** DO YOU WANT TO BUY A SWORD?). Undoubtedly, playing computer based RPGs is just an awful lot more passive than having to gamesmaster yourself.

I find that idea oddly worrying. Well, not in a - OH MY GOD WITHIN SIX MONTHS WE'LL ALL BE LIVING LIKE IN CORMACK MCCARTHY'S THE ROAD IF WE'RE ALIVE AT ALL - sort of a way, but a bit worrying nonetheless. The creativity you need to gamesmaster is a useful step on the way to the creativity you need to write. Without GMing myself, I'm not sure I'd ever have thought about the possibility of taking the next step and trying to write fiction. I daresay there's nothing one can do about it - except to hope that the computer generated fantasy worlds that replace RPGs are as clever and innovative as they can be, rather than the rather ill-conceived smorgasbord of cliches we often get served up (I'm looking at you, Oblivion). And hey, there are an awful lot of other ways for writers to find their creativity (like reading other people's books, for instance).

But still. Can I shed just a little tear for The Keep on the Borderlands? Can YOU?

Labels: games, influences

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

Resident Evil 5

Man, what with the house move, and the baby, and the book promoting, I'm so behind on everything. I played this what feels like fifteen years ago, and only now am I organising my thoughts.

I was a big fan of the first Resident Evil when it was released on the Difference Engine in 1892, but the series did rather wane over the hundred years that followed. Resident Evil 4, however, was a brilliant, brilliant game. Mind-blowing in many ways, and had that rare feeling games sometimes have of everything working really nicely, all the rough edges being smoothed. Number 5, like a less gifted younger son living endlessly in the shadow of a far more famous brother, suffers by comparison. It's still a very accomplished game but, for me, it just doesn't push things on far enough to make its own mark.

It's been generally spruced up, particularly (as one would expect), in the graphics. It looks great, especially the characters' faces, which have a slightly uncanny sweaty sheen about them. But the overall content of shooting lots and lots of zombies is largely the same, and the ham-fisted control system is more or less identical, and less and less forgiveable as the years roll on and more fluid over-the-shoulder shooting games like, say, Uncharted, make it look ludicrously slow and laborious. Lots of time spent running from corner to corner of a game area so that you can have time to turn round and raise your gun to fire for a bit from a standing position, before lumbering off again.

The plots of Resident Evil games have long been a little on the silly side, but 4 at least ignored most of what went before and started afresh, making some kind of crazy sense viewed on its own. 5 tries too hard to cobble together and unite all kinds of ill-conceived bits of previous games and ends up a jumble, not helped by creaky script and voicing. There's too much bibble-babble and not enough drama.

In some areas it seems to have taken rather baffling steps back. Resident Evil always left you with only just enough equipment to do the job, and ammunition preservation was elevated to an art form in number 4. Number 5 would seem to do the same, until you realise that, due to its strangely clumsy saving and checkpointing methods, you can play a stage on easy setting collecting ammunition, then simply carry it across to a stage on hard setting and blast away with impunity.

The most disappointing thing, though, is that it just isn't very scary. Partly it's that many of the sequences (attack by chainsaw-wielding, bag-headed freakoids, for example) we saw already in the last game. Partly it's that where the game does innovate, it occasionally tends towards the silly (motorbike riding zombies, now? Are you sure?) Partly it's that you always have your trusty partner alongside you, and they're actually, perhaps for the first time ever in a computer game, reasonably effective and resilient, so you always feel someone's got your back. And partly it's that the hero, Chris Redfield, has evidently been working out. A LOT. He's about the size of Lou Ferrigno if the man had, you know, taken the whole gym thing a bit more seriously. He looks as if he could crush a zombie between his eyebrows. It's simply hard to believe that a small African country full of hideous mutants could put him down.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a highly enjoyable game once through - there are some great moments and blasting zombies' heads off with a shotgun will never get entirely old - but it feels nothing like the leap forward for the series (never mind gaming in general) that its classic predecessor did, is oddly rough round the edges, and in its gameplay already feels a little dated. Resident Evil 4 was so good that a rerun is no bad thing, but you feel they'll need to step things up a bit with the next outing.

7/10

Labels: games

Thursday, 18 December 2008

Fallout 3

I actually completed this game a month ago, wrote half a review (the half bitching about Oblivion) but what with one thing and and other I've waited until now, when it is no longer at all relevant, to complete and publish it. That's the kind of timing and work ethic that has CATAPULTED me to the heady heights of genre publishishing where I now reside.

My short opinion of Fallout 3? For me, probably the best game of the last couple of years, certainly in the rpg/adventure mould.

My long opinion? Ah, well sit down, while I spin thee a tale...

I've been a big fan of the Fallout series of games since they started back in ... 1783, was it? 1 and 2 were old school isometric adventure games, set in a unique post-apocalyptic wasteland that managed to fuse Mad Max with strange McCarthy-era fifties-y influences, splatter, and a weird sense of humour. They had an interesting game system, were well ahead of their time in offering varied ways to achieve objectives, but most of all they had in spades that hardest of features to pin down - atmosphere. I even really enjoyed the much-reviled not-quite-a-game-in-the-franchise-cos-no-one-liked-it-let's-just-pretend-it-never-happened Fallout Tactics. Call me shallow, I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic raiders in spiked american football armour and silly hairstyles dancing to the rhythm of lead.

So I was very excited when I heard a while back that they were making a Fallout 3, even though I'd heard it was going to be kind of a first-person shooter, which made me worry that they'd dumb it down somewhat, emphasise the action and minimise the role-playing elements, ending up with something a bit like Bioshock, which I found not bad, but very disappointing after all the blah blah.

What I hadn't realised was that Fallout 3 was being developed by Bethesda, the folks behind Oblivion, apparently everyone's favourite RPG of the last couple of years. If I had known, I would probably have been more worried still, because me and Oblivion don't always get on. Certainly Oblivion ain't my favourite anything. And don't get me wrong, I don't hate it, I've played it and its precursor Morrowind quite a bit, but there are a few things that really rile me about it, which I might as well discuss here, since they're very relevant to my opinion about Fallout 3:

1. Huge world that's all the same. Fans of Oblivion talk a lot about the massiveness of the game world, and it is impressive in a sense, until you realise that the vast majority of the huge number of locations are all one of about four or five virtually identical dungeons. After a while, you can even see where they've used the same u-bend or flooded passageway. Sure, one might have a table with a book, while another has a table with a coin, but that hardly makes for a meaningful and stimulating game universe. There's not much in the way of sense of humour either. It's all rather po-faced and pompous. After a while it just becomes like chewing sawdust. Another indetikit dungeon. This one's got flying thingies instead of ogres, but, you know...

2. Ridiculous play-balancing. Because the world is so free-form, you can wander wither you please and pretty much visit any area from the start, they felt the need to scale up the opposition as the player becomes more powerful, which makes sense in a way, and helps to keep the game challenging. The problem is that it results in some real silliness - ultra dangerous wolves chewing your enormously powerful paladin to death. Gangs of muggers dressed in top-level glass armour and wielding demonic 2-handed swords. I mean, if they had that gear, why mug anyone? This contributes to the feeling the world already creates of nothing being particularly special or interesting. There's a lack of mystery. A lack of atmosphere.

3. Tedious game play. Combat tends to consist of running around slashing with a sword by tapping the left mouse button a lot. Rinse and repeat.

4. Is it me, or is Oblivion actually a really silly, over-the-top name for a game? The more I type it, the more I think so...

Fallout 3 works on the same engine as Oblivion, and has a lot of features in common. So have the developers managed to overcome some of their previous shortcomings? Yes. Massively.

The game world is absolutely brilliant. Immense, and some might say occasionally repetitive (a lot of tube stations seem similar, but then tube stations are, I guess), but nowhere near as repetitive and dull as Oblivion. The hospital feels like a hospital. The abandoned hotel like a hotel. Washington looks like Washington. After a nuclear war. There's a sense of meaningful history everywhere, you can almost see what might have happened in certain locations when the bombs fell. It feels far more like a real world than Oblivion, and the fact that it's OUR world only helps with the effect. It still manages to be completely huge, and you could probably play the game through three or four times and not do too much of the same stuff twice.

It also really feels like there are a lot of different approaches you can take. I can still remember when that was proudly trumpeted about Deus Ex, some years ago, but the freeform element basically came down to pick the lock or hack the computer, but basically you still have to shoot everything. With Fallout 3, yeah, you still have to shoot a lot, but it feels like there are plenty of different approaches that would work, and pretty much all of the non-combat skills feel like they have a valid use. The system is much better balanced than most, in other words, and I can imagine very different character types would all have their appeal. I can't think of many games, certainly adventure games, that have such good replay value.

Gameplay is vastly superior to Oblivion as well, with a system that allows you to stop time to target specific areas of your enemies. Sure, you pretty much always go for the head, but it's amazing how watching a Super-Mutant's brain explode in slow motion never really gets old. It also manages to capture some of the sense of the turn-based combat of the original Fallout, and update it for the modern era. It's arcade-y enough, without being too arcade-y. Which is good as, when time speeds up again, it's pretty clunky as a First Person Shooter, with most weapons, anyway.

The plotting is nice, with some excellent set pieces, especially the end sequence, but there are plenty of side-quests, and they manage to feel important in their own right, on the whole, and generally pretty involved. There's a thankful lack of the rather pathetic, "get me six fish" type jobs you sometimes get in these type of games. It is truly open-ended, and you can go anywhere you please pretty much right from the off. I can't think of many games where they've made this approach work as well as they have here, and the moment where you leave the Vault (think bunker) in which you are born and the vastness of the outside world becomes clear has to be one of the classic moments of gaming history.

Effort has gone into everything. There are vast numbers of nooks and crannies, all carefully designed. There are strange random encounters which I hear are sometimes different depending on choices you've made during the game. The whole thing is presented beautifully as well, and feels seamless. From the moment you turn it on, everything, from the clickety 50s style slide-show that starts it, to the inventory screens which are handled through your 50s style personal computer, reeks of atmosphere.

One can point to shortcomings, of course. The graphics on some of the figures are a bit ropey, especially your own character in third person view, but, hey, play in first person, then. Some people bitch that the post-nuclear wasteland isn't very colourful but, duh, it's a post-nuclear wasteland. Dialogue options occasionally don't tally with what's actually happened, although the range of possibilities are pretty huge what with the game being so free-form, I guess. The physics is a bit dodgy at times - A body once fell through a floor and dangled there, legs swinging, cans get caught in corners and rattle around forever, and I once sniped a raider on the roof of a building and his corpse inexpicably flew into the air and zipped around all over the wasteland for a few moments like a burst balloon.

But these are details. For me, it triumphs as an update of Fallout, really maintaining, and expanding on, the unique flavour they'd produced in those old games. It has the sense of humour. It has the atmosphere. But it also triumphs as a fine-tuning and a natural development of Oblivion, delivering a much more interesting and balanced game world and far more exciting gameplay. The graphics may not be truly AMAZING, no better than good, I wouldn't say, but nonetheless I can't think of another game I've played recently that felt like such a quantum leap forward in those areas that really count. Kind of gives me faith in the whole genre, actually, and also makes me very excited to see what Bethesda come up with for the next game in the elder scrolls series.

10/10

And by the way, people who say that you should never give 10/10 because no game/thing is perfect need to get over it. There's no point in having a scale out of ten if you can never use ten. Especially if you never use 1-5 either. I can think of ten or twenty games I'd give 10/10 to over the last twenty-five years or so. By it I mean that a game delivers great entertainment, succeeds completely on its own terms, and also manages to push things forward a bit at the same time. For me, Fallout 3 does all that and more.

Labels: games

Monday, 1 September 2008

Uncharted Soul Overlord: Raising Fortune IV

This past month I played 3 games on the Playstation 3. See how I have amusingly combined their titles to make the name of this post sound like a badly translated Anime series? I will now discuss them in the order of playing. Simple as that:


Overlord - Raising Hell

A dark lord a la Sauron (and owing not a little in terms of styling to Peter Jackson, not that that's a bad thing, necessarily) is defeated by a load of squeaky-clean heroes, and many years later returns from the the dead to wreak vengeance upon them. Yes, we've been here before, except in this version you are the dark lord in question, and the heroes have become even more evil than you were. The halfling is a monstrously overweight fascist, the paladin has become a pervert, the dwarf got so greedy that he invaded the elven realm and enslaved the fair folk, and as for the wizard ... man, it's always the wizard you've got to watch ...

Anyway, as overlord you control a load of mischievous minions with varying powers, and need to grind assorted cliche fantasy lands (halfling hills, elven woods, dwarven mines) under your spiky heel and return your dark tower to its former sinister glory. Naturally, ever since that pathetic excuse for a piece of rubbish disappointment, Black and White (a game which bore the tagline, 'find out who you really are', to which my answer was, 'bored') there needs to be moral choices. So you have the option of evil, or really evil. Force the peasants to do your bidding, or slaughter them to a man? It's a laugh, this game, it really is, with nice graphics and great design throughout. The designers obviously have a deep understanding of cheesy fantasy mores as frequently expressed in the video game scene, and take great glee in taking the piss out of them. This being an expanded version, there are also a load of hell-like abysses over which you can extend your totalitarian dominion. These really are pretty funny at times, something you don't see often enough in computer games, that's for sure. A giant incompetent theatrical show portraying the destruction of the elven race to an audience of bored demons. Death rocking out on his scythe while giving it the metal fingers. Using a paladin as a giant mop. Well, maybe you had to be there...

Anyway, a nice little game with which to while away a few evenings, nothing too mind blowing, but does what it says on the tin, nicely styled, and has a wicked sense of humour, especially for those of us in the fantasy business. 7/10


Soul Calibur IV

Man, I loved Soul Edge when it first came out in the arcade. To those who don't know, it's a sword-fighting beat 'em up, in essence. At a time when 3d meant virtua-fighter and characters as blocky as the Thing, Soul Edge really did look frickin' amazing, with revolutionary texture, gravity and detail. And the gameplay was new and exciting too, with real variety to the different characters. I used to run down to Wizard Video on Harrow Road (from whence I also rented lots and lots of crap sub-John Woo oriental action films) with pound coins in my hot little hands and hammer that arcade machine with limited competence but great enthusiasm. Ah, happy days. Later, when it came out on the Playstation 1 (called Soul Blade for reasons I've never understood), I played the hell out of it with mates. It was almost like Street Fighter II all over again. Ah, happy days. Again.

I had Soul Calibur II, I think it was, on the PS2, and it was good, but it didn't quite seem to have the magic, so I was keen to see whether they'd pushed things forward on the PS3. Have they? Not really.

The graphics undoubtedly get better with each iteration - better shading, better textures, all the stuff we expect from next gen and yada yada. I must say though, that I kind of feel some of the personality has leaked out of this series with each iteration. The female characters in particular seem to have become more and more identical wide-eyed big-boobed manga dolls, like they've all visited the same crap cosmetic surgeon. I mean, they never covered up, but these days several of them seem to sport costumes that would make a stripper blush, let alone an expert in armed combat. And though they've added more characters (frankly too many, to my mind) the old favourites don't seem to have changed much in terms of moves and movement. They even do the same victory celebrations and say the same tough putdowns as they did not one game ago, but two, only now the camera angles appear to be a lot less varied and inventive. It feels like the developers are phoning it in. I remember the first version of Tekken that came out on the PS2 - can't remember the name of it, but basically it was identical to Tekken 3 with better textures. This game feels like a similar upgrade (or lack of one), but at least they had the excuse there that the console just came out. PS3's been out a while, and this is the best they can come up with? Bit weak.

This version also doesn't feature the cornucopia of one player modes that earlier ones had. The plotting (such as it is) is cursory at best, the one player experience feels ... a bit dumb. Yeah, I know, it's all about the internet, and that makes a lot of sense. I mean, what kind of saddo plays beat 'em ups on their own? Erm... [nervously raises hand] But still, I don't see any reason to make the one player actively worse. You get into the one player enough, maybe then you decide to be embarrassed by the army of brilliant twelve year olds waiting sweaty palmed to destroy you.

I loved the first of these games. It's still fun bashing the crap out of assorted freaks with a sword, and you still have the most ludicrously over the top voice-over guy in the world spouting magnificent gibberish like, "transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords, eternally retold!" which is a plus, but I don't think the series has got better, overall. It's got ... the same. 5/10


Uncharted - Drake's Fortune

Well, now, talk about saving the best til last. This just came out on platinum on the PS3 (half price, that is), and I hadn't really heard much about it (why would I, since I have a two year old and almost never leave the house?) but it turns out to be pretty much an object lesson in how to make a great game.

I guess you could describe it as a video-game Indiana Jones, or perhaps Tomb Raider with a sense of humour and much more sophisticated combat. Pretty much every aspect, from control system, to storyline, to music and sound, to design of the characters and settings, to the way the opening and loading screens look, hits the nail squarely on the head. Everything is beautifully smooth, intuitive, seamless. This is the polar opposite of designers phoning it in. This is a game in which every aspect has evidently been polished until it shines, huge effort has been expended to create a feeling of effortlessness (is that a word?)

There's a great variety of settings and feels. Jungles, ancient tombs, flooded cities, crumbling forts, overgrown monasteries, cargo ships, even an abandoned U-boat pen. There's also a good variety of gameplay - gun-based and hand-to-hand combat, running, jumping and climbing, exploration and puzzle solving. Some sequences near the end are genuinely scary, as well, as it steps briefly and very effectively into horror territory.

For a game that isn't necessarily a full-on shooter the combat sections are excellent, fluid, exciting. Use of cover is slick and responsive, hand to hand fighting is neatly managed, enemy AI is impressive, and there's a range of weaponry that's interesting enough without getting in the way. Particularly good, oddly, is that you can't carry more than two weapons at once and not that much ammunition, so you tend to just toss guns aside regularly and use whatever's to hand - just like Indiana Jones would've done - rather than feeling like you have to scrounge every spare shotgun shell as you often do with these sort of games. In combat, as everywhere else, the whole experience is improved immeasurably by the variety of animations and the way the personality of the main character constantly leaches through. He'll cower behind walls under fire, he'll fling himself from one crate to another with suitable desperation, he'll say, "oh god, oh god, oh god," when a grenade lands next to him, or quip, "that'll hurt in the morning," after butting some pirate off a cliff.

And it's the personality of the whole thing that really lifts it. The three leads - everyman out of his depth tricky but basically decent main character, slimy old conman sidekick and spunky love-interest - are eminently likeable, the cut-scenes are well acted, involving, but not intensely over long (I'm looking at you, Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!) They look like real people (no enormous boobs in sight). They even kind of talk like real people. Or at least like actors from a good pulp action-adventure film, which is kind of the idea. This is one charming-ass game. Even the villains are kind of likeable. I played the whole thing with a smile on my face. I even started thinking I should make my characters more likeable. For about 10 seconds. But that's a long time for me.

You could point to some trifling shortcomings, maybe. The climbing and jumping sections feel relatively straightforward, kind of obvious, and not particularly challenging, but perhaps that's partly because the controls are so damn good and the character moves so smoothly. It feels like quite a linear game, with very little deviation offered from a set path. Plus the continue settings are pretty forgiving, on the whole, and it offers frequent hints, so the experienced gamer will no doubt find themselves tearing through it in double quick time. The result is the game is quite short (though it doesn't necessarily feel small), but I guess there is a comparable upside in that the experience feels extra rich, packed with cinematic moments and very rarely frustrating or boring, and I'd certainly consider playing the whole thing through again on harder difficulty, which I don't often feel in these days of limited time.

The whole thing bursts with personality, is full of detail without ever being finicky or fussy, and offers great, responsive, polished gameplay. I'm reluctant to give 10s out without due consideration, since I think for a 10 something needs to stand the test of time, feel like a classic in hindsight. But I'd say this has a good chance of getting there. Supposedly a sequel is in the pipeline. Here's hoping this is the start of a long and beautiful series. 9/10, and we'll see about that extra point ...

Labels: games

Sunday, 27 July 2008

Metal Gear Solid 4

Everything these days seems to be a sequel, and moreso than ever in the world of video games. Only look at some of the releases I've been looking forward to this past year or two:

Grand Theft Auto IV, Civilisation IV, Resident Evil 5, Neverwinter Nights 2 (though let's not forget that Neverwinter Nights 1 was a sequel to Baldur's Gate II), Gothic 3, Oblivion (The Elder Scrolls 4), Final Fantasy XIII (13, for fox sakes?). Those that don't have numbers have colons. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Command and Conquer: Tiberium Sun. Some even have colons and numbers. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, anyone?

You know what you'll get with sequels - old friends, familiar gameplay, better graphics, in jokes, plots that are incomprehensible unless you played the other twelve installments, and perhaps even then. And few sequels are quite as sequel-y as the keenly anticipated game I've just been playing - Metal Gear Solid 4, one of (and there would seem to be a dwindling number) the few good reasons to have a Playstation 3 (itself the third in the series, lest we forget).

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (yes, it has a colon too) describes itself as Tactical Espionage Action. It's one of those sneak-em-ups we get these days, where the emphasis is on slipping unnoticed like the breeze through war-torn warzones where wars are happening. Warrily. If you want you can go all rambo-styley, flinging grenades with wild abandon and blazing away with an M60, but the rewards tend to be higher for sneaky, sneaky, with occasional use of non-lethal force involving gas traps, silenced anaesthetic pistols, tapping on the walls to distract attention of guards, and perhaps the occasional use of a sleeper hold or good old punch in the nuts. Make sure you hide that corpse somewhere shady, though!

The only other entry in the series I'd played was the first, which I was slightly disappointed by, feeling the majority of the slightly hokey top-down gameplay let down its huge and often impressive ambitions to be something truly revolutionary. I guess this game finally fulfils the promise of manga-inspired tactical espionage action, and though perhaps a bit too late to be totally revolutionary, it's still a beautifully slick and immersive experience.

The masterstroke is that the hero, Solid Snake, while still being an unstoppable special forces death machine, is now, due to accelerated aging, also a grumpy old chain-smoking duffer with a bad back, a dodgy 'tache, and a voice like a washing machine full of gravel. Yesterday's hero, out of his place and his depth in an age of nano-machines and remote control war robots, back to save the world one more time before he inevitably kneels at the grave of his fallen comrades and eats his own .45. That is just sweeeet, and with every mission he's more of a coughing, oxygen mask using, drug injecting, hideously burned, physically and emotionally tortured mess, haunted by the piercing memories of dead friends and old failures. Why don't we have more cynical old dying duffer heroes, I'd like to know?

The gameplay sometimes feels a touch clunky compared to free-flowing stuff like Prince of Persia (Just climb over the crates, Snake! Why can't you climb over the crates?) or full-on shooters like Gears of War (He's right next to you, Snake, turn and shoot you old bastard! Turn and shoot! Snaaaaaaaaake!!!!!!!) but the sneaking around is ace - the chameleon suit which blends into whatever you press yourself against is particularly cool. The enemy AI is ace - watching two man teams direct each other around searching for you gets the hairs standing up. The bossfights are pretty ace - surreal battles with octopus, raven, and wolf themed crazies that produce a genuine sense of drama. Above all, that indefinable something, the feel of the game, the world it creates, the sense of immersion, dare one even say emotion, is pretty damn ace.

The FMV sections are kind of ace, and kind of ludicrously overlong and self-indulgent. I mean, they look beautiful, the characters are well-voiced and acted and all that jazz, they just go on for half an hour. And I'm not kidding. You frequently find yourself watching the game more than playing it. Several times I'd think - ok, just a quick hour of Metal Gear before bed, then find myself still up at 2.00 in the morning waiting for the next absurd string of overly detailed waffle sequences to get done. Can you all stop talking so I can go to bed now, please? Granted I haven't played the previous two games, and maybe that'd help, but the level of exposition seemed uttery unnecessary/incomprehensible at times, and left me with the feeling that I, the player, didn't really have that much to contribute.

The ludicrous arsenal of weapons is pretty damn impressive, though the way in which each one is customisable, examinable, and lovingly rendered in superbly detailed 3d does seem slightly at odds with the ham-fisted anti-war messages frequently delivered with all the subtlety of, well, a combat shotgun blast to the face. "WAR IS WRONG!" the game seems to say. "Man, war is so wrong. Especially war conducted by sexy women in skin-tight camo-suits, with more figure-hugging webbing than seems decent, wielding maybe a P90 submachine gun in a really cool way, you know, the one lovingly moulded from low-weight ballistic polymer using NATO's new standard five-seven round with the high muzzle velocity offering an excellent mixture of firepower and penetration, probably also fitted with laser sight, flashlight for low light conditions and suppressor for wet work. Holds fifty in the clip providing high rate of fire for point or suppression with minimal reloading. Holy shit, but that's a nice gun! Oh. But war is so WRONG."

Sneaking around the warzones, pursued by mercenaries and revolutionaries alike while they also spectacularly battle each other is very, very cool. But as the game goes on it seems to insist on showing off its more interesting game modes, kind of like Russel Crowe proving to the audience that he's more than just an angry actor. Sneaking around irritating robots you can't kill. Manning a gun on a jeep, or a bike, or etc. Controlling a giant robot. A lot of these feel a bit tagged on, and sometimes leave you wondering whether what you do with the pad makes any difference. They're slightly, for want of a better word, rubbish. I just kept thinking, let's be done with this nonsense so I can hide behind a crate, sneak up behind some guy and snap his neck like a twig again. Please. I was enjoying that.

Still, in the end, depite the meanderings, the self indulgence, the creaky philosophy, the weird sense of humour, and the occasional tedium, this game is overall a brilliant experience. A moving experience, even. The design, the way things look and feel, the music, the way the FMVs bleed into the action and back - it all builds to some truly memorable moments, and creates some truly memorable characters. Can't say fairer than that.

So long, Snake, you grumpy old bastard. For you the war is over. Now you can blow your brains out in peace.

9/10

Labels: games

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV

From the dim and distant past of computer gaming to the incandescent, high definition now, and a game that is surely one of the biggest releases of all time. It's interesting, looking at the two together, how far the games industry has come. From a time when games were coded in a couple of months by some geezer with huge specs and a chunky jumper in his attic, to one in which they're developed over years by teams of hundreds with astronomical budgets. The sole preserve of screaming school-kids, bemused dads and terminally uncool twenty-somethings to a multi-billion dollar international industry that eclipses Hollywood, and can surely only grow further.

I've been a lover of this series since the original, top-down game came out way back in '97 on the original Playstation. In many ways the formula hasn't changed in the eight or so games that have followed on various platforms: a hard-bitten crime simulator, if you will, with lashings of fast driving action and tongue-in-cheek splatter that frequently imitates classic gangster films. It's the sense of humour (all too often missing in video games generally) that's always really separated these games from the many stodgy imitations, though, with a sharp line in biting satire on modern life.

It was Grand Theft Auto III, in 2001, that really made the series into a phenomenon and established the basic pattern of gameplay for the games that would follow - introducing a totally 3d city, one of the most detailed and complex ever realised at the time, incorporating some great characterisation and voice-acting and a new level of immersion and gameplay, with vast amounts of side-missions and flexibility. Every title since has been a massive hit, apparently the franchise has sold over 70 million copies. Despite the many, many imitators it has spawned, nothing really comes close for the mixture of beautifully realised urban settings, range of different games modes including driving, action, role-playing, exploration, and sheer sense of humour. The previous installment, San Andreas, in particular was an enormous, epic game spanning three cities and a whole load of country in between. The only games you can really compare these to are others in the series.

So what's better in GTA IV than the previous one?

Well, graphics, for a pretty major start. I've never been someone who really valued graphics of themselves, they're certainly no substitute for gameplay, but this is the first game I've played on a hi-def console on a proper, quality, hi-def LCD TV, and it does look frickin' amazing. The characters are vastly more detailed and expressive than ever before, which helps with the characterisation. Sometimes when you add detail to people and really get in close it can make them look very unreal - a mistake developers make all too often, especially when new technology becomes available - but they've kept a larger than life, over-vivid, slightly cartoony feel to the faces and places that's consistent with the pop-graphic art they've always used on the covers, and flows beautifully with the whole feel of the world.

Liberty City itself is the real star. I don't think a city, or for that matter any kind of environment, has ever been realised so completely and in such detail on a computer game. I mean the place lives , shifts, changes. Time passes, shadows move and lengthen, weather comes and goes. People of all types throng the streets. They knock into you, drop their hot-dog and call you an asshole. Stuff happens - guys chat about nonsense as you pass, hit up girls, get into fights, get chased by overweight cops. It's a city packed with magic moments, and everyone will have their own - gunning your recently stolen sports car past middle park as the sun peeps between the skyscrapers and burns away the morning mist. Crossing the Broker Bridge at sunset, just as the lights come on. At times, like when I first went up in a helicopter over the city, you'll just think, how the hell is this possible? Parks, churches, affluent office blocks and seedy housing projects, graffiti-daubed flyovers and rubbish-strewn back alleys, floodlit refineries and mansions on the heights, rattling l-trains and echoing tunnels, the sense of realism, the detail, the feel and the variety is amazing.

And the city is absolutely massive. It could easily be three hundred city blocks, arranged in five boroughs that are rough analogues of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Jersey City. It is massive, even by the standards of the previous massive cities in the series, and this is somewhat of a curse as well as a blessing. To truly explore every nook and cranny could take months, and because the city's so big and the content is hence comparatively spread out, there isn't that much to find, just looking at random. At least there wasn't when I tried, and so I soon gave up on that aspect, and just went where the game took me. Driving from one place to another, especially in later missions spanning the whole city, can take ages. You're assisted this time round by a nice guideline on the little mini-map, but again this proves more curse than blessing, as you typically end up following it slavishly from one place to another at high speed, eyes half on it and half on the road, generally missing the urban wonder around you lest you drive your motorbike off a pier. I didn't feel like I got to know the city the way I had the cities in San Andreas - a few landmarks, a few main roads, a couple of blocks round my safehouses, but I didn't know the cut-throughs, the alleyways. They never felt like my streets.

The acid sense of humour that has always characterised the series is there in spades, and suffuses every aspect - the ads on the streets for German beer Piswasser, the talk on the radio stations, the send-ups of tv shows (a cartoon in which american space rangers take democracy to the stars by any means necessary is particularly good), the fact that the statue of liberty holds aloft a disposable coffee cup instead of a torch, and so on. And there's bucketloads of character too. The main character, Niko Bellic, could easily have turned out to be an implacable, brutal, bullet-headed balkan killer of the type we're used to seeing on The Shield. Instead he's funny, honest, very likeable, and has an excellent double-act with his cousin, bullshit-merchant Roman. Other characters are pretty much great across the board, and a wide board it is, from Russian gangsters, to Irish Goons, to Sopranos-style low-rent mafiosi, they're all affectionately drawn and nicely acted. You can build friendships with some of them, go out and get pissed together, take in a show, play darts. If they like you enough they'll offer some special service - cut price guns or a good word with the cops if you find yourself wanted. But the little sub-games are rather repetitive, and despite some occasionally hilarious dialogue, maintaining the relationships can quickly seem more of a chore than a diversion.

The combat has been significantly re-tooled, and mostly for the better. Fist-fighting is fudgier than before, for some reason it's very hard to give someone a shoeing once you've knocked them over, but the gunfighting is way better, with reasonable systems for taking cover, aiming and zooming in that lift the shooting sections of the game considerably. And those sections interact and fit into the rest much more smoothly - there are a lot of interiors you can explore now, merging seamlessly with the rest of the world. You get shoot-outs in museums, in hotels, in housing projects, abandoned hospitals, you name it, you kill gangsters in it. With pistols. Pop, pop, pop go me nine. With shotguns. Boo-yah. With SMGs. Rat-a-tat-tat. With assault rifles, grenades, bazookas... Yes, the violence level is still sky high, but there's a far greater sense of realism, and with it seems to come...responsibility. Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't imagine just going out on the streets and cutting loose with a desert eagle in this game, like I regularly used to on others. It just would have seemed...disrespectful of the environment. And out of character with Niko, who's basically a good guy, forced to do bad things. Very bad things. In line with this new realism some of the more splattery extremes have been pruned. No rampages (little challenges to slaughter a certain number of bystanders with a given weapon in a given time). It feels a more grown up, more adult game, perhaps.

So I've touched on what was worse than last time, what else was worse?

Somewhat of a lack of customisability. In San Andreas, there were a mighty range of options for hair, facial hair, tattoos, jewelry, clothes. You could go down the gym and work out (which with my spinal problems is about as close as I get to a gym these days), or you could pig out on fried chicken, and the results would show on the character, buff or flabby accordingly. I went through noticable phases in different cities and areas, tweaking the appearance to fit the environment. In GTA IV there are far fewer options - the character is always physically the same (kind of fly-weight boxer with a crew-cut, stubble, and a stance that says, "fuck you") there's limited choice of clothes and shoes but not much more. Four shops in the entire game where there were a cornucopia of barbers, tattoo parlours, gyms and clothes places before. There was also a system of experience in San Andreas - you'd get better with a certain type of gun the more you used it, for example. Maybe I've got OCD (actually I definitely have) but the mere existence of things like that make me want to explore them. You felt as if the character grew as the game went on, from punk kid to hardened gangster to feared kingpin. All that was gone in GTA IV - at the end of the game you're basically the same shovel-faced balkan killer you were at the start, just with better shoes and a suit, maybe.

Related to this slight feel of lack of progress is that there seems to be a lot less side-stuff to do, and what there is is less compelling. Specifically lost are the businesses you could buy up, do a couple of jobs to sort out, and would then start making money for you. Maybe there was nothing particularly special about them in terms of gameplay, but it created a sense of building an empire that I really enjoyed. Likewise you no longer buy safehouses, you just get given them at various key points, and there are far fewer. One of the big reasons for earning the money in San Andreas always seemed to be to buy a better pad. You'd look at a big house on the hill and think, one day... With that gone there didn't really seem to be much point in earning all the money. Five or six grand would buy you all the clothes you'd ever need, so then it's just exhorbitant medical bills after you're riddled with lead by a bunch of angry mafiosi, and lots and lots of guns. And you usually pick up all the guns you'd ever need anyway, which leaves the money feeling kind of pointless. There was no fighting for territory, as in San Andreas, no ownership of the streets, so Niko becomes a kind of eternal freelancer, working for bigger, better, richer bosses as he goes along, sure, but basically always an outsider. That was disappointing, especially since Niko's cousin is a kind of lame-ass business man - you'd have thought building up the family business would have been an easy set of missions to include.

There are little extra bits and pieces you can do, of course, just as there were previously. You can hunt criminals in a cop-car, take fares in a cab, steal cars to order, hunt down 200 pigeons scattered about the city if you're completely insane, but without much reason to make the money it feels a bit pointless, and changes very little except the % completed statistic. And I'm getting a bit old to worry about that. It becomes about the main missions only, and getting from one to the other as fast as possible, and the sense of daily life gets kind of lost. It's a good thing that some of the missions are absolutely brilliant. The heat-influenced bank heist in particular - three masked men charging through the back alleys of chinatown, blazing away with assault rifles, escaping down the subway tunnels - is one of the most impressive sequences I've ever seen on a game.

The writing of the cut-scenes, the voice acting and the interaction between the characters is great throughout, but there's a bit of a lack of star turns. San Andreas had some dream casting - Samuel L Jackson and Chris Penn as the bent cops? Peter Fonda as the grass-growing hippy? James Woods as the shady CIA man? Ice T as the washed-up rapper? These were the guys you'd pick if you could pick anyone. GTA IV didn't have any voices that I really recognised. It generally felt a less huge, less epic game, smaller-scale, with less crazy excesses (not necessarily a bad thing) but also a more pedestrian plot and a less satisfying resolution. I found myself rushing through it a bit towards the end, a sure sign that it had slightly lost my interest. I think they pulled a blinder as well by setting the last couple of games in the recent past - 80s, Miami-vice, Carlito's Way style Miami, and 90s, Boyz n the Hood, Colours era LA were instantly themed and recognisable. Setting this game in the now made it somehow less impactful.

In this era of internet connections and downloadable content, perhaps some of these holes will be filled in with future patches. Perhaps the multi-player mode adds layers of depth, or at least additional gameplay, I missed out on. The city they've created could certainly support another two or three complete games without seeming repetitive. I guess time will tell on that score, it's not an area I've really started to explore yet, and I hear additional content will be exclusive to XBox anyway. Ah well...

So the verdict, after all this waffle? A very good game, still, don't get me wrong. But it feels as if it stands slightly in the shadow of world-beating forebears, and in an effort to streamline and simplify they've maybe lost some depth. The all important humour is there, and the setting is spectacular, but the game within it is, for me, a much lesser one than San Andreas. That game I would have given 10/10 without a doubt. For me, GTA IV is closer to an 8.

Labels: games

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

A History of Gaming 1 - Childhood

My name is Joe, and I'm a video games addict.

Been playing them all my life. A lot. Quite a bit less over the last couple of years, what with the writing and the child and all the rest of it, so there hasn't really seemed an apt moment to begin to discuss them. But, as some of you may be aware, Grand Theft Auto IV came out recently, as a result of which I treated myself to a Playstation 3. So over the last few days, rather than waste all my writing time pissing about on the internet, I've been wasting it revving a stolen motorbike through the mean streets of Liberty City, and gunning down gangsters. More of this later, for the time being let me only say that I've found it not quite as magnetic as the previous installment, San Andreas, but still completely brilliant, and - very rare and very welcome in video gaming - the thing that really makes it is the humour, the personality, the writing.

But since, at 33 (a young and spritely one), I've pretty much grown up along with the computer games industry, and witnessed a lot of it take shape first hand, I thought it might be amusing (for me, at least), to push back the mists of time and reminisce about my long association with the medium. To pick out some of the landmarks that have entertained me, transported me, amazed me, and dare I say influenced my writing over the years...

I think we were the third household in my neighbourhood to own a computer when I was...maybe 7 or 8? My old mate Al's dad had a Sinclair ZX80 (huge metal box with clackety-clack-clacky clear plastic keys, action something like the stops on a 1700s organ), my old mate Tom's dad had a home-built Tangerine (the case was made out of wood. Yes, wood, painted magnolia as I recall.) We got an Acorn Atom. It had a staggering 2K of RAM. That's 2000 bytes, or 16,000 bits, biatches! I can still remember the excitement as we swtiched it on and saw that > cursor flash, flash, flashing on the monitor (greenscreen, maybe, or it might even have been just a black and white telly with a screen the size of her majesty's 3p stamp.) Gaming opportunities were limited, however. Probably stuff like space invaders and pac-man were out there at the time in the arcades, probably asteroids and a few others too, but on the Atom all that was really available was Stargate, in which you maneuvred a triangular block of eight or nine massive pixels left to right and tried to shoot other blocks of massive pixels which dropped from above (leaving a fizzing cathode-ray trail behind them). We were utterly gripped and stunned by it, played it madly, hammering at the clackety-clack keyboard until half the keys broke off leaving little metal bars covered in razor-sharp solder, then hammering at those until our fingertips were red-raw. Ah, happy days.

Some time later we got a BBC Model B. It had a staggering 32K of RAM. 32,000 bytes, read 'em and weep, mofos! It had eight colours! You heard right - colours! A whole bold new world opened up. Admittedly, not as much of a one as opened up for owners of the (relatively contemporary with the BBC) Commodore 64, or the sexy rubber-keyboard Sinclair Spectrum 48K. They got top-whack fly shit like Lords of Midnight (very early fantasy adventure/war game which I played about three times round a mate's house and affected me so strongly that I still dream about it), Way of the Exploding Fist (the great, great, granddaddy of all beat-em-ups), and Marsport (whose crap side-to-side graphics and boring gameplay were hailed as revolutionary). The BBC was sold on a semi-apocriphal academic-cum-educational tip, so fun was out, at least to begin with. But we had rocket-raid, horizontally scrolling shooter, which we often played with three of us round the keyboard, my brother steering the ship, me shooting, and my dad dropping the bombs. Wicked times, bro! We also had text adventures. That is games where everything was described by text, and you would enter commands by text. Not much of a development beyond fighting fantasy gamebooks, in fact a step back in some ways. Anyone who remembers those text adventures ever complete one? I remember Philosopher's Quest, Castle of Riddles, and Adventure Quest early on. The ludicrous thing was that, especially in these first efforts, you had to come up with exactly the right phrasing to make something work. To younger people the following will sound inconceivable:

You are standing outside a castle. To the north there is a forest.

What now?

>GO NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>WALK NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>FUCK OFF

You cannot do that right now.

To older people it will no doubt bring back tears of fist-clenched frutstration.

We had the BBC a long time, maybe 4 or 5 years, so things came a long way in that period. Every new game would herald some new development, and noticable genres started to appear which are still around today, albeit it in forms so hugely evolved that they are barely recognisable. Platform games, like Killer Gorilla, Blagger, Manic Miner, and later isometric stuff from ultimate like knight lore. Racing games like Revs. Horizontally, vertically, and diagonally scrolling shooters of all descriptions, always provided with a high score table that you couldn't save and would hence be lost whenever you turned the computer off, occasionally prompting you to try and leave the computer on for ten days straight.

All this magnificent software was supplied on her majesty's audio cassette, probably at around the cost of 8.99, which is seven thousand pounds in today's money (or three million dollars). You'd blow thirty weeks' pocket money, then spend ten minutes loading a game, though it felt like hours, and the machine would make a noise like, "wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeeee" the whole time while a hexidecimal counter went from 0 to what seemed like 7000 and D, a brightly coloured pixelly picture in the background loudly proclaiming what it was you were missing. Some of you know what I'm talking about. Later floppy discs appeared - not the hard-cased 3.5inch ones that have only recently disappeared to be replaced by CD and DVD ROM and flash drives, but the proper 5.25inch floppy, wibbly-wobbly ones. The double-disk drive we had weighed about 70 kilos, and made a noise like a washing machine. But it moved like the proverbial shit off a shovel compared to audio tape, let me tell you.

The BBC also featured the first Word Processor with which I was ever acquainted. Wordstar, a piece of software so powerful that you had to send your computer away so it could be installed on the motherboard on its own chip. Me and my mate Tom actually tried to write a fantasy masterpiece on it, believe it or not. I don't remember the title, but it featured the attempts of three mismatched young companions to reclaim the lost kingdom of their people, and featured the timeless sentence: "they will never forget their long-forgotten land." Hugo, anyone?

So what really stands out from those sunny slopes of long ago, in terms of gaming? What do I still fondly think of, draw inspiration from, not perhaps for what it was, but for what it made me feel? Well, for me, a game called Twin Kingdom Valley, which was a graphic adventure (basically a text adventure but with pictures) in a magical valley split by the lake of Watersmeet into a desert and a forest kingdom. The amazing thing was there was a picture for pretty much every one of its hundreds of locations. They'd seem absurd now, perhaps, but at the time it was magical. I still don't know how they coded such a massive game into 32K. It was a also a lot more free-form than the adventures I'd played heretofore, not an impossibly grammatical puzzle in every location, and featured combat, which was WAY cool.

>HIT TROLL WITH BROADSWORD

A troll is hit with a broadsword. A troll is dead.

Now that's more like it!

Then there was Citadel, a colossal side-on platform game from Superior Software which featured a massive game world with all kinds of settings, and some puzzles which actually made sense. Gasp. I actually completed that one, which was a real rarity back in those days. Turned out to be about an alien invasion, in the end, of all things. Doesn't everything, though...

And finally, the game which represents by far the biggest quantum leap forward in gaming I've ever witnessed, which saw mind-expanding innovation in pretty much every area, which was literally YEARS ahead of its time ... Elite. It was basically a space combat game, but also featured trading, piracy, bounty hunting, exploration. It was probably the first game to be entirely open-ended, so you could do whatever you pleased on it, set your own goals. The universe was indescribably massive (repetitive, perhaps, but not by the standards of the day, and undoubtedly massive). Above all, it was the first serious game to feature 3d graphics. Wire-frame, see through vector-graphics, but still. Can you believe the impact? Before, and for quite a while after for that matter, everything was cardboard sprites, usually seen side-on, often moving round single static screens. In Elite you were plunged into a three dimensional world, of objects tumbling in space, of planets and suns, of dogfights with pirate ships, of fumbling, fatal attempts to dock with space-stations.

With games that take huge leaps in one area or another, they often suffer in others. Ground-breaking graphics is all too often accompanied by shoddy gameplay. Not so here. The structure of trading, to make money, to buy better weapons, to kill pirates, to get better combat ratings, to make more money, seems simple now, obvious, maybe, but was compelling beyond belief at the time. And the flying itself was revolutionary, swift, responsive, effortlessly intuitive. The ships seemed to have weight, inertia. The AI was like nothing seen before - enemies would break off, spin, tumble away, evade. The radar was easy to read and always worked. Hard to believe it was released more than 25 years ago. Looking back on this game now, it seems such a vast leap forward that it's almost an anomaly, an aberration that you have to consider separately from everything else that followed for about five years. It was to other games of the time as the human being is to the amoeba. This was a game so mind-blowingly good that it was successfully released, years later, on the next generation of computers with only the most passing of cosmetic changes.

Elite. Greatest game of all time? For me, probably. It's certainly hard to imagine, in this much more jaded age, anything having such an impact across the board as that game did.

Anyway, that takes me up until about age 12, I think. If any of you give a toss, by all means share some of your own gaming experiences in the comments section. Nothing past about 1985, though! We're going to get there later. In the next thrilling installment, I get me an Atari ST. 1024K, man! That's right, we call that a frikking MEGABYTE! And what's this big grey, squeaky box? It's a little thing called a MOUSE, motherf*cker!

EDIT: On looking some of these games up on the internet, I've found Wikipedia links for a lot, with screenshots that might bring back some memories, so I've added some in where possible. You can also find video walkthroughs of some, complete with sound effects on google video. A lot of them are actually available through various emulators. Lords of Midnight is apparently still quite widely played twenty-five years later, and has a few thriving communities dedicated to it. Twin Kingdom Valley can be downloaded to play on your mobile phone, believe it or not. That's an interesting point, actually, how as technology changes some of the classics get new leases of life on different platforms...

Labels: games