The Christmas Steam Sale has begun in earnest and in response a few threads have arisen asking whether games such as Space Marine are worth buying.
For the price of £14.99, you'd get about 4-5 hours of enjoyable single-player experience (with a campaign that is 8 hours.) My currency of leisure time is one pint of beer an hour. This rather conservative method of drinking equates, in Hull prices, to £2.50 an hour. So, in terms of the single player experience, it's rather steep.
However, the game manages to sell on its cultural capital of the 40k universe. True to its 1980s indie gaming roots, the 40k universe is brutal. There is no righteous battle for good, or even for bad; only imperialism. There is no war-weariness; billions die on a whim and countless more step forth to replace them. I even read recently of the suggestion that the messiah-figure of the Emperor (who is supposedly guiding humanity during its struggle for survival) could just just a lifeless husk kept as a trophy so mere men can play out the empty fate of humanity.
Graphically the game is able to portray some of this brutality: your chainsword satisfyingly crunches arms off orks; the landing-smash of a jump-pack propelled marine turns heretics into fine red mist; and the game contains an impressive plethora of weaponry.
However, the marines speak, and argue, in British public school-boy accents.
Still, the game is meaty enough. It's just that it's more of a grind in some places than others. After three hours I thought "Gears of Warhammer (but not so well-paced.)"
An immediate sequel is unlikely as I believe PC-Gamer ran an article on how the upcoming W40k MMO precludes one. There isn't much in the way of modding for it, so in the meantime I see Space Marine as equivalent to a limited version of Mount and Blade as Dawn of War's is a limited version of Total War.
I've been thinking much about this recently. I've considered seeing being 'grown-up' as dedicating less time to my imaginative life. That is, less time and judos to imaginative experiences than experiences of 'reality.' Reality, by my definition, being that which still exists even when you ignore it: taxes, rain and hunger for one.
Play is a serious thing. Just because we think that we stop playing, doesn't mean we have. I think most of our lives - not least our 'professional' lives - are games with set rules and achievements (and power-ups!) Just because we don't commit all the rules to paper doesn't mean they don't exist in a very real fashion: no-one has told me not to wear an entirely black suit (black tie, etc) to work, so I feel it trangresses on some rule (or another.)
I tell an anecdote from Vygotsky (Russian educationalist) to my kids about how play is serious. A bunch of kids are playing on a climbing frame. Without warning one climbs to the top and shouts in his best pirate voice, "Aye ya LandLubbers! I'm gonna cut out ye gizzards!"
A second kid hangs off and, in his best throaty voice, responds (without prompting), "avast to starboard, you can't best me scimitar!"
The two kids play back and forth until a third kid approaches and says, "can I join in?"
Instantly the game ends, without word. The game could only exist when the rules were both spontaneous and implicit. As soon as the rules needed to be reflected and considered, the fun left the game; indeed, perhaps it was a little too close to reality.
As long as people around you trust you with responsibility, 'growing-up' in the way I feel people connote the term is not necessary. In fact, it is perhaps anathema to living happily.
A final thought I'll leave you with is this: in my school I admire the fact that so many kids can actually be kids. I see 15-16 lads playing tag. These are soft kids; just in a semi-rural community where they are (seemingly) free of the angst of being faux 'grown-up', whatever that might mean.
Tonight, after a difficult day of work, I resolved myself to return to Shogun 2. Often I find myself after a day that exhausts me that I fancy anything other than an RTS game. RTS is, in itself exhausting. Or, occasionally, exhilarating. Both of which are the same thing, depending on when you come.
So, in Shogun 2, for those who have some familiarity, has an event called Realm Divide. It occurs after you become the most powerful faction in the game. Its consequence is that every faction goes to war with you. As a result, you find yourself in battles like I did tonight; Oda and 6000 troops against my 2500.
Once I read on a forum that you should recruit cavalry - that mainstay of crushing battlefield victories - because you risk the multitude of sieges battles in which they are useless. The truth is, though, that the battles often fought in the campaign often require you to pause your expansion and consolidate your economy. Although that has cost me something like 12 hours and 30 mins of research time, it does mean that often I can have armies filled with cavalry sieging towns that are compelled to attack me.
The reverse happened this evening. After a busy day filled with the intensity of teaching with the gut, I had not time for the joy of war. However, some mental impetuosity remained enough to try to fight the battle I had saved on: 2500 samurai against near 6000 of the opponent's.
I expected to fight a battle where I might (hopefully) decimate 3000 or so my opponents army before being overrun. The outcome was different.
Initially I positioned my samurai on my left - next to woodland - while my archers took the open centre ground. My cavalry - 340 strong Katana cavalry - took a right near some woods. The enemy was initially comprised of some 2000 Ashigaru (militia)and about 800 samurai.
To my luck, the enemy marched his front line of archers, and one of his three generals, towards my far right. I should say that Shogun 2 is accurate in the sense that an army will crumble if its generals fall. And that, as a result, the AI will be rather too bolshy with its generals.
Therefore, when the battle started, I was surprised (although not non-plussed) to see a general supporting his Ashigaru archers. I waited, somehow, until he advanced until he had no chance of retreating, and streamed my cavalry from the woods. One of his generals was swarmed, and cut down in short order. Although his archers shot many of my cavalry from their horses, they weren't enough for me to storm and rout 700 of his Ashigaru.
While I was awkwardly micromanaging this one-sided battle, my samurai began to charge a more even battle in the woodland. While his massed archers were attempting to fire upon my elite troops, they were protected by the woodland.
I should have perished on that field. However, the fact that one of his generals had died, and that I had recently slaughtered 800 of his men, meant that his right flank had entirely surrendered. I moved my morale-busting troops - ashigaru bomb throwers - up to support, but without careful managing they were caught by a unit of Yari Samurai (elite spearmen) and annihilated. Against a more worthwhile opponent (read 80% of the multiplayer component of Shogun 2) I would be dead. Against my happy level, though, I was still in with a shout. My cavalry marched against their right, and along with my general's presence somehow routed their entire 3000 army. Perhaps it was the ability to crumble and roll up this flank, but his army was shattered and fled.
For the first time I faced an entirely new army of 3000 troops with less than 1200 of my own, exhausted, men. However, my advantage was that he was marching on in a line. A human opponent would have surely have formed his lined and crushed me carefully. The computer AI, of course, simply formed his four most elite units and charged. Although he should have routed me, my general somehow convinced my men to stay their ground. Like with all such conflicts, the fact that my fewer men managed to stay sooner shattered the morale of his stronger troops. That, and the fact that I managed to surrounded and rout two of his units in quick succession.
In all, I managed to kill 4000 troops for the loss of 1500 of mine. The game told me this was costly victory. I knew otherwise. For me, it was a game that someone I managed to speculate on a battle when the odds were far worse than I had ever played. And I won. I even watched the replay afterwards.
This weekend I purchased a fair few games in the Steam Sale alongside other commitments. Settling down to play, I found my first game - Deus Ex HR - crashed on the first level. Repeatedly. At different points. It tooks 30 minutes of tweaking the settings and files and googling irate forums to get it to work.
In a fit of pique, I posted a message on the PC-Gamers forum. The response was particularly interesting. I suggest, by the end, that if we pioneered a gaming BTEC, what would count as a C-grade? You had to be determined to get DOS games to load, or C64 tapes to run. These days, some games are demanding that same dedication. However, what really makes an A* gaming student?
Here is the link to the thread. Bear in mind that, as a public forum, the language might become a little fruity, so I take no responsibility should you decide to view the following link. There are mods, though, so it's for a mainstream audience:
I rarely purchase new games, least of all expansive efforts like The Elder Scrolls series. Partly this is snobbery: I feel above the tumble of experiencing that to which I feel the crowd might flock because of its newness. Part of it is because of cost: Total War games slash their prices in weeks. And, like with all great gaming communities, the modding community creates a better, more refined game over time.
But it was with great excitement that Skyrim arrived on Friday. As an old friend of sixteen years was visiting my sleepy seaside town, I hadn't planned on getting some gaming time in. Therefore, I had only preordered via amazon.co.uk with a free supersaver delivery. It is with great kudos to that behemoth that it arrived on the release day.
Skyrim is a cultural experience. It links to the ludic desires to game in a sandbox. To discover and create values and experiences and judgements through your autonomy as a privileged human being. The lore of the game has a rich history, too, refined in its desire to move beyond the traditional RPG format of being a bunch of numbers that kills other numbers in an attempt to get the biggest numbers in the game. The genre has a way to go, but joining 250,000 PC Gamers on Friday night was an event.
The graphics look great, but there are issues with smoothness. Smoothness affects the gamer's perception of their experience more than anything. Some tweaks were made of the .ini files (I know!) thanks to help from the community, and it runs smoother than before. But still not smooth. Still, I know one of two things: a) This game will be refined by free mods in weeks. b) Without the community troubleshooting my need to reduce my sound quality, my game would have crashed to desktop perpetually.
My first played was for two hours. I felt the distinct disappointment that the genre is still not a narrative. A foolish disappointment, of course. The game requires more from you than that. Just as perhaps life does. But do I want my life to have a narrative? Or should it be a perpetual sandbox? A sandbox life becomes quickly existential and angst-filled. However, a narrative-driven life is one without choice, or the freedom to create meaning.
Still, I wanted to play again soon afterwards. And, in playing, to avoid fast travel (which made Oblivion a little tedious towards the end for me.)
I have worked hard this weekend at my teachering. I have marked for 3-4 hours, and planned for something of the same. I may be able to get some Skyrim in before the evening burns out. But that experience is different to others. I do not want to rush the game and tour the content. This is something to play for different reasons.
Recently Sins of a Solar Empire (known as 'Sins' where I have read it before) was on sale in Steam. It contained all sequels for a reduced price, and was in the top three sales when MW3 and Skyrim were still selling.
Like all excellent strategy games, it rewards concerted time and effort. Despite the immense number of bodies present in the game, there is a sense of control and long-term strategy. However, like all excellent strategy games, it required a hefty amount of time dedicated to get anything out of it.
I looked recently at my Steam Stats; that is, the amount of time I had spent on my games. These ranged from 7 hours a week to 17-18 hours. That is a few hours on most evenings, and a good 6-7 hours over a weekend. Seeing as all the games I play are Steam-tracked, this is an accurate figure. How does this compare with other people?
Seeing some of the profiles of the moderators of the PC-Gamer board, I see I lag behind. There we see people clocking up 50-60 hours a week of gaming. That, as a hobby, is a full-time job.
I consider myself to have more than one hobby. Gaming is one of them, as are writing and running (and, at times, painting.) I follow football with some suitable intensity, and keep myself dabbling in different pedagogies (ways of teaching.) I'm sure, therefore, that people who play games - who also work a full-time separate job - should consider 7-15 hours a week to be a substantial amount of time to dedicate to gaming. And this amount of time should be rewarded.
I say all this because Sins of a Solar Empire is a game that requires some attention. Purchasing it many months ago on the recommendation of a friend, I looked forward to the epic sprawl of civ across space. As I inferred before, this was not immediate. To understand what was going on required 2-4 hours of playing. Even on the easiest level, the enemy aren't useless. I even played through the (separate) tutorials which, for someone who is a teacher, were near useless. But at least they were short. They seemed decontextualised, showing your principles that didn't quite make sense as you did not yet need them. Far better would be to start a tutorial that took you through your first ten to fifteen minutes of play, and then leave to continue to repeat what you had learned in the tutorial.
Instead I was compelled to restart the game several times once I had found myself in winnable positions.
In particular, the game has an options to have Space Pirates. This faction can be bribed to attack other factions and, for those who have invested time into the game, can be an excellent layer of strategy (by forcing your opponents to divert their attention and resources away from their economy and expansion.) However, the Space Pirates are dangerous for a beginner at the start of the game. While you might have six to eight middling ships, they have over a dozen powerful ones. And although you can fend them off, they can attack every fifteen minutes or so. There was no tutorial for how they work, so my first few hours of play involved being decimated, even on the easiest level.
There will be a time, perhaps even now, where writing a tutorial for a game will be done by something with pedagogical expertise, not just a game designer. Such tutorials such be contextualised to the what the player needs, and the immediate experience of the player should reflect the repetition of that learned in the tutorial. New requirements - such as dealing with the pirates, or diplomacy - should be advised upon as and when necessary rather than require the player to bumble through from the start.
Of course, for those willing to dedicate dozens of hours to the game, your mistakes make garner how to work all these functions. You will decipher them in due course.
But, for people like me, there is not the time to spend playing these games so extensively, not when there are:
a) Other games to play. b) Reality to contend with. c) A job to maintain.
It says much for Sins that I persevered despite its problems (which are relatively new to its genre, in that the demographic of gamers must have aged in the past 20-30 years.) Consulting my friend, I discovered one way to win was to build as many overpowered capital ships (orbital behemoths several miles long) and focus them in one fleet. With this advice I won a game.
As is peculiar to some games, it did not reward with my new content or congratulations. Instead I was given a stat screen exactly as if I lost, or even quit a game before completion. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It implies that the success of a game depends on the imagination of the player. It also implies, though, that the designers couldn't devise anything else upon completion of the game.
I haven't spoken about the graphics or the game mechanics themselves. As a strategy game, it is polished. I will recommend it, with 3.5 out of 5. But it is telling that, for my sins (groan) I have not played it since completing it, and neither has my friend.
Since the start of the year I have been playing through the total war games. They're the kind of games that while a man might think he can give them thirty minutes or so, they really demand a few hours at a stretch.
I have always been a fan of the epic stretch of wargames. The strategy of manoeuvring, of bluffing and second-guessing your opponent, of whom you know their strategies and their preferences and their bluffs: I think it's brilliant. The ludic aspect of gaming is, for me, at its strongest in the bluff and double-bluff of wargaming.
Tabletop wargaming is less so. While a worthwhile (if expensive) hobby, such an experience is more the mutual discover of a narrative than a gaming experience. By that I mean that tabletop wargaming is unbalanced, and will always be so. Points and sheets and systems are second to the desire to create a sandbox narrative; something that not everyone is inclined to do.
Fantasy wargaming has had poor representation in the gaming industry. Such games, from the Warhammer series to King Arthur, chug through engines keenly developed but poorly tested (and not through laziness, mind, but rather through their lack of players and history.)
To an extent, The Call of Warhammer mod for Medieval Total War II has changed this. It is evocative of its amoral setting. The graphics are superb. The gameplay is (reasonably) balanced. And it is free.
Yet despite the success of this mod, I find myself drawn towards Shogun and Napoleon far more. These games have a simple addition that has transformed the gameplay for me. A morale bar.
Good friends will deride the addition of a morale bar. In a battle, they say, no general would have seen a helpful bar pop above the heads of the enemy and gradually decrease. True. And neither would a giant crane camera swoop over the heads of everyone. And orders would have to be given from a central unit, and run or shouted or flagged to your corresponding units. That will make for, one day, an excellent wargame of realism. But until then, the morale bar revolutionises the game.
Morale is what makes a wargame more than just a beat-em-up. In war, men (poor sods) don't fight to the last man. If they feel as if they might die, they run. It doesn't matter if they outnumber the enemy across the field. It doesn't matter if they are winning. It only matters if they are in immediate danger. Therefore, in true Sun-Tzu fashion, even with a smaller force, you can force the battle to be fought on your terms.
One example is fighting 700 men against 1400 in a Napoleonic campaign. I was defending a hill, and the enemy advanced along a straight line. In a straight fire-fight I would lose (as I had lost twice before, at 20 minutes a pop!) This time, though, I waited this he was almost in range before retreating my centre and left flank and charging with my right. Although I was in danger of being swamped and encircled on my left, I was able to break the morale of the far right unit. What this meant was I was continually attacking the flanks of my enemy's right while he was still ambling up the hill. Once a few more units broke, panic began to spread across those troops who weren't even fighting. Therefore, even when he had finally begun to encircle me, I was encircling him in return. Throughout all this the morale bar showed me exactly how much pressure to put on each unit to make them turn and run.
Wargaming isn't a genre to play just before bed. It requires, like with all RTS, to over-occupy your mind. Like playing pool before an exam, it is not possible to consider those concerns at the root of your subconscious: the only thing of which you are aware is the game. Which is a entirely new post in itself!
Having moved into a new apartment, I have managed to secure four rooms. The first two are essential - a small bedroom overlooking a churchyard, and a bathroom with a newly-fitted, landlord-harassed shower. The third room is my study (aka Den!) In here I have two desks, one with dual monitors to do my work (albeit with one with a permanently open calendar and to-do list.)
The fourth room has a studio kitchen, two sofas, a coffee table and a dining table (with a view of the sea-front traffic) but, most importantly, my gaming computer has pride of place above above a pseudo-desk/cupboard. I purchased, at great extravagance, a new gaming monitor. Two years ago I was on a 19 inch monitor; now I am on a 24 inch job.
Why tell you this?
It is significant for me that I have separated my work computer from my gaming computer. Too often, and for too long, I have sat at the same computer and alternated between the drollness of work-grind and the enjoyably distracting flashing of FPS games. I feel, like you might, that I do not sate myself on either satisfactorily.
And now?
To watch a film or to play a game is much the same thing. No work is allowed in my living room. I could, as I did in the past, crack open my laptop while watching some something. I don't quite know why I did that. Maybe it's the same reason that people I meet at young leaders courses talk about how they can't take more than 10 minute lunches.
I think I remember writing something about playing the kind of games that take little cognitive effort, or that are especially easy to enjoy, or are simply cinematic experiences. And that playing these games is often the habit of limited time and effort - why give a precious hour of evening time to something that might not work? Why play, for example, Empire Total War when I might not quite what they hell I'm doing? Or what worth giving an hour to a game like Tropico 3 that doesn't even load 2/3rds of the time?
Gaming time, like with film time, is not something that I plan into my day. I either do it, or I don't.
So what significance might this have? In the past four years, I have had periods where I have enjoyed working hard - 70 hour weeks and similar. Like with my running, this is not something that can be happily sustained. In fact, the body and the mind breakdown, or at least become susceptible to fatigues of apathy and ennui. Far more difficult, then, to attempt to live a moderation, working hard where necessary, living as a social being, and still making due time to hobbies that nourish your imaginative life.
My recent ambition is to see quite how I can balance my film watching, and my game playing, with my work and social commitments. To what extent am I willing to do slightly less work, and hence put myself under more pressure in the classroom, under the guise of enjoying a richer imaginative life? How much do I trust that if I plan to watch a film, or to play a game, that I will be eager to do so when the time comes?
Why even bother? I think because, left to my own devices, I tend towards the same limited range of games and films (and people!) Is that a bad thing? Perhaps not. And in the past, when I have tried to play games under the guise of scheduling them in, such as Oblivion, I have found them unfulfilling at best.
Like an esteemed colleague suggested, one often-underrated facet of time management is doing things at the 'right' time. There is little point grinding certain work out in the evening when an early morning, or lunchtime, provides the mind with the necessary impetus to just bloody get it done.
This is a response to a great thread on the PCG forum board. Link is at the bottom. Well worth a read.
I've considered this question before. Not only are we older but, as the OP says, we have less time to dedicate to games. I think that games used to 'get away' with a lot more in terms of poor gameplay. That is, pixel-perfect jumps, or no saves or simply the same levels rehashed.
Gamers these days are now more discerning. I don't think that we, or at least those who visit this forum, will take games that don't have an excellent tutorial, or simply take too long to get us into the action element.
For example, Sins of a Solar Empire has a terrible tutorial. It doesn't seem to realise that you only understand how to use the various mechanics of the game when they become necessary. Shogun 2's tutorial (albeit I've played all the TWs since the original) is much better: you use the game's mechanics as and when they become necessary, and the game seamlessly 'starts' when the tutorial ends. However, Sins is one game where I gave a few hours over a few games (plus looking at the forum and asking a colleague's son for advice) until I could actually play it competitively.
I think that there is, ultimately, a great thing in the experience of play. Sandbox games are a superb example of this. However, most evenings recently, coming to the end of term, all I'm loading up is Batman AA and kicking the hell out of a load of goons using two mouse buttons. Immense game! I should also begin to check out Megazell's list a bit more, too...
Ever since I picked up a PC (and some time) about two years ago, I have almost become used to the graphics post-HL2. Yes, I love how Left 4 Dead and the like look superb. Sometimes I still load Oblivion simply to walk the grounds. However, there is something in the old-school isometric graphics of a game like Project Zomboid that appeals.
PZ, for those who have not yet heard, is Sims with Zombies. The focus is on maintaining the moods, whims and sanity of your characters as much as the food in their bellies. At least, that is the idea. It is being developed by, as far as I can gather, 4 folk who live in an apartment in Cleveland (and whose address is actually available when you purchase the game!)
Furthermore, the game itself is in a pre-Alpha stage; that is, people are purchasing a game that, like Minecraft, is being developed on the speculative funds of other people. Doing so is a risk. And yet it does foster a community of gamers (and developers) that is riding on the back of the recent success of The Walking Dead series (that is superior to the comics, I have found.)
Any literature works in provoking an emotional response as well as an intellectual one. Isometric graphics and sandbox games appeal to both of these. The demo itself didn't really have much in the way of interaction (the wife of the main character simply doesn't speak or eat or drink or even die after two days of the tutorial.) Therefore, it remains to be seen how the
There has been some pretty fruity PR from the developers. However, they aren't marketers, but rather game-makers. Having posted a promised update in days, they have seemed to have come unstuck in relying upon third-party developers. While, for me, this is simply par for the course, it is apparent (from their PR) that they have received some rather aggressive comments (which, again, is par for the course from the anonymity of the internet.)
What makes this stand out for me, though, is how they have responded.
A few posts make it clear that they are hurt by such comments (to put it likely). While such comments are indeed hurtful at best, and damaging at worst, they are to be expected when you have 'the internet' convening on a forum board. Moreover, when those people are paying (albeit the small sum of £5) for a product, the marketing should be considered. That is, having any kind of update is better than nothing.
Despite the apparent angst of the developers, the comments seem, to me, to be entirely positive and supporters of the developers. It is true, though, that there are other ways to handle the dark forces of anger and ridicule - my job requires me to deal with those human inclinations a regular basis.
So what does all this mean? That the journey to make this game is something that I think is part of the pioneering digital art that is gaming, and that it is something that even four folk with no apparent prior experience in marketing a game as widely as PZ will be can give it a go with what seems to be no little success.
If the game delivers even a fraction of the NPC interaction promised, it'll be worthwhile gaming experience. I doubt the multiplayer would work, as PC multiplayer seems broken on almost every indie game I've ever played (and that's on those that have a far heftier budget.)
At university I used to work in the retail store Game ( as I may have mentioned before.) As a result of this I was deeply suspicious about the value of purchasing any PC games from high-street retail. Although I might be supportive of local stores over internet shopping, PC games are universally cheaper, sometimes by 25% of the actual price, than retail. I think that's what made my purchase of PES 2011 for a tenner somewhat surprising.
Having previously reviewed PES 2009 as one of the best examples of the balance between realism and 'arcadeness' (I never did find a suitable noun...) I was happy to take PES 2011 as I found it.
This was just as well.
My first game was a bore draw between Spain and Serbia. There were some goals in the next few games as I took my beloved Wolves through the first few fixtures of the Master League. Unfortunately, they were all against me. This didn't bode well. However, if being a teachergamer has taught me anything, it has taught me some sense of perseverance. This side of things, two weeks later, I am happily into the mindset of the game and winning games freely.
The game itself is much slower-paced. PES games have been characterised by team-play, but it was still possible to pass cleanly by simply pushing towards the opponents goal and hitting short pass at the precise time. Those times are no more. It took my a fair time to get used to defenders passing the ball out of play (Vidic!) or passes trickling to my strikers. Perhaps this is a result of me having never attempted to master the manual pass button in the previous PES incarnations. As a result, once you get your head used to the need to face in precisely the direction you wish to pass, you find through passes are deadlier than ever.
This makes the game sit firmly on the side of realism. This is also reflected in the other functions of the game. The Master League has, at last, implemented a rudimentary value system where you deal in your chosen currency. It hasn't quite realised that international players cost a little more than £500,000, but I'm sure the designers are saving that till later. What they have developed accurately is a calendar that reflects the footballing season with weeks numbers having been replaced by months, and transfer windows lying over existing football fixtures. The characteristic rhythms of the season (the hopeful summer fixtures, the difficult Xmas list, and the dour march grind) are now reflected. Well done developers!
Another addition is the ability to edit your stadiums. Pleasingly, Molineux stadium has been included in the smoke patch (albeit with one filled in corner.) In the fantasy world of PES football though, only 17,000 people ever fill it, even when playing the big four. This has so far resulted in some desperately empty looking games. However, I hope that winning some trophies (or a patch) might change this.
The Become a Legend mode is much better thanks to giving your player some decent starting talent. Despite being England's best player in PES 2009, my player in that game developed at a hideous crawl. Playing 5 minute matches meant that I rarely scored, and 10 minute matches took something near 10 hours to finish a season. Your statistics also adjust depending on where you changed positions on the pitch, so my brother can no longer use his expertise with Roberto Carlos as a striker (with the best speed and shooting on PES 1990something.)
Despite these improvements, the rating system of players is hideously broken. This is what the game seems to do:
5.5 = rubbish to average game. I haven't seen a score less than this. 6.0 = An average game. For a goal-keeper, this means having saved 12 shots. 6.5 = Good game in which the player may have scored. Top score for a goal-keeper 7.0 = A great game, often consisting of a goal and/or assist. Reasonably rare for a defender or defensive midfielder. 7.5 = An outstanding game where a striker or a midfielder has scored several goals, or at least the winning one. Every few games or so a player will attain this score. 8.0 = The games '10 out of 10.' Scores several goals or dominates the game.
As this rating system seems to involve a scale of five with a 'perfect' rating, it seems to make sense for a mod (or a perceptive developer) to change the rating system to something that makes more sense. Still, in the words of a David Mitchellesque student, I sure that the reasons behind the choice will all become clear in time...
The game's change in speed and control does have the added benefit of making you feel like you have truly meant to score the goals you do. A few nights ago (as I rarely play more than one match an evening) I needed to score to equalise against the mighty Fulham. In the last two minutes, the ball broke to my defender who passed strong towards Guitereez (the only decent striker) who played a one-two (essential in this game) with Minanda, the classic aged playmaker of the Master League fame. Minanda had to run away from his maker (and the goal) in his attempt to receive the pass. I saw that my striker was about the pass beyond the high-line of Fulham. Audaciously, without looking, I saw Minanda loft a perfect pass that was controlled first with a keen turn away from the onrushing defender by my Spanish journeyman. As the goal-keeper and three defenders rushed to crunch Guitereez (sic) he ease the ball onto his right foot before stroking it into the right corner.
In PES 2009, this would have been completed by pushing the d-pad in the horizontal direction of the goal. In PES 2011, I had to weigh the pass, and push in the diagonal direction at a precise moment.
It is small changes like this that make this a distinctive game. It is a worthy edition to the PES series, and plays differently too. Frustrating as hell initially, and in ever need of the outstanding Smoke Patch, it rewards the perseverance of any teachergamer willing to give it some time.
The original Shogun, which I fondly reviewed, was my first game on my first personal PC back when I was at university. Yes, I had an Amiga and Championship Manager and the like, but Shogun was my first experience of a game that pushed up the bar of my expectations beyond the bunny-hopping graphics of the Amiga. Having played, on and off, the entire Total War series, I was seriously looking forward to this incarnation. And yet I was dismayed.
You may, like me, have installed the demo expecting great things. A lack of graphic options was naff. Four frames per second was unplayable. The damn game simply did not work. And the smoothness of MTW2 made it a better game.
Resolved to give Shogun 2 a miss, I ignored it for several months. Then browsing the PCGamer forums, I saw that it had been reduced on amazon to a mere £15. Buying it on a whim, I revealed my bargain to the community only to commit forum seppuku by hearing that, the same day, it had been reduced to £12. I never did like the economy aspects of such games.
Still, purchasing it a while later had the advantage of a working patch that made the game actually work. My experience with CoD Black Ops meant that I was already prepared to install the game from the disks (unless you fancy a 17gig bandwith hit.) The patch itself was at least 3 gig.
When the game finally loaded my patience was well-rewarded. The opening movie is one that I have yet to skip; it is incredibly well-made and evokes the spirit of game every time I have seen it (so far.) And the game itself plays very differently to previous issues of the TW series.
For a start, the unit tweaks make the game more of a tactical masterclass. Archers in previous incarnation can exhaust their ammunition and decimate an average unit from, say, 60 to 20 or so. In this version, even the weakest archers be expected to rout enemy units with half their ammunition. A welcome change. In addition, cavalry truly feel powerful. In the original Shogun, I never took heavy cavalry. They simply weren’t as useful as their Yari counterparts. In Shogun 2, however, a unit of heavy cavalry can decimate a peasant archer unit entirely within 10-15 seconds. This is the Mongol expansion all over again. Brilliant!
The campaign mode always see me play as the green Shimazu, rolling across the entirety of the campaign map from left to right. I initially set the game to its default options which, unfortunately, left me with incredibly small units sizes (15 in a cavalry units rather than 60, for example.) However, I needn’t have worried on my first play through. Many of the battles are sieges. Yet siege battles, although irksome to me, play very differently as all students can scale any wall. A pleasing addition.
The final aspect of the game which makes this a vastly improved TW game is the collision detection. Having copious played MTW2, I am well-used to hitting the ‘r’ key to ensure my damn army actually runs to where its meant to, I am yet to get used to that collision detection actually works in Shogun 2. While in MTW2 I simply accepted that soldiers would charge to within feet of the enemy before stopping, Shogun has happily solved this problem.
That is, in itself, a rather nice metaphor upon which to end this impressionistic review. This game is a step forward by the best developer in the RTS business over the past ten years. For producing a game that I can pick up and play midweek, I thank them. It’s just a shame that the option screen contains so much animation that it sometimes burns out my graphics card...
When I last wrote about Mount and Blade, I spoke about how I hadn’t made any progress with the diplomacy. In fact, I had managed to alienate all the factions (due to not realising that attacking them would make them dislike me...) This time round, though, I was on my best behaviour and ingratiated myself as much as possible.
As I have read before, each promotion changed the game. After pumping an extraordinary amount of time into the game (I won’t reveal how much... ok, around 70 hours in total...) I gained several in-game promotions.
Firstly I was granted the position of Marshall. This meant that I began to try to decimate the other factions. My stupid king, though, didn’t sue for peace with the other factions, meaning that I was fighting on three fronts at once. While somewhat frustrating, it felt manageable. A bit like a promotion would be in real-life, I imagine.
One of the things about this sandbox game that I don’t think I emphasised enough last time is that it should be treated like high-brow literature in the sense that to get the most out of it, you should really read some study guides. Yes, there is an element of fun in killing thousands of enemies. But there’s a certain entropy that sets in rather quickly.
As it was, I used this to my advantage and rebelled against the King. To my surprise, I was allowed to set up my own kingdom aptly (if ridiculously) named The Andersonians. If I had a chance again, I would choose something more like The Gregorians or even The Empire. Or Scarbados. Still, the game continues to hold my interest. Even if I don’t have any diplomacy mods installed, and I don’t quite understand what the hell is going on.
One important update to my original review to note is that the game plays extremely well with Medieval Total War 2. Both involve conquest, and both play with the idea of controlling large armies. The chaos of the Mount and Blade battlefield is more evocative, although the trait system of Medieval TW 2 more immersive;; I image that something that combines both games into a developed system would be highly successful...
Playing an aptly named Grand Campaign on Medieval Total War 2 for the past two years has given me a new found appreciation for the RTS genre. If you read my review of the original shogun experience, you would have thought I’d be more of a fan of that era. In fact, the darkness of the medieval atmosphere appeals to me much more. In the Grand Campaign I am playing as the English. After striking north and conquering Scotland and, rather easily, Ireland, I turned my attention south. After several months of slowing rolling over the French, I found myself in a situation where I was defending myself on several fronts against the Germans, the French, the Milanese, and (rather uninspiringly) the Danes.
Like with all campaigns in the Total War series, there isn’t much in the way of an overarching tutorial in which improvements to build in your empire. As such, I leave the AI to decide for me. They tend, like all true councils left in charge of things, to build everything and anything. Do I need to train diplomats in all my cities? Why not... Do I need to specialise in different elite units in my main cities? Why bother. Presumably this is to ensure that players like me don’t simply benefit from leaving the AI to handle my economy.
In order to progress, like in all TW games, it is essential at some point to take on larger armies with fewer troops. For a game that purports to follow the principles of Sun Tzu, this perhaps isn’t the case of how things should be. Or perhaps I am simply poor at diplomacy and fight on too many fronts at once. I must admit, I have never felt bad for fighting a battle where the odds are stacked heavily in my favour.
Where the game does excel, though, is in the ability for a small, highly-trained army to destroy much larger hordes through simple out maneuvering and superior morale.
Take, for example, my progress this last half-term. I had a true stalement in the middle of Europe. Most of lands were being taken, and retaken, by the combined forces of the angry Germanic-Franco-Milanese empires. I decided, as somewhat of a break from the incessant sieges, to expand into Spain.
Like all good Spainards, they rolled over. Having spent the past 50 years doing very little, my unmounted knights were able to smash their militia time and time again. In the space of 10 turns, I had conquering all of Spain, leaving me with, effectively, only one front to fight on. Memories of the original Shogun, where I rolled from left to right across the map, began to return.
It was in this time, though, that the Danes had made a surprisingly successful foray into my empire. Whereas they had small armies they were universally comprised of elite troops. One army of 500, in particular, managed to decimate three standing armies of 800 troops, including one in a siege. The usually excellent auto-battle option let me down here.
The sign of a great game, of great story-telling theatre, is that the Dane’s march across my northern front was a more engaging experience than me conquering Spain. Watching, with increasing trepidation, one general growing up to eight stars (whilst controlling far better troops than I), I took great pleasure in converging on him with three times the size of an army. He went down fighting.
Graphically, I think the game is the smoothest of the series. The music is evocative and the mass control of an army is still extraordinarily easy. The charge function, though, is somewhat broken. Sometimes knights will charge; sometimes they won’t. In addition, some soldiers simply won’t path-find correctly to chase down enemies. This is a shame, as utterly annihilating an army was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the the original TW - here it’s simply a pain.
A recommended edition to the series. However, if you are more of a fan of the other eras, I’d recommend those TWs to this.
Today is the crunch week of the year. Terminal exams are arriving and, for me, the Edinburgh marathon looms next week. This weekend I need to finalise my coursework folders (a somewhat arduous, yet consequential, administration task that involves cross-referencing several documents) as well as the usual domestic chores.
It is in that I have enjoyed playing an extraordinary amount of Total War, Mount and Blade, and Supreme Commander 2. Not to mention PES 2009.
While I play these games, I wonder of the different ways of playing them. I rarely play a Total War game on a weekday. And I am yet to play Men of War for any length of time, not surprisingly seeing as I have encountered an especially complex mission and the game lacks anything like a decent tutorial (or voice-overs for that matter.)
So, with this finite time with which I have to play and live, how do I play?
That is something for an extended blog post. In the meantime, I'm on the lookout for anyone else who has similar thoughts. In the same way that I perceive (for whatever reason) that most people who read do so at night before I bed, I perceive that most people who game do so extensively after work in the evenings (rather then at the weekends.)
Memories of my A-level exams bring back memories of Championship Manager. How can what is essentially an interactive spreadsheet create such theatre? Have such memories? Be so brilliant?
Right now I (as most teachers are across our fair and pleasant land) am focussed on the defining point of the young people I manage - their exams. It is a time that requires skills similar to that of a swotting student: perseverance, planning and plenty of pizza.
However, my GCSEs were not taken at the time of the most recent (and well-designed) Football Manager franchise, but rather of the original quality spreadsheet gaming that was the glorious Championship Manager 1993. Like many things of the time, it was not polished; it must have taken between two and three hours to load a season (something that would fairly often crash.) In addition, I would only manage something nearing 8 seasons before the complexity of the data would result in hideous corruptions of the league data (such as Liverpool securing the services of a player with maximum stats, for example.) Despite these misgivings (of which a TeacherGamer would simply expect back in the day) I still managed to play through at least two full campaigns in the epic stretch of free-time between my exams and the next stage of my educational career.
Despite its age, the game held many facets of gameplay universal across all the versions. Well, save for the fact that I would always sub a player after 20 minutes and find their replacement was better. Curiously, the subbed player would never be unduly affected by what would have undoubtedly been an embarrassing experience.
The best experiences, though, involving purchasing players before they were stars, watching them develop, and then selling them just as they passed their peak. Many PC games involve this concept - get bigger numbers than anyone else. The theatre of it plays out in your imagination. The players didn’t have the dozens of stats they do these days; they had five. And it didn’t even give a finishing stat. However, value did dictate which were the good players, and it was fixed to age. Purchase a player under 21 who was a million pounds or more and he would be a star. Conversely, if a player hit 29, they would strangely dip in form (or by a few other circumstances that my distant memory can’t quite currently muster.) Suffice to say, I remember selling a utility midfielder for £7 million (which made him one of the most expensive players in the game) and revelled in checking on his hideous sub-7 (out of 10) performances. Another player who I still remember was a generated player who had maximum stats for all but one of his statistics, but was only ever worth half a million throughout his entire career. He occasionally had decent games as a sub, but he was more of a progedy that never quite developed (my Joe Cole, perhaps.)
Unlike my current experience as a TeacherGamer (where I only give myself time enough to manage teams in the top-flight of the Premiership), I would start with Wolves in the bottom league of a regenerated player list. I would promote them in successive seasons, and win the Premiership after either one, or two, years constantly. I wouldn’t always win the cups (as even then I couldn’t see the point of resetting a lost game or an inconvenient injury.) While I felt that winning six league titles in a row was somewhat unrealistic, I would always lose a league game or three. Watching Barcelona this season (2011) and Arsenal’s invincible season in the early 2000s though made me realise that my league wasn’t too far off the realms of reality.
What was a great touch for such an early management game was that the playing style of your team evolved as your team progressed. Although you only had options for five playing styles or so (long ball, direct, short passing, mixed, and continental) you would find that only ‘direct’ would enable your team to win promotion strongly.
To win the European Cup (which was still in a purely knockout form save for a final one-game league) required a continental style. And that required at least a season of transition as your selected this style. Even with this transition, to win the European Cup was an incredible hard feat I achieved only once. The game had a perculiar way of making your best players transfer to foreign teams, thereby making them unsignable for a few seasons. When they returned, they were never the same player. Too many pizzas, perhaps?
Like with all truly difficult (yet achievable) feats in gaming history, winning the European Cup was theatre that I will never forget. Paul Simpson was my decent £5m left winger. He was the best winger available to me, but not my best player. Normally I simply failed to score against European opposition; he scored the winning goal in the last ten minutes of the final. The game itself only presented text when a team scored. I often thought that the difficulty of scoring a goal was was reflected in the tone of the text: I remember even now the text saying: Simpson has scored one of the best goals you’ll ever see!
As an English teacher I appreciate a life in books and imagination. Seeing that text in the theatre I had created in the space either side of my GCSEs and A-Levels is something that has motivated me to share even now, over a decade later. The game itself is utterly indicative of that time in my life, and of my exams. While I don’t think that I would play it again (I’d rather try to immerse myself in the current FM) it is a piece of gaming history that I welcome as I would an old, if rather difficult, friend.
For a sandbox game to have such a profound influence on my life is something to laud. In writing this review, while sitting in a seafront cafe on the evening prior to a race, I wonder to exactly whom am I writing? I do not intend my reviews to be thorough things when PC Gamer (for one) provides that for us. I do not even intend for them to be raucously funny - James Rolfe at www.cinemassacre.com and Yatzhee at Zero Punctuation do that brilliantly.
Instead I intend to write my reviews from the perspective of a professional who has a limited amount of time to dedicate to hobbies (which are hugely necessary to live a life of moderation.) A Teacher Gamer, I think, should be anyone who:
a) Reflects on things in how they impact on daily life (not just in their abstract mediums), such as the most dynamic digital medium today - computer games! b) Doesn’t have much time to dedicate to hobbies. c) From the above, they will want their games to allow them to both (or either...) be pick-up-and-play or immersively rewarding.
Oblivion is the latter.
Purchasing it from Steam, it was the first game I had played for five years. The games I could remember purchasing, and playing, were CIV 3 and Empire Earth. And Severance. I had, also, worked at Game for a time while at university (which I enjoyed immensely. My boss had wanted to be a DJ outside his day job and there was pleasing banter all the way through the department store of which we were a franchise booth.) I can’t quite remember why I hadn’t gamed for the previous time, but I think that:
a) I played a lot of chess. b) I couldn’t afford a decent computer. c) Computer games seemed to be universally £30+, and I only had £30 disposable income a week in those days. d) At university, I remember playing CIV 3 at the expense, sometimes, of doing other stuff that I really should have been doing.
So why would I pick it up and play after so long? After my first year in my new school in Scarborough, my housemate (an acquaintance from York) had managed to convince his Wakefield girlfriend to apply for a job in Scarborough. Having managed to secure a job, this compelled my housemate and me to move out our 7-roomed sea-view apartment (all for only £475 a month... I know!) into separate digs.
Whilst waiting for everything to be moved out the flat, and for everything to defrost in our fridge, I felt at a bit of a loose end. Having worked 70 hour weeks, my social circles still largely remained in my university towns of York and Hull. I decided, on one reckess evening, to see if I might purchase a game on Steam. I went to metacritic, and decided to purchase the best one available.
Cirius, a long-standing friend, had recommended Oblivion a long-time back. With that in mind, I clicked my purchase and went away.
The first thing that struck me (in retrospect) was how linear such a non-linear experience seemed to be. That’ll be the radiant-storytelling, I hear you say. For those who don’t know, radiant storytelling is the ambitious AI that pieces together dialogue and plot to create a seemless and immersive living game experience. It is something that I have quietly raved about to the NATE (English teaching) ICT (Information Technology) committee, although it is still its infancy. Such radiancy reflects (mostly) the fact that the populance of even the most distant villages are aware of your exploits in the deepest dungeons, even though there was no-one around to have witnessed what you’ve done.
The effect of this experience, for me, was to meander around beautiful countryside for about ten minutes which, like real-life, was enough for me to hanker after the direction of city-life. Fortunately you start (unlike, in my experience, Morrowind) close enough to a city to get straight stuck in.
This being-able-to-head-anywhere lark was certainly enjoyable in the large part. Yes, the main quest beckons, but being able to complete quests that (unlike WoW) largely avoided ceaseless grinding kept me playing while boxes remained unpacked, and bedframes remained standing. I must admit, after two days of sitting in a near-bare house with a (now) defrosted fridge, I felt an escapism from the grind of my job (and the tempting space of a week’s holiday) begin to grip me.
In my excitement I roasted a leg of lamb unwanted by my housemate. On one day it provided all my nourishment.
That fitted perfectly with the experience I was having. Having discovered the ‘strange door’, and not quite understanding how to select quests (which, brilliantly for a man with a limit on time, are compassed in Oblivion, unlike Morrowind) I decided to take a little break in this side-quest.
What I didn’t realise, though, was that this was an entire expansion pack.
As a result, I spent the next two whole days (10 hours each?) playing through it. Testament to the game design I kept thinking that the next task would clock it. Get to the Gatekeeper? Clocked. Get past the Gatekeeper? Clocked. Get to the palace? Clocked. Realise you haven’t even started? No problems.
I remember that it was at this point that while my temporary diet of roasted lamb was good enough for my digital alter-ego, for me it wasn’t so good. Unlike the man of moderation you read before you now, I suffered greatly from a lack of varied nutrition and, perhaps, hydration. It was perhaps apt that I was also playing through one of the (only) fiddly parts of the game; battling through a fell-dew induced hallucination. Unfortunately, my character’s health was being constantly reduced throughout this section, and I couldn’t quite see how to find my way out. When I did, I decided to celebrate by ordering a (only slightly more) nutritious meal of an Indian takeaway - not least because I was having to live without a fridge whilst living arrangements were made.
Unlike the above, most sections to the game are pick-up-and-play. In particular, the side-quest of fighting in the arena was brilliant. If only because it was straightforward. As you fight in a Colosseum of ever-increasingly potent foes, you are forced to devise even more diabolical tactics. My favourite, which was soon adopted (up to and including defeating the Arena Champion) was to summon several powerful creatures (having been granted the ability by completing the Shivering Isle expansion) and then run in a circle around the edge of the arena floor.
The scene was akin to the python sketch where the gladiator is chasing after the Christian. Three minotaurs would chase after my character whilst a giant stitched zombie would bash them as they ran past. However, as with all great games (like Deus Ex), the absurdity of this gameplay didn’t detract from its experience (such as when Deus Ex’s guards stop moving when you log onto a terminal to activate cannons to take them out).
There are issues with the game that (thanks to an immense modding community) can be avoided. The levelling is unbalanced, especially for a Teacher Gamer. Simply put, the better your character, the harder the monsters. The result is that my character of 60+ hours encounters spawned bandits with the hardest armour and weapons in the game. Now, to a Teacher Gamer, it is expected that as your character grows more powerful, you should be able to dispatch with ease those enemies which once troubled you greatly. One effect of this is that I failed to entirely finish one early section of the game. When I returned, the handful of lower-level creatures were replaced by (literally) dozens of the hardest monsters possible. I was forced to use every magical item I had accrued up to that point just to survive. That wasn’t fun when I found of about this bizarre levelling glitch.
Writing this, though, makes me realise that to start as a lower-level character is not so bad. And that now I have played through once already, I should start again. The truth be told, there are too many great games that require me to play them through once too. And that’s not to mention the much anticipated release of the next in this series, Skyrim. It’ll be interesting to see how the quest design works on that.
Should you purchase this game? I played it through on a work-based laptop that had a resolution as low as shark excrement and a framerate as intermittent as Scarborough’s seaside sun, and it looked and felt incredible. Even now I occasionally load the game just to walk its rendered landscape. Yes, the genre has plenty of scope to advance, and the lack of NPC party experience in the style of Warband is sorely missed. But as the game that made me a Teacher Gamer, I feel proud that this is what did it.
Amnesia is not a game you play to win; it is a game to win to stay alive. The tutorial screen says this is the attitude with which you should approach this game. It’s not wrong.
The horror genre of gaming is rather narrow. Penumbra seem to have the market niche with several titles. Horror gaming has been something of a delight for me ever since Waxworks back in the early 1990s. It was a terrifying puzzle game, although moreso for the implication then the fiddly level design and problem-solving.
The gameplay of Amnesia, however, is a little more sophisticated. Essential you are working your way towards the inner chambers of a gothic castle to discover the answers to a murder in which you are involved. The puzzles between the levels are generically designed yet intuitively straightforward (fill the acid to melt the barrier; find to key to open the door; step on the invisible pressure pad... no, not that one!)
Unique (in its emphasis in an FP game) though is the insanity meter. While you have a health bar that be reduced from attacks by horrific-looking monstrosities or falling scenery, you are much more likely to lose your sanity through looking at monsters, or staying in the dark too long. However, if you stay in the light, monsters are more likely to stalk you. And so the game is a balance of moving from light to dark.
Light is frugal resource in this game. You lantern has barely any fuel, and the tinderboxes that illuminate fixed light points are in incredibly short-supply also. After the first twenty minutes or so, you begin to realise how sparingly you need to create your own light, and grow used to creeping through the dark.
Hiding in the dark holds a few surprises, though. The game will distort your vision, or play disturbing flashbacks to gruesome events, when you stay too long in the dark. The AI director will adjust the music, the breath of your character (which is enough to affect your breathing too, I find) and your visual acuity in response to the fear that your FP character suffers.
Like with watching horror films, I think should only experience this game in bite-sized chunks. A few Christmases ago I watched about 7 horror films over three days. After a short time I became sanitised to the same events, particularly the metaphor of the female figure becoming corrupted as she rises to overcome the crises of the film (i.e. kill the baddies) which occurred in most of them. This game might suffer from that same issue.
Recommended in your playing experience is to wear headphones and to ensure you are in a darkened room. Preferable at midnight. Like with experiencing a horror film, though, the game is genuinely disturbing. Unlike manhunt, the gore level is low (although dismembered corpses and implications of torture are rife). However, to desire to be scared is an evocative emotion.
I cannot play this game for more than a short time. I played a gameplay video from youtube to one of my classes recently, and they weren’t impressed. Neither was I. Probably just as if you would be if you watched, say, The Others in a park with a childish football game in the background while an ice-cream truck blared for your money. However, given the right environment, this is an immersive gameplaying experience that, should you appreciate the horror genre, will offer you an experience that will stay with you while you sleep.
Left 4 Dead offers the greatest multiplayer experience with strangers so far. Even if you do not like FPS games, or western zombie culture with its pretentious assertion that it all represents something else a little bit deeper, I warrant you’d like this. Both its gameplay and soundtrack are procedurally perfect; it might even be mentioned in the same breath after/as Mario cart.
The four distinct characters fill the spectrum of your preferred styles of playing at surviving an apocolypse. You have Bill, the irate Vietnam Veteran who acts as a sullen father figure to the survivors. On the other end you haven the other end you have Zoe, the eager student. In between you have Francis, the permanently angry biker who seems a bit too skilful with a shotgun. Finally you have Louis, an ICT office worker whose banter with Francis forms the basis for a tenuous society vs freedom metaphor. All I know is that the banter is funny as hell; these don’t feel like bots.
The crux of the gameplay is that you are forced to work together as a team. While the standard infected merely run after you (terrifyingly fast, like the zombies from 28 days later) the special zombies trap you. For example, the smoker zombie wraps a massive tongue around you and constricts you. The only way to be freed is for another survivor to shoot the smoker; you can't do it yourself. This simple mechanic ensures that the team can only function if it works together as a team. Even with the new players. The first time I played online I was saved by a teammate in moments. Even though I accidently sprayed him with shotgun pellets (to which he complained bitterly), it made a healthy change from being annihilated by teenange FPS Dougs.
The range of weaponry reflects a range of playing styles. The assault rifle (usually best of laggy online play) kills in three bullets. It also delivers accurate distant headshots. The sniping of the hunting rifle is good enough to make a game of its own. My personal favourite is the automatic shotgun – it can clear a room of zombies close up, although it loses potency longer distance and suffers from a long reload time. Fortunately, while ammo can be scarce, pistol ammo is infinite and very John-Wooish. In addition, the melee attack is very effective (especially when combined with the automatic shotgun. Push a zombie back, blast them away, repeat.)
The lighting is superbly evocative on each level, too, offering a variety of settings both indoor and outdoor.
The replay value is superb; I managed to rack up 48 hours of gameplay on this in a few months while working a 50-60 hour week. Multiplayer offers perfect matchmaking as the game doesn't crash if a player drops out. Single player is also immensely playable.
My favourite level, though, has to be the finale of Blood Harvest. You are forced to defend a fortified farmhouse from waves of zombies. While you can hold up upstairs or downstairs, there are always more entry points for zombies than you are capable of covering. As a result, you are forced to move, rather than just camping, which makes for moments of frantic scrambling as your team struggles to react to an overwhelming mass of zombies climbing through that window you didn’t have your eye on. There is also something suitably disturbing defending a boarded-up bedroom from zombies too. Online, I find the tension between players deciding where to defend to be particularly enjoyable too.
Games seem to be increasingly adopting moral decisions. These decisions, when played, make the experience of playing better than a win/lose scenario. For example, when the outside world enters the game to save you in the final moments of the finale, often one or more survivors are incapacitated. The decision of whether to save yourself, or to risk certain death to rescue a fellow survivor, is a immensely difficult decision after over an hour of desperate action. Often I am inspired by the example of others rather than an inherent altruism in myself. Fortunately I am yet to make the decision on the basis that I refuse to play through the finale AGAIN (although I have been close!)
As a game to pick up and play in the evening, this is still amongst the best in my collection. Even now I enjoy jumping into online games as much I enjoy playing single player (although the online community seems to migrated to Left 4 Dead 2, save for a few usermaps). However, as a case where the steam matchmaking system works perfectly, this is a game without peer.
I am a teacher. One of my favoured hobbies is gaming: hence the considered creation of the monika of TeacherGamer. What might this mean?
Who is the audience of a TeacherGamer? It is a particular demographic that I imagine comprises of a fair number of gamers. It comprises of those between their 20s and 40s who work a professional job. They cannot dedicate more than 1-3 hours a night to gaming, and no more than 3-8 hours a weekend day to their hobby. Oh, and they don't believe that playing ends when you hit 18, or only when you're drunk.
What kind of vocation will they have? If they aren't a teacher, they will have a career job. And/or will be a parent. That is, they are unable (and unwilling) to drop out of society to dedicate themselves to gaming in the way that professional Korean Starcraft Gamers can. Should they play an RTS or RPG, they will take many months, if not years, to complete it. Like reading, they consider themselves to be playing such games even while they are 'on-hold'.
What kind of games will they like? They will play a variety of genres. While the genres deemed high-brow will be admired, such as strategy, RPG and RTS, more immediate action games will be deemed, as Alan Bennett asserted, worthy antidotes to the seriousness of the cerebral. Such snacks of gaming are also great for those weary after the ravages of work. Therefore, although they will not take a high-brow approach to gaming, they will link gaming with other facets of life and other aspects of culture. So, while they are experienced in gaming, they will also have some curiosity and cultural capital in relation to other media, such as literature and film. I, for example, have an English degree. They will consider how gaming experiences can, like literature, tweak someone's perception of life.
They will have undoubtedly played some hideous games in their youth. And completed them.
They appreciate games that can be picked up and played over an extended period of time. But they will appreciate that this is not what makes them great games (if they even are), or that other gamers can't validly enjoy games that require more extended attention.
Why do you have both the job and the hobby in the moniker? Because the job and hobby might inform each other. They might use ICT in other aspects of life. If they an actual TeacherGamer (someone involved in education and someone who games as a hobby) then they might look towards how games can change the way people learn, interact and improve.
The challenge of designing a football game is to achieve the balance between the theatre of realism and arcade controls. Actual football can be very cagey. Not to mention that it ebbs and flows over 90 minutes - not the 10 minutes expected of a gamer. Therefore, every football incarnation since 1996 has found its place along this spectrum of realism vs arcade controllability.
An example of a game that offered arcade controls to near-perfection is Sensible World of Soccer. The fluid passing game essentially consisted of a series of attacker vs defender situations. While shots could be somewhat controlled, whether they went in relied upon a seemingly random factor. From this, the game varied the skill levels of the players to simulate the variance in forms of your players. In addition, the game seemed to let shots in the 90th minute score more frequently (for the drama of it all of course.) The result of this was a football gaming experience that was unmatched at the time.
3D football (including the ill-fated, and short-lived, SWOS 3D) was initially unable to deliver the same arcade controls. Either the players were unable to pass, or the skill functions to beat defenders were substandard. This changed with the FIFA and PES (World Soccer 11 in Japan) series.
FIFA had the licence. FIFA had the looks. FIFA had the same damn button for shoot as for tackle. PES, on the otherhand, had an element of gameplay unseen before in football games: the ability to pass the ball in a way that dragged the opposition out of position. The game itself was blocky compared to FIFA (and the surprisingly atmospheric Euro 1996 spin-off) but compared to the atrocious virtua-striker series, it was an immense game. It actually made you feel as if you meant to pass the ball and deliver a killer pass in the way that you could.
Fast-forward to the present day (early 2011) and I can see that FIFA have made their game morelike PES. PES, though, still retain their reputation for emphasising team-play, while FIFA is saddled with their perception as one-trick players dribbling through teams.
So why am I reviewing PES 2009, and not PES 2010 or PES 2010? Simply because PES 2009 has a balance of arcade gameplay that I like, and because it still looks gorgeous to my eyes. If you read my blog, you’ll realise that I came back to gaming after a break from 2003 to 2008. Even after two years of playing graphical greats such as Batman Arkham Asylum and Crysis, the meshing technology used in PES 2009 (and my high resolution monitors) mean that the game looks photo-realistic. Better than photo-realistic, as its slight cartooniness allows for the immersion of the as-good-as-it-can-be-but-can-be-better collision engine. What this means, as I mentioned before, is that the graphics are good enough to allow the game to be theatre - the graphics allow the variety of smooth animations and high frame-rate that allow the arcade gameplay to flourish.
Replay value is the order of the day in a PES game. The Master League has been tweaked, but can still be improved further. Transfers are reasonable, if a little unguided in the real value of players. Would it be so difficult to value players by something as authoritative as transfermarkt.co.uk? Or even the papers? The Master League original team are still there - Miranda is the best of a terrible bunch. Personally I played through on only medium difficulty, and offer much kudos to anyone who plays through the master league enough to purchase decent enough players.
The Become a Legend (BaL) mode is superb, but only if you play it with the wide camera. Having played it for a season in the hideous vertical mode, I was glad to see that I could actually score and pass and judge in the (usual) wide view. The ability to photoshop yourself in too is a welcome feature. There is plenty of theatre to be had in this game - a housemate happily suffered two entire seasons through on the vastly inferior PS2 version on an analogue TV. As a striker he scored four goals in those two seasons by tackling defenders and shooting past one on one. Fortunately, on the PC version (in maximum difficulty mode) the game is somewhat easier, and I score about once ever 2.5 - 3 matches. It would be great if the game could give you better starting stats, or even a player who is already some seasons in. But as a TeacherGamer, I am two years into my season, and play a match on average once a week.
Speaking of statistics, the game is able to vary the ability of your players according to a randomised form meter. My houserules dictate that you cannot change a player with low form, but the game (apparently) does reduce, or increase, the ability of players according to their form. This makes a most profound difference when playing on the maximum difficulty, top player. In previous incarnations, I could clock the most difficult teams with the poorest on PES 1998.
Speaking of which, PES 1998 gave for me the greatest football gaming theatre to date. I used to play Korea (I know!) on the hardest mode on 15 minute games in the world cup, with no save function. After 3 hours of solid playing, to go behind to a goal would elicit panic play as you strived to salvage your time. After going behind 2 goals to France in a quarter final (and two hours of play) I remember scoring from a deep cross just inside their half before half-time. I scored from a corner to equalise, and from a six yard through-ball ten minutes before the end. I don’t think I won that tournament, but the game made me feel that my skills, perseverance (and luck) had won a glorious victory.
PES 2009, ensures that you are unlikely to have that experience on maximum difficulty. The computer will put in undefendable crosses from which they invariably score 1 in 3. Players will be tackled far easier. And long-shots will be conceeded far too often. As a TeacherGamer, though, to not have clocked tournaments on maximum difficulty without saves is not a problem - just a new experience.
What can be rightly criticised is the broken online play. Although I only played 5 matches, every one suffered terrible lag; players would impossibly teleport in front of my striker faster than they could run. In addition, there wasn’t much humour to be found in the fringes of the community. This wasn’t too much of an issue as the game simply stopped working online after a few weeks anyway, not to mention to lack of automatic patching. The PC gaming community has great potential, and I think responsibility, to solve these issues.
Despite these gripes, PES 2009 remains a great example of the theatre of football. It is an essential part of my gaming hobby, and sees action at least once a week. One word of caution, though: download the excellent Smoke Patch to licence your teams, and to improve the edited graphics and shirt sponsors. Do this and there is no reason to choose FIFA over the pinnacle of football gaming so far.
PC gamers often complain about the issues of porting console (action) games. To be truth, I find many of the arguments elitist and a little empty (take the issue of Portal 2 showing a ‘don’t turn off your console screen’ leading to a plethora of low star ratings on amazon.co.uk). Darksiders, though, is a terrible port. Terrible enough to warrant it as some of the worst games I have played.
The graphics comprise a huge aspect of the game. Based upon a comic strip, the game (like Braid) should be a glorious visual experience. The graphics, though, offer no options other than resolution. No anti-aliasing. No level of detail. Just resolution.
Repetitive is one word to describe the gameplay. Repetitive without the sense of skill required by, say, Devil May Cry or God of War. There are two attacks, but essentially the control system feels like a throwback to Golden Axe. When you consider the quality of Batman Arkham Asylum, there is no need to resort to the parcity of control that this game offers.
One initially excellent addition is the range of finishing moves. However, seeing the same errant leap onto a Cyclops to pull out its eye for the tenth time in two minutes is akin to hearing the same joke explained repeatedly by an annoying drunk.
Another thing, while I clearly nail my colours to the mast of this game. I dislike the culture of a character carrying a huge sword. Still, fortunately I was distracted by the game’s tendency to crash to desktop if the resolution was too high. Is this why resolution is the only graphical option to vary? I was forced to move the game’s resolution from 1920 to about 1000 just to keep this ill-made construction from falling to pieces.
To judge how annoying this crash is, I should say that Magicka crashed recently, losing my progress. I happily continued and played through the first chapter again. Darksiders forced me to replay the same parts 4-5 times until I dropped the resolution down to its minimum. And the sword is still too bloody big.
I guess this review has fallen to too focus on its flaw as a console port. If I were you, I would only purchase this, like a console game, in DVD format. While steam occasionally offers this for £5, the download is 11gig. You don’t see me complain about Empire’s 20gig download, though. Probably because I feel that I am getting a crafted games with plenty of content - not the gaming equivalent of a kid colloquially urinating away his bandwidth inheritance.
Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is experiencing a great film. And great films - like great some games - never appear linear; their finite stories belie the seemingly expansive possibilities of their genre. The reality is, of course, that the action of an FPS offers only a limited number of scenarios. However, done well, these scenarios offer both the serious and the casual gamer well-crafted slices of unreal action. Not least because the army down-plays the getting-shot-aspect of real life.
As I stopped gaming between 2003 and 2008, I didn’t play the original Call of Duty games, so this was my entry into the series. To be honest, as an RTS fan, I didn’t fancy playing FPS. However, I had read so many wonderful reviews for this game, that I thought I had to try it.
My first impression was that the graphics were immense. No glitching, smooth frame-rate and glorious textures. The first level was cinematic. Rushing from the sinking ship, fearing I had unshot my leap (having a childhood of failing pixel-perfect platform jump) I openly applauded the game when the game was toying with my expectations. All to a continually epic cinematic score.
Having played through all but one of the Call of Duty games, I began to realise the variety of gameplay offered. The ability to shoot through walls is particularly brilliant. While not akin to the scene in Robocop where you calculate the angles to cut down a criminal, it does allow you splash the cover of a cautious enemy with bullets with some success. Fortunately (as far as I’m concerned) the AI rarely, if ever, shoots you back through walls. I should add that I’m atrocious in the multiplayer mode; I can stalk and find opposing players. But no matter how long I shoot them for, they don’t go down. No BOOM HEADSHOT! for me.
One aspect of gameplay that works extremely well is the switching from soldier to vehicle combat. For example, after rendezvousing a POW across the countryside (a particularly tricky mission that requires well-picked path through encamped enemies), you zoom into an invulnerable attack helicopter that serves to mow the masses of enemies converging on the patrol. Having struggled through the previous mission (dying more than three times in the same place - normally a cardinal sin for a TeacherGamer) it was gloriously satisfying to finish the enemy off with massively overpowered weapons.
The best aspect of console gaming that I’m happy with is the autosave function. Taking the choice of saving out of the hands of the player turns the game into a series of (occasionally) claustrophobic mini-missions. For me this is perfect evening gaming - I can play five minutes of the game and get a little further.
To stand any chance of getting some kind of skill at the game, you need to purchase a decent mouse. Mine glows purple and blue, and cost me under £20 in a sale. It also got me through a level where I storm a TV station without dying once. It is in this sense of immersion, of completing a mission without seeing the ketchup of blood splashed over the eyes, that the game really excels.
Call of Duty is a gaming phenomenon that helps bring gaming increasingly into the mainstream focus of hobby culture. As a teacher, almost all my tutees use it as a social networking tool. Even if you dislike the genre, this is a game to experience (as part of your linear progression through gaming history.)
For those who enjoyed the smashing board game, this bloody realisation is a faithful recreation. Those who don’t understand, or haven’t played, the classic game, this game in unlikely to feel like theatre, and more like extra time. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you haven’t already played the board game, then you’ll find playing this akin to watching two nondescript German division 3 teams scrapping out a midtable draw.
The game is an ultraviolent take on American Football. With Orcs. It works on the basis of two halves of eight turnovers. Any failed action causes an immediate turnover. A 1 (on a D6) is an automatic fail, while a 6 is an automatic success. Immediate tactics involve trying to maximise the actions your side can do before you invariably fail.
Of course, this makes the entire game a gamble. If necessary, in the last turnover, you can throw a ball almost anywhere on the pitch (successfully, on the roll of a 6), catch the ball under pressure (successfully on the role of a 5, or 6), dodge away on the roll of a 4, and then run the two extra squares you find you need to reach the end zone. The chances of doing this are 0.083%.
There may be experts at this game who, like those gamblers who can card count, can minimise the risks. But, most likely, you’re a deeply casual player who simply plays by gut and whim (like me!) Fortunately, the AI is forgiving, yet realistic enough, for a player like me to feel like I get a game.
Random events occur regularly to give variety to the match set-up. This variety reflects the fact that it is a game designed to take a team through several seasons of improvement. Shame, though, that even with a rather gig rig like mine (4gb, top 40 graphics card, quad core) it feels like an Amiga loading. Patience is the order of the game.
I suppose I should praise the animations. And I should have even perhaps at least tried the real-time animation mode (in the same way that I should have completed the head-tennis mini-game before reviewing PES 2011). But are these part of the spirit of the game? There was a thriving free version of blood bowl kicking around for several years before it was shut down.
In all, the game itself, I must say, is one big bloody dice-roll. One giant dice roll that crushes your free time, and the chance to play more rewarding, immersive games. If a game could be completed quicker than 30 mins, it might have been a regular part of my gaming calendar. As it is, though, without a human player, the randomness is a bit too close to nihilism for my liking.
08:20
A teacher
