Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s Alec who normally brings you the latest on Firaxis’ XCOM remake so I expect you shall be somewhat confused to hear that I actually played it last week. Alec will probably never forgive me for taking what he saw as his rightful place but he was too busy being rained on in Greece to defend the Earth from invasion. I didn’t manage to protect anyone from the invasion either but I did cause a few soldiers to die trying. They might have specialisations and there might be less of them per squad, but the poor sods are as vulnerable as ever. This is how they died.

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Former AGS adventure, The Journey Down, has now had its first (and so far only) chapter remade and re-released as a commercial product. How does it do going from retro-pixel adventure to something more modern, voiced and priced? Here’s Wot I Think.

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I think I’ll annoy some Arma fans when I say that Day Z is a better showcase for that tech than the original game’s campaign or multiplayer missions. But I have my reasons, and I’ll explain some of them below. I’ll also continue the story which we began the other day, which will serve to illustrate a bit more about why both Arma 2 and this modification are something singular and brilliant in the landscape of gaming.

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World War II shooter Sniper Elite V2 has topped the all-format charts in the UK for the past couple of weeks, which meant it was time to turn the searchlight of RPS judgement on this high flier. Was it one of the great FPS sniping experiences? Or had Rebellion really just given everyone a good excuse to put a bullet in Hitler? Turns out that without his robot-suit, he wasn’t so tough.

Jim and Adam got together to talk killcams, testicles, and Thief with a rifle.
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My companions have stopped following me. The map has suddenly blanked out. The dungeon doors aren’t opening. And despite my just having cleared out a two-storey dungeon for the second time, there hasn’t been a checkpoint in over a half an hour. If I quit out to fix it, the entire area map will be reset yet again (a previous quit to see if there was any way to raise the difficulty had already done this to me once, and is how I discovered the dungeon wasn’t checkpointing), so in total an hour’s play time lost, and, well, here’s the thing: Diablo III just isn’t brilliant enough to warrant this.

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‘Cinematic’ should rightfully be a dirty word when discussing games and yet Max Payne 3′s marketing wears it proudly, like a sweat-stained vest or an inappropriately jaunty tie. A cutscene is cinematic, every detail and angle just so, no room for accident or deviation, but to aspire to a ‘cinematic’ experience during play is to ignore so much of what makes experiences within a game unique to the form. We run, gun and react in worlds that rely, for the enjoyment they bring, on the accidental and the curious as much as they require adherence to a plan. Here’s to the unexpected, the unplanned and the unforgettable.

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A videogame came out recently. If you consider yourself part of the unruly mass that is Everyone On Earth, you’re probably playing it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, or stroking it in a none-too-subtly suggestive fashion right now. (Stop that, by the way. It’s really weird.) Or, you know, you’re not. Because – given Blizzard’s track record so far – there’s a very good chance the servers are down, or lag has hurled you into a minefield of hungry, hungry Diablos, or the unnatural reaction that is Templar-meets-shield has broken reality again. I imagine you’re angry. It’s only natural, after all. You’ve waited more than a decade, and you just want to dive headfirst into hell while the hype fires are still at their brightest. Really, though, it’s probably only a matter of time before PC gaming’s most massively successful giant steamrolls the kinks and turns this nightmarish launch into an ugly, short-lived (in the grand scheme of things) memory.

That perspective in mind, it’s easy to watch the pitchfork-and-torch-wielding hordes storming Blizzard’s walls and think “Yuck, these people sure are blowing things out of proportion – just like they always do.” So a major game launch came down with a fairly violent case of the hiccups. Don’t they all? And now Blizzard’s apologized, so what more could these people possibly want? At this point, you’re just waiting for whiners to swallow this bitter pill and eat their words so they can inevitably start singing Diablo’s praises again. That mentality, however, is precisely why I’m begging you: please stay angry.

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Diablo III is now a thing that you’re capable of owning and (hopefully) playing. Just before the launch, when those network problems were yet to freeze Hell over, I sat down with senior world designer Leonard Boyarsky and lead technical artist Julian Love to keep them company as queues formed in the streets outside. Along the way, I discovered that having an ex-Troika chap on your game means that ‘lore’ is a very important word indeed, that the distant roguelike heritage hasn’t been forgotten and that technological progression doesn’t necessarily alter design principles.

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The expanding popularity of an Arma 2 mod, Day Z, might have surprised all of us, but imagine the surprise felt by the chap who created it, Dean “Rocket” Hall. There are nearly 48,000 characters now registered in the game’s stats, when he imagined there’d be just a few hundred. His motivation to make the ultra-bleak multiplayer zombie survival mod might not surprise any of you, though, when you read his take on what games should be, and why the kinds of stories experiences like Day Z produce are so important. There were a couple of times in this interview where I hooted in agreement with what Rocket had to say. See if you can spot them.
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Wargame: European Escalation snuck up on me like a Delta Squad stealthing around the side of the map in a pair of Chinooks. The dull, heavy register of the rotors sounded a rhythmic beat that went utterly unnoticed by the net of Luchs Recon Vehicles that I’d spread like an ill-repaired net across my game-spotting flanks. Which is to say that I didn’t hear about it until a good month after it was released, both because my friends who play strategy games are useless, and no one seemed to have covered it. But once it landed that surgical strike on my wide-open brain, it was difficult to understand why there weren’t people on nearby hilltops, shouting about how great it was. It looks beautiful, has unique, interesting battle mechanics, and a meta-game of deck building that makes each encounter different, thanks to the units that people bring to the game.

It’s time to talk about those encounters, and you shake you by the lapels. This is why Wargame is worthy of your attention.
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Diablo III is out. (In the UK and Asia, at least, with the US version unlocking in about four hours.) Words that still don’t make sense when you look at them. So after the struggles of server issues all experienced at the start, I finally settled in to spend three very late hours with the game. A game which is, at least so far, action RPG perfection, worryingly troubled by the requirement of its always-on DRM. This is the tale of my first three hours, joyful and infuriating.

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