Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Back from a quasi-week in foreign climes, I return to discover Eurogamer has published some writing they recklessly hired me to write. There’s a preview of Assassin’s Creed 2, detailing what I found when I nosed at the first couple of hours of the game, and perhaps more interestingly, there’s my review of Torchlight. In it, I claim that absolutely everything Walker said it about the game here was embarrassingly wrong and that we should all fire cannonballs at his face. Or did I largely agree with him? I forget. Let’s fire cannonballs at him anyway. There was also supposed to be a preview of Avatar up there, but it has mysteriously not arrived. I’ll have a little cry until it does.

You may have noticed Quintin’s enthusiasm about The Void. It really is a remarkable game, and we’ve certainly not heard the last of the analysis and attention it deserves. Me, however – I didn’t fall in love. Which made it an interesting one to review. Well, you can see what I thought of it over at Eurogamer. Then there’s some new bits and pieces of interest below. It starts like this:

“The Void makes me feel stupid. I’m more daunted by writing this review than I have been by any other. Perhaps not surprisingly, the last time I felt this terrified about writing a game up it was Pathologic, the previous game from Void developer Ice Pick Lodge. This is a game that’s an awful lot smarter than I am. Or perhaps just weirder. See, I don’t know. A review is designed to provide the reader with a description of the game, and then act as a buyer’s guide. This will fail on both counts, since The Void is so far outside of the realms of helpful description that I might as well phone you up and make animal noises at you, and since I honestly couldn’t tell you whether you should buy this or not. Instead let’s fumble along together, and at the end you can decide for yourself.”

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Last month I spent some time in Cities XL with another RPS ally as we tried to figure out the MMO side of the game. We both ended up feeling a little frustrated by the way it wasn’t really possible for us to construct complimentary cities. “You be tank city, I’ll be DPS city” was the joke that came to mind, but there was a serious side to it: the metagame of economic interaction needs to be improved if Cities XL is going to fulfill its lofty ambitions as a series of online worlds with a player-driven economy. You can read my thoughts on that and the single-player city-builder aspects over on my Eurogamer review.

Over at Eurogamer today I’ve a retro piece about the completely brilliant Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Or Jedi Knight to its friends. It includes words such as:

“And by crikey, it’s good. It’s very, very good. It’s so good that you can only look down at the ground, shake your head in confusion, and slowly pen a letter to LucasArts asking them what the hell they were thinking when they abandoned FPS development and handed the reins over to Raven. With this, Dark Forces, and indeed the enormous Mysteries of the Sith expansion, LucasArts demonstrated a rare and brilliant skill with a genre that’s so often so mediocre.”

Read the rest here.

The response to my Section 8 review on Eurogamer seems to have been tempered somewhat by the release of a demo on the 360. It’s worth stressing that I haven’t seen 360 code and can make no judgment there, but impressions have not been favourable. I tried playing it on the 360 pad and, well, yes. Mouse and keyboard will be the default choice. It seems like the release of a demo on the console might actually have seriously damaged the chance of the game on there. As a relatively complex multiplayer FPS it does seem to me like it carries some serious PC heritage, however, and you won’t win any prizes for guessing what version I would recommend. One other thing that I didn’t mention in the review was how impressed I was with the way the game scaled. I played a bunch of five-on-five games pre-release and the smaller maps still delivered tight games with so few people, which is pretty impressive.

However, ugh. It also seems that the PC version of Section 8 is having some technical difficulties in its US launch. The culprit: Games For Windows Live failing to intiate. Another fine game marred by Live? Why oh why… Developers: use something else, please.

Having spent rather a lot of time talking about how unfairly unremembered the Sierra Space Quest series are when people get nostalgic about adventure games, I went back in time to replay my remembered favourite, Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. The results were an interesting combination of absolute brilliance and maddening failings, with a story more interesting behind the scenes than in front. You can read the results on Eurogamer, which include this:

“The story behind the development of Space Quest IV is certainly more interesting than the story in the game. The tale of Roger Wilco, hapless space janitor, travelling through time to prevent something something, and rescue maybe his son or something, is clumsy at best. In fact, in a throbbingly bad bit of storytelling, you only find out any of the motivating reasons for doing anything you do in the closing cut-scene. However, SQ4 is about gags, lots and lots of gags, everywhere.”

Once more unto the breach of reviewing that which is many ways unreviewable… This time around, I’m taking a sober look over on Eurogamer at the Euro-state of Mythic’s MMORPG Warhammer Online, nearly a year on from its high-profile launch. You’ll find my ruminations lurking over yonder, and including chin-scratchy nuggets such as these:

Mythic don’t want you to waste your time saving up money for a bigger rucksack. They just want to you to fight – ideally, to fight other players. The game’s greatest triumph is a largely seamless blend between punching NPCs and punching real people – no need for different skill sets or alternative armour. The enemy is the enemy. That row of number keys and a few team-mates, be they anonymous or known chums, are all you need. The sad side-effect of such single-mindedness is a glaring loss of personality.

A few bonus thoughts are below…
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Bookworm Adventures 2 is now officially released. This is: Good News. Only announced a month ago, there was barely time to get excited about it. We will have the world’s most important opinion about the game early next week, but in the meantime you can read the world’s second most important opinion about it over on Eurogamer. It begins, helpfully, like this:

“The magic of spelling is a lost art in the European isles. Technology is now so advanced that if you say a word incorrectly it appears with wobbly red lines in the speech bubble above your head. Young people tweeting pods from their mobile Xboxstations care not a jot for the inclusion of vowels. Local Spelling Stations are closing down all around the continent. Spelling is going the way of the apostrophe.”

The really rather special LucasArts adventure, The Dig, had me getting my retro hat and trousers on for Eurogamer. It begins,

Seeing the 15 to 20 year-old point-and-click adventures appearing in Steam’s top sellers warms my heart. There is still an audience for these games, and they don’t need them to be in 3D with volumetric physics and dynamic downloadable content. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has, unsurprisingly, sold the most so far, but for me the game I was drawn to uncover from the archives was The Dig. Not because I have fond memories of it – I had almost no memories at all. But because when The Dig was released in 1995, it carried the weight of six years of expensive, over-hyped development around its neck, and was played under a cloud of preconceptions and prejudice.

I feel that I should restate where I write in the piece that I discuss events throughout the fifteen year old game, including the ending. People seem to be missing this, and then getting cross. It’s not a game that would have been interesting to write about if not discussing its entirety. So don’t read page 3 if you’re about to play the game. Or read it anyway and yell at me.

Up now on Eurogamer (yes, you’re allowed to read it even if you’re not a Europerson) are the word-fruits of my recent hands-on time with a near-finished version of ArmA II. It’s the second spiritual sequel to Operation Flashpoint, nasty old Codemasters having nicked the name from original developers Bohemia Interactive Software, but reportedly it’s the first true sequel – the first ArmA having been something of a stopgap release primarily aimed up updating the tech available for the enthusiastic community to tinker with. Arma II, though – that’s definitely a whole new game. And an incredibly ambitious one too, as you’ll read in my EG piece. I’m massively excited about it, even if I am a bit frightened by the obtuse controls and punishing difficulty – but unlike ArmA 1, I reckon I will get into this. Read why here.

We’ll also have some bespoke RPS coverage on ArmA II soon – Jim and I are going to sit down and have a chat about our individual impressions of what might be a landmark videogame. Beneath the digi-hurdle, you can find some recent footage of this huge, strange thing.
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