A Game A Day

[Adam]

Keeps society away! With little to do in the holidays besides learn C++ and pretend to revise for Collections in the last week, I've decided to dip into the massive amount of unfinished, unstarted or rarely-touched games I have lying around. I looked, and compiled a list. It's... long.

Age of Empires 2 Alone in the Dark American McGee's Alice Armageddon Empires Armed and Dangerous Chaos Funk Cholo Chronicles of Ridthingy Civilisation 2 Clean Asia Company of Heroes Cryostasis Deus Ex Drome Racers Dungeon Keeper II: Silver Edition Earthworm Jim Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Exit Fate

Galactic Civilisations II Grand Theft Auto III Halo 2 Hitman: Blood Money Impossible Creatures Last Scenario Mario Forever Mass Effect Max Payne Max Payne 2 Metal Fatigue Mirror's Edge Mondo Agency Mount and Blade (Demo) Natuki One Night Penumbra: Overture Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Psychonauts RayHound Resident Evil 4 Silent Hill Silent Hill 2: Director's Cut Silent Hill 3 STALKER Superstructure Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Thief: Deadly Shadows Titans of Steel Torchlight Total Annihilation Tumiki Fighters Unreal Gold Unreal II: The Awakening Uplink Warcraft III

That's 54 games, plus Yahtzee's excellent adventure games, but those don't count because they're more like short stories with 8-bit graphics. You can count on me discovering more freeware games/deals on Steam and expanding the list at some point, too. The holiday might be, oh, about 35 days long.

I can at least try. What I'm going to do is play one or two of these every day (or most days) and then write a mini-review of what I've seen. Some of them I've already played and are pretty familiar with - Mass Effect, for example; I'm 12 hours in, and am going to play it to death without any encouragement, but it's there for completeness' sake. On the other hand, I have more or less no idea what some of them even are, having acquired them in times past and subsequently forgotten all detail. I'll note my prior experience with the game when I do my little review. It'll get me playing some games I haven't yet tried, and maybe expand my gaming knowledge and give me extra inspiration for my forthcoming third-year project (which is, you guessed it, a game. Woo!). They won't necessarily be in order - as I mentioned, I'll play some of them anyway - but I'll try to roughly stick to the alphabetical list.

Stay tuned, folks!

Edit: I'm sure everyone here knows the name of Pitch Black's glasses-wearing anti-hero of ambiguous morality, played with gravelly-voiced panache by Vin Diesel, whose name upsets the fragile sensibilities of ProBoards' word filter. Please forgive it. It tries hard, and lives a good life.

[Adam]

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
With special guest, Supreme Commander 2 (demo)

What is it?: Epic-scale RTS
Previous experience: A few games with Ollie and the easy AIs. Just about enough to know how not to get immediately curbstomped after the no-rush timer runs out (hint: 20 flak tanks).
Played today: A skirmish game of SC:FA (on easy) and the two campaign missions present in the SC2 demo. This'll be a more general review comparing the two rather than an account of what happened (the latter, as far as my skirmish went, can be summarised as "UEF Tier 2 bombers > Everything").

Supreme Commander is a bit of an odd child. It's extremely hard to pick up and play. You start the game with your ACU, a giant mech capable of building other things, which houses you, the titular commander. The ACU is a capable combatant, but must be protected, as it detonates in a massive nuclear explosion when destroyed. You build factories to produce units, which can be anything from engineers to battlecruisers, and are also allowed a series of support structures and mighty experimental units. Sounds good, but it's rather complicated.

The game goes for the Starcraft/Dawn of War resource generation model, where you have deposits of a material that must be mined (or in DoW's case, strategic points that increase your standing with the people giving you reinforcements), and energy generators. However, instead of resources stacking up and being spent instantaneously to 'buy' a unit or structure, resources are gradually drained over the time it takes to build said unit. SupCom 2 doesn't have this, which is kind of a shame, as manipulating the resource rates is quite a cerebral exercise and gives the feeling of an actual economy. SC2 does have an advantage, though, in that stuff is cheaper and builds more quickly. Waiting half an hour while you build some game-ending experimental device is epic, I suppose, but drags at times.

Another of SupCom's quirks is the tech tree. There are three tiers of technology (plus experimentals). You gain access to higher-tier stuff by upgrading other stuff, or building higher-tier engineers from upgraded factories. The odd thing is that every building upgrades separately. You can't build factories of above Tech 1, and have to individually upgrade them (which is expensive and time-consuming, although totally worth it...). There are no limits on the tech tree bar your economy and sense. You can build Tier 3 units at the very beginning if you want. Factory, Tier 2 upgrade, Tier 3 upgrade. Of course, even if you can afford it, you'll only have time to build about two Tier 3 units before the no-rush timer (a great mechanic that prevents you leaving your base for a certain amount of time - normally ten minutes) elapses, and will get destroyed in short order by Tier 1 tanks and aircraft.

All this means that Supreme Commander is pretty mentally demanding as games go. Complicating the issue further is the sheer number of things you could attack and be attacked by. Land, sea and air units all exist. Submarines, bombers, transports, aircraft carriers, mobile shield generators, point defenses, anti-air towers, artillery, and nukes also all exist, and will make mincemeat of you if you don't defend against them properly. Yes, nukes. It's a pretty intimidating game to play, but the variety also provides fun in that you can do completely different things in each game. No one approach is dominant over the others. Economic and technological management is crucial, which does get to be something of a drain after a while, but it all pays off when you send a Monkeylord or Galactic Colossus crashing into the enemy's base, lasering units and buildings off the map with contemptuous ease.

SupCom 2 does the tech-tier system differently, opting for a stylised research system reminiscent of games like the Civilisation series. Researched technologies unlock others, and so on. Actually researching them is instantaneous, but requires expenditure of research points, which are generated from fighting and from building research stations. When technology is researched, it applies to all suitable units and structures on the battlefield, including ones you've already built. It's a nice system which encapsulates the SupCom series' emphasis on variety, but in a more all-or-nothing fashion - focusing on, say, naval power will leave you with an understrength land army should your opponent decide to attack that way, for example. It is of course possible to research other things later in the game, opening up new avenues of expansion, but I would imagine a lot of games will be determined by both players' opening decisions, making them more rapid and self-contained than the slowly evolving, hour-plus games present in the original (and Forged Alliance).

Visually, it's safe to say that nothing really compares. SC:FA isn't that pretty, although is an improvement over its predecessor in terms of performance, so I'm told. It does, however, perfectly capture the massive scale of the games. Hundreds (literally) of units, the smallest of which happen to be tanks, hurling explosives and bullets at each other in a clash of titanic proportions. All units, apart from certain artillery vehicles, in both SC:FA and its sequel are more than capable of firing on the move, which is rather refreshing. It makes for dynamic battles. Give your units a move order and they'll keep shooting at the enemy as they advance. Tell them to attack something far away and they'll fire on enemies they pass as they advance towards the objective. (If they get there. The pathfinding is fairly atrocious at times.) It not only sidesteps that horrible feeling when you mis-click and your units start running instead of shooting at the guys right in front of them, but also allows neat tactics like 'kiting', where your units stay out of range of an enemy while shooting them.

SC2 features both improved pathfinding and improved graphics. I'll put it bluntly: this game is gorgeous. Impractical-but-amazing maps, smooth clean lines, and lovely special effects give it a unique visual appeal. Swarms of fighters clashing - looping around each other, homing missiles spiralling away to chase their targets, all without a whisper of performance loss* - is a joy to behold. SC2 also has an improved user interface, although it seems to lack unit information. I don't know if these things have been removed from the demo deliberately or left out of the game full stop, but all RTSs should allow you to read about the units you're considering building before you spend resources... It also doesn't have the nice range-measuring circles that SC1 possesses, a very useful tool for determining the disposition of your forces.

Comparing the two games highlights rather a lot of differences. Many of the units and structures from the first game have made it into the second (albeit usually with a graphical redesign), and the thematic concept of robots building other robots is still there too. Other than that, though, they're two very different games that share little other than sub-genre (if epic-scale RTS counts as a sub-genre).

Would I recommend them? Yeah, sure. I want to get SC2 (probably when it gets a bit cheaper...) and I enjoy SC:FA. Each game offers an RTS experience quite unlike any other, and let's be honest, how many games are there that not only let you nuke your enemy's base, but also allow you to cause blinding mushroom clouds by blowing up his general?

*This may be due to my computer. It's quite powerful. Hopefully though, it's testament to the optimisation of the software.

[Adam]

Age of Empires 2

What is it?: Historical RTS
Previous experience: Very little. A couple of confused multiplayer matches.
Played today: The tutorial campaign, seven games aimed at teaching you what's going on in AoE2.

The evolution of RTS games is an interesting thing to observe. The first RTS I played properly was Dawn of War, and the lack of zoom in old-school RTS games bothers me far more than it should. My recent surge of interest in Supreme Commander has only made this worse (putting extra builders on a structure costs me nothing?... I can't zoom all the way out and back in instead of panning?...). Age of Empires isn't exactly pretty, either - it, like Total Annihilation, sports the high-contrast, somewhat unrealistic look that's a little hard on the eyes. Still, for a game that's currently 11 years old, it hasn't aged too badly. People (e.g. me) still play it to this day. Here's what I like and don't like about it.

Age of Empires II's tech tree is well-implemented. There are four 'ages', researched as upgrades at your Town Hall (base building). You start at the Dark Age, and progress through the Feudal Age and Castle Age before reaching the Imperial Age. Each age unlocks new units and buildings. You create units using several different structures - barracks (infantry), stable (cavalry), archery range (archers and cav archers), dock (ships), siege workshop (siege engines) and castles (various bizarre elite units). Upgrades are available from the blacksmith and university as well as the unit-creation buildings, and there are also monasteries, which build monks and help generate gold through the medium of captured relics. When you research an upgrade, it immediately affects all units of the required type as well as those created in the future, something I've already mentioned as a feature I liked in Supreme Commander 2. The variety of units is decent, and each race (of which there are 10 or 15) has a few select advantages and a unique unit or two, enough to change the playstyle of the faction.

AoE2 tends towards the complex/strategic end of the RTS spectrum, presenting most of its difficulties in the gathering of resources. Things in Age of Empires are fairly expensive. There are four different resources - wood, food, gold and stone - and each must be collected by your villagers. This economic micromanagement gets a bit annoying when you're worried about being attacked, but I imagine with practice it becomes a more enjoyable challenge. Villagers take up unit cap, and unless you have hordes of villagers, the gathering rate tends to be fairly slow. To the game's credit, you only really need wood and food until you reach the Castle Age. Stone is significant for building castles and stone walls (and very little else) but gold rapidly becomes a limiting factor, as you suddenly need large amounts of it to build almost anything. Upgrades, units, you name it. It seems that you'll spend most of the game running out of at least one resource.

AoE's user interface is pretty good, but lacks in a couple of crucial areas. A unit cannot be part of more than one control group, and selecting military units won't exclude villagers that happen to be amongst the group. The pathfinding is decent, although it occasionally has a hiccup and sends units the wrong way. Additionally, units tend to stand very close together and it's sometimes hard to tell which ones you've selected. I'm not a huge fan of the every-unit-for-itself model of RTS combat. Individual units become insignificant, and it's easy to lose track of small bits of your army or have them become strung out due to accidentally not selecting some of them (this often happens during the aforementioned pathing hiccups). It's something that bugs me in SupCom as well, although those games do it a bit better. AoE does have a nice formation mechanic, though - groups of units can be told to automatically form any of four formations, which they do with alacrity.

Sadly, the combat part of this RTS seems a bit lacklustre. Spamming one particular unit will usually be a sufficient tactic to gain victory; this unit is often your faction's specialised/unique unit. Buildup is slow. Units are produced reasonably quickly, but your economy is ponderous and takes a long time to get off the ground. Once you have units, you'll need a lot of them to break through the enemy's fortifications. There doesn't appear to be a strong rock-paper-scissors element to the game, except in terms of buildings, which take a long time to kill unless specialist units are deployed (such as trebuchets, which are deadly). That being said, huge charges of 150+ cavalry are pretty epic in their scale, even with the old-school graphics. Even so, this game does seem to be mostly about micromanaging your economy until you have a big army of something effective, then throwing them at the enemy and hoping he doesn't have a good counter. This is the case with 90% of RTSs, to be fair, but it seems more pronounced in AoE somehow, given the emphasis on economy and slightly weak battle system. It might be more realistic, but doesn't make for an excellent game.

Overall, it's still a fun game to play with your mates, but it's not really my thing, I think. Supreme Commander is cleverer, more epic, and focuses on what you do with your resources rather than how you gain them, so I'd personally recommend that as a better alternative. (Or Total Annihilation, which is the same game, but with 1997 graphics.) It's hard to ignore what AoE has done for the genre, though - games like Warcraft 3 use an almost identical tech system, and far more people have played or heard of Age of Empires than pretty much any other RTS out there, I'd say. If I was in the business of handing out percentage scores, I'd rate Age of Empires at a 70-75% - a solid game let down slightly by putting its emphasis in the wrong places.

[Adam]

Total Annihilation

What is it?: Epic-scale RTS
Previous experience: very little. One skirmish game where I spent ages building several enormous battleships which then died to the AI's plentiful supply of point defences.
Played today: First three missions of the Arm campaign

Total Annihilation is the predecessor to Supreme Commander, a predecessor by a whopping ten years. As such there's little need in reiterating much of the day-before-yesterday's SupCom double review, and instead I can comment on some more interesting things.

The missions seem reasonably good as an introduction. Each mission, without preamble, unlocks a few more buildings for you, gradually opening you up to the full range of possibilities inherent in the game (I haven't even progressed beyond Tier 1 yet). There's no tutorial, but there's not much time pressure in the first two missions and it's fairly self-explanatory so far. I say that; I've played Supreme Commander, so I know how the economy works. I imagine that without prior experience with the economic system in the series, it could be a lot more confusing. The first mission simply has you move a few units from A to B, blowing up some lone enemy patrols en route. The second mission tasks you with destroying the enemy's factory, which is quite heavily fortified, but as it turns out you stop taking casualties after killing a few things and can proceed to make said factory explode with ease.

The third mission wants you to go and rescue a few experimental spider tanks, bringing them back to your base. The first time I did this mission, it failed to recognise my victory even after I wiped out every last Core 'bot on the map. Two of the tanks had died before I reached them, which may provide a reason why (even though the game says only one of them has to survive). The second time, I decided to get it over with, and after building a barebones base, rushed my Commander and the six starting units up to the top of the map, blasting a path for the spiders. Commanders dominate at the lower tiers, especially in Total Annihilation, where he's armed with a 'Disintegration Gun' in addition to his normal laser. You have to order him to fire it, but it tends to destroy whatever it hits (so far at least), and it doesn't seem to have any sort of cooldown or reload time. Even better, it can blow up multiple targets in a line. Thinking about it, I could've done the mission without even building the base. Sure, it's on easy, but whatever.

As I mentioned in the Age of Empires II review, Total Annihilation's not the most beautiful of games, although kudos to the developers for making every unit easily recognisable. The game is zoomed-out quite far (it doesn't have an adjustable camera despite being fully-3D), but it's still easy to tell what everything is. The interface is good, but could use a little refinement. By default, only the left mouse button is used (with the right being deselection). Changing this to the right mouse button removes the nice little icons that appear when you hover over things, instead only changing the colour of the mouse cursor. I don't know why they did that. Selection groups may also be a bit dodgy.

TA has fully-3D terrain as well as units, and makes excellent use of varying elevations. Few areas in the game are impassable, even though they often look like sheer cliffs. Rivers are frequently present, with shallow areas creating fords. The elevation affects combat as well. The game has an odd, possibly unintentional way of implementing cover: units will fire irrespective of what's in front of them, shooting at wreckage or the ground instead of manoeuvring to find a clear line of fire. This may be an AI fault, but it has an odd side-effect in that hiding your robots in a (destructible) wood actually gives them some decent protection. I haven't noticed whether the Supreme Commander games also have this quirk.

It's actually a pretty good game, 1997 or no 1997. Supreme Commander is modern, interesting and seemed almost revolutionary to me when I first saw it, but the mechanics within are pretty much all present in Total Annihilation. The rate-based economy, radar, land/sea/air combat, ACU + engineers constructed in factories, and so on, are all there in TA. And as a bonus, it'll run on anything. Score!

It must be said that I do miss SupCom's strategic zoom and graphics. I don't yet know whether Total Annihilation contains experimental units (I think it does) or shield generators (we'll see about that one), two things which contribute to how radically different Supreme Commander is from most other RTSs. It has nukes at least (there's one in the intro). I wonder if your Commander goes mushroom-cloud-shaped when he dies...

Update: I played a couple of skirmish games after writing this and have discovered the following.
- Units in TA are rather myopic. Lines of sight aren't much bigger than they are in games like Age of Empires.
- Your Commander does go nuclear when he dies, although the effect is lacklustre.
- The D-Gun kills Commanders in one hit. This tends to lead to both Commanders exploding hugely (as the D-Gun is short ranged and leaves the firing Commander well within the explosion radius of the other).
- When you can't see units, even buildings, they aren't marked on the map. Even if you've got them on radar. This means that you can't target them. You have to use units as spotters.
- Build times are sloooow compared to Supreme Commander (apart from generators, which seem to be faster). This includes units. No making swarms of 50+ Tier 1s in a few minutes from one factory. This is good or bad depending on your own standpoint on the matter. Naval units build comparatively quickly, probably taking about the same amount of time as they do in SC:FA - still longer than the other units, but not by much. Bombers take ages.
- Despite the minimal polygon count, quite a bit of attention to detail is evident in the units and their animations. This is good.
- The statistics for a unit show its metal/energy costs, build time, movement speed, acceleration and turn speed. They do not show costs per second, damage, or health. WTF.

Conclusion: Supreme Commander Forged Alliance > Total Annihilation. Ah well.

[Adam]

Drome Racers

What is it?: A Lego racing game.
Previous experience: Trying to play it on the 1998 family computer we used to own, and watching in despair as the PC failed utterly. I think we eBayed it or something. I saw it in Gamestation recently and bought it out of nostalgia/curiosity.
Played today: A bunch of career races.

I bought this game with the full expectation that it was going to suck, and guess what? It's actually alright! If you accept that it's basically a cross between Mario Kart and Wipeout, with emphasis on the former.

The Lego-y graphics look reasonable, given their age. The levels are actually very pretty, with heavy usage of background scenery and varying environments. Most of the cars don't look half as cool viewed from behind, which is a problem, because before you buy them there's no way of telling what their stats are like, so you pick them on appearance alone. The stats don't seem to be that well-balanced (the Torq Racer is head and shoulders better than the other two road cars I currently own). One of my cars is glitched so it performs waaaay worse than it should, too. Oh well; I have a better one now.

Like Lego Racers, Drome Racers has powerups. These operate on a different system (no white bricks) and work a lot like Mario Kart's. There's the homing rocket (red shell), shuriken (green shell), EMP drone (basically lightning but only affects one person), flare (squid), thing that makes your car fly (the most fun powerup out of Lego Racers), mine (fake powerup/banana) and disruptor (star, without the invincibility).

To be fair, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. They're well-implemented, and it so happens that the ones they (deliberately? accidentally?) ripped off are the ones that aren't complete game-breakers. The rocket and EMP drone require a lock on a target before they'll actually do anything, and can't be fired backwards. The flare slows opponents down. The rocket and shuriken blast your car pinwheeling into the air, describing a 360 degree revolution before you land again facing in roughly the right direction, which looks pretty destructive but doesn't leave you completely screwed over (it does provoke panicked expletives the first couple of times you experience it...).

The physics in the game is a bit slapdash, unfortunately. Again, like Mario Kart, it seemed they made the game more about the powerups and the use thereof (as well as the speed boosters on the floors) and collision avoidance than finding and learning tight paths through each track. As such, the traction ability of each car is a bit vague. They'll drift when you don't expect them to, sometimes, and vice versa. It doesn't overall detract from the game, but what does annoy me is the Mario Kart (again) collision physics. My car is not weightless, dammit! If I am clipped by another car, it should not cause me to pinwheel around and head for the nearest wall, destroying my chances of catching up for a good half-lap at least. The cars are large and there's not much room on the track, so overtaking people tends to be difficult; fortunately, you're a bit faster than the NPCs, which can help to earn back time lost from early mishaps.

The campaign takes the form of a number of MRCs, which I believe stands for 'multi-race challenge'. Each one consists of a drag-race qualifying stage followed by between two and five races, reusing tracks with variations (changing routes, different weather, reversed routes, etc). There are two types of tracks, road and off-road, with different vehicles used for each; road cars tend to be faster, but have a lot less grip, so tend to drift if you steer too hard. Your position in the pack - including the time difference between you and the next racer - is maintained from race to race, meaning that once you have a significant lead, you can easily maintain it for the remainder of the challenge, provided you don't majorly mess up or get owned by a couple of powerups in succession. If you do get knocked to 5th or 6th place, it's still possible to recover your position if the bad guys are strung-out enough; if they're all bunched up, it can be quite difficult to fight your way through, due to the aforementioned collision physics.

Why did I say it was like Wipeout? A couple of reasons. There are boosters on the ground, which add about 20mph to your speed and cause your tires to leave cool-if-impractical trails of flames. The powerups do your vehicle damage, too. I don't think you can die, but if you suffer enough damage several parts fall off, making you a lot slower. There are health pickups scattered around the tracks, which is good, as one rocket blows off about half of your armour. It's a lot easier than Wipeout, though. It's slower, the tracks are less tortuous, and the cars can steer without needing advance notice in writing (well, the off-road ones can).

So, is it good? Yeah, it's not bad. It sounds like a bad game; it could just use a bit more care and attention. It may just be the fact that it ties directly into one of the Lego toy lines, but it does feel a bit like a massive advertisement, even though the toys themselves aren't actually mentioned anywhere in the game. It's a bit too similar to a de-fanged Mario Kart for me to say "Yes, this game was loved". For comparison, I don't get this feeling from Star Wars Pod Racer, mostly because Pod Racer is actually frickin' brilliant.

But I'm going to play it again later, and that says a lot.

[Adam]

Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare

What is it?: Survival horror.
Previous experience: Zero.
Played today: Some of the beginning of Edward Carnby's storyline.

I would like to make a point here. To the designers of Alone in the Dark:

When I am playing a computer game and I am attacked by an enemy, I will attempt to kill it. I will assume that the game requires me to kill it to proceed, that the enemy in question will follow me if I attempt to run away, and that generally it will be able to do so. My first instinct is not to flee and see if there are any invisible boundaries beyond which it cannot pass.

This is a reasonable line of thought, and one I assume most other gamers also follow.

Why, then, do you decide to attack me with several worthless enemies to exhaust my ammunition, then pit me up against a demon of considerable health and power which cannot be fled due to the small, linear nature of the area in which it is fought, and not think to put a melee attack option in the game? Why do you not think to inform me that Carnby's double-barrelled revolver in fact fires two bullets with each shot rather than, as I assumed, firing more rapidly? Actually, while I'm on the subject, why isn't there a reload button?

Survival horror my ass. I'm 15 minutes into the game and already can't proceed (literally, the demon will kill me) because I'm out of ammo. I looked in some walkthroughs and they're all "oh, run away from the dogs, they can't go up the stairs". Obviously. Of course, I didn't even know the stairs were there in the first place, never mind that they'd be an obstacle for some zombified guard dogs.

The cheats don't work, either. Bah.

It's a shame, because up to that point, I was enjoying myself. The graphics are almost laughably primitive at first glance - pre-rendered 2D backgrounds forming linear scenes - but it soon becomes clear that not only does this not impact particularly on the combat (aiming isn't hard; in fact Carnby does the vertical aiming for you), but that the developer actually uses cinematic camera angles to their full potential. The small hesitance as each new scene loads from the CD is quite irritating, especially as they're very small scenes, but it works a lot better than I'd expect.

And Alone in the Dark is scary. Scary in a cheesy way, perhaps - ambient sounds ripped straight from horror movies, decrepit stone walls, an old and mysterious manor, the "Shadow Island" upon which the game takes place - but scary nevertheless. The mindscrewing begins pretty early on, and I imagine it doesn't let up. The first demon is introduced through a cutscene that - despite the low quality - is primally gory and, again, nicely cinematic. Whoever's pointing the camera in this game really does know what they're doing.

The use of sound is good. Not stellar, perhaps, due to the aforementioned cheesiness, but it helps to raise tension. The voice acting is fairly bad, I suppose. It's just at that point where it makes you slightly uncomfortable without you being able to point out why.

But, y'know. They really should have put a melee attack in. Apparently Alone in the Dark 5 has them, but then again, apparently that really sucks as well. Who knows.

[Adam]

American McGee's Alice

What is it?: Third-person combat/puzzle game, but it's not really about the gameplay.
Previous experience: Didn't even know what kind of game it was.
Played today: About three hours of it.

Alright. So. There have been no end of Alice in Wonderland adaptations, pseudo-sequels, and so on, but I don't think any of them were video games. American McGee's Alice (hereby renamed AMGA) breaks the mould.

As I understand it, Wonderland in the original book was but a dream. Well, shortly after having her bizarre adventure, Alice loses her parents in a horrific house fire, and her mind snaps. She is institutionalised - and mistreated - in an asylum. Ten years on, she is drawn back into Wonderland in an attempt to save its inhabitants from a corruption that has befallen them. So far, the game hasn't made any mention of whether Wonderland is a real place, or a figment of Alice's crazed mind. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Wonderland is insane. It's hauntingly drawn. Bits of it maintain an innocuous childish charm and sense of wonder, but they're drowned out by horrors both subtle and unsubtle. Some levels have faces everywhere, distorted visages painted into the décor that you won't notice for quite a while. Everybody seems to be either crazed, in suffering, or hostile. The graphics are old - the game was made in 2000, built on a modified Quake 3 engine - but brilliantly evoke the atmosphere and tone of the game. There are bizarre things everywhere; the environment is unpredictable and temperamental.

The voice acting is top-notch, too. The Cheshire Cat (your support character) speaks in a languid, creepy purring tone. Alice is the now-grown-up prim schoolgirl, an attitude complimented by her outfit and even (some of) her animations. Characters have varying, almost random accents, and all seem to have personalities of their own visible during the small amounts of time they spend talking to Alice.

Right, that's three paragraphs of praise. What about the bad stuff? AMGA's gameplay is a bit rough. There's a lot of platforming, which is fine in principle, but it tends to be make-this-or-die platforming, and dying is a massive immersion breaker. There's no real tutorial - you have to look up the controls in the options menu from time to time - but I suppose that actually contributes to the immersion (this being a video game, I wouldn't go so far as to say that our confusion mirrors Alice's own, or anything like that; if that is the case, stop being pretentious and give us a tutorial, McGee).

Shooting things is fine, and reasonably easy so far. There's a lock-on system which causes your projectiles to home in on enemies, which helps a lot with the profusion of airborne nasties the game throws at you. Unfortunately the weaponry's a bit off. Only two of the six weapons I've collected so far are actually useful in the majority of situations. They're all pretty amusing (especially the Demon Dice), just not that well-balanced.

That said, Alice implements something I've wanted to see in a game for a while: regenerating ammo. Enemies drop health when they die, which also restores your ammo meter (this is good, as it depletes disturbingly quickly, and recovers slowly), and there's plenty of health lying around anyway, so the game plays with suitable dynamism and doesn't have you pottering around making sure you've got as much ammo as possible at all times. All the weapons draw from the same ammunition meter, which seems odd, but works fine in context.

AMGA isn't the kind of game you pick up after hearing about its innovative gameplay mechanics or fast-paced/tightly-balanced/intelligent combat. Play it if you want to be surprised by, enthralled by and awed at its sheer twistedness, the sickened reimagining of a fairytale-like childhood story turned sour by trauma and mental illness. Play it if you want to stare, slightly open-mouthed, at unprecedented vision after vision. (The 'Skool Daze' level is particularly good.) I'd definitely recommend it, if you can get hold of it.

[Adam]

Mondo Agency

What is it?: Uhh... Some kind of creepy horror puzzle game. Freeware.
Previous experience: nil, bar a recommendation from Ollie.
Played today: all of it, it's only about 20 minutes long.

Rendered in bad Game Maker 3D visuals, entirely black and white bar a few choice items, Mondo Agency nevertheless succeeds extremely well in what seems to be its primary objective: mystifying and creeping the hell out of you. Unfortunately, there isn't much to actually say about it that won't spoil any of the levels. It's very short, as I mentioned - 20-30 minutes' work. You may need to look at a walkthrough for some of the levels, although the first level's jumping puzzle is thankfully skippable.

There's no solid connection between any of the levels. Some of them lack context; others provide small pieces of a plot. Disjoint as they are, there's a definite sense of progression (and later on, mounting dread). Each one is preceded by a cutscene that links roughly to it - one of the game's agent characters, a robot-like figure with a revolving blocky head showing four screens, standing on some pillar surrounded by darkness, talking unintelligibly while odd Engrish subtitles translate. Rather strange, and contributes nicely to the atmosphere of the game.

The game lacks any sort of pause or save button, and alt-tabbing doesn't free the mouse if you're in the middle of a level. This is quite annoying, although the game's brevity offsets it somewhat. The jumping physics is unrealistic but functional (if anything, it's helpful); there's no UI, except a repeating set of status messages in the top left of the screen that serve as a reminder that you're some kind of robot or machine (the suggestion is, I think, that you're one of the screen-head people).

Worth a look? Definitely. It's free, after all.

[Adam]

Chaos Funk

What is it?: Freeware turn-based wizard combat game. Apparently a remake of a 1985 game called Chaos.
Previous experience: zero.
Played today: Three or four matches.

Chaos Funk is pretty neat. Supporting between two and eight wizards, each of which gets a randomly generated list of spells at the beginning of the game, it's a turn-based game revolving around the use of said spells. You can summon creatures, which will move and attack other creatures or the enemy wizard, cast offensive and buff spells, or even raise structures and areas of forest.

As with most freeware games, the graphics are primitive, but get the point across. CF is grid-based, although the grid isn't shown, and played top-down through the medium of icons. There's a good variety of spells and creatures, and a mix of ranged and melee attacks as well as offensive spells. Additionally, spells (including creature summonings) are ranked as Chaos, Neutral or Law. Chaos or Law spells shift the 'balance' of the world one way or the other. A balance tipped towards Chaos increases the chance of successfully casting Chaos spells, and the same for Law. I used this to good effect in one game where I summoned tons of Law(+2) creatures (pegasi, unicorns, elves) to increase the casting chance of a Golden Dragon from 10% to 40%. It then killed the enemy wizard in one hit.

There are a few neat trick spells. Each spell can only be cast once, after which it is lost to you; the spell Magic Wood spawns trees, which grant wizards new spells when they're inside. Subversion converts an enemy creature to your side. Creatures can be summoned as illusions, which always succeed, but the spell Disbelieve gets rid of them. Dark Citadel and Magic Castle protect your wizard by putting them inside castles, and so on.

The AI is a little easy, or maybe the luck of summoning chances was on my side. (The computer will attempt 10% chance casts, and usually fails them, as you'd expect...) It's a fun game, though. If nothing else, its similarity to tabletop gaming may mean it proves as inspiration sometime...

[Adam]

Psychonauts

What is it?: Third-person platformer. Many many things to collect.
Previous experience: none.
Played today (well, and yesterday): Three or four hours of it.

Psychonauts is the kind of game you only leave when you ragequit. When it's good, it's creative, amusing, charming and clever. When it's bad, it's making you redo tedious boss battles, sending you running from place to place and back again to do stuff you could've done through the medium of a menu screen, making you redo tedious boss battles, and killing you in two hits via some random turret, thus sending you all the way back to your last save point (before a tedious boss battle).

It was £1 on Steam, though, so whatever. In a way, it's worth it, because it's quite a different experience to most other games I've played. The basic idea behind Psychonauts is that - get this - there are psychic soldiers, right? Called psychonauts? And they're trained as kids in this summer camp type place. You play as one of these kids, a precocious circus runaway called Raz (short for Razputin, of course). Gameplay takes place in and around the camp, but also inside the minds of various characters, and that's where the game shows its flair.

Indeed, it's the in-mind sections that make the game worth playing. Pretty much everything else could be replaced with a suitable menu; it may detract somewhat from the immersion they may be trying to build up, but it would make the actual game so much better. I don't want to watch cutscenes of Raz talking with random kids he encounters on his way around camp. Sure, it fleshes out character and whatnot, but I'm trying to get somewhere and most of them have supremely irritating voices. It doesn't help that the camp's stupidly hard to navigate. There's a transport system, fortunately, but that could be a little better as well (saying that, kudos to the devs for including "I only came down here to hear your voice" as a quit option to the sexy-sounding greeting it gives you). Also, buying things from "the camp store" (the game never tells you where this is, but fortunately it's guessably inside the Lodge) and making use of certain collectibles both require you to visit specific, disparate, areas. It'd be nice to have all of this collected in one place, minimising the effort needed to get there. Of course, the only reason it's a problem is because you're usually itching to get back to the next level...

Ah, yes, collectibles. The game and its levels are full of them. From 'figments' (as in, of the imagination) that increase your psychic rank very slowly, through 'psi cards' that do the same thing when nine of them are combined with some random item from the store and put into a machine somewhere, to scavenger hunt items, arrowheads (money)... Far more than is necessary, I say. They don't spoil things too badly, but it gives the game the feel of being one massive item-grabbing session, detracting somewhat from the imaginative level design and the otherwise smooth platforming. The disco level has few collectibles in it, which gives it much more of a sense of motion than the others. I'd cheat and eschew the need for them at all, but the cheats don't work on the Steam version.

Psychonauts has the PopCap-esque feel of a game by and for adults that's pretending to be a kids' game. There's a subtle parody present in Raz's Mary-Sue-ness and the way he delivers his lines with the 20-minutes-before-the-end-credits voice of incredible inspiration and significance. There's a local bully, who Raz stands up to and puts in his place from time to time; a girl with the usual slightly sickening kid crush on him; and a few adults, who all think he's the business. It's funny, and would raise a chuckle if you saw it on TVTropes, but gets really annoying at times. If it wasn't for the theme and level design, you could quite easily say it was a kids' game. The collectible-focused gameplay doesn't do anything to lessen this, either.

You may notice I've been comparatively negative so far. I thought I'd get all the (actually fairly minor, I suppose) ranty bits out of the way first. Now, the good stuff.

The platforming gameplay is well done in my opinion. I don't get on with platforming generally, but it works for me here. Raz's ability to catch ledges as he leaps up to them is quite forgiving, and missing jumps - even over distances or at quite awkward camera angles - is quite rare. He can double-jump, always a godsend, and has access to a levitation power which is not only useful but fun; the level that takes you through how to use levitation properly is both creative and enjoyable. Levitation allows faster movement in certain areas, higher jumping and double-jumping, and floating. Very useful.

The combat has only one major flaw: your aim (and lock on) is based on the direction in which Raz is pointing, not the camera. This means that, say, evading a boss's attacks and then trying to quickly lock on to it and blast it when it momentarily exposes its weakpoint can be quite a task. While locked, though, you can circle-strafe nicely, and even use a variety of dodge and flip moves to get around faster or evade attacks; once I remembered this, the same encounter went a lot more smoothly, as I just maintained lock-on to the thing for the entire fight and took it from there. Shooting things is accomplished with the psiblast power, and requires the aforementioned lock-on to be useful. Your standard attack is the punch, which also comes with a nice slam-type move if executed while in the air. You can also attack people with telekinesis or pyrokinesis, but my abortive efforts at using these in combat proved unsuccessful; they're both a little clunky. There's a psychic shield, too, which blocks and partially reflects attacks, but renders Raz immobile while he's using it. I haven't unlocked the other three powers yet, but I know that one of them's invisibility.

Okay, and now the best bit: the level design. I've seen five so far. The initial Basic Training section - inside the military camp commander's mind - puts you through an almost mazelike 'war is hell' run, with good use of vertical as well as horizontal movement and a fair bit of swinging stuff probably inspired by the Prince of Persia games. The scientist psychic's mind - where you learn to shoot - is an orderly cube floating in space, where 'up' and 'down' are just relative to whichever side you're standing on at the time, and which starts to lose its order in odd ways, manifesting floating platforms and random objects, until you shoot enough stuff. The mind of one of the other teachers, a cheerful Latino woman who calls people 'darling', is a multicoloured disco-themed level reminiscent of the Casino sections from Sonic games, except that it isn't constantly trying to kill you, which again contains lots of nice vertical movement. (This is the levitation tutorial, and it's awesome.) Raz's own mind is a twisting underground tunnel of odd plants, complete with a white rabbit to follow.

The final level I've observed so far (and by far my favourite) is the lungfish's mind. After you defeat it, a support character makes the time-honoured remark when dealing with creepy living things: "It's more afraid of you than you are of it." This, of course, is an amusing inversion, because this particular lungfish is absolutely enormous. Anyway, inside its mind this fear manifests as Raz being an enormous, kaiju-style monster inside a diminutive city of lungfish people. Any level where you can (literally) pick up tanks with one hand and throw them at other tanks, while punching down buildings with the other hand, gets my vote. I mean, LOOK.



GRAAARGH. STOMP.

I just need to find a way past that damn two-hit-kill turret.

Is the game good? Hell yes. Play it for too long and the bits that aren't wandering around people's minds will get on your nerves, but it's ridiculously addictive. You always want to see the next mind, marvel at the next off-the-wall, wondrously designed, lovingly twisted level.

[Adam]

Mirror's Edge

What is it?: Unusual first-person platformer with emphasis on momentum. PHYSICS!
Previous experience: the tutorial and up to the point in the first proper level where it has a massive slowdown seizure. I've now fixed this (temporarily).
Played today: the rest of that level and a couple more after that.

Mirror's Edge is beautiful. It's not just the visuals, although they're lovingly drawn; stark, pretending-not-to-be-a-dystopian cityscapes stretch away before you, high-contrast use of colour amid the whiteness highlighting areas for you to jump to. The plain white city is a sci-fi staple, but the addition of ordinary rooftop details like fans, vents and pipes go a long way to making it believable (as well as navigable, otherwise there wouldn't be a game to play in the setting at all). Tasteful use of bloom gives it a lovely gleam in the sunshine. You know those people who complain that modern graphics add nothing to a game? Screw those people.

The other side to ME's beauty is its sense of cinema. Shooting people in ME is generally optional (so far), and requires you to disarm someone who's attacking you. You get however many bullets were left in the gun, and then you drop it. Despite this, the game pits you up against armed soldiers, SWAT teams, and even helicopters. How do you kill them? You don't; you just run away. And here's the brilliance of it. As long as you keep moving, the baddies pretty much won't hit you - but bullets ricochet from the walls and the concrete at your feet, shattering windows as you sprint past, almost but never quite harming you. If you stop, you'll die, or at least that's the feeling you get. Only running keeps you safe. It's extremely cinematic and gets the adrenalin flowing.

Even better, the game's clever use of colour means you never have to know where to go beforehand. Visual clues that blend in with the overall look of the city point out the next place to jump to, the next door to break through, the next spot to hide in. You're (quite literally) fleeing in a panic, but always somehow pick the right route, like heroes in movies.

So, what's the downside? Lots of people seem to have panned Mirror's Edge, and I'm not sure why. I think technical glitches are a problem. While I haven't seen many examples of dodgy collision detection, there's one notable buggy leap in the tutorial that saw Faith fail to grab a pipe and plunge to her death numerous times. I think you have to approach it in exactly the right way, otherwise it won't register, or something. The aforementioned PhysX problem is also a bit of a big deal, because the game gets screwed over by another popular title (from the same publisher!): Mass Effect. If I play Mass Effect, I'll have to reinstall PhysX again before I can play Mirror's Edge without experiencing massive slowdowns in certain areas (there are two such areas, apparently). Other than those two things, the game seems fine so far.

People also mention shooting sections. I haven't seen any sections where the game forces you to shoot people yet. If those exist, I could see why people get annoyed; the game isn't supposed to be an FPS, it's a platformer, although as a longtime FPS player I doubt I'd particularly mind having the chance to put some guards down rather than run away from them all the time. I've shot a few so far, and it doesn't seem to be particularly offensive as far as FPSing goes. Point, click, there's a very satisfying sound effect (the sound in this game is good too), and some faceless NPC's 'alive' variable is set to false. I suppose for some players it's a break in the feel or flow of the game, but there's only so much constant adrenalin-pumping fleeing one can take. A little catharsis never hurt.

What else? Oh yeah, it's a platformer where you can't see your feet, as Yahtzee pointed out. Despite being a) crap at platforming b) a longstanding opponent of platforming sections in FPS games, I don't generally find Mirror's Edge a problem, because it's more about jumping to places than jumping over things. Generally, when I die in Mirror's Edge, it's due to going the wrong way and either attempting an impossible jump or running into a bunch of baddies. Judging your jumps isn't that hard, or even that necessary, when the entire level is set up to support that exact, specific series of moves, give or take a little speed variance or the odd mistake.

Best of all? I got it in one of the Steam sales. £3. Rock on.

[Adam]

Unforeseen problems have cropped up.
- I don't spend *that* much of my day gaming.
- I want to play Psychonauts.
- I want to play Mirror's Edge.
- I want to play American McGee's Alice.
- I keep getting FPS cravings and am going to have to fire up UT3 or Crysis at some point. Like... maybe now...

That's right... I didn't foresee that I might like some of these one-a-day games enough to want to spend the next few days on them too... However, I have actually played another game lately, even though it's not on the list.

Painkiller: Overdose.

What is it?: Mod-turned-official-expandalone for Painkiller.
Previous experience: the demo, a while back.
Played today: all of it. (Well, technically, yesterday and the day before, but yesterday's review was Mirror's Edge.)

Painkiller is one in a rare few FPSs. Despite being reasonably recent - it came out in 2004, which I count as recent - it harks back to gameplay years before its time: the bullet-hurling, monster-murdering simplicity of the earliest FPSs, such as Doom and Quake. The only other modern series I can think of which takes this approach is the Serious Sam so-far-trilogy, the latest of which is about the same age as the original Painkiller. Basically, what happens is that you and a few oversized weapons enter an area. The door seals behind you, and a crapload of enemies appear. You murder them all in a graphic fashion, then the exit opens, allowing egress. Repeat. Painkiller beats Serious Sam in that it feels far less repetitive and has final levels that aren't worse than DIY dentistry. Also, [insert obligatory shurikens+lightning=awesome joke here].

Painkiller already has a follow-up, the 10-level Battle out of Hell, commendable chiefly for a) being more Painkiller b) having a sequence where you shoot demons while travelling along a rollercoaster. Overdose started life as a fan-made mod, but was picked up by the developers and received proper funding and art assets. Does it work? Mostly. As I mentioned, it gets points for being more Painkiller. PK is one of my favourite games, boasting varied and oft-gorgeous levels, many types of interesting enemies, cleverly designed secrets, and of course, lots and lots of blowing up demons in graphic fashions.

Overdose continues this, and actually branches out a bit beyond the remit of the original's levels. Stages like the Town-esque Village of the Damned, war-themed Field Hospital, Nuclear Plant (similar to Battle out of Hell's Lab) and the reappearance of Loony Park (minus rollercoaster, plus pirates) tie directly in to the original games, but the Haunted Valley and Dead Marsh are much more unusual, as are the Egyptian- and Viking-themed stages. The enemies are also weirder. Many of PK's baddies reappear, but there are new additions such as the walking trees, frankensteins, stage monsters, butchers with sawblades for heads, demonically possessed hen houses which spawn exploding chickens, and the brilliantly-designed tortured. Few of them behave in significantly different ways, but they look a lot stranger.

Overdose has a different main character to the originals, a half-angel-half-demon called Belial, not that that really matters. In deference to the formula, the cutscenes are pointless and generally boring. It also comes with different weapons, most of which turn out to be replicas of Painkiller's own. It's at this mark that Overdose falls flat a little. Ammo seems extremely scarce, even on the easiest difficulty where things die in a stiff breeze, and the balance is far from tight. There are eight weapons, and about three of them are good. What tended to happen was that I'd play for a while, realise I had less than 30 shots for any of the 15 ammo-using fire modes at my disposal, open the console, type 'pkammo' and play the rest of the level using the crossbow. You get a razorcube, which is a clone of the original (and titular) painkiller, and which I almost never used because it simply wasn't powerful enough in most situations. You get a bonegun, a crap version of the shotgun - it seems to spread more, meaning it's ineffective at anything but almost-melee range, and lots of the game's larger enemies are conveniently immune to the freeze-then-one-hit-kill alternate fire that serves you so well in the original. The steampunk-looking rifle and crossbow are clones of the rocket-chaingun and boltgun, except that the crossbow fires fewer spikes and fewer bouncing explosives with each salvo. It's still probably the best weapon in the game - there are some sections (all of the tower/building areas in the Haunted Valley, for example) where it absolutely tears the baddies up. What's not to like about an extremely accurate, near-instant-hit stake attack backed up by a grenade launcher firing five explosives at once?

Enough crossbow lovin'. Weapon #5 is some kind of dismembered goblin head, and would be an excellent weapon if it was more ammo-efficient and had less annoying sound effects. Its primary attack is a damage-over-time beam, which isn't very powerful really, but its second attack is an agonised scream that causes heavy damage and can affect multiple opponents in a line. Weapon #6 is this broken sword thing. Its primary attack fires homing skulls, which sound useful but seem quite pathetic, and its alt fire sends the sword spinning through the air, from whence it can be steered to dismember multiple opponents. Would be good if it killed things more quickly. Weapon 7's primary fire is good - basically the original game's stakegun but less amusing and with a better rate of fire - but its alt, a debuffing flamethrower-esque stream of acid, isn't that powerful and eats up too much ammo to use if you haven't cheated. The final weapon, the demon egg, lets you throw out lots of, well, eggs, then cause them all to explode hugely. It's not that effective as a quick kill weapon, but it's damn hilarious. Eggs stick to any surface, including bad guys; carpeting an area with them then blowing up the entire first wave in a cataclysm of green explosions is funny, but lobbing a few onto some unfortunate melee goon and then nuking him and his mates with a click of the detonator never fails to bring on hysterical evil laughter.

So, we've got one weapon that dominates, two or three that are useful (ammunition permitting), one that's incredibly amusing, and the rest fall a bit short of the mark. Not great, really.

Overdose's other weakness is that it feels a lot more slapdash than Painkiller itself. The objectives in each level required to get the tarot cards are all copied from the original games, most of them reused (I think "Keep HP above 50" appears three times, including in the final boss fight), and slapped hastily onto levels without thought for the composition of the enemies therein. One level requires you to collect at least 160 souls; there are 161 enemies, and an area with exploding environmental hazards, with which the baddies are more than happy to accidentally kill themselves, meaning their souls may have dissipated before you've even realised they're dead. Good luck with that. The Dead Marsh objective is to complete the entire level using only the razorcube. The enemies in this level are: fast-moving melee troops; flying things that drop explosives; tentacles that appear from underground and beat the crap out of you, then release other enemies upon death; Cthulhu lookalikes that throw poison bombs at you; tough, slower-moving things whose attacks I can't remember. These all tend to appear in number, and in a mix. I found it one of the most difficult levels using normal weapons AND on the easiest difficulty. On the other end of the scale, the Village of the Damned level is laughably easy considering its position late in the game, and would be ideal for that selfsame condition (it has a similar one, actually, but allows you the bonegun as well).

The secret areas are simpler, too. There's much less need for physics-abuse and quick jumping skills. This is a mixed blessing, but it does remove the feeling of awesome design that the original game's secrets showed. I also wish they'd removed Belial's habit of spouting one-liners. He reuses them constantly. "Lead for free!" is the only one that stays funny after the first time you hear it, but even that only lasts a couple of iterations. Y'see, when Serious Sam did it, he used them once each, at appropriately scripted points. That's the whole idea of jokes... but never mind. Oh, and it crashed a few times, too - annoying, that - although I was able to play the whole game.

Is it fun? Well, sure, but the way the weapons are set up does impede the experience somewhat. I'd rather not have to use the pkammo cheat, and I'd also rather not end up preferring one weapon almost exclusively when I did so. More damage = more dead demons = more amusement, AND it pins people to walls, AND it rewards the ability to shoot templars in the head over their shields, AND it has the best range... the crossbow beats all the other guns hands down, which is odd because in BOOH the boltgun wasn't all that great. I suppose it had some serious competition there, and even the stakegun - on which it was ostensibly a direct upgrade - was more ammo-efficient and had better, more accurately placeable grenades. Still, I have to give the game props for its creative enemies and greater variety of environments, and in the end, it is more Painkiller.

No shurikens-and-lightning gun though.

[Adam]

In case anybody wondered why I suddenly stopped updating this completely, it's because I went on holiday for a few days and couldn't really be bothered to pick it up when I got back, as nobody seems to read it. However, I think I might as well carry on.

Prototype

What is it?: Sandbox murder-a-thon. Easily the most violent game I've ever played.
Previous experience: really, really wanting it.
Played recently: Quite a large number of hours. I wasn't counting, but I'd estimate 10-15.

Prototype is absolutely, ultra-violently awesome. It's a sandbox game set in a New York infected by some horrific virus that turns people into zombific creatures. Your character is a guy called Alex Mercer, amnesiac, who has some other form of the infection that makes him a combination of any superheroes you'd care to mention. Capable of shapeshifting his body into weaponry or into other people, Alex's wide-ranging, upgradeable arsenal is in some ways the main focus of the game.

Any attack you have - even just basic punches - will kill a human-type enemy in one hit. Not just kill, either. Dismember. Prototype's NPCs have modelled intestines, which are more than happy to expose themselves to slashes from the claws, blade, or whipfist. Alternately, you can grab and consume them, netting yourself some free health and a new disguise. (This does mean that civilians can basically be health packs.) Alex gains EP - 'evolution points' - as he kills things and completes objectives, which can be spent on new special moves, upgrades and abilities. Here are a few things that 'my' Alex can do so far:

- Jump kick helicopters, or grab onto them from a distance with his whipfist and steal them.
- Run up the side of a skyscraper, backflip off, and elbow-drop onto a tank, destroying it in one hit.
- Cause huge spikes to explode from the ground, impaling people and vehicles alike.
- Glide through the air, usually after jumping off the top of something tall.
- Throw cars at targets more than a city-block away, and hit them.
- Sneak up behind a military officer, consume him without being noticed, then call in an air strike on the victim's mates.
- Swat aircraft out of the air from the top of the Empire State Building, except that unlike King Kong, he probably won't die in the process.

Like any game, Prototype has its flaws, here in the annoying nature of some of the missions or events. Events are essentially side missions, and while most of them can be done to a reasonable standard in one go (on easy at least), some of them are just unnecessarily hard. Watch out for Irony. It has a two-minute timer, and you will keep dying with five seconds to go. The missions themselves, likewise, can be a bit harsh. The worst one I've seen so far has you sabotaging four viral detectors, machines which are designed to raise the alarm at the presence of infected (such as yourself). Sabotage them wrongly (which is very easy to do!) and they'll go off, but you're not allowed to just destroy them, as it'll fail you the mission. Fortunately, you can run away, find somewhere to hide and change disguises, which will make them lose track of you.

The stealth/disguise system is slightly simplified in this regard. Military personnel won't recognise Alex in his normal form, a guy in a black hoodie with a distinctive design. They also won't notice you stealth-consume someone if they're looking away, even if you're doing it right next to them. (The stealth consume is very well implemented, actually. You open the 'consume menu' by pressing F, and approach someone from behind. An icon lights up when a stealth consume is possible. No guesswork involved.)

Thinking about it, Prototype boasts a surprising attention to detail despite its unsubtle nature and the frustration factor of some of the missions. A message shows up in a corner of the screen when you're on the run from the military and it's safe to switch. There's an icon letting you know when you're visible to the military and when you aren't. If you're low on health, you can eat people to regain it, and killing enemies causes them to release small amounts of health, too. You can hear the military chatter as you fight them, with a good variety of statements for each situation (and occasionally some panicked expletives as you dismember them). Civilians scream and flee if you reveal your weapons in a crowd, or consume/randomly kill someone. The game does a very good job of making you, as Mercer, feel like the super-powered psychotic outsider, and the military's prime target. They refer to you as ZEUS, which is presumably some code name from whatever it was that made Mercer the way he is, and yes, it's usually spelt in capitals in the subtitles. Strike teams often comment on how unusual it is that you're still standing after their initial attack runs. When you stop fighting, a small after action report comes up showing the amount of money you just cost the military as well as the number of soldiers, civilians and infected you killed since the last such report. Once you've got the Armour upgrade, you can take ridiculous amounts of punishment, and of course you're more than capable of blowing up tanks with a few hits. The entire city is against you, and you're winning.

I even liked the oft-panned 'Web of Intrigue' system. Consuming certain people unlocks their memories (brief, vague cutscenes that slowly assemble into a bigger picture, and which contain some startling, unexpected revelations) in this big, sprawling network of personalities that you can access anytime during the game. Navigating it is painstakingly slow, and you're never sure whether you've actually watched everything in it, but I avoid actually having to use the interface by simply watching the cutscenes as I find them. The developers, in another good move, recognised that it's quite easy to accidentally kill people in Prototype (especially while chasing someone through a panicking crowd, or if there happen to be actual enemies nearby which you're fighting) and made it so that if you murder a Web of Intrigue target, they'll reappear if you leave and return to the area in which they're found.

Combat in Prototype, which forms the major part of the game, is fluid and intuitive. It uses three buttons, plus jumping, and with just those, fuels a slew of abilities rivalling the arsenal of the average fighting game character. I currently have 30 or 40 different ways to kill someone, from running into them with Armour or Shield equipped, to blasting a mass of lethal impaling tendrils from Alex's body that destroy everyone in the area of effect. I can throw cars at people, and if those cars explode, the splash damage takes out everyone nearby as well. I can turn my body into a cannonball, which if I happen to have Musclemass equipped, will easily one-shot a helicopter. I can jump kick someone and then continue moving, surfing on their rapidly-disintegrating body, bowling aside others in my way. The nice thing is that performing these attacks is very easy. Alex attacks when you release the buttons, allowing you to hold them down beforehand to charge them up for greater power, and will (in the case of targeted attacks) automatically aim himself at either the target judged the nearest/greatest threat, or one you've selected using the targeting button. Context sensitivity is well used - the same key combinations sometimes perform different attacks depending on whether you're in the air, what move you were in prior to the button press, and so on.

The rest of the game is mobility, an important part of any sandbox, and again, in this Prototype excels. The game gives you full access to the entirety of the island you're on, and impressively, does so without in-game loading times. (The pre-game loading times aren't long at all, either.) You're in central New York, and so everything is a skyscraper. Alex can run up walls with consummate ease, glide, change direction or receive a boost of speed mid-jump, charge jumps so that he goes higher and further, leap from wall to wall, and so on. It's not only fast and intuitive, it's fun. In fact, driving around in a tank or helicopter is actually slower and less fun than footing it. That's how good it is. I don't know how accurate the size or layout of the island is, but all of the landmarks I recognise are there; the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Central Park. And yes, you can run up the side of the first two, although getting on top of the spires is a real pain.

[dragonlord]

I have been reading your reviews every now and then, they are quite interesting and have made me want to get a few of the games, unfortunately I expect they wouldn't run on my laptop.

[Adam]

Apr 9, 2010 5:09:52 GMT -5 dragonlord said:

I have been reading your reviews every now and then, they are quite interesting and have made me want to get a few of the games, unfortunately I expect they wouldn't run on my laptop.

Thanks! Glad to hear it ;D

Ones that'll run on your computer (as it's basically the same as my old one):
- SupCom:FA, badly
- Total Annihilation and Age of Empires 2
- Drome Racers
- Alone in the Dark
- American McGee's Alice
- Psychonauts
- Mondo Agency and Chaos Funk
- Painkiller: Overdose

Basically all of them so far, except Prototype. Bah, I need to go back to Psychonauts. I haven't played it since the review went up. Although I doubt I'll play much of anything until I finish Prototype.

I tried (briefly) a few more of the freeware games last night. I didn't play any of them for very long (some of them didn't even work), but here are some summaries. I'll try and post another proper review later - I haven't done Torchlight yet.

Cholo is an extremely confusing FPS involving abstractified graphics, hackable enemies and green. Lots of green. You pretty much have to read the manual to have any concept of what's going on or how to play it. I skimmed through, then gave up. I didn't uninstall it, and might have a proper shot some other time, but of note is that I might as well not bother when I have Crysis to play.

Clean Asia didn't work. Score.

Earthworm Jim appears to be either a copy of an older title or an extremely old-school platform action game. Probably the former. I played a little bit of it, but was apparently unable to kill the birds that kept buzzing me, knocking off little bits of health. Maybe there was another button I hadn't found, or something. So, I died, shrugged, and moved on.

Exit Fate seems to be an RPG in the style of Legend of Chrono Fantasy (see what I did there?). Text-based dialogue, almost-top-down viewpoint, simple graphics. I watched (and read) some intro before my low boredom threshold kicked in while the protagonist was talking to some friend of his who'd come to wake him up. I gathered that they were about to go to war, but didn't feel particularly compelled to continue reading as I actually wanted to watch a movie. I left the game there; maybe I'll go and play it some time.

Mario Forever is, as far as I can tell, a perfect clone of one of the old Super Mario games. I suck at it and the sound is really annoying, but get it if you like Mario in any way, shape or form.

Natuki didn't seem to work properly, and the manual was in Japanese or something. Awesome.

RayHound is a weird little game by the guy behind Warning Forever (which you should definitely play, by the way). You're a spaceship, in a circular area, which flies around as you move the mouse. Turrets appear and fire red beams at you. You click to make a circle appear around your ship, inside which the red beams turn to harmless blue. You can deflect these in some way, and use them to destroy the turrets, although I'm not really sure how to actually do that; it seems a bit vague. Clever little game, I suppose, but not that playable for me.

Superstructure didn't install.

Tumiki Fighters is an unusual shoot'em'up. You and your enemies are made of square and triangular blocks, and enemies (or pieces of the larger enemies) fall to the ground as they're destroyed. You can fly into destroyed chunks to pick them up, adding them to the front of your ship in a katamari-esque conglomeration, which then acts as extra ablative armour. It's quite clever, although the sound got on my nerves after a while. I doubt I could play it for very long. I suppose there wasn't much else to it (that I saw) besides that one gimmick. The enemies exhibit a good variety of attack types and weapons, although they all behave the same way - hover in front of you and shoot at you until you fail to dodge something lethal and die, or until you ping enough shots off them for each section to fall off.

Were any of those good enough to really grab me? I don't think so. Sadly, freeware games that I actually really like seem few and far between. Fraxy, Glitch, Armageddon Empires, Iji, Toribash, Warning Forever and N are the only ones I've played 'properly' so far, although Spelunky would be on this list too if I had the patience for it. Given my occasional sprees of acquiring massive amounts of freeware games, seven isn't really a huge number. There are, I suppose, reasons for this. A game based around showcasing a clever mechanic is usually not going to grab me purely on the strength of its one trick, as they tend to lack interesting gameplay otherwise. A lot of freeware games are 2D platformers, which I don't like very much, or shoot'em'ups, which are very difficult to make unique and interesting. (And yes, this condemnation includes my own.)

[dragonlord]

Sadly I think prototype is the one that has sounded most interesting thus far, though I might also look into Painkiller or Psychonauts next time I'm bored and feel in the need of a new game. I already have Supreme Commander, which works reasonably until the numbers of units gets over a thousand or so, drome racers and age of empires 2. At least I did have drome racers once, not sure if I still do but I did used to quite enjoy playing it every now and then though. I have age of empires from my friends because they were going on about it and wanted people to join in some LAN games with it, but to honest I don't like it much, for largely the same problems you pointed out with it.

[Adam]

Apr 9, 2010 16:42:29 GMT -5 dragonlord said:

Sadly I think prototype is the one that has sounded most interesting thus far

I feel your pain. I've wanted Prototype since it came out. You are of course welcome to have a go at it on my laptop some time

Apr 9, 2010 16:42:29 GMT -5 dragonlord said:

though I might also look into Painkiller or Psychonauts next time I'm bored and feel in the need of a new game.

Good idea. Painkiller Gold is £6 on Steam and includes both the original game and the Battle out of Hell expansion/half-sequel.

Apr 9, 2010 16:42:29 GMT -5 dragonlord said:

I have age of empires from my friends because they were going on about it and wanted people to join in some LAN games with it, but to honest I don't like it much, for largely the same problems you pointed out with it.

Aha, finally someone who agrees with me that 50 villagers managing four different finite resources is completely unnecessary! 'Bout time. ;D

I really should do that Torchlight review, shouldn't I?

[Adam]

Torchlight

What is it?: Dungeon-crawler RPG with heavy influence from Blizzard's manifold works. (Apart from StarCraft, obviously.)
Previous experience: This is a bit moot, as I'm writing this review having owned and played Torchlight now over the course of two weeks. Nil as of the beginning of the holidays, though, which I suppose is the reference point for these reviews.
Played recently: Not sure. Perhaps about 8-10 hours? More? I'm Level 23 now, I think.

Torchlight is quite a charming game. It's the graphics. Chunky, colourful and softly lit, they're apparently designed to be similar to World of Warcraft's, not that I have any experience with WoW. They're also designed to run on cheap-as-chips hardware, which is definitely a point in the game's favour (it even has a 'netbook mode' which drops performance requirements even further). The visuals are the first thing I noticed about the game, and the thing that attracted me to it; they quite remind me of BattleForge, actually, although they're a lot less demanding on ye olde CPU.

Gameplay itself is fairly simple and straightforward, complemented by a very good interface (most things are self-explanatory). You click on enemies to attack them, and if they don't die, click them again. Right click or press number keys to cast spells and use abilities. My main gripe with the combat is that it's very hard to actually see what's going on. When my character gets swarmed by baddies, I end up having no idea where he actually is or which one of them I'm clicking on. Sure, I'm a newbie to this genre, but even so. Fortunately, the game is extremely easy (it recommends "hard" or "very hard" for anyone who's actually played a dungeon-crawler before; I'm on "normal") and you can generally get away with it.

Torchlight has three distilled character classes - warrior (melee beatstick), rogue (ranged beatstick) and alchemist (magical beatstick). Any class can use weapons of any category, which I appreciate greatly, having played Hellgate: London. The differences presumably lie in the skill trees. The Alchemist's includes spells and summonings as well as generic ability increases (weapon masteries, that sort of thing) that probably end up in all the skill trees. Not all spells are created equal; at level 15 I got access to Ember Lightning, which happens (or at least seems) to be by far the most damaging attack in my arsenal. I think I've levelled that one up four times now.

Your character also has a pet. This pet can carry items for you, return to the surface to sell stuff on your behalf (for item-ditching while you're dungeon crawling) and fight. It can even learn spells, which is badass. How many dogs do you know of that can cast Heal All and Fireball spells?

Items. Items are the backbone of this sort of game, and just as with Hellgate: London, they don't quite work. Torchlight doesn't have Hellgate's problem of 2/3rds of the weapons you pick up being unusable (not to mention Hellgate's main problem, that of being a really bad game) but it does share one thing that bugs me: 99% of the stuff I pick up absolutely pales in comparison to the Unique Coruscating Bull's Hammer Staff (yeah, they all have names like that) I've been wielding for seven levels. Random rare item drops are pretty cool, but have the side effect that almost everything you see in shops or loot from enemies will be inferior. You also have no real control over what special rules your items have, so when you upgrade you're usually making some compromise. You can add special rules to items at an exorbitant fee, but when you do, there's a small-but-increasing chance that the procedure will instead remove all of the item's special rules. I paid several thousand gold to buff a piece of armour up from three special rules to six, and then the next enchantment attempt wiped it completely. What a waste.

On top of that, items usually have stat requirements (there are four stats, Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Defence) as well, which inevitably end up relying on stat buffs granted by other items you're wearing. I found myself carrying around a replacement pair of boots for about three levels' worth of time until I had amassed enough Strength increases to maintain the minimum Str of 46 I needed to wield my 299-damage uber melee weapon after taking off the boots I'd been using before, which happened to grant a +8 to Strength. Aargh! It's a bit less confusing than this in game, but it's no less annoying. You usually have to identify rare items before you can use them, too, which is accomplished through 'identify scrolls'. Fortunately, at some point you can buy a spell which does the same thing, eliminating the need to continually buy more identifiers.

Sure, the end result of 23 levels' worth of careful item selection is a pretty pimp character. The predominance of less powerful items gives the feeling that your character is actually far stronger than he's supposed to be at this point (which I doubt, as the game's difficulty curve is still climbing at its smoothly gradual rate), but I don't really have many choices. Most of the stuff I pick up will never be used, and gets dumped on my dog's back, whereupon he goes off and sells it for me. Inventories fill up quickly for little reward, and shifting stuff around is pretty time-consuming.

Overall, though, I like Torchlight. It's quite relaxing due to the generally mindless nature of the combat, but also has the pleasure (for me, at least) of being able to horribly min-max my character with the game's full consent. I'm not breaking any background or thematic elements by doing this, nor am I cheating. It is, after all, what you're supposed to do. The visuals are charming and welcoming, as I mentioned above, and the item-based system that makes people get addicted to dungeon crawlers also makes the game feel quite rewarding. Even if I don't change my equipment that much, I'm still accumulating gold and XP, which means new abilities (or rather, more levels in Ember Lightning).

And (are you seeing a pattern here?) it was £3.75 in a Steam sale. Go Steam.

[Adam]

Soul Calibur II

What is it?: Flashy weapon-based fighting game.
Previous experience: none. Well, I had a go at SC4 once ages ago.
Played recently: quite a lot. None of it particularly skillfully, but hey, it's a fighting game, what do you expect?

SC2 was first introduced to me a couple of weeks ago. I and three other friends all congregated at a fifth friend's house for a few days' stay. On the first night, that we got the PS2 working, and the first game we tried was this.

We spent a lot of time on it that week.

Since coming home, I've gotten hold of the Gamecube version and got it running on an emulator (a rather fantastic piece of software called Dolphin). It works fine, although the menus break unless you enable Safe Texture Cache. I keep playing it, although I did return to and finish American McGee's Alice last night. This review will be about the Gamecube version. There's little difference between them except for the licensed character; the PS2 version has some bloke called Heihachi from Tekken, the Xbox version gets Spawn, and the Gamecube version has Link (yes, that Link).

As I mentioned, the Soul Calibur series deviate slightly from the average fighting game by including weapons as the main focus of combat. Characters can still kick and perform various bizarre grappling/execution-type moves that the game understatingly calls "throws", but the bulk of the damage is dealt by the weapons. This helps differentiate each character significantly. I'm not sure how many of them have fighting styles based in reality, but most of them are pretty unique amongst their peers, even at the simple level we were playing at.

There are three attack buttons - horizontal attacks, which are easier to hit with; vertical attacks, which are easier to avoid but tend to do more damage; and kicks, which seem to be useful situational tools. Alongside those is your trusty block button, not that my reflexes are quick enough to use it appropriately in the middle of combat. Each hit will briefly cause its target to recoil in pain or be knocked down/away/up into the air, interrupting whatever they were doing, so (especially if your character has rapid attacks or a good reach) the best defence is generally a good offense. This does lead to problems of the 'spam' kind. One character, Raphael the old'th-century duellist, has a fast vertical attack that does decent damage and can quite easily keep an unskilled opponent stunlocked for the (short) duration of the game. My friend James has a very fast thumb. He destroys with Raphael.

Each fighter has a staggering number of moves, most of which are surprisingly easily accessed. Few moves require more than three or four commands, and even those are usually quite simple. There are of course exceptions, such as Talim's Monsoon Season chain-throw which is crazily complicated, and you need to be very much in control of what you're doing and what's going on on the screen to use them fluidly and rapidly, but a short while in Practice mode will let you pick up a few nice tricks.

The reason such a huge movelist (seriously, we're talking 60+ moves per character here, at a guess) is so distilled is due to the occasional bit of context sensitivity and excellent use of 8-way movement. Soul Calibur works in three dimensions. There's no jump button (some characters do have jumping moves, and holding block+up does a little realistic sort of jump), but pushing up or down moves you around your opponent. This allows for evasive manoeuvres, positioning your opponent to slam them into a wall or off the edge of the arena, and so on. On top of this, though, pressing a directional key in tandem with an attack command can completely change which move you're doing. Holding (or double-tapping) the button can do something else entirely. Random button-mashing, so long as it's random enough, can actually look pretty stylish in Soul Calibur as your characters twirl, leap and lunge unpredictably about the place. This does have a downside in that doing the exact move you want can be quite difficult, even if you can remember which of the eight directions you press in combination with Horizontal Attack to do a crouching sweep.

The reason SC2 has grabbed me is because of this depth. My interest in games (of both kinds) has by now given rise to a strong curiosity and interest as regarding their actual mechanics. Soul Calibur is good flashy fun, and a laugh to play with mates, but the thing that draws me to it most is the way it works. That's just me, though.

The character design is solid. Each of the characters is instantly recognisable; they're different heights, different builds, and exhibit a wide variation of costumes, colour, and armament. SC2 also has its fair share of weird standouts. There are two samurai, a female ninja in a bright red bodysuit, an old-fashioned fencer/duellist, an evil mastermind knight, a lizard man (imaginatively called Lizardman), a woman with an extending whip sword who dresses either like an S&M dominatrix or a Pirates of the Caribbean-era naval officer, a towering golem with his heart on the outside of his chest, a weird... thing consisting of a gigantic purple eyeball with bits floating around it that copies other people's fighting styles, and best of all, an honest to god zombie pirate. Awesome.

As I mentioned, they also have very different playstyles. Characters with big, powerful weapons like Nightmare and Astaroth specialise in keeping the enemy at range and doing heavy damage with each hit. At the other end of the scale, Talim and Taki have blades barely the length of their forearms, and use evasion and rapid attacks to harass and stunlock the enemy into submission. Given that even Nightmare's six-foot ubersword (which is a manifestation of evil, and has an eye) takes six or seven hits to reduce an enemy's health bar to zero and even then only knocks them out, one must assume that all their weapons are made of soft-play foam and rubber, but whatever.

Voice acting is also pretty good, and smacks of considerable effort, with each character having seventy or eighty different sayings that crop up at various points. Some of the characters are rather irritating, but that's inevitable, and it's made up for by Raphael being condescendingly upper-class ("How boring!") and Nightmare being a real, playable supervillain ("Souls! I must have more souls!"). Graphics are lovely despite the game's age; they may not be of the highest quality by modern standards, but that's only due to a lack of bloom/HDR and the fact that the game was designed for a fixed 640x512 resolution. They're clean, colourful, appealing, and depict imaginative and varied characters and arenas. Weapons leave coloured trails behind them as they swipe through the air, which sounds silly, but when you think about it, helps you actually see what just happened. It also smooths the weapon's movement. One of the other games we played was a Lord of the Rings hack'n'slasher, and the characters' swords seem to flicker from angle to angle rather than actually move.

Do I recommend SC2? Sure. If you have a console, doubly so (as you probably won't have to shell out for USB controllers or something to enable multiplayer). I couldn't get Nathan's copy to work with the PS2 emulator I was using, but the Gamecube version I have now plays flawlessly. (PS2 emulators are also a pain in the neck to set up.) You'll need a computer with a decent processor, but I don't think the graphics card matters that much, letting you turn the resolution up and slap on some anti-aliasing without suffering a particular framedrop. You should be fine with most half-decent dual core systems, I'd guess. Something notable I found - this may be a quirk of my system, or it may not - is that the game runs more smoothly (I got about a 10fps increase!) with the emulator's "Enable 16x anisotropic filtering" option turned on than it does when it's off. And remember to turn on "Safe Texture Cache", otherwise the menus half-disappear.

[dragonlord]

I feel your pain. I've wanted Prototype since it came out. You are of course welcome to have a go at it on my laptop some time

I may well take you up on that at some point.

I've never been particularly good at games like Soul Calibur II, probably partly because I've never had a games console myself I suppose and only ever play those sorts of games when I'm round at friends. Thus the character I am best with is usually the one that I seem most able to accidentally make good attacks with in the course of random button mashing. I particularly remember one such occasion when my friends and I were playing a game like that (it might even have been one of the Soul Calibur series), and there was a character whose weapon was a full height staff. One of its moves seemed to consist of repeatedly hitting the opposing character in the groin with its staff, this was quite effective at doing damage and by quirk of chance also happened to be one of the moves that coincided with my random button mashing a lot. Needless to say we all found that highly amusing and I kept using that character.