Arrrgh!

Good mornington my fellow readerinos. Have you ever played a game so frightening, so terrifying that you squealed at your PC screen, shrunk into your chair like the blubbering imbecile that you are and cried out for Mumma? Well that happened to me … twice.

So there’s this first-person-survival-horrror-puzzle poop inducer called Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You assume the role of this dude who creeps around a castle in search of the exit sign with only his wits to defend himself. As the adventure progresses you find these conveniently placed letters which purely serve as exposition.

Cordial fountain ...

While the plot is interesting-ish, the immersive elements are spectacular. You need to watch your health and your sanity. If you linger in the dark too long, or if you see something grotesque like corpses or monsters, your vision begins to swim. The distortion is unsettling and that’s the point.

You can find tinderboxes to light candles along the way but there are never enough so you do need to rely on your lantern (so long as you don’t burn all of your oil). One of my scariest memories of Amnesia involves complete darkness, being chased by something vaguely human with blades for hands and relying on sound alone to survive. And then I fell off a ledge and died.

Amnesia is an interactive horror film. Those frantic moments where you need to pull that lever to trap the baddie and then slam doors behind you to make it out alive are what makes the game so exciting.

Pace is excellent and the gameplay is fantastic. Frustration was rare but then there’s the DLC ‘Justine’. The game save function is disabled, which only emphasises the tension. One mistake and game over. The trial and error method of playing is super annoying. At the time of writing this I am still getting pwned by that shambling bastard whenever I grab a cog wheel.

‘Justine’ is a cruel bitch. There are two ways to make it to the end. Complete the puzzle to proceed or pull the lever to kill the captive and let the puzzle solve itself. As the intro states: ‘This time it will be a trial of character’.

Another scary distraction I’ve been playing is Tiberium Alliances, a browser game set in the C&C3 universe.

You can’t play as Nod in the open beta but you can build a GDI base, collect resources, build an army, attack mutants and inevitably be annihilated by a fellow player.

Rebuilding is an option but it takes so long for the player to accumulate enough research points and crystals and minerals to be able to do anything cool in a short period of time. You’re meant to build your base and wait 11-plus hours before you can upgrade your structures and tech up your army.

The idea is really cool but the opportunity to dominate the world map quickly loses its appeal when you constantly find yourself with no base.

Fark

TOR myself a new wallet hole

Persistent in the ways of the MMORPG, I am not. When did playing TOR become a tedious chore? Fat’imafatfat, the obese blue Twilek, embarked on a perilous quest to save his ailing master from the twisted Plaguemaster. Planets were visited, Rakghouls were slain, Luke got bored.

I like to play games at my own pace which is what made KOTOR fun. The flashpoints and multi-character levels in TOR are brilliant but it is tough to play with a team of friends who are at different levels. If they’re too low, you lose all HP before you can respond to the enemy or if you’re too high there’s no challenge and you simply walk through the entire dungeon. We end up doing other things (i.e. stop playing) to let others catch up although more frequentlyI find myself grinding for an entire weekend so that I can join in on the group carnage, where the real entertainment is at.

Story driven content is what makes me wanna play on. When you have an endless list of boring fetch-this quests I tend to walk away and clean my room or find something new to pass the time. If there was less minor tasks and more group missions that catered for teams with different level characters then that would be sweet.

The slashing and healing became so mundane that I snuck in a few rounds of MW3’s Spec Ops (survival mode). The mind needed something a little different (but was ironically just as repetitive), and that’s probably the reason why I was hesitant to try an MMORPG in the first place.

Also, the $15 a month is a bit steep for a game that I have only spent a couple of days on. That financial model almost conditions you to change your lifestyle to reap the most out of your Star Wars experience. I can’t live a life where I have to play the same game over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

A good buddy of mine recommended Anarchy Online, a free-to-play MMORPG with loads of content. Did I mention it’s free?

At the moment my TOR subscription is on hold while I revist BF3 and Kane’s Wrath multiplayer. BF3 is kind of boring on your own, it is a team-based shooter so that makes sense. And you can never play enough C&C!

Come on Diablo III, hurry up.

 

26.01.2012

Copyright infringement unintentional

And you might be wondering—after all of these years—why

uncles & aunties and their uncles & aunties and their uncles & aunties

soil the soil, stabbing suppurating wounds into the sand and the sky

to make civilised and productive use of this land because we can

rejoice for we are young and free—

and exploited and fat—

like that denialist notion of being forever young

in the womb of your Corolla …

anyway

Death over a century

ago is not forgotten

yet

I thought there was no sound in space?

Space combat in The Old Republic is a fun diversion from the usual questing. My only criticism is that you can’t roam the black freely like you can in Star Wars: TIE Fighter (that would be sweet), but that might be asking too much of the on-rails minigame.

 

In the Imperial Navy

 

Before you could upgrade your personal starship in TOR, but not before playing with your favourite X-wing toy in the garden, there was a time where you could brave the cockpit of a Twin Ion Engine fighter.

 

TIE Fighter puts the player in control of one of the most pitiful starships in all of the outer rim. No shields, no proton torpedoes, no hope—at least until you gain access to the missile boats and so on.

 

The opening level is terrifying for two reasons: the opposing force is deadly, but so are the cargo containers that you have to inspect. To inspect a container you have to fly super-close to it, but not too close otherwise BOOM.

 

Many hours were spent progressing through the ranks and the secret order. Good times.

 

wat-wat-wat-wat-wat-wat-wat

 

 

All of those blinking lasers and torpedo trails in TOR’s space battles also remind me of Star Wars: Rebel Assault, another PC classic. You begin your journey as a rookie pilot on Tatooine and after scraping throughBeggarsCanyon you join the Rebellion to seek your revengeance [sic].

 

If you get to the X-wing bit then you’re a patient person because the controls are very clunky. How many passes does it take to wreck a Star Destroyer? Too many.

 

Just when you think those bulbous shield generators are about to burst you’ve zoomed past and things get real repetitive. Those lasers sound cool to start with and then they just punctuate the tediousness of the level.

 

I don’t think I ever clocked Rebel Assault, but I did complete the sequel …

 

Behold …

 

Will we see another Star Wars space simulator in our lifetime? Maybe. Hope so. My Jedi Sage is at level 23 and he can deal out the healing like a game of 52 pick up! Later y’all.

The Old Republic!

The massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing-game thing never really interested me. Blizzard’s fantasyscape never captured my imagination to the point where I felt the urge to fight the Horde as an overpowered midget. I could never justify the ongoing payments for a game that seems so repetitive and lacks zazz.

Eve Online has the Z factor but it looks so daunting and user-unfriendly that it would be like working another job only you’re paying your employer. Hmm.

And then Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced and I instantly renounced my hatred of subscription fees. It’s finally here … well, sort of. Local servers aren’t online yet but we can play on the American internetz, yay.

 

What the hell as an Aluminum Falcon?

 

Imagine playing Knights of the Old Republic except for the rest of your life! Never played KOTOR? You roleplay as an archetypal character from the Star Wars universe—set many, many centuries before the movie A New Hope. If you’ve always wanted to kick it like Boba then experiment with the bounty hunter’s gadgets or if shaping your destiny with the Force is more inspiring then forge yourself a lightsaber. Or you can just find the biggest blaster and shoot things.

The Star Wars universe is polarised. Good, bad; Jedi. Sith. Each side has four unique classes that range from gun slingers to troopers to healers to melee fanatics. That’s eight different classes with eight special stories. Your in-game decisions also accrue light and dark side points to represent your path so you could play as a nasty Jedi if you really wanted to.

 Surprisingly, Sith and Jedi characters can work together to complete common goals or even help each other conquer character-specific missions. Teamwork is rewarded with social points and sharing the dialogue sequences is always entertaining. An automatic dice roll will determine who gets to speak on behalf of the group. If you’re a goodie-goodie, for example, and your mate murders innocent engineers to gain dark side points … so long as you chose the light side option you will receive the points you wanted.

I was concerned that the leading choice would dominate your in-game preference, but that concern has been abated. If you’re playing with a couple of people you will notice a bit of lag between dialogue choices, but that’s not always a bad thing. Whenever I’m using a taxi or a speeder bike to fast travel I always use those opportunities to grab a drink or take a quick break. I’m not a slave to the game …

To be able to play as a team you really do need to stick to the same character level as your mates. Things get frustrating when you play catch up. Grind takes the form of bonus missions, picking fights with local baddies in baddie-designated areas. I haven’t played for long so this kind of grind isn’t frustrating yet.

 

That’s no moon

 

Story progression is very linear. You start on a basic planet, learn the basics, get a feel for your story arc and then you move on to the next planet to finish your next shopping list. Rinse and repeat.

The planets and the landscapes, like the graphics, are exquisite … for an MMORPG. Fat’imaFatFat, the obese Twilek, started his journey on Tython and then progressed to Coruscant. There is so much left to explore and Fat’imaFatFat doesn’t have his own starship yet!

I’m keen to try more of the heroic missions and flashpoints (raids) where the real challenges are. As a healer, my job is to keep my tank and DPS dudes alive. Recently I made a big mistake. My mates were doing fine. While I was watching their red health bars I was surprised that they weren’t taking any damage until I glanced at my own hit points—before I had time to target myself and cast Benevolence—I was waiting for respawn.

 

Putting the pwn in PvP

 

PvP servers are fun. Many duels, I have lost. There are PvP games that you can participate in too, but the higher-tier players seem to dominate. Despite that, the house mates and I held enough turret objectives to obliterate our opponent’s ship-thing.

I’ll give the PvP thing a miss until I’ve accomplished more with my Jedi sage. The story-heavy adventures elsewhere are more interesting to me as a player.

Is there tactical merit in PvP or does having a higher level avatar make all the difference? Obviously if your team is a balanced and coherent force to reckon with you would think that lower-level forces would be able to rip through a less-organised team of random level 50s. I haven’t played enough to be able to see if tactics beat attacking spam.

 

Who’s scruffy lookin?

 

So far my TOR experience has been mostly positive. The game is very addictive. Eight hours zipped by the other day without my noticing (even though there’s a clock to the lower right corner of the screen!). The only major drag is the down time for server maintenance and patches and the occasional waiting to get into a server (30 minutes isn’t too bad, at least I can play the other neglected games such as MW3 and BF3).

It’s too early to tell whether TOR is worth the additional $15 a month. From what I’ve read there are guilds of level 50 players who are devouring all of the brand new content. Where do these people find the time? Ah well, I have medkits to craft and Justicars to thrash.

Y u no work?

What’s the difference between BF3 and MW3? MW3 works. Hmm. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Most awesomest dialogue moments in recentish computer game historica

‘Suffer like G did?’

Before the X-Box and the lightguns, Cal and I would gladly surrender a few gold coins to this arcade classic. There have been some sub-average The House of the Dead sequels but the charm for number two (who do you work for?) is the thick spread of B-grade cheese that slathers this product. Everything from the character movements to the dialogue is clunky and that’s why we adore this rail shooter.

Voice fail

You’d think that most of the people you meet in all of Tamriel—or at least in Cyrodiil and Skyrim—have split-personality disorders. As the video demonstrates the voice acting can slip from one specific person like an elderly miser to a young, pleasant woman during the same conversation. It’s weird and you do let it go after a while but it does break immersion just a little.

‘I know what you are thinking.’

Udo Kier’s portrayal of the psychic villain Yuri is like a Soviet version of the Master! You can mind control soldiers and tanks—even buildings. There is no limit to the destruction that you can wreak with Yuri’s forces in the Red Alert 2 expansion. Just don’t use the brutes because they’re one of the most useless and easily countered units that you can train.

G-man

Creepy, croaky mister G-man. Half-Life fans know him well, or do they? He’s that dude in a suit, carrying a briefcase, who stalks Gordon Freeman and talks a lot of vague stuff. What does it all mean? I guess we might find out when Episode 3 arrives …

Who wants a Krotchy Doll?

Postal 2 was as hilarious as it was controversial (the kittens as silencers and public urination thing pushed it). You’re a trailer-trash dude who has to complete tasks on a shopping list from purchasing milk to getting Gary Coleman’s autograph. Yeah.

‘I’ve got balls of steel’

So the latest Duke Nukem game sucked. Like CS:CZ it came out too late but even that’s not an excuse for how terrible the final product was. Despite that, Duke’s misogynistic and egotistical character was immortalised in Duke Nukem 3D where the quotes are so memorable that there are soundboard terrorists who prey on unsuspecting WoW players via Ventrilo.

Heaps cooler than Twilight and True Blood

Role-play as a vampire in a world that’s not tainted by lovey-dovey tripe and is instead rife with choices and consequences. Nosferatu suck on rats and travel in the sewers, Toreadors cling to their humanity and socialise publicly while Malkavians are an insane breed in their own right. Dialogue choices as a Malkavian are always entertaining and odd. Enjoy the excellent writing and the frenetic action, pity the Source engine they shipped on release was buggy as hell.

‘You’re freakin dead, Payne!’

Vinnie Gognitti: everyone’s favourite whiny criminal boss. Some, or probably most, find his nasally whinging irritating but I laugh at everything he says. He’s the light-hearted entertainment in this gritty noir story of revenge and painkiller addiction. Cue theme music, aww yeah.

Stream of Skyrim

Hairy Silt Striders are rare

There’s this fantastical world called Nirn or something and it’s so much prettier than our own because you can mod the planetoid in the sky to look like the Death Star (that’s no moon) and you can run around as a cat dude and litter the vistas with steel arrows as you chase that sly fox that always scarpers when you chase it but then out of nowhere—oh lordy—a dragon will swoop and belch fire at the poor  peasants which is fantastic because while Alduin’s buddy is distracted you can crouch among the mushies and the bushies and thrust out your hands—Palpatine style—to deliver the electrical pain and when your mana pool runs dry you can finish off the beast with a poisoned arrow (something’s in the air/is anybody there?) but if animal hunting aint yo thang then you can, by Sithis, end some lives for the Dark Brotherhood or permanently borrow from non-playable characters for the Thieves Guild and bring about phase three which=profit or if looting bores you then you could always quit because the never ending list of quests can be so overwhelming that it feels like you’re triple-checking a reference list so I just bounce around the Nordic-Scandinavianish terrain with gleeful abandon and admire the digital beauties from the brilliant drawing distance to the minute details like those sweet lookin smithing signs — oh how they don’t glint in the sunlight because they’re so dull but their rough textures … oh the rough textures … Why stomp when you can force a horse to swim and traverse mountains? Why use punctuation consistently [sic] when you can join the Stormcloaks despite the fact that their racist ideals amount to nothing more than a few repetitive fort sieges and a lame speech and then there’s the main quest which I have deviated from so much that I’m enjoying the random adventures but then isn’t that the core strength of any Elder Scrolls title because we all know that the main storylines are pretty average when compared to the Daedric shenanigans that you can find yourself in like the time you drank too much in Whiterun or that skull thing that’s vaguely reminiscent of Freddy Krueger’s taunts in the nightmarescape (and we’re not talkin about kiddy fiddling folks) so where were we … oh yeah you can eat troll’s toes and human hearts and combine these oddities to create potions only these are more effective than the ice cream container full of grass and water and shampoo that Cal and I perched on top of the swing so many years ago which was probably a few years before our first jumping spree throughout Balmora and it is a shame that there is no acrobatic skill to improve in the latest Elder Scrolls  epic (and where’s ‘mark’ and ‘recall’? I haven’t seen them around for centuries …) because getting around via rooftops was always cool … cool like the enchantments that you can enchant apparel and weapons with and you can change the name of that item when you enchanterise it which allows you to be super creative with your gear and just imagine the possibilities with damage multipliers for attacking while crouching in the shadows you can knock out most targets with one shot which is hilarious and most violent so why aren’t you ignoring your body’s needs and immersing yourself in one of the greatest digital escapes since Civ III? Do it. Make sense? Splendiferous!

Balmora and Tatooine, my inner child is torn between - Image: Entaris

Triple Threat: BF3 V MW3 V Skyrim

Battlefield 3 just broke the street date and if it wasn’t for rent and bills—and poverty in general—I’d be gettin pwned by n00bs and bitchin about servers bootin me.

Despite the lack of funds, Bad Company 2 ensures that I receive my more-than-fair-share of pwnage and rage quitting. Hooray for EA …

Call of Duty fans are waiting for the imminent arrival of Modern Warfare 3, which is supposed to make BF3’s single-player look terrible by comparison.

Apparently, BF3 is copping crap for a clichéd campaign that fails to do it better than what the boys and gals at Infinity Ward and co can concoct. The hearsay is probably true but we all know that BF3 is gonna rock online.

So the popular shooters are covered, but what if you’d rather skewer rats with arrows than riddle walls with lead? If you also like dragons and magic then Skyrim might be of interest.

The Elder Scrolls will unfurl early November and I can’t wait. Assume the role of a dude or dudette as he/she engages in typical RPG shenanigans to defeat a dragon god. Maybe I can clock the game in less than a minute if I stop believing in dragons …

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

In Mother Russia, Stalingrad plays you

That’s right, there’s another WWII shooter on the shelves—or in the cloud— and this one attempts to emulate realism for a massive-ish scale multiplayer romp.

This frag fest is a retail release of an Unreal mod that was popular a few years ago. Now it’s back, looking great. And then there’s the bugs and the crashes to the desktop …

Urban warfare between Axis and the Allies is always exciting, right? The singleplayer missions teach you the basics, but the squad-related orders that you can give are very simple for the bots. At the beginning of each mission your fellow comrades, or Hitler fanboys, will charge the enemy and take cover when they’re being shot at.

Missions become a tedious case of occupying objectives and clearing the hostiles out. I tried to flush out the ‘grain elevator’, a tall multi-levelled structure, from the top to bottom, but I’m guessing I didn’t trigger the scripted events because the building was empty. Shit got confusing when I cleared the ground floor and then level two went from dead quiet to dead holy-shit-where-did those-bastards-come-from?

Some of the subtle ‘realistic’ elements in play include setting your sight for distant targets to account for ballistic drop and manually bolting your rifle. While you’re aiming you can ‘breathe’ to focus and zoom in just a tiny bit more. There’s also a neato suppression meter that indicates how screwed you can be.

If someone is pelting your position with lots of metal then it’s a good idea to stay prone or cower behind something solid. Machine guns actually fulfill their role, which is pretty cool. Online against real people though, the machine gunner is a suicide role because the moment you set up somewhere or let your muzzle flash, some prick will snipe you.

 The conductor just fled the Red Orchestra

Very early on you realise that you can’t just run and gun, arcade style. Firing from the hip just sprays lead everywhere. Even if the baddie is in front of you, shooting without aiming is not wise. This forces players to switch to their side-arm, focus on melee (swing the butt of your rifle), drop a grenade or retreat. If you think it isn’t safe to crawl to the burning wreck for cover then chances are you’re right.

Online games are like playing any kind of deathmatch game with Caldred (you will always die due to long-ranged weaponry). Also, dying is worse than waiting for respawn in Counter-Strike because it happens so frequently. If you like your killstreaks and your tripped out guns then this is not the game for you.

It is refreshing to play against people who don’t talk trash on their mics. Obviously, the target audience for Red Orchestra 2 comprises the more sophisticated gamer. Pfft.

 Ve’re all living in Amerika

This game should be renamed to Sniper Heaven. The class system sets a maximum number of riflemen, machine gunners, assault infantry and so on to keep teams balanced, however due to the almost one-hit kill mechanic most people camp with a Kar 98 or Mosin Nagant and hit anything that moves. I tried to camp at one of our objectives but I accidently team-killed an assault dude who tried to take the building I was sniping at, three times. I was booted from that server.

The next game I joined I decided to be a little more mobile. In-game, I notice there’s only a toggle for iron sights and crouching and going prone. Frustrating. At least Call of Duty allows toggle and/or holding a key. Even more frustrating is the ‘left control’ is used to interact with cover but it’s also the default button to apply bandages. So if you’re exchanging shots with someone and you get hit—and you don’t instantly die— then ideally you hide behind cover, bandage your wound and then keep firing. Unfortunately, the ‘left control’ can get a little buggy and when you go to bandage yourself you might get out of cover or pick up weapons strewn on the ground instead. If this happens you bleed out and respawn. Many deaths are due to the fiddly controls (I swear on my Primus collection).

 Panther, Tiger, birdy

Oh yeah, there are tanks too. They’re hard to use because you need a driver and a gunner and a commander. Without a mic, it’s just silly. At the end of the day I think Call of Duty: United Offensive is more enjoyable because gameplay is more fluid and the tanks are much simpler to handle.

Red Orchestra 2 is fun, but it is also a very frustrating experience. Battlefield 3 is looking fantastic …