Just got back from Cabin in the Woods. I went in knowing practically nothing about the film, as evidenced by my thought process through its first 10 minutes:
“That guy sounds just like Josh from the West Wing.”
“What was his name? I think it had a W in it.”
“Wait, is it Josh from the West Wing? Can’t be. He doesn’t really look like him.”
“Bradley Whitford! That was his name. Man, this guy seriously sounds just like him. Speech patterns and everything.”
“It is Bradley Whitford. Man, he got old.”
Anyway, it was great. Even expecting that the film wasn’t what I was expecting, it wasn’t the film I was expecting. Plus it’s got Josh from the West Wing in it.
I’ve dusted the cobwebs from the CSS, swept the floor of loose widgets and add-ons, and dug through piles of half-finished draft posts. We’re back!
Some things that happened in the four months since I last posted:
December:
- Not much. Worked in a pub. Continued freelancing for PC Gamer.
January:
- Not much. Worked in a pub. Continued freelancing for PC Gamer.
February:
- Not much. Worked in a pub. Continued freelancing for PC Gamer.
March:
- Not much. Worked in a pub. Was asked to spend a week in PC Gamer’s office. Was offered a temporary job in Manchester. Did some freelancing for both PC Gamer and PC Gamer US. Travelled to Bath to spend a week in PC Gamer’s office. Travelled back to work in a pub. Travelled to Manchester to watch Los Campesinos! perform a gig. Travelled back to spend a night in a pub. Travelled to the south coast for a funeral. Travelled back to work one last night in a pub. Found a new flat in Manchester. Moved into my new flat in Manchester. Started a new job.
The worrying pattern of my life is that every couple of years everything changes at once, usually in ways I have no real control over, and I just sort of ride it out to see what happens. In a sense I’ve regressed – I’m back in this city, doing pretty much the same job I was doing before in a place which, based on the two weeks I’ve worked there, seems just as doomed as the last one. The breakdown is basically: move good/job bad.
Luckily there’s a plan. Of sorts.
The Plan:
- Work at my doomed temporary job until 1) the six month contract expires, 2) everyone gets laid-off, 3) someone managerial discovers this blog. Whichever comes first.
- Meanwhile: Continue freelancing, maybe take some initiative (for once) and contact some editors of other publications.
- Try not to get axe-murdered by the crazy man who lives on the bottom floor. The one who spends his day counting people on buses and burns documents in the back garden because “the FBI tell him to.”
- When my temporary contract is renewed, which tends to happen at these places if you can go six months without dribbling on yourself, turn them down and (optional) do a little dance. Not that not dribbling on myself is a guarantee. I don’t function well in the morning.
- Attempt to write about games for a living. Either full-time, or part-time while doing some bar work to cover the rent. Fortunately the rent is cheap, probably because there’s a crazy person on the bottom floor.
I’m not saying it’s a solid plan, but it’s better than taking any of the stupid shit “the office” obsesses about seriously.
Anyway, it’s a good a reason as anyway to kick the blog back in to some form of life. Right now I’m looking at ways to cover my expanding portfolio without spamming the front page to the point where it’s only that. I’ve found a couple of solutions, but I either hate them or they’re ‘complicated’. So until then, here’s what I’ve done recently:
- The current issue of PCG contains four reviews by me, including Mud – FIM World Championship, PixelJunk Eden, J.U.L.I.A. and Scoregasm. Also: I tried my hand at writing news articles, and did a competition page in which I may have gone Too Far.
- The mag’s Extra Life section continues to be ridiculously fun to write for. Despite not being qualified to tell anyone how to do anything, I’ve recently done a couple of How To guides for X-COM and Saints Row: The Third. Although admittedly the SR3 one was about being stupid, which is my area.
- Risen 2 preview for PC Gamer US. I totally misspelled the word ‘colours’ and their editors didn’t even notice.
- The soundtrack blog hasn’t been updated properly in months either, but it’s next on my list to receive some attention. Ideally I’d like to start posting on a weekly schedule, if just to prove to myself that I can. I probably can’t.
In case you haven’t noticed yet, this post is basically a mental checkpoint, only here because it seemed odd to just launch into posting with no preamble. Well the preamble’s done! It’s nothing but amble from here on out.
Get over to Spotify’s preview page and you can download a beta version of their upcoming (and originally named) Spotify Apps. For the most part it seems to be a way of listening to album recommendations from various review sites without the messy business of typing a name into the search box.
As well as such a revolutionary time-saving feature, there is also the Soundrop App, which I think can officially be described as “neat”. It’s a series of rooms in which you can add new tracks and vote to decide the order in which everything is played, creating a sort of bespoke radio station based around whoever is in the room at any point. Typically, of the official genre-sorted rooms, Dubstep has the most listeners, but you can create your own from any saved playlist, which friends can enter and warp to their own pleasure.
Anyway, check it out. If there’s enough people interested I’ll set up a room at some point. I even promise not to fill it with Japanese ambient electro in a shameful attempt to look hip.
This month features my first reviews for PCG. The scary thing about this? Metacritic listing!
It’s weird knowing that something you’ve written is going to be condensed into a one sentence caption and number for people to use as a metric for a game’s worth. Luckily my coping mechanism isn’t too dissimilar from my general approach to Metacritic: just ignore it.
PC Gamer
The biggest challenge for the Clash of Heroes review was not being able to say “look, it’s basically Critter Crunch with magic and a plot,” what with Critter Crunch being PS3 exclusive. Basically, though, it’s Critter Crunch with magic and a plot.
Also reviewed: Stronghold 3. Which made it to the PC Gamer website, meaning I can finally prove to non-magazine readers that I’ve not just made this all up.
Finally in Extra Life this month, I took a look at this pro-TF2 match. This was actually a lot of fun, and a great match for the Battle Report’s first foray outside of Starcraft 2. Worth watching, especially if – like me – you primarily play Scout and just sit mouth agape at the skill of YZ50.
Gaming Daily
And for GD I took a look at stylish infiltration platformer Stealth Bastard.
Tagline aside, this free 2D puzzle-platformer has a few more Metal Gear reference points lurking within. Enemy vision cones, hovering drones and the iconic punctuation-based alert system all point to the inspiration at work. But where that series was happy to include a seemingly endless cutscene in which a man reminisces about the time he pissed his pants, Stealth Bastard is laser-focused. For a start, there’s no story at all. The only other characters you’ll meet are robots and security drones – with the only interaction they’re interested in being the one that leaves you in bloody chunks.
I’m not above giving an unpopular service an easy – if deserved – kicking. But unlike GfW Live, I don’t have an inherent problem with the existence of Origin. While EA’s latest distribution platform is routinely compared to Steam, I see it more in terms of Impulse. Just as that store is a place I use solely for buying and updating Stardock games, so Origin could be a useful tool for managing EA’s latest releases. (Although not for buying them, unless the retail/digital price disparity levels out.)
The problem is Origin isn’t content to exist in this niche. It wants to be the next Steam. That puts it in a difficult position: Steam pulls a lot of bullshit which, frankly (perhaps hypocritically), I wouldn’t put up with in a service I didn’t already have 400+ games tied to. It also has a very specific use, offering a variety of features that, to my mind, more than make up for its more odious practices.
Origin doesn’t. Worse, the first game to be inexorably tied to it is Battlefield 3, a game that leaves me scratching my head as to what benefit Origin offers, aside from the marketing win of getting it onto the computers of a large user base.
Here’s how you launch Battlefield 3 – try and spot the point where Origin becomes essential to its working, because I sure as fuck can’t:
Step 1: Decide to play some Battlefield 3.
Step 3: Be taken to this page.
Step 4: Swear profusely.
If you squint you can see a ‘Remember Me’ box on that page. That’s new. Previously every time you visited the site, it asked you to re-enter your details. That might seem like a nitpick, but it was actually infuriating. I can only assume that checkbox was added after EA’s fourth receptionist fell to a delivery of anthrax laced cookies, and they finally took the hint.
Step 5: You’re in Battlelog!
This, in case you aren’t aware, is BF3′s main menu. From it you launch both the singleplayer campaign and access the server browser to join multiplayer games. It’s… interesting. I’d describe it as a solution to a problem that never existed, if it wasn’t slightly too broken to be a solution.
I get what they were trying – it’s meant to be an evolution of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit’s Autolog, and it does push the social features a lot harder. It also misses what made Autolog great: it wasn’t simply a social layer, it drove content. You could spend days in Autolog, challenging friends, posting times, watching them get beaten and then attempting to reclaim the top spot in your friend-specific leaderboard. It was entirely possible to get through Hot Pursuit without ever touching the campaign menu; just using Autolog to decide when to push through and when to replay.
All battlelog does is inform me that a friend has unlocked a bit of a gun. Go them, I guess?
Step 6: Join a server.
At this point a few things happen. The game “launches” with a website pop-up informing you of your connection progress. Also, finally, Origin rears its head. It’s not quiet about it either, it’s the 4-year old in a room full of grown ups, slightly put out that he’s not getting any attention. Rather than a silent background open, it pops up its ugly login screen, even though the details are already saved, before ramming the game manager page on top of all the other windows. Maybe it’ll bug you about cloud saving, just to seem the least bit useful, before you banish it to the taskbar.
By this point the browser has also launched the game. Congratulations, you’re now playing Battlefield!
When you’re done with that server, you quit out the game and use Battlelog to find another one. It’s a cumbersome system, but one that at no point actually requires Origin to do anything. Even if you launched Origin upfront and opened BF3 from there, all it does is open your web browser to Battlelog.
Should you want to join a party of friends, that’s done via Battlelog – Your Origin friends list isn’t even automatically imported into it. Game updating? Not 100% sure where that happens, but Battlelog at least informs you that it’s all up to date. The entire game seems to be a dialogue between Battlelog and the BF3 executable. The only point of Origin seems to be to shout “look at me!”
If you look at Team Fortress 2, it’s easy to how Steam is essential to the game. Friends are managed through Steam, the TF2 server list is Steam’s own server browser, and can be accessed outside of the game through the Steam client. Everything that BF3 does in Battlelog (and more) is done through Steam. Like it or not, it at least justifies its existence. Origin has yet to do that, and if it truly wants to be anything other than an inconvenience, it needs an actual reason to be involved.
So your neighbour is going on holiday, and asks you to check in on the cat each day. You know, let it out and make sure it’s water bowl’s topped up. 10 days later you’re browsing Facebook, and the neighbour’s posted pictures of the Egyptian resort he’s staying at. It strikes you odd that he seems to have spent his time in this old and wondrous country exclusively next to a hotel swimming pool. Then it strikes you that, SHIT, you’ve forgotten about the cat!
In this metaphor the neighbour is my attention span, the cat this blog, the Facebook pictures are the monthly bill from the hosting provider, and the 10 days is over a month. The wall-to-wall mounds of shit littering the kitchen floor are the spam comments I’ve just come back to.
When I started freelancing, I told myself I wouldn’t leave this place empty of new posts. I’m an idiot.
So, what have I got to show for this period of inactivity?
Uplink
Sometimes I’ll tell people, “I’ve got some work to do.” Then I go to my computer and play Uplink, write about it for PC Gamer and then laugh at the bare-faced cheek of referring to it as ‘work’.
This was for December’s Reinstall section, which is about taking a fresh look at classic games. Uplink’s great in that regard – it captures a very specific atmosphere, and does it in a way that’s unique and pretty damn clever. Although as Alex pointed out on the Tweets, this does mean I’ve written exclusively about blue games for the mag.
And a review for Gaming Daily. Difficult thing about reviewing a Worms game? It’s a bloody Worms game. This one’s in 3D, which doesn’t change the fact that it’s Worms. It’s just Worms with camera problems.
To make matters worse, the chunky objects and terrain can easily lead to your worm getting stuck, or even falling through seemingly passable gaps to your death. The game seems to recognise this: on maps with perilous drops, the enemy’s aim has all the finesse of a drunk at a urinal. As a result, it feels like you spend more time fighting the controls than you do the opposing team. When the game lists “camera enhancements” and “optimized AI” as selling points, such obvious flaws show an overall lack of polish.
Between writing a feature for next month’s PCG, a period of being ill, my birthday, sending out job applications and mainlining a full series of Fringe, September’s been a busy month. As such, just the one article over at Gaming Daily.
Captain Morgane Preview
Judging from the first two chapters included in the preview build, Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is familiar. This pirate themed adventure sticks to the traditions of the genre like a barnacle to a ship’s hull. That’s not necessarily a criticism – there’s still an audience eager for both pointing and clicking, but even within the rigid adventure gaming structure, Captain Morgane looks to be a mix of things that work well with things that just don’t.
An odd one this. The game itself was a frustratingly bland adventure in a time when I’d love to see the genre break out a bit. That meant, despite it not doing anything wrong, I just couldn’t get enthusiastic about it. To top it off, writing previews is just full on weird. It’s unfair to just review what you see, because there’s no telling how that’ll be built upon in the later chapters. At the same time, you can’t just assume everything will be okay (or that everything will be shit), especially at GD, as there’s no guarantee we’ll review the full game. Finding the balance is tricky.
NEXT MONTH: A review of Worms: Ultimate Mayhem! A big article that I’m keeping under wraps, that may or may not be ready in time! Something else, maybe! Also some stuff here that isn’t just, “oh look at me, I’ve written things for other people!” Perhaps.
This week sees the release of issue 232 of PC Gamer. And of the 196 pages within, I’ve written a whole one of them!
How this happened was pleasingly surreal. Back in June I got an email from section editor Tom Francis, asking if I’d like to write for their Extra Life section. Being essentially semi-nocturnal these days, it arrived while I was still very much in bed and not entirely conscious. After reading, replying and promptly falling back to sleep, I had to double-check a couple of hours later, in case my brain had pulled one of its trademark lucid dream dick moves.
Anyway, this month I’m writing for the mag’s Now Playing feature. It’s a collection of interesting or funny stories about whichever games the writers have been playing. I’m doing Frozen Synapse, and retelling the tense story of my first accidental exploration into the game’s online component.
Writing for a professional outlet is an odd mix of fun, excitement and sheer terror. I’m very much looking forward to the point where I can settle into it a bit, and not submit things full of a nagging doubt that I’ve fucked it all up. Still, one of the most useful aspects of the process is the chance to get actual critical feedback on something I’ve written. I’ve now got a whole document full of tips titled “How to suck less.” I should give motivational talks or something.
So, go check it out. It’ll probably be in shops or something. Or here as a digital copy, if you don’t live near shops or the UK.
My first taste of receiving a game specifically to review. Unfortunately it wasn’t exactly indie irreverence at its best. Or even at its most barely functional.
I nearly became quite obsessed with the The A.Typical RPG’s name. I spent the first few minutes analysing every element for signs of it differing from the standard RPG template. The first objective is to complete a turn-based 3 vs. 3 football match. That’s pretty atypical, right? Turn-based systems aren’t usually reliant on a singular object, placing importance on the position of the party over the actions they carry out. That definitely isn’t something you see too often. Then a glitch caused the ball and a couple of the opposing side’s players to disappear from the screen. They were still there, moving around and even managed to score amidst the confusion. I just couldn’t see them. With that I was interrupted from my intellectual genre critiquing revelry, realising there were far bigger problems ahead.
Ubisoft’s DRM-model has been discussed extensively before on the Internets. Difference here being From Dust is a game I’m interested in. Other difference being I was bored at work when the copy-protection was announced, and had plenty of time to write this out on my phone.
What keeps me from purchasing your game – and you can probably guess before I even type it – is the DRM you have included. Now I’m not going make up some dramatic story about how my Internet is delivered by a traveling merchant who arrives on a donkey drawn cart frequently delayed by storms and bandits. The fact is I am always online. While BT’s rural Internet service does have enough wobbles that I’d never buy any singleplayer game that requires your always-on connection, activating the game at the start of each session wouldn’t be a problem. After all, if my connection drops I’m going to be spending my time fixing it rather than attempting to play a game. Neither am I inconvenienced by not being able to launch it while traveling. I don’t own a laptop, much less one suited for gaming. Basically the only way this requirement would ever inconvenience me is if your activation servers went down – although let’s be honest, that has happened.
I’m not convinced the “open-letter” format doesn’t completely suck. Most of the article would work in the standard template, so it feels fairly contrived. Actually it was intended to be a genuine email to Ubisoft, but quickly got silly because that’s what happens when you’re at work writing about DRM into your Google Docs app.
Not long afterward Ubisoft announced they’ll be patching out the activation system, so this is pretty much invalid anyway. Oh well.
Deus Ex: Invisible War – Retrospective
And this went live today. After finally getting my computer to run the bloody thing, I was able to spend some time with this most derided of sequels.
The sequel to Deus Ex has always had an important use. Find any community of PC gamers and suggest to them that Invisible War was actually pretty good and you are guaranteed a few hours of cheap entertainment. The game is hated by Deus Ex fans, to the point that many will repeatedly announce that no, it definitely doesn’t exist. Unfortunately having finally played through it this month as part of my “ohmygodDeusEx3!” preparation, I find myself in an unfortunate position. You see it turns out that Invisible War is actually pretty good.
What follows can be summed up as “why the game isn’t as good as Deus Ex and why that ultimately doesn’t matter.” Oh, and it was written before Eurogamer published their Retrospective arguing something similar. Bloody Eurogamer! They didn’t even include a Kenan and Kel reference.
NEXT MONTH: Hopefully I’ll get my Fate of The World diary finished. I might also attempt to review a game I actually like for a change. Oh, and I’ll finally make the exciting announcement I’ve kept under my hat for the last few months.
I understand. Really, I do. There’s been a lot of downloadable games with distinctive styles garnering various levels of praise over the past month’s impressions series. So you skim the titles and maybe look at the pictures and think “oh great, another £10 indie game – not enough of those to spend my money on already.” I don’t blame you, in fact you’re right, there are fucking loads of them.
But don’t skip this one. I’m still in that odd post-completion phase so it’s hard to make an accurate judgement, but yeah – I’d say it’s my favourite indie game of the year. So far at least.
Ah, but it’s going to take more than that. That’s just a meaningless hyperbolic statement to try and hook you in. I need to back that kind of statement up. Don’t worry, I’m prepared to work for this. We’ll try a video to bounce some thoughts off because as much as I want to explain the bits – the bit – of this game that really knocked me out… well I can’t. It doesn’t work if you know about it.
That voice! It’s like having Sam Elliot from The Big Lebowski accompany you throughout the game. The narration mixes the moment-to-moment actions of the player with backstory of what the world used to be and incidental details about characters and places. It’s an undeniable gimmick, but it works and importantly isn’t just some generic fantasy delivery – the old Wild West tone fits clearly with the picture of the pre-’Calamity’ world. At points the actual words spoken are less important than their weight and lyricism, coaxing you through as a familiar and comforting companion.
The developers could have been satisfied with the combat and RPG mechanics – both of which deep enough to cover the game’s length – but instead kept pushing the presentation into something eclectic and weird. The art and music – probably the best soundtrack we’ll see all year – have a myriad of influences from classic Oriental design to the aforementioned Wild West with even the odd trace of steampunk. It heightens every great encounter. Take the “Who Knows Where” levels – essentially just a gauntlet of increasingly difficult enemies, but the striking graphical filters and the tragedy told through the narration create something memorable.
And it all weaves together to create a deep and fleshed out story. I didn’t even realise (until Richard Cobbett hinted at the subtext on Twitter) that the seemingly sweet song sung by one of the main characters is actually an old war song about the conflict between the game’s two nations. This is then reprised by the old narrator – a former soldier – to dark effect, twisting its tone, arguably back to its original meaning. It’s incredible attention to detail, showing a genuine care for how to craft a deep story within a game.
If you went into Bastion purely looking for an action-RPG you’d possibly come away disappointed. It’s not that hard, which bothers people purely in it for the challenge; it’s not very long, which bothers people who like to get lost in the mechanics for weeks on end; its enemy design is not particularly varied, which bothers me slightly because their most distinctive enemies arrive at the start after which they gradually become more ordinary. But if you go in looking for a truly inventive story, told with style, care and attention and utilising the full spectrum of what makes up a game then Bastion will reward you.
Octaeder: "It's worth noting that the web version of the Stronghold 3 review doesn't include the boxout titled "Brawl along the …" on November’s Word Round-Up
Phil Savage is a UK-based games writer. Infinity Words is his inaccurately named workblog.
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