Oblivion: a reflection more than a review

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.

And not COD.

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Amnesia: The Dark Descent Review

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.

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Left 4 Dead Review

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.

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What is a TeacherGamer?

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.

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PES 2009 Review

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.

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Darksiders Review

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.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

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.)

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Blood Bowl Review

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.

Plus you can’t play as Halflings.

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Mount and Blade Warband Review

As I write this review I am readying myself to embark on yet another adventurer into the realm of Calradia. But in terms of ‘completing’ this game, I have yet to leave my figurative front-garden. This ambitious sandbox RPG had left my last ambitious warlord at odds with every nation in the land; I literally didn’t have a single town that allowed me to sell the plethora of goods I had looted from the bodies of my errant enemies. It says everything, though, that I’m (reasonably) happy to start a new game (albeit with my imported character) to try to be (a bit more) diplomatic.



As a precursor, I could probably make peace with some of these nations in my original game. But, truth be told, I have yet to scratch the higher-level diplomatic mechanics of this game.

And, in some ways, that is essential to get ahead. While you can be like me, a TeacherGamer happy to put a few hard hours slaughtering careless lords and making frenemies wherever I go (do you have any tasks for me? No? Then prepare to die!), you really need to be building yourself an economic empire to fund your quests to be king. But my lack of economic nouse demonstrates this game’s greatest strength - it leaves so much up to the imagination of the player. Both the heroes and men under my command have their own stories untold by the narrative, albeit usually one of being raised as a recruit and dying as a sergeant.

The Oblivionesque battle system works wonderfully well. The variety of weapons, and grades, means you can equip yourself with a wicked battery of authentic blades, while the intuitive battle orders give you some control over the chaos of fighting. Unlike the total war series, you don’t have the benefit of an eagle-cam or infinite pauses to consider your next move (should that be your thing.) Rudimentary tactics rule. Usually you call for your men to hold certain parts of the battlefield while you lead your cavalry to strike at the flank or rear. Seeing as the battlefields are procedurally generated, and distinct depending on the map terrain where the battle is instigated, these tactics never grow tiresome.

It should be said, though, that actually hitting a man in the face with a sword while riding a galloping horse is not exactly easy. In that sense, this RPG is realistic (unlike, say, Morrowind’s windstrikes). Still, when you do connect with a blade, the results are immensely satisfying.

The epic conanesque soundtrack is constant yet sufferable - rather like the gameplay’s mechanics. For example, at my level of experience, I was able to somehow take a lightly defended castle with 80 men, only for it to be besieged by 500. Without diplomacy, this was the pattern of my gameplay. Take a castle. Have it taken. Repeat. Annoy someone. Get annoyed myself. Ride out into the wilds. Attack someone. Feel happy.

In doing all these things - recruiting men, levelling your heroes, attempting to improve your economy and diplomacy - there is a real sense of time passing. Days move into nights (a day takes about 3-5 minutes to pass), and you quickly have weeks go by. Testament to the enticing freedom of this ambitious RPG, such time passing is akin to the passing time in real life as you play it!

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Batman Arkham Asylum

Batman Arkham Asylum opens with several minutes of a glorious cut scene. It can't be skipped. And I've seen it three times and still not been bored. In fact, this reminds me of what makes this game so good; you never have to see the same scene more than three times in a row. As an action adventure, it is so well balanced, I never died more than three times in a scene.



It is the balance that makes this an outstanding game. One aspect of balance in the game is in its Gothic humour. It is dark, but it knows the inherent silliness of a man in black pants. Another balance is with its judicious map directions. Unlike action games of the past, you aren't forced to artificially extend the life of the game by ambling around directionless; you always know where you need to go next (albeit for one section where I walked past a door and ten minutes into the game.)

Another balance, and perhaps the best for a TeacherGamer, is that the games saves a preset points (like in the COD series). This is the only way for action games to proceed, I think. It divides the game into discernible set-scenes that seamlessly integrate into the next. When I think that adventure games (starting with God on the Amiga) consisted of finding a key for a door, and repeat, I admire how richer and, simply, more fun adventures games have become.

PCGamer suggests that busy professionals should consider playing games on the easiest setting to complete story. Harder levels of difficulty are either for replays, or for veterans of the genre (or series). I can't even remember whether Batman even had a level of difficulty - I remember that it was an immensely achievable game. It can be clocked in under ten hours of gameplay. The boss battles are varied yet clockable. There was no sense of a lucky win.

Anyone who plays this game, though, will recognise what all gamers aspire to: the feeling that you actually meant to control the actions unfurling on the screen. When you single-handedly fight a dozen hired goons at once, blocking multiple kicks and punches while slamming titanium boots to faces, all through the judicious use of two buttons, you know you are playing an exceptional game. Watching Batman cursorily cracking his knuckles, after knocking out a vicious pipe-wielding goon, never gets tiring.

RPG elements are thrown in with the sense of improving Batman's armour or fighting skills. These, generally, level your character in line with the difficulty of the game. Some extra elements - like a grappling hook - are added to allow you to revisit previous scenes and reach higher levels. But these elements exist to serve, rather than than detract, from the action of the game.

For a game that is so regularly cheap on stream - £5 in the last sale - this is the pinnacle of well-balanced action gaming in 2011 so far.

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Eye of the Beholder Review

Vanquishing the mighty (and eponymous) Beholder at the end of the game is one of the most satisfying RPG experiences to be had. I have killed the Archdemon of Dragon Age - and survived (!) - I have saved defeated more than one Daedric Prince of Oblivion, and I have even killed the Dragon at the end of this game's sequel. But none of those is an achievement like beating the floating monster.



You might think the satisfaction comes from the variety of ways you can kill the beholder:

a) Fire magic and missiles from afar.
b) Nimbly hack it to bits.
c) Use a magic wand to drive it into a spike trap that gruesomely bursts it open

You might also think the kudos comes from its level of difficulty. As with all good old-RPGs, the beholder has several 'instant-kill' spells (disintegration, cause instant critical wounds, and even just a 'death' spell).

But no. The achievement is managing to endure what used to pass as an RPG experience. For example, earlier in the game (about 30 minutes in), you have to fight your way through giant spiders. One unlucky bite and a party member is poisoned. Of course, cure poison potions are in short supply and, without the ability to create new ones, you can suffer game-breaking deaths of key party members.

I still loved it though. Those party members were created through one of the best character creation screens made at the time. If you wanted, you could forgo the RPGing aspects of the party's attributes, and simply ramp up everything to maximum. God knows, with designs like the spider level, you would either do that, or save every few minutes. And (as anyone with an Amiga background knows) saving onto a floppy disk is something you want to do as little as possible - the disk might break before you do.

What else? The magic system was intuitive, with a real sense of progressing onto more powerful spells. However, I never did appreciate the way that in order to regain the spells (and heal an injured party) you would often need to rest for several days. Watching a clock wind up for several days, open a door, kill a monster, and repeat for a week, didn't feel heroic to me. But you just have to give games like a break.

What this game does have, though, is the puzzle that kept me stuck for six months. It involved me clicking on every pixel-area of every wall (until I decided I needed to map it). Far more difficult than defeating the ultimate baddies on WoW (although I am yet to play that game...), only the greatest of adventurers - the true chosen ones - can hope to overcome the follow piece of game-design history:

Step on the invisible pressure pads in the right order. And they don't make a sound when stepped on. And you don't know you have to do it.

What kept me, and so many others, with the game despite the true monstrosities like the above design? And no, it wasn't the fact that there were no other RPGs at the time. It was the variety unseen of in a game at the time, both in the enemies and in the levels. Trust me, when you have spent six months clicking on every pixel in a grey-stoned wall, to see green-stone walls is akin to gazing upon the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Another anomaly concerns the spell system. When you find a scroll, you can either use it immediately as a one-off, or scribe it so you can use it permanently when you reach a level capable of casting it. Unfortunately, some of the best spells require a level unachievable (in my playthrough) in the game. So that regeneration spell, something that you've waited for ever since half your party was poisoned to death in the spider level near the beginning of the game, turns out to be entirely useless, save as a reminder of how you should have used it when you had the chance.

Should you play this game today? As a piece of gaming history, it is certainly worth watching some Youtube videos at least. Taken for what it is though - an old-school immersive dungeon crawler - it still holds up today. However, there are too many flaws of design to make it an enjoyable experience. It exists now a piece of nostalgia; as something to realise how much more we expect in our RPG games.

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Supreme Commander 2 Review

Engaging enormous engines of war in battle should be more difficult than this. It certainly was in the original - and much loved - supreme commander. The difficulty, for some, is that while the game looks the same, the economy itself is inherently different.



For starters, unlike the original it is difficult to run short of mass and energy - the two resources needed to power the production of units. This is coupled with the emphasis on upgrading a few core units, rather than producing, and memorising, a plethora of the-same-but-a-bit-different tanks. I still remember now an old friend telling me, during a mutliplayer of medieval total war, that he intended to build his army from as many different, and obscure, troop types as possible, thus as to ensure that I didn't have a clue what I was fighting, or how to counteract it. Such beardiness has been devastated in Supreme Commander 2.

Instead what you have is an engaging game that allows the easy(ier) building of experimentals - skyscraper robots capable of destroying an army single-handed. Their names are as ridiculous as their power - King Kriptor, for one!

Admittedly, if you had dedicated a substantial amount of time to perfecting your build orders to the second, then this game will frustrate you. If you had an inherent knowledge of how the dozens of different basic units counteracted each other, then this game will feel like an imposter. Indeed, the smaller maps (often strangely cramped due to extra scenary) will tone down the epic feeling for those expert at the original.

For me, though, it is perfect. Having stalled on the tutorial for several months, I managed to give the game a morning. In those few hours, I had won skirmishes will all the sides (which feel, and look, genuinely different), unlocked all the experimental units and progressed in the campaign. I have tried some multiplayer, and enjoyed the epicness of it all (something served by an incredible soundtrack.)

For those on PC, this game has also regularly dropped to £2.50, which is a farcical price. You simply must own this game for that amount of money. Very incisive descriptions of why the game feels 'broken' to the experts of the original exist, but suffice to say that if, like me, you play many different genres, this is a wonderful addition that allows you 20-60mins of intensely satisfying RTS at a time.

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Shogun Total War Review

Shogun Total War is one of those games that allows you dream of how to gloriously command thousands (or, at least, dozens) of screaming samurai. By allowing devious flanking tactics, or encouraging heroic frontal assaults, STW was the first game to depict the frantic action of real time strategy with mainstream success.



Which, when you consider that the game was originally intended as a 2D strategy game, makes this game a definitive milestone of the RTS genre.

The strength of game is its simplified unit interaction: like paper (spears), scissors (cavalry) and stone (archers) every unit counters another unit. Unlike the expansive RTS units of SupComm or SCII, mastery of unit types should be expected in hours rather than weeks. There's no seeking for the 'overbalanced' unit combination or the perfect build-order in this game; only blood and thunder battlefield fighting.

Ten years after first release, the gameplay still holds up surprisingly well. The kill rate of units is low (perhaps too low!) but this places a greater emphasis on the paper-scissor-stone principles by which the game runs. Add into this the significant effect of hills (archers will beat infantry with a height advantage in melee) and flanking (even now tying an enemy head-on with infantry and flanking with cavalry is the RTS staple tactic) and you have warfare that is satisfyingly expansive. By expansive I mean there is a real feeling that a smaller army can defeat much larger numbers with superior tactics.

Such victories exploit the game's excellent morale model. You don't need to kill every soldier to win a battle. Even now I can remember battles a decade imprinted on my memory - the enemy ushered through a valley to attack my weakened archers; the hidden charge from woods; and the routing of one flank that rolls down the rest of the enemy until a fresh force flees from my emergent (and no doubt grinning) general.

The campaign mode itself was pleasingly simplified. I always played as Shimazu (the green ones) not least because they were tucked away in the corner. As always in such strategy games, no-one has yet devised a way to counteract strategic AI. In the end game, I always faced off the Hojo clan who had horded dozens of armies into a few spaces. While something that I accepted at the time, these days such a gameplay facet would (rightly) demand a patch, or simply recognise that the campaign is won when 50% of map is yours.

The expansion pack (part of this game) goes some way to addressing these problems but it still lets slip with the overpowered brutality of the mongol heavy cavalry. Having spent 100s of battles watching body counters drop a man at a time, the shock at seeing multiple people die at once is enough to make the mongol expansion feel like the challenge of countering a truly warmonging race with what are essentially a civilised people.

So should you own and play this game because it defined a genre? The graphics are, admittedly, pixilated with a 680 resolution. The campaign can drag on. Heavy cavalry aren't my first choice when I have infinite money. And the bridge battles are immensely arduous tests of attrition.

But the immersion is still there. The sound is evocative of the Sengoku period and the battlefield principles are still refreshingly straightforward and effective. If you win a battlefield, you really feel a sense of control. Even more so than a ctrl + A then right click on their general. I've owned three copies of this game - you should grace your collection with one.

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Max Payne Review

Nearly ten years ago the snowy rain fell on Hull like all the angels in heaven had decided to colloquially urinate at the same time. And so opened this innovative action adventure for me: I had a weekend to kill, it was snowing outside, and I had no heating. I didn't want the intellectually intensity of a strategy game, nor did I want to frenetic multitasking of an RTS. With a blanket on my legs, I sat down and completed this game in 10 hours without even a toilet break. And the first thing I did? Began again. After a toilet break.



Max Payne pitches its progressive difficulty perfectly. Action games shouldn't - in my busy world - kill you more than three times at the same point (well, at least not more than three times in a gaming session.) You shouldn't be slugging through a game with a face as pained as Payne's permanently constipated expression. Instead you should be smiling appreciatively at just how awesome it feels to burst horizontally through a door (in slow motion) while expertly twisting through your hips as you innerringly shoot three baddies with your John Woo pistols before time jolts back into the present and all three baddies fall down at the same time. Whump.

This is not a serious game, but it is seriously evocative. The weapons, even now, feel powerful. I can remember a scene where a baddie hiding behind an apartment door unfortunately proclaims that he intends to shoot you as you dare to enter. He doesn't expect you to leap towards him while simultaneously opening said door before unleashing a full shotgun blast to his chest that lifts him several feet in the air. You can almost hear Chuck N..., I mean Max, saying, "not today bozo."

These scenes reoccur tirelessly throughout the game. Face an impossible situation. Engage bullet time (copied from the Matrix). Shoot all enemies. Read film noir comics. Laugh. Repeat.

While the game itself is not so serious, what should be a serious consideration is the known (and ongoing) compatibility issues with steam. Unfortunately the download seems to fail to name a weapons file correctly which can result in the game simply crashing on the first load. While I have managed to get it work (on occasion, PM if you have this problem) you cannot expect Steam to help you out on this one. Much better to buy on amazon.

Fortunately the game gleefully leads you on a deeply humorous (if judiciously silly) adventure once you have got the damn thing working. The dialogue between the baddies is priceless. Not to mention the subplot of the Lords and Ladies TV series - "My Lord! My Lady! My Lord!" - which can continue for about twenty minutes if you care to halt your carnage to watch the many analogue TV sets scattered throughout the game.

Take this game for what it is - a romping film-noir - and you'll find an outstandingly crafted adventure that is also a piece of gaming history.

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