On the Subject of StarCraft 2

These typical RTS fans* can't contain their excitement at the release of SC2

Don't care. Beneath all the "OMG new Blizzard game!!!1!!11" hype, it's an RTS. I neither enjoy nor excel at RTS games, I know it and no amount of fanfare or fan hysteria is going to change that. I'm not saying it's a bad game at all, obviously I don't know whether it is or not, but I'm not going to buy it in the same way I wouldn't buy the new single from the latest Pop Idol winner. Although in the Idol case, the single would inevitably be a load of old wank.

It's curious just how rabid the fan response has been. Not so much in terms of ferocity, more in terms of volume. Maybe it's a relatively small number of very, very loud individuals but it seems to me that RTS games have never enjoyed the popularity of, say, first-person shooters. Nevertheless, drop into any games-related forum in the last few weeks and there will still be a crust from the tidal wave of jizz spunked-up by all the furiously-masturbating fanboys.

I suspect SC2 will be bought by a) everyone who loved SC1, and b) a lot of people who are either intrigued by the feverish excitement or who have found themselves hitched to another Blizzard wagon in the 12 years since the release of the first game. in the case of b) I suspect a fair number will discover that RTS games are indeed a niche genre for the simple reason that while they can inspire religious devotion in a relatively small fraction of gamers, it is still a relatively small fraction. RTS games are like chess, and chess games don't dominate the gaming charts. Clear a space for that soon-to-be-dusty SC2 box, probably next to your copy of Spore.

Don't imagine that I'm being a curmudgeon, though, I have nothing against SC2, nor even against the people who play it. I do however suspect that the celebration and joy which have been inspired by the release of SC2 will pale into insignificance compared with what we'll experience when Diablo 3 rolls around. And at least that's a game I'll be vaguely interested in playing. Start stockpiling the Kleenex, Diablo fans.

* Typical RTS fans not pictured

On the Subject of Dragon Age: Origins

Lorena

Damn the neverending Steam sales. Somehow the Dragon Age expansion appeared in my game library, as if by magic, and so I decided it was probably about time I completed the original game.

First time around I took what I presumed to be the straightforward route and built a standard issue tank character. This was fine to start with but I soon found the difficulty creeping upwards, despite lots of people posting on forums claiming that the encounters were "easy" (see my Guide to Forum Posting). If you find yourself in a similar position, you'll soon notice that all the people claiming the game is easy a) are playing mage characters, and b) recruited the additional healer party member Wynne. Unfortunately I a) was playing a tank and b) killed Wynne in the mages tower because I thought she was a sanctimonious old bitch. This leaves your party without a healer (unless you spec Morrigan as one, but that would be no fun), and I think you'll find that ups the difficulty considerably. Ultimately I got a bit bored of spamming potions and eventually moved on to other games, after completing perhaps 25% of DA.

So, lesson learned, this time I made a nice mage character, cranked up her healing skills, recruited Wynne (who turns out to be largely unnecessary if you play as a healer yourself) and set out to save the world from the nasty darkspawn.

It certainly was a lot easier this time, no doubt partly due to my familiarity with a large chunk of the game. Unfortunately that also made the early stages quite tedious, despite starting off from a different racial/class starting zone. I doubt I'll play DA again for a while, unlike both Mass Effect games which I've completely 2 or 3 times. I'm not sure why but I don't find the game world of DA quite as compelling, despite the storytelling and voice acting being very similar. Except for the fact that your own character doesn't speak in DA, which has quite an impact on your relationship with him/her. It sounds like that will be one of the big changes in DA2, and it's one I whole-heartedly endorse. Also there's a lot less party micro-management in ME which streamlines the game play a great deal. DA is quite an old-fashioned, almost turn-based game at heart so it doesn't "flow" as smoothly.
Still, once I caught up with myself and reached a point where I was facing new encounters it got a lot better. The story takes a while to find its feet, and of course it takes a while for your character to level to a point where you feel like a double-hard killing machine. Eventually you're felling dragons and laughing at the ragtag ruffians who dare to take you on and you reach that golden stage of really feeling like the hero you're supposed to be. I also turned my mage into a blood mage (at the expense of a poor, defenseless child), which is slightly odd in a game world where blood mages are villified while you're the great white hope for civilisation's future. You do get some cool spells though.

I'm still not keen on all the micro-management. I still want to play as my character and let all the others get on with their jobs. I don't mind gearing them all up, except for the fact that there are quite a lot of them, but forever pausing battles and switching party member to issue instructions or heal or whatever is a bit too RTS (not even "RT", mostly "S") for my liking. I could probably have tweaked the combat tactics a bit more, but in the end I just made them at least try to heal themselves, and to prioritise serious enemies, and protect my character above all else.

I'll admit I did cheat once, but I also maintain that it was forgivable. Essentially I wanted my pretty lady mage to get it on with naughty bard Leliana, but I ran into a bug where you can't trigger Leliana's personal quest if she likes you too much, so I had to make her a little less adoring temporarily.

And bugs are my main complaint. Not necessarily in terms of game play (although I did encounter stuck characters occasionally), but god DAMN the game crashed a lot. For a start if you play for extended periods then it begins to crawl, especially during loading screens. And I had any number of CTDs during battles, often "important" battles. I suspect they were audio-related, as a recent patch does list that as one of the fixes. But there were several sections, especially towards the end of the game, where the fucking thing would crash immediately upon entering a new area, over and over until by luck I could do a quick-save on the other side and restart. Given the relatively modest technical complexity of the engine (at least in PC terms) it was quite disappointing. Especially compared with the surprising reliability I had become used to while playing GTA4 (even if they did manage to fuck up the engine with the LC expansion).

Anyway, I got there in the end. The world was saved, the girl got the girl and various other boring shit probably happened but I couldn't be bothered with reading all the end-game text. I think I'll take a break before diving into Awakenings, though.

On the Subject of Episodes from Liberty City

Perla/Simi

As I reported previously, GTA4 was a surprise hit for me and so it was inevitable that I would pick up the Episodes from Liberty City expansion. Naturally I did so immediately before it was sold for tuppence in a Steam sale. You'd have thought I would have learnt that lesson by now (cf Grid, Dirt 2).

Anyway, after completing the original game (no thanks to the fucking stupid helicopter bug in the final mission which still hasn't been fixed as far as I'm aware), I was straight into The Ballard of Gay Tony. In hindsight that was possibly a mistake, as TBOGT is superior to The Lost and Damned, so I would have been better off getting the latter over and done with first.

First things first, and Rockstar somehow managed to cripple the engine with the release of EFLC. It's supposed to feature fancy-pants clever shadowing trickery, but ultimately makes the game run like shit compared with the earlier version. Unfortunately this shittery now applies to the original game too, thanks to the patch which was released alongside EFLC (and which is of course mandatory if you play through Steam). After a lot of dicking around with graphics settings and turning down shadow quality, I was eventually back in business.

Since this is an expansion, there's not too much to say. It's the exact same game world, and there are some clever crossovers between the three stories, especially regarding a central diamond heist. To be honest I prefer Niko to either of the expansions' protagonists, who are slightly one-dimensional in comparison. On the other hand, TBOGT in particular adds a lot of variety to the game play, often involving a parachute. I cannot fucking stand the helicopter sections though, that fucking thing is virtually unflyable, or at least it is when you're trying to shoot something else at the same time. And doubly so when that thing is also in the air. During one particularly annoying mission I kept having to land and take out persuing choppers with the (ludicrously overpowered) automatic shotgun thing (don't ask me), before taking to the air again to continue. Fucking awful.
Still, there's not too much of that, and plenty of the standard-issue infiltration and general carnage. With a slightly worthless rhythm game tacked-on in the nightclub. Speaking of the nightclub, I believe there's supposed to be some sort of "nightclub management" mini-game, but despite being asked to show up at the club by the doorman, and despite the woman being in the office, it never seemed to trigger for me. Didn't seem to make any difference in the end, at least it didn't prevent me from completing the game.

So in TBOGT you run around clearing up the mess made by an over-the-hill, coked-up club empresario in freefall, and in TLOD you're a biker gang-member who's chief has gone off the rails and is running the club into the ground for no apparent reason. To be fair, TLOD did pick up eventually and does has its moments, but it doesn't offer the variety or the humour of the other campaigns and feels a bit flat.

Together they form a pretty satisfying extension to the game, and overall I had a lot fun. I suspect that when I do dip back into the game in the future it will be into the original story rather than the expansions, but that's not a criticism of the expansions as much as a vindication of the original.

Thought for the Day: Tera Patrick

Get your pencil cases out, we're going back to the old school.

On the Subject of Batman: Arkham Asylum

Kelly Brook

People have been bleating on about Batman: Arkham Asylum being a great game for a while now. In between playing some games I genuinely was interested in, I thought I'd give it a try.

So far, so shit. The basics are there; it looks pretty enough, it runs smoothly enough, the controls... work. I've been using a 360 pad because it's "one of those games" which benefits from one.

One thing that bugs me about the game is how Batman seemingly isn't allowed to kill anyone. It's not that you get punished for killing people, it's that you don't get the chance. Henchman come at you armed with everything from fists to sniper rifles, by way of shotguns and pipes and cattle prods, but once you've taken (knocked) them out, you don't get to pick up any of the leftover firepower. Oh no, you must continue with only your pacifist-friendly problem-solving toolkit. Rather than humanise Batman, or make the game more challenging or whatever the fuck it's supposed to achieve, all it does for me is work against the self-conciously "dark" atmosphere of the game and make it seem cheap and shallow.

Talking of cheap and shallow, there's the dialogue. What a load of uninspired, cliched shit. The Joker is a mind-numbingly irritating and tiresome character which absolutely makes me want to kill him (just like in The Dark Knight, funnily enough), which is fair enough, but then of course you know you're not going to get the opportunity to properly cave his skull in and he'll probably just end up incapacitated and ultimately locked up again at the end of the game. Harley Quinn (or however you spell it) has a certain fancy-dress whore charm (i.e. she looks hot) but she manages to be even more of a whining, screeching, vacuous cunt. And I have to say, "Bats" is such a fucking pathetic nickname. "Oh hello, Bats. Nice to see you again". The dialogue in general is just grating and awkward and bad.

But who cares about that sort of thing, it's all about the action, right? Maybe I'm just not in tune with old-school console beat-em-up mechanics or something, but I don't seem to get on with AA's combat system. It usually seems to descend into a load of random button-mashing which, 90% of the time, will win the fight. And the other 10% you just try again and end up beating it the second time for no discernable reason. It seems like it should be similar to The Witcher's timing-based combo system, but unlike with that game in AA I don't feel the same connection to the moves. The cues are probably there, but I'm too bored by the randomness of it all to notice them.

But what turns me off the most is how tediously repetitive the game is. The whole thing is just "chase the Joker, almost catch up with him, watch him run off to another indistinguishable part of the asylum while you fight a boss". Repeat. I'm not a fan of boss battles in any case because they're usually contrived and meaningless to the story and just serve to get in the way and artificially extend the game, and that's definitely the case in AA. The random combat doesn't help.

So I'm unimpressed. Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion that gamers have either given in to the torrent of cash-grabbing, derivative wank that some developers are putting out or else are too young to be familiar with genuinely innovative and involving games and so don't have an adequate frame of reference when it comes to quality. That is especially true of the absolutely loathesome Dead Space, and to a lesser extent Assassin's Creed. Although AA isn't quite in that league of middle-of-the-road, cheap, lazy piss-stained blandness, it's certainly not the impressive experience I was hoping for.

On the Subject of PCZone

Kelly Brook

I was slightly saddened to hear of the recent demise of PCZone magazine. That's right, "magazine". You know, bits of paper with words printed on them and glued together and sold in shops. Yes, shops - places where you would go to buy porn before the internet was invented. You know, porn - pictures of bare ladies printed in magazines and then dumped in the woods for kids who weren't old enough to buy them to find.

Slightly saddened, but perhaps more surprised that PCZone had survived this long. It was a must-buy for me back in the 90s, being significantly superior to the competing (and shit) PC Format. One of PCZone's most notable contributors was Charlie Brooker who started out as a cartoonist before emerging as one of the magazine's most memorable writers, and who has since gone on to become an established name in British TV and radio comedy, and who has been mercilessly ripped-off by that derivative, talentless hack "Yahtzee" Croshaw.

And lest we forget, PCZone was responsible for the magnificent Colin Culk, who's occasional videos were hidden away on the cover CDs.



Can't be arsed to link them all, just search youtube for Colin Culk, they're all on there.

Nostalgia aside, I won't really miss PCZone that much. I don't recall when I last bought an issue but the chances are it's been well over a decade. You could argue that's there's still a market for intelligently written, irreverent games-related journalism, but the fact is today's gamers are mostly fucking retards with single digit attention spans who think Zero Punctuation is a masterpiece of satire rather than repetitive, tiresome cuntery. In that sense the passing of PCZone is sad because its demise is a symptom of a broader malaise.