Suddenly, Videogames

3 Oct

For reasons known only to the vast, pulsating brains floating in supercooled jelly that act as EA’s key decision makers, the single map available in the Battlefield 3 open beta is a miserably chokepointed infantry-only map, and features none of the tantalising tanks’n'jets’n'jeeps we’ve seen in various marketing montages. I’m complaining, of course, of the lack of Caspian Border, which appeared on a tiny handful of password-protected servers before being promptly bundled into the back of DICE’s Hoarding Van so we could all get back on with the much more interesting business of being sniped by some twat hiding in a Parisian hedge. Hopefully before everything breaks.

I’ve only reached level 12, while most people seem to vary between 16-ish and 35, which means I haven’t yet unlocked the ability to have a good time. Weapon unlocks and attachments are mockingly superior to the basic kit, and unlike Call of Duty – where you’re forced to pick a single attachment that best compliments your playstyle – BF3 lets the rich and powerful slap all manner of scopes, stupid torches that completely blind everyone, and upgraded ammo onto their fully automatic deathsticks, while the impoverished are left to be killed over and over and over, slaves to sluggish controls and infuriatingly inconsistent weapon accuracy.

I will say that things are looking up a bit now that I’ve tried the shotgun. It’s unique in that you can point it at someone, fire, and semi-reliably inflict a modicum of damage on them before they can turn around and shine that fucking flashlight right in your face I mean my God.

Here’s a few things  that, I would hope, are slightly more pleasurable to have going into your eyes than a barrel-mounted 300,000 watt bulb: two reviews and a first impressions thing I done wroted for Gaming Daily.

  • Hard Reset Demo Thoughts – ‘From the harsh lights of translucent billboards to the cracked, rain-slicked streets, Hard Reset boasts a vision of the future that is at once oppressive and bright, broken and bleeding-edge.’
  • Xotic Review – ‘One of the best smugness enablers since I was tapping my initials into the high score table of some ridiculous jet-skiing arcade game over a decade ago, before the leisure centre replaced all the cabinets with pool tables and vending machines.’
  • Fotonica Review - ‘Five static courses plus one infinitely generated and one multiplayer course are available,and that’s about it, really – a kind of Usain Bolt cheese dream simulator.’

I may or may not be, depending on how much opinion I can feasibly fit into a feature article, be getting something in print within the next few weeks. Nothing special – university newspaper – but it’s quite big, and delves into considerably more consequential topics than my usual computer game spewings, so I’m a little excited about the possibility. I may even do something of a self-critique of it on here. Now won’t that be special.

And Then I Went To The Eurogamer Expo, pt.3 – The Games

1 Oct

Part 1

Part 2

Ah, videogames. Let’s not prat about with a real introductory paragraph; here’s what I played, and just a smidge of what I thunk.

Battlefield 3

The only game I queued more than once to play, though admittedly that was because a) the line was comparatively short and b) rounds were extremely short, and we got kicked off after just one – about four minutes of play time. Even more disappointing was that we were playing a map designed for 64 people with between 10 to 12, and was in fact the same map in the open beta that everyone is rightly complaining doesn’t contain any vehicles. Or fun. Even with truly distinct classes, excellent sound design and impressive tech, it’s genuinely difficult to decide how such a brief, sparse experience affected my purchasing intentions – by all accounts, both this and the beta are completely unrepresentative of Battlefield’s trademark combined arms battles. File under ‘Hmmm’.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 2 with a few more places to put skill points, basically. And that’s great – ME2′s combat was a phenomenal improvement over the laughable awfulness of ME1′s interpretation, and here it’s been augmented with some weighty melee moves. One guy in front of me, in fact, spent much of the action-oriented demo striding up to armoured bad guys and pistol-whipping them to death, including the section’s final boss, which exploded in Shepard’s face after sustained gun-butts to the shin. My own run-through wasn’t so much tactically questionable as just flat-out awful, my untrained hands stabbing at the mysterious controller of something called an “Xbox 360″. Regardless, I had fun shooting things in a series known mainly for rambling dialogue, and if Bioware take the same ‘expand, don’t overhaul’ approach to ME3′s conversation and role-playing systems as they have to its combat, this could be very special indeed.

A brief moment of some screens not having anyone playing on them, a few minutes after we all piled inside.

Smuggle Truck

A brief detour to the Indie Arcade here: Smuggle Truck is a side-scrolling driving/physics game, whereby you attempt to navigate a pickup truck full of illegal immigrants over bumpy desert terrain. Sadly, our comrades are prone to bouncing clean out of the vehicle should the truck take a particularly nasty knock, and soon I was throwing migrants all over the place – losing them all would end the game. Eventually, a baby, wrapped and still smiling, lept from the back end like a pinball, and landed – to my horror, as well as that of anyone watching over my shoulder – a few feet in front of me. I can’t stop. I can’t even slow down.

I ran over a baby.

If this all sounds hugely disrespectful, the game itself is intended – I think – to draw attention the dreadful things immigrants to the US have to endure in order to improve their standard of living, rather than to mock them outright. Still, when the second baby went flying and landed, head-first, in a pile of quicksand before slowly descending out of sight, I understood why Apple were a bit iffy about including the iOS version in their store.

These Robotic Hearts of Mine

Click on cogs to rotate the hearts attached to them until they all point upright. Decent blend of narrative and puzzling with plenty of eerie ambience, but…if it were a person, it would wear lenseless glasses and use Tumblr.

Blocks That Matter

A 2D platformer filled with destroyable blocks that, as in Minecraft, can be collected and placed elsewhere to create bridges, steps and traps.Of the Indie Arcade games I played, this was easily the most substantial and satisfying to beat, and the only one I wished I got more time with. Some entirely unexplained restrictions on where I could place my blocks caused a bit of avoidable frustration, but the idea and execution are otherwise solid.

Really Big Sky

Retro two-stick shooter, played on a keyboard, with gorgeous environments and effects. There’s not much original stuff here at all, besides the delightfully British man running comms, so I’m not too glum about never seeing it again.

Uncharted 3

Naughty Dog had laid out a few multiplayer games, a bizarre failure to acknowledge their game’s strengths that’s almost on par with the BF3 demo. Online in Uncharted 2 was fiddly and had no sense of weapon balance — number 3 has actually tightened things up so that I didn’t feel completely helpless using the default loadout, but hand-to-hand combat (which in previous singleplayers was swift and brutal) is still an embarrassing dance of missed swings and lame canned animations. Uncharted 3 is still a day-one purchase as far as this reporter is concerned, though that’s based entirely on qualities not evident in multiplayer.

Modern Warfare 3

I was dumped in a chair next to a stranger, who remain entirely silent and emotionless throughout, for twenty minutes of the new Spec Ops mode. Much like the Zombies mode of Treyarch’s Call of Duty offerings, we were tasked with beating back increasing waves of enemies, earning cash for doing so and using it to buy bigger and better guns for when the choppers and exploding suicide dogs showed up.

As a co-op mode, the fact that your enemies are alive and toting automatic rifles make this a far more tense and enjoyable experience than the bleak, doddering Zombies mode. Spec Ops is absolutely the newest thing in MW3, so hopefully it won’t make the mistake that MW2 did with its equivalent and close it off to anyone who wasn’t a Steam friend. With more people playing, this could be the surprise hit of what will be the year’s biggest money-printer.

***

There were a few other games I got my hands on: Skyrim, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Saint’s Row 3, most notably, but didn’t get enough time with any for a worthwhile opinion to crystallise in my brain. Next year will, fund allowing, hopefully be an all-weekend affair. How could it not be? For eight hours I got to explore a side of games – a massive, gregarious, exciting new side of games – which you can’t ever appreciate sat at a screen in a bedroom.

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And Then I Went To The Eurogamer Expo, pt.2 – The Line

27 Sep

Part 1 is here.

Apparently the Earl’s Court tube station has two exits on opposite sides, and the directions I’d been given didn’t specify which was closest to the arena itself. Regardless, it was a safe bet that the one I picked wasn’t it. After ten minutes or so of wandering around Greater London, I decided to just find a group of at least two people and tail them for a bit. Sure enough, they unknowingly led me straight to Earl’s Court proper. I should be in the next Splinter Cell.

World of Tanks brought some tanks, whereas Uncharted 3 brought a billboard. Which is fair enough, as they probably couldn't have brought any charts.

The queue to get in, six bodies wide and at least a thousand long, was a funny old thing. Even though it snaked down the side and around the back of the building, I was inside in less time than it took to get served at the MacDonald’s at JFK Airport. Still, the doors had barely cracked open, so we all had a bit of wait ahead. In the meantime, fellow punters waved idly at approaching friends, a portly man and his bearded cohort discussed the finer points of Assassin’s Creed mythology, and a passing tout quietly insulted me after I ignored his offer of an additional ticket at five times face value. I didn’t catch the whole phrase, but it began with “Fucking”.

Much like on the tube here, I glanced around to take stock of my company for the day. Aaaaaaaaaand, we’re mostly white guys in our early twenties. Well, that was fun. And liberal guilt-y.

Finally inside after a quarter-hour of phone-fiddling, I grabbed a plasticky wristband and entered the main hall: a gloriously loud cavern of glowing lights and walls upon walls of hi-def LCD screens, each one the size of my desk back home. It’s big, it’s busy, and it’s very, very exciting.

Now, to go hunch over a smallish monitor in the Battlefield 3 booth.

Next time: I actually do play some games, after lying about doing so in the previous post.

And Then I Went To The Eurogamer Expo, pt.1 – The Journey

24 Sep

Famed philosopher and poetry warlock Edward Monkton once wrote: “It’s not the destination, it’s the glory of the ride“.

Monkton, I will box you right now, because that statement is about as accurate as a blunderbuss loaded with styrofoam. Travelling anywhere is a tedious gauntlet of physical exertion, crushing boredom, constantly increasing monetary expenses and queues. Flying is probably the worst, partly because of the unavoidable lack of privacy and concessions to personal space but mainly because the descent has always caused a hugely irritating sensation within my ears, both of which stubbornly refuse to pop, and could perhaps best be described as feeling like someone is squeezing my head in a vice while the resulting brain-juices dribble out the two canals. Basically, unless the hotel is filled with snakes, the chances of the ride somehow being more worthwhile than time spent at the destination are, in fact, slim.

All things considered, the drive, Tube and walk to London’s Eurogamer Expo (my first) could have been worse. Driving from my home in Cardiff to a 24-hour multistorey car park in Hammersmith means roughly 130-odd miles on the M4, one of the South’s longest and most nondescript motorways. Entertainment, therefore, came in the form of two of my legendary mixed CDs, which included such material as:

  • A Bollywood-styled song intended to promote the second-most-recent series of a popular online sitcom
  • Biffy Clyro, lots of
  • Four songs based on a certain creation of Lauren Faust’s, one of which being an incredibly skillful rap
  • Zebrahead’s magnificent cover of Wannabe

London does, of course, hate cars like it hates eateries which aren’t Pret A Manger. I’m enormously grateful that a convenient place to stash my Clio for a few hours is located in Hammersmith, which is just far enough out of the heart of our capital to avoid becoming an impassable labyrinth of dense traffic and one-way systems – yet close enough to contain a robust Underground station. Earl’s Court, where the Expo is held,  is two stops away – ample time to give my carriage a scan and ponder if anyone else is headed for some fresh videogames. Many are wearing suits. A handful are at least in their fifties. Some are fast asleep. Possibly not, then.

Moderately sure I hadn’t stepped foot in this part of town before, I’d been sure to check for directions on Eurogamer’s site. Luckily, they said the station was right in front of Earl’s Court itself. There was no small degree of unease when I crested the exit’s stairs and found myself looking at a branch of Subway.

Next Time: I actually find the damn place, and play some games.

 

Bugging Out

20 Sep

The screenshots in this post reveal which character I’m playing; if you’re part of the GD game and want to keep playing in total anonymity, either go back or try to avoid looking at the big colourful rectangles. Just sayin’.

For the past five days I’ve been locked in a battle of wits with staff and friends of Gaming Daily in Jupiter’s Folly, a browser-based boardgame that has twelve players racing to build the most efficient crystal-mining operation on the surface of a desolate but mineral-rich planet, building fragile alliances with each other along the way – knowing full well our friends could backstab us at any moment in the name of unchecked capitalistic greed.

And that a nice daydream I had. In reality, for the past five days I’ve been moaning on Twitter along with some staff and friends of Gaming Daily about the metric assload of hostile aliens in Jupiter’s Folly, a browser-based boardgame that has twelve players unexcitedly batting away/being devoured by swarms of the omnipresent bastards on the surface of a desolate but arthropod-rich planet, occasionally asking each other to borrow some pesticide or grenades – knowing full well that the other nearest player to a packed, impregnable nest probably isn’t putting as much effort into fighting it as they are.

I understand we’re still relatively early into the game. But these fanged twats have had an adverse effect on more or less every single one of my attempts at both mining and player interaction. I can’t spend any of my money on new mines because I need dozens of new soldiers to guard my existing sites from the oncoming horde. I can’t play the diplomatic route because the insect war is taking up so many resources I can’t use them to appease potential allies, and I can’t screw over people over because both myself more or less everyone else is sufficiently wrapped up  fighting bugs that causing additional problems during these crucial early stages would be a dick move so turgid that the recipient would, quite understandably, never speak to me again (especially problematic if that person turned out to be a fellow GD writer or, worse, editor).

Their purpose is, I think, fairly clear: they’re catalysts, an uncontrollable influence introduced early in the game to force us to try out interaction, trading and sabotage. They’ll be gone by the end of the game in a few weeks time (individual turns take hours to complete, so I’d be surprised if we finish before this time next month), but by then we’ll have been trained as devious industrialist geniuses and, deprived of cannon fodder, inevitably begin turning on each other. That’s the idea, anyway. Probably.

But here’s the thing: we’re human beings. We don’t need external forces guiding us to become scheming, self-serving villains (if you’re in this game: don’t give me that look, you know it’s true) as long as we know it’ll help us win the game a bit easier. Likewise, if we want to take the peaceful route, we won’t necessarily be strong-armed into joining forces by the threat of hungry insects – we’re perfectly capable of perceiving the benefits of co-operation in a cutthroat game world without, thank you very much.

So, as long as you and your friends have a modicum of initiative, bugs are ultimately an irrelevant addition. I wish that was their only problem. But:

- Swarm nests, vast strongholds of the alien menace that act as spawn points, are dotted seemingly randomly over the map. Considering you can’t take a look at the world before choosing a starting point, this means some players may be constantly bombarded with a never-ending stream of bugs from three or four positions while some lucky sods don’t even have to deal with one. Of course, the latter will shoot ahead in the race for crystal, riding on the coattails of his good fortune rather than any tactical skill. I don’t know each player’s situation in our game, but there are already some huge score discrepancies which the guys at the bottom have, if I’m honest, little chance of closing.

- Groups of bugs also move randomly around the board. While the temptation to say ‘And by random, I mean consistently towards me’ is great, the real problem with this is that it makes reacting to them extremely tedious. When moving a unit of friendly soldiers to what turns out to be the wrong map node takes over fifteen hours just to undo, never mind correct, these swarms’ greatest strength is often that it’s painfully difficult to adequately prepare for them.

- Going back to the nests a bit, sorry, but they are just complete fucking horseshit. Besides these being immune to certain offensive cards for no clear reason, they’re massively overpowered. The standard squad size for troops is twelve, with a single dice to roll in combat which adds to that number. Nests are generally at around 20o-strength, and gain an extra dice every time they spawn a new batch of bugs. To have a good chance of attacking and destroying a nest, you’d need at least 230 men, plus you’d have to level them all up by – yup – fighting smaller swarms in order to gain a competitive number of die. Oh, and every new swarm will usually have a strength of at least 16 and will inherit the nest’s rapidly inflating dice level.

Guys, that is just too damn big of a headache to have to deal with in the first week. And you will need to wipe out those nests in that time, otherwise  they’ll grow to too high a level and will simply continue pumping out laughably powerful units to come and break all our mining stuff.

In my ideal version of Jupiter’s Folly (it also begins by giving me a bonus 5,000 crystal and is actually called James’ Dashing Haircut), space bugs just wouldn’t exist. But, if they did, I can think of two distinct yet superior variations on how they should be implemented:

1) Bugs increase in level and swarm size over time, but you can see their positions on the map at a far greater distance, in addition to their travel routes. There are no nests – once they die, there are no replacements, so we can move swiftly on the much more enticing prospect of corporate espionage rather than playing a half-baked combat RTS. The idea here is that insects remain a considerable threat, but you have the foresight to be able to plan accordingly. Instead of a panicked scramble to drop some soldiers near an approaching cluster, we have a more cerebral goal of balancing our mining needs with the need for a very specifically sized and levelled army. If it rolls right over you, tough – you didn’t plan well enough. But at least you had the chance to plan.

2) Swarms are small and weak – any of the units you begin a game with could kill one without many casualties. But, they can reproduce, and create swarms of identical size whenever they’re in a darkened section of the map. In other words, if nobody has expanded to that area yet, there’s a good chance a number of these little pests will be emerging from them soon. This type of enemy wouldn’t require constant tactical considerations, but do encourage players to venture out into areas they might otherwise not have bothered to. Here, the risk of sending manpower out into the black is rewarded with the possibility of finding new crystal deposits, as well as eliminating the insect’s hiding places. Of course, this raises new issues to chew over – if you leave a darkened area alone, might it help your cause by sending packs of bugs at a competing player on the other side?

I can’t remember the last time I played a game with such grand possibilities for interesting, intriguing, infuriating interactions with other human players, nor a game where a single element (possibly intended to be gone by the halfway point) has soured the experience to such a degree. I can accept that we’ll never see a Jupiter’s Folly without bugs, but I’d settle for seeing them toned down to become the temporary distraction they’re actually worthy of being.

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Things Found to Have Occurred

18 Sep

Sat down? Good, this will provide ample opportunity for me to bleat at you about what’s been going on these past weeks – some of it not even about games.

Part 1: The Part About Games

Obviously I’ve been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution,which takes pride of place as this post’s image theme. Shamefully, I hadn’t even played the original until last year, and Invisible War remains untouched, so I wasn’t able to honestly join in with the collective sighs of relief that oh boy, someone had finally got a DX sequel right. That said, it’s a magnificent game in its own right, a deep and compelling story of conspiracy and face-punching set in an artistically unique and richly detailed world. How great exactly is the scale of freedom? Easily the biggest complaint being levelled at Human Revolution is the inclusion of unavoidable boss fights, a jarring misstep considering every other section caters for shooting, sneaking and subterfuge. And yet, players promptly found clever and/or cheeky ways to end these fights without firing a shot. It’s not quite reminiscent of DX1′s pseudo-bosses, which you could circumvent by uttering a code phrase which makes them explode or, better yet, simply running away, but it’s always good to see an FPS which asks ‘So how do you want to do this?’ rather than ‘Which assault rifle do you want to shoot up this corridor with?’. Even when it locks you in a room with a furious man with a minigun for a forearm.

I also moved house, which isn’t particularly interesting, except it meant that, for the first time since June, I had broadband with actual broadband speeds, rather than something akin to a man reading an encyclopedia aloud down a length of hosepipe. In game terms, this meant I could download Battlefield: Bad Company 2 without causing horrific slowdown for myself and everyone else in my home, having purchased it weeks ago in the Steam Summer Sale. ULTIMATE VERDICT: it’s okay. I love how the weapons handle and sound, each having just enough recoil to feel powerful without becoming completely unwieldy. Other than that, there’s nothing special about what I’ve played so far (entirely the singleplayer campaign, as per my procedure of completing offline modes before entering the online fustercluck); it’s shorter than Black Ops, the story plods along, tonally shifting between Saving Private Ryan and Delta Farce with a peculiar regularity, and only one level – a hilly desert, previously filled with seawater and thus dotted with crusty shipwrecks – is visually distinct from places we’ve visited in games dozens of times before. Strangely, while I bought this to prepare for the upcoming Battlefield 3, it hasn’t changed my expectations at all – based on the admittedly dubious sources of trailers and alpha footage, this looks like it’s aiming to be an entirely different beast. Considering it’s a modern-day shooter set in the Middle East, I suppose it has to try.

Briefly returning to console land (Christ, it’s been what – a year and a bit?), I picked up Resistance 3 for the PS3 and blasted through it while pointlessly attempting to sniff back an incoming cold. The change from grunting military epic to a more personal, down-home tale was a welcome one, and I didn’t even think I missed being able to carry a dozen huge guns at once (Resistance 2 limited you to a primary and secondary) until I was switching between five in a single fight. That said, the emphasis on character-focused storytelling is somewhat at odds with a series that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go with its lore. Here’s a short version: a parasitic alien race called the Chimera have occupied Earth, and after two games which end with apparent victories, it’s only gotten worse (way to make replaying the old ones feel completely futile, guys!). Meanwhile there’s a bunch of incredibly tantalising backstory that literally everybody wants to hear, but remains infuriatingly stuck with passing mentions in notes and audio logs. I can’t fault the vast majority of R3 – it’s great fun, even now I’m a mouse and keyboard convert -  but perhaps the reason it left me cold was that it’s based on a story so afraid of revealing anything important, in case Insomniac want to use some of it further down the line, that the scraps we were given couldn’t sustain yet another full-length adventure.

Part 2: The Serious Stuff

“One speaker described a British Tactical PsyOps team which had been working in Iraq. Its staff consisted of a builder, a fashion photographer, a telecoms engineer, a nursing graduate, several snipers and a mortar platoon on transfer to make up the numbers.”

After five goddamn months, I could finally be bothered to finish reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News. As a lowly student of journalism, rather than a card-carrying, cape-wearing Grand Master of professional writing, I kind of went into it with the same mindset as a textbook. This was all wrong – it’s a book that aims to expose rather than teach, since every tale of embarrassing failure or ridiculous cosying-up to politicians, PRs and crooks is delivered with the kind of incredulity that assumes the reader knows how horrible it can sometimes get. As a result, I don’t think Flat earth News made me smarter, but I felt a bit smart whilst reading. It’s also surprisingly funny, in a kind of droll manner I can’t quite sufficiently articulate, and ends with three chapters each dedicated to a particular newspaper and packed with so many moreish details I wish he’d write a revised edition that does the same for all the major UK broadsheets.

Actually, there was one thing I’ll be sure to consider in my career: if you’re ever meant to be taking care of a source who has sensitive information on Israel’s nuclear weapons plans, don’t leave him alone to be kidnapped by Mossad agents. That’s quite important.

Incidentally, it wasn’t long after I completed this encyclopedia of journalistic mishaps that Johann Hari was found to have been a) copying quotes from other sources to use in his own interviews, ostensibly because what he gathered himself didn’t always make sense on paper (surely a fault of his technique rather than the interviewee?), b) policed his own Wikipedia article from negative comments whilst editing those of his rivals, calling them homophobes and anti-semites and c) fabricating details for a piece describing a visit to the Central African Republic, for which he was awarded an Orwell Prize in 2008. I mean, damn.

In the interests of disclosure, I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan to begin with, but always found his style too sanctimonious to be the work of an habitual liar. I also find it odd the majority of ensuing Twitter-amplified anger has been directed at his quote wrangling rather than his Wikipedia antics. Common troll’s work, of course, made considerably worse with the knowledge that he was using an alias named for a real-life university acquaintance (who now holds a senior position at The Times – yikes), as well as the infuriating hypocrisy of posting libellous bullshit on one of the internet’s most-read sites when, in 2007, he was threatening to sue a blogger for libel – specifically, for calling his journalistic integrity into question. Incredible.

We haven’t seen the last of him either. He’s on a temporary suspension from the Independent while he takes a training course in the States – because how else can you know not to be dishonest in the press without private tutoring? – and has a decent sized circle of columnist friends who’ll probably vouch for him upon his return. It’s the least they can do, after he kept their Wikipedia pages clean of anything other than glowing praise as well. Frankly, though, any sane person should be more worried about what’s to become of the Indy. I’ve always enjoyed it, but their apologetic treatment of a man with such contempt for things like ‘honesty’ and ‘his readers’ has very unpleasant implications. Which is a terrible shame, as on the same day that Hari confessed to it all, his newspaper was running a marvelous and long-overdue investigation into Steve Whittamore, private eye and Fleet Street’s go-to man for dodgy info-gathering, on the front page. Solid, fearless journalism, forever to be overshadowed by one rogue hack. I’ll defend this craft to the death but Christ, no wonder Nick Davies had to write a book.

Part 3: New York New York, Newww-www Yoooork

I was in New York. It was great! Even with an underground train system you could bake clay in, I can easily see myself living there, on the conditions that I a) lived within walking distance on my day job and b) had a day job that made me filthy rich. We were there when Hurricane Irene passed through, five days after an earthquake rattled the border patrol desk I was passing through at JFK – there was some rain, and then we went to the Hard Rock Cafe in the evening, but just in case we needed to shack up in the hotel we ended up spending over $30 on a modest day’s rations from a cramped, sweaty deli.

NYC: The USA’s most populous city. Still doesn’t have any supermarkets.

I won’t list all the stuff I did, nor the places I recognised from various games (a lot), but here are some things I learned: one, Jack Daniels makes the greatest barbecue sauce in the known universe. Two, the holes in the side of a pair of Converse are wide enough to allow complete waterlogging from a brief step in a puddle. Three, don’t feel bad for ignoring people who try to talk to you on the street; their indignation might sting, but you may have just saved twenty-five bucks in horribly-titled rap CDs you’re only going to throw away when you get home.

Part 4: Torchwood

Finished, was terrible.

The Curious Case of Wayne Haas

6 Sep

When he pulled a gun on me, in the lobby of my own apartment building, I didn’t hesitate – a single, sharp punch and he’s out cold. But of the dozens of men whose noses, arms and ribcages I’d broken during my time with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Wayne was the only one who didn’t truly deserve it.

I’d bumped into him a few days ago – he was manning the front desk at the police station I needed privileged access to. It happens we go way back – further than almost any other character in the game. He was my deputy during the botched SWAT operation that ended with me quitting the force and Wayne with the blood of a 15-year-old boy on his hands. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t entirely pleased to see me, and even less so when I asked him to break protocol and let me into the morgue.

In seconds, he was on the offensive. It’s my fault he was bumped to desk work. I’m putting his job at risk by demanding unauthorised access. I should have taken responsibility for the kid’s death. My attempts at talking him down – absolving him of blame and offering to keep his job safe – were met with accusations of condescension and, not entirely inaccurately, self-servitude. On the brink of enraging him completely, I released the pheromones.

There’s a situational but extremely helpful augmentation in DX:HR that,  when entering conversation with a person, lists some of their personality traits that should inform your dialogue choices. As a last resort before they tell you to bugger off for good, you can sneakily douse them with chemicals with an accompanying argument that will either convince them to back down, or severely piss them off. Staring Wayne down, I plumped for the ‘Pressure’ option.

Unfortunately Adam Jensen is a sufficiently unscrupulous man to perceive pressuring someone as indistinct from blackmailing them, and after a short speech in which my character coldly reminded Wayne that his bosses wouldn’t like to hear there’s a bottle of pills in his wastebin, I was let through. At this point, it was reasonable to assume Wayne was hitting the switch just so his hand would be too busy to smash my robo-shades in fury. Yes, it sucked, but I was where I wanted to be without crawling through a child-size air vent for a change. He’ll get over it.

Several days and many thousands of air miles later, I’m back in town. Wayne didn’t get over it, and he’s waiting for me.

“Your little blackmail stunt cost me my job, asshole!”

He manages to squeeze a shot off before I knock him out, but it’s not the bullet hole that makes me feel bad. Unlike the balaclava-wearing, rifle-toting jerks that are most frequently on the wrong end of my mechanical fists, up until this point Wayne hadn’t wronged me in any unjustifiable way. He was just a man, doing his job, and I’d waltzed in and snatched it all away. I’d betrayed my promise to protect him, made him an unwilling fall guy for my antics, and ruined the only solid prospect this insecure, guilt-ridden soul had left in the world. No wonder he was resorting to a suicidal gunfight – I hadn’t defeated him, I’d broken him. He wasn’t even an enemy.

For a while, this felt like a frustrating result of discord between what the single-word dialogue option could reasonably be expected to entail and the uncharacteristically harsh response that actually came out of Jensen’s mouth. In retrospect, however, that wasn’t the reason I’ll remember Wayne much longer than how I tackled every other debate section in the game. Somehow, be it through good writing or convincing voice acting or notably emotive facial animation, this £25 electronic toy had forced me to care. To care about how I’d maltreated someone I might have been able to call a friend, about what would happen to him after I left him laid out on the marble floor in a pool of dribble and broken promises.

“You got my word. Whatever happens, I’ll take care of you”. I’m a monster.

We do horrible things in games. We shoot, stab, run over, blow up and, indeed, say nasty things to murderers and civilians alike. Often, it’s because they happen to be of no consequence, but more likely it’s because the game didn’t put in the effort to make its NPCs anything more than walking props and exposition conduits. My interactions with this guy weren’t so much a display of irritating problems as they were a triumph of characterisation and worldbuilding. For the rest of the game, I endeavoured to be as little of a twat as possible. How many people you only meet twice in a 25-hour game have that kind of effect? More importantly, how many times have you wanted look a victim square in their polygonal eyes and say, without a trace of irony or insincerity, “I’m sorry”?

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