Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A couple of weekends ago Alec and I got together with some journalist chums and dragged computers and a folding table into our friend’s lounge. It was the JournoLAN: a tea-and-biscuits PC hookup in an editor’s comfortable home. In there we mucked about installing patches and discussed the error messages being displayed by a desyncing instance of Supreme Commander. We also played SWAT4. It was incredible.

I’d previously enjoyed SWAT4 when I played it at review, but the attention paid to the multiplayer section was reduced to a couple of distracted lunchtimes in a noisy magazine office. To my disappointment, we never really got to grips with it. This time, however, we were determined to get stuck in, and the co-op takedowns were absolutely riveting.
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[Since it's Space Week, it's a good time to pull my Edge-commissioned Making Of System Shock 2 feature out of Stasis. The material for this was drawn from the lengthy conversation I had with Ken Levine last year. So, yes, before Bioshock. I'm quite fond of this piece, if only as it reveals the secret origin of the Psychic Monkeys...]

The lights are low. Everyone’s panickedly fighting against a seemingly impossible, oppressive deadline. At every turn there’s a crippling lack of resources. Viewed by any objective criteria, the small inexperienced team doesn’t have the skills to achieve their aims. They’re all crammed into a single room – in fact, half of one, since it’s one room bisected with screens. When you look at where and how Irrational worked on their first game, it’s easy to think of the claustrophobic horror of RPG/Shooter System Shock 2 as a pure product of its environment.
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Ask me what my favourite game of all time is, and I’ll probably say Planescape if I want to seem arch, TF2 if I want to seem contemporary, Peggle if I want to seem kooky, maybe Dungeon Keeper or AvP if I want to succumb to nostalgia. If I’m feeling balanced and honest though, there’s a very strong chance I’d say UFO: Enemy Unknown, the first X-COM game.

It’s a game that’s been endlessly… let’s be generous and say ‘homaged’, both commercially and by dedicated fans. Nothing quite seems to recapture it, sadly – either it’s too different, or too similar, or, most often, it pulls off the underlying structure but doesn’t bother with the gentle surface charm and humour of the old DOS dear. UFO: Alien Invasion, though, is one of the more impassioned and direct clones – a community effort that’s entirely free, and built upon the Quake II engine. Read the rest of this entry »

[Considering Mr Levine's turned up in the rumour mill today, I thought turning an eye back at one of Irrational's other games would be a worthy endeavour. This interview with Ken was done in the run up to the second Freedom Force game.]

“We had a lot of internal arguments at the time. Some people wanted it more dark and gritty, and others preferred it in a lighter style,” recalls Irrational head-honcho Ken Levine, “I remember waking up in the middle of the night, before we shipped and going “What did I do? Why did I go and make it so it was retro? What was I thinking?””. Read the rest of this entry »

Shock 2 veterans of the world unite! They can take our lean function! They can take our ability to walk! They can take our skill system which means that a highly trained solider can’t work out how to pull a trigger on a grenade launcher for most of the game, guns which break down within seconds of acquiring them and a basically linear final third ending in a single risible cheap-gag cut-scene undercutting the whole thing!

But they can’t take our Irrational Logo. ANYMORE.

Strangebedfellows.de have posted a tiny mod which replaces the logo at the start of Bioshock with Irrational’s old one. As they put it…

“We acknowledge that their new publisher 2K has played a big part in making Bioshock come true. But many of us were truly disappointed that they renamed Irrational Games just days before the release of Bioshock, deleting a valuable corporate and personal identity. In other words, this is a protest.”

Shodan would be proud. Well, she wouldn’t be, she’s never proud of a p-p-p-athetic hacker, but that’s hardly the point.

I love things like this. I’ve got into some of my favourite things via creators of things I’ve loved recommending them – following the trails to interesting places. Because if they’ve inspired something you’ve loved, they’ve got to be pretty good, yeah? That thought process has lead me to everything from Vonnegut to the Buzzcocks to Nethack.

Anyway, Gametap asked Ken Levine for his list of works which kept the Irrational team’s creative engines fully stoked up. For example…

Animal Farm: (Book, 1945)
“You really only need to read this one book to understand power and what it does to people; it’s the ultimate story of what happens when ideals slam into less than ideal people.”

Miller’s Crossing (Film, 1990)
“My favorite film of all time. It’s all dialogue, style, and more interconnected plot threads than you can possibly comprehend in one viewing; probably why I’ve seen it 20 times. A huge inspiration when trying to create the slang and language tonality of the city of Rapture.”

More in the full article including the music-inspiring Sweet and Lowdown, the Rand double-combo of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the entire city of New York and Gilliam’s retro-sci-fi opus Brazil (For the record, which is in at least half of RPS’ staffs’ top 5 films ever).

A semi (well, mostly) re-post of my 10 observations upon the Xbox 360 demo, now updated to reflect my thoughts on the PC one. The original post one is now gone – don’t cry for it, it’s at peace now. Contains mild spoilers and speculation, but honestly, anything written below is based only on the demo, as I have yet to play the full game, nor have I let Kieron tell me much about it. I also haven’t done anywhere near the level of reading around the subject that others have done, as I want to come to it as clear-headed as possible, hence have yet to form arguments about its take on Objectivism and the like. Given the game’s now out in the US, there’s every chance you’ll find I’ve said something that turns out to be completely off-base. Please resist the urge to let your anger/mockery mean you spoil anything should you post a comment though. I’ll be correcting myself as required in a future post.

Ready?

Sure?

OK. Click to read on. Unless RSS skullduggery means you’ve come straight to the full post anyway, in which case there won’t be a friendly clicky any second now and I’ll just appear to be speaking nonsense.

UPDATE: Kieron also plays the demo and adds some comments from the perspective of someone who’s played the full game on the considerable differences.

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Yes, due to the cheery activity of clever internet bods, they’ve managed to drag the Bioshock demo from the hands of Fileplanet before release. This caused the preloading to be cancelled and… oh, all manner of stuff. In other words, yes, it’s a cheery clusterfuck.

But that’s not really our problem. What matters is it’s available. You can get it via a direct download via Softpedia (Which claims to be a torrent, but actually isn’t) or torrent via Mininova (Which claims to be a torrent and- strike a light! – actually is). Be sure to update your drivers and stuff – in fact, the reason for the delay in the release is meant to be there’s some new drivers for Bioshock coming out today, so it may actually be (er) a bit quirky.

Meer and Walker are currently excitedly downloading it, and expect some screens in the feature we’re lobbing up later today.

Okay – a quick one. The PC demo we’ve been all waiting for will go live at 7pm EST (aka 12pm GMT).

Which is – oooh – just over a day and an hour’s time.

Apparently you can predownload via Fileplanet but I can’t find a direct link. Also, 2k encourage you to get the latest drivers which – frankly – is never a bad idea.

I’ve just finished Bioshock. On the 360, alas, but I figured Bioshock a week early is better than spending another seven days trying to dodge spoilers. Here’s a picture of the Big Daddy.

And, beneath the cut, with no-spoilers, here’s what’s wrong with it. Read the rest of this entry »