That makes handing out our awards every year an excruciating task. Because there are plenty of games that did things well and many games that do them extraordinarily well, but only one that can be said to have done something best. These awards are a tribute to those games—the ones that, in a year of outstanding work, stood above the rest; the games that set the high mark for each category and put the challenge to developers in 2012: top that.

MMO of the Year:

DC Universe Online

The epic showdowns from the comic books and TV shows we grew up with are masterfully recreated in DC Universe Online with often grim intensity—and we’re not forced to be the good guy. Combat is refreshingly deep, the player customization gives incredible freedom (in both looks and play style), and Gotham and Metropolis are filled with secrets to explore and collectible goodies to find. Its costume collection system is the best ever made, and every MMO should steal its two-person Duo dungeons design. Every gamer should have this MMO installed, and play through it at least once—there’s hardly any reason not to, given the game’s generous free-to-play content—and then keep an eye out for content packs that emphasize their favorite characters, including Flash, Green Lantern, and Brainiac (pictured above).

Publisher Sony Online Entertainment
Developer Sony Online Entertainment

Simulation of the Year:

DCS: A-10C Warthog

Meticulously crafted by Moscow-based Eagle Dynamics, this über-accurate study simulation of the USAF’s A-10C Thunderbolt II close air support fighter sets the bar for PC combat flight sims so high it may never be eclipsed. From its fully clickable and stunningly accurate 3D cockpit to its high fidelity avionics and flight modeling, DCS: A-10C Warthog delivers a master class in advanced flight simming. If you want to be a fighter jock—a real fighter jock—it doesn’t get any better than this.

Publisher The Fighter Collection
Developer Eagle Dynamics

Strategy Game of the Year:

Frozen Synapse

Forethought is the key to any great strategy game, and Frozen Synapse delivers a brilliant tool to predict (but never guarantee) what’ll happen—a preview button. It’s around this single mechanic that all the other elements come together so elegantly. Positioning, setting the timing and rules of engagement of units—it’s all intuitive battle-programming, analogous to writing down a musical score and having it played back to you by an arena of rockets, machineguns, and splattered blood.

Publisher Mode 7 Games
Developer Mode 7 Games

Action Game of the Year:

Batman: Arkham City

Outside the confines of Arkham Asylum, Batman has, quite literally, the freedom to soar. After proving that it had the imagination and skill to make administering Batman’s signature rough justice to Gotham City’s worst a thrilling videogame experience, Rocksteady aimed even higher in the wide-open world of Batman: Arkham City. The result is a superhero game that convincingly immerses you not only into the being, but also the psyche of a lethal vigilante who—let’s face it—gets off on terrorizing his prey.

Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive
Developer Rocksteady

Adventure Game of the Year:

Gemini Rue

The lo-fi graphics, the classic adventure game mechanics, the Blade Runner-style combination of hard science fiction and gritty noir—Gemini Rue is steeped in PC gaming nostalgia. But don’t let that fool you: its fusion of a strong, linear narrative with gameplay that doesn’t leave the player on the sidelines is absolutely cutting-edge. Instead of overwrought puzzles and make-work, the game challenges us to navigate a labyrinth of conspiracy and deceit, questioning every character’s motives along the way—including our own.

Publisher Wadjet Eye Games
Developer Joshua Nuernberger

Indie Game of the Year:

Dungeons of Dredmor

We died from kicking a door down. We gained ludicrous XP from performing feats of “Heroic Vandalism.” We foolishly charged into a monster zoo, thinking our Dire Sandwiches could save us. And we paid with our lives. Again and again. But thanks to the creativity and diversity of character traits (rolling a wizard with Flesh-smithing, Fungal Arts, and Necronominco-nomics, to name just a few), Dredmor’s randomized dungeons and perma-deaths are an essential part of the fun, with every grisly demise leading to fresh possibilities and unique stories.

Publisher Gaslamp Games
Developer Gaslamp Games

First-Person Shooter of the Year (Single-player):

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Most games manage to slip in a spectacular set-piece or two into the action: Modern Warfare 3 strings them together like bullets on a bandolier. Completing a mission in the middle of a sun-occluding sandstorm; floating Inception-like in the cabin of an airplane as it comes apart while trading rounds in the air; accidentally blowing up the Eiffel Tower; wrecking enemies with a remote-controlled tank. Everything’s at stake, there’s a clear enemy and a team of men who only speak in catch phrases and military shorthand determined to stop him—it’s a trope-filled template, but the spectacle of Europe and New York under attack in Modern Warfare 3’s campaign is beautifully tuned action-movie indulgence.

Publisher Activision
Developer Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games

First-Person Shooter of the Year (Multiplayer):

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad

Both sides in Red Orchestra 2—Axis and Ally—have a unique sprinting animation that reflects the way they were trained to run with a rifle. That isn’t realism for realism’s sake—it’s a useful moving silhouette for distinguishing Fedor from Franz at 200m. In these kinds of details, Tripwire wraps its reverence for WWII history around thoughtful FPS design that rewards those players with the most battlefield awareness. Detailed damage modeling means enemy bodies don’t act like bags of hitpoints, but a body of simulated limbs and organs with specific vulnerabilities. Real bullet behavior is the other side of that; seeing a grey-coat run behind a brick wall, then tagging him in the heart (because you’re pretty sure he crouched behind it) honors your skill and intuition as a soldier.

Publisher Tripwire Interactive
Developer Tripwire Interactive

Puzzle Game of the Year (Multiplayer):

Portal 2

Portal 2 wove humor, drama, adventure, and puzzles into a single tightrope and then led us gracefully across it—and such was the combined strength of these threads that we eventually forgot that we were solving puzzles at all. Instead, we were confronting life-or-death challenges; we were meditating on physics and geometry. And that incomparable experience was followed by yet another: brilliant cooperative play that required precision maneuvering, punished every lapse in teamwork, and carefully cultivated moments of insight that made us rocket out of our chairs and yell “Wait, I GOT IT!”

Publisher Valve
Developer Valve

Mod of the Year:

No More Room in Hell

Derived from the classic, shuffling-zombie template of the George Romero movies, No More Room in Hell feels uniquely more like a horror game than an FPS. Every bullet matters, and you can’t hold a flashlight and a weapon at the same time (other than your pistol), so illuminating a zombie with your Maglite while a teammate applies his sledge-hammer is typical of the game’s excruciatingly tense, realistic teamwork.

Requires Source SDK (free)
Developer No More Room in Hell Development Team

Update of the Year:

League of Legends

The category we used to call “Expansion of the Year” got a name-tweak to reflect the continuously evolving nature of many PC games, including shooters, mods, MMOs and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs). A case in point: With only two exceptions in all of 2011, League of Legends received a new champion every two weeks, which players could try for free a week after its release. But it’s the capture-point gameplay mode Dominion that takes away this year’s prize. While not designed for pro-level tournament play, it solved the biggest question holding the entire genre back: how the hell do we get our casual friends playing with us?

Publisher Riot Games
Developer Riot Games

Wonder why you haven’t seen a certain game yet? Hop on over to the next page, and bask in the glory of our Game of the Year 2012 award. We’ve also got personal picks from each of the editors: games that weren’t quite GotY material, but we love them just the same.

Steam handles downloading, installing and activating them in-game, and will even automatically update them when a new version comes out. But the sheer volume is kind of daunting right now, so we’ve trawled through to find you the highlights, divided into three categories that broadly reflect the trends in what people have made so far.

• Fun stuff
• Useful mods
• Oh God Oh God Oh God

Fun stuff

Posh mudcrabs
Gives all Mudcrabs a tophat and monocle. Commenter Coward Duck: “This mod changed my life.”

Valve’s Space Core
Valve themselves have added the space-obsessed personality core from Portal 2 into Skyrim, who now rockets down from, yes, space, just outside Whiterun. You can kick him around, pick him up or Fus-Roh-Dah him, while he mutters Skyrim-appropriate things about space. “Also, since Skyrim was the only major release of 2011 without Nolan North in it, you should consider this mod a patch to fix that problem.”

Less Condescending Guards
At last. Guards no longer comment on your skills unless you have over 75 points in them. I don’t know about you, but when they’d comment on my Destruction magic when it was only level 32, it would rend my soul.

Pickupable Forks
Not sure how we lived without this one.

Lusty Argonian Maid teaches one and two handed
“Lusty Argonian Maid vol.1 teaches one handed, vol.2 teaches two handed.” Bethesda wish they’d thought of this.

Rabbit Rage
Gives rabbits the voice and ultra-aggressive AI of the Dremora demons. They still have no attack.

Bigger giants
Makes giants bigger. “V1.1 Now BIGGER!”

Clam Chowder
“There’s something distinctly wrong when there are clams in the world but nobody knows how to make clam chowder. ”

Blackreach Cheese Pack
“Supplements your Skyrim experience with four addtional sacks of mammoth cheese, convieniently located outside Sinderion’s shack in the depths of Blackreach. A must have modification for gamers who hunger for additional content.”
 

Useful ones

Midas Magic
An incredible suite of new abilities, including a spell to cause huge chunks of ice to fall and crush your enemies, and one that causes plant life to erupt from the ground and walls wherever you point it.

New: Relentlessly Unrelenting Force
Commenter Alphasim points outs this awesome version of the Unrelenting Force shout: it’s now a spell, and it fus-roh-dah’s people for as long as you hold the key.

Lydia no longer says “I am sworn to carry your burdens”
87% less sass.

Dwarven Robot Spider Follower
“He cannot be killed and his name is Skittles.”

All NPCs Killable
Lets you kill even quest-essential NPCs.

Mark & Recall
Two super-handy teleportation spells last seen officially in Morrowind. Mark saves your current location, Recall summons you back to it later.

Open Cities
Integrates cities into the general landscape of Skyrim, which means there’s no loading screen when you wander into them.

Ice Island
Someone’s made a whole island out of ice, with a village on it and everything.
 

Oh God Oh God Oh God

Spiders turned into Spidermen
Or more specifically, ‘pidermen. Spider removal mods are generally for arachnophobics, but it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this replacement less terrifying. Copyright infringement is the least of this mod’s worries, this infringes the human body.

Sir Dwarf
“Adds a dwarf follower in High Hrothgar. Not really a dwarf, more of a small nord.” The picture is priceless.

Killable children
Warning: the image for this one is pretty horrible. Equally disturbing is the unrestrained enthusiasm in the comments for it. Remember, making it possible doesn’t make it acceptable.

Argonian Skin Shoes
Does it bother you when there are creatures in the world whose skin you can’t use as footwear? This mod is apparently for you.

Found any other fun/useful/ohgodohgodohgod ones? Let us know in the comments.

You’ll often find articles that tell the “oral history” of something, with direct quotes from those involved telling the story of a band’s success, or a TV show’s creation. With Minecraft, to begin with, there was just Notch and the internet. Instead of an oral history, you have a messageboard history, as the game was rapidly updated and players commented.

When Notch posted that first Minecraft link, the game was only at version 0.0.11a. It took 7 minutes and 57 seconds for someone to post the first response: “Their animations pretty crazy,” said forum user Schtee. Over the next 24 hours, 4 pages of comments were posted. Looking through the full thread, it’s remarkable how quickly the game seemed to capture player’s imaginations.

We’ve quoted some of these comments below to try to tell the story of those first few moments with the game, including the first screenshot shared by a player, where the Minecraft name came from, and two game modes that were planned but never made the cut.

You can see people’s excitement at the concept immediately.

Reply #2, twelve minutes after launch:

 
Reply #3, 15 minutes after launch, comes from Increpare, the developer of the recently released puzzle game English Country Tune.

This image isn't chronological, but helps break up the text. Hello!

Reply #4, 20 minutes after launch, comes from Notch himself and outlines some of his plans for the game. What’s striking here is how early on he had ideas that wouldn’t be implemented till just shortly before Minecraft’s 1.0 release, like the need to eat in Survival mode.

There are also two modes listed that didn’t make it in to the game.

Reply #7, 49 minutes after launch, forum user Muku posts what I think might be the first ever user-shared screenshot of something built in Minecraft. Ready for this?

The first ever user-made Minecraft screenshot, possibly.

Yeah, it’s a single-block wide bridge, four blocks off the ground.

Plenty more screenshots follow, from tall towers, to small castles. The contents of the screenshots aren’t significant, but it is remarkable that so soon after release, people already felt compelled to share what they were building. It’s a little under an hour before someone posts the first video of a castle they had built. Sadly, the user has since removed that video from YouTube.

Reply #17, two and a half hours after launch, jwaap posts the first piece of sprite art made in-game. It’s-a him, Mario!

It's-a me! Copyright infringement.

Later down this page, there’s some disagreement. One forum user thinks you should have to chop down trees to make stuff, while another thinks that’s a bad idea because the fun is in building stuff.

Reply #44, 19 hours after launch, from user Muku again:

 
Notch himself responds, four posts later.

It’s great that I’m in the future, because it means I can feel smugly superior about knowing things these people in the past do not.

The terrain generator improved a lot later, I guess.

Reply #47, 20 hours after launch, is the moment Tim became interested in the game. The first giant cock built in Minecraft was described by forum user Türbo Bröther:

 
Reply #56, 26 hours after launch, you get the origins of Minecraft’s name. Forum user Paul Eres says:

 
Notch confirms it, two posts later:

 
What’s not mentioned is that this isn’t the original full name. Three days before posting the public release, Notch wrote on his own blog: “The awesome but insane people in #tigirc helped me come up with a title for this game, and it’s Minecraft: Order of the Stone.”

Thank goodness that changed, then.

The thread continues for a total of 123 pages, until early last year. But in these first few moments, everything that made Minecraft such an enormous success, and such a vibrant community, is immediately apparent. That’s amazing, and looking back now with the knowledge of the past two years, it looks like gaming history in the making.

You can read the full Minecraft Alpha thread on the excellent TIGSource forums.

Marriage in Skyrim begins with deeds, the priest told me, and deeds in Skyrim generally involve killing people. Not murdering them, necessarily, but fighting them, scores of them, while completing a favor for your intended life-partner. My engagement, however, came about by simply buying a mammoth tusk and handing it to a woman. Take that, Game Filled With Adventure! I got a bride with zero casualties! Unless you count the mammoth, which I didn’t even kill. And, it’s not like I’m going to kill a lot of people on my way back to Riften, right?

The first person I kill on my way back to Riften is a bandit woman. Jasper and I are taking the route south of the tallest mountain in Skyrim. We made it to Riverwood last night without incident, spent the evening ignoring the locals and their troubles, and continued on this morning. This is new ground for us, so naturally, when I spot a mine on my radar, I walk over to check it out, and this bandit woman charges at me with a mace.

Will you marry me? Oh, wait. I got that covered.

A little later, we come across what appears to be the remains of a Khajiit caravan. It looks like they were ambushed, possibly by the four bandits that are running right at me. A few moments after dispensing with them, three more bandits arrive, apparently a little late for some sort of bandit convention, and we have to fight them, too. My new ceremonial Dwarven wedding armor is definitely being put to the test, and Jasper’s ceremonial dog fur is getting filled with arrows.

DON'T YOU HURT MY DOGGIE-WUGGUMS

We barely finish killing the seventh and final bandit when two wolves appear. Jeez! I haven’t even had time to catch my breath. Annoyed, I hit one wolf with my axe, and curiously, it doesn’t immediately die. I try again. No luck. Turns out, they’re ice wolves, which are apparently 700 times tougher than regular wolves, and not only are they not dying but they are actually sort of killing the crap out of me. My health has suddenly spun down to nearly nothing and my heartbeat is pounding in my ears. Jasper is hunched over, unable to fight back. This is bad. I use my Battle Cry, which scares the wolves off, I chug a few potions, and finally kill one wolf with a poison arrow and another with my poisoned axe.

We continue walking, well into the night, and eventually find a place to sleep: a small, empty shack on the far side of the mountain pass. Shockingly, it’s not full of bandits or monsters or the gruesome remains of a former resident. After sleeping until morning, I find a journal on a table that tells me the shack used to belong to an alchemist. Poking around a bit more, I find a live butterfly in a jar, which I decide to take, because it’s kinda cool. I don’t considered it stealing, because, let’s face it: finding someone’s journal and not finding them usually means they’re dead, possibly killed by the giant spider that scuttles over as we leave.

We continue on. More bandits are slain, two of them, at some ruins near an Imperial camp. More wolves. Then, a bear.  Then I come across a stronghold filled with incredibly rude orcs, but as mean as they are, and as much as they badmouth me, at least they don’t try to kill me. They don’t even complain when I defuse the tension between us by sleeping in one of their beds for eight straight hours.

Let us bridge the gap between our races by me snoring and drooling in your bed.

In the morning, though, a friggin’ giant attacks the stronghold, and suddenly all of those grouchy orcs are nowhere to be seen. Honestly, I’m in no way, shape, or form prepared to handle a giant on my own, but luckily, for all his size and strength, the giant seems baffled by the fact that I’m standing on a platform next to the stronghold walls. He stomps around menacingly, but only makes one swing at me. Weirdly, he and Jasper completely ignore each other, too. I don’t know how many arrows I put into him, but he finally dies, and I immediately eat his toe.

This is payback for the mammoth tusk. Isn't it.

I know, it sounds gross, eating a dead giant’s filthy toe, and it means that I’ll have giant-toe breath on my wedding day, but it’s an alchemy thing. If I kill a thing and cut off part of it and I’ve never had that part of that thing before, I have to eat it. It’s alchemy! DON’T JUDGE ME.

Anyway. By my count, my wedding trip took the life of ten humans, a bear, a giant, a couple spiders, and a bunch of wolves. So much for the for that zero body count: I guess Skyrim is making me pay for my wedding in blood after all. I finally reach Riften, spend the night in the inn, and head over to the Temple of Mara to arrange my wedding. The priest tells me the wedding will happen tomorrow, which gives me the whole day to live it up, crazy bachelor style! So, I spend the day making potions and crafting boots. That’s about as crazy as I get.

The next morning, I get up and head to the church. This is it! My wedding! I have butterflies in my stomach because yesterday I ate a couple of butterflies (alchemy!).

I had intended to take my helmet off before the actual ceremony, but the second I walk into the church, the wedding begins. I can’t really do anything but watch as I walk to the altar while the priest starts talking, so I guess I’ll be getting married looking like a full-on robot. My bride is already here, the one whose name I’m always forgetting, though the moment I see her, something magical happens: I remember. Call it fate, call it love, but I actually do remember. Not her name, but the spot in my notes where I wrote her name. Ysolda. It’s underlined, even. Because I keep forgetting it.

Do you, Scary Robot, take uh... uh... what's her name again?

It’s a magical ceremony. With the priest jabbering on about Mara, and with Jasper barking and snuffling continuously, and a couple of NPCs I don’t know watching us, we are wed. Ysolda do you take this slow-moving, toe-eating Mechano-Man as your husband? She does! Weird Robot Man, do you take this woman you’ve had two conversations with as your wife? I do! As soon as soon as I say the words, though, I’m somewhat alarmed to see my new wife turn and start walking away, even though the priest is still talking and the ceremony isn’t complete. Um, honey? Sweetums? Pookie-bear? We’re not quite finished. This is our wedding day, don’t you want to maybe stick around for the end of it? Don’t you want to share in our first kiss through my terrifying robot mask? Do you know how many people died so we could be standing here together? Honey?

I can’t even really turn to see if she’s actually leaving: since the ceremony is continuing, I’m firmly rooted in place (with love). I do, however, hear the sound of the temple doors closing behind her as the priest gives me a ring and ceremony ends. Well, great. It appears I may have married an inconsiderate asshole. Now that I can finally move again, I turn to see that not only has my bride left, but the wedding guests are scattering as well. I manage to speak to one of them before he leaves, and it appears he did quite enjoy watching a disinterested woman marry a sulking robot, something you probably don’t get to see every day.

I step outside. My new bride is nowhere to be seen, so I clonk through the streets looking for her for a couple hours, then give up and head to the inn to spend the night with my idiot dog.

And there you have it! Marriage in Skyrim. One day an ugly young man is giving part of a deceased elephant to young woman, the next day he’s committing mass murder to get to the church on time, and before you know it he’s clomping slowly through the streets of Riften like a horrible Amber Golem, searching for the wife who didn’t even stay for the entire ceremony. That’s marriage in Skyrim. That’s love.

Mother Nature is a nightmare, and her spawn nothing but hideous monsters. Nobody knows that better than B-Movie directors, or that the best way to appreciate their true horror is to zap them to Godzilla size. Them! Earth vs. The Spider. The Beginning of The End. Honey I Blew Up The Kid. The list goes on, with special effects ranging from advanced tricks with glass and cameras, to simply dumping some grasshoppers on a postcard and hoping the audience weren’t paying very much attention.

It Came From The Desert brought grammatically questionable horror to the desktop.

Cinemaware was an interesting company. Its ‘thing’ was creating interactive movies, but not in the standard ‘lots of bad FMV with occasional mouseclicks’ kind of way. Really, it went about it in the right way – taking the primitive technology of the late 80s/early 90s and trying to figure out ways to make it both more cinematic dynamic than your average adventure. By far its most famous game was Defender of the Crown, which plenty of people look fondly back on. Others included Rocket Ranger and Sinbad, neither of which I’ve ever played much of. They may be great, but looking at them, I suspect not.

It Came From The Desert was by far the most iconic of the Games That Were Not Defender Of The Crown though, all thanks to a single screen like the one at the top of this page – a tiny, hysterically weak pistol pointing defiantly at a gigantic killer ant that clearly could not give a shit.

What was the game like? Who cared? Giant ants! And guns! See you next week!

Sierra parodied the hell out of this game - and many others - during Space Quest IV.

There was more to it than a single iconic picture though. It Came From The Desert is a quirky, but interesting mix of adventure, real-time simulation and simple arcade action that puts you right in the middle of a 1950s style creature feature. Do you have what it takes to save the day, or will your efforts only serve to make a mountain out of an anthill? There’s only one way to find out…

Day One – Something Very, Very Bad Is Coming

Ah, Lizard Breath. Town Motto: Stay Awhile Amidst Our Sweet Bugger All

Checking my ID badge, it appears I’m Greg Bradley for the duration of this one – a geologist visiting the sleepy town of Lizard Breath to study mineral samples. God, I sound awesome. It’s 1951, hair is intentionally greasy, TV news programs unironically use phrases like “world famous nuclear physicist” in missing persons reports, and young men called Biff can go through life without hearing constant cries of “Butthead!” Young men called Butthead however must continue waiting for their Beavis.

The best thing about today? It’s a tie between some new samples I have coming in, and the fact that giant ants definitely don’t exist. And as I savour that, there comes a loud knock-knocking on my door.

Doc, I got me a part in Duke Nukem Forever! Out next month, they tells me!

Turns out it’s Geez and his trusty mule, both spooked by something out in the desert that definitely didn’t involve giant ants. They’ve brought me some more samples to play with, though Geez mentions that his mule won’t go near the volcano to the south ever since a meteor hit a few days ago. Probably some supervillain building a lair. If I see a bald head staring out over the horizon, I’ll call the authorities myself. Someone has to step up. Someone has to be a Hero. I hope there’s a hot lady-scientist in town.

(Spoiler: There isn’t.)

Biff shows up and together we check out the new samples. “Jeepers, this is spooky!” he exclaims, frankly trying too hard. “One of these samples has a weird glow to it!”

“Thank you, Biff,” I reply. “As a professional geologist, I’d never have noticed that.”

I tell him to pass me the mysterious ore, only it turns out to be hotter than it looks. Not hot enough to burn its way through a small cloth bag or be noticeable to Geez and his mule, but still hot enough for Biff to drop it to the floor with a cry of pain and almost burn down my fucking house.

Right! That does it! I'm replacing all my stuff with that nice safe asbestos!

When I put the fire extinguisher down, he apologises. I accept. After all, he didn’t know. He has however just been promoted to Head Radioactive Rock From Space Carrier, and I impress on him the importance of keeping it somewhere safe and ideally very, very close to his balls. Eugenics is underrated.

Right. To business. I have a standing invitation to call some reporter, Bert Lamont, at the local newspaper, but I haven’t trusted journalists since that guy gave Hard Reset a pathetic 58%, so he can go suck it. I figure that I should probably check out where the glowing rock thing came from, just in case Biff ends up with superpowers instead of scrotal cancer and I decide I want in. Geez heads over to O’Riordan’s pub, Biff… I don’t care what Biff does. I head out and go scouting on my own.

Nothing’s happening at the Dairy, or at the Mines. On a whim, I stop in by JD’s Farm on the way back to town, and get a less than warm reception from the farmhand while checking in on the meteor crash.

“I heard about you,” the yokel says. “You’re that know-it-all scientist who’s pokin’ around other people’s business! I suppose you came about the cow with the missing head.”

I try to explain that not all science is the same, and that while as a 1950s braniac I almost certainly can handle everything from quantum physics to producing anti-zombie serum should the need arise, I usually appreciate it when mere mortals don’t simply assume this omnidisciplinary mastery.

Also, what cow?

But instead of answering, he freezes… seeing something terrible. Something awesome. Something nobody could have predicted, unless they noticed all the ants and stuff on the game box…

THAT'S DEFINITELY NOT JUST CRAWLING ON A POSTCARD!

Luckily, I have my gun – a standard precaution for us geologists, just in case we run into some samples that don’t want to be taken. I aim firmly for its squishy… tail… bulge… thingy and fire and fire and fire until my gun is empty. The ant turns round and gives me a look that says “Dude, seriously?” and wanders off. Finally, I breathe out. I may not have triumphed today, but at least-

AAARGHSHITFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKAAAARGH!!!

Day Two – Bed, Bugs and Hello, Nurse!

...then I realised I was leering at the clipboard. Concussion sucks.

I wake up the next morning to the sight of Judy, Lizard Breath’s chestiest nurse. “You’re lucky that they found you, Doc,” she says, winking in the way you don’t usually want from someone with the power to stick a gloved hand up your bottom and bill you for the priviledge whether you enjoyed it or not. “Whatever you tangled with won. You’re going to be with us for two days at least!”

I mumble something that sounds like “giant ants… giant ants…”

“If it’s bugs you want to know about, Dr. Wells over at the University Lab is the guy to see,” she winks, winking with a wink. “Now, do you want to Escape Hospital, Make A Call, or Accept Treatment?”

I consider my options carefully. On the one hand, I was just savaged by a giant ant, and have no reason to assume that I have fifteen in-game days to deal with this before the town is destroyed. On the other, I’m screaming “AAAAAANTS!” like some kind of madman, and I always promised myself that in situations like this, I’d be sure to see a neurologist before founding some kind of religion around my experiences. I decide to play it safe, and try to at least salvage something from the day by just calling the lab for news. Unfortunately, Dr. Wells is out. Darn. Okay. I phone home instead… getting some sass from the operator asking if anyone’s going to be in, as if being a scientist didn’t automatically make me a chick-magnet…. and get through to Biff. Apparently Geez has brought over more samples.

Jeez, I sigh, hanging up and lying down to have nightmares about impossible entomology.

Day Four – When This Town Is Ash, I Will Dance Amongst The Charcoal

He dreams of stealing that skull, wearing it as a mask, and declaring himself Dominator.

Leaving the hospital, I head straight home to see if anything was up. No sooner am I back though, my neighbour Ben showed up looking shaken. He’s been camping over in the south-west – the Valley of Certain Death, I think it was – and had found something mysterious – a bit like a deer leg, but bigger, and probably part of… crazy as it sounds… a giant ant. I rush it over to Dr. Wells in the University Lab, but like many scientists faced with the unknown, he found himself officially Baffled.

(This is code for “was just asked questions by some fool in a hurry, and not given time to do any tests.” At least by the year 2000, I’m confident that newspapers will understand this.)

With no other pressing leads, I pop into the local bar to find Geez, but he’s not around. Nor’s that farmhand from earlier, who I’d kinda hoped would back up my “AAAAAAANTS!” story when I went to tell the mayor about it. Who else was there? The guy at the newspaper, I guess. Or wait! What about that secret Neptune Society I’ve heard about from the locals? Maybe they’ll help.

On second thoughts, let's not talk to them.

Well, I figure the mayor should probably be told. I swing in on my journalist person-I-know at the local paper to scope out the situation, and am stunned to find out that he’s trying to kill any negative story because there’s a Hubris Festival happening next week and he doesn’t want the bad publicity. In my experience as a 1950s scientist, nothing draws monsters, volcanos and invasions of the saucer people like a big ironic party. But hey, at least some authority figures must be open to evidence, right?

Not this one though.

You know, just once it’d be nice to see a disaster movie of some kind where the Mayor’s first response to trouble is to hold a big town meeting and say “I’ve just been handed some worrying news from some experts; it might be nothing, but just in case we’re going to do exactly what they say for a couple of days.” But today is not that day. Fine. When the ants attack, may he be eaten first.

Swinging by the bar again, I overhear some rumours about mysterious happenings over at Mine 1. That sounds like it’ll be worth checking out, but it’s 6PM and I’ve had a busy day. I decide to treat myself to a movie over at Beverly’s Drive In on the edge of town, jump in my car and head over.

Unfortunately, just as I’m pulling in…

Oh, Grease is our world, is our world...

Ah, hell, it’s the Hellcats – a trio of sociopathic kids with knives and nothing better to do with their time than practice with them. I’m pretty sure I could take them on an intellectual battlefield – or even in a game of Who Can Count To Three? – but they’re not in the mood, so I just back off and head home.

Then see them speeding ahead, turning around, and…

Wait! You idiots are on the wrong side of the roa-

Day Five – Carry On Again Nurse

...no, this time it's that blood bag in the corner. I suck at lechery!

Familiar breasts greet my eyes as they open. “You’ve been in a car crash,” Nurse Chestington tells me, winking inappropriately. What is it with this woman? I half expect to wake her to see her holding a mallet and insisting I find a way to bring Misery back from the dead. Or worse, bringing a hospital meal.

“Nothing seriously wrong with you, but we’re going to keep you here for a day or so.”

Well, that’s not too bad, I guess. Could be worse, anyway.

“By the way,” she adds, raising her eyebrows and grinning. “Ice is really mad about you wrecking his car. He said he’d be waiting for you at Beverly’s Drive-In to finish what’s been started.”

I put aside any plans to invite her to the movies after this ant problem has been dealt with. Speaking of which, do I really have another day to waste lying in bed? I don’t think so. It’s time to escape.

You can't hold me, suckers! In fact, I don't think you're legally allowed to!

Metal Gear Solid, this is not. Worse, I’m no Solid Snake. I just about make it to the ground floor, but the staff around the entrance are too quick. They jab me with a needle, and my legs turn to jelly before I can ask “Wait, are you sure this is a good idea, medically speaking?”

Not that I suspect they’d have listened anyway.

Day Six – Scientist, Hero, Lover

What do you want us to do, arrest your imaginary giant ants? Pffft.

After a night strapped to a bed with Nurse Chestington’s constant creepy winks… something that might be quite pleasant under less lethal circumstances… I head over to see Dr. Wells.

“Greg, I’ve looked at the results of the tests we did on that tissue you collected,” he tells me, almost playing a drumroll. “Are you sitting down? It’s from a harvester ant. An enormous one.”

No shit, Sherlock, I don’t reply. But he redeems himself. A little.

“With ants this big, the only place they will be vulnerable to pistol shots is their antennae,” he explains. “If you can shoot off both, they will lose contact with the others and die.”

Finally! A tactic! Not a fun one when faced with a snarling giant ant, but at least 4.5% better than being completely unprepared if one happens to show up. Or if I choose to go on a little hunting trip.

Worst Village People tribute band ever.

Figuring that there’s no evidence quite like a giant dead ant, I take a look around town in search of one to make so… The farms seem empty, but the Ore Plant is another matter. As I arrive, everyone is clustered around a radio from which we can hear a terrifying, unholy screech from the depths of pure nightmare. “Good lord!” shouts the voice on the other end, surprisingly restrained. “It’s-”

We all race up to the shaft and another definitely-not-a-hallucination-mr-mayor giant ant. This time though, I’m armed with a pistol, knowledge, and most importantly, a recent savegame. This last one proves important, because trying to hit a couple of wobbling antennae on a fast moving creature with no aiming assistance is, to use a technical scientific term from science, ‘a bitch and a half’.

Ha! Turned that ant into a sitting ten-ant! Guys? Hello? Is this thing on?

Flushed with success, I race back to the Mayor’s office to invite him to kiss my arse. But he’s out. So is Dr. Wells when I pop into the Lab. Even the newspaper office is empty. Bloody typical. I single-handedly take out a giant ant, and everyone else takes a half-day holiday.

Asking around, they all seem to have headed over to Neptune Hall, and while I can’t say I’m in the mood to jabber with the one man who watched Superfriends and asked his parents for an Aquaman poster, I can take a hint. Arriving, he tells me that someone … or someTHING… bashed in his toolshed the previous night and left strange fluid all over his belongings. I gather some up, really, really not wanting to ask too many questions. Unfortunately, with the Lab now closed and the mayor not around to kiss my feet, the only thing I can think to do is head over to Beverly’s and accept Ice’s challenge to settle our car-crash dispute with a knife-fight. That would definitely be the heroic thing to do.

Day Seven – After A Nice, Relaxing Sleep At Home

Wait, Jack Thompson is in charge of the weird fish cult? That explains... so much...

Geez knocks on my door to say he’s heading up to the mines for some reason, and that he’ll put a marker down on the ground if I want to go to the expense of chartering a plane. I promise that in the event of his death, I probably won’t have his corpse taxidermied and put into humiliating poses for my personal amusement. He doesn’t seem as grateful as he should. I may reconsider.

At the lab, Dr. Wells takes my recent evidence and promises to get back to me about it tomorrow, apparently oblivious to the fact that there’s an entire dead giant ant that should have been hauled into town already. The mayor is equally oblivious to this, and while I’m not a violent 1950s scientist by nature, I can’t say this doesn’t make me want to slash a hole in his bladder and make him pee the word “ANTS!” all over Main Street in his own blood. How is nobody seeing these things that should be dwarfing the horizon? Do they have cloaking devices? This is getting ridiculous! Open your eyes!

On the plus side, there’s talk of a posse burning down Neptune Hall, home of the fish weirdos. So that’s okay. I head over to see if I can help pile up some kindling, but only bump into their leader, Billy Bob, looking sombre in a regular suit instead of his usual outfit. When I press him about recent events, he demonstrates his trustworthiness with calmness, delicacy, and randomly pulling a knife.

Shoulda played more murder simulators, Jackie-boy.

Luckily, it turns out that I learned geology in the School of Hard Knocks, and not only have my own knife, I soon leave him a bleeding pile on the ground. At that point, a girl runs into my arms – his daughter Jackie, apparently, though we’ve yet to actually meet. I take her home immediately.

Won't lie. Hero-geologist was kinda hoping for another option or two here.

“Greg, that man is a monster!” Jackie tells me. “He saw something when he was out camping – something he believes he can use to take over this whole valley! Whatever it it was, it’s coming from the southwest and has something to do with the meteor crash you were talking about!”

Seriously, how is nobody else aware of the giant ants by now? Everyone’s seen one! We have one of their corpses! But no. Even when I nip into the police station to let them know I may have killed a guy, all they can talk about is that the bridge out of town has been taken out. By what? Gee, let me think…

I head back home with a mind to taking Jackie out on a hot date to the Hot Springs on my map, before realising that it’s still under construction. Not many other ideas spring to mind, unless you count the Garage… but not many sexytimes are likely to come of that this side of Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet The Pulsating Inconvenience From Planet X.

Well, never mind. At least we still have the rest of the evening to find something to-

Oh goddamnit...

Day Eight – From Ant To Ant-Agonist

And you need to go to Specsavers and ask for better glasses.

“Greg, that drawing of the track that Geez found has been identified as a harvester ant as big as a building!” no-shit-Sherlocks Dr. Wells as I stagger in after yet another night in Nurse Chestington’s World of Adventure. Still, with that, the tissue samples, what turns out to be formic acid from Neptune Hall and, oh yeah, the giant dead ant I killed a couple of days ago, we should at least have enough to persuade even the world’s stupidest mayor that Something Has To Be Done About This.

Haha, no.

I check in back home, where Jackie tries to convince me that she’s heard about giant ants the size of vans. “Call me when they’re the size of trucks,” I sigh, and head to the pub. At this point, it looks like I’m going to fight this invasion personally, and if I know anything at all about ants, it’s that their mounds are typically flat and broad, 0 to 100 mm (0 to 3.9 in) high, and 300 to 1,200 mm (12 to 47 in) in diameter. Also, there are usually a buttload of them inside. A metric buttload. And that’s a lot.

From the air though… from their air it’d be safe enough, and I know a pilot who’s willing to lend me a plane. Even better, he tells me that one of his colleagues recorded some strange sounds to go onto my giant ant corpse shaped pile of giant ant related evidence. Checking my watch, it’s too late to go to the Mayor with it today… but I still have enough time to head up-diddly-up and see if I can find Geez’s marker out in the desert. If I can locate the ants’ nest, maybe we can blow it up…

Ah. I just realised I don't know how to fly.

Well, they say any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Louie, who owns the plane, disagrees quite a lot about that, but at least I’m not badly enough hurt to need more of Nurse Chestington’s ministrations. Overall then, I’m going to call today a success. Hurrah for Day Eight!

Day Nine – On The Other Hand Can Sod Right Off

Sir, you are slowly developing the most punchable face in gaming.

I wake up and head to the Mayor with my exciting tape recording. He doesn’t care. I go home. I go back to bed and spend the entire day with a bottle of Coke and and expression of pure hate.

Screw this town. I hope they all burn in Hell.

Day Ten – Invasion Of The Ants

Two down... 9,932,546 to go. Give or take a few.

Dr. Wells calls to say he’s at the farm south of town, and wants me to head over. I grab my gun and grudgingly do so. No sooner have I arrived though than he gets into a flap about something.

“Greg!” he screams. “Help me! It’s coming this way!”

I turn and yawn at the sight of one of the giant ants approaching. “Yeah, I got this,” I tell the dustcloud where he used to be, and effortlessly pop off its antennae. Approaching its corpse, I give it a very satisfying little kick. “There,” I tell it, waving my gun. “You and who’s army?”

Oh.

I make a desperate run for it and get clear of the small swarm, but to no avail. Under the burning sun, I soon collapse. When I wake up, I figure that at least now, the evidence is incontrovertible – nobody, not even these idiots could have missed a swarm of giant ants killing the local doctor. But no. The Mayor kicks me out. All my friends and contacts are mysteriously gone. And just to add insult to injury, Ice and his pals show up on the way home and make me spend another night at the bloody hospital.

Time for a new plan. A better plan. A brilliant plan.

Day Eleven – A Brilliant Plan

LALALALA WHAT ANTS I DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANY ANTS LALALALA!

I wake to a world where the Mayor has finally accepted that his town is under attack by giant ants… because one of them ate his car. He’s still not too bothered about the situation though.

“Maybe they’ve gone,” he grins, punchably. “That’s it! We scared them away! I’ll declare tomorrow Ant Evacuation Day… we’ll have a float and crown an Ant Queen! What a BONANZA!”

I ponder my options in the face of this idiocy, but only one seems appropriate.

Okay. Two. But I don’t have a urine-soaked crowbar to hand.

Days Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen – Do Giant Ants Dream Of Electric Sheep? (No.)

Why change a plan that's working so well?

I wake up to Biff telling me that the ants have destroyed the ore plant and the airfield. I tell him not to worry. I totally have this. And by the way, do we have any more chocolate biscuits left? I’m feeling hungry. He answers no, and something about duty and honour and stuff. I roll over and go back to sleep, idly wondering where Jackie is. Maybe eaten by the ants. Pity. She seemed nice enough.

The next morning rolls round and there’s still no sign of her. Just Biff. Again. “So… the lab’s gone,” he says, with a certain ‘I’m about to run like hell’ look in his eyes as he looks out of the window at something in the distance. “And gee whiz, you have some unexpected house guests.”

“Call Nurse Chestington,” I yawn, rolling over. “Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”

Day Fifteen: The Final Stand

Going to need a bigger can of Raid...

The early morning sirens announced that the final battle was already under way on Main Street. I had a nice long breakfast and a relaxing shower, then ambled over to see how it was going. It was going badly. The National Guard had mobilised a few tanks, but nowhere near enough to handle the onslaught. I wandered between the explosions, looking for the Mayor. Humanity was over, that much was clear. The ants would expand their territory, turning the Earth itself into the ultimate hiding place. We’d bomb them and spray them, and we’d kill many… but with just a handful left, they’d rebuild. Possibly even in time for an expansion pack to this invasion that would have an incredibly stupid name, before returning for a completely different invasion on Turbografx. Which used FMV. And looks completely dreadful.

Hey, Mayor! What? Save you from the what? Sorry, I don't see anything out there! Nothing AT ALL!

And I couldn’t help but wonder… what if things had gone differently? What if Ice hadn’t shown up when he did? What if I’d checked the farm at some time I went to the bar? What if I’d been able to persuade the Mayor to act sooner? What if I’d been able to fly a plane? They were questions that could have changed the world, and the kind of decisions… albeit decisions wrapped up in dodgy mini-games… that could have done so much for adventure gaming as a genre if followed up on by future games.

But not this time. No, this time, the ants had won.

And I for one welcomed our new insect overlords.

I’m trying to play Batman: Arkham City on PC, an excellent game that was unfortunately developed in 1408 AD, the last time anyone alive didn’t know Games for Windows Live was universally hated. And it’s working – in fact, it’s working better than usual. It’s working without Games for Windows Live. That part of the game simply never starts – I’m not asked to log in, the Home key won’t summon it, the main menu option does nothing, and the game seems to function smoothly without it.

The problem is that this was a Games for Windows Live game when I started playing it, so my thirty-odd hours of progress are tied to my GFWL account. This new, otherwise excellent version of the game I’ve stumbled into has no memory of that – I’m starting from scratch.

In fact, it has no memory at all – I play for 15 minutes, and that progress is also gone when I next start it up. No errors and no warnings – it even leaves out the confirmation screen that normally warns you you’ll lose any progress since the last checkpoint. That would, after all, imply that it had saved at the last checkpoint.

And so, with the same screwed up face I wear when punching an explosive barrel to see if that ‘works’, I try to manually install Games for Windows Live.

This is one fat clown in a top hat I may never get to strangle again.

As you might have heard, PC gaming no longer warrants its own site for Microsoft. It’s games, so that makes it one of those Xbox things. gamesforwindowslive.com doesn’t even redirect there – it’s a page of classy “sponsored listings for goods and services” like jackpotjoy.com.

So I get the GFWL client from xbox.com, install it, and get an error. This is not unexpected. The neurotic error text even seems to anticipate that I’m probably on the verge of giving up already:

“A required Windows component is disabled on your machine. Do you want to learn how to fix this problem?”

… or is life too short?

Actually, Microsoft, since this is for official PC Gamer business: yes. I care, I have time, and I’m going to try to use your support process. I’m the person you were hoping didn’t exist.

I click ‘Help’, and immediately the program seems unsure how to proceed. After an awkward pause, it starts up Google Chrome and takes me to a blank white page reassuring me that I’m being redirected to the appropriate support page – but presenting me with another option to give up, just in case.

I get an error – this is not unexpected. It is, however, extremely funny.

They’ve actually taken the time to pose an Xbox avatar in a dismissive shrug. His cheerful smile says, “Oh well! Doesn’t really affect Xbox!” But his empty black irises, his blank flesh-coloured sclera, glare with a deeper corporate indifference. “YOU ARE NOT MONEY.” They say. “I FEEL NOTHING FOR YOU.”

Apparently I’ve found a glitch in the system! Well done me. With all that clever probing, including but not limited to attempting to actually play the game, I managed to catch them out! Thank God they seem so cool about it. I just need to look up error code 18307F760405E4F s:mGdrKQGKMfExOFYHmj2lJg== id:d2b83066-0f9f-4ba8-a833-abf86a9a2f03 req:89e81e05-998d-4ee7-8b7a-ccd2b5e058f8 and it’ll all be OK!

That’s when I notice the URL. Have a look at the URL.

xbox.com/en-GB/support/pc

This isn’t one error code’s obtuse solution page that’s missing, it’s the English support page for PC gaming. It’s an error. Error 18307… is that the whole support section for the PC has gone.

In this shot, Batman represents GFW Live, Mr Freeze represents Batman, and the railing represents the working classes.

I found it, eventually, by Googling. It’s a page divided into four sections:

Section 1: Is this really our fault? Please check. You’ll find that it isn’t.
Section 2: Here’s a list of people whose fault this might be.
Section 3: Maybe this is YOUR fault! Reinstall DirectX.
Section 4: “Did this solution solve your problem?”

There is no support for Games for Windows Live itself, since it has never been the cause of any problems in PC gaming.

So I’m still stuck in my Games For Windowless world, which would be nice except for the Arkham City thing. I still don’t know which essential Windows component I’m missing – is this because I uninstalled Chess Titans, Microsoft? Actually, don’t tell me. I think I’ll stay here.

It all boils down to this: deep inside his thick, ugly head, Nordrick has a dream: a place to call home. Angrenor Once-Honored can give me a lot: companionship, happiness, comfort, a variety of social diseases brought on by unprotected hobosex in an unsanitary public thoroughfare… but he can’t give me a home. And so, I have to turn my back on the one man to ever love me. I’m off to Whiterun.

Before I leave, though, I feel like I should try to do something for poor Angrenor, who walks endlessly through the frigid, snowy streets of Windhelm without a penny to his name or a pair of sleeves to his, uh, arms. I buy some fine clothes and boots at the general store, and drop them in his path, hoping he’ll pick them up. He sees this, and runs over to ask if he can have them. Aw. He’s so nice, you guys! I give him permission and he picks them up, though I’m a little disappointed that he doesn’t actually put them on. I was hoping to leave Windhelm with the image of Angrenor strutting about in some classy duds. Alas.

Hey! I bought you a shirt! Also, I'm leaving you forever!

Jasper and I begin our stroll to Whiterun, following, as we always do, the river. Aside from some wolves and one giant spider, we make it through the day without much hassle. As evening approaches, we climb a long hill and come upon two towers connected by a bridge straddling the river. A bandit woman rushes over and tells me there’s a toll to pass safely. She wants 200 gold, but I talk her down to 50 (with my honeyed words). I figure we’re cool at that point, and I spend a few minutes using her cooking pot and looking at the tower. She eventually grows irritated and attacks, but I calm her back down by killing her. I search her body, but my gold isn’t there. Did she eat it?

I try to leave but the remainder of the bandits hiding in the towers attack, one by one, and Jasper keeps running off into the tower to protect me. After a long, calamitous fight, so frenzied that no decent screenshots of it were taken, four or five bandits lie dead, including one on the far side of the river who I bring down with a couple well-placed bowshots. That was pretty gruesome, but at least we have a place to spend the night.

BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK (Jasper captioned this one.)

Another day of quiet walking (except for Jasper’s continuous barking, which is starting to grate) and a night spent at a Stormcloak camp, Whiterun finally comes into view. Sort of. It’s a bit gloomy today. Reaching the city gate, the guards don’t want to let me in because there’s some dubious talk of a dragon in the area. I’m pretty sure a locked gate won’t stop a dragon, but whatever. I bribe the guard and he lets me inside.

A classy city where a dropped hat probably doesn't lead to mob violence.

Whiterun! Now, this is a city. Forget the grim, claustrophobic alleys of Windhelm and the shoddy, jerk-filled wooden walkways of Riften. Whiterun’s avenues are wide, bright, and clean, and the people seem mostly pleasant. I start my day off at the blacksmith’s, where Adrianne Avenicci invites me to learn the trade by doing some basic crafting for her. I’m a pretty accomplished blacksmith by now, but I play along, and make her a dagger and helmet as if it’s my first time, hoping she’ll be so grateful she’ll marry me. While she’s impressed with my skills, she asks another favor: would I bring a sword to her father who works in the castle? I agree, and roughly three seconds later I realize she’s already married to the guy who runs the weapon shop. Great. Half the morning gone for nothing.

I stroll around the streets of Whiterun, with Jasper following and barking noisily (seriously irritating now), looking for anyone else who needs safe, reasonable help with something. Once again, everyone needs something. An elderly woman says her son was abducted by Imperials, and asks me to meet her at her house so she can give me all the details. Well, I am aroused by the mention of a house, but I’m trying to avoid any Imperial entanglements. Another woman I speak with is being stalked by some guy who wants to marry her, and would like some help fending off the leering jerk. Seeing as how I’d only be helping her so I could stalk and leer at her, I’m probably not the right man for the job.

There’s also an angry woman in the tavern who wants to fight me because she’s been snubbed by the local fighter’s guild, but I can’t imagine telling our grandchildren how it was love at first fight (plus, she looks really tough), so I’ll give that one a miss. A man and woman are bickering over a stolen sword, and the man wants to hire a mercenary to retrieve it from bandits. Sorry, I don’t kill for money, plus it seems as if he’s already married. Another woman named Ysolda is trying to break into the merchant business, and asks me to bring her a mammoth tusk to impress some Khajiit businessmen. Mammoths? I’m a hunter, sort of, but I prefer to stick to elk and deer. Mammoths are big and generally guarded by giants. Pass.

One of these days I'm going to ask someone to fetch ME something.

Although. I did see a mammoth tusk sitting on a bookcase when I rented my room at the inn. It turns out it’s not for sale, and I’m not a thief, but the general store is only a few feet away from where I was just talking to… what’s her name? Yolanda? Yosandra? Ysolda. Maybe they have a mammoth tusk I could just flat-out buy. I walk into the store and sure enough, the proprietor has a mammoth tusk for sale. It’s pricey, but it saves me from having to go nose-to-trunk with a giant hairy enraged elephant, so it’s probably worth it. I buy it and walk back over to… what the hell is her name again? Ysolda.

I give her the tusk, hoping she’ll think I somehow managed to bravely kill a mammoth in the past two minutes, and wouldn’t you know it, she suddenly notices I’m wearing an Amulet of Mara! Man. Love in Skyrim seems to involve not so much the performance of romantic deeds but the completion of routine business transactions. But, again, I’m just in this for the real estate, so who am I to criticize? Yosoldra (or whatever) wants to marry me! It’s happening! Again!

I back off immediately. Sure, Yosanta (whatever!) seems nice, and I like a woman who swoons when you lug part of a deceased elephant a few feet over to her, but I need to scope her out. It’s time to spend the day following her around like a horrid creep.

For a few hours, she walks around the merchant booths, chatting about this and that with the vendors. Okay, she’s sociable. That’s nice. I never saw Angrenor talk to anyone but me. In the afternoon, she stops chatting with the locals and walks off. I follow. She’s heading for a small house behind the general store. Could it be? Oh, it could. Oh, it be.

All this could be mine! The bed, the chairs, the dishes... oh, and that lady!

Whatsername has a house! I follow her inside, because I want to make sure her house doesn’t completely suck. Oh, and because I love her or something. It’s a small place, to be sure, though there’s a nice cooking pot, a bookcase, a table, a wardrobe, and a little dining nook with two chairs. After she has a snack, she leaves and I continue shadowing her. She walks all the way to the castle, twice, which gives me a chance to deliver Adrianne’s sword to her father so it doesn’t haunt my inventory for the rest of eternity. He gives me 20 gold. Ooooh, thanks. Now I can buy that carrot I’ve had my eye on.

The woman I’m in love with whose name I still can’t really remember continues walking around town until dark, then heads to the tavern, where she drinks, eats, and enjoys the bard’s performance, even stiffly (but politely!) clapping after each song. Around midnight, she heads home. She locks the door, so unfortunately I can’t stand over her watching her sleep all night, but there will be plenty of time for that if we marry.

I head back to the inn for the evening. Time for the pros and cons list! It’s pretty easy this time.

Pros:

1) Likes me
2) Impressed by speedy mammoth bone delivery
3) Active social life
4) Eats and drinks
5) Enjoys music
6) Not filthy, homeless

7) THIS

Cons:

NONE. Let’s do this. In the morning, I find her by the merchant booths, and excitedly pop the question. She says yes. We are to be wed. Holy crap.

“You should arrange our marriage in Riften right away,” she says and immediately walks away. Oh. Uh, sure. I’ll just go arrange the entire wedding all by myself, shall I? Okay. I’ll just do the whole thing. I just went out and killed a mammoth for you, as far as you know, and brought you a piece of it, but why shouldn’t I also do all the wedding planning myself? I’ll just do everything in this relationship! EVERYTHING! YOU’RE SUFFOCATING ME!

Okay, okay. Let’s calm down. We had a little tiff, honey, but that’s normal for two people about to marry, right? Perfectly normal. Couples in love grow and change and sometimes bicker, but it doesn’t mean that their love is any less JASPER GODDAMNIT WILL YOU STOP BARKING? I’M TRYING TO HAVE AN IMAGINARY FIGHT WITH YOUR FUTURE MOTHER! SHUT! UP!

I’m sorry, Jasper, I’m sorry. It’s just the stress of having to plan this wedding. You know, plan it all by myself. I guess it’s getting to me.

So! Now I need to go all the way back to Riften to arrange our wedding (by myself). I think maybe I should have something nice to wear on my wedding day, though. Wouldn’t that be appropriate? I head to the general store to find some fancy duds, but they aren’t selling much besides “Clothes”, unfortunately. I can’t even find a nice new hat to wear. Then an idea strikes me: why not craft something for my wedding day? I recently increased my smithing skills to the point where I can craft Dwarven accoutrements: why not whang myself out some special ceremonial wedding armor?

It takes most of my savings, but I buy a bunch of Dwarfonium bars (or whatever) and presto! I’ve some gleaming new Dwarven armor to wear on my wedding day. I have to say, I’m a quite impressed with myself. Using my self-taught crafting skills and most of my personal fortune to build myself some ceremonial Dwarven wedding armor is a pretty damn romantic gesture to my bride-to-be. Slightly less romantic is the fact that wearing my new Dwarven armor makes me look like a giant fucking robot.

LOVEBOT 5000 ONLINE. PRIME DIRECTIVE: TO BONE YOU

Not quite the dashing knight I was picturing, but it’s the thought that counts. Now, all that’s left is to clomp my way back to Riften, and plan the wedding (myself). Come on, Jasper! Stop your stupid barking and obey your robot overlord! Bleep bloop bleep!

Save the date! If I can make it back to Riften speedily and safely, you’re all invited to the wedding of Nordrick and… shit, what the hell is her name?

The inevitable sound of smoky jazz echoes down the dark Los Angeles street. Somewhere, a man falls to the ground with an ice-pick in his neck. A damsel puts the finishing touches to her look of mock distress. A crucial clue is picked up off the floor and torn up by a genre-savvy plotter. And in his dark, cramped office, Philip Marlowe waits to be told the lie that’ll pull him into the middle of it all.

Yep. It’s time to head back to the golden age of detectives and take a look at a game that – while no classic by any stretch – deserves better than to languish in its current obscurity.

Do you ever feel like you're trapped in the world's weirdest postage stamp? Me too.

Proper detective games have always curiously been thin on the ground. Sure, there have been plenty of games where you play a detective, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. Any old flatfoot can find a few hidden objects on a screen, or shove a bit of newspaper under a door to recover the key on the other side. To actually feel like a sleuth is to enter a world and be given the chance to investigate; to work out whodunnit instead of having to be told. Half the fun of watching detective fiction is trying to get one step ahead of Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Jonathan Creek or whoever. It’s rare to see an actual game built around this rather than straight-up solving puzzles though, to the point that you usually have to head back to the 90s and games like Laura Bow to even get close to something resembling a case to pick apart with your, how you say, leeetle grey cells. Sure, a few have tried, like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and the Phoenix Wright series over on Nintendo DS, but nowhere near enough.

(At a pinch, you could also add Fog, but that’s less of a game than the answer to the question ‘if a multiplayer adventure is released and nobody plays it because it’s shit, does it actually exist?”)

Philip Marlowe: Private Eye… or Private Eye: Philip Marlowe, the logo makes it a bit tough to tell which way round the words go… is one of the few that tried. It didn’t make much of a mark, ultimately ending up slumming it with Noir and The Dame Was Loaded instead of joining Tex Murphy and Discworld Noir in glory – but that doesn’t mean it didn’t do anything worth remembering before it disappeared.

Marlowe was always my favourite of the classic pulp detectives: the iconic PI with a sharp tongue, hard-boiled exterior, and noble heart that both separates him from the far more cynical world around him and ensures he’s constantly ground down by it. They’re traits shared by others of his era, not to mention subsequently picked up by everyone from Tex Murphy to Harry Dresden, but you just can’t beat the original. Sam Spade? Nah. Bit of a bore, especially when played by Bogart.

Unfortunately, if you’re a fan of the character, you won’t find much mystery in Private Eye. It’s based on the novel The Little Sister in much the same way that a photocopy is based on an original sheet of paper, with precious little you don’t already know. There’s the option to play an alternate version of the story with a different criminal and a few minor changes here and there, but the majority of the investigation remains the same. If you haven’t read the original on the other hand… well… prepare for confusion. As great as Chandler was, his actual stories could be a bit of a mess. Most famously, when a movie was being made of Marlowe’s first case, The Big Sleep, the makers called Chandler to ask “Uh… who killed this guy near the start?” only for the author to realise he hadn’t got the faintest clue.

The Little Sister doesn’t have anything like that, but it does seriously pile on the plot threads. In the book, this doesn’t matter – it’s Marlowe’s job to solve it, and you’re mostly there for his attitude and to see what happens. When you’re the one in charge, simply staring at a pile of names like “Orfamay Quest” (no relation to Johnny Quest or the Quest for the Holy Grail) quickly gets confusing, and the story quickly moves from simply trying to track down Orfamay’s missing brother to a whole heap of other trouble, including icepick murders, false identities, and intrigue involving Hollywood starlets.

Thank goodness notepads are so cheap. You really need one here.

Some men see a crime. Some men see a tragedy. Me, I see a free icepick! Woooo!

Investigating the case is an unusual experience though – a mix of adventure (pointing and clicking), interactive movie (it’s a very pathed game) and radio play (there’s a lot of talking) that only really works because of the extra little elements scattered in. My favourite, and one I don’t think has been done anywhere else, is how the game handles crime scenes. Marlowe’s method of investigation has a tendency to dump him on the wrong side of the law, not always for particularly smart reasons. In keeping with this, you’re quite welcome to walk into a crime scene, pull an icepick from a corpse’s neck and stash it in your pocket for later. After all, you need evidence, right? However, you also have to factor in that when the police finally decide to check out your office, they’re not going to be impressed if they find a cupboard full of bleeding murder weapons and other souvenirs you pinched. And they’re certainly not above just arresting Marlowe for the crime and declaring it a three-day weekend…

Does this have much impact on the game? No, not really. It’s a great idea though, both making you think a little more carefully about how you handle each situation that comes along and ramping up the danger. Similar scenes include only having a limited amount of time to raid a room before the police show up, and hoping you grabbed everything, and simple decisions like whether or not to investigate before interrogating a suspect or vice versa. It also leads to the hilarious image of Marlowe casually pulling an icepick out of a corpse’s neck, considering it, then going “Nah” and stabbing it right back in.

No. You lost your dame card when you showed me what you blew into my hankie. Good day, ma'am.

Adventure gaming still desperately needs ideas like that, and while Private Eye is too tied to its source material to make the most of them, they’re probably why I look back on it so fondly. It’s a shame that there wasn’t a follow-up with a completely fresh story, although looking at the general quality of storytelling here, you can see why – it’s a great demo of how words that would be fine in a novel written in the 1950s don’t necessarily shine in an interactive game designed for 1997. Modernising classic stories is tough, even if you’re not planning to drag them gloriously into the modern day.

What it lacks in spark though, it more than makes up for in atmosphere – the music, the location design, the use of cel-shaded characters that fit into them instead of blotchy FMV characters filmed in front of a bluescreen – and that’s honestly as much of noir’s appeal as the stories the genre lets unfold. There are better noir games, like the aforementioned Tex Murphy series (and The Pandora Directive especially) and Discworld Noir, but few that make it so satisfying to slip into a pair of gumshoes and snark at a prissy dame from Kansas whose attitude really isn’t worth a measly $20 a day plus expenses.

$40 a day? Perhaps. That whisky and detective-friendly dog-food’s not going to buy itself…

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Do not try to kiss. Lips may stick to icy, disapproving stare. Detachment awkward.

Oddly, the age of the original story and its setting mean that while Private Eye has obviously aged, it manages to pull off the rare trick of feeling retro rather than ancient. If you’re a Chandler fan, it’s still worth checking out if you see it cheap anywhere (though it’s not 64-bit compatible). If you’ve never read any? Maybe you should fix that. You’ll find cheap compilations almost anywhere books are sold, and the pulpier they are, the better. Afterwards, you might not feel like jumping into this adventure specifically, but that’s okay. Hit Good Old Games for the second two Tex Murphy interactive movies and you’ll still get all the noir you can handle, along with a couple more adventures with the guts to be different.

Sigh. How I wish I’d been able to say “LA Noire” instead. How that disappointment still burns…

My warm feelings for Jasper help me overlook his main flaw, which is his incessant, endless barking. They also explain the sudden bolt of terror and sadness I feel when, while crossing a river, Jasper gets trapped in the current and sucked over a waterfall.

You hear that, boy? It's the call of the wild. And we're going to ignore it.

We left Riften a few days ago after I decided to take my marriage search to a new, hopefully more pleasant location: Skyrim’s central city of Whiterun. Before we left Riften, I checked with the blacksmith again and found he’d somehow filled his inventory with a bunch of steel ingots, so I whanged myself out a new suit of armor, and improved it to “exquisite” levels. It doesn’t look particularity exquisite on Nordrick’s ugly, awkward frame, but it’s an improvement.

Dog armor DLC hopefully coming soon.

When I consulted my map to plan our trip, I noticed a wee little obstacle between Riften and Whiterun: the tallest, most intimidating mountain in Skyrim. My options were to travel around it to the south, where it looked like there may be a partial mountain pass, or skirt it to the north, which would take me most of the way back to Windhelm. I opted for the latter. It’s familiar ground, and NPCs like Nordrick are known for retreading their steps. I knew what to expect from the terrain and where to find places to spend my nights. Most of all, I was worried that if I passed through mountainous terrain to the south, Jasper might have difficulty following me over cliffs and rocks, and I didn’t want to lose him.

I’ll spare you the intricate details of the first part of the trip, since there really weren’t many. There were some wolf attacks, one angry sabre cat (which I’ve mistakenly been spelling “sabercat” this whole time), a couple bandits and some skeevers, but otherwise I just picked flowers, caught butterflies and fish, and walked along the river with Jasper as he barked non-stop from dawn until dusk.

JASPER NOOOOOOOO

Now, though, I’ve stupidly crossed the river a little too close to a waterfall, and poor Jasper can’t quite make it across. He tries: he paddles with his big feet, his shiny eyes fixed on me, in a display I would find comical if I weren’t so scared he was about to die. I run into the river — I don’t know why, really, since I can’t help him or grab him — and we both fight the current, but a moment later he disappears over the falls. Then, I’m sucked over as well, plummeting down to whatever lies below. Pounding water. Roaring noise. Jagged rocks. The abyss.

Actually, we’re both fine. No worries. In fact, we both run back up to the waterfall and go over it a couple more times. It’s fun!

As we continue along, I realize I’m running low on arrows, and decide that we might as well stop in Windhelm, my old strolling grounds, since it’s not too far out of the way. Plus, I can poll the locals to see if any of them might be interested in marrying me, since I wasn’t able to last time I was there. We even stop in for a night at my old bloody riverside shack along the way. The sabre cat hasn’t returned, but the disgusting bones have. Again. I kick them back into the river for old time’s sake.

The next morning I return to the familiar bleak, snowy streets of Windhelm, and after conducting my usual potion and crafting-related business, I drift around the city for a day, talking to the locals about the endless series of tasks they are unable to complete for themselves. And then, after giving a gold coin to a beggar named Angrenor: a bombshell. A bombshell of love. The beggar notices I’m wearing an Amulet of Mara.

Do I hear wedding bells, or do I just have a terrible inner ear infection?

For the uninitiated, the dialogue option “Interested in me?” really means “Interested in marrying me?” This is it. If I want to, I can totally marry this guy. His deed was simple: just give him a coin. I always donate to beggars because it gives me a nice Speech buff I can use on the vendors. Angrenor says he is indeed interested in me, and then tentatively asks if I’m interested in him. Am I interested in marrying a stinky, sleeveless beggar? Are you kidding? I’m so interested I feel like my head is going to explode.

And yet, I don’t want to say yes. I can’t rush into this decision, not me, Nordrick, who once spent five minutes having an internal debate as to whether or not I should borrow a spare pickaxe. I also don’t want to say no, because I can’t remember if you can still marry someone after you’ve turned them down. So, I say nothing. I just tab out of the conversation and walk a few feet away. I need to think this over. I need to find out everything I can about this filthy homeless man I just met before I can decide if he is my true soulmate. I need to engage in a ritual as old as love itself. I need to stalk him.

Since Skyrim hasn’t invented Facebook yet, I have to do my stalking the old fashioned way: on foot. So, for the rest of the day and well into the night I follow this guy around to see what he does. I need to make sure he’s a good person who will treat Nordrick like the delicate flower he is. I also need to find out if he’s really homeless, because where am I going to live if he is? Will we share a disgusting sleeping bag somewhere on the street? Will I get my own pile of filthy hay, or will we have to sleep in shifts? Granted, this isn’t a BioWare game, so there won’t be a cutscene of us vaguely humping in some public alleyway, but I’d still like there to be some modicum of privacy in our marriage. If we get married.

He acts like he doesn't detect me, but he totally does. That's why he's flexin' those guns.

After hours of following Angrenor around, I’ve only learned that he spends all of his time walking between the inn and an alleyway near the Elf slums. He doesn’t talk to anyone or do anything. He doesn’t even appear to ever sleep or eat. It eventually occurs to me that a good way to find out more about him is by, you know, actually talking to him. So, I walk over to him while he’s stopped in the street. Hi! Remember me? The guy who wordlessly walked away in the middle of a marriage proposal and has been following you around for fourteen hours at a distance of ten feet in the company of a constantly barking dog? Can we talk?

He doesn’t really have much to say, except that he once fought six Imperials while trying to rescue his Stormcloak buddies during an ambush. He also says he’s not too proud to admit he needs help, hence the begging. That’s about all I get out of him. Having delved into his life a bit, it’s time for another well-worn ritual of relationship decisions: the pros and cons list. I start with the pros, the positive aspects, for getting married to this sleeveless hobo:

1) He actually wants to marry me, unlike every other jerk in the world
2) He seems nice

That’s a good start. I think for a few minutes, then write:

3) It would be funny

Well, wouldn’t it? Sad sack Nordrick marrying a stinky homeless guy? That’s comedy gold, as gold as the coin Angrenor fell in love with. But do I really want to spend my life with him just because it’s funny? Finally, I write:

4) Probably no other Skyrim player has married him

Could be true. Everyone else playing Skyrim is running around covered with enchanted armor and awash in treasure and perfectly willing to perform dangerous quests for NPCs far more attractive and well-off than this sad, aimless frump of a man. I might be his first and only love in all possible versions of this world. Now, there’s a reason to marry him: pity.

Not so long ago, I too was balding, stinky, homeless, and sleeveless. Now I have sleeves!

Okay, time for the cons, which is, as it turns out, a much shorter list:

1) He loves my gold, not me
2) He has no home I can live in

I admit it’s weird to criticize him for only loving me because I gave him a gold piece when I myself only want to marry someone so I can live in their house for free, but there it is. The hypocrisy can’t be denied. There’s also this concern: if he loves me because I gave him a Septim, what happens if someone else gives him money? Will he leave me? Will he dish out that sweet hobo honey for anyone who thumbs a coin in his direction? Can I trust him to be true to my coin purse?

This is all too much to decide tonight while standing here staring at my potential future husband as he shuffles endlessly back and forth in the street. In the shadow of this monumental life choice, even the normally boisterous Jasper has grown quiet and contemplative. No, just kidding, his incessant, moronic barking continues unabated as it has over the past five days. I lead his noisy butt back to the inn and rent my room.

I’ll sleep on it. Choosing whether to marry a homeless man isn’t a decision you can make in a single night. It might also take a couple hours in the morning.

When evil rears its ugly head, the cry for justice echoes throughout the post-apocalyptic streets! Which brave, valiant, daring, fearless, hardy, indomitable, unabashed, valourous, thesaurus-owning heroes will arrive to save the day? The Superhero League of Hoboken, of course. And if you need to see inside pizza boxes, tread water really well and make robots rust a little faster, then citizen, relax!

(But if you know how to make a mini-Batsignal with a torch, definitely try that first.)

Fighting them isn't the embarrassing part. Losing to them is.

At some point in the future, computers as we know them will cease to be. Games will no longer be things of code and pixels, but simply carefully constructed ideas that we download into our brains, where they’ll exist in a state of pure imagination, as incapable of disappointing us with the cold harsh nature of reality as a pleasant dream. Until that day though, we have to take a lower-tech approach, and in the 80s and 90s, that form was the good old magazine review. On the surface, they were simple buying advice. In fact, they were primitive game simulators in their own right. Long before online forums turned casual discussion into a heated deathmatch, long before the internet made it possible to play demos that didn’t come mounted on the front of a magazine, there were kids holding screenshots up to their eyes and jiggling them around to pretend they were moving. Even before Tomb Raider came along.

This was easily the best way to play many games, letting the concepts behind them live and breathe free of any control issues, sadistic difficulty curves, or just plain Not Being Very Good. In many cases though, the issue was more that the ideas that stuck in your head towered over the actual execution, making the actual game feel far flatter than if it had just been a dull idea in the first place. Here is where Superhero League of Hoboken stands – not in the corner of shame, but spending its afterlife eternally mingling with the ghosts of games like It Came From The Desert. “You know, we had great ideas,” they sigh to each other over watered-down cocktails. “We could have been so much more…”

And this is why I never got that job in PC World.

The premise is that a couple of hundred years into the future, America is a melted slurry of toxic waste and the remnants of the polar ice-caps, and its post-apocalyptic world reliant on brave mutated superheroes stepping up to the plate to defend the innocent. Unfortunately for New Jersey, the best they’ve got is the fearless but useless Crimson Tape, whose sole power is creating organisational flowcharts. This power is never, ever used in the game, and it’s a game that finds a use for a hero called Robomop. Not to mention Princess Glovebox, mistress of maps. Specifically, paper maps. That need refolding. She’s good at that. And only that. Still, it comes in useful. Exactly once.

Isn’t that a cool idea for a game? Crap superheroes can be almost as much fun as the good ones, from The Tick to Mystery Men to Kick-Ass to those other two superhero movies that came out at the same time as Kick-Ass, but not Superhero Movie because that was rubbish. Add to the pitch that it’s an adventure/RPG hybrid, give it what for the time were solid graphics, and the clout of universally recognised makers-of-good-games Legend, and you surely have a recipe for a great game. At the very least, a great idea that you could smile at for a good long time. “Superhero League of Hoboken,” you’d think, many years later. “That was a funny game. I really should ask Richard to write about it.”

You may want to stop reading at this point and keep those fond memories.

Superhero League of Hoboken has been one of the most requested games since Crapshoot started, mostly I suspect thanks to those fuzzy memories. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from a dreadful game. For the time it was a clever idea, it scored and reviewed pretty well, and plenty of people will defend it to the hilt. No, the action hasn’t aged well, but most games of this era really haven’t. That said, it was never honestly a great adventure even in its prime, and there’s a reason that most of the really memorable stuff tends to be along the lines of “You get attacked in the streets by killer wardrobes!”

(Incidentally, you totally get attacked in the streets by killer wardrobes.)

In short, move the individual gags from a description to the screen and it’s just not that funny. When it’s not being funny, there’s not much here. Case in point, McMutants – mutated hamburger mascots who may or may not represent any multinational fast-food chain with a team of itchy-fingered lawyers. The first time you get attacked by one, wielding chips as weapons and grinning a malicious smile in lettuce and probably pickle, it’s weird and wacky. The seventieth time, they may as well just be a kobold for all the difference it makes. The one-off jokes obviously work better, but are incredibly spaced apart and often lost in a slurry of maybe-important, maybe-joke filler text that’s a real pain to sift through.

I’m reminded of another Legend game, the wonderful Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. That was even more text-heavy, but got away with it because the individual bits of writing were punchy, with fun characters and puns bad enough to suck your life essence through your eyeballs. Here, everything is lost in the interface. A long infodump revealing that the reason nobody’s heard from the Superhero League of Scranton recently isn’t down to evil Dr. Entropy, but because they found a whole load of Playboy magazines… well, it just doesn’t have the same oomph. The gag’s fine. The delivery? “Eh.”

If it was an itch on his bum, that's probably for the best.

What little story Superhero League of Hoboken has is split into several rounds, each split into unrelated missions that can be anything from acquiring guacamole for a forthcoming party to stopping a supervillain use a confusion ray that will reverse all the world’s signs. Each is solved by trekking across the post-apocalyptic wasteland, surviving random encounters with the crazy mutants and homicidal furniture that gets in your path, and solving puzzles when you get to the other side. RPG, meet adventure. Adventure, meet RPG, and- put down that knife! Stop stabbing adventure in the back, RPG! I said stop!

The RPG side is very, very simplistic, with combat borrowing from the Bard’s Tale school of thwackery and only very limited upgrades for your team. There’s some amusing parody in it, with enemies making your heroes feel itchy instead of poisoning them and subsequently missing their turn, and the enemies are a fun batch, but it soon becomes a drag. Mostly, it serves to split up the adventuring bits and scatter them to the corners of the Earth… or at least New Jersey… and that in turn only makes sifting through the adventuring bits where most of the original jokes happen even more of a chore.

Why a chore? Well, you know how irritating pixel-hunting is? Scanning the screen for something usable, trying to figure out what you’re meant to do? Right. Imagine pixel-hunting when every screen is separated by a long walk, guarded by enemies trying to gut you, and the map is entirely blacked out. Exploring takes forever, and it’s not helped by more than a few outright ‘screw you’ moments. That example a bit earlier, with the Superhero League of Scranton’s Playboy addiction? You literally trip over the item you need to fix that – a ‘bowdlerising gun’ (and hopefully you get the reference, because the game doesn’t help out much there), but you can only use it if the one female member on your own League’s books is in your team. If not, you get a loooong walk back to swap her in thanks to the rest of the gang’s less than heroic commitment to Truth, Justice, and the American Hey Are Those Boobies?

'I swear, we only read it for the nudity.'

It doesn’t help that Superhero League of Hoboken ranks as one of the least rewarding games ever. In most cases, your attaboy/girl for finishing a mission is returning to base and being politely informed of the fact, then being sent straight back out with another shopping list of injustices to foil. Okay, you also get bonus experience points and similar rewards, but the occasional ticker-tape parade in honour of your valour… even if it was only in service of stopping your arch-enemy Dr. Entropy creating a precision-pooping pigeon… really wouldn’t go amiss. This hits a low hitherto plumbed only by Syndicate when you finally face-off with Entropy in a fight for the future of reality itself. Your ultimate reward for heroism? The text box: “The other members of the party boost you onto their shoulders, carrying you off to a well-deserved retirement.” And some credits. And an advert for the sequel that never was.

Hurm. Suddenly the wages of sin sound positively generous.

The puzzles themselves aren’t too tough – and you’re told where each mission objective is. You still have to be very lucky, or very observant, to figure out what you’re meant to do, and willing to wade through a lot of filler text. Throughout most of the first set for example, you find yourself carrying around a rag that you can dip in various substances. This won’t make sense until you get to the last bit though, where you’re suddenly told in a throwaway line that a particular type of material’s warranty will be void if it comes into contact with a mixture of “ovine saliva, automotive lubricants and loam”.

A ridiculous request? Bah. To an old-school adventure gamer, it may as well be eggs, bread, milk.

Coincidentally, this is the reason you should never accept cake from a Monkey Island fan.

Meanwhile, in a game of Civilization, not far away...

What’s always most frustrating about a game like this is that you can’t stop thinking about how much better it could have been, ‘if only’. If only it had been more of an adventure game. If only the puzzles had been more built around using your team’s abilities in clever and awesome ways, not simply lucking into the one situation where their skill happened to be useful. After all, you’d be amazed what you can do with even the crappiest sounding powers. Even lactokinesis can be a weapon in the right hands.

But hey, them’s the breaks. Imagining it was a better game made Superhero League of Hobokan terrific for its day. What better legacy could it have than for us all to keep up the tradition? Killer wardrobes. The Crimson Tape. Robomop. You’ve got to smile, right? Right. And so do we save its reputation.

Plus, it is at least a hundred times better than Hero X…

That’s my wish for Riften.

Things start going wrong before I even get inside the city. When I reach the gate, late in the evening, the guards tell me the door is locked and I have to use the north entrance. Fine, whatever. I slog around the outside of the city, running into a necromancer who attacks me, and then three bandits who attack the necromancer and then attack me. After everyone is dead and their bodies have been stripped of armor and weapons, I finally reach the north gate, where another guard tries to extort a toll out of me just to unlock the door. I complain, presumably loudly enough that he worries about getting in trouble, and he lets me in.

I know the timing is a bit awkward, but will you marry me?

I’m two steps inside the gate when a huge guy gruffly warns me not to cause any trouble. Another fellow glances at me and decides I’ve come by my wealth (wealth?) dishonestly and that I should help him with some criminal enterprise. A woman at the inn glares at me and tells me to get out of her face before I’ve even crossed the room to try to hit on her. Just how inhospitable this town is can be demonstrated by the pile of hay I find in Beggar’s Row, the dank chamber under the city where I hope to spend the night rent-free.

Pwned.

Yeah. The hay pile is owned. OWNED. A stinky matted bunch of hay in a filthy cellar frequented by penniless panhandlers is too exclusive for me.

After paying to spend the night at the inn, I visit the Temple of Mara and talk to the priest about getting hitched. I buy the (fairly expensive) Amulet of Mara from him, which, when worn, will let the other NPCs in Skyrim know that I’m on the hunt for a spouse and they might as well get used to my optimistic leering. The priest also gives me the bad news I already knew: to get someone to like me enough to want to marry me, I’ll have to perform some sort of task for them. Marriage, in Skyrim, begins with deeds.

Deeds. Why did it have to be deeds? I don’t do deeds. Deeds, generally, lead to adventure, excitement, riches, power, intrigue… I’m not interested in any of that crap. I just want to chop wood, craft boots, and catch butterflies. Still, I’m holding out hope that there may be some NPC with a safe, simple deed I can accomplish to win their heart (and their home).

The tough part is, I’ll have to complete the deed before I even know if it’s a deed that will convince someone to marry me. No one will come out and say, “Hey, ugly, I’ll marry you if you bring me the enchanted toilet seat I lost in Batshit Cave.” I’ll have to brave the bats and retrieve the seat before I even know if the NPC is interested in marriage at all.

Mo' people, mo' problems. I bet even that crab has a fetch quest.

So, I spend the next two days wandering around, talking to NPCs, seeing what kind of deeds they need deeded, and trying to determine if the deeds are doable and if they might lead to marriage. Sure, I know there are wiki pages that can give me all this information in advance, but I’m trying to be pure. It quickly starts sinking in that this is going to be next to impossible.

There’s the burly blacksmith who needs fire salts for his forge, and tells me the best way to acquire them is by killing scary magical fire monsters. Pass. An elf at the meadery wants me to smuggle a illicit barrel of hooch to a buyer out of town. Smuggling? I’m not Han Solo. A barmaid is unhappy with her boss and wants me to collect evidence of her employer’s promiscuity. A Redguard is in dutch with the local gangsters. A guy on a local farm wants me to retrieve some items of his that were stolen by the Thieves Guild. The list goes on and on. I finally meet a quiet, pleasant Nord woman who doesn’t want me to do anything at all, but that’s only because she’s dead.

I like low-maintenace women, but...

Desperate, I even stop by the orphanage on the off-chance that someone will simply adopt me. Looking at these poor kids with no parents and realizing they that have even worse lives than I do cheers me up a little, but not much.

Free to good home: one giant ugly Nord child.

I eventually find a decent prospect: an Argonian woman working at the Riften Fishery complains that she’s addicted to skooma, Skyrim’s drug of choice, and asks me to bring her a healing potion to cure her. An ugly talking lizard with a crippling drug habit? It’s every young man’s dream. Still, as quests go, it’s a simple one, especially since I happen to have a healing potion on me. I hand it to her, and she thanks me… then gives me a ring. A ring! Oh, I do! I do! A thousand times I do!

Wait. No. She’s not proposing to me, she’s just giving me an expensive ring as a reward for handing her a potion. Well, jeez, you stupid junkie lizard, you could have just walked to the general store in town, pawned the ring, and bought the potion yourself. Is this what adventurers have to deal with on a daily basis? Idiots who can’t complete even the most simple of tasks without assistance? What a terrible job that must be: admin to every NPC in Skyrim.

Adding to my growing list of irritations with this crummy town, I notice some random dickweed is wearing the same stupid hat I am.

First the hay, and now THIS.

Come on, man! That’s my signature Nordrick man-about-town lid. You’re totally copying me. Then it strikes me that I don’t even recall where I got this hat. I flip through my notes, and find the scribbled answer: “DEAD GUY SHACK – DUMB HAT.” Oh, right. This hat belonged to the guy who got eaten in the riverside blood shack, the guy whose grisly reappearing remains drove me to this lame city in the first place. I take the hat off and throw it on the ground. This causes a stir as three nearby townspeople notice the hat, then start arguing over who saw it first, then draw weapons and actually start fighting over it. Do you see now why I hate this town?

Okay, I need a break from my depressing marriage hunt and hat-related woes. Luckily, I have another personal goal in mind. I’m a little tired of the grim, patchwork look of my banded iron armor, so I head to the blacksmith’s, thinking maybe it’s time to craft myself some attractive steel duds. While I’m milling around, checking out the facilities, I notice something. There’s no ore smelter. What kind of blacksmith doesn’t have his own ore smelter?

Another problem: neither the blacksmith nor the general store have any steel ingots for sale. Riften just keeps getting worse. There’s no way to smelt or buy own ingots. I can’t find anyone to marry. I caused a brawl by dropping my hat. And, I completed a quest by helping someone, which makes me feel like a common hero. A local guard can’t help but rub it in: “I used to be an adventurer like you, until I took an arrow to the knee,” he says in passing. Granted, guards say that a lot anyway, but I find it particularly hurtful now.

I grouchily decide to spend the next day out in the wild. Maybe there’s a mining community nearby: they often have their own smelters. Maybe I can still make Riften work. I head north, and sure enough, a mine appears on my psychic radar. As I stalk slowly toward it, I spot a Khajiit, dressed in Dark Brotherhood armor, sprinting right at me. What, this assassin shit again? We fight. I immediately start losing. I use my Battle Cry. He stops fighting and starts fleeing. I kill him. I examine his dead body, and sure enough, he bears the same assassination contract as the Argonian assassin did. Look, it was cute the first time, Skyrim, but now you’re just repeating yourself.

Speaking of repeats, the near-constant wolf attacks are getting a little tiresome. Why are these wolves so damn hungry and stupid? Shouldn’t they know by now to chase foxes and rabbits, and leave the iron-plated, sword-wielding travelers to bigger monsters? I can always use the pelts, but having to stop seemingly every few feet to kill the same three wolves is getting old.

I finally reach the mine, but as I approach, I can already tell something is a little off. Generally, there’s a little community, or stronghold, or town built around these mines, but this one is just a door in the rock wall. Weird. Inside, it’s weirder. No filthy but friendly NPCs greet me as I enter the cavern. No comforting sounds of workers chipping away at the stone ring through the air. I creep around in a crouch, suspecting foul play, but no monsters or bandits charge out to meet me. It’s just an abandoned mine. Worse yet, whoever abandoned it seems to have abandoned it after mining out all the ore. Apart from a bunch of mushrooms, the mine yields nothing of value.

Well, that fits in perfectly with the rest of my crummy week. No ore to smelt and no smelter to smelt it in. No one to marry and no home to be married in. I actually miss my cruddy, bloody, bone-filled shack by the river. I never should have left.

Feeling glum, I leave the mine and start the long, lonely trudge back to Riften. And what do I see a hundred yards down the road? Three wolves. Sigh. I draw my sword, then notice that they’re not attacking me but each other. Wolves fighting each other? I’ve never seen that happen before.

As I get closer, it appears that one wolf is fighting the other two, and the one looks a bit different than the others. A little bigger, perhaps? Wait, that isn’t a wolf at all, it’s a dog! I hurry over to help him finish off the annoying wolves, and then look around for the dog’s owner. No NPCs in sight. This dog is a stray.

A novice of fetch quests meets an expert.

What’s more, I can interact with him, telling him to wait, to go home (wherever that is), or to follow me. I have a dog. I have a dog now! I name him Jasper. My mood lifted, I start walking back to Riften, turning around every few steps to make sure Jasper is really following me. He’s always there, a few steps behind, panting and barking.

Okay, it’s not the same as having a husband or a wife, and I still don’t have a home. But I have a companion who will sit in the pub all night, happily watching me drink. What more can anyone really ask?

Les Misérables is one of the most beloved musicals of all time; a tragic, beautiful piece of work that fills your veins with fire and soaks your cheeks with the softest of tears. From Broadway to London, it’s touched the hearts of millions with its humanity, passion, and unforgettable musical numbers.

So obviously, someone in Japan turned it into a beat-em-up.

OH YEAH! DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE ROCK?

And so it came to pass that a beat-em-up based on Les Misérables, against all sanity and reason, came to exist. Gamers who found it gleefully passed it onto their friends, not for the sake of sharing its greatness, but because a claim like this could only be proven with physical evidence. And as the world fractured under its existence, for some reason, familiar music began to play. Well. As long as there was local access to Spotify, where such things would be okay to link to, or some other legal copy…

Music: Prisoner Work Song – Listen to it on Spotify

GAMERS CHORUS
Download this game
Officially “Arm Joe”
Download, download
It’s a hundred megs or so.

GAMER 1
These controls suck
Is there balance? Oh, hell no.

GAMERS CHORUS
Download, download
It’s worth it even so

GAMER 2
It doesn’t run!
My tech’s too up to date!

GAMERS CHORUS
Download, download
Try Windows 98

GAMER 3
I can’t play this!
It’s all in Japanese!

GAMERS CHORUS
Download, download
You’ll soon work out the keys

GAMER 4
I want to play! But I must say! It looks shit!

GAMERS CHORUS
Download, download
Can’t say that isn’t true

GAMER 5
All right! Shut up!
Just show me what to do…

GAMERS CHORUS
Download, download
You’ll regret it if you don’t
Download, download
Or possibly you won’t…

Gamesmaster of the house, no, not Patrick Moore...

Those who downloaded it were not disappointed. It was every bit as dreadful as it sounded – a cheap beat-em-up where everyone from hero Jean Valjean to his adopted daughter Cosette, to the spirit of Judgement itself took turns fighting. Judgement, incidentally, looked like Akuma after a crash diet.

To call their moves hilariously stupid barely did them justice. Enjolras’ special move for instance involved dropping a barricade on his enemy. An entire barricade. As for Cosette? Well, she was never a fighter. When she attacked, Valjean himself would usually swoop in to deliver the blow instead. As in every time she punched or kicked. Of course, she wasn’t completely defenseless. She had the special move of being able to summon her father, pick him up, and throw him at her opponent for mad damage in every conceivable sense of the word ‘mad’. And then it kept getting stranger.

The action soon proved so goofy, so improbable, that the characters within it began to become self-aware. Truly, it had transcended mere inanity and discovered a whole new dimension of pure, unbridled what-the-**** previously thought impossible by science. This didn’t mean that its new residents had to like their new lifestyles…or even understand them any better than their players.

Music: What Have I Done? – Listen to it on Spotify

VALJEAN
What have I become?
Ye gods, what have I become?
Am I a shotoclone ninja?
Are my moves really dumb?
Can fire shoot from my hands?
And do I charge my attacks?
Are there super bars that I should fill to the max?
Got nothing to work with except for my name
Wish I knew more at the starting of this game

If there’s a GameFAQ on the net
I for one sadly haven’t found it yet
My life was a book that could barely be read
Then they made an adventure, a genre that’s dead*
Thought there was nothing worse that they could do
Then they went and cloned Street Fighter 2…

(* It’s not really)

What the hell is wrong with Japan
To think this was a good idea?
Did they just take me for another?
I’m hardly Liu Kang
Ryu’s not my brother

Hugo’s work they claim for this nonsense
How can this stand?
Why not do a “Hunchback” game?
Maybe a sequel could be planned…

Kick some guy up the arse!
Punch him hard in the stones!
This is not what I exist for!
Is it for what I’ll be known?

But maybe it won’t be so bad…
Besides the pain, behind the fear
This game may offer me some freedom…
I feel much shame, but maybe that’s just life.
They told me I have special moves
But do they know?
What commands I use to trigger them
And why this game is called “Arm Joe”?

I am retching, but I nod
And my fight is starting soon
And I stare at my first foe
On a computer in some room
I’ll escape now from this world
From the world of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo is nothing now!
A dumb brawler must begin!

Gonna knock you to my castle on a cloud, bitch.

As the mere concept of Les Misérables crumbled under the continued assault of pure, calcified stupidity, reality itself began to crack. It wasn’t enough that hardened enemies like Jean Valjean and Javert might end up facing off on a 2D plane – everyone had to take their turn. Marius took some time out from lusting after Cosette to beat the living shit out his best friend and the leader of his student revolution, Enjolras. Across town, poor formerly pampered innkeeper’s daughter Eponine, found herself on the wrong end of the spirit of Judgement’s fists – possibly for having been a bully to her adopted sister Cosette when they were both kids, but more likely because the random dice roll said ‘whatever’.

Eventually though, the sisters were bound to face each other. On the left, Cosette stood – demure, pretty and innocent. On the right, Eponine stared, clutching her far more awesome looking trenchcoat tight. Who would win? Hint for people who’ve never seen the musical: Eponine’s life completely and utterly sucks. How much? In earlier versions of the musical, her dying moment is with a kiss on the forehead from the man she loves and ultimately gives up so that he can be happy with Cosette. In at least one later version, it was switched so that she dies mid-way through stretching out for what passes for her one pleasant moment in later life. Also, Fantine is Cosette’s mother. That may help in a few lines time.

Music: Lovely Ladies – Listen to it on Spotify

RANDOM GUY
I sense fighting
Blood is in the air
Think I’ll take a gander
At that cat-fight over there

ANNOUNCER
Fighting ladies! Give your mates a call
Eponine and Cosette are about to have a brawl

GUY AT BACK
Although that makes no bloody sense at all…

ONLOOKERS
Fighting ladies, neither full of spite
In fact one helped the other ’cause she knew that it was right
Fighting ladies, a winner one will be
Just not for a while ’cause this one’s a best-of-three
Quite exciting though, we all agree!

OLD WOMAN
Come here my dear
What’s going on over there?
This… paradox

FANTINE
Madame, I’ll explain it to you.

OLD WOMAN
No, you’re okay.

FANTINE
But you’ll be thrilled and amazed!

OLD WOMAN
Ah, keep it down, you’re far too eager to tell. What’s up with that?

FANTINE
It’s really good!

OLD WOMAN
LA LA LA LA.

FANTINE
Five minutes? Ten?

OLD WOMAN
No more than five, now hurry, while we both remain alive…

ONLOOKERS
Fighting ladies, fighting for no cause
Except for maybe honour and a quick round of applause
Fighting ladies, ingenue Chun Lis
Except that both would blow away in even a slight breeze
Without clothing damage, it doesn’t count as sleaze!

OLD WOMAN
What clever answers
You explained everything there
Oh, by the way, I’d like to buy all your hair
Not weird at all.

FANTINE
No, I’m pretty sure that it is.

OLD WOMAN
Don’t be like that. I’ll give you all of ten francs.
Don’t think too hard.

FANTINE
Why cut you in?

OLD WOMAN
DON’T NOTICE THAT!

FANTINE
What can I do? Shouldn’t have bet
So much against my poor Cosette…

ONLOOKERS
Fighting ladies, that was pretty brief
The swanky mademoiselle just beat up the gutter thief
Fighting ladies, whatcha waiting for?
That was only your first fight, you’ve still got plenty more…
Can someone pick that tramp up off the floor?

Uh... um... Honestly, your guess is as good as mine...

Defeated, Eponine slunk away. Even in a crazy, mixed up universe where nothing made sense, it seemed her life was destined to be one of misery, starvation and disappointment. She resolved to begin Arm Joe training so that next time she would not be so easily defeated. Six months and one carefully stolen PC later… it was going about as well as anything else she’d put her mind to recently…

Music: On My Own – Listen to it on Spotify

EPONINE
And now I’m all alone again, my net is down, my Steam won’t load up…
Without Bejewelled, without a smile, without a single friend to call up…
But maybe I’ll feel less shame
If I can learn to play this game…

Sometimes I play with no AI
Which I know is kind of cheating
But when I win I feel so happy
Even if it’s only fleeting…
I have my little spree
And it’s not quite so bad being me.

On my own, no Player 2 beside me
All alone, my life bar almost empty
Without this, I’d never taste sweet victory
‘Coz when I play with others I try so hard
But they still beat me…

In the game, there’s moments that I feel okay
I can dream of landing flawless victories
In my screen glow, sometimes things even feel right
And all I see is my high score a-climbing higher and higher…

And I know, it’s only ’cause I cheat
That I mash my buttons hard, but I can’t play
But although I know that that I’m not elite
Still I say, I’ll be The Guy someday…

I love games
But when the game is over
All hope’s gone
My score is just a number
Without them, the world I know is lonely
My diary’s bare and everywhere
I go I’m told I’m homely.

I love games
But every day I’m playing
All my life
Will only be decaying
Without games, the world would be much colder
A world that’s full of many things
That I will never know…

I love games
I love games
I love games.
But only on my own…

…

Unbeknownst to anyone though, the horrors of Arm Joe had only just begun. It had one more secret waiting – one more character to join the fight, whose mere existence was so stupid… so insane… the entire loose-fitting fabric of reality was about to collapse in front of their very eyes. For all the fighting, for all the silliness, for all it had wrought, nothing compared to the revelation of…

Who could possibly stand against this unstoppable force of vocal performance – a beast with all of the real Valjean’s abilities, but none of his weaknesses? (Especially the one about not being a robot…) Clearly, only the original could win the day, triumphing through sheer force of heart, of will, of-

Well, anyhoo. Still a better ending than Love Never Dies

Want to experience the insanity of Arm Joe for yourself? Download it here. The default controls are horrible, but can be reconfigured – and while almost all the in-game text is in Japanese, it’s obvious from the key editor what they do. You’re on your own as far as most of the moves and combos go, but for the most part just hitting random keys will make the screen explode in eye-popping ways anyway. It’s very stupid, completely broken, and a dreadful, dreadful fighting game… but if you’re a fan of the musical, you’re going to find it hilarious. If you’re not, don’t worry. Everyone else is just as confused.

This morning, however, on my way back from spending the night in Windhelm, something is nagging at me. I’ve spent my morning walk trying to figure out what do to next, but I’m drawing a blank. Where do I go from here? What’s on my to-do list? And then, as my shack comes into view, I suddenly realize why I’m having so much trouble planning my next move: I may not actually have a next move.

"Morning." "Morning."

I mean, isn’t this the dream realized? Isn’t this mission accomplished? I’m living as an NPC. I’ve got several ways to make money. While my crafting business is still operating at a loss, alchemy is paying off and it’s only a matter of time until I grind my smithing and speech skills high enough to start turning a profit at the forge. I’ve got a home to live in rent-free and a quiet yet enjoyable routine. For all intents and purposes, I’ve done what I set out to do. Isn’t this, well… the end?

As I step inside my blood-stained hovel, however, I notice something is wrong. It’s the books. When I first arrived here, they were stacked in a pile on the table, but I’d moved them to the bookcase where they belong. Today, they’re back on the table in that same neat stack. Next to them lies a dagger, which I’m pretty sure I moved to the nightstand. What’s going on here? Who undid all my painstaking interior decorating?

More alarmingly, sitting in the center of the room, on the floor, is a bloody skull and ribcage. These belonged to the previous owner, who had been partially devoured by a sabercat, and I had kicked them into the river and watched them float downstream. Now, though, they’re back, reset to their original positions. It seems I have a roommate, a dead roommate, and no matter how many times I kick his disgusting remains into the river, he will return. An even more dreadful thought: if the dead victim of the sabercat keeps returning, isn’t there a chance the sabercat itself will return as well?

We've all had roommates who just lie around the house.

As I halfheartedly kick the bones back into the river, I realize the truth of the matter: as much as I’ve tried to make this filthy busted shack a home, it simply isn’t, and never will be. It’s a borrowed hut belonging to the bones of a dead man. As low as I’ve set my expectations for Nordrick’s life, this simply won’t do. I want and need a real home. The question now is: how to acquire one?

I can’t buy a real house: as far as I know, all the buyable homes are tied to dangerous quests and tasks. The only other way to acquire a house is to marry an NPC who already owns a home, and move in with them. Nordrick needs to get hitched for the most romantic of reasons: to own property.

Of course, I can’t just walk up to nearest man, woman, or indifferent giant and simply propose. Getting married in Skyrim is a three-step process. First, you have to travel to the town of Riften, which lies to the far southeast of Skyrim. Second, you have to visit the Temple of Mara and buy an amulet which, when worn, will signal to the other NPCs that you’re interested in bumping uglies on an exclusive basis. Third… well, the third step is incredibly problematic for an NPC like Nordrick, so I’m not even going to think about it at the moment. It’s all moot unless I can reach Riften anyway, and Riften is a hell of a long stroll from here. I won’t be able to sneak around the edge of the map like I did on my trip to Windhlem: I’ve got to march straight through the interior of Skyrim.

To Riften, then! I set out in the early morning and leave the bloody shack behind, perhaps for good. Examining my map, it looks like I can follow the river pretty much all the way there. That’s good news: if I run into trouble, I can always swim to safety.

It’s around noon when I come across a small camp with tents and bedrolls, sitting on the rocks amidst some bubbling hot springs. I don’t see anyone around, which is odd, because I can clearly hear someone talking to me. “Yes?” the voice says. Then, “Do you need something?” Finally, I look straight down and see that I’ve nearly stepped on a half-naked female hunter who is lying in the hot springs at my feet. Oh. Hi there. I didn’t notice you lying there being pretty much nude.

I spot another two nearly nude hunters also enjoying the hot springs. Well, when in Rome, right? I strip off my armor and hop into the water with them. I can’t sit down with them, though, and crouching just feels a bit… predatory. So, I just sort of stand there awkwardly for a while. The hunters stare at me and offer up conversational tidbits like “Hello” and “Huh?” Then they start making nasty comments about how I’m not wearing anything, which is a bit hypocritical. People in glass houses shouldn’t sit around in their skivvies.

Anybody up for a quick game of Marco Polo?

My beefcake display clearly unappreciated, I strap up and move on, eventually finding a small mining community at the base of the mountain I’m going to need to climb. I do some mining and pick their crops, but I can’t find anyone to sell the crops to, so I just drop the wheat in a neat pile for them. I’m honest that way. I meet an NPC named Annekke Crag-Jumper, who talks to me a bit about her marriage. Maybe that’s a good omen for my search for a spouse. (I wonder if her maiden name was Crag, and her husband’s last name was Jumper, and she went with the hyphenated option.)

Gonna need some high altitude baking instructions for my horker loaf.

I spend the night in a spare bedroll, and in the morning I get a good look at the mountain that stands between me and Riften. It’s going to be a long climb. There’s a switchback trail snaking up the side of the mountain, but it takes me away from my escape route, the river, which is now basically a series of waterfalls. Well, as long as I don’t run into anything large and angry halfway up the mountain, I’ll be fine.

I run into something large and angry halfway up the mountain. Sabercat! We spot each other at the same time. I freeze, he leaps. I manage to get a single arrow into him as he charges, and then unleash my Battle Cry power right into his big, furry face. He runs off in fright, thankfully heading past me, down the mountain, allowing me to continue up without having to worry about meeting him again. Perfect. As long as I don’t run into another sabercat today, I’ll be fine.

I run into another sabercat roughly two minutes later. Okay! No river to dive into, no magic shriek to send the sabercat away harmlessly. Just my arrows and sword between me and the abyss. It’s pucker time. I manage to get two arrows into the beast before it’s on me, then switch to my shield and scimitar. I block one swipe, then raise my weapon for what I hope will be a deadly slash.

Nordrick puts the SABER in SABERCAT! Hah! That works on so many levels! (Two.)

And wouldn’t you know it, it’s a damn deadly slash, right through the beast’s neck. Fatality! It’s dead. That was, um. Easy? Almost disappointingly so. Is it that my smithing has improved my bow and scimitar so much that they’re actually dangerous? Or am I just a badass and didn’t know it? I did look pretty buff while I was standing around naked earlier.

The next morning, having spent the night in another camp, I’ve reached the top of the mountain and am heading along the river again. Riften is finally in sight when I spot a female Argonian running directly at me. Before I can even ask her to marry me, she’s leaping at my face with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. She spins, she whirls, she dances, stabbing and slashing in a balletic display of violence that would be difficult not to admire if she were not carving me into bloody little Nordrick nuggets. I finally get my shield up and saber out and fight back. My swings are slow and spastic compared with hers, and it seems pretty clear I’m outmatched. I still have my ace in the hole, though: I hit her with my Battle Cry, which has recharged since I used it yesterday. As she pauses ever so briefly, gripped in fear and preparing to flee, I cut her down.

She puts the SABER in NORDRICK. But not in the clever pun way.

What the hell was that all about? I examine her corpse, noticing that she’s wearing assassin’s armor and that her name is “Assassin.” This wasn’t some common bandit or thug, this was the Dark Brotherhood. But why was she attacking me? Then I find the note on her body.

Poor fool? I'm offended. I'm making a comfortable living.

Someone wants me dead? Not just wants me dead, but wants me dead so badly they actually they took time out of their day to pray to an shadowy deity and pay for a contract on my life? Why? What the hell did I ever do? And to whom did I do it?

As I walk the remaining steps to Riften, I assemble a mental list of those who might hate me enough to hire an assassin. Someone in Dawnstar, angry I’d lured a giant angry troll into town? The hot springs hunters, offended by my casual nudity? One of the Jarls, because I always sit on their thrones when they’re not looking? The blacksmith in Windhelm, because every time I want to use the grindstone or the forge, and he’s using it, I’ll just stand there repeatedly poking it with my hand until he finally gets the hint and stops using it? Yeah, probably that last one. I can be pretty annoying like that.

Well, no matter. My feelings are a little hurt, but a personalized assassination contract is kind of a cool souvenir. It actually says “Nordrick” on it! I’m really making a name for myself.

But did you ever wonder what happened to scenic Myst Island after some four million players had tramped across it? Of course not. But if you had, Pyst might just have been your answer…

Pyst? You would be if you'd bought it.

Ignoring a few shout-outs here and there, direct parody has never been a big part of the gaming world. A few games will poke at their genres, as The Bard’s Tale tried to do for RPG, a few take a light-hearted look at a type of story, as with No-One Lives Forever, but it’s incredibly rare to see a game that straps one of its contempories into a chair for even the lightest, friendliest kind of gumming.

Then you play something like Pyst. And suddenly feel very grateful for that small mercy.

To give it the once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear something nice, I’ll say this: the basic gag behind Pyst is quite funny. Creators Parroty Interactive, last seen failing to get a laugh out of Microsoft Windows carefully recreated much of the iconic Myst island a year or so after the Stranger’s adventure, now in tourist trap form. An evil company called Octoplex has moved in with the idea of revamping the whole thing into luxury condos, water slides and sewage plants, while King Mattrus and his sons Prince Syrrup and Prince They Couldn’t Be Bothered To Come Up With A Pun So Let’s Call him Achinarse get fat and rich off the profits. Quite clever. Almost like they bothered trying. Y’know. Almost.

This concludes the ‘being vaguely nice’ portion of this week’s Crapshoot.

For your convenience, I've highlighted the good jokes with big red and yellow flashing arrows. You're welcome.

Against the odds, Pyst’s biggest problem isn’t that it’s as funny as a wire pipe-cleaner up the penis tube – though that is Problem #2 through to #514 – but that it’s not actually a game. It’s simply a series of rendered slides in sequence, which you click on to make pointless stuff happen and wait, I may as well be talking about Myst itself. Let me clarify. Even in Myst, a game so simplistic that it could be recreated with flash cards, you got to explore the world. See a path. Click the path. You walk down the path. When you went into a room, there’d be these things called ‘puzzles’. And boredom. But at least stuff.

In Pyst, you simply click on the backgrounds to make animations play, and then click on the right to move forward into the next screen. Even when, as with the jump from the docks to the secret room with the holoprojector thing, the exit is on the left. When you get to the last of the slides, the game is over. Even if you take your time/play on a full dose of Valium, that won’t take long at all.

In the Library for instance, all one room of it, the fireplace will light up, what was once the map screen makes a honking sound, there are three letters you can read from various characters (none funny), a postcard complaining it doesn’t look like the demo, and a bit of narration. These aren’t examples, incidentally. Those are literally all the hotspots available on the screen, and there are only ten screens. The books? They do nothing. Portals to other worlds? Nope. The secret passage? Not in this game. Syrrup and Achinarse? Nope! There are barely any jokes on most of the screens, not even getting into the sad, sad ratio of comedy to simply staring in apathetic disbelief at something happening, with the majority of the screens happy to consider their job done if a wire sparks or a random sound plays.

This is the rare parody that makes Seltzer and Friedberg seem insightful slightly less rubbish.

Normally, trashing Myst would be a pleasure. But today? I'm just not feeling it...

It’s not like Myst is a tough game to parody. The central concept is a mad writer, Atrus, creating universes people can cross over to via magic books. That’s a free pass to do whatever you like!

(Admittedly, Myst’s own creators used it to create entirely desolate worlds, to the point that every book on Atrus’ shelf must have read “And then there was a sort of obsidian spire thing sitting in the middle of an armillary with a twiddly bit on the side that could be flipped when the moon was on the ascent” and his sons probably turned evil as a result of having to listen to him read his latest achingly dull passages to them, but still – freedom! Let’s go party on Hr’shee, world of oddly vomit-flavoured chocolate!)

Even just sticking to Myst Island has possibilities though. For instance, the Stranger and Atrus soon become good friends and even hang out together quite a bit. But look at the worlds this man creates. How much would it suck to join him for a big dinner, only to realise you really need the toilet. “No problem,” says your gracious host. “You’ll find the toilet just down the corridor, behind the combination lock that uses the gem equivalents of the star sign you can calculate based on the charts for my wife’s birthday in my secret underground observatory. And the loo roll is in the cupboard.”

What? Toilet humour a bit low-brow for Myst? Please. Atrus is the one obsessed with the dunny.

Uh, King? There are two people on this island, and you're both guys. Whose bikini top is that?

Instead of wit, funny jokes, puzzles, or more than an hour or so of material, Pyst opted to bring in John Goodman for what has to be the easiest cheque of his entire career. He plays King Mattrus, appearing on screen for… oooh… two minutes? Maybe three? His first appearance is in the secret room from next to the dock. He welcomes you with a cry of “Hello there! I am King Mattrus, ruler of Pyst! And I know who you are! All the world’s a game, and you’re… a pest. No! A player! And all the players, merely pests!” and closes the game with the most terrifying threat of all – releasing a sequel!

Thankfully, it never came out. Though there was a short demo of what it would have been like…

…which would have been ‘awful’, obviously…

(It probably goes without saying, but “Driven”? When the word “Drivel” exists? Not! Even! Trying!)

Probably the weirdest part of the whole thing – other than that it sold well enough for a sequel to be on the cards – is the song that plays at the end. Goodman sings it, and it’s called “I’m Pyst”, but what the hell it’s meant to have to do with anything, I have absolutely no idea. It’s only King Mattrus singing in theory, nothing about it involves Myst in any way shape or form, and… well… listen if you dare.

And now for something completely different. And a million times better.

But what if you want to play a parody of the Myst genre, if not the game itself, that’s genuinely funny as well as being incredibly clever? You’re in luck! It’s called Zork: Grand Inquisitor, and it’s cheap-as-chips from Good Old Games. While the plot’s not up to much (at all), it’s packed with wonderful lateral thinking puzzles, actually knowing pokes at the genre, and it finds the time to be a damn good adventure game in its own right too. You could also play an actual Myst game while blowing raspberries at your screen, but this will be much more entertaining and not waste anything like as much of your precious saliva.

Or just play a Myst game for fun. But really. Why would anyone want to do that?

In this recurring video segment, three editors go head-to-head-to-head as they take on the same section of the same game with dramatically different strategies and play styles. Once they’ve put their methods to the test, the editors reconvene to survey their colleagues’ trials and exercise their inalienable right to copious wisecrackin’.

In this edition, Evan, Logan, and Dan “Former Reviews Editor” Stapleton attack Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a stealthy vent-crawler, a persuasive chatterbox, and a gun-slinging murder machine, respectively. Check out the introduction above, and watch the team’s attempts in the videos that follow!

Dan: The Psycho Killer (qu’est-ce que c’est?)

Evan: The Vent Crawler

Logan: The Chatty-Pants

We didn’t see this coming. Stupid, I know. But when we got our hands on an early build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I was certain it would be the game of 2011. Skyrim would be great, but it would just be Oblivion with a bit more snow. So now that it’s here, why does it feel like so much more than that?

For so many reasons – but I’ll pick four. The first is that character progression is so much more exciting, an element we’ve talked more about in our selection for RPG of the year.

That’s a fundamental change, but in other places, differences of degree are just as important. The biggest of those is just how much stuff they’ve packed into this world. A ten minute stroll in Oblivion might pass one cave and an Elven ruin – both uncannily similar to the last ones you raided. The same journey in Skyrim can lead you up a rocky mountain path, past the door to a dripping abandoned mine, under a spectacular waterfall, past rebel guards escorting an imperial prisoner, through an icecrusted underground pass, into a steampunk Dwarven ruin, through a battle between an Elder Dragon and the guards of a local village, and ultimately to an ancient Nordic dungeon that ends in a wall of Dragontongue glyphs that grant you the power to breathe jets of ice.

It doesn’t feel like a grudging reaction to a few fan complaints about monotonous dungeons, it feels like Bethesda genuinely understood how to make a richer environment. They went so many extra miles in fleshing this world out with substantial and interesting adventures that Skyrim feels like a different kind of place to Cyrodiil.

Then there’s the landscape. Mountains have a natural drama to them that gently rolling hills never did. Skyrim is the spectacular skyline other games paint on their backgrounds to suggest a wilder, bigger world than they can really give you. This time it’s really there: you can scramble up its twisting paths, tumble down its icy slopes, explore every frosted forest.

It’s so much more than just a fantasy postcard generator: this crinkled country is always hiding the next adventure behind a cloudsmudged summit or a heart-stopping drop. Not being able to see what’s over the next ridge – or where the game world ends – gives Skyrim a sense of limitless promise.

Lastly, it’s just one leap closer to the perfect open world game that the Elder Scrolls series keeps shooting for. When I first heard about Morrowind, I kept thinking there must be something wrong with it. It’s third person, right? Or the combat’s turn based? Or I’m really controlling a party? Or I can’t actually go anywhere? It can’t actually be like an FPS in a gorgeous fantasy world, utterly unrestricted and rich with story. That’s just ridiculous.

But it was, and every time Bethesda jump a bit closer to achieving that dream game, that incredible feeling of freedom hits me again. Every time they give us a new world to explore that way, my brain buzzes at the possibilities. Skyrim makes such huge improvements to the magic, the stealth, the characters and the landscape that they all feel real again, and the immersion is complete.

It won’t stay fresh forever. But when Bethesda release a game that makes Skyrim feel clunky and barren, we’re all in quite a lot of trouble.

Check out our Skyrim review for more.

Highly recommended: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Total War: Shogun 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, Limbo.

And yet, a very un-NPC-like emotion has reared its ugly head inside Nordrick’s even uglier head. I may walk, sleep, eat, and drink like an NPC, but when it comes to my professional life, I’m definitely falling short. While spending time with the locals, and seeing what they do for a living, I’ve come to an unexpected conclusion: I’m insanely jealous.

For example, there’s an NPC in Windhelm who runs a museum out of his house. For two gold pieces, I get a quick tour of his collection of mundane junk, which includes some bones, an empty book, and a spoon. It’s a boring collection of cruft, but he invents wild stories that make his assortment of crap seem interesting. Why can’t that be my job? I collect plenty of junk, so why can’t I put it on shelves, make up ridiculous stories about it, and charge people to look at it? Nordrick the Curator, they’d call me.

"Gaze in wonder, if you dare, upon this BOWL OF SALT! Also, no refunds."

I also meet a fiction writer who lives at the inn. A writer! Now, that’s a job I’m jealous of. I’d love to write a book, perhaps about a hero named Nordrick The Bold who single-highhandedly slays the dreaded Frost Troll of Dawnstar. Or I could pen a tome about Nordrick the Fair, who recovers stolen magic weapons and returns them to their rightful owners. I could sell them to stores in Skyrim and collect the royalties.

(I actually read one of the writer’s books, which is pretty awful. He uses phrases like “I leave you now, good reader, with this gentle reminder…” Blech! I hate when authors address their audience. You know what I mean, gentle blog viewer?)

Even the beggars seem to have good jobs. I meet one who asks me for a gold coin and offers to train me in the art of pick-pocketing, which seems a bit dubious. If she’s so good at picking pockets, why is she begging for gold? On the other hand, I did give her a piece of gold, and as I walk away I realize that she’s so skilled that she tricked me into picking my own pocket for her. Now, that’s talent.

With my fair Nordic skin, this is the only safe way to tan.

I think all of this occupation envy I’m feeling is due to the fact that my chosen profession, smithing, isn’t really working out so well. Sure, there’s a nice smithing area I can use in Windhelm that has all the tools I need: forge and anvil, ore smelter, tanning rack, grindstone, and workbench, all within a few feet of each other. With the right materials I can fashion armor, weapons, and even jewelry. The problem is, it’s not making me any money. In fact, it’s losing me a ton of cash. Ideally, I’d be able to buy raw materials, fashion them into things, and sell them back for a profit. As it stands, however, the materials I buy cost more than the finished product, so I’m operating at a steep loss.

The only way to buy for less and sell for more is to boost my Speech skill, and the only way to boost my Speech skill is buy doing a lot of buying and selling, and since my Speech skill is currently pretty low, that means I’m losing gobs of money there, too. So, Nordrick the Silver-Tongued Blacksmith, at the moment, is a complete bust.

Hey, log! Let me AXE you a question! Hah. Totally pwned that log. Stupid log.

Luckily, there are several other ways to make money. Alchemy is one, and I’ve got plenty of ingredients after my long trip to Windhelm. I mix up all the potions I can, selling them to the local alchemist for a nice profit. I also spend a day visiting several nearby farms and gathering crops for the farmers, who had the time and energy to plant, cultivate, and grow the crops, but are suddenly are too lazy to spend thirty seconds picking them. I chop firewood as well, for people who have gone out and cut down trees, dragged them back to their farms, and cut them into small pieces, but lacked the follow-through for the final step: splitting the small pieces in half.

In fact, I do such a good job, the local farmers get together to hold a special election and vote me in as the new Jarl of Windhelm! And here this blog ends, as Nordrick The Helpful rules wisely over Windhelm for the rest of his days.

Looks like I won the Game of Thrones. Now, someone bring me a rasher of bacon!

Okay, I actually just had a quick sit on the throne while no one was watching. An NPC can dream, can’t he?

Funneling my earned wages into my smithing and vendor-grinding, it’s not long before I’m basically broke again, so there’s not much else to do but head back into the wild to do some hunting and mining. I blow the dust off my armor, strap it on, and head south. I come upon a small mining town called Kynesgrove, where I chip some minerals out of the caverns. They also have some spare bedrolls outside, so I spend a rent-free night and continue roaming the following day.

Attention wolves: to make this easier, please strip off your pelts and leave them in a nice pile. Thanks.

The morning passes as some wolves attack me and I attack some goats, both serving to fill my pelt quota. While wandering alongside a river in the afternoon, I spot what looks like a small wooden shack. As I approach, I spy a tiny flicker of motion through the broken boards on the side of the shack. Someone’s inside. I drop into a crouch. Is it a bandit, wanting to kill me for gold? A necromancer, wanting to experiment on my corpse?

Unfortunately, it’s neither. The flicker of motion in the shack suddenly becomes a flash. It’s not a person. It’s something big, it’s something fast, and it’s coming right at me. Sabercat. Sabercat! Oh flip, it’s a mother-flippin’ Sabercat!

OH FFFFFFFUUUUUU

A sabercat. I would honestly prefer to fight a dragon than a sabercat. Dragons are deadly, sure, but they lazily circle, then land, then take off and circle some more. Sabercats are all business. They’re lightning quick and deadly: I’ve run into them with the other characters I play in Skyrim, characters with skill points in something other than Speech and Smithing, and the outcome has almost always been a quick death and a largely unscathed sabercat. Now I’m facing one with Nordrick, who can’t even buy an apple from a friendly merchant without losing a few hit points.

I’m both crouching and creeping, the slowest possible combination of movement apart from sitting in a chair, and I frantically hammer at my keyboard, trying to get upright and running. I manage to get upright and walking, then crouching and scooting. Great. Trying to quickly draw my sword and shield results in me first readying my healing spell, and then my bow, neither of which are going to slow down this rampaging prehistoric cat. My Battle Cry power! Of course! That will save me, or it would, if I hadn’t used it already earlier today to scare off some attacking wolves.

This is the end. This is the end of Nordrick. I won’t be known as Nordrick the Blacksmith or Nordrick the Woodcutter, but as Nordrick the Cat Toy. Then I remember the river. The river! If not for the river, this blog would end, right now, with a brief description what it’s like to pass through the sabercat’s digestive system.

With the beast lunging and slashing and my vision filled with its fur and my blood, I somehow remember how to stand upright and run. I splash into the river and begin swimming, managing to reach the opposite bank. I turn and am mortified to see the cat paddling after me. As soon as it reaches my side of the river, I run back into the water and swim to the other side. The cat begins crossing after me, and I cross back. Okay. Good. If I can just keep this river between us for the rest of our lives, I’ll be fine.

I was told cats hated the water. I was told wrong. TOLD WRONG.

About three river-crossings later, the cat seems to come up with a fresh idea: to run up the side of a mountain and get stuck behind a rock. Hey, I didn’t say it was a good idea. But if the Gods of Poor Pathfinding love anyone, it’s Nordrick, and I find that by standing near the shack I can loose arrows into the cat from a safe distance. It just stands there angrily and takes the abuse until it dies, destined to become the next pair of boots I craft.

With that unpleasantness done, I heal up and check out the shack the cat was prowling around in. It’s pretty gross in here: the cat was munching on the previous tenant when I arrived, and there’s a bloody skull and ribcage and gore splashed all over the floor. There’s a bed, though, unowned, which means I can sleep here, which kind of, sort of, means I can live here. Which kind of, sort of, means I have a home! Kind of sort of!

A home with giant holes in the walls and ceiling, and no door, but there’s a wardrobe, a table with some books on it, and even a fireplace and a tanning rack. This might not be so bad. I can’t pick up the skull and ribcage, but with some strategic walking I mange to kick the disgusting bones out the doorway and into the river, where they float away. As far as all the blood on the floor, I lay out some goat pelts over it as sort of a makeshift throw rug. So now instead of it looking like someone died in here, it just looks like a couple goats exploded. It’s a conversation starter!

When visiting my house, you wipe your feet after you leave.

Not bad. I’ve got a lovely, gore-splatted home with no door and some dead fish hanging from the roof. It’s definitely no Proudspire Manor. Hell, it’s not even Oblivion’s Imperial City shack. Still, finally, I have my own place. Nordrick the Homeowner. That’s what they’ll call me.

Before The Elder Scrolls hit the big leagues, Bethesda was best known as the company that made Terminator games – though not necessarily the best known Terminator games. The awful platform games, with the infuriating mechanic of having to shoot human enemies in the legs to maintain the second movie’s no-killing rule? Other guys. The for-the-time-impressive light-gun game? Nope.

Instead, with the exception of the deservedly beloved FPS Future Shock, one of the first to combine on-foot action and vehicles, certainly in a way that actually made it fun to jump behind the wheel, none of them were particularly remembered. Admittedly, in the case of the action RPG style Terminator 2029 and Wolfenstein-level teched FPS Terminator: Rampage, that’s probably for the best.

But their first attempt? It’s the only Terminator game that lets you risk destroying humanity by buying Kyle Reese a pack of condoms while protecting Sarah Connor. How did that get forgotten?

YOUR HAIR IS STUPID HAIR. YOUR STYLE WILL BE TERMINATED.

The Terminator isn’t a great game. It’s buggy as hell, incredibly short, and however it ran on systems at the time, it stumbles like a dead dog under the mighty DOSBox. That doesn’t mean it’s not a game worth respecting. With nothing but 1990s 3D technology, it presented an open world action game set in modern-day Los Angeles, while even the mighty John Carmack was busily working on engines like this.

It’s also a surprisingly advanced playground, with cars to drive, a map based on the actual city (or so it says here, though I wouldn’t use it to try and get around the place in real life), interior locations like a shooting range and assorted stores to stock up on gear from, and even some RPG elements. In contrast, the most noteworthy thing about its similar looking rival Resolution 101, released around the same time and also offering urban combat in a sprawling city, is that that it makes you fight Daleks with boobs.

This year's resolutions - lose weight, find love, make convicts fight to the death in hover cars.

Rather than offering a campaign, missions and all the stuff you’d expect in the average shooter, The Terminator is a glorified duel. Whether you choose to be resistance hero Kyle or the implacable Terminator, both are simply dropped stark naked (though have presumably at least found some trousers by the time the game starts) in the middle of Los Angeles on a mission to kill or be killed. Kyle teams up with Sarah, who can be ordered around and be an equipment mule as the two are hunted around the city, while the Terminator is a ****ing Terminator. Needless to say, he’s by far the easiest choice.

Most of the game is spent preparing for that fight, and exploring a version of Los Angeles so large, its map has Fast Travel. Most importantly, you need equipment, which you can get in a couple of ways – buying it or stealing it. Robbing a bank is guaranteed to get the cops on your back, indicated by the wonderfully coy phrasing “Come out of the bank please. The police are here and would like to have a word with you…” but is a good way to get set up if you have a getaway car to hand. Other destinations include the Gun Store, Hospital, Shooting Range and most bizarrely, the Drug Store.

Normally, this wouldn’t be that weird. And indeed, most of what it sells isn’t. Stores in the game sell things like Running Shoes that speed you up, and the Compass that works like the Compass app on your phone and maybe even a compass. The Drug Store is your go-to place for handy items like a Crowbar to help you break into tougher buildings. So far, sounds like standard RPG economics. Right?

Except that unlike most games, stores in The Terminator don’t just sell questing items…

I NEED YOUR CLOTHES, YOUR BOOTS, AND A FRAGRANT VAGINA.

(And yes, that’s where you’ll find the condoms. No, sadly, they don’t do anything.)

Tooled up, whether to take on the police or your rival, you quickly realise that the combat is both pretty janky and pretty awful, but very far from actually pretty. The most satisfying part about killing enemies is a little death cam in the bottom corner that shows them folding over, though the re-use of the same animations mean that methodically gunning down everyone in LA soon loses most of its appeal – even when you finally bump into Kyle Reese and obliterate his hilariously awful pudding-bowl haircut.

In an unusual twist, the easiest way to see the ending is to pick the other character and let them die. One side’s lose sequence is the other’s victory party – though thanks to the power of bad lightning effects, neither end up looking anything like as badass as the artists obviously intended.

NO. THE TICKLING. STOP THIS TICKLING. WHY WAS I NOT BUILT TO SELF-TERMINATE?

While the first two movies still stand up reasonably well, time definitely hasn’t been kind to The Terminator. Playing it though, it’s hard not to glance at most modern games’ lists of objectives that boil down to ‘walk onto this map pointer and maybe hit something while you’re there’ and wish they could be something more than the sum of their objectives. Where are the espionage games that give you a stack of resources and a mission to complete however you like? Where are the GTA games where important NPCs exist outside of cut-scenes, to be assassinated or not, and can be trailed and observed for your own benefit instead of just shot in the face on command? Where are the strategy games following the example of something like Jagged Alliance 2, which lets you be the one calling all the shots, but in a world with enough detail and narrative to let you troll the villain with a bouquet of flowers? Sigh.

But I digress. If you only go back in time to play one Terminator game, obviously, it has to be Future Shock. The Terminator proper though deserves far more credit than it’s ever received though, at least for what it tried to do – even if that did involve biting off a bit more than the technology at its disposal could chew. It’s a rare example of a game license that tried to capture the spirit of the original, and bring us something new. Good or not, if this had been the pattern others had followed, and they’d tried this hard, just maybe… maybe… licenses wouldn’t have been condemned to be an industry joke.

Bit of a shame it was followed by this, really.

Princess Rosella? Come with me if you want to live.

Never mind though, eh? Happy New Year! See you in 2012 for more oddness from the archives – the good, the bad, and the just plain weird. Until then, why not check out any you may have missed, while feeling sorry for my hard drive and some of the forgotten horrors it’s currently holding for you.

The Elder Scrolls games have been brilliant for long time: huge open worlds that let you go wherever you fancy, get wrapped up in hundreds of different stories, and make a life for yourself. But until Skyrim, they weren’t particularly good at one of the most exciting things about other RPGs: levelling up.

You levelled up, of course, but you didn’t get to spend any terribly valuable points on any terribly exciting skills. In Skyrim, you do. It’s the perfect compromise between a traditional RPG and the organic practice-based system of previous Elder Scrolls games. You still get incrementally better at whatever you do, but each level gets you a perk point, and the perks on offer are absurdly tempting.

So your character adapts both to how you end up playing, and the grand ideas you have for them. I started out as an archer, but all the sneaking around made me stealthy enough to pull off backstabs. That was more satisfying than I realised, so I shifted towards it and improved it dramatically with perks.

The organic progression influenced my conscious progression, and resulted in a character build I hadn’t set out to create but which suited my play style perfectly. I became an assassin who can hide in plain sight, vanish mid-combat, and kill almost anything in a single strike. I’d tailored my own custom stealth god, through 84 hours of practice and 41 perk choices.

Now I’m working on a tank: an unstoppable orc clad in hand-crafted brass, with a shield the size of a small country and an axe I’ve sharpened beyond anything money can buy. I already have a perk that lets me bash people away with my shield, and next, I want the one that lets me knock everyone flying when I sprint at them. Then I’m making an illusionist.

It’s a sense of excitement I never had with Oblivion. When I started again in that game, it was usually because I’d messed up my character. I start again in Skyrim because there are so many possible characters to try, lives to lead, possibilities to explore that it would be rude to the developers not to seek them out. That, to me, is the definition of a great RPG.

Read our Skyrim review for more.

Highly recommended: The Witcher 2, Dawn of War 2: Retribution.

Deus Ex: a game so good it gave us actual neuroses about its sequels. Invisible War, a shonky but interesting and sometimes hilarious shooter, became reviled as a crime against gaming for declaring itself to be Deus Ex 2. And when Human Revolution started looking seriously, seriously good, none of us could quite believe it.

But it happened. This third game has the wealth of alternate routes and versatile tools that made Deus Ex great, and expands it with huge city hubs, packed with more sidequests and background story than the original ever had. It reworks the system for augmenting yourself to give you trickier choices between more powerful abilities. And all of those abilities are more slickly designed and satisfying to use. It’s not better in every way, by any means, but nothing else comes this close.

It’s an action game, which our neuroses tell us is automatically bad, but most of the concessions to blockbuster accessibility are genuinely, and surprisingly positive. Melee was almost comically unconvincing in Deus Ex 1: now it’s jaw-droppingly brutal and consistently satisfying. A cover system seemed like a frightening departure, but it ended up making for a much more developed and complex stealth option.

Mainly, though, it’s just so good to have it back. It’s Deus Ex! But shinier! And we haven’t played it through 26 times yet! And DLC is coming out for it! And everyone’s sharing stories about the incredible things that happened to them, and all the ways the quests can play out, and all the people they punched in the face, and what aug builds they want next. Deus Ex 4 is bound to be shit, though.

Read our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review for more.

Highly recommended: Battlefield 3, Orcs Must Die!

Do you remember the tail end of 2010? We all wore rags and lived in dirt-floored shacks, dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and ‘free to play’ was still a dirty set of words. 2011 saw those words climb into the word shower and wash themselves clean, courtesy of League of Legends.

Developers Riot Games released player figures for their five-on-five Defence of the Ancients interpretation in November 2011. The numbers were, frankly, dazzling. League of Legends now has more active players than World of Warcraft – yes, World of Warcraft – sporting a population of 11 million. More impressively, over four million people play LoL every day, and 1.5 million of those are on at the same time. To put that in context, all of Steam has 2.5 million concurrent users.

But capturing the short term attention spans of children, idiots, and child idiots was easy enough for the terrible free to play titles of the past. Craftily, League of Legends snared their monstrous userbase by bucking that trend, and by being crisp, clear, and blessed with thousands of ways to play. No wonder it’s done so well – it stands out like a golden pin in a shed full of pigswill.

I play as Caitlyn. I stand in the bushes, peppering creeps with shots from my comically oversized sniper rifle. My basic attack is a single shot. My ultimate attack, gained after fifteen minutes of play and souped up over the next half an hour, is a bullet wider than Caitlyn’s waistline that travels a quarter of the length of the map and slams a third out of its target’s health bar. I kill people from a distance, and never let myself near other players.

Tim plays as Leona. She’s a holy paladin, kitted out in gleaming golden armour and armed with a repertoire of incredibly earnest sayings. Leona’s pure tank – she steams into combat, drawing attention and aggression from everyone, leaving other players free to escape or level their weapons on their stunned foes.

Owen plays as Teemo. He runs around behind the AI creep scuffles, watching and waiting for his moment to drop traps. Teemo’s stealthy: he hides in plain sight, supporting his team and sneaking shots against any weakened foes. Well, he’s as stealthy as he can be, at any rate, considering he’s dressed as a fluffy white rabbit, and the traps he lays are easter eggs.

I always play DPS characters. Tim’s tanked for years. Owen… Owen really likes dressing up as fluffy animals. That League of Legends lets us all play different games inside one title is impressive. That it let us play them even when it had one game mode and one map is amazing. That it’s a free to play game with a level of polish, community, and developer support unseen outside of studios like Valve is utterly unheard of.

Highly recommended: Team Fortress 2, World of Tanks.

Launch bugs and connection problems can’t dent Battlefield 3’s sense of ambition. Call of Duty might have bagged the ‘modern warfare’ label, but Battlefield 3 shows us what a modern online shooter can really be. Developers DICE have tapped into the potential of modern PCs to create online battles on a massive scale, and with technology that makes its competitors look years out of date.

A 64 player scrap on one of Battlefield 3’s largest maps creates a tapestry of war stories. Your experiences as a lone footsoldier form just one strand in that overall picture. You can spend half an hour in a tense sniper battle for control of an important ridge, while another player can spend that time in an AA vehicle hunting choppers in the skies above.

Battlefield 3 is at its best when these stories intersect. Fighting for control of a hilltop in the middle of the sprawling Caspian Border map, I found myself lying in a bush, taking fire from an attack chopper. There was a sudden hefty CRUNCH, and the flaming corpse of the helicopter crashed to the ground, only six feet from my head. A friendly jet blasted overhead, barrel rolled to celebrate the kill and then flew off to become part of someone else’s story half a click down the road.

Battlefield 3 only fails when it tries to force these moments. The single player campaign’s linear progression of scripted street battles disappoint somewhat, but online, the moments of drama the designers try so hard to shoehorn into the story mode happen organically, and they happen all the time. It’s co-op on a massive scale. Quite reassuringly, the smart XP bonuses dish out the same rewards for supportive play and teamwork as they do for aggressive actions like shooting lots of men and blowing up objectives.

The squad system works beautifully, it is more important than ever on the biggest maps. Squadmates provide mobile spawn points that all but eliminate spawn camping. Squad experience bonuses encourage teams to stick together and fight as units, providing useful focus on maps that could all too easily become overwhelming.

They also give friends a way to stick together. It’ll be hard to forget the fantastic round I spent with Graham, Owen and Rich riding around Tehran Highway in an armoured personnel carrier we dubbed the “battle bus.” We skidded up to each control point in turn, diving out, tearing apart defenders, capping the objective and then vanishing into the night. You can never single-handedly win a game of Battlefield 3 for your team, but there’s just enough room to be a hero. In those moments, those rare, joyful, exhilarating moments, Battlefield 3 is better than anything else online.

Read our Battlefield 3 review for more.

Highly Recommended: League of Legends, Minecraft.

In most co-operative games, players don’t work together so much as work beside one another. The closest you’ll get to real teamwork is pulling the trigger at the same time. Portal 2 doesn’t work that way. Its co-op problems are impossible without a friend, and each reality-twisting solution forces you to share a brain.

My brain is neurotic, and though he hopefully never noticed, playing with Tom was competitive, too. Every time he worked out the solution first, it stung. Every time my suggested solution turned out to be wrong, I was convinced he thought I was an idiot. The problem is that you’re never just wrong in Portal 2, your idea is stupid, deadly and physically impossible.

Thank god it’s also funny. In singleplayer, Portal 2 is a finely scripted sitcom starring a woman, a robot and a potato. In co-op, it’s a slapstick buddy comedy, with both players as comic foil and GLaDOS as your straight man. When either of us would screw up, Tom and I wouldn’t yell or criticise one another – we left that to Owen and Tim, who were playing at the same time. Instead, we’d laugh, sometimes make P-Body and Atlas high-five, and leave my brain to find reasons to be paranoid on its own.

Having a friend along cancels out all the loneliness you feel in Portal 2′s singleplayer. It’s a deliberate part of that experience that Chell is isolated amidst the world of test chambers, but it’s not always a relaxing way to spend a few hours in the way the co-operative mode can be. Once you’ve completed both, you’re also far more likely to return to the co-op mode a second time than you are the singleplayer. Even knowing the solutions while playing with someone who is on their first run through is fun, as you get to step back and play shepherd to someone else’s enjoyment.

As much as acting out the solution is kinetic and wonderful, it was the thought process I enjoyed most. Tom and I would walk in to a new challenge and think: “Um, wait, how do we do this?” We’d both stand still, playing the level through in our mind, once, twice, wait, I’ve got it! If I place a portal here – foont! – and then another here – pshoon! – then I can cover that floor with slime. Then, if I place two new portals at either end – foont! pshoon! – and now you run between them. Woosh. Woosh, woosh, wooshwooshwooshwoosh. And now I place the exit portal here – pshoon! – which will – Wheeeeeeee!

Read our Portal 2 review for more.

Highly Recommended: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Fifa 12.

To give you some idea of how indie Wolfire games are, the rabbit-based kung fu game they’re making is not the first rabbit-based kung fu game they’ve made. It’s called Overgrowth, and it looks great, but it probably won’t change the indie scene forever. Their other project has already done that.

They launched the first Humble Indie Bundle last year, to enormous success: it’s just a bunch of great indie games, you pay what you want for them, and a cut of the money goes to charity. At first it doesn’t exactly sound like commercial genius – people generally pay about $5 for games worth at least $20 – but the good cause, slick presentation and friendly attitude created a perfect storm of goodwill.

These games have no DRM, they all work on Windows, Linux and Mac, and if you have any trouble with them the organisers offer quick, friendly and efficient support. The result: the bundles have now taken a total of more than $10 million in under two years.

But one of the main reasons these guys are our community heroes this year is what they’ve done with that success: they’ve used it as a platform to launch (or relaunch) a range of great indie games that deserve a broader audience. Four times this year, they’ve released new bundles that showcase a particular game or developer: Trine, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron, and most recently Introversion’s whole catalogue. Each one has taken more than $700,000, a vast success for games that genuinely deserve it.

The latest, Humble Indie Bundle 4, launched on December 13th and made $500,000 within its first few hours. The final total will be divided between the organisers, at least seven game developers, and two charities. But the sheer popularity of these bundles, the latest in particular, makes each of those shares substantial. In many cases, the bundles guarantee that a lot of great indie developers are able to continue making new games for us to enjoy.

The Humble phenomenon is the latest stage of an ongoing revolution in indie games. First, tools like Game Maker, Unity and a free version of the Unreal engine made it dramatically easier for anyone to make a game with no startup cash. Then Steam led a charge for digital distribution that left the indie-friendly platform the dominant player in PC gaming. Now, small developers have a new channel to get enormous exposure and sales for great games, without either a marketing budget or the need for a mainstream publisher.

It’s a huge catalyst for getting great and interesting games to the populace at large, and it’s making PC gaming better for everyone.

Highly recommended: DJ Wheat and Tastosis.

We elevate the Total War games beyond simply being good strategy games because we believe they’re story-engines: that not only do they offer deep and difficult decisions about how to paint the map your colour, but they also entertain you with your own genius.

Shogun 2 is a spectacular return to form. Partly, it’s the period: a time in Japanese history when heroes and villains rise and fall. Partly, it’s the technology: there’s little in PC gaming that can match the drama of a full speed cavalry charge. But mostly, it’s because the game creates interesting drama. The time when you had to rush an army home to fend off a betrayal from your neighbour clan. The time when you hid an army and engineered an ambush. The time when your veteran clan leader dismounted, and held the line while thousands of peasants rolled into the front gate. That time when… you’ve got the stories. You remember.

Highly recommended: Frozen Synapse and Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

After all the bandit and troll-based excitement in the last entry, I’m ready for a nice long stretch of peace on a nice long stretch of beach. This morning, so far, I’m finding it: it’s so early the sun hasn’t come up yet and Skyrim itself seems to be slumbering. As I stroll along, it feels like the game has completely forgotten I’m even here. No enemies come charging out of the pre-dawn gloom to greet me with whistling arrows. No monsters are at my heels, swinging at me with hairy fists. No thieves are trying to burden my inventory with stolen magical weapons. It’s just me, the soothing music in my head, and the sound of my own footsteps. Then — suddenly — nothing happens.

Perfect.

Not a creature was stirring, not even a draugr scourge lord.

I’m not simply out hunting for pelts today, either: I’m traveling. I’ve decided to leave Dawnstar behind, for several reasons. First of all, I want to have a real go at crafting as a profession, and while I can create weapons and armor in Dawnstar, the blacksmith shop has no grindstone or worktable for improving them, which is a bit limiting. There’s also no general store in town: the only place to sell my collected miscellany is that Khajiit nomad camp, and, being nomads, they’ve packed up and left. The iron and quicksilver mines are stripped and it will take ages for the minerals to repopulate. Perhaps most importantly, trolls can wander right into town and beat the shit out of everyone at will.

I’ve decided Nordrick needs to be in a real city. A city with real shops, a full complement of blacksmithing tools, and big stone walls and a huge oak door to keep out angry snow gorillas. I’m tired of being a big dork in a small town. I want to be a big dork in a big town.

And so, I’ve hatched a plan, a plan so boldly cautious and daringly timid that it just might work. My target is the city of Windhelm, which lies far to the southeast. I’ll have to walk there, naturally, but rather than stride through the interior of Skyrim, which is filled with forts and crypts and bears and giants and who-knows-what-else, I’m going to take the coastal route, along the outer edges of the map. It’s a long walk, but I’ll have water to one side of me and cliffs to the other, so any danger that wants to jump on my face will have to do it from directly in front of me. Skyrim is full of adventure, but my plan is to sneak around the edge of it, unnoticed.

My secret route. Shh. Don't tell Skyrim.

So far, it’s working. The entire morning is uneventful: I hunt a couple foxes with my bow, catch a few salmon with my bare hands, collect the meat of many vicious clams, and walk along in complete peace. In fact, I grow so accustomed to trudging around unmolested that when I see a charred corpse kneeling next to a spell book on a patch of land with a bunch of flames shooting out of it, I just walk right on over and have a look and immediately catch on fire.

Kids, if you catch on fire, remember: Stop, drop, and stroll!

Okay, so, that was incredibly dumb and fairly painful. Note to self: weird corpses are not to be trusted.

As evening approaches, I find a shoddy lean-to perched on a rock. I decide to camp there for the night, ignoring the shipwreck I can see in the water below (no more boats!) and trying not to think about the presence of skeletal human remains on the bedroll. I set my infallible mental alarm clock for 4am, hoping to rise early enough to continue slipping under Skyrim’s adventure radar.

All I ask for is a warm bed and a ribcage to rest my head on.

The next morning, the constant snow flurries give way to a proper blizzard. The wind howls, the world darkens, and there’s so much snow I can’t see my big nose in front of my face. I press forward until I notice I’m not actually moving because, in my blindness, I’ve walked directly into an angry horker. It bellows and fusses and flops around angrily, offended at having been stepped on, but it’s fat and slow and easy enough to avoid. I briefly consider killing it for meat and tusks, but it just seems too charmingly huffy to hurt.

Have you watched a horker swim? Surprisingly graceful. Not a joke, just a nature-watching tip.

The blizzard continues. Wolves attack every so often, signaling their presence with mournful howls, then lining my pockets with their fuzzy, bloody pelts. I eventually come across two human skeletons and a bear trap. It looks like someone got their foot caught in the trap and perished, and someone else sat there, helpfully watching as the trapped person perished, and then perished themselves. The skeletons are at the bottom of a narrow mountain pass, and I climb it, slowly and carefully, to have a look around from higher ground. The blizzard stops, briefly, affording me a nice view.

Someday a Nord like me will walk around aimlessly on that moon.

While I’m up there I spot a little bit of dark rock poking up, and I walk over, thinking it might be another camp or shelter I could use. As I get closer, it starts looking less like a camp and more like an altar of some kind. And there’s something… something… on it. It looks like a dead body, but it appears to be encased in ice or something… shimmery. I crouch down and creep up as slowly as I can, but just as I’m getting close: VOOOOM! A sudden burst of light and noise and magic hits me right in the face.

AHHH SCARY BLUE LIGHT ATTACK THING WHAT THE NUTS

I just run. I run all the way back down the pass like a giant coward. When I catch my breath, I realize it was probably something similar to what happened with the burned corpse from the other day. Some idiot was trying to learn a spell, some sort of ice spell in this instance, and offed himself. And then I just come along and blunder into him despite having done the exact same thing earlier in the trip. Didn’t I just say “Note to self: weird corpses are not to be trusted?” Is there any point in writing notes to myself if I don’t read them? No wonder Skyrim isn’t flinging adventure at me on this trip. It doesn’t need to. It just lets me come across the dead bodies of people who were looking for adventure and I pick up where they left off.

Toward the end of the afternoon, amidst more snow flurries, I come across a small camp. There’s a couple bed rolls, a horker corpse, some tables covered with horker meat and tusks, and a cart. The camp’s inhabitants are nowhere to be seen, save a single horse standing around benignly. I remember the two skeletons from yesterday. Were they horker hunters? Did they perish out on a hunting expedition after becoming ensnared in their own trap? The horse isn’t talking.

I sleep there and rise early. While I’m pretty sure the owners of the camp are the two dead guys I found yesterday, it doesn’t seem right to completely loot the place. However, after much internal debate, I do decide to take the horse, because the horse isn’t marked as owned, and if he is owned, the owner is probably dead. Plus, anyone who kills adorable pudgy horkers doesn’t deserve their own horse.

It's not stealing if the owner is decomposing in a bear trap. That's a law.

I don’t press the horse to gallop, so I’m not really traveling any faster than I would on foot, but it’s been days since I’ve seen another living NPC and it’s kind of nice to have a companion I can sit on. I decide to name him Flurry. Unfortunately, it looks like I won’t get to keep him: every time I have to dismount to fight off wolves, Flurry starts wandering back to the horker hunter camp and I have hustle after him. I realize that having to chase a horse the wrong way every few minutes means it’s taking me twice as long to travel to my destination, so I eventually just have to let him go. Bye, Flurry.

Now, that's how you keep out a troll.

Toward the end of the third day, the massive stone walls of Windhelm finally come into view. I’m here! Windhelm! My cunning plan of skirting around adventure totally worked, with the exception of a couple magical traps I stupidly wandered into. Still, I came a long way and didn’t encounter any horrible monsters or murderous humans. Plus, there are no new icons on my map, which means I didn’t discover anything.

Three full days of walking around in Skyrim without discovering a single new map location? You can’t get more hardcore NPC than that. I really feel like I’ve accomplished something by basically accomplishing nothing.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all round the net
At least a few writers weren’t quite this desperate. Yet.
They refused the cliche, the call of something so trite
As giving this old poem its millionth rewrite…

“Ah, sod it,” thought Santa, “It does fit the mood.
And ignoring Christmas would seem somewhat rude.
But where are the games celebrating the season?
There’ve barely been any! There must be a reason…”

No arms, no movement, no real attacks. But still roughly 37% tougher than Dan Hibiki

“Oh, sure,” he added, “There’s always a few,
Like Holiday Lemmings, and Elf Bowling 2.
But most of them suck, and few make a splash
And let’s just forget the ones cranked out with Flash.”

“I know what I’ll do,” Santa said with a grin,
“I’ll assemble my own, in a tool called MUGEN
(Which is said with an ‘i’ in my Lapland accent
Or so I will claim if there’s any dissent.)”

“It’s a beat-em-up maker with a gigantic community
Full of characters I can download with impunity.
I’m sure I can find any goodies I need.
Oh look! Someone’s done a crap version of me…”

So Santa jumped into the world of computers
Accompanied, oddly, by a dwarf Freddy Krueger
And swinging a ball with the uncommon might
Of a lazily edited Chang Koehan sprite.

And he picked up his lists, full of actions observed
To give gaming’s celebs presents they deserved
Heroes and villains; creators, destroyers
But mostly the ones without bored in-house lawyers.

'I'm here to suck ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of excuses.'

Duke Nukem came first, for pure irony’s sake
But Santa soon learned, he’d made a mistake
For this was an old Duke, still rendered in 2D
Not the 3D one, whose last game was poopie.

“Come get some,” said Duke, and Santa obliged
Pounding Duke’s balls with the one at his side
“Here’s your damn gift,” the huge fat man said
And levelled a kick at his smug empty head.

Duke fought back as hard as he could
But the AI in Round 1 is never much good
His gun was some help, his pipe bombs some more
Soon enough though, he was down on the floor

Santa stared down victorious, but stuck for what to do
This Duke had been in good games, he knew that to be true
Did the sins of his future mean he’d only get coal?
Even if he was now and forever a total arsehole?

“Yes,” he decided – Forever was that bad and worse
And its DLC had hardly tried breaking the curse
He left him behind with a note on the floor
“Grow the hell up, you dull, sexist bore.”

'You may know me better as WODAN, GOD OF FURY! What do you mean, no? Uncultured heathen...'

His next hero was someone in a quite different vein
A disgraced, balding cop by the name of Max Payne
He fought with two guns; in each hand a heater
Though his bullet time made him a bit of a cheater

The battle was short, neither man in the mood
Max’s thoughts still on Mona, and Santa’s on food.
“You fought well,” said Santa. “Now what can I give you?”
“My dead wife and child? Some hope for the future?

“Not really my thing,” St. Nick sadly explained.
“On matters necromantic, I’ve been told to refrain.”
“But they’re all I want,” the poor hero cop sighed.
“Then have an Amazon gift card. In case you change your mind.”

'Goodness me, Mai Shiranui's really let herself go,' thought Lara.

When Santa fought Lara, he saw he’d found his match
With her guns and her gadgets, she was tough to dispatch
(The spikes were the worst, which she could summon below
And went where no spike had ever wanted to go.)

The battle was long, and twice in a row he lost
Thanks to none of her special moves having any cost.
She swung, she stabbed, sometimes she even flew
And after doing damage, she healed herself too.

(His size had hardly helped him, not even to distract her.
Though as she confessed later, it could have been a factor.
“I didn’t mean to stare,” she said, “Nor to wince at your spine,
But damn, I rarely see boobs so much bigger than mine…”)

Her present this year was obvious, and gratefully received.
A shotgun in a secret cave at the back of Level 3.
Next year of course new reality was going to change the rules.
For now though, none would question it. The silly, silly fools.

Prepare to take a licking, Lich King!

Arthas was the Lich King, cursed to command the Scourge
His armies of death he unleashed to-

Wait, armies?!

“Sod that for a lark” thought Santa, running like hell.
And without 24 friends, that was probably as well.

Dopefish! He's a one-hit killer. When he realises where you are...

And that was just the start of the fat man’s great quest
If you want to see more, why not download the rest?
There’s no point in lying, these mods are often crappy
But there’s plenty of variety to keep anyone happy.

To install stuff is simple, though hard to make rhyme
You’re probably best reading the Readme. This time.
Add characters and stages and get ready to fight
It’ll pass the hours waiting. For Santa. Tonight.

Check inside for the full list of our fifty things you need to know about The Old Republic.

• 01 Your choice of faction isn’t as simple as just goodies and baddies. You’re just as likely to meet corrupt Republic politicians as you are to meet hardworking and downtrodden Imperials. You can’t change your mind either, so go with whichever matches your long-term ambitions: do you want to be a respected Jedi Master, a feared Darth, or a legendary smuggler?
• 02 The Old Republic’s character progression system provides a wide range of potential roles: three of the four classes can heal, three of the four can tank, and three of the four can deal damage, depending on the advanced class you choose at level 10.
• 03 Warriors and Knights tank and do melee damage; Inquisitors and Consulars do ranged damage, heal, and can specialise in stealth; Troopers and Bounty Hunters provide fire support and tanking; Smugglers and Imperial Agents heal, provide crowd control, and can specialise in long-range damage, or stealth and melee.
• 04 Gender has an obvious impact on your character’s voice, and each race has a unique cosmetic emote: humans can cheer, cyborgs can scan people, and Twi’leks can dance. Oh man, can those Twi’leks dance.
• 05 Your starting planet depends on your faction and class. Jedi begin on Tython, which is the current home of the Order; Sith begin at the academy on Korriban, in the ancient excavation that you last explored in the original Knights of the Old Republic. Troopers and Smugglers find themselves in the middle of a civil war on Ord Mantell, and Bounty Hunters and Imperial Agents work for the approval of a crime lord on Hutta.

Every character has a basic ability that fires or swings their weapon.

• 06 There is no auto-attack: instead, every character has a basic ability that fires or swings the currently-equipped weapon. This is in the ‘1’ slot by default, and any ability in that slot can also be used by right-clicking an enemy in range.
• 07 Every class has a buff that lasts an hour and significantly increases certain stats. You should always keep this up, and cast it as soon as you enter a group: that way it’ll automatically apply to everyone.
• 08 Imperial Agents and Smugglers play significantly differently to other classes as a result of the cover system. By using your ‘Take Cover’ ability (F by default) you can crouch or roll behind a handy obstacle, increasing your defensive stats and unlocking coverbased abilities.
• 09 Both classes should drop into cover first thing in group fights, and when engaging foes at long-range. They soon unlock the ability to drop portable cover. Do this in hard-to-reach places, but you’ll still need line-of-sight to shoot.
• 10 If a conversation choice has a blue or red icon next to it, this means it will earn you Light Side or Dark Side points. These unlock alignment-specific equipment later in the game. Pick a side: there are no rewards for neutrality.

Dark side conversation options include the ability to force choke your enemies.

• 11 During non-story group conversations, you’ll roll a die to determine whether you get to speak. Either way, you’ll earn social points used to access new emotes and costumes. If your group makes a Dark Side decision and you choose the Light option, you’ll still get Light points, so don’t disengage your moral compass.
• 12 You’ll earn planet-specific commendations by doing missions. These are medals specific to a planet that can be traded for high-quality equipment. You can view all of your commendations on the ‘Currency’ tab in your inventory.
• 13 TOR is a pretty game, but it can look even better. If your graphics card can handle it, we definitely recommend enabling anti aliasing with some simple tweaks. Click here for our handy guide.
• 14 Every planet has hidden items called Datacrons. These glowing artefacts offer permanent increases to your stats. Some are found after a few minutes of solo exploration, some require fourplayer cooperation for upwards of an hour to snag.
• 15 Some items have modification slots for upgrades. These can be tailored to fit your play style – like fitting your lightsaber with a crystal that boosts willpower and subsequently your Force powers.

Some weapons can be upgraded to suit your play style.

• 16 High-quality modifications can be bought from commendation vendors. The best ones can be crafted after level 10.
• 17 If a doorway has a red forcefield over it, you’re not the right class or on the right mission to enter. Players of other classes can accompany you on your story missions, but you’ll need to tick a menu option before players of the same class can join you…
• 18 …But other players won’t get credit for completion of your story missions. That means all loot and XP is yours. They will, however, get experience from the enemies they kill, and the warm glow that comes from helping a chum.
• 19 Through story missions and certain achievements, you’ll earn titles to indicate that you’re a Jedi, a Sergeant, or just very nice. Set these by clicking the arrow next to your character’s name on the inventory screen.
• 20 Missions designated as Heroic are designed for groups. ‘Heroic 2+’ can be tackled by two or more players and their companions, or soloed by careful players. ‘Heroic 4’ is intended for a full group of four.

Companions have a specific key stat that affects their skills.

• 21 You’ll receive your first companion around level 8. These are summoned and dismissed using the blue portrait at the bottom-left of the screen. Click the ‘plus’ icon to see their full range of abilities – here you can set which ones you want them to use.
• 22 Click your companion’s portrait and use the button in the bottom-right to send them to sell your trash loot. They’ll return in a minute with your credits, the faithful buggers.
• 23 Companion customisation items dramatically alter the appearance of your allies. You’ll receive one on your starting planet, and others are available from specialist vendors.
• 24 Each companion has a particular key stat that affects the majority of their skills. You can tell which it is by mousing over each item on their character sheet to see where the bonuses are coming from. Prioritise this stat over all else when looking for equipment.
• 25 Equipment will change appearance to match the class equipping it. If you give your Bounty Hunter companion a piece of Trooper armour, it’ll look handmade rather than shiny and white.

Back at the start of the 90s, the PC was still at war with both the Amiga and the Atari ST, nobody yet felt like roadkill on the information super-highway, mullets were finally an endangered species, and simply adding the word ‘cyber’ onto a word made it the most proto-radical thing since, like, something totally triumphant. But on the plus side, Gremlins 2 was brilliant and some other things were okay.

Click isn’t simply a nostalgic glance back at those days. It’s a video time capsule that lasted just two issues, largely I suspect due to the difficulty of persuading stores to fill their shelves with VHS tapes, and its then-staggering cost of £5. Let’s crack it open and take a peek at its secret juice.

Ah, the sweet quality of encoded video based on old VHS tapes.

Commercial failure or not, I remember being sad that there was never a third issue of Click. Rewatching both episodes now, it still seems like a shame. This was long before YouTube and CD-ROM made video ubiquitous, with the only real way to see games in motion without buying them being to hold a magazine page up to your eyes and jiggle it around a bit while squinting. Simply getting to see something like Elite or Double Dragon 3 in action was cool, with each of Click’s reviews offering a good couple of minutes of sexily cut-together footage to enjoy. And not (always) just from the intro/first levels!

For the most part, it also avoids the most common pitfall – trying to be too cool for school. Nobody raps, there are no EXTREME CLOSE-UPS, and while the action is set in a fictionalised version of the magazine’s office, there are no outright characters like the Gamesmaster/Games Mistress, Nam Rood or Dave Perry, and no big storyline save the team trying to finish the issue. Instead, everyone plays a tongue-in-cheek version of themselves, with (hopefully made-up) complete disdain for everyone else around them, with the second issue especially playing things up. Editor Tony is officially cursed to be left out of anything cool, second reviewer Robert’s deeply uncomfortable performance in front of the camera ends up morphing into increasingly anal management, and (in a less than PC move) the cast take most of the issue to realise that their sole female colleague, Lucy, has changed between episodes and is now a completely different woman called Rachel. And then respond to her frustrated cry that the office needs more women with cheers and a cry of “Get a blonde!” Who says gaming is a boys’ club, eh?

(On the plus side, this does bring an end to the toe-curling running gag of John ‘the office brat’ constantly trying to pick her up in ways even Wesley Crusher would wince at. Why do these things always feel they need a kid-identification figure? Have any of them ever been popular? The answer is no.)

One day, all games will be like this. I recommend trying to sleep through it.

Click’s first feature remains one of my favourites, though not for the same reason as when I first saw it. Two words: Virtual Reality. To recap: In the early 90s, when 3D graphics were still a novelty, any arcade wanting to make a squillion pounds would install one of these machines – usually a sit-down flight game called VTOL, though others were available. You’d pay a pound or two to wear a spectacularly heavy helmet with a couple of monitors and movement sensors in it, reeling at the incredible experience of being able to look around and interact with a blurry virtual world in more or less real-time. The problems were obvious – motion sickness, headaches, and the fact that the games themselves were rubbish – but the experience is one I highly recommend if you ever find yourself in the 90s with a case of amnesia and a bit of loose change to spare. Also, you’ll probably want to buy shares in Apple. Just a thought.

Oh, and don’t get a Cyber Razor Cut. Game Genie works much better.

Being of this time itself, Click unsurprisingly takes the “OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING!” approach to the tech, and I promise – at the time, it was. Similar features then go on to give the same treatment to other now hilariously quaint innovations, including a role-playing game called Shadowlands which gets a whole segment based on nothing more than a lighting engine, an earnest discussion of whether you should import a Super Famicom from Japan (conclusion: maybe, if you were rich and spoke Japanese), and my personal favourite, a review of the Core Design game Heimdall where the reviewer breathlessly narrates “If you’re not sat at home now saying ‘wow’, I want to know why!”

Well, Tony, if you still care – that would be because it’s 2011!

(Also, Heimdall was pretty awful, with its most memorable bits being the mini-games you played to generate your character – especially the first, where you prove your Viking prowess by throwing axes at a girl’s pigtails. But never mind. As disappointing as it was when I finally got to play it, I did get to enjoy a year or so of thinking it looked like the coolest RPG ever. So that was some consolation.)

Yes, you can. Yes, she dodges it. Because she knows exactly what everyone immediately tries.

Even without the snark bait, Click’s reviews were pretty dreadful things – very little criticism, only surface level descriptions, and more than a few face-palm moments. By far the worst has to be the review of the inevitable Captain Planet game, where the reviewer is apparently under the illusion that the show is Japanese and has a main character called “Fire”, and claims it doesn’t fit into any gaming genre despite it quite obviously being a platformer, before finally concluding “The game is basically unplayable” and awarding it 71%. Gasp! No! Not 71%! That’s the lowest of all the numbers!

(Even here though, at least the reviewer does comment on the game, and elements like its bad controls. Far too many of the others appear to be using the ancient and celebrated art of reviewing from the back of the box, especially early on. Last Ninja 3 stands out here, “Bleeping brilliant” or not.)

For video reviews at the time though, this was still pretty solid, and nobody buying a magazine like this wasn’t also going to get a platform-specific one with hopefully slightly more informative reviews. The fun wasn’t seeing what you were going to buy yourself so much as getting a step closer to playing some of the ones you never would, be they action games on other platforms, like Rolling Ronnie and Mega Twins, or just things you were never going to devote weeks of pocket money to. Super Space Invaders, anyone? It’s the sequel with no equal, apparently, but a few minutes of video was all the nostalgia it deserved. Thought of like that, Click’s £5 price was a pretty good deal. You could even get your money back if you ordered one of the reviewed games through its mail order service, though I’m pretty sure you’d still be paying way more than if you did a little price comparison because duh.

Had the series continued, it looks like Issue 5 would have been a 45-minute long punch-up.

While both issues of Click soon vanished from the shelves without a trace, it’s good that copies remain. Each is around 45 minutes long, and an entertaining bit of time travel. There’s an endearingly hand-made quality to them that helps bridge the gap, from a feature on covermounts self-destructing in the first issue to the constant attempts to persuade industry types to let readers/viewers send in demo discs to be filed instantly in the nearest bin, to the way that almost none of the cast seem to have any real experience in front of camera. (Though at least one, designated office joker Jake Wood, did end up having a proper TV career afterwards, appearing in Red Dwarf, Eastenders, and quite a few other shows.)

Prepare for one disappointment here though – that the PC gets very little love throughout. Many of the games covered were actually available on the One True Platform, but the versions seen are inevitably the Amiga and Atari ST ones. In fairness to the magazine, more or less, and the kinds of RPG and adventure that made it great at the time were generally going to be less exciting to watch and less conducive to info-blast type information. And in glorious victory, we can probably afford to be a little bit gracious to the long fallen competition. Or just giggle at what people like that were reduced to playing while we all moved on to bigger and better games like Doom and Ultima VII and the popular party treat Smashing Old Amigas With Sledgehammers. Ah, such sweet, sweet victory…

Smashing Old Atari STs With Sledgehammers is also acceptable, of course.

Watch Issue 1 here

And the Issue that is Issue 2 right here

I get a lot done on my second day in Dawnstar. I visit the Jarl and listen to him air all the problems he has that I have no intention of helping him with. I buy my own pickaxe and work in the mines some more, chiseling out every last bit of ore and selling it to Leigelf, the mine-owning racist. I find a group of Khajiit nomads camped on the edge of town, and sell them some of my jewels in exchange for some hide boots, bracers, a hunting bow, and some iron arrows.

And now, to the hunt!

Well, eventually to the hunt: it takes ages just to slowly walk out of town. And then it takes a while to find anything to hunt. And then when I do find a thing to hunt — a moose, or whatever Skyrim’s version of a moose is — it turns out the moose is already being hunted, by three wolves, who decide that rather than continue hunting the moose they’d rather hunt me.

At least his nose isn't in my crotch. I guess.

It’s my first taste of combat! I suddenly realize that besides my bow and arrows, I completely neglected to buy any actual weapons. I don’t have a sword or a mace or anything, just a dagger and my mining pickaxe. Turns out, the pickaxe is a decent melee weapon, and I quickly and frantically pick the lives out of the snarling wolves. The hunting continues: I chase another moose and fail to kill it, I survive an attack by skeevers (they’re basically giant rats), and I bravely vanquish a vicious goat that makes the fatal mistake of standing harmlessly in my vicinity. Back in town, I use the blacksmith’s tanning rack to turn my pelts into leather and leather strips, and finally have a go at crafting, making myself an iron sword and a helmet, just like the one that guy wears in the Skyrim commercials.

Here's some box art for you, Bethesda!

Despite my fancy new helmet obscuring my ugly face, people in town suddenly stop talking about how terrible their dreams are and instead start commenting that I look like shit. Apparently, I’ve noticeably contracted a disease called Ataxia, either from the wolves or the skeevers, but it only affects my lock-picking and pick-pocketing skills, and as a harmless NPC, I have no real plans to pick either locks or pockets. So, apart from the flood of insults, I’m not too worried about being covered in skeever cooties.

The next day, I head further out to hunt along the cold, snowy beach to the west. I spot a figure in the distance, pacing and carrying a round shield. I assume it’s a Dawnstar guard walking patrol, but just as it occurs to me that I’m kind of far from town to find a guard, I get hit in the head with an arrow.

At least the new helmet is coming in handy already.

Oops. Instead of a Dawnstar guard, it’s a bandit, and it’s also another bandit, and it’s also a third bandit. I draw my handmade sword and hack away at the closest two, but they both have shields and block every single swing. Meanwhile, the third bandit, the one with the bow, deposits another arrow into me from a safe distance. Hm. This could go very badly very quickly.

Why are you jerks robbing me? You have way more stuff than I do.

While the bandits and the rest of the universe wait patiently, I examine Nordrick for any tricks up his sleeve (though he doesn’t actually have sleeves.) I find he was born with an ability called Battle Cry, which he can utilize once a day and, for Nordrick, probably translates into more of a Coward Shriek. I use it and the two closest bandits dash away in terror of my terror. I chase them, swinging at their backs, but they’re running just as fast as I am and I can’t actually connect. The parade of two fleeing bandits and one wildly slashing idiot takes all of us, luckily, right past the third bandit, who was out of range of my arcane terror-scream and hasn’t moved. I cut into him wildly, bringing him down with a few hacks. The other two eventually regain their courage and re-engage, but suddenly they don’t seem terribly adept with their shields, and after a few minutes of frenzied hacking and backpedaling all over the beach, they both fall dead.

Oy. Whew. Wow. I’ve just killed three people. Not wolves or skeevers or goats, but actual people. I pause a moment to reflect on the fleeting nature of life, ponder what darkness leads men to take up arms against their fellow man, and grieve the senseless loss of human life in the traditional Tamriel fashion: by stripping the dead jerks of all their stuff and leaving their stupid naked bodies in the snow where they fell.

I sleep in the dead bandit’s camp that night, happy to have a free bed, and while doing some early morning hunting (I kill a snow fox and two wolves), I spot what looks like a shipwreck in the distance. I was going to head back to Dawnstar, but that ship looks intriguing, and I want to have a closer look. Along the way I find an overturned canoe that some mudcrabs are calling home, and also a small collection of treasures, like a jeweled circlet, some fine boots, a book, and a curvy sword that is cooler than my straight sword because it’s all curvy. With my new sword and bandit armor, I feel like I’m assembling quite the impressive kit.

Three things you have to investigate in games: campfires, waterfalls, and shipwrecks.

I finally reach the large shipwreck, and while I’m admiring it, I hear a voice behind me. Some dude has run up and is talking to my back. He tells me to hold onto something for him, and not to tell anyone about it or he’ll kill me. I turn around, baffled, and watch him sprint off. What the hell was that all about? I check my inventory, and sure enough, he’s stuffed A GIANT MAGIC SWORD into my pants.

Great. I’ve accepted stolen goods against my will. I hate it when people just add stuff to my inventory without giving me a choice in the matter. It’s called personal space, people. I sullenly skulk around on the deck of the ship, annoyed, then turn around and see some other asshole racing toward me. Oh, let me guess. This new asshole is the one the other asshole stole the sword from, the sword I’ve got hidden down my pants-leg. Fantastic. See, this is what happens when you try to avoid adventure in Skyrim: Skyrim gets annoyed with you and runs up when your back is turned and jams a giant stolen enchanted sword into your underpants and makes you have an adventure.

Yes, that IS a sword in my pants and no I'm NOT happy to see you.

Well, I’m not getting involved in anybody’s personal drama. Just the other day I had to decide if I should borrow a pickaxe or not, and that’s plenty of excitement for a guy like me. I immediately hand the magic sword to the new asshole, who seems somewhat mystified that I would do such an honest, unadventurous thing. He then runs off, promising to kill the first asshole. Good luck! Keep me out of it!

I’m irritated, but you know what? This is all my fault. I saw a cool looking shipwreck, and decided to check it out, thus signaling to the game that I wanted some adventure. What was I expecting? Grampa Nondrick checked out a couple boats in his day, and they blew up in his face, too. One time he wound up at sea, surrounded by bandits, and another time he got attacked by ghosts. This boat is probably filled with zombie pirates or mudcrab vampires or republican presidential candidates or something equally horrifying. I’m not even going to poke around on this boat. I’m just leaving. Do you hear me, Skyrim? Nordrick is OUT.

I grouchily stalk straight back to Dawnstar. I’m not even going to sleep at the camp: those bandits will probably respawn, or I’ll awaken to find those two quibbling assholes have returned and are using my boxer shorts as their own personal storage locker. From now on, when out in the wilderness, I will shoot at anything furry, or crabby, or goat-y, and ignore everything else.

Boy, wish I still had a giant magic sword in my pants.

Or, not. Skyrim isn’t quite done with trying to make me have adventures yet. I’m almost back to Dawnstar when the calm, soothing music constantly playing in my head becomes suddenly ominous, and I turn to find a giant goddamn frost troll bearing down on me. I backpedal, peppering it with arrows, but it ignores them, heals almost instantly, and keeps on coming. I manage to scramble up on a rocky outcropping while it roars and bellows and tries to find a way up.

Well, this isn’t good at all. Trolls are friggin’ dangerous. I work my way carefully over the rocks, spot a the roof of a building, and realize I’m basically in Dawnstar at this point. Will someone help me with this crazy ice gorilla, maybe? I can see a couple town guards, clearly alarmed and readying weapons, but they don’t seem to know where the danger is.

Suddenly, help arrives from an unexpected source. I see Leigelf, the racist mine-owner, run past me toward the troll, pickaxe at the ready! Yes! Get ‘im, Leigelf! I love you! I’ll forgive your vague racism so long as you hack that troll down to oh wait he’s dead. Leigelf is dead, instantly. The troll kills him with one blow and his stupid racist body flops into a crumpled heap. Yikes!

Another one of the miners, Lond, runs up to the troll, also armed with a pickaxe. I’m not optimistic: the guy isn’t even wearing a shirt. Lond lasts roughly .0003 seconds longer than Leigelf did. This is quickly getting horrifying. I have a sudden vision of the entire town’s population perishing at the hands of this troll that I innocently led back here. I try setting the troll on fire with a fire spell, and while the monster seems generally unhappy to be engulfed in flames, its health barely dips.

Now the troll is actually entering the town proper. I’m suddenly certain this troll attack is never going to end. This going to be my life from now on: running backwards for days and weeks and months, over trails and roads and through towns and cities, endlessly pursued through the world by an unkillable troll that punches every single NPC to death, leaving the entirety of Skyrim littered with dead bodies.

Or, not. The troll promptly gets trapped between a rock wall and the back of a house and just stands there, confused. A couple guards team up and fill him full of arrows, and the beast finally, thankfully, expires. I pull six of my iron arrows out of him, eight steel arrows belonging to the guards (and a bunch more out of the side of the house).

The final troll toll: three. Leigelf, Lond, and one of the town guards. I don’t feel quite right stripping the dead NPC bodies of all their belongings and then selling them to the other NPCs in town. It just feels a little… ghoulish, especially since I’m kinda sorta totally responsible for their deaths. So, I just leave the dead where they fell, head back to the inn, eat some fresh troll fat, and stand next to my bed for the night.

Poor citizens of Dawnstar. They’ve already been having nightmares. I somehow don’t think watching half of their mining industry getting punched to death will help.

I won’t be looting ghoul-infested crypts or rampaging through bandit-occupied forts, I won’t be helping citizens with their various problems and quests, and I certainly won’t be awakening any dragons. My name is Nordrick. I’m not a hero, I’m an NPC, and I’m here not to play Skyrim, but to live in it.

I did something similar with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and wrote about it in a blog called Livin’ in Oblivion. The NPC I created for Oblivion was a dopey-looking fellow called Nondrick, and I’ll be following similar rules with his descendant, Nordrick, here in Skyrim:

• Eat and sleep regularly, and walk everywhere, as NPCs do, unless there’s a specific reason to sprint, such as while hunting, fighting, or fleeing. No fast travel!
• Do my best to avoid adventure, intrigue, and excitement, though if a quest seems reasonably boring or safe (such as a crafting tutorial), it might be okay.
• No stealing, and no “stealing” (I can’t join a guild for the sole purpose of helping myself to all their stuff and selling it to a vendor).
• Find some way to make a living that doesn’t involve adventuring. Find a place to call home, and maybe even land a spouse, if the fates allow (they probably won’t).
• NPCs can’t reload a previous saved game if things don’t go their way. Neither can Nordrick. If  he dies, he dies.

The looks are hereditary, but the poofy sideburns are a personal choice.

In my Oblivion blog, I began the game standing on a boat in the small coastal city of Anvil. As Nordrick, I will be starting in a similar fashion, standing on a boat in the small coastal city of Dawnstar. Nordrick will begin the game with the same meager inventory as Nondrick did: a dagger, an apple, and 17 gold pieces. (If anyone is interested, I can post in the comments what console codes I used to start my game like this).

Okay. Enough mundane set-up! Let’s get into Nordrick’s mundane life! I slowly stroll off the boat I’m pretending to have just arrived on after a long trip I’m pretending to have taken, and walk up the dock into the town. Dawnstar is a chilly, drab-looking village, its few buildings clustered together as if for warmth. Lo and behold, the entrance to a mine is straight ahead of the dock. I sort of wanted to have a look at the town and maybe chat with the locals a bit before beginning hours of routine manual labor, but since the mine is right here, I might as well get to work.

When visiting Dawnstar, don't forget to check out the sights, like this filthy hole in the ground.

Walking into Quicksilver Mine, I’m gripped by a sudden moment of panic. The place is dark and rumbly, and I have a vision of the mine entrance collapsing behind me, trapping me inside, and having to fight giant spiders or cave trolls or irresponsible mine safety administrators to escape. What if this isn’t a mine but a clever attempt by the game to force me to immediately have an adventure? Oblivion was constantly trying to engage me with thrills, and I don’t imagine Skyrim will be any different.

Luckily, the mine remains mundane and doesn’t collapse, although I am immediately faced with my first tough moral quandary: I’m here to mine ore, but I don’t have a pickaxe. I find one lying on a table, and it’s not marked as an owned item, so if I take it,  the game won’t consider it stealing. Still, it feels like stealing, since it’s not mine. I decide to compromise and borrow it: I’ll do some mining, and then leave the pickaxe behind when I’m done, and try to buy my own later. That feels like a satisfying decision, and probably as close as I’ll get to a dramatic personal choice in this blog (you’ve been warned).

This is my kind of combat: hitting things that can't hit back.

I get busy, swinging the axe with my spindly arms, chipping away at the rock in a few different places in the cave. Pretty quickly, my pockets are loaded with quicksilver ore: 15 hunks of it, in fact, which I determine to be worth 25 gold apiece (I’m sure the local vendors will disagree). I’m also surprised to dig up a couple shiny garnets, which I value at 100 gold each. Man, I’ve only been working for an hour and I’m already rolling in loot! Poor Grampa Nondrick worked for ages picking flowers and mixing potions to attain the kind of wealth I’ve amassed in my first hour in Skyrim.

Finished, I drop the borrowed pickaxe roughly where I found it, but I’m surprised when another miner, a woman named Edith, walks over, picks up the axe, tells me she saw me drop it, and hands it back to me. How thoughtful of her! Shame that I can’t propose to her on the spot (marriage is little complicated in Skyrim), because Edith is my kind of woman: hard-working, considerate, and female. I can’t explain to her that the axe doesn’t actually belong to me, so I walk close to the entrance of the mine, drop it again, and leave before she can scurry over and politely force it back into my inventory.

Outside, the mine’s owner, Leigelf, offers to buy all the ore I chipped up, which strikes me as a little weird. It’s his mine, isn’t it his ore? It’s like owning a grocery store, then buying all the food back from the customers as they leave. Leigelf also makes an angry, passing reference to “milk drinkers.” I don’t know what the heck that means, but I assume it’s some sort of racism. Stay classy, Leigelf. At any rate, I want to try to use this ore to craft something more valuable, so I don’t sell any of it. I wait patiently for a miner named Lond to finish using the smelter, smelt half of my ore into ingot form, then head over to the blacksmith’s shop.

I look like I'm working, but I'm producing nothing. Just like my real job!

I chat a bit with Rustlief, the local smith, and try to sell him my garnets, but he’s not interested. I start using his forge, hoping to make something with the quicksilver I mined, but, even as watch myself bang away at an anvil with tools and materials I don’t have, I see that I can’t craft anything with my quicksilver ingots. I don’t even know what the hell quicksilver is, frankly.

I take a quick (actually, instantaneous) break, eat my apple for lunch, and then I stroll around town some more. I chat with the people I pass, and nearly all of them mention having terrible nightmares. Some go on about it at length. Ominous. There is a cloud hanging over this town, a dark cloud in the shape of a giant quest. I walk away in the middle of a conversation to eat some strange berries I find on a bush, which I admit is pretty rude. Someone is desperately asking for help with terrible supernatural nightmares, and I walk away and start stuffing random berries into my face. But look, sometimes you get quests just from listening to people for too long, and I want to avoid that. Also, free berries! Eating them reveals one of their alchemical properties to me, so I’ve taken my first small step in the world of alchemy. Grampa Nondrick, a decent alchemist in his own right, would be proud.

I descend into an iron mine and leave a few hours later, laden with iron ore and a bunch more gems (at this rate I’ll be able to craft my own game of Bejeweled). I still can’t make anything at the forge, though, because I need leather. I can’t afford to buy any, so that means I need to hunt, and hunting means I need a bow and some arrows.

Karita: easy on the eyes, murder on the ears.

It’s actually getting kind of late already (walking everywhere instead of running really eats up the day: try it sometime), so I head over to the local inn. I meet an attractive woman named Karita, who mentions she’s a bard and that she trained at a Bard college. A hot, employed college graduate? I think I want to marry Karita instead of Edith. I mean, maybe if Edith had gone to college she wouldn’t be covered with filth and breaking rocks in a hole.  Then, Karita starts beating on a drum and singing, and wow, she’s just terrible. I’m quickly leaning back toward wanting to marry Edith again.

I pay for a room for the night, and I’m genuinely charmed by the fact that the innkeeper, Thoring, actually walks me to it, rather than just vaguely telling me where it is (as innkeepers did in Oblivion). Pleasant, helpful, and runs his own business? Plus, he has a nice selection of cheeses on his counter. Maybe I should marry him instead.

After paying for the room (10 gold) and buying a piece of bread for dinner (6 gold), my savings account is down to a single gold piece. I’m a little conflicted: mining has provided me items of value, but no one I’ve come across will buy the precious stones, and I want to save the ingots and ore for crafting, if possible. I’ll have to find a solution tomorrow, because the room is only rented for one night, and a Nord’s gotta eat. At least I got through the day without having any adventures, and only fell in love three times.

"Don't hesitate to call the front desk if you need an extra dead animal head to sleep under."

There’s a book on the night table, and I consider reading it before bed, but it’s called “The Cabin in the Woods, Volume II”, and I haven’t read Volume I yet. No spoilers! I’m a little worried about these nightmares everyone is having: what if simply falling asleep starts some dangerous quest? Thoring, though, tells me I won’t have bad dreams: they don’t seem to affect travelers, only locals. As I stand beside my bed all night, sleeping, I take some small comfort in that.

In the not too distant future, a world oppressed by the shadow of Terrorism cried out for its saviour. And the counter-terrorism task-force known only as HELL listened. Its best scientists gathered and forged a plan. They made a prototype warrior; the first of many capable of doing what no mere flesh and blood man ever could. They made him strong. They made him heroic. They made him a living god.

Then they made one big mistake. They named him Bert Higgins.

Who's the sexy cyborg cop that all the chicks can't help but mock? BERT! You're damn right...

We may never know what convinced the forces of HELL to create a cyborg capable of disabling whole armies of hardened terrorists simply by announcing his name. Who needs a machine-gun when just those three syllables – which you just know would be grunted in an Arnie voice – could lead to the criminals and hostages with guns to their heads alike collapsing into the same pool of hysterical laughter and probably a little bit of pee. There’s no going back from that. Who cares if the day is saved if even the mayor can’t keep a straight face while handing the hero his medals afterwards?

And it’s not like this is a small matter. Names have power. Just imagine some of the most most badass quotes in movie history, if the Hollywood studio system was run by the marketing geniuses who thought the public would feel comforted by having an organisation called HELL watching over them.

“Now you know why they call me “Dirty Cuthbert”. Every dirty job that comes along.”

“I am Ripper… Tearer… Slasher… Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength… and Lust… and Power! I AM NIGEL!”

“I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her: marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet…buried alive. Buried alive.”
“FEATHERSTONEHAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!”

“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr. Fart, I expect you to die.”

Of course, in the real world, you’ve got to give the creators some credit. Bert Higgins: The Man From HELL may be in the running for the stupidest name ever, but you’re never, ever going to forget it, are you? Even when you’re lying in your death-bed, hopefully at least many months from now, there’ll be at least one cell of grey-matter recalling that at one point you became aware that this game existed and that it was real. That’s quite an achievement, even in a world with Tongue of the Fatman.

In short, yes, it’s an epic, epic failure. But also a bit of a success. This was an indie game looking to get some attention, and it wasn’t likely to do it with amazing action or photorealistic graphics. If it wasn’t called… well… this, would it ever have gotten a review in the esteemed PC Format, even a teeny-tiny one at the back that said not to bother getting it? Probably not. At the very least, it gets bonus points for its name being very, very deliberate, which is more than you can say for a certain Nintendo DS game called – genuinely no kidding – Faceez. To this day, I wonder if they ever realised…

When you find yourself needing green and maroon security cards, YOU HAVE TOO MANY LOCKED DOORS.

Despite its silly name, the game itself is a deeply po-faced shooter, spiced up only by occasional inadvertently funny messages like “Due to your incompetence, too many hostages were killed. This has been an embarrassing day for the BERT project.” It’s hard not to keep imagining the poor damned souls back in HELL slumped at their terminals, trying to work out when it all went wrong. The day they found out their careers were now in the hands of a cyborg called Bert Higgins, probably….

As the ultimate weapon, Bert Higgins definitely lives up to his name. Unfortunately, as I may have mentioned once or twice, his name is Bert Higgins. He can punch a terrorist’s heart out through another terrorist’s back with little problem, but that doesn’t help much when said terrorists have brought along robot spiders and about five goons for every hostage. What little ammo you get is spent very, very fast, enemies are invisible if you don’t have line-of-sight on them, and they can kill poor Bert Higgins with very little ceremony even on regular difficulty. It would help if the controls included the ability to aim in 360 degrees with the mouse while moving with the keys, but they don’t, so it doesn’t.

I put the blame for Bert’s uselessness on HELL, whose training leaves much to be desired. Bert’s final test for instance starts with a great demonstration of how much they value intelligence and initiative. He has to escape from a completely sealed room with no supplies and no assistance… except for the door key sitting a few steps away on his table. A case for Jonathan Creek this is not. Subtlety then goes completely out of the window to be replaced by gunning down a village full of guards with a shotgun that seems to be using live ammo. At the very least, if you die, the game simply ends without you ever finding out that your whole existence is part of a conspiracy to blah blah, who cares.

No, really. I’m a huge advocate of story in games, but I draw the line at becoming emotionally invested in a character called Bert Higgins. And I’ve played the Space Quest games. You know what Space Quest’s love interest is called? Ambassador Beatrice Wankmeister. After Bert Higgins, that’s nothing.

…

Okay. So it’s almost nothing.

I still maintain that when the terrorists get giant spiders on their side, they win by default.

Bert Higgins: The Man From HELL never got a big release back in the day – I know about it because of that PC Format review I mentioned, but didn’t actually get to play it for a good while longer. You can though. As a result of trying to track down a copy for this very column, one of its creators decided the time had finally come to declare it abandonware. You can download the whole thing from his website here, and it runs just fine in the mighty DOSBox without any technical fiddling.

Is it worth playing? Not really, except for one point that shouldn’t be forgotten. By doing so, you’ll always be able to say you’ve played a game called Bert Higgins: The Man From HELL, and who could put a price on that? I could, and it would be £50,000. But it’s Mort and co’s game, and they’ve gone with free instead. They’re obviously nicer/more generous/more grounded in reality than I am.

One minor point though – I do need to quickly clarify a statement you’ll see on the download page, lest some of the other games I own get the wrong idea. While it’s absolutely correct that this column isn’t just about lynching crap games, let it never be forgotten that lynching always remains an option!

Requiescat in pieces. In a microwave. On a landfill. Being fired into space. Specifically, the sun.

Not this time though. With Bert, I’m just happy to finally have evidence his game exists, so nobody can ever again accuse me of just making it up. Unless of course, this has all been a dream…

Only one way to find out, isn’t there?

Biing’s intro begins in the year 2156, with mankind facing extinction at the hands of an intergalactic evil in a time of dread. As civilians scream and run in terror, a fleet of battlecraft called X37-2-in-1 Strike Ships close in on their goal… EARTH. The evil Athros, Ruler of the Universe appears in all his cloaked majesty, kicking off an apocalyptic attack, and more importantly, kidnapping the beautiful anime-style Princess Pinkcheeks. But! The last remaining Earth hero steps forth, fighting back in a 2D battle that looks at least a little like the old NES shooter Lifeforce. Will he be able to defeat his foe?

No. No, he won’t. Because Biing is an erotic hospital management sim.

Things get considerably stranger from there.

Well, 'sim' may not be quite the right word...

Saying that the German gaming industry leans towards incredibly anal, micromanagement heavy strategy games and deeply surreal porn is, obviously, a gross simplification of an entire nation’s output. Sometimes they make incredibly boring adventure games too! It’s a stereotype that Biing: Sex, Intrigue and Scalpels is happy to live down to though, and about as far from the sleek professionalism of other medical games like Theme Hospital and Life and Death as Cleethorpes is from Alpha Centauri.

(Oh, and that sci-fi intro? Supposedly the developers were just messing around and trying to come up with ideas, and decided to stick it on this game because they thought it was cool. It ends with a clip of John Cleese saying “And now for something completely different…” and as far as I can tell, is never mentioned again. Unless you want to count the intro to Biing 2, which is- oh, who cares?)

Before you’re allowed to play for the first time, you have to sit through an incredibly long, mandatory text-scroller where the developers point out that the nurses in their game have ‘voluptuous figures’, the docs are ‘complete idiots’ and ‘the rest of the plot makes fun of everything else’. The women in the game, it sternly points out, in no way reflect reality. “Or do you think that women are just there to look good and are utterly brainless babies? If this is the case, then you’ve got a big problem.”

True. Though at least you’re unlikely to piously point out that (supposedly) the nurse in your tutorial video actually is one, and thus a qualified expert. Before asking her to strip down to her bra and pants.

Ah, all those years of training and study and cleaning up vomit. Totally worth it.

Endless tutorial out of the way, you at least know what you’re meant to do: Everything. Except the nurses, who have doctors to handle that for them. You’re the one sane person in the whole place, responsible for everything from hiring new staff and deciding whether or not to buy or rent a new Ward to… no kidding… buying individual pencils and making sure they get to the right office. About the only thing you don’t get your hands dirty with are the actual medical procedures themselves.

Everything begins simply enough. You have to rent huge tracts of land, hire nurses with huge tracts of land, and sort out the first handful of required buildings while your new doctors get an eyeful of something else. Both doctors and nurses vary dramatically in quality and education, though the most relevant stats in Biing’s world are the nurses’ minimum breast size, and the doctors’ golf handicaps.

You place adverts in the local paper with your requirements, then sit back and hope like hell you get good applicants who’ll perform well enough to keep you as afloat as they’d stay if you threw them into a swimming pool/help you stay out of the rough when your cashflow ends up far from the green. Much later, you need other employees too, including baseball bat wielding Hoodlums to sabotage rivals, but you practically lose the game just by thinking about hiring them at this stage.

This is probably a good point to mention that the game’s currency is the ‘dong’. As in “This job pays 6 dongs.” Risky. That market’s always up and down, and makes a real mess when it fluctuates.

No shoes, no shirt, no service? Hired!

Most of your starting cash resources are spent almost immediately, building up massive cash soaks. Just for starters, you need a reception, a waiting room, a treatment room, a storage room and a dental surgery, along with all their required staff members. Throw in a little money to pay a guy to walk around with a placard you can only afford to have say, more or less, “We Don’t Entirely Suck”, and you’re already on the edge of bankruptcy. About this, Biing is merciless. Run out of cash and you’re instantly out on a rather less shapely ass than the ones you were once in charge of hiring.

Oh, and the clock is always ticking. Tick, tick, tick, tick…

Your main job early on is funnelling patients from A to B, and trying to work out when you can afford to expand. It’s not easy because it seems entirely random how many patients you actually get, and the early ones don’t spend much. They arrive at the Reception desk, and you have to decide whether to take their case. From there, they head to a Waiting Room, while you go into the relevant treatment room to have the nurse summon them. You then leave them to their job until they have a diagnosis, at which point you can approve or change it, then leave them to get it done. Finally, you can bill them, kick them out, and move onto the next victim. What you really want is to be able to bounce patients around to multiple departments to build up a massive bill, though early on you’re only set up to take care of abrasions, toothaches and other low-paying injuries barely worth your attention.

'Usually doctors don't ask patients to strip to check out earache, but we like to be thorough.'

As more patients arrive and fill up valuable space in the waiting room, the pressure quickly builds. Nurses can be ordered to entertain the crowd by stripping, which presumably works just as well regardless of whether the onlookers are male, female, young, old or the Wolfman. You on the other hand spend more and more of your time dealing with much less attractive figures – the tables and ledgers showing how much debt you’re in – and the chronic micromanagement they demand from you.

One of the most irritating things is that you can’t simply hire a doctor and nurse, plonk them in a room and expect them to work 24-hours a day for your greater glory. Of all the universes to have unions! Biing is far more bothered about see-through tops than transparency though, so you’ll always see a full complement of manic medics and their fanservice floozies when you visit their screen. Only when you try to do something, like call in the next patient, will your snarky assistant point out that they’ve gone home and you need to hire or assign someone else to take over the room.

Similarly, the room where you check how much money you have is in a different room to the one where you buy land, with a third given over to personnel. This is not exactly having information at your fingertips, especially under time pressure, but is a clear demonstration of how things can go wrong when a game is designed around squeezing in as much cheesecake as possible, not being played.

(Honestly, for all Biing’s skin and sluttiness, what it really ends up fetishising is good old Microsoft Excel. Not in a weird way or anything, you understand. I’m just saying that so far, nobody’s gone out and registered girlswithspreadsheets.com and it suddenly seems a big gap in the smut market. Private Functions, a sexy Ribbon, maybe even a quick spin on a Pivot Table… it’s a winning Formula.)

'I vant to suck... amongst other things... your blooood!'

Your reward for success (by which point you’re completely inured to seeing the same uncomfortable looking cartoons every five seconds regardless of what the patient looked like on their chart/in the waiting room) is being allowed to spread yourself thinner than the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. This mostly means adding the other rooms to your hospital, including a blood bank where you can trade both organs and armfuls of the good stuff on the black market, a torture chamber, a bar for your doctors to hang out in, and best of all, the Golf Room for them to practice another kind of swinging.

Why is this the best room? Because when you click on the flag in the middle of it, the game quits and loads up a complete mini-golf game called Hole In One, and time spent playing that is time in your short life that you don’t have to spend playing Biing. Talk about a massage, warm bath, and bag of Mars Planets all rolled into one. It’s not a great game of golf, but nor is it a relentless slurry of naughty postcards accompanied by the screams, bloops, snorts, ploinks and cheery shouts of “Biing!” that pass for the ‘real’ game’s soundtrack. The last especially is infuriating after the Monty Python bit in the intro. Hospitals want the machine that goes ‘Ping!’, you fools! Did John Cleese teach us nothing?

Typical Biing. One of its few screens without boobs still brings out a giant cock. Whatever. Just hit the balls..

So, what did we learn? Firstly, this vision of private medical treatment is enough to make you fall on your knees and join an eight month queue to bless the NHS. Second, much like the real world, too much cheesecake in too short a period of time really will make you feel queasy. Third, Germans are weird, though still trail far behind the French and Japanese as far as PC games go. Fourth, the square root of 364 is a very unusual looking potato indeed. Fifth, there is no fifth. Or is there?

Any or none of these things may be true. If you find yourself using Biing as an educational tool though, consult a neurologist. For best results, find one whose assistant isn’t falling out of an undersized bra, who doesn’t have a Grim Reaper poster on the wall, and – most importantly – who exists.

What are you doing, Matt?” asked my friend. It was March 2002 and he had spotted me through the window of our college computer room. Why wasn’t I in the pub with the rest of our friends? I explained that I was playing a free fantasy MMO called Runescape. Technically, that was true. It was certainly true enough to suffice as an answer for now.

“Oh. Right.” He was clearly unimpressed by the low-resolution 3D blobs trundling around the screen. “Is it to do with killing dragons and goblins?” “Yes,” I lied. “It’s just a bit of fun.” I wasn’t happy that my new friends at college thought I was spending all my free time killing waves of magical monsters, but it was better than the truth. The truth was that, driven by impatience and greed, I had found myself running a coal mining business fuelled by child labour.

In my defence, I didn’t intend for it to end up this way. I don’t think anyone living in rural Cheshire ever really intends to get into child exploitation. I never really planned to start buying Rage Against the Machine albums, and I wouldn’t recommend that either.

None of what I achieved back then could be carried out today, anyway. In 2007, Runescape’s developers introduced the Grand Exchange, a marketplace in which players are able to easily buy and sell their goods for fair and reasonable prices. Back in 2002, though, Runescape was a wild new world. Outside of the game’s NPC shops, buying and selling items usually relied on players simply standing on the streets for hours at a time, shouting their best offers at anyone who’d listen. It was a world ripe with opportunity for deceit.

Wizards and chickens, a classic combination.

I wasn’t always a manipulative git. My earliest obsession with Runescape was driven by a confused fascination. My younger brother had started playing shortly after the game first went online in 2001, and initially I was happy to watch over his shoulder as he mindlessly pottered around this strange and muddy world of unappealing shapes and colours.

Most of his exploration revolved around an area known as ‘the Wilderness’, an anything-goes PvP zone that was especially deadly for low-level players unaware of the dangers. My brother explained that if you were quick, you could nip across the border and grab bits of unwanted loot from the corpse of the winner’s victim. The trinkets were cheap, but he seemed to enjoy playing the part of a professional vulture.

Mostly though, he’d be in the windmill. “I’m making pies,” he said, picking up two freshly spawned tins from the kitchen floor.

“You collect grain from outside, then grind it in the mill to make flour,” he explained. “Then you get clay to make a jug, and fill it with water to turn the flour into pastry. You put that into the tin with some berries or meat, then it goes in the oven and you sometimes get a good pie.” This specific distinction explained the abandoned black discs that covered the kitchen floor, and why none of the other players seemed interested in scavenging them.

Magicpants was a lover, not a fighter.

Part of me knew I should stay away, but there was something strangely compelling about an MMO that wouldn’t give you the ability to make a pie until you’d burnt about 15 of the bastards. In February of 2002, my character Magicpants was born.

At first, Magicpants just wanted to be a warrior. After hours of constant battle, he learned the true cost of warfare: fruity pies. Healing up naturally took ages, so it was always best to stock up on tasty cakes before dashing into the field. Pies were expensive to buy though, so most of the world’s bravest warriors would run out in to the Wilderness, fight for a while, and then retire to the kitchen to master the art of pastry. It was odd. The elves in The Lord of the Rings might have had a penchant for magical chunks of bread, but you can hardly imagine Legolas nipping off to make a cheeky Bakewell tart. After seeing the carbon-coated carpet of the windmill’s kitchen, I decided I’d be better off risking death.

Unfortunately, this meant that I often found myself biting off more than I could chew. Fights were tough, and weren’t made any easier by a zoomed-in interface that made it almost impossible to move and talk at the same time. To compensate, players would boil down messages to impenetrable acronyms that, even now, make very little sense. Sporadic bursts of movement paired with exclamations of “HH” usually translated as: “Oh God, help me! I’m being killed by a goblin!” Few players ever worked out these cries, causing me to fall again and again to depressingly avoidable deaths.

After one too many, I realised why so few people in the game seemed capable of social interaction.

Go to page two for the rise of the Magicpants empire.

Welcome to the PC Gamer gift guide! A guide to gifts for gamers who PC. What’s that? You don’t know any of these ‘PC’ gamers? Why, that’s no problem! The gifts are for you.

So let’s get on with it. Either send this link to someone who could feasibly end up buying you a Christmas present, or bring your own credit card and click away! Please note, our prices were accurate at the time of publishing but the internet being the fickle place that it is, they are subject to changes. Just click the link for the most up to date UK and US prices.

Cyborg Gaming Lights

£90 or $100

Here’s a way to make your gaming ever so slightly better, while slightly alarming your neighbours. Install these lights behind your monitor and they’ll project the shade of light on screen across the back wall, turning your gaming room into a laser disco. At night, your gaming room window will look like the coolest/loneliest room on the street. Result.

Cisco E3200 Router

£110 or $135

So, you’re born to the forbidden union of the queen of Minos and the white bull of Poseidon, the king to imprisons you in a vast labyrinth, and you cannot get a Wi-Fi signal. You need the Cisco E3200 – a dual-band wireless-N router that’ll give you much better transfer rates and signal strength than the generic one your service provider gives you.

PNY Liquid Cooled GeForce 580

£445 or $669

Battlefield 3 is out now, and if you haven’t upgraded to play it you probably should. Spend your credit limit on a liquid cooled GeForce 580. This PNY card comes pre-overclocked. What’s the benefit of liquid cooling? You get to say: “Yeah, my PC is liquid cooled. Bitches.” And they run a bit quieter.

Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Gaming Mouse

£70 or $85

Craig used to swear by the R.A.T.7 mouse – all the dials and gears mean you can adjust the shape to fi t your hand, and the weight to your exact muscular definition. Craig’s dead (to us) now, yet the R.A.T.7 remains. Now there’s a recommendation.

Minecraft Pick

£23 or $20

This foam pick doesn’t have the heft to damage anything, but it does mean you can bash your office and only get escorted off the premises for looking like a mental.

Action heroes don’t get much sleeker than the Silencer—an unnamed, mute super-commando who worked for the evil, all-controlling World Economic Consortium until ordered to massacre a group of civilians. Refusing, he officially switched sides and joined up with the rebels instead, lending his gun, skill, and (most importantly) awesome-looking battle armor to their noble cause. Just one glance at him tells you you’re many, many weight classes above most enemies you’ll face.

For the time, Crusader was amazingly impressive. The high-resolution graphics were incredible, the number of animations and combat options almost ridiculous. What were stodgy controls then are now a little painful, but there’s still plenty of power in being able to roll around, fire in 360 degrees, and unleash an armory of toys like scuttling spiderbots and placeable detpacks. Who doesn’t love lots of big explosions? Nobody, that’s who – and Crusader did them bigger than almost anyone at the time.

Overkill. The best kind of kill since 1342.

It’s the story side I still find most interesting, though, not in terms of the big plot (in summary: blah blah dystopia blah blah evil chairman blah blah Vigilance Platform), but in how Crusader treats you, the supposed hero and savior of the Resistance. Your first glimpse of it is after the first mission, when you return to base for a pat on the back, only to have your commanding officer practically spit in your face and make it clear you’ve been forced on him. The other rebels you meet don’t trust you as far as they could throw you, and remember: you’re wearing power armor.

In fairness though… they have a point. Not only do they have no reason to trust you, you haven’t even taken their enemy’s logo off. You’re the futuristic equivalent of an SS defector fighting for occupied France in a swastika-covered jacket purely because you think that logo looks cool. The best argument for you not being a double-agent is that one would never be this stupid.

Much of the story revolves around proving their suspicions wrong. There’s never any hint that the Silencer himself cares what anyone thinks of him—he’s a tool who’s simply jumped into a different toolbox—but you do. Every time you return to base, it’s to a propaganda-filled news post about how your mission to blow up an evil research lab was really an attack on the local puppy orphanage. Every time you get back, you hope your colleagues will finally take note of the fact that you really are on their side. And slowly but surely, they do, with nicknames like “Tin Man” giving way to grudging acceptance, and ultimately respect. And then nothing at all going wrong. Definitely not.

Don't expect a love interest here. Maybe a firm handshake if you're lucky.

While all played out using the hammy acting and blue-screen effects that absolutely scream “’90s PC game,” it adds a surprisingly strong emotional core to the game that was sadly missing in the standalone expansion-pack-style sequel, No Regret. It even adds something to the missions themselves, where guards will inevitably be blown up, burned alive, or melted into goo for your entertainment, but there’s a personal reason to keep the engineers and other civilians alive. You don’t have to. In fact, if you kill everyone, the game doesn’t care. It still feels right to try, though, if only to set a good example.

Besides, if not for the civilians, who’d leave all those convenient passwords and keycards lying around? Crusader wasn’t the first game to use the “everyone is a forgetful cretin who should be fired immediately for leaving vital codes less than two steps from the bloody locked door” school of security, but it remains one of the worst offenders. Oddly, it’s less noticeable now than it was at the time. Like health packs fixing up rockets to the face, these days we’re just inured to the silly.

Crusader’s primary weakness is that it falls between two different genres. It’s not fast paced and fluid enough to be a great action game, but nor do the extra bits it bolts on add enough to make it a hybrid. There’s a bit of stealth, but you’re not going to play it as a stealth game. You get plenty of gadgets, but it’s hardly Deus Ex. It’s impossible to play without wishing it could have had the flexibility of 3D, even knowing that the technology of the day would never have been up to the challenge. Still, if the suits at EA (which currently holds the Crusader license) are looking for a franchise to reboot, they could certainly do worse than dig the Silencer up for one last mission…

Crusader on hard mode was one of the original cover shooters.

Release date: 1995
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Origin
Get it: $5.99 — Good Old Games
Video guide: Let’s Play Crusader:No Remorse

Trivia: Crusader: No Remorse used the same engine (albeit a modified version) as Ultima VIII: Pagan. While a much simpler game than that RPG, Crusader uses the engine much better. It has a higher resolution, more detailed graphics, far better controls, and—most importantly—a game that isn’t Ultima VIII: Pagan. The semi-sequel, No Regret, was just a new set of missions. A proper Crusader 2 was on the cards though and would almost certainly have used something more advanced, but was aborted along with the rest of the series when creator Tony Zurovec left Origin.

Mull this over: it’s been eight years since we last saw Max rip a raw, bloody wound through the New York criminal underbelly. Eight years. That is old (staff writer Rich was 17 when Max Payne 2 came out). But no one has managed to take his place. Kane & Lynch tried, and they’re still trying, but for grumpy, hyperviolent third-person action, we really need some more Max.

Despite a new haircut and the sunnier setting of Sao Paulo, as I’m shown the new game in Rockstar’s offices it’s clear they’re sticking to the well-worn path that Max sourly trod before. In fact, we’re in New York. Brazil does feature a lot, but this wouldn’t be the same game without a dingy, Big Apple corridor to tear up.

It starts in Max’s apartment, where he’s under siege from a mob family. Max has killed the boss’s son. It’s the incident that’ll send him to Brazil, fleeing from the rage of the mafiosi. Rockstar have done a remarkable job of impersonating the original developers Remedy: when Max runs out into the corridor blasting at the mob guys and drops into bullet-time, everything feels spot on. The world thickens as the trenchcoated ex-cop fires his gleaming handcannons. I can pick out individual bullets leaving the gun. The guy at the end of the corridor folds. The sniper rifle laser sights coming in through the window are easily dodgeable as time takes a break.

Explodable stationary really adds pizazz to office shootouts.

Coming out of bullet-time, the noise and bodies play catch-up, and everything rushes into place with a chaotic whoosh that’s as satisfying as the violence. Glass tinkles as the snipers’ bullets play across the corridors: Max dives into bullet-time and aims at the opposite roof, peppering the snipers. As he hits the ground, the camera zooms to his target’s face, tracing the bullet. A short cutscene plays – a crazed ex-military neighbour of Max’s runs into the corridor with a shotgun and takes out a few mobsters, before detonating a bomb vest. Inside, his apartment is littered with conspiracy paraphernalia and bomb-making equipment. It has nothing to do with the main story, but those surreal little pockets of madness fit into Max’s strange dream-like noir world perfectly.

The story bounces between New York and Brazil. Fleeing NY, Max ends up working for the Brancos, a wealthy Brazilian family, as a security chief for hire. Their money makes them a target for the paramilitary group Cracha Preto. They’ve already kidnapped the trophy wife of the family’s boss, Rodrigo Branco.

Max goes through some major image changes on his trip; the shaven-headed, wife-beater-vest look is the final stage in his transformation. It’s a ‘fuck you, shit’s about to get real’ to the people he’s fighting. Before that, though, he’s rocking a cheap, crumpled grey suit, while protecting the family from strangely well-equipped invaders.

Max channels the 'John McClane from Die Hard' look.

The bad guys rappel into Branco’s HQ while Max is escorting an IT guy to the server room, but the NPC isn’t a burden: he keeps away from the fight and opens doors when asked. That’s his contribution. The open-plan office is a perfect place to show off the new cover mechanics. Max sticks to the walls, and ducks under waist-sized desks. He can blind-fire over and around the edge of cover. It’s a concession to stealth, but there’s a lot more fun to be had just running around and gunning.

Modern offices are good places for shootouts: everything explodes in papery, glassy blasts under Max’s double-Uzi onslaught. There’s just enough cover to take people unawares, and Max now has a disarm move that spams a few punches at a nearby enemy before yanking whatever weapon they’ve got out of their grip. There’s plenty of opportunity to upgrade weaponry from a warm grasp – or cold, dead hands. While Rockstar are known for their open worlds, this is a tightly choreographed bolt. The bullet trail camera, which follows the killshot from the barrel of your gun to the target, kicks in when Max fires at an enemy standing in front of a glass window. He spins backwards out of the window, the camera following his final moments in a haze of blood and broken glass. It’s a nice reward for the player, and it doubles as a way of telling you that you’ve just shot the last bad guy of the section.

Further on, after Max has a battle with a heavily armoured minigun boss who requires nothing but bullet spam to put down, the office explodes. As offices tend to do, when around Max.

The bus depot offers lots of windows to smash.

Stumbling through the ruins of the building, Max has collapsing floors and flames to contend with. But even when he’s limping, concussed and slightly on fire, he still has to shoot people. Max battles his way through the flames; no wonder he’s grumpy.

The game is punctuated with cinematic moments: tiny instances of obligatory bullet-time, a few per level, such as the warehouse sequence I’m shown. The level floods with enemies and you’re given a few seconds of unlimited ammo. Max leaps from a balcony to a hook, and dangles from it, before slow-motion kicks in and he’s swinging, shooting everyone in a few seconds. The warehouse is part of a bus depot, which is where Max has to lead Giovanna, a girlfriend, to safety – and again it looks like Rockstar have got it right: there’s no mollycoddling a dim AI here. She only gets in trouble when the story demands it.

There’s a lot of environmental detail in the bus depot. Nearby, a petrol station explosion results in an impressive blast that destroys a bus and launches enemies through the air. Other points of interest include a gunfight in the station garage that ends with Max shooting the control panel on a massive platform, dropping the bus that’s resting on it onto the heads of the enemies who were using it for cover. Later, Max uses his bullets to aid a loose balcony on its way to collapse.

It all looks lovely in slow motion. It was never enough for Max Payne to look slick: it had to feel awesome as well. Rockstar have expanded the Woo-some action a little, allowing Max to land after a dive and to continue firing in a 360° arc from the ground. It’s a nice touch, further empowering the player to shoot whoever you like while lying on your back.

This week we won't join our local Neighbourhood Watch.

But laid back it’s not. When Max and Giovanna have to commandeer a bus to make their escape, the inevitable happens: an on-rails shooting section. Yet, as with the NPC escorting, it looks like Rockstar have neatly side-stepped the usual pitfalls. It’s short and it’s explosive. Giovanna drives while Max leans out of the open front door and unleashes his Uzi. Even in a bus, Max can use bullet-time to pick out the gas pumps, although the constant forward progression tends to leave the resulting plume of flame somewhere in your peripheral vision. The demonstration ends with the bus crashing and a fitting fade to black.

Truth be told, the action hasn’t moved on that much in the dormant years. The NPCs are a bit smarter, but this is the sort of stuff that Remedy delivered nearly a decade ago, just with some spit and polish, and extra action moments underpinning the classic manshoots. The gravelly narration remains and the story is still delivered through graphic novel-style cutscenes, although now they take scenes from the game and force them into each panel.

In fact, the only concession to what we expect from a modern game is in the hidden multiplayer that Rockstar have confirmed but are refusing to talk about. In pretty much every other aspect, Max Payne 3 has refused to move with the times. It’s absolutely the old Max in new clothing

In the world of PC gaming, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and casual gaming companies willing to churn out games about some staggeringly inappropriate things. Like this – a casual game based on a real-world killer, currently serving his time. Fun! His name is Ira Einhorn, and he evaded justice for 25 years after beating his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux to death and stashing her corpse in his closet to fester. Yes. Really.

This is the story of how he was captured. According to Real Crimes: The Unicorn Killer.

They brought the war. Not so sure about the Peace.

The last week of March, 1979 was an eventful time in Pennsylvania. Within a 48 hour period, the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island underwent a partial core meltdown, and, less than 100 miles away, Detective Michael Chitwood discovered the body of Holly Maddux in a steamer trunk inside 60s activist Ira Einhorn’s apartment. But Einhorn had no intention of sticking around for the trial. Shortly before it was due to begin, Einhorn vanished, without a trace, a wisp in the international ether. It didn’t matter that he was convicted in absentia; he wasn’t there to be incarcerated. This is where you come in.

One look at the crime scene was enough to make FBI Agent Jennifer Lourdes regret her choice of career. She’d expected blood. She’d expected nightmares. She’d never expected to be sent back in time to 1970, only to be ordered to rummage through the rubbish of a hippie protest in search of… a pinecone. Why a pinecone? She had no idea. It was just one more thing for the evidence bag, along with – she checked – an oar, a wrench and a bowling ball. To Sherlock Holmes, any of these might have been a bonanza of clues. To her, they were years of dreams pouring straight down a rusty drain.

“This is where it all started,” announced her boss, Detective Alan Michaels, an older man who was conspiciously not on his hands and knees in search of a discarded guitar pick. “This is where Holly Maddux first caught sight of the man who would eventually beat her to death. Ira Einhorn was the featured key speaker, and by all accounts he was fascinating. Ah. The pinecone!”

“Is it relevant, sir?”

“Not in the least,” said Michaels, cheerfully throwing it over his shoulder. “What matters, Agent Lourdes, is that you found it. Think of it as the first step on the road to catching our killer. If he slips up, and that slip happens to involve a pinecone, I can think of no better person to help bring him to justice.”

Lourdes sighed. “Okay, sir. I think I have everything. Rope, oar, guitar pick… pinecone… watch, file folder, wrench. Should we pick up the rest of this stuff, like the… uh… gas mask, or is that-”

“Irrelevant, yes.” Michaels thought for a second, surveying the scene. “Ah. A rare opportunity. Agent Lourdes, did you by any chance see a spoon on your travels?”

“A wooden one?”

“Excellent. Now, do you see that black pot over there?”

For a moment, Lourdes’ pulse quickened. Forensics! If this was a pot that Einhorn himself had used, perhaps his DNA would be on it. From there, they could put it into the magic computer at FBI Headquarters and triangulate his position. Or maybe it would be full of what the science team liked to call ‘corpse sludge’, and she was about to serve up a soggy spoonful of hot justice! It didn’t matter. On the very first day of her very first case, she was going to play a key part in bringing in a murderer!

“Yes,” she said, hurrying over to it, spoon in hand. “What now, sir?”

“Stir it.”

“The… the empty pot?”

“The very same.”

“Just… swirl the spoon around it? Like this?” She lowered it in, uncertainly, and gave it a theatrical little waggle. Glancing over, she saw Michaels nod with satisfaction, pluck a ragged moleskin notepad from his inside coat pocket, and make a careful little mark with his biro.

“I like to set myself little challenges,” he said, noting her expression. “Stir The Pot. Ten points. Amazing. Do let me know if you find a stick of butter, a candy cane and a budgie on your travels, won’t you?”

Lourdes didn’t ask. Though even then, she knew she was doomed to dream the question.

“I don’t think we’re going to find many clues here,” she said, as tactfully as she could. “Sir.”

“Unsurprising. We are standing seven years before the murder happened, after all. I simply thought it important for you to get the full history of the man before beginning the chase. We’re done here though, let’s move on. Besides, I hear that Carmen Sandiego woman has stolen the Sphinx’s nose again, and Zack and Ivy keep calling to ask when they can have their Chronoskimmer back.”

Ah, the first traffic light that makes you stop and bow before you go.

As the afternoon progressed, Lourdes came to realise that while death may or may not have travelled in Einhorn’s wake, litter certainly did. From outside the building he had once stood for election, she’d found a hatchet, an arrow, pepper, flashlight, a toy horse, and the King of the Traffic Lights. Outside Einhorn’s house, there was a wrench embedded in a tree, a sword hanging from the wall, and a flamingo that Michaels gleefully noted, scratching off an entry in his notebook that read ‘A Fllamboyant Bird’.

“What was it like, being here and knowing that Holly’s body was in the closet?” Lourdes asked, trying and failing not to be distracted by a top-hat on top of the drainpipe.

“Well, I didn’t know. I strongly suspected that Ira had kiled Holly, but I didn’t think he was so brazen as to keep her body in his apartment for almost two years.” Michaels paused. “In retrospect, the piles of air freshener cans everywhere should probably have tipped me off. We live and learn.”

“Should we go inside? There might be clues.”

“Clues… perhaps. Pinecones, no. No, my dear, I feel our attention is better spent elsewhere.”

Sigh. If this was Bones, they'd be pulling up a hologram of the crime scene already. Like real cops do!

“The fingerprints lab?” asked Lourdes. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple,” said Michaels, slumping down in a chair to watch her work. “I want you to just take a look at the fingerprints we found, and compare them to the prints on file for Einhorn.”

“The prints… from Einhorn’s house, an event he spoke at, and his own election headquarters?”

“Precisely. This way, we’ll know for certain if he was at any of these places. Everything we do has to be based on evidence, even chasing a bail-jumping murderer around the world. I can’t predict where the next lead is coming from, and neither can you. You have to get in the head of both the suspect and the victim as much as you possibly can. You never know when that insight will come in handy.”

“And here I was thinking you were just making me collect random crap from not-even-crimescenes.”

Michaels shrugged. “You say ‘potato’, I say ‘do as I say or you’re fired.’”

Ah, the 'Make The Cops So Fed Up They Just Blame It On Some Homeless Guy' method of getting away with murder.

The revelation that Ira Einhorn had indeed been to Ira Einhorn’s house soon proved a key bit of information, and it wasn’t long before the detectives were standing in his lounge. By any standards other than the litter-strewn horrors they’d already seen, it was clearly the abode of a madman. Who else would put a stopwatch in a glass, for Christ’s sake. Who but one touched by evil could master the sorcery required to keep a banana split unmelted for year after year? Who else would consider a candy cane a sofa decoration, or frame his back window with the world’s largest poker and a full-size sword?

“At least it’s tidy,” said Lourdes, picking up his diary. “She’s gone, and the knowledge rips into me, hovers and swirls, bites, erodes, and the sadness again… the light must come through as we/it goes on its way. Now what do you feel? Anger, loss, resentment arising from the pit of your stomach. Let it rise, detach yourself from it, feel fixation… instead of living out the violence of anger.”

Michaels shuddered. “What does the next entry say?”

“‘I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, how hatred and an infinity of regrets flood through my soul as I see my folly for what it was, is and shall forever be. May angelic and stygian lights bear witness to my blood confession; Tom Baker is a much better Doctor than Jon Pertwee ever was.”

“The ravings of a lunatic,” said Michaels, though not convincingly. Had he stared into the abyss so long that the abyss had offered him a jelly-baby? He had no idea. All he knew was that the little plastic bits on the ends of shoelaces were called aglets. And he also knew that he couldn’t tell his partner about his concerns. She had, after all, proven rather less professional about the chase than he had hoped.

Good grief, woman! Most cops don't take cases this personally when they get shot!

For her part, Lourdes had given up trying to understand her partner around the time they were looking at Einhorn’s boat, the ‘Sheets To The Wind’, only for Michaels to suddenly spot a giant watermelon in the sea, cut himself a slice, and mark another thing off his Things To-Do At A Crime Scene List. It wouldn’t have been so bad had she felt they were actually making progress. Instead, they were just going round in circles. At one point, he even dragged her all the way back to their previous investigation sites, only this time at the dead of night. What did he hope to find? And for that matter, who the hell had been messing with them? Einhorn’s banana split was gone. How had it tasted? Was that a clue?

She didn’t know any more. She didn’t remember why she’d ever even cared.

Bloody Europeans, always leaving their pink rocking horses lying around everywhere...

If Michaels saw something she didn’t, he didn’t tell her directly. One minute they were in America, trying to build a psychological profile of a man with a grappling hook, police tape, handcuffs and a giant fish lying around his house, the next, outside a pub called The Lamb and Flag in Sweden. As far as Lourdes was concerned, that was a hell of a leap to make considering that their last real clue was a scrap of yarn they’d picked up for no apparent reason. Not even found on something. Just cut from a ball.

“What about Interpol?” she asked. “Weren’t they tracking him after he jumped bail?”

“I’m afraid your notion of Interpol is garnered mostly from movies,” laughed Michaels, patting the trained FBI agent on her cute little head. “Real investigations involve completely breaking any notion of jurisdiction, heading to a pub whose only connection to the case is that the suspect drank there occasionally, and hoping to draw inspiration from an abacus, croquet mallet, lawnmower and fresh loaf of bread that just happens to be sitting around outside it.”

“Excuse me?”

Both detectives glanced over at the man in the door. “Americans, am I correct?”

“Correct!” said Michaels, and mentally awarded him fifty points.

“My name is Ludvig, I manage the Lamb and Flag. Is there anything I can help you with? Aside from telling you whether Swedish pubs traditionally have names like ‘The Lamb and Flag’, of course…”

“There may be,” said Lourdes, who had in fact been wondering about that trivial point. “You haven’t seen a heavyset, obnoxious bull of a man around lately, have you?”

“No, I am sorry. The last person I saw who fit that description was the American criminal, Einhorn I believe his name was. He brought much disgrace to this establishment by not even bothering to invent a fake name for himself; he was evicted and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Thank you,” said Michaels. “Lourdes, you know what this means?”

Lourdes nodded with excitement. “An actual lead! We can call the Swedish authorities, set up a nationwide manhunt, and slowly draw the noose tight. After all this pointless hunting for hidden objects of no value, it’s finally time to use old-fashioned policework to nail this son of a bitch and-”

A few hours later, in the scenic English countryside...

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING IN ENGLAND?” screamed Lourdes.

“I thought you’d be interested to see another place where Einhorn visited while on the run,” said Michaels, unconcerned. “You see, for him, this was almost a punishment. He was cut off from his networks-”

“I WILL INSERT ALL OF THE PINECONES INTO YOUR ANUS.”

“-and-”

“ALL THE PINECONES!

A few hours later, glad to only be pulling the villain's hiding place out of his ass...

“Anyway,” continued Michaels, after one pain-baiting return to Sweden and quick jaunt in the other direction to France, “There’s a local FBI chapter here that, working with the French Police… an organisation that apparently does not dick around searching for parasols and roller skates instead of clues… has tracked Ira to this chateau. It was once a windmill, but it has long since been decommissioned. In short, it’s a regular house. Saying ‘chateau’ just sounds more impressive.”

“So what are we waiting for? Let’s storm the place!”

“We can’t do that without the full co-operation of the local authorities. We’re here merely to recon.”

Lourdes took the inevitable list between thumb and forefinger. “Yes. Yes, when they get here, they’re going to be so happy to know Einhorn has a wooden spoon, a pair of scissors, and felt the need to stick his Marriage License high on the outside wall. Next to Satan, and a windmill sail decorated with a guitar, a set of pan-pipes and a pitchfork. You know. By that tree that’s growing robots.”

Bad enough to be supping with the devil without arranging a house-share with him.

Michaels sat patiently, letting her get it out of her system. Barely any hours had passed at all by the time she finished hyperventilating. Wrapping a towel around her and wishing that had been on his list, he drove at a reasonable speed to the local FBI branch office, because they have those, apparently, to make sure everything was going according to plan in the land of people who actually solved crimes.

“Stan,” he greeted the agent in charge.

“Alan.”

“Ludvig?” breathed Lourdes. “What are you doing here?”

“My work at the Lamb and Flag is just a cover identity,” Ludvig told her. “To ensure my safety and operational security, I find it best to pose as a humble barman. And just to be extra, super-sure nobody can stumble onto my secret identity, I do it in Sweden.”

Lourdes opened her mouth to let her brain finally just dribble out of it. Michaels clamped a hand over it to prevent spillage. “Is the team set to go?” he asked quickly, hoping the man hadn’t noticed.

“Yes,” said Ludvig/Stan. “Of course, we’ll need you to play your parts.”

That was music to Lourdes’ ears. “Finally, some action!”

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” cautioned Michaels. “While Ira might not escape this particular net, the courts will take their time with the extradition hearing, and it is anything but a foregone conclusion that the French government will comply with the wishes of the United States. Do you see now why I had you find all that worthless crap? At least there, you can find some satisfaction in a job well done…”

“Lourdes, I want you to run point,” Ludvig/Stan cut in. “We could use someone we’re sure Ira won’t recognise, and there’s at least a chance he didn’t see you climbing all over his house to steal his shit. Just take a quick look around. See if he’s home, see if there’s anything in the yard-”

“Any pinecones…”

“-anything he could use to escape. Give us the signal when you’re done, and we’ll move in. That signal will be finding a Pole Axe, a Peace Sign, a radio, toy teeth, a doodlebug, an ice skate, a screw….”

What? They made a HOG about me? Why couldn't it have been a platform game?

And so was the escaped murderer Einhorn rather unceremoniously caught and banged up in Houtzdate State Penitentiary, where he continues to serve a life sentence. Occasionally, he is heard to mutter “I knew I shouldn’t have left that pinecone lying around.” Nobody knows why.

Agent Lourdes and Detective Michaels returned to the FBI in triumph, much to the FBI’s surprise. They even brought with them so much accumulated crap, the resulting eBay auction was able to fund the Agency for ten years. Their method later turned out to be the exact same one used to track down Jack the Ripper, finally answering the question of how he managed to evade the police so well.

“To happy endings,” said Lourdes, holding up her half-empty champagne glass. “I’m sorry I doubted you, despite clearly having been completely and totally correct to do so, because you’re mental.”

“Cheers,” replied Michaels, clinking her glass. “And yes. To a happy ending.”

THE END

He wins his next game, and his next, and his next, until he’s won thirty eight bouts of his chosen sport across a handful of days. He’s at the final. He’s sixteen years old, at the final of one of his sport’s biggest events, placed against a Scandinavian star whose robotically perfect performance so far would be the story of the tournament. Would be the story of the tournament, were it not for the kid. The kid’s played thirty eight games already. If he wins game thirty nine, he’s won the entire tournament and joined an elite number of the planet’s best.

He wins.

Somewhere, that script lays crumpled. The Disney executive who read it scoffed. Too unbelievable, he thought, too unrealistic.

Lee ‘Leenock’ Dong Nyung is that kid. Leenock plays StarCraft II, is sixteen years old, and yesterday, Leenock won Major League Gaming‘s Providence SCII finals. He left Rhode Island $50,000 richer, having beaten Johan “NaNiWa” Lucchesi in a best of seven match. Half-way through his teens, Leenock has risen to the peak of his chosen discipline. It doesn’t matter your take on professional gaming – be you a fan of esports, a PC gamer, or someone who’s ever trained for anything – Leenock’s story is gloriously human

It wasn’t meant to be like this. MLG Providence played host to the scariest StarCraft II professionals currently stalking the globe. Throughout the the tournament, they were in fine form. Lim ‘Nestea’ Jae Duck retained his imperious stature as ‘Professor Tea’, crushing opponents with flawless play and coming from behind to render himself seemingly unkillable. Both MMA and MVP, fresh from their showings in the Global StarCraft II League‘s Blizzcon finals – the ‘battle of the alphabet’ – were in attendance, MVP’s litany of build orders carrying him far into the tournament.

But Providence also marked one of the first tournaments contested on a equal-footing by ‘foreigners’ – non-Korean professional players. Aside from the near-flawless NaNiWa (who was able to smash Nestea out of the competition), pro team Evil Geniuses‘ Chris ‘HuK’ Loranger and Greg ‘IdrA’ Fields streaked far into the tournament, earning spots in the top 8. Those final few were a markedly even split for a discipline dominated by South Korea: four Koreans, two Swedes, an American and a Canadian. Of that final eight, only two lacked experience on a stage as imposing as MLG’s. Swede Hayder ‘HayprO’ Hussein battled bravely, but crashed out to MVP in his first set in the top eight. Leenock kept going.

He surgically sliced through two of the west’s greatest players: Zerg macro-monster IdrA and the Protoss winner of two previous MLG championships, HuK. He was left to face MVP, South Korea’s most consistently perfect Terran player.

Prior to MLG, Leenock wasn’t a total unknown. In his homeland, he was a regular fixture in the top two tiers of the GSL. Long-time viewers will recognise him as one of the authors of some of that league’s most breathless, enduring games – his matches versus Clide particular highlights. But little Leenock was also known for terrible luck, drawing the game’s biggest beasts out of their cages early on in the GSL tournament. He fell down to the GSL’s second division for a time, his reward for daring to step against players older and wiser. Players like MVP.

MVP has a brain like a storeroom. In each of his countless mental filing cabinet, he has hundreds of build orders. His encyclopaedic knowledge is only compounded by his complete mastery of game timing: not only is he able to pull out the exact combination of units to bat his enemy’s force down, but he has an innate ability to shove them under his foe’s nose when they’re least able to deal with them. Against Leenock on one of the game’s smaller maps, Xel’Naga Caverns, MVP queued up StarCraft II’s version of a haymaker punch: a two base siege tank push.

It was designed to sock Leenock square in his adorable cheeks. Somehow, Leenock absorbed the blow. As MVP came closer, Leenock marshalled his troops backwards, halting them just outside the tanks’ range. For a moment, he held the line, buying time to reinforce, before swelling forward as a mass of chitin and legs. It was a knife-edge battle, but Leenock’s Zerg army were able to close the distance and chew through MVP’s Terran forces thanks to some masterful micromanagement: at one point, Leenock deliberately moved one of his static defence spine crawlers out of position. Leaving the horrible bladed tentacle unable to attack seems like a mistake, until the crowd realised Leenock was using its greater hit-points to absorb tank strikes, leaving his units free to scurry into melee range.

The games against MVP were over quickly. Leenock had taken the match 2-0. Up next was fellow Zerg DongRaeGu.

Leenock was winning, but he’d taken a blow earlier in the competition. The MLG championships are organised into winners and losers brackets, the final contested by the players who’ve risen to the top on both sides of the fence. DRG had knocked Leenock down to the losers’ side of the draw six games before. Now he would face him again.

Zerg on Zerg matches are one of StarCraft II’s most volatile pairings. Players rely on melee units like zerglings and banelings for much of the first ten minutes. Should a game go on longer – and it rarely does – the Zerg arsenal allows as close to a ‘hard counter’ as StarCraft II allows. The decision to go for flying mutalisks, for example, renders an opponent’s entirely ground-based roach army near obsolete. DRG had been playing at an untouchable level earlier in the tournament. Indeed, he’d brushed Leenock himself off with a 2-0 victory. And thanks to MLG’s arcane rule set, not only would Leenock have to win to get through to the next round – he’d have to win four games. DRG would only have to win two.

Leenock began well, knocking DRG for three games in a row. Down a game, DRG began construction of an incredibly early baneling nest. The shuffling bug-grenades would arrive at Leenock’s base way before any sane human would have expected them, and would – if they were marshalled properly – wreak havoc on Leenock’s vital workers. The banelings began their inexorable march toward the sixteen year old’s base, bypassing the hasty defences an economic-focused Leenock was able to throw up in time. His workers seemed sure to die, melted under a torrent of acidic gak. Commentators Tasteless and Artosis performed their eulogy. But they weren’t counting on Leenock.

When StarCraft II’s worker units are under threat, most players draw a box over them and click away in panic. They then form a line, scooting along in neat little rows that ensure that any splash attack that would kill one, kills them all. The best players are able to attempt rudimentary ‘splits’, sending a handful of workers in one direction and a handful in the other, halving casualties. Against DRG’s banelings, Leenock was able to, in the space of a few seconds, isolate every single one of his workers in its own separate corner of the base. DRG’s banelings snuffled sadly around a few of them in turn, looking to exploit those few standing too close to their peers. Eventually, their explosive welcome defused, they popped together, taking down exactly two of Leenock’s previous drones.

That game went to DRG, the constant pressure finally unseating Leenock, but the damage had been done. In the corner of the stream, DRG was clearly shaken, running his hands through his hair and rocking back and forth. Leenock, on the other side of the screen, had an air of calm utterly at odds with his age. The final game of the best of seven series went to Leenock, in control from the start.

Thirty four games in, that left Leenock one player to face. Clawing his way from the losers’ bracket, he’d been drawn against NaNiWa. The Swedish player is no physical Dolph Lundgren, but at MLG he shared his countryman’s perfection in his most famous role: NaNiWa was a StarCrafting Ivan Drago, seemingly a machine built to pound pro-gamers into the ground. The Swedish player’s run through MLG Providence was lethal. He eviscerated MVP and Nestea early on, his Protoss builds timed out to the millisecond to extract as much advantage from the game’s maps as possible, while simultaneously punishing any minor misstep from his opponents with a stalker slap to the face. NaNiWa has been a threat since StarCraft II’s launch, having won an MLG championship earlier in the year at MLG Dallas. But having spent time in South Korea – living in the MVP (no relation to the player) team house for a few months – reignited his abilities.

To beat Leenock, NaNiWa would have to win a single best of three. Should he fail, the series would become a best of seven, making either player notch up four victories before taking home the oversized cheque.

NaNiWa started strong. Leenock composed a quick attack from the shaky economic foundations one Zerg base offered on the map Shakuras Plateau. His roach advance spotted by Protoss zealots, Leenock dallied too long in the middle of the map, letting NaNiWa finish construction of a set of photon cannon defences. The subsequent Leenock aggression was repelled with ease, and the Korean conceded the loss. One more game, and the championship would be NaNiWa’s.

But Leenock wouldn’t give up without an honest scrap. The series’ second game was a tumultuous back and forth experience, both sides trading armies in the middle of the map. At times, Leenock extended himself too far, leaving his soft organic bases open to hard, robotic pokes from a mixed Protoss force. But just as NaNiWa seemed to have the win sewn up, Leenock was able to surround him, his Zerg forces swollen so large they left none alive. NaNiWa had been relying on his giant colossi to pin Leenock back in his base; as his opponent’s forces waddled across the map, Leenock had built a gang of flying corrupters, their aerial position leaving them free to whack away at the colossi untouched. His army’s heart excised, NaNiWa was forced to concede.

At one apiece, Leenock went for a daring early spawning pool. His early force of zerglings was rebuffed, but his choice didn’t cripple him economically. The result was a wary NaNiWa, leaving Leenock free to expand his economy and gain the edge – and the win.

The series expanded into a best of seven, Leenock began playing mind games with his elder opponent. After scouting his foe’s base, NaNiWa began preparations for a lengthy economic game. Little did he know, as soon as Leenock had ushered him to the door, he’d cancelled his expansion base and began massing troops. Their arrival at NaNiWa’s own base was preceded with little warning, and despite a valiant effort, the Swede was quickly overwhelmed in roach bile.

And then there was one. Leenock had to win a single game to take the match, and the Providence MLG title. His previous game was won with a risky manoeuvre, one that depended on his youthful brain anticipating the reaction of the calculating NaNiWa and executing a killing blow at exactly the right moment. Naturally, Leenock pulled exactly the same move again. As his early roaches streamed down the map and it became apparent the Swedish player lacked the requisite defences, NaNiWa tapped out a set of letters on his keyboard. From inside his playing booth, it looked like he was hotkeying a new army. On the screen outside, a word appeared.

“congratulations :)”

Major League Gaming takes much from the American sports model, so it’s only fitting there’s a story in the statistics: Leenock is the very first person ever to come to win the championships from the losers’ bracket. But Leenock’s achievement can’t be defined by figures. The story of the kid who came half the world to play and wound up winning is a tale that transcends esports, something that engages people no matter their cultural tastes. In a programmed game where clusters of numbers battle other clusters of numbers, Leenock’s achievement remains resolutely human.

On a day with Skyrim, Saints Row 3 and the Tribes Ascend beta on my PC, do you know what I wasted about five hours of my precious existence playing? That’s right – the new Jurassic Park game. Well, it claims to be a “game”, though I argue that “Jurassic Park: The Vaguely Interactive Machinima That’s Suspiciously Like Aliens For Some Strange Reason” would have been almost as snappy.

Did I like it? I did not. Do I recommend it? Only if you’re planning a time capsule full of warnings to the future. Honestly, we sent this kind of interactive movie the way of smallpox for a reason. Instead, how about taking a look back at something a bit closer to what the Jurassic Park movie deserved. Something innovative. Something ambitious. Something not shit. Trespasser is definitely two of the three.

See if you can guess which two…

Like being force-fed a gallon of your own sick, at least it's more enjoyable than watching The Lost World...

Even if you’ve never played or seen a picture of Trespasser, you probably know it’s name. It’s one of the great failures of PC gaming, to the point that while it was actually highly anticipated during development, the only thing sparing its name actually meaning failure, is that it’s busy being ‘noun: someone who intrudes on the privacy or property of another without permission’. Few others have hit these lows. Daikatana. Big Rigs. Max Payne 2. Legends in disgrace, every one of them.

It’s the right kind of failure though, a game that may have shot for the stars only to hit its own feet, but at least a game with high enough aspirations to try. To give at least some credit, many of its ideas were even still innovative six years later, when Half-Life 2 became the first mainstream hit to embrace things like physics puzzles, even if there are reasons people decided it could keep many of the others. It’s also notable for being one of the few Jurassic Park games to understand the appeal of the franchise, even if it fell far short. Here. Let’s compare its core premise to the most recent game…

JURASSIC PARK: TRESPASSER: Take the role of Anne, sole survivor of a plane crash on the deadly Isla Sorna. Explore a lost world where dinosaurs have retaken their heritage. No conspiracies, no secrets, no big epic story. Just survival. Are you resourceful enough to get back to civilisation?

JURASSIC PARK: THE GAME: Press the flashing buttons when we tell you, bitch.

See? Much more appropriate. Unfortunately, the concept is as good as Trespasser gets. It does have its fans, some of them spectacularly hardcore – and far be it from me to call them deranged, mental and objectively wrong – but it’s a game that sticks in the memory far more for being quirky that being good. Case in point, the health meter. Trespasser wanted to be a completely immersive experience. Do you have handy bars in front of your face? No. Nor does Anne. Instead, you have to sneak regular glances at a magic tattoo, which reddens as you take damage. And where is that magic tattoo, you ask?

See, my eyes ARE up here. Why does nobody ever realise that?

This approach to realism undercut by both reliance on magic, and being the only game in history where I’ve felt I should apologise to the main character for checking her… uh… vital statistics, quickly becomes an albatross around Trespasser’s neck. Much as it can’t give you a health counter, it can’t show you how much ammo you have either. Instead, you’re reliant on Anne keeping you up to date as she picks up new guns and shoots at raptors, calmly intoning ‘four shots left’ in life and death situations, as well as try to remember the last number between the scattered action sequences.

JURASSIC PARK: TRESPASSER: Tried and failed to create something new and interesting.

JURASSIC PARK: THE GAME: Didn’t try even a little. Still failed.

Trespasser’s real innovation though was creating the worst interaction system in the history of all gaming – the arm. Anne breaks her left arm during the crash at the start, forcing her to use the most malformed, painful looking appendage imaginable to do everything from shooting guns to pressing buttons. And you control it directly, sweeping it around the screen with the mouse, gripping items with a right click, and manipulating the scenery to both cross holes and put holes in cross dinos. Again, any hint of realism is instantly lost by the attempt to create it, with Anne routinely doing impossible things like picking up crates by sticking her hand onto the side as if both are covered in invisible Velcro.

Figuring out the code should be the end of the puzzle, not the start of a descent into Hell!

Here, try this. Find a keypad – a burglar alarm will do. Put one arm behind your back, and punch in a six digit code. Now reset the burglar alarm before your neighbours call the police. Now take a few steps back, lock your finger in front of you, and do the same thing by moving backwards and forwards, never stretching or retracting your arm even a little. If you find yourself mashing the wrong keys, that’s absolutely fine. If Trespasser has some odd ideas about magic boob-tattoos, it’s nothing compared to how it thinks human arms work. And this isn’t even a puzzle. Imagine trying to stack crates in the same way, with the added bonus that objects slip and slide against each other like nobody’s business. Or fighting a raptor, again with one hand tied behind your back, and only two bullets in your gun.

JURASSIC PARK: TRESPASSER: Forces you to fight using the most painful interface this side of Die By The Sword, until you decide Anne is having an easier time with her mere broken arm.

JURASSIC PARK: THE GAME: Wants an apology for the mean comments about its buttons.

Phew. Donthinkhesaurus.

There isn’t much fighting though, because there aren’t many dinosaurs – Trespasser only has a handful per level, and they’re unimpressive to say the least. The original design called for all kinds of complicated stuff, like an emotional system that would control their reactions to you, and the game being more of a survival game than a shooter. Instead, it had to pull most of that out and patch the gaping holes with bits of paper stuck down with spit. The result? An lonely. empty shell of a game where you’re lucky to occasionally bump into a big dinosaur or a couple of social pariah raptors.

JURASSIC PARK: TRESPASSER: Stooge around on a quest to prove that while nature finds ways around many things, repeated shotgun blasts to an overgrown budgie’s face still remain a challenge.

JURASSIC PARK: THE GAME: Savour the satisfaction of watching the annoying main characters get repeatedly eaten, treating the Death Toll as your unofficial score. Get more than 200 and the God of Achievements will personally come round to your house and poke you in the eyes!

The emptiness is probably Trespasser’s biggest problem. If it was a proper open world, it might have worked. If that world had been filled with life, it could have been immersive. Instead, it’s a largely linear track through only a handful of levels, where the appearance of terrifying monsters is almost a relief. They may be evolution-honed killers fixated on dinner, but at least they’re never going to ask you to try and stack a box on something or type a code into a ****ing keypad. That’s horror.

A rare case of things literally going tits up.

While it’s not worth tracking down Trespasser to play it (though surprisingly, it actually runs in Windows 7 if you don’t try to run the x32 only setup.exe file), it is worth reading this Gamasutra post-mortem written a year after it came out. It’s a great way to see what the team planned to create, even if the result did end up being disturbingly similar to the film’s version of the story – good intentions, slack and rushed development, and just as likely to leave visitors tapping on the screen and going “Ah, now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs in your, in your dinosaur game, right?” But hey, no QTEs!

JURASSIC PARK: TRESPASSER: No QTEs!

JURASSIC PARK: THE GAME: No comment.

Unfortunately, even winning almost every point doesn’t make Trespasser a better game than Jurassic Park: The Game. The Game may annoy for its lack of ambition, tedious action, and the fact that it would be over at the half-way point if not for all the characters apparently taking time to suck on a car exhaust before making one specific decision… but it’s still more enjoyable than fighting to convince yourself you’re enjoying the deeply awful Trespasser experience, rather than admiring it for what it tried to do. Does it deserve to remain one of the Great Failures? Probably, yes. It’s as much fun as chewing silver foil, none of its ideas came to fruition, and there’s a reason it’s never been ripped off. At least its heart was in the right place though, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for “The Game”.

Witness the rise and fall of Trespasser here, in scholarly Let’s Play format.

Or really experience the Park with the… indescribable… Arcade version…

This isn’t just about us though, we want to see your Dragonborn too! Tell us about who they are in the comments, or share a picture in this forum thread started by DuddBudda.

Owen Hill – Bop the Squinty

Bop the High Elf. Level 10. A sneaky, wandering archer, Bop spends a lot of his time staring at waterfalls and rocky formations while encumbered. His bow skills are now strong enough to take down a dragon without too much bother, though he does have issues with killer horses. Bop is currently training at Solitude Bards college (to become a bard).

Tom Francis – Pentadact the Stealthy

Pentadact, level 37 and a half. Hobbies include stealing your dreams while you sleep, then drinking your blood, then slipping paralysis poison into your bloodstream, then slitting your throat, then eating your corpse. Enjoys long walks on the Reach.

Tom Senior – Ludo the Untidy

Ludo the Lizard, Level 14. Notorious coward. Spends most of his time reworking helmets to fit his enormous lizard head. Enjoys jumping on carefully laid tables and kicking platters across the room. Can often be found on the plains of Skyrim tickling giants and then running away.

Tom Hatfield – Dante the Inexperienced

Dante the Redguard, level 1. A newcomer to Skyrim, Dante likes to combine magic with swordplay, sympathise with rebels and obsessively collect sets of imperial armour. He is very happy not to be executed. He is less happy about being attacked by a dragon.

Rich – Rich the Beardy

Rich is one part Night’s Watchman, one part battle-Jesus, and all level 18 Breton. He’s got a range of stabbing implements, but he prefers hurling a seven foot manifestation of winter at the floor and letting him do his wetwork. Enjoys unequipping all his weapons and armour, standing back and shouting “why are you hitting yourself?” at foes being pummelled by his conjured creatures. Is currently enrolled at Hogwarts the Winterhold Mage’s College.

Tony Ellis – Antonia the Modestly Dressed

Antonia is a level 11 female Nord. Her hair colour is flaxen and her vital statistics are 120 – 140 – 140. She is currently employed as an executive in Skyrim’s burgeoning lost property industry, reuniting people with their lost magic swords, golden claws and precious family heirlooms. Her hobbies include mammoth watching, long walks in the frozen tundra, and “punching minstrels so hard that actual blood shoots out.” She would like to personally thank the makers of Skyrim’s female heavy armour for appreciating that the term ‘breast plate’ does not in fact mean serving up a woman’s breasts on a plate.

Graham – Cat Power the Smelly

Cat Power, level 16 Khajiit. Enjoys sneaking with bows, slicing with iron warhammers, and scratching with claws. She’s the prophesied Dovahkiin, the foretold champion of Asura, the entirely expected guardian of the Companions guild, and a predictable tennis player. Smells like wet dog.

Skyrim! It’s here, it’s awesome, and you’re probably playing it right now, aren’t you? But here’s something interesting you may or may not know – while it’s officially The Elder Scrolls V, it’s actually the seventh game set in its universe – not including expansion packs like Shivering Isles and Bloodmoon, or a set of mobile games for N-Gage and cellphones. Somewhere in the middle, two went missing – and their names are Battlespire and Redguard. What happened to these lost adventures?

We got from this to Skyrim in just 15 years. Makes you think, huh?

While The Elder Scrolls is currently the biggest single-player RPG universe out there, the surprising thing is that it was never originally intended to be one. The first game, Arena, started out as a gladiatorial combat hack-and-slash about a team of mercenary types fighting their way through fantasy tournament bouts with the aim of ultimately taking down an evil wizard. During development, what had been intended as side-quests ended up becoming the game’s core; a game that featured no magic items called The Elder Scrolls, nor any fighting in an arena. The first bit was added to the title more or less for the hell of it, the second handwaved by the idea that the land of Tamriel was so dangerous, so chaotic, simply living in it was like living in… uh… an arena, that “Arena” had been adopted as its nickname.

If that sounds tenuous to the point that it could be represented by a piece of Juicy Fruit gum stretched from the North Pole to Saturn… you’re right! Allegedly, the only reason was that the adverts and boxes had already been printed… though all the boxes I’ve ever seen have had the Elder Scrolls tag on them, so that bit may be one of those apocryphal tales that’d taste better with pinch of salt.

Neither of the first two games are particularly obscure, though with the first coming out in 1994 and its sequel, Daggerfall, landing in 1996, but let’s take a quick look at them just to set the scene. They’re pretty weird games, starting by dropping the player in some of the biggest gameworlds ever and ending with conclusive proof that bigger isn’t necessarily better – especially in a primitive 3D engine. Daggerfall remains one of the standard worlds that gets trotted out as a comparison whenever someone claims their world has 15 square km or space or whatever, boasting as it does no less than 487,000 of the randomly generated buggers. That’s twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns, cities, and villages. Or so it says on Wikipedia. If you’d like to go count them for yourself, feel free to correct it.

Oh, the head bone's connected to... my sword, the knee bone's connected to... my fist...

Don’t let the graphics fool you. For the time, this was impressive 3D, and a reasonably deep RPG. It wasn’t the narrative based joy of something like Ultima, but if you just wanted a sandpit, the only thing in your way was one of the most brutal welcoming committes ever. Arena especially came out swinging. You know how Oblivion and Skyrim start with tutorial dungeons? This game starts with a fuck you dungeon. It’s big, sprawling, and will kick your ass, but that’s only the start of the pain. Dare to sleep in the wrong place, and it actually spawns extra-tough monsters to punish you for it. How bad are we talking? The lead designer – repeat – the lead designer of Morrowind/Oblivion claims to have fired it up around 20 times since it came out, and only finished it once. Not the game. The first dungeon.

And once you’re out of it? It gets worse. You emerge battered and bruised in the middle of an entire continent, with about six million square kilometres of terrain to explore. How many hand-crafted dungeons are there in that, holding plot relevant things? Seventeen. One plus seven. Not eight. Yow. You may as well try to find a needle in a haystack, blindfolded and using your teeth. Only without the needle. And with a bucket full of scorpions instead of a haystack. Upside down. On the moon. Reached by a rocket. That you built yourself with Kraft cheese slices. Paid for by a part-time snipe-hunting job.

Or you could just cheat your arse off, like 99.9% of the people who ever finished it did.

The Elder Scrolls, then and now. Though Skyrim still has more than its share of low-cut armour in the snow...

Looking back, it’s a miracle the series ever got off the ground… and it almost didn’t. It was a buggy mess, with little ‘real’ content, and a spectacularly bad art swords-and-sleazery cover of the kind that only contemptuous marketing people still persist in thinking gamers will be drawn to like Pee-Wee Herman to a porno theatre. All of that, plus the fact that distributors had been expecting some kind of rock-em-sock-em action game, only to get a hardcore RPG instead meant that Bethesda initially shipped fewer copies of Arena than of The Terminator 2029: Operation Scour – an expansion pack to a completely forgotten licensed game. (That we may do one week.) Hard to imagine now, isn’t it?

For their sins though, the Elder Scrolls did some awesome and quirky things – a demo and word-of-mouth attracting the hardcore RPG demographic and and ultimately turning it into a slow burning success. And not without cause. Being able to make your own spells quickly became a series trademark, though unfortunately not one that continues into Skyrim. Similarly, elements like its melee combat, while rudimentary now, were surprisingly fun for the time. After Arena, Bethesda realised the importance of actual content, and served up a far more complicated world with guilds and missions and a much stronger story… that was also impossible to complete at launch, but never mind… and a ton of options that would still be noteworthy in modern RPGs, like becoming a vampire or a werewolf.

Oh, and one more, that no commercial RPG is ever likely to do again…

'So... uh... funny story. We were... making this new invisibility spell... only... it went off and...'

Yep. Daggerfall especially was pretty filthy by modern standards, not only leaving your character naked if they took off all their clothes instead of welding tacky underwear to their naughty bits, but sprinkling its world with naked priestesses, horny succubi and more, regardless of whether you switched on the special child-safety mode. And there were plans for other things too, which never made it into the game, like a joinable guild of prostitutes and a cut-scene to play for when sexy time happened.

This mage will not be censor- oh.

After making a name for the series with Arena and Daggerfall, Bethesda opted… to release something completely different. Meet Battlespire – easily the oddest, and by far the worst of the Elder Scrolls series. It was originally intended to be a Daggerfall expansion, being promoted to a full game during development, which landed right at the end of the DOS era. Where previous games had been taken on huge worlds, this took an Ultima Underworld approach and was (almost) entirely set in one mage academy taken over by everyone’s favourite baddie called Mehrunes Dagon, Mehrunes Dagon.

(Incidentally, doesn’t “Mehrunes” sound like a particularly apathetic mage? Just saying.)

Battlespire was the first and only game in a spin-off series, Elder Scroll Legends, and the first in the Elder Scolls series as a whole where everything was designed in an editor instead of by throwing a bag of random seeds at a map and seeing what happened. It’s also the only multiplayer game in the series, though one of the many reasons for its failure was that getting it running was a real pain in the arse. This wasn’t really its fault – server browsers as we know them today were still in their infancy and most people were still on awful modems – but for good and bad, it was a bit ahead of its time.

Never having played it with anyone because other people smell and try take your sweeties, I have no idea how it worked in either co-op, or what’s probably best described as the This Game Has Deathmatch? modes. Flying solo though, it’s another brutal, brutal game. You’re not allowed to rest to regain health, the monsters are hard as nails right from the start, and the design goes out of its way to give you rubbish, fragile equipment. All the niceties of a full RPG are gone, from towns to the wimpy idea of a difficulty curve, replaced by a relentless trudge around every level. Cool things are few and far between, unless you count being able to talk to a few of the monsters if you can persuade them to stop impaling you on their claws for a few seconds, and absolutely awful writing.

Here’s a handy Let’s Play courtesy of YouTube.

Won’t lie, I don’t have much to say about this game for one reason: I’ve never gotten more than a couple of levels through it. There are harder RPGs, but the relentless trudge of its hack-and-slash action makes even that much a real grind, and it offers next to no good reason to endure it. At the time, simply getting it running required a hefty PC (mostly because it was built for then-high resolution graphics without having any support for the 3DFX card), with fans more likely to praise it for its very in-depth character creation system than anything in the actual game. Ultima Underworld 2 it was not. And that game got away with saying “Okay, you’re in a flying castle… with no windows. Just trust us, ‘kay?”

Ooh, you startled me!

Despite shoving the Elder Scrolls Legends series firmly to the bottom of the drawer, Bethesda decided to try something else. Games like Tomb Raider and Space Bunnies Must Die… more the first than the second… had exploded onto the market, CD was now standard, and 3D acceleration was rapidly spreading. Cue a brand new series that would bring a whole new audience to the world of Nirn/get unceremoniously canned after just one game… The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard.

Redguard was a decent enough action adventure for its time, if one that deviate even further from the series than Battlespire. It’s the only game in the series where you don’t get to make your own character and story, casting you as a pirate type called Cyrus on a hunt for his sister on the island Stros M’kai.

It’s also the retrogaming equivalent of being broken on the rack.

For some insane reason, Bethesda built the game around two of the Holy Trifecta of pain: Windows, 3DFX and Quicktime. It’s a DOS game, but with a Windows installer that basically doesn’t work on any recent version. Painfully extracting the files by hand and throwing it into DOSBox, you then discover that while it does have a software rendering mode, you’re not going to get more than a few frames a second out of it. People tell me it’s possible to get it running, but I tried for hours without success – and even then, it apparently breaks midway through. The only way I got anything out of it was with Glidos-

'You rang?'

No, Glidos, which seems to work, but adds its own spinning logo to the 3D world unless you cough up $10 for an unlock key to play this, Tomb Raider, and not a vast amount else, really. Still, $10 isn’t much. Obviously, only a spectacular skinflint would begrudge the hard-working programmer that.

'Been out at sea too long. Started... seeing things...'

Even after all this work, nothing’s guaranteed. My i7 PC which handles Skyrim on Ultra chugs away like nobody’s business, keypresses are laggy, and the sound doesn’t work. Also, it’s surprisingly hard to fight and keep track of what’s going on with the word GLIDOS spinning in front of your face on a constant loop. So, while I originally planned to play through a decent chunk of it and see how it lived up, instead I’m going to have to rely on my memories from playing it way back in 1998. Unfortunately, since my PC at the time was a pile of crap, mostly what I remember is it chugging away like nobody’s business, with lots of lag. There was probably music, but I don’t recall. Hmm. This is going well…

As attempts to turn a franchise into a 3D adventure go though, it was definitely more successful than most of the time, from King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity to Ultima IX. It may not have sold brilliantly, but it wasn’t a spin-off that had fans vomiting out their skulls or cursing its name until the nth generation – if only because Morrowind was on its way, and the use of the ‘Adventure’ tag made it clear that this was a spin-off series. Its hardcore roots would never be left behind! Not even in Oblivion! Cough.

The choice of subject matter definitely didn’t hurt it either. Pirates have always been such an undertapped niche that Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Monkey Island are the only ones that have ever particularly stood out, and Redguard’s take on them was at least reasonable. It used a proper dueling system for instance, more like Prince of Persia than simply hammering the button… but as ever with the Elder Scrolls series pre-Oblivion, leaned firmly towards the ‘murder the player’ school of game balance. As for the adventure side of ‘action-adventure’, it didn’t cheap out by turning all the characters you might have talked to into kumquats or similar to avoid having to have a conversation system… a rarity at the time… and told a reasonable story on a much smaller scale than the RPGs.

Mind you, it was equally impossible to finish, not because of bugs, but because of unfinished French homework. I think the final boss was the pluperfect tense. But again, I might be mis-remembering.

Maybe this Let’s Play will help…

Hack! Slash! Have at you! You fight like a GLIDOS! Shit! Cow! You fight like a cow!

As for the portable games? Being neither a millionaire nor a moron, I’ve never owned an N-Gage, so I have no idea about that one. Nor have I ever felt the urge to play an RPG on anything less powerful than the iPhone. The only things I know about them is that they were called The Elder Scrolls Travels, and one of them, Dawnstar, is a city that also appears in Skyrim. I’m guessing it looks prettier now than crushed onto a tiny LCD, but you never know. Maybe Bethesda buried it for shame that even with its great technology, it could never hope to create anything so beautiful, so realistic, so transcendent. In a thousand years, maybe archeologists will uncover it and be instantly blinded by the sight of their very God, the revered game that has sparked churches and crusades, and a new Golden Age based on the hope that one day humanity may again touch such perfection, pair it with one of those plastic wristwatches that played Altered Beast, and take off into the celestial heavens cosmos on a mission of love that will spread light to the darkest corners like a beacon. A beacon called Dawnstar…

…

Anyway, if you only play one Elder Scrolls game this weekend… make it Skyrim. Obviously. But if you’re interested in taking a trip back to see how things first started, both Arena and Daggerfall have been released free, and don’t take much dicking around with DOSBox to get up and running. The original versions aren’t the best ones, so I’d recommend going through The Elder Scrolls Pages for links to fan-patches, extra content, and the information you’ll need to even stand a chance without a copy of the manuals to hand. They’re not easy games, and if you’re not willing to basically make your own fun, you’re probably best off steering clear. As a way of really appreciating how awesome Skyrim is though, you won’t find may better ways short of… well… actually playing Skyrim. Like you already are.

And on that note, if you’ll excuse me, I have a Dark Brotherhood to murder my way into.

No plot spoilers here, but there are shots of the lovely scenes.

1. Icebergs

Skyrim’s Northern shore is the coldest bit, and in places looks like the arctic. Horkers – Tamriel’s version of the walrus – flop around on them. Kill them and turn them into delicious stew.

2. The bit that isn’t snowy

The area around Whiterun is one of the few places that doesn’t look uttery freezing. In fact, it looks sort of like Wales.

3. The coolest bit of rock

One of the most remarkable landmarks in the country happens to have a city on it. Solitude is awesome. Unless there’s ever an earthquake.

4. The coolest city

Every major city is unique and interesting in some way, but it’s hard to top Markarth. It feels like a place from another time, unchanged for thousands of years but still lived in.

5. The prettiest forest

Snow is nice, but trees are better. This stretch of brisk woodland feels like the great outdoors we’ve heard about from people who leave the house.

6. The highest point

OK, you probably could have found this on your own: it’s hard to miss. High Hrothgar, the place you can walk to, is not the summit though. Get a bit further in the main quest and you’ll be looking down on that place.

7. The best dungeon

Alftand, an unassuming Dwemer ruin. There’s a bit more to it. Not going to spoil what’s down there, but I can tell you it goes deep. The main quest will take you here eventually, but feel free to explore on your own.

8. The best cave

Do you like the Goonies? So do Bethesda. There’s a gorgeous, dripping, smugglers cave near Solitude, and a great quest relating to it in the city itself.

9. The best view of the aurora

You can catch the Northern lights on a clear night from almost anywhere in Skyrim, but for some reason I’ve always found the most stunning views around here. It might just be clearer weather, since it’s a warmer region. You can also get a Dragon Shout that makes the weather slowly clear up – doing that on a cloudy night will be the most magical 60 seconds of your Dragonborn life.

Liberty City. Vice City. San Andreas. Since the first Grand Theft Auto back in 1997, they’ve been our explosive playgrounds for criminal activity, casual murder and annoying the crap out of the Daily Mail. In GTA V, we now know we’ll be heading back to the third. But what of the city the series forgot? No, not the weird future one from GTA2 that nobody remembers. I speak of course… of London.

Probably just a gas leak. British people are far too civilised for this kind of naughtiness.

GTA: London is the only game in the series to be set in a real place… though not to the extent that you should use it to find your way around or anything… and was an expansion pack for the original GTA. Somewhat unusually, it’s also one of the few expansion packs to get its own expansion pack, London, 1961, which was released as freeware and would have taken over from its parent game as the earliest point in the GTA timeline had the series had even the slightest interest in having one back then.

The early GTA games were a far cry… not that one… from the open-world, story based games out now. Without wanting to diminish the achievement of creating believably functional cities back in the late 90s, they were essentially arcade games, complete with points, high score tables, and much more freedom. Instead of screaming at the screen as Niko Bellic shuffles around the screen with $30,000 in his pocket but no compulsion to do anything but goon for assholes he despises, you were simply dropped in the middle of the world with the job of hitting a certain number of points to progress. If this meant blowing up half the city to deliver a motorbike, so be it. And it almost certainly would.

The easiest path was doing missions, which you only got one shot at, but you could make your own way too by creating chaos, finding hidden objectives around the city, or just running over hippies and Hare Krishnas. At no point would anyone call you up to ask if you wanted to go bowling. The only hot coffee the media needed to care about was the cup by their keyboard as they wrote endless screeds about how games like this would ruin the world. As we all now know, they were actually thinking of Myst.

And this would be a 'geezer' in his natural habitat. Don't feed him. He bites.

GTA: London was almost exactly the same game, with slightly different ‘jokes’. This being before Lazlow showed up to make Chatterbox FM a thing of wonder and beauty worth parking a stolen car for, most of them are ‘clever’ names that more than deserve their apostrophes. Player names? Sid Vacant. Maurice Caine. Rodney Morash. Charles Jones. Del Rename. R. Reset- wait, sorry, that’s the option menu. The big bad criminals in charge of London 1969 are the Crisp Twins, which is a reference to the Krays but not exactly a joke, there’s a car called the Crapi, another called the James Bomb… you get the idea.

Beyond that, the only real difference from the original is the inclusion of words like ‘ponce’ and ‘tasty’ and ‘leave it aaaht’, though not usually in correct sentences. Much of the dialogue sounds like it was designed by pinning Eastenders transcripts on a dart-board, then going down to the pub to try and remember what they were. Your first contact for instance tells you “I’m the monkey and you’re the cheese-grater,” while the second informs you “In a couple of years I’ll be taking over the whole bread basket and if you’ve got that special summfink you can too, now stop loafing around.”

…

Thus speaks a man with serious logic gaps in his ambition. And if you’re wondering how intimidating he sounds… we’re not so much talking master criminal as a less confident Mackensie Crook. These are not games anyone expected to one day boast all-star casts. Ones with actual actors, maybe…

Well, that's not very cultured. At least slip in a wanker or something.

The light conversion continues in all the obvious places. When you die, you’re told ‘YOU’RE BROWN BREAD’ because brown bread is shit it’s slang for ‘dead’, and you don’t get arrested by the police so much as nicked by the rozzers. But they still let you back out on the street after shooting a rocket launcher at a tour bus, without even checking if you can do the secret handshake or have what’s left of your trousers at half-mast. Realism? Pah. It’s a game with lives. The cars do however finally drive on the right side of the road. Which is to say, the left side of the road. That’s a massive improvement for the five seconds or so you actually spend obeying the rules. Like a great big Nigel. Called Julian.

…and after that point, it’s standard GTA. Not surprising. It was an expansion pack, after all.

'And on your right, you'll see the guy we just ran over. No refunds!'

But what if London had taken its place amongst the holy trinity of GTA cities, and been a true candidate for full-3D greatness? There are reasons to leave it out… sorry… leave it aaaaht of the running, like giving Rockstar the freedom to create whatever they want every console generation, but surely London, the very cradle of civilisation-with-an-s, deserves another chance? Imagine the possibilities!

Okay, so most of the driving would have to go. Driving around London is a stupid idea, which would need to be replaced with boosting characters’ Oyster cards to travel on the Underground, or heading home to top-up at regular intervals. For getting around in a hurry, the game’s leading scumbag would instead make proper use of a Boris Bike. It may not have the class of driving around in a tank, but on the bright side, it does mean the wages of sin don’t have to be wasted on congestion charges. As your boss, Big Al “Da Crowbar” Killingsworth will explain, everyone’s got to do their bit in the current recession. Tying into the GTA series’ increasing use of anti-heroes, you can also take solace that while you may still be forcing your enemies into concrete shoes, you’re doing it with a spectacularly low carbon footprint.

What things might look like on the correct side of the road.

Next, guns. Gone too, obviously, thanks to the UK’s strict firearm policy. This will have a bit of a knock-on effect on the missions, but a new British sensibility to the combat will help. This time, you may not have a battle-tank or AK-47, but you will still be armed with all the standard weaponry expected of Her Majesty’s Subjects, including cutting wit, biting sarcasm and a rusty shiv. The challenges ahead of you will be different, as you’d expect, but no less exciting – like figuring out how to get from Paddington to Camden while the Circle/District line is shut, driving a tour bus for extra money, carefully sneaking past drunken hen parties at midnight, and beating chuggers to death with a cricket bat.

And the main game? Obviously, it’ll be a full multiplayer experience, with all players starting out as those people who hand out fliers for dodgy sounding ‘Learn To Speak English Good’ schools on the Tottenham Court Road. Soon enough though, you’re sucked into the depths of the London underworld, being forced to fight for your life against drug-crazed tramps, feeling the callous boots of the Old Bill on your face as you politely protest student fees on behalf of the local guv’ner’s activist daughter, and even resort to eating dinner at Wetherspoons. But that’s only the start of your problems! Soon you realise your ambitious boss is in league with foreign terrorists from overseas, and your past loyalties have made you all the lynchpins of a dastardly attempt to repatriate America via a co-ordinated strike on Buckingham Palace itself. Sneaking into the Tower of London to sabotage the day of the event by replacing the Crown Jewels with a Tesco-brand strudel seems like the obvious solution, until the Queen is blown up by an exploding dildo in an unrelated incident. The winner is the first to get to 1000 points.

Or it could be something like Lock Stock meets The Getaway. That could work too.

If only everything in life could be as satisfying as a good Crapi.

If you want to play GTA: London, you’re mostly out of luck, unless you want to hit up eBay, since stealing a game called Grand Theft Auto would be as wrong as it is deliciously ironic. You can however download both GTA and GTA2 for free at Rockstar Classics, amd just pretend the characters are speaking proper English, instead of that weird version where ‘honour has no ‘u’ in it and the letter z is allowed to run rampant. You can also download a copy of Wild Metal Country, the game universally referred to as “What the hell is Wild Metal Country?”, if you want to find out what it is.

As for the real GTA V, if you missed the trailer earlier this week, here it is again.

Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project is unquestionably the pinnacle of horror movies in which nothing actually happens. Like trees? Seinfeld? Serial killers? Then this is the film for you. It’d be a great nap movie too, if not for all the shouting. Upon release, it raised many questions, notably “Wait, people actually think this is a true story?” and “If they all died, are those zombies on the talk-show circuit?” and “Didn’t they consider just following the river until they made it out and could go buy pie?”

But for some, another, more important question beckoned. “How can we cash in on this?”

This is the story of how they failed.

'Ma'am, are you listening sarcastically, or just poorly animated? Tough to tell with these glasses...'

To give the Blair Witch games some credit, probably for the last time, they’re based on an interesting idea. Nope, not a bunch of morons stumbling around in the woods and being startled by rocks and twigs. A massive cross-company production, where three different developers would offer their own take on the movie’s back-story, albeit in one engine – a survival horror one built for Terminal Reality’s Nocturne. Terminal Reality took the first game, subtitled Rustin Parr, with Human Head Studios picking up the baton for the second, The Legend of Coffin Rock, and Ritual Entertainment bringing everything to a close in The Elly Kedward Tale. All three were released in just under a month or so, around the same time as Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 – which remains the dumbest sequel since Highlander 2, and the stupidest thing to allow into your eyes that isn’t actually a nail soaked in battery acid.

Pick a flaw in the survival horror genre, and the Blair Witch games have it. Clumsy integration between characters and backgrounds? Check. Animation that acts about as well as… well, anyone in Book of Shadows? Check. The kind of combat usually inflicted as a punishment, only with the pretence that it’s all part of the experience? You better believe that’s a check. Now cut the length of the game in about four, for three games that you’d have had to buy at closer to full price than they deserved, and fill it full of the kind of nonsense that makes sinister stick-men in the woods seem vaguely threatening. The series was swiftly ignored, to the point that even Blair Witch fans barely acknowledge their existence.

To see why, you need look no further than Rustin Parr. Nocturne, Terminal Reality’s first wander through these forests, was an interesting if flawed game about a team of monster hunters called Spookhouse, travelling the world to face vampires, Cthulhu style monsters, a version of Al Capone with a bit of a Frankenstein leaning, and a sequel hook that never actually went anywhere because Terminal Reality discovered that atmospheric film-noir monster hunting wasn’t particularly commercial, and instead opted to do the exact same premise, only with a female lead, the name ‘Bloodrayne’ and a couple of… cough… major concessions to the plot. Shocking nobody, such pandering worked considerably better.

Not that there weren’t already signs that they were looking to move in this direction anyway…

'Svetlana, go and get dressed properly, then we'll have our boring expository dialogue. Okay, sweetie?'

Rustin Parr was Terminal Reality’s attempt at cross-over fiction, with the Spookhouse – specifically an agent called Elspeth “Doc” Holliday – being sent to the town of Burkittsville to investigate the Blair Witch legend. That may not seem a bad idea, but… well… Spookhouse is a seriously dumb organisation, and hardly something that helps boost the original movie’s focus on reality and mystery. The opening scene involves a fake-out involving Holliday being told to report for her execution, before it gets instantly revealed that this is just her boss’ idea of a joke, with her co-workers consisting of a hysterically stereotypical Chinaman, a military guy with a chin that can be used to hammer whole planets, a guy in a big Nick Fury style eye-patch, and the star of the previous game, The Stranger, with his double-guns, JC Denton voice and fedora hat. It’s made no less silly by the fact that Holliday has to keep calling him that, setting the scene with clunky exchanges like “Oh, Stranger, you’re so paranoid…”

The mandatory training involves fighting actual zombies, which the characters unsurprisingly shrug off as being nothing special, and experiments with assorted firearms you’ll have access to. Because when you think of The Blair Witch Project, you think of zombies and guns, right? Nothing says dark, spooky, mysterious horror like an experienced monster hunter tooling up at an agency devoted to that kind of investigation, before being dispatched to track down the Witch and shoot her tits off with a rifle.

None of this works. At all. It’s like having Mulder and Scully show up in a Hitman game because they’ve heard rumours of a cloned assassin, Lara Croft advising Indy, or Itagaki announcing a new opportunity to see the girls of Dead Or Alive like you’ve never seen them before… in Hamlet!

Had Nocturne actually been a beloved series instead of an underperforming one-shot, this might have been an interesting twist. Instead, it’s almost creepily parasitical – not to mention cheaply done, up to and including the fact that most of the game itself thinks it’s still Nocturne, from the name of the application window to a few of the error messages, and the inability of the characters to hit their marks during cut-scenes. There’s a lot of cut-scenes of people sitting on top of chairs and walking around in big circles instead of having a conversation, and anyone in a flappy coat has yet to be told that they’re not meant to flap all the time. It makes them look like they’re producing their own wind. Parp.

Nocturne's big gimmick was its lighting of rendered 3D backgrounds. Actually quite cool. But here? Yawn.

Rustin Parr is still the best of the three games though, being split into multiple days of investigation and nights of running through the woods and really angering the local spirits by breaking its stickmen apart and playing a sinister round of Poohsticks with them. Its attempts to fill in the backstory are the most notable part of it though. Remember how The Blair Witch Project had mystery on its side? Here, not so much. Monsters are up-front, combat strictly professional (and with no real metaphorical element a la Silent Hill 2), surprises non-existent, and most bizarrely, the witch herself is mostly irrelevant. Instead, the dark force in the heart of the woods is a demon called Hecaitomix, who has a tendency to suck crappy game protagonists into a spiritual/demon realm and then get beaten up by them. At one point, he even gets his slobbery arse handed to him by a man wielding a flaming pugel stick.

Our villain, everyone! Talk about a new low for demonkind…

'Urk! I just realised I'm mortally wounded!' (collapses)

The second two games each have someone new going up against ol’ Heckofacomic. The Legend of Coffin Rock features a wounded amnesiac soldier called Lazarus, and if you can’t figure out his big twist, feel ashamed. It’s a pitifully short game, based on a bit of the series lore – a bit of rock where five men searching for a missing girl called Robin Weaver were found tied together, disembowelled and with carvings all over their bodies. The game version involves that search, Lazarus’ hunt for his identity, and the increasing realisation that absolutely nobody seems to give a damn. Not because the plot says so, mind. No, because the Blair Witch games have some of the most apathetic voice acting in the history of all gaming, to the point that if you can stay awake during the exposition, it’s probably only because you went to get a sandwich. Any tension is long gone by the time you get to the end boss – and the fact that there is an end-boss says a lot about these games – which looks like an angry fish with legs.

Avatars of terror shouldn’t look like they’d go well with mushy peas. I’m just saying.

'I'm here for your witch, but I'll settle for whoever set up these camera angles.'

The third game, The Elly Kedward Tale, doesn’t quite so happily set sail on a course of ‘due shit’, though it’s no easier to take seriously. This time, Helganomics’ opponent is a witch-finder called Jonathan Prye, who arrives in town just in time to find everyone leaving. They’re terrified that they’ve been cursed by Kedward – the Blair Witch – who turned out not to be a very good sport about being shackled to a wheelbarrow and left to freeze to death, and are taking it out on another suspected witch in town. There’s more action than in the previous games, though only in a technical sense, but by this point it’s become clear that the series is little more than fan-fiction with an official license, so who cares?

Nobody. That’s who. Google the word ‘Hecaitomix’ for proof, and remember that The Blair Witch Project has spawned more piffle about the true meaning of a bunch of empty woods where nothing interesting happens than Avatar and Return of the Jedi combined. There are Western made Silent Hill sequels that earned more love than this. Even Homecoming! And that one was… yes. Moving swiftly on!

Best disclaimer ever. Remember! It's not crappy QA, it's the Great Old Ones.

Fans of either horror or The Blair Witch Project… read that as you will… can obviously not so much skip these games as jump-rope over them. But what if you’re in the mood for something weird and scary? Consider this a suggestion to check out Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth – a bad game in many ways, but one that does several very clever things with atmosphere and tension building.

Unlike the Blair Witch games, it puts you into a hostile adventuring environment where nothing is necessarily as it seems… except for the bit about you being in a town of monster-people and not on a sugar binge at the Sweet Factory… and has some genuinely tense, frightening moments. It’s spectacularly buggy, ropey as all hell, and the odds of you actually finishing it aren’t worth betting the £6 it currently costs on Steam. But! It’s probably worth that £6 just for a scene in a hotel near the start, and a very different take on survival horror from the norm. Awesome? No. But definitely memorable.

Happy Halloween. May your trick or treat be free of caltrops.

Realism

'Hey cousin! I'm going to be loud and obnoxious!'

Here’s a thing. Rockstar make amazing places. They create deliciously realistic cars and vehicles for you to traverse them. They build gorgeous lighting models and a spectacular weather patterns. They imbue them with brutal, explosive physics. And then they fill them with cartoon characters. Their illusion is shattered.

The problem is with character animation and faces. The detail in the people in GTA games has never matched the life and clarity of the places they’re set in… if the cities are impressionist paintings, the people are caricatures. It means that all dialogue is dialled up to 11, that scenes are written to be catastrophically over-the-top, rather than subtle or quiet, and that plotlines tend the absurd. That used to be fine. But Liberty City is/was gorgeous. It’s just the inhabitants were murderous lunatics.

I think I know how Rockstar can achieve. LA Noire’s performance capture technology could give the chance for actors to imbue their characters with life and emotion that goes well beyond the cartoons we get today. If they do that, they can start telling compelling, human, real stories. Taking the game from the excesses of GTA IV, to something closer to the kind of adult entertainment we’ve dreamed about for years.

Less-scripted missions

Rockstar, nothing you can script will live up to this.

Tightly scripted missions are pretty dull even when they’re done well, but in the open worlds of the GTA games, they almost never work. Remember that time you were chasing that guy, and you caught up to him and uzi’d him in the face from your bike, only he wasn’t scripted to die yet so he was completely invincible? It was all of the times.

GTA games are open worlds, a genre we love for the freedom it gives us. So it’s weird that when it comes to missions, Rockstar keep writing movie scenes and expecting the player to stick to the script.

They’re also games that cast you as a criminal, rebelling against the law. So it’s weird that they seem to think we’ll obey an arbitrary set of rules about where we can go and what we can do, in order for their overwritten missions to make any sense.

We’re gamers: we love to break things. That fits beautifully with both the genre and the themes of the whole GTA series. Embrace it. By all means tell us why we’re chasing this guy, then get the hell out of our way and let the glorious chaos of the simulation take over.

A little love for the PC

Pictured: The process of getting GTAIV to work on PC.

On PC, GTA IV requires you to sign into three different DRM services to play: Steam, Rockstar Social Club, and Games for Windows Live. Idea: don’t do that, ever again, for any reason.

It’s also weirdly demanding, even today, despite looking pretty drab by PC standards. And it doesn’t trust you: it won’t allow you to crank the graphics settings higher than it thinks is safe, even in the rare case that the game is running well.

I know, the PC isn’t a priority for Rockstar: they like to show up to the platform late, unannounced and half-heartedly – if at all. But the PC is as big as you want it to be. This time, we want GTA optimised, ready to run, and to hit shelves alongside console versions on release day.

If you turn a game that runs perfectly on a six year-old box into something that chugs on PC hardware many times more powerful, you turn the biggest gaming platform in the world into a niche. And if you wrap it in the most widely hated DRM system, on top of your own, you turn the most sociable and influential gaming community into a weapon against you.

Get people who know what they’re doing on PC. Stick to Steam as the only copy protection. Put some love into it and find out how big PC gaming really is.

Proper mod support, please!

How can you not want more of this?

Every Grand Theft Auto game has played host to fantastic, ridiculous mods, from the addition of multiplayer to Grand Theft Auto 3 to the astonishing graphics tweaks and silly zombie mods in Grand Theft Auto IV. But the community has made these mods – and often fixed bugs in the original game – without any support from the developers. What could those passionate, committed gamers make if, in Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar made a commitment to supporting mods by releasing official tools, providing documentation, and did their best not to break everything with each new patch? Amazing things that would give the game a longer, better life, we’d bet.

Cross-platform gaming

Imagine switching seamlessly to this.

The core GTA experience has remained pretty much unchanged since the original game back in 1997. Yes, there are helicopters, experience points and cutscenes, but at it’s heart its just running around a city and driving vehicles.

DS and iPhone versions of Chinatown Wars prove that the franchise can work on handhelds. It would be mind-blowingly awesome if you could start a game on your PC in full 3D, then switch to your phone and do a bit in 2D, and continue back on the PC. Microsoft promised something similar a while back, and the whole GFWL deal Rockstar has means that it could actually come to fruition.

More Flock of Seagulls

Way cooler than Nico.

Vice City worked incredibly well because it was an 80s pastiche done properly. It didn’t matter that the characters and vehicles looked a bit basic because everything was lit in neon pink and soundtracked with classic 80s tunes. It also employed a cinematic level of self-reflexivity with its references to Scarface and Miami Vice.

GTA IV took itself far too seriously in this regard – yes, there were jokes and comedy missions, but it felt self-conscious in its attempt to be a “modern” product. The problem could be that, following San Andreas’ early-90s adventure, there’s nowhere for the series to go. The 70s are unlikely to connect with its target audience, and the early-2000s are too embedded in recent memory. Surely there’s some room for some retro action, though.

Bikes?

Oh CJ's pushbike, how we've missed you.

Thanks to rising petrol costs the popularity of urban cycling has increased massively in the few years since the notably bicycle-free GTA IV. And although everyone soon became bored of the human-powered transport in San Andreas, they could still serve as a speedy and efficient way of getting around whichever city V’s set in.

We’re not talking San Andreas’ BMXs and mountain bikes, either – we want proper road bikes with skinny tyres and dropped handlebars. In real-life you can hit 30mph on a road bike, and yet at slow speeds they’re manoeuvrable enough to turn tight corners and dodge between traffic. Imagine being chased by the cops and then skidding down a tight alleyway to make a getaway. There’s so much untapped potential.

Artemis isn’t an official Star Trek game, but it is the Star Trek game you’ve always dreamed of. It’s a bridge simulator, in which multiple players take on the roles of starship crew. There are six slots in a bridge crew: a captain, a helmsman, a weapons master, an engineer, a science officer and comms. The captain hosts a server. Everyone else logs into the server to play their role. Everyone but the captain gets their own screen and their own jobs. To succeed, crew members must communicate and work together. Science officers need to provide bearings and scan readings to helmsmen and weapons officers. Engineers need to divert power between the warp drive and weapons. Everyone needs to listen to the captain’s orders.

Artemis is an exciting new take on asymmetric cooperative multiplayer.

Whisper it, but it’s basically liveaction roleplaying with viewscreens. Without pausing to read any instructions or forum posts, the PC Gamer team flung itself into a randomly generated mission. What could possibly go… oh.

Episode One – The Kobayashi Maru

Stardate: Wednesday. Lunchtime. About a quarter past one.

Our rookie crew has embarked upon a randomly generated combat mission without looking at the manual, Wiki or readme. We quickly choose our roles and launch the game. No one has any idea how to play, or what the buttons do. All we know is that there are enemy cruisers out there, and we have to kill them.

Captain Tim Edwards: I’ve made my first decision of the day. I’ll command the Starship Artemis with my feet on the desk, eating a sandwich. This will be known as ‘The Edwards manoeuvre’. As I do this, my T-shirt rides slightly up. I pull it back down. No no no. Straightening my T-shirt will be called ‘The Edwards manoeuvre’. My first order to the crew: “What the hell is going on?”

Science Officer Graham Smith: As our ship’s Science Officer, I assume I’ll be standing off to Tim’s right, looking stern and raising a single, curious eyebrow at confusing human ‘feelings’. Which sounds like a regular Thursday. Instead, my screen is a muddle of numbers and graphs. The first screen has a triangle in the middle, with three lines poking out and a circle around it. The second screen has an empty grid with space in it. The third screen shows a poorly rendered 3D spaceship.

I check the computer’s databanks (the Artemis Wiki, bit.ly/artemiswiki) to find out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. While being the sexy voice of reason, I can also use the ship’s long-range scanners to bring up tiny numbers about enemy ships. Like that enemy ship half a dozen sectors away.

Tim orders us to attack – or rather, “Attaaaaaaaack!” I relay their position to our Helmsman, Tom Senior, so he can plot a course, and then let Weapons Officer Tom Hatfield know their shield frequency so he can program the torpedoes. Our course is set and we… go nowhere.

Owen ‘Welshy’ Hill: I’m the engineer, which means I control the power to everything on the ship. Except, as soon as I load the game up, I’m confronted with a giant screen covered with blue blobs. The rest of the team seem to know what they’re doing and are gleefully making jokes and shouting out instructions. I think back to the two episodes of Star Trek I’ve seen. What do the engineers do? What is warp? What is impulse? I vaguely remember something about lithium crystals. Ah, it’ll come to me. I tell Tim that I’ve got impulse engines, shields and warp power. And repair crews. He asks if I know what I’m doing. I nod sagely.

“Then why aren’t we moving?”

“I’m sure the helmsman will know.”

Phew. Dodged that one.

Senior Ensign Tom Senior: Finally, I get to pilot a starship. It’s my job to get from point A to point B via either sluggish impulse propulsion, or warp speed – which is so powerful it reduces your ship to a smear that streaks across the galaxy. As I jump into the game I half expect to see a bank of complex course-plotting software. The reality is, thankfully, much simpler. A small green icon in the centre represents the ship. It’s surrounded by a ring, labelled with bearing degrees.

But where’s the ‘go fast’ button? Oh, there it is, a pair of small sliders at the bottom left of the screen. What happens if I set warp to maximum? Absolutely nothing. There’s no power. I’m not in charge of that.

Welshy: Oh no. Everyone’s looking at me again. Apparently I’m in charge of power. I’m starting to figure this out. I can use sliders to distribute power across different systems. I should put all of our power to impuuuuuuuuuuuuullllse… That works. We’re no longer docked.

Uhurich McCormick: I’m working the communications rig and am supposed to use the ship’s arrays to chat directly with the things hanging in space around us: to secure docking permissions, check the status of allied ships, things like that. I’d previously been wittering away happily with the station’s manufacturing teams to get some more photon torpedoes, but out in the inky blackness of the void, there’s no one to talk to. Aww. Wait, we’ve just scooted past something!

Some red dots on the ship’s scanner. I call over to Graham and ask for his expert analysis on what they are. “Red dot things, over there!” he squeaks. Thanks, Graham. Are they hostile? Let’s find out.

I bring up my communicator and find their designations. They’re marked under ‘enemies’. Time for a chat. I have four gambits with which to begin my fledgling diplomatic career, three of which are insults. I think today I’ll start with their mothers.

Captain Tim: Red dots. Awesome. We’re going to have a scrap. I put down my sandwich, stand up and shout at the crew. “Engineering, shields up. Helmsman, impulse power. Weapons, load torpedoes.”

Ooh, weapons. I forgot to check what guns we’re carrying.

Science Officer Smith: I scan the ships, which brings up little numbers next to their names. “There’s a Torgoth Cruiser and it has RS200 and FS150! Does anyone know what that means? Also, (M74) BRG, DMG and 2K! Guys, I think we’re fighting a motorway.”

Well I’ve played a lot of Football Manager over the years, so I’m going to try and explain why. It’s because despite all the stats and number crunching, Football Manager is a game about stories. It’s about the little narratives that emerge from every game. Like this one. The story of Shane Paul.

This tale comes from way back in Football Manager 2006. I was doing the same thing I do every year; trying to win the Champion’s League with my beloved Aston Villa. In my way were Italian giants Inter Milan, who had more money, a better squad and a long tradition of winning things. The first leg of the game had not gone well. Inter had come to Villa Park and made us look like schoolboys playing against adults. They sauntered down the pitch like we weren’t even there and scored twice, then did what Italian teams do best: shut us down and sat on their lead. Worse than that, they also inflicted a series of niggling injuries on my team. Not enough to put people out for long, but just enough to ensure that I’d have to fill my bench with inexperienced youth players, and pray that I’d never need to use them.

Enter Shane Paul.

Shane was one of my youth team, he was only eighteen at the time, but already my coaches were telling me he wasn’t going to make it at this level. There were better prospects in the squad, but I was incredibly short of left sided players and. despite being so incredibly right footed he probably walked with a limp, Shane could play on the left wing a little, so he made the cut.

Sixty minutes into the Inter game, things were still not going well. The Italians knew they had a good lead and a home advantage, so they played a strong defensive game. No matter how often we attacked they held us off confidently. I tried everything; I tried to hold back and keep the ball, I pushed forward recklessly, I changed formation, I upped the aggression, I did every tactical tweak I could think of, but nothing worked. Clearly it was time to make some changes. The problem was that, because of the injuries, I didn’t have much in the way of substitutes. Most of my bench was statistically worse than the players on the pitch, but sometimes freshness counts, so young Shane was sent out for an under performing left winger.

That’s the thing about Football Manager, once in a while all the sensible tactics fall flat, and that’s when you start trying the crazy ones. Playing an inexperienced youngster out of position in a major match? This was a desperation move, and I knew it.

For another half hour, little changed. We pushed them hard, but they would not be moved. They were determined to shut us out, and we couldn’t stop them. Shane popped up once or twice but he wasn’t distinguishing himself, my fairytale story was over, this was where it would end.

Most of the time, this is what happens. In Football Manager, like real football, for every cherished tale of triumph against adversity there are dozen of ignominious defeats, but once in a while…

Again we gallop forwards, again we hopelessly toss the ball into the box. There’s no art any more, we’re too tired for that, there’s only five minutes left in the game after all. The cross is vague and messy, easily fielded by the solid Inter defenders, who go to boot it clear… but wait! The Inter captain has mis-kicked the ball horribly, it bounced awkwardly to one of my midfielders who cannons it into the box, it bounces off a defender, into another, a striker goes for it and slips on the muddy ground, everyone scrambles for desperately for the ball, but only ones reaches it. Stretching, sliding, the left foot of Shane Paul gets the slightest of touches, and deflects the ball into the opposing net.

The crowd explode, they haven’t had anything to cheer for two whole games, but suddenly the previously impregnable Inter defence has fallen to a flailing teenager’s boot. Shane grabs the ball and runs back up the field, plonking it straight into the centre circle. The message is clear, your move Inter, you have five minutes to stop us from scoring again.

This should be easy, Inter are experts at keeping the ball, so long as they don’t panic, so long as they aren’t rattled by the last minute goal and accidentally send an awkward pass right into the path of my striker, they’ll be fine. Only they do panic, they are rattled, and that’s exactly what they do. Suddenly we’re bursting forward again, and the Italian defenders are no longer confident and aloof, they’re jittery and unsure. The ball is flicked forward and it’s Shane Paul, the unknown teenager who has it at his feet. He has no support, there are three men between him and the goalmouth, but these men are uncertain, scared of losing, while the boy is riding high on the confidence of scoring his first Champion’s League goal. He jinks, he swivels, the first man man can’t keep up with him, the second slides in early, missing his chance, but the last is cleverer, he stays on his feet, jockeying the young boy for the ball. Shane Paul has a strength of eight out of twenty, and the defender has more than twice that. It should be easy for him to push the teenager off the ball, but the young lad just won’t give it up, he wants that second goal, and he won’t be denied.

This is the thing that makes Football Manager special. The fact that, despite all the precise stats and complex tactics, there’s an element of randomness inherent in the match engine. I don’t know what sorcery makes it possible, but nothing is quite certain in a Football Manager game. Sometimes a goalkeeper plays a blinder and stops your team short, sometimes that world class striker develops an attitude problem and just doesn’t work out and sometimes, just sometimes, an unknown teenager leaves three veteran defenders trailing in his wake, before slotting the ball away like he’s been doing it all his life.

This time it wasn’t just the crowd that went insane, I leapt out of my chair and cheered, I was ecstatic, I think I may have even done a little dance there, in my room, by myself. The game wasn’t over of course, we may have taken away the lead Inter had held for nearly three hours, but we still had to finish them off. Extra time came and went, both sides were too exhausted to conjure much, this one was going to penalties. Goal. Miss. Miss. Goal. I don’t remember the order, but I do remember that by the time it got to the final penalty I needed to score to win, but I hadn’t changed my penalty order to adjust for the injuries. The computer would pick for me, anyone could be stepping up. Of course you can guess who did. That’s right. Shane Paul. He hit that ball so hard I’m pretty sure there was a sonic boom. It flew straight down the middle, the keeper dove away from it like a pillock. We’d done it.

Like football, fairytales don’t happen that often in Football Manager, but they do happen, and they happen just slightly more often than they do in real life. Just enough to keep things interesting, but not so much that it lessens the impact when they do.

The tale sort of tapers off at that point. I started Shane in the final, against Real Madrid, but it was uneventful. Real inexplicably decided to play a pair of midgets in defence, so I trotted out the massive Peter Crouch and cheerfully headed home three goals without reply. Shane did little to distinguish himself. I signed him up for another year, despite my coaches misgivings I was convinced he was secretly amazing and his stats were a lie. This turned out to be optimistic. Despite my attempts to play him, he never really inspired again and I sold him on. Years later, when I finally stopped playing that game, I looked him up again. He was in his mid twenties, plying his trade for a small league one team and looking well off the pace.

Shane’s career might not have gone anywhere, but I like to think that every now and again he thinks back to that one day, the time he took apart some of the best players in the world, and thinks ‘Yeah, it was worth it’. Of course I know that Shane Paul is just a collection of statistics, just a little dot on the match engine. I also know there’s a real Shane Paul whose career is nothing like the tale I’ve described. None of that matters. To me, Shane Paul will always be that one story. The kid who came from nowhere and went back there, but had a hell of a time in between.

This is why people play Football Manager, because every one of them has a story like that, of something incredible that happened out of nowhere. I’m sure you all have them too, so why not share them in the comments? The best ones will be bundled together and put into a post for everyone to see.

If you haven’t played Football Manager before, give it a try. You might just find your own Shane Paul.

Most gamers have a secret shame. There’s always one classic title everyone raves about that you never quite got around to playing at the time – either because nobody was raving about it back then, or because you played the first level and couldn’t make head or tail of it.

It’s a quirk of PC gaming: a lot of our true classics, particularly the old ones, are baffling or intimidating to play. It’s their complexity that makes them so great, but it’s also what makes them off-putting if you don’t immediately grasp how they work. A game that gives us a great amount of freedom also gives us the freedom to miss what’s good about it.

So we moan at each other, endlessly, to play the things we love. Graham, how have you still not played Deus Ex? Rich, why would you skip Morrowind? Craig, you like crosshairs! Play IL-2 Sturmovik!

It’s time to find out what we’ve been missing all this time.

Graham Smith – Deus Ex

What is it? A first-person RPG set in a cool, trans-humanist future with nanotechnology, robot arms, vast government conspiracies and people who wear shades indoors.
How late? 11 years.
Excuse for lateness: I was obsessed with Half-Life and Counter-Strike at the time, and paid no heed to what seemed like another shooter.

Deus Ex has been at the summit of PC Gamer’s annual Top 100 for the last two years, and in the top five for most of the time before that. I’ve also played the opening chapter of its second sequel, Human Revolution, twice. Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous that I haven’t played the original.

The first thing I notice is the game can’t run at 1920×1200. Tom recommends Deus Ex Launcher to fix that, so I download and install it. The second thing: all the characters sound like a Dalek with a heavy smoking habit using an electronic voice box. I turn off Direct Sound in the launcher and try again. It works! Enter JC Denton, super-agent.

I skip the opening cutscene – I’ve seen the edited version on YouTube, so I’ve already got the gist. Electronic old men, whatever. I also hop past my brother Paul on the docks of Liberty Island, leading him inland before starting our conversation. When we’re done, I’ve got the crossbow and there are four terrorists waiting to kill us. Paul takes them all out while I hide and loot their bodies. I’ve now got a pistol, a knife, a baton and some cigarettes. I love this game already. And then I die, and die, and die and die.

The enemies are totally incomprehensible. Sometimes I’m directly next to them and they can’t see me. Sometimes they psychically know I’m behind them when I’m sneaking. They’re so stupid that I can’t predict their behaviour.

Eventually, I reach some crates piled next to the base of the Statue of Liberty and start to climb up. It’s an alternate route! Everything I’ve ever heard about Deus Ex is true!

I fall off near the top, but succeed on the second attempt. I shoot and stab my way to the terrorist leader. He surrenders, so I pepper spray him in the face. He runs back and forth across the room while a UNATCO soldier arrives and tells me they’ve killed all the terrorists; they were right behind me the whole time. Hey, doesn’t that make my role totally irrelevant?

Back at UNATCO HQ – also on Liberty Island, making the whole terrorist thing pretty embarrassing – I meet Manderley, Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre, the latter two of whom are instantly great. I hear the orange soda conversation. I access Gunther’s emails and read about his idea for a skull-gun. I’ve never played this, but it all feels familiar, as if I’m visiting a famous PC gaming tourist destination. I spend another 30 minutes in UNATCO headquarters, stealing and chatting and being told off for going in the ladies’ toilets.

When I’m done, Anna Navarre and I head to Manhattan. I remember hearing something about her being evil later in the game. Is there enough freedom that I can kill her now? A few moments later, when I’m dead, I discover the answer is no. I also find that there are no auto-saves, not even when you start a new mission, and not even when it says ‘Saving’ on the screen. Crap.

I’m back on Liberty Island, and this time I shoot the terrorist leader in the head before even starting a chat. Manderley tells me off for it, but Anna is impressed. I think this time I’ll try not to kill her.

I’m hooked. All these years later, Deus Ex is clunky and in a lot of ways old-fashioned, but its style, sense of humour and impressive ability to make the player feel inventive mean it’s still totally worth playing.

Craig Pearson – IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946

What is it?WW2 flight sim. Pilot mechanical marvels as they hurtle through the clouds battling for sky-based supremacy
How late? 5 years.
Excuse for lateness: I’m terrible at flight sims. Whenever I step into a sim’s virtual cockpit, bad things happen.

When most people flick the virtual switches of their cockpits, they imagine getting the kill count of German World War II fighter pilot Erich “Bubi” Hartmann (352). Me? I just want to be PC Gamer’s resident flight-sim expert Tim Stone (0, hopefully).

When IL-2’s training chocks are, er, chucked it’s clear I’m no Tim Stone. Even the menus are terrifying. Where he can gracefully ascend this rickety tube of metal into a sky full of Nazis and return with his cup of tea unspilled, my sorties suck.

The training seemed to go well. I’m methodically walked through the surprisingly simple series of switches to flick to get the gleaming Ilyusha into the skies: start the engine, fix the flaps, put the throttle up… I was up in the air before you could say Marmaduke Thomas St. John “Pat” Pattle (51+ kills).

It was a little too easy. Where was my usual veering awkwardly off the runway into neighbouring fields? Why wasn’t I crying and on fire right now? That’s how it’s supposed to go with me, joysticks and complex flight models. Either reading Tim’s words had somehow imbued me with the skills of Theodor Weissenberger (208 kills), or something was wrong.

Ah. Turns out I wasn’t in control – IL-2’s training missions aren’t interactive. It was all in my head.

Outside of my mind, things are as they should be. I grasp the AV8R-01 stick sat in front of my keyboard and go through the pre-flight conditions that I wrote on a post-it note during the tutorial. Except I scribbled them.

Is that a ‘B’ or a ‘D’? What am I pressing ‘V’ for again? I just want to move! I’d give my cockpit for WASD controls! Then, somehow, the engine’s thrum moves from ‘limping bee’ to ‘orgy of vacuum cleaners’, and beneath me the plane rumbles into action, aching to meet the clouds. Soon, my pretty.

Even though I’m not moving the stick, my Ilyusha is careering down the runway and curving steeply off to the right. This is why I keep away from these things: even not doing something can lead to picking bits of plane spotter out of your hair. It turns out that single-engine planes simply do this during take-off. That seems like a cruel joke to me, and I blame Einstein. The only way out of this twisty physics puzzle is to compensate with the rudder. A twist of the joystick starts to right the plane, before sending it away to the left. I end up drunkenly snaking off down the runway as if I’m dodging invisible traffic cones. I believe this is known as ‘over-compensating’ in flight schools. I over-compensated the hell out of that take-off.

What would Jesus (Antonio Villamor) (4 kills) do? He’d probably yank back on the stick, thinking that being in the air is preferable to being on the ground, where people have left a lot of inconvenient buildings and fences. I yoink. I’m airborne! I’m up! I’m up! I’m UPSIDE DOWN! All of Hans-Joachim Marseille’s (158 kills) life flashes before my eyes and I pile into the ground.

That was fun. Not the crashing bit; the taking off. It was hard, but it felt responsive. Each climb got easier, the subtleties of stick control became less cloudy. I learned to put distance between me and the ground before performing complex manoeuvres, such as daring to turn. But that first successful take-off had got me hooked. I’m already considering getting a better joystick and I’ve downloaded the sequel. Now, I just need to learn how to land the dambusting thi… KABOOM.

Karate translates as ‘Empty Hand’. Damn, no easy joke opportunities there! But is Bikini Karate Babes the gaming equivalent of Ronseal – primarily aqua and potassium tripolyphosphate? There’s only one way to find out, and we’re going to do so by trying something roughly 98% of online write-ups of it have never even dreamed of… actually installing the damn thing, and playing for more than ten seconds.

I know. It’s a crazy idea! But it might… just… work…

Hey, I found a boiled sweet!

By review law, any write-up of a game like this has to immediately slip into a comfy, well-worn auto-drive of moral outrage about its mere existence. Just look at it. It has boobies in it! Shameful! Won’t someone please think of the children who shouldn’t be playing it in the first place! Why, it’s so shameful, there’s only one way to express the innate indignity of it – to print about a hundred screenshots, especially of the mucky bits. While wagging the very sternest of fingers, of course! Tsk. Such naughtiness!

At the risk of losing my critic license though, I… don’t have much of a problem with Bikini Karate Babes’ existence. It’s a dreadful beat-em-up, where the girls in bras can’t hide the engine being completely pants, but it’s at least honest about what it is and plays it up for laughs. That alone makes it less gratuitous than most ‘respectable’ beat-em-ups, which have been constantly reinforcing the far more toxic idea that outfits like these are how gaming’s female martial artists should be dressed:

It is now safe to turn Google SafeSearch off again. Oh, the horrors... the horrors I just saw...

Next to this nonsense, it’s tough to get a good head of outrage going about a game for using actual women in regular store-bought bikinis rather than freakishly chested mutants in fetish-wear. Is it some enlightened piece of social commentary? Of course not. It’s a beat-em-up based on the revolutionary idea that guys – and some girls of course – like looking at boobs and will spend money to do so.

But, y’know, compared to many of its competitors, it does have some good points. The use of real models at least means the characters all have human proportions (and the almost unheard-of ability to stand on the edge of a cliff without instantly toppling to a rather nasty bounce), and a reasonably wide range of body types, from the model-proportions of Aphrodite and Venus to chunkier fighters like Sedna and Voluptas. It embraces the silliness, and – aside from a couple of moments here and there that are a little uncomfortable or push its luck to too far – does so in a cheery way rather than with the rampant sexism/misogyny of other games that have gone down this road – Variable Geo springing instantly to mind. It’s not even particularly violent, with no blood and incredibly cartoony animations. Oh, and also due to the use of live actresses instead of cartoon sprites or 3D models, it’s one of the few fighters that isn’t an automatic member of the illustrious Boobs Don’t Work That Way Club.

Okay, except for the laser beams and flamethrower nipples.

None of this is to say that Bikini Karate Babes is some kind of wholesome, enlightened game with any kind of message. It’s pure, shameless fan-service that may as well have called itself Moretits Kombat, whose unlockables include short videos of a couple of the fighters a few seconds after agreeing to do topless jumping jacks, a boss whose special attack is to instantly win a round by ripping the bra off her opponent, and a dedicated game mode about doing just that several times in a row.

It’s also a dreadful, dreadful beat-em-up. Not Tongue of the Fatman bad, but little is. It’s also better than Catfight and I think we can assume Fetish Fighters too. Compared to grown-up beat-em ups though? Bad. Stinkingly bad. The use of video clips for everything means that most moves take forever and can’t be cancelled if you accidentally trigger a combo, you’re constantly bombarded with confusing discrepancies like getting down on the floor and pressing kick only to throw a punch instead, blocking isn’t so much a question of pressing a key as sending the character a telegram asking them to kindly put their arm up above their face, and the AI …oh god, the AI. It’s like playing against the ultimate button masher, with your task being to find your character’s one vaguely good move and spam it like you’re a Nigerian prince. You don’t even get a move list. Nope. You have to unlock that info.

At this point, if you just want to see boobies, you may as well quit, or type a couple of words into that internet thing that’s been quite popular in recent years. At its most graphic, Bikini Karate Babes plays the peekaboo game. There are moves that involve characters popping their tops and using them as whips, the aforementioned bra-stealing, and one of the endings is of what looks like a slightly confused girl who just realised her contract included doing some topless exercises in the middle of a very cold field, but there’s always an arm, a lens flare, a tree, or something similar to get in the way. Even in the Jumping Jacks videos, there are little digital pasties added to cover up the jumpee’s nipples.

Shudder. Nipples. The most horrifying of all erotic skin protrusions!

Horny beat-em-up fans, you have just been saved £5. You're welcome.

If you want to see crazy though… hoo boy, does Bikini Karate Babes have you better covered than anyone who’s actually in it. Boob lasers and bra whipping is just the start, with characters having the power to do anything from fire lightning out of their lady bits and creating duplicates of themselves, to tagging in the game’s final boss to finish a battle instead. And there’s a ridiculous number of characters – 19 in total, most of whom have to be unlocked. That’s 19 totally different models too, no Mortal Kombat style palette swap ninjas here, all of whom have their own moves, a full range of animations, and most eye-poppingly, close-up Special moves where every combination of actresses does their thing with every other one in turn, from a tickle to a disorientating butt-bump, to a rather more practical headbutt, rather than simply doing their parts in a vacuum and having the artists stick the sprites together.

Sometimes there are even special versions between characters. Gemini’s special for instance is a kiss, which most characters just look confused or slightly repulsed by. If she tries it on Zaria though, it just earns her an instant slap in the face, making it an attack that only damages her own health bar. Damn. Even Dan Hibiki usually has better moves than that. Not to mention better luck with women.

Probably not what Skittles meant by 'Taste The Rainbow'.

By far the weirdest character in the game is called Thalia, who is named after the Greek muse of Comedy, but… damn. She’s like Harley Quinn’s even more deranged kid sister, who she has to tell to take the tea cosy off her head and stop pouring jelly down her nose before the neighbours call Batman. She spends the whole game dancing around in a Stars and Stripes bikini and waving at the fourth wall instead of paying attention to the fight. Her main victory animation is pulling a lit torch out of her… uh… herself, with attacks that involve mad clowning around and hitting people with her pigtails.

Oh, and she also has a projectile attack. This is her projectile attack.

AMERICA! F*** YEAH!

Gotta give Bikini Karate Babes credit. It’s a shockingly poor game, but at least it’s not dull.

…

Speaking of which, did I mention there was a sequel earlier this year?

Oh, a kick to the head may be... quite sentimental... but fireballs are a girl's best friend...

Well, there was a sequel earlier this year. It’s called Warriors of Elysia, and the weirdest thing about it isn’t that it’s rubbish – in fact it suffers from exactly the same flaws as the first one, only in a 3D world and at a higher resolution – but how goddamn boring it is in comparison to the first.

Actually, no. Boring’s not quite the right word. The first game is crap, yes, but campy and goofy in a way that’s easy to find entertaining – much like a dreadful B-Movie. It’s not a game to like or respect, but against the odds, its heart is closer to the right place than you’d expect. At the very least… honestly, probably the absolute most as well… it feels like everyone involved had fun making it.

Warriors of Elysia suffers from Magnum Opus Syndrome – up to and including its pompous title. It’s as if someone spent too much time between takes working out the lore of this world and some great epic story, and came to the mistaken conclusion that the the only thing holding the Bikini Karate Babes back from the top tiers of PC gaming was that people might think it a bit silly. For the sequel then, everyone involved had to first find a pair of socks and put them on, and then pull them up, to create an epic adventure worthy of these characters… none of whom had ever had a single line beyond “Hiyaaaa!”

At least, that’s how it feels, watching the more grandiose presentation of it all, complete with proper physical sets, extras, special effects and all the other bits and pieces crammed into it. And maybe… maybe… it could have worked, with a storyline and tongue-in-cheek style borrowing from something like Xena: Warrior Princess and creating quirky relationships and proper cut-scenes and… y’know… a script and dialogue and plot. In the game itself I mean, not stuffed online in a wiki somewhere.

Another scene dripping in symbolism. At least, I think that's symbolism. (sniffs) No, wait. It's prune juice. Weird.

Instead, what the game offers is the most mind-numbing blather this side of… okay, of half the Street Fighter IV endings. There are cut-scenes, but all they ever show is Stuff. Nonsensical, unexplained Stuff – and I checked, my download didn’t come with a manual or anything to explain it. All you get, you get in the intro, a mad montage made up of scenes from the characters’ ending videos. There’s a small army of unidentified girls who appear to be some kind of army whose uniform is bright pink bikinis and weird glowing Tron style bracelets, boobs, ancient temples, boobs, random fights, boobs, dungeons, boobs, more random fights… it’s like like the fan-service fairy forgot to take its Ritalin…

In game, all of this… is completely forgotten. None of the characters have an introduction to say they’re working with X or trying to accomplish Y. The only story bits you get are at the end of the Arcade mode, where it’s revealed that none of the clips make any more sense in context. One winning character just ends up fighting the Pink Bikini Army for a few seconds. Another apparently crafts the ultimate battle bikini out of glowing blue goo, while another gets to either set up a lesbian prison or be beaten up by her prisoners… but why are these people suddenly working together? What are the stakes in this conflict? What does everyone want from this? Is BLECE involved? What the hell is going on?

Ah, Vesta, the walking wardrobe malfunction. But you'll never see that in the game itself, obviously.

Even if you think there are more important things to focus on than plot, the atmosphere of the game is completely broken. One of the only reasons the first game even vaguely works is that it’s a good natured, incredibly silly game, to the point that you can see the characters occasionally forcing back smile or trying to avoid collapsing mid-shot. Characters punch and kick from a distance, and there are some up-close martial attacks, sure, but far more are about bouncing the other character off or spinning them around, to the point that while M. Bison gets a Psycho Crusher and head-stomp, the final boss of Bikini Karate Babes’ up-close special is to… stamp on her opponents foot. Not even in shoes.

Warriors of Elysia goes in much more for gut-punches, kicking opponents on the ground, and trying to make things look like it hurts. One of the endings consists of pretty much nothing but one woman – who we’re never given any back story for or anything – being surrounded and beaten up by a gang of Pink Bikinis, complete with shouts of pain, with her arms held behind her back, her face repeatedly punched and lifted back up for more punching, before being thrown to another girl to be painfully kneed in the crotch and then finally thrown to the ground and surrounded, presumably for more beatings.

Remember the whole ‘context-over-content’ thing that makes the first game funny and even entertaining despite itself? Dumb and badly choreographed as it is, this is its evil mirror universe double.

Tanlines are one thing... but scanlines? Serious sunbathing fail.

Context is always king in games like this, which is why Leisure Suit Larry 7 is a naughty, funny, silly, sex-positive adventure, while Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude is a pile of misogynistic shit. Warriors of Elysia isn’t that much of a shift – exploitative in a filmic sense perhaps, though with little that would trouble a PG rating in terms of actual content – but it’s a similar kind of slide.

The fact that it’s a terrible game in its own right barely seems to matter, since I doubt a single person would ever buy it expecting the next Tekken, but its weaknesses there certainly don’t help. On the default Normal difficulty, you can literally beat the whole game on every character by mashing either the punch or kick button, making it even easier than Bikini Karate Babes. There’s an obvious ‘playing one handed’ joke to be made there, though nothing in the game that actually warrants it. Instead, I used Twitter for a while and sighed a lot. That was the most satisfying T&A here: Tweets and Aaahs…

Unlike a lot of the games we cover in this column, both Bikini Karate Babes are still actually sold, both on Direct2Drive. The first costs £6, the second a less-than-arousing £15. You can even buy DVDs of behind the scenes footage for around $25, though exactly what wonders they contain, I have no idea. Probably girls in bikinis. Seems a fair guess. But there’s only one way to find out. If you care.

Project Zomboid is a great game born from a passion for zombie fiction, piracy, panic and corporate generosity. Of all the drama indie devs face, little comes close to the police breaking into your flat because a car is about to explode.

Chris Simpson is one sixth of The Indie Stone, the team behind the free-roaming isometric zombie shooter that’s about narrative, not headcounts. He explains his game: “We’ve tried to turn the genre towards the survival aspect and away from the focus on combat. It’s not just about seeing how many zombies you can kill. It’s holding up in a house, going on raiding missions, trying to trade with NPCs and making friends. It’s dealing with trust issues between people. This is the ultimate plan, seeing as it’s currently a Minecraft-style alpha tech demo.” His partner in crime, Andy Hodgetts, elaborates: “Basically if you’ve ever read World War Z or the The Zombie Survival Guide or I Am Legend you’ve read the blueprint of the game.”

Things didn’t go smoothly for the fledgling developer. The team were forced into releasing a ‘pre-alpha tech demo’ state to avoid eviction from their Hartlepool homes. “We thought we could scrape up enough cash for rent by borrowing money from our parents and announcing the game early,” Andy says. “We had a couple of screenshots, a bit of text, and some bullet-pointed plans. “We were taking shifts through the night to try and get the tech demo ready. We’d be doing it together for a bit, then I’d grab a few hours sleep, then Chris would carry on. We’d gone to bed at six in the morning. A few hours later we were rudely awoken by a policeman looming over our beds. He said, ‘You’ve got to get out man!’ We were like, ‘What the hell?’”

An uncannily familiar sight for the apocalypse enthusiasts followed. “The thing is we were basically the last people to be evacuated from the building, so when we walked out it was like the opening scene from 28 Days Later. There was like nobody around and police vans and police tape everywhere and it was like, ‘Oh my God, what the hell’s going on?’”

A car bomb had been left outside the developer’s flat. It eventually exploded, killing a 58-year old man. But the team resisted any free publicity and, although mainstream media journalists pestered the team for the name of their game, they refused to give any details. “We felt it would be a bit tacky to try and capitalise,” says Chris.

Such tactics weren’t required anyway – the PC gaming community came to The Indie Stone’s rescue, purchasing pre-orders in droves, and Andy is still grateful: “We woke up that day scared about rent, but we went to bed with two months of development time in the bag, along with our rent and living costs sorted.”

Will Porter, The Indie Stone’s writer and PR-type figure, and former PC Zone editor, offers his theory on the community’s passion so early in development: “We’re making it for the traditional PC gamer. A lot of people see their first screenshot and say, ‘Bloody hell that looks just like X-Com’. They assume it’s going to be turn based because of our old school visuals and those sorts of sensibilities. I think that’s what a PC audience really likes.”

They were making money from the pre-alpha tech build of Project Zomboid. Enough to cause new problems. Chris is honest about the team’s early naivety: “We know how to make games, but we are not born businessmen. We didn’t pay close attention to terms and conditions in PayPal or Google Checkout.”

The Indie Stone were selling preorders for a game that didn’t exist yet, and PayPal and Google Checkout didn’t like that. “Notch had the same problem,” admits Chris. If a lot of people buy the game then we get hit by a bus, PayPal would be liable for the refunds. God bless ’em, a lot of people came to our defence and called out the companies for being evil, but I guess they were only protecting their own interests.”

The team needed a quick fix. One came just in time. To avoid legal issues, The Indie Stone bundled their early Project Zomboid build with what Andy describes as “the world’s worst games.” We thought, OK, we’ll sell products that do exist and the PZ licence will just be a freebie!” Chris wrote a Rock Paper Scissors console application and sold it for £15.

It was a messy situation. I asked Andy whether the Minecraft model (where initial pre-orders fund early development) is a necessity for today’s indie developers: “The reason we’re doing indie stuff is that we don’t like the separation between studio and players,” he says. “It’s an impenetrable wall. When we first decided to do an indie we wanted to have absolute communication. We said we’d have a Twitter account, a forum and an IRC chat; anything we could do to make people feel part of the game they were funding.”

And it’s worked. Although the game is still far from final release, there are already fan fiction sites, a dedicated wiki and YouTube tutorials on how to play the soundtrack on piano. A cult following has begun.

But some people still aren’t happy about the funding part. Pirate copies of Project Zomboid ended up online. The team were using a cloud service to host their patching process and getting charged every time a player received an update or installed the game. Pirates were not only stealing Project Zomboid, they were driving The Indie Stone into bankruptcy.

Then, in July this year, a troup of digital distribution knights in shinning armour appeared. The team received offers of support from Steam, indie and mod download portal Desura and the digital distribution service FilePlanet. “In the case of Steam, we’re getting all their perks apart from being on the store, and it’s all via redeem code,” says Chris. “We get to use their servers, we get to update and we get to be in their library.

“As far as I can see they’re not getting a penny from this. Perhaps it’s in preparation for when we do get on Steam, but they’re doing us a huge favour.” Desura and FilePlanet also made similar offers to help the team, solidifying their base infrastructure for future updates.

Visit projectzomboid.com/blog for more on Project Zomboid. There’s a lot of love for The Indie Stone, but we still recommend you bring an axe or chainsaw. And possibly a shotgun.

If a man’s worth can be judged on how many drunken students and parents have repeated their material, the Monty Python team is rich indeed. They’ve not done too badly in terms of more mundane success either. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Dead Parrot, to the cinematic masterpiece that was Life of Brian, there’s no sense pretending you don’t know who they are. (Though if you don’t, you’d probably best avoid sitting down with a notepad for that upcoming Holy Flying Circus thing…)

But did you know there have been Monty Python games? Five of them to be exact, four on PC. How do you turn the anarchic surrealism of a sketch where anything can happen, but will probably get forgotten due to not being about Vikings singing about spam, into a game? Let’s find out…

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

I'm not really sure what I can add to most of these pictures...

A relic from the days before developers could even dream of just digitising a load of clips and stringing them together in vaguely interactive form. The original Monty Python game is notable for coming from Tomb Raider creators Core Design, and honestly for existing in the first place. How could you possibly make a good game about the insanity of a surreal sketch show way back in 1990?

Simple! You make a shooter and platform game that defies anyone to use the word ‘generic’, starting with a Gumby being turned into a fish and forced to travel through an endless pipe maze of Gilliamesque monsters, Inquisitors, and occasional pauses for the screen to go blank and tell you “No #1 – The Larch” or make you have An Argument, in the hope you’ll get the reference and go “Ho ho, very funny.”

It doesn’t however defy any attempts to use the word ‘rubbish’, ‘boring’, ‘stupid’ and ‘as much fun as a wire pipe-cleaner up the penis tube’. It’s a seriously obnoxious game that succeeds at being weird and wacky, but doesn’t have much to back it up after the first few minutes. For the time though, it was still a brave attempt at what was always going to be a nightmare license to make into a game.

As ever with platformers, the only Longplay seems to be of the Amiga version. Sorry, but the only thing you miss out on is not having to listen to the bloody theme music on a soul-destroying loop.

Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time

Just quoting the show would be incredibly lame...

A relic from the days when developers realised they could in fact dream of just digitising a load of clips and stringing them together in vaguely interactive form. Complete Waste Of Time is another of those dreaded multimedia experience things, though at least one that tried not to suck.

It’s broken into multiple rooms, all excuses to rehash some old footage in incredibly low-res ways, sometimes in the form of games like a One Armed Bandit that uses screencaps of various sketches instead of cherries and BAR symbols, or trying to fly a head that turns into a chicken across a field of spikes and into a gaping maw. You can also ‘Pythonise’ your desktop by inflicting all manner of rubbish screensavers and wallpaper backgrounds on it, and take advantage of the included sound samples to make your non-computer savvy friends’ lives a living hell every time Windows boots up.

There was one genuinely fun room when it first came out though, and somewhat unfortunately, it was the one they gave away in the demo – the Loonatorium. This offered a weird landscape full of Gilliam art like bottomless can-can dancers and a glaring policeman’s head, and was all about clicking all over the place to make it bounce and jump and play assorted clips, from the opening round of Spot The Loony (a target shooting game) to a quick lecture on The Ant, our most disassemblable friend. Worth buying? Hell no. But the demo was quite fun to play with back when multimedia was still cool and magical.

(There was actually more to it, but I’m pretty sure most people never realised…)

Monty Python’s Invasion From The Planet Skyron

A relic from the days when developers realised dreaming of just digitising a load of clips and stringing them together in vaguely interactive form was something too good to keep to the PC. Unfortunately, the platform they chose to bring it to ended up being the CD-I, making it irrelevant. My experience of the CD-I being limited to the brilliant Zelda games that showed even Nintendo a thing or two about creating awesome stories and adventures, I see no reason not to assume it was something like this:

Even if not, I’m not too bothered I never got to play it. Next!

Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail

I think I'll just hum instead.

A relic from the days when developers realised that just digitising a load of clips and stringing them together in vaguely interactive form was a somewhat limited dream, especially when they could be spending that time thinking about boobs. Holy Grail was a half-way house between the pure multimedia of before and something vaguely approaching a game, though it was closer to an interactive storybook with occasional games like a version of Tetris set in a plague pit, where the ‘pieces’ would occasionally protest “I’m not dead!” and wriggle around as you tried to fit them around the actual corpses.

Here’s a handy Let’s Play. From the PC this time, thankfully…

It’s… actually better than you’d think. There’s some excellent meta-humour for the time, like the fact that the title screen offers a “Collect The Grail” button that lets you win immediately, or the option to watch the entire movie… at about 100x speed. It also doesn’t hurt that by following a story and having specific characters instead of having to do things with a pile of completely unrelated sketches, there’s more scope for the developers to add their own jokes and background bits, as well as make original work from the team feel like part of the experience. Great? No. But for what it was, not too bad.

And now for something completely different.

HUUUUUUMMMM....

Where were we? Ah, yes. Of course…

Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life

No. No, this doesn't work in text. Don't know what I was thinking with that.

A relic from the days when developers realised that just digitising a load of clips and stringing them together in vaguely interactive form wasn’t remotely going to cut it any more. This was the last of the series from 7th Level, and against all the odds, a reasonable game in its own right.

For starters, it was huge, being broken into three massive chapters – The Stages of Life, The Goals of Life and finally the Cottage. Most of the game is spent poking around assorted spinny-roundy dioramas full of well-done cut-outs of the cast and assorted extras, all full of interactive bits. Bored kids sitting in a church while Cleese’s stern schoolmaster drones on all have a couple of text-only lines via thought bubbles, background images play silly voices or cue strange animations, and one wall decoration promising good times for believers promptly cues up that bit from the movie with the naked women chasing the guy off the cliff… only in slow-motion, and without the guy. Why? Because.

Sod it, I'll just leave the captions blank this week.

All the surviving members of the team contributed new bits, and the meta-humour was still in full force – the highlight being Eric Idle narrating a gentrified English quiz called “You Don’t Know John” based on another, slightly ruder quiz whose identity you should probably be able to work out if you are not, in fact, a potato. It’s also an actual game rather than just a collection of bits, with inventory items, non-linearity and a couple of admittedly dreadful mini-games that mean you can’t just finish it off in an hour like the others. Unfortunately, that could be because you ran into a couple of nasty bugs, which make it almost impossible to finish without a walkthrough to guide you precisely around the trouble spot. Shame.

And The Rest…

There have been a few web things too, and an upcoming Facebook thing that looks pretty dreadful. But have the games so far lived up to the Python spirit? Surprisingly… yes. Even the platformer tried to hit the right notes, and 7th Level’s multimedia games were at least solid for their time, with The Meaning of Life going above and beyond considering what they could probably have gotten away with even in the mid-90s. Sure, they all shared the obvious problem that if you were in the mood to play a Monty Python game, you’ve already seen the main sketches and know all the jokes… but what do you expect for games about a comedy troupe whose final movie was released back in 1983?

Are any of them worth tracking down now though? Nah. Just watch the DVDs yet again. At least they won’t take hours of arsing around with virtual machines to get running on your PC.

And now, a completely pointless link that plays fart noises. And that is all.

“Somewhere between Paris and Miami… when ecstasy and angst mingle in a frenzied embrace…” whispers the intro, and already I’m feeling lost – especially knowing that our heroine, Doralice, is a pilot. Is that something she mentions along with the turbulence? It’d be awful if you were on the toilet when you hit that bit of the transatlantic flight, and probably very messy for the cabin crew later.

Welcome to Fascination, one of the most confusing erotic thrillers ever.

Quick! Name three famous corporate lawyers!

Fascination comes to us from a company called Coktel Vision, and Coktel Vision was… a weird company. It made one of the earliest attempts at a sexy adventure, Emmanuelle, along with strange stuff like Inca, the comedy Gobliiins series, and a hilariously awful interactive movie called Urban Runner, which was originally titled “Lost In Town” until someone pointed out that the company would do better by selling games than just shooting itself in the foot. Back in the 90s, it also released a huge adventure game called Lost in Time, which at least sounded cooler. Fascination is a bit of a prequel to that one, though only in the sense that both star a young woman called Doralice.

Doralice, incidentally, is what you get if you don’t comb your doors on a regular basis.

From Emmanuelle onwards, Coktel never did well at sexy. But Gobliiins? That sold loads.

Fascination is a pretty typical sexy adventure, in that the entertainment comes from watching it try and fail to be sexy in 320×200 pixels than in any of the goods it actually serves up. Want to see an incredibly low-resolution cut-scene of Doralice taking a shower? You’ll find it literally one click away as the game starts, and you’d better enjoy it, because that’s all you get for a good long while. If you bought the upgraded CD version, there was even less. For some reason, all the smut was removed, making the whole thing about as pointless as a game called Max Payne Goes To Ibiza And Has A Lovely Time.

Here are a couple of other interesting things about Fascination. Like many games that took on sexuals theme beyond simply FMV or polygonal ladies bouncing around to the sound of grunting, it was written by a female designer. Completing it can be a pain, because while the puzzles never change, many of the phone numbers and similar do. It’s also pretty terrible, with a heavy reliance on the other kind of pixel-peeping to get through the story, and a hell of a lot of sadistic dead-ends for missing objects.

Mostly though, what stands out is that it almost wilfully makes no sense. Few games have ever had a more confusing intro, from the bizarre attempt at an opening line that demands some ghastly 80s/90s sax music… in fact, let’s add some of our own to set an appropriate mood…

…to the fact that no two scenes even seem to connect together. Talk of ecstasy and angst mingling end up fading into a seedy looking nightclub called the Blue and Red, where bad 3D was a gimmick long before its time, where a sinister deal is taking place. Two FMV men silently around a hotel bedroom, presumably on the ‘angst’ side of the opening montage, silently arguing over a briefcase. They shake hands and one of them leaves, only for the courier to immediately fall under the sights of a cartoon sniper. He’s just lining up his shot when a woman with Spidey Sense runs in, points him out, and the two run away while the sniper tries to work out if he can be bothered to pull the trigger. Instead of finding out what just happened though, we’re shown a newspaper about the death of a man called Fayard Nichols, right-hand man at a company called Q.U.L, who died of a heart attack while on a plane.

What?

'Ooooooh, I knew I'd regret drinking so much on the plane...'

“I’m Doralice,” explains Doralice, shown in a photo taken a few seconds after finally relieving a full bladder, “…the sexiest captain on the Paris-Miami flight. You like suspense? Well, you’re invited to spend a delicious weekend with me. Fasten your seatbelts, we’re ready for take-off!”

It looks nice, but the giant finger coming through the window every few minutes never stops being disturbing.

For some reason, Doralice lives in a hotel room built into a giant woman’s head. It’s quite nicely laid out though, with big windows that seem clear of earwax, a shower for gratuitous sexy-time, and the briefcase the guy in the intro was carrying. What happened to him after she saved him from the sniper? We’re not told directly, and like a lot of the game, it’s muddied up by inconsistencies, but it’s not difficult to work out what we’re supposed to think went on between scenes. This is an ‘erotic’ thriller after all.

“That guy who died in my arms… at least he enjoyed his last glimpse of the world…” Doralice sighs, happily oblivious to the fact that starting a game with a higher body-count than the villains she’s going to be chasing isn’t the greatest way to launch her adventuring career. No wonder she opted to keep her knickers on and pretend to be a different Doralice when starring in Lost in Time.

Fanservice dutily provided (up to three times, if you can’t get enough of it, after which even she gets bored of performing on demand and claims to have run out of soap, as if cleanliness has ever been the point of these scenes), it’s time to kick-start the story. Before you get a chance to do that though, you’ll notice one of Fascination’s oddest quirks – the music. You know how music tends to run in the background of scenes, providing what’s usually known as ‘background music’? Fascination’s programmers couldn’t do that properly, so instead decided to just occasionally play clips like the ‘badoom-badooom’ noise that starts, then shuffles off in shame almost immediately. I believe the CD version actually hired someone who knew how to write code and fixed this, but it was too little, too late.

The first objective is to open the dead guy’s briefcase, but Doralice lacks either a code or a sharp object to force it with. The only clue is that the answer has to be in the room, because she won’t leave it until she’s gotten a vial that we’ve never actually seen her be told about that’s hidden inside it. The fact she’s not that fussed suggests she’s used to odd conversations during random sex with strangers.

“Oh, oh that feels so good….”

“One second, the sleazy sax music finished. Let me play it again.”

“Thanks. Look, all I’m saying is…”

“What? Balls no. It’s just that.. well… if I spontaneously have a heart attack, I really need you to go on a dangerous adventure to make sure the chemicals I’m carrying get to their destination intact. Speaking of which, who the hell is flying the plane?”

Unsurprisingly, there are few clues to the briefcase’s combination in a totally different person’s hotel room, and it’s a letter based code that would take lots and lots of tedious trial-and-error clicking to work out by luck. Even adventure games aren’t cruel enough to inflict on players.

“I’m not leaving until I find the vial in the briefcase,” declares Doralice. “Let’s see, he told me the combination was… AAARGH!” And so you start looking for a way to jog her memory. Like three hot showers in a row, regardless of how much soap is left. Or checking the fridge. Or taking a sip of water. Or, eventually, remembering what kind of game you’re playing…

Amazing! I have the same combination on my Monty Python joke!

After your head stops recovering from the concussion of slamming it repeatedly into your desk, the case opens to reveal very little. A pair of pyjamas, with Doralice making a point of mentioning have a packet of ‘comdoms’ in the pocket that she doesn’t bother taking, an electric toothbrush, and no vial. A bit more messing around, and the vial turns out to be in the toothbrush, in a secret compartment that opens up when you switch it on. So, to recap. The guy brought condoms, just in case, but nothing to clean his teeth after an incredibly long flight. Truly, Doralice is a lucky, lucky girl.

Psychically aware that agents have travelled across the world to recover the vial of liquid and that every second not spent rubbing her breasts under a flow of hot water counts, she hides it away by the somewhat odd method of putting it into an ice tray and freezing some camouflage around it, before just ambling downstairs to the lobby to call the President of the company and let him know what she has to offer, and also that she has his science goo sitting in her fridge. All she needs is the number.

My god, if you squint, that's filth!

First though, it’s time for one of Fascination’s oddest censored moments. In the original floppy disk version, the lobby of Doralice’s hotel has a porn mag just lying around, and she doesn’t just read it for the articles! No, she reads it in the hope that there’ll be a secret code on its pages which will be useful to her later. Though as she doesn’t know this just yet, she phrases it slightly differently.

“Let’s see, is it true the Americans like ample breasts?” she ponders, flicking the pages. Unless of course, it’s the CD version, in which case it’s a car mag instead, and she’s instead forced to ask “Is it true the Americans like nice bumpers?” When a main character’s eye-rolling line about boobs has more dignity than the censored replacement, you know things are pretty damn funked up.

The reason for the porn mag is obvious – three pages of bikini pictures. There’s also half a phone number for the photographer though, a guy called Lou Dale, who will presumably be important later, and underneath a Who’s Who type directory that just happens to have the personal phoneline for a company called QUANTUM Unlmtd Lab. As well as fighting James Bond in a really dreadful movie, they’re described as working on ‘Special 6th gen cerebro-cimical pdts, Weighs: $500 million.’

No, I have no idea either.

'Arms... tired... sexy pose... exhausting...'

“Oh! Good morning, Miss Dora!” Miller greets her. “Delighted to hear from you. I heard what happened in your plane.” How? “Poor old Fayard. Fortunately, you have the vial. Above all, keep it somewhere safe! Don’t carry it with you! I’ll explain the whole business… then we’ll think things over. Come and meet me at my office. The entry code for the building is B5874.”

So, obviously, he’s desperate to get it back. You can tell by the way he waited not only for her to call him, but for a newspaper to be printed about the death of his employee, and now she’s got in touch, he’s not even sending over some armed goons to collect the package. Apple made more of a fuss when Gizmodo got its hands on an iPhone 4 from some guy in a bar. But hey, whatever. Right?

Doralice isn’t much more fussed after receiving a phonecall on her way out of the room from a man called… from a man called… and I swear I am not making this up… Robaire de la Cafetiere. He’s a fellow pilot, in from Mexico, who invites her down to the pool to have a drink, and possibly sex. Since the vial is nice and safe in the fridge, that seems harmless enough. She runs straight down, pausing only to change into a bikini, and also completely swap out her face, body and skin color.

“Hi Dora, my darling little firefly!” Robaire de la Cafetiere greets her. “Haven’t crashed your plane yet? Hmm! When will you marry me?”

“No way, you old macho! Why should I make one man miserable when I can make a lot of men happy?”

“Well, yeah…” he concedes. “Don’t worry, I adore you anyway! And do you love me?”

And they kiss. But nowhere passionately enough for the Night Man music.

“Hi, Robaire,” says a topless woman called Prisca who is also there. “Hey Dora, did you know I was asked about the death in the plane at the airport? A man in a wheelchair with a cat…”

“What’s this all about?” demands… Rob… “Are you murdering your passengers these days?”

“Oh, nothing serious. A heart attack,” grins Doralice, the sociopathic seductress.

“I managed to get this flashlight off him,” continues Prisca, as the game fails to realise that what she’s admitting to is stealing from a man in a wheelchair, unless we’re supposed to believe he was handing out free samples. “And a pendant I dropped somewhere around here. It’s stupid, I can’t find it any more.”

The flashlight has words on it, but no battery. Doralice ponders this, before psychically deducing that this would be a good time to order a coffee and take a sugar cube for later use. God only knows what. She also hands the topless Prisca a hat, saving her the horrors of walking a whole two feet to pick it up herself, and the remaining i and two ls of her name. Behind the hat was a switch to turn on the lights in the hotel pool, which illuminates the pendant in the water, which she dives in and collects and discovers was really a micro-transmitter. “Pity I can’t find out who was the receiver!” she sighs, having apparently forgotten that she is not in fact a spy and would probably need more to accomplish this feat than a fake toothbrush and a dead man’s condoms. Or maybe not. She is reasonably industrious.

“What are you doing now?” asks Rob, as she heads out. “Can I kidnap you?”

“This evening, if you like,” she tells him, heading off to QUL. Then, presumably realises she’s still in her bikini and hurries back to put some actual clothes on first.

Okay, be very, very careful where you put that mouse cursor...

QUANTUM turns out to be situated downtown, in the middle of a naked lady. The rates are presumably good, but the working conditions very cramped. Doralice calls Miller, who warns her “I’ve just had an alarming call and I must leave immediately!” Either her reputation precedes her, or it doesn’t.

“I’ve prepared some instructions for you… the reception people know you’re coming. Oh, by the way, you need a secret code number to move around in here.” Isn’t an ID badge more conventional?

Rushing to attend the man who couldn’t even be arsed to stick around the five minutes to talk to her face to face, it turns out that Miller is a lying sack of crap. All you get from the receptionist is a brush-off, followed by a stern “I can let in only authorised personnel. Adios, Miss!” and then finally “Ok, listen, you’re starting to make me angry! I’ve had enough of your sob-stories…! I’ll get my colleague. He knows what to do with pretty girls who won’t mind their business…”

Remind me, why am I bothered about helping this company, exactly?

Not willing to let a little thing like rape and murder get in her way, Doralice sorts this out by steal a key from the reception desk and feed a lump of sugar to distract the receptionist’s dog, and sneaks in via the parking lot instead. Here, she’s greeted by a raving madman who demands “Get your tits out of my face! I was having this great, sexy dream!”, but still manages to be the friendliest employee she’s met so far. He even helps her break into the cleaning woman’s car to steal her keys!

Miller turns out to be dead by the time Doralice gets to him.

“So the body count is rising: 2 deaths in 24 hours!” she declares, ignoring the fact that her vagina was apparently the murder weapon in at least one of them. “Anyway, it’s too late for small talk now… I have to find the information he left for me… Where could he have put it?”

It’s a room with exactly one obvious piece of furniture – a bare breasted statue lamp. Guess where the button is she needs to activate it is is? You get two guesses. The lamp isn’t used for light though, but to let Doralice retrieve a message from… uh… a solar powered dictaphone he has hidden away in a secret compartment behind his bookcase. Which he expects her to find, but hasn’t so much as hinted exists, making it either the world’s worst hiding place, or him the dumbest man on the entire planet.

Again, you get two guesses to figure out which.

A solar dictaphone? That sound you can hear is a designer pulling a muscle straining for a puzzle idea.

“Miss Dora, you’re accidentally in possession of a sample of my most important invention,” Miller tells her from beyond the grave. “I’ve decided to give it to the government because I’m constantly threatened and in fear of my life.” Yet still spectacularly lazy about retrieving it. “Only three prototypes exist, but the formula can be obtained by analysis. One is with my son – I trust him completely. Fayard’s sample is with you, but the third… was stolen by that maniac Peter Hillgate better known as “Doc”. He’s probably synethesising the product right now in his secret Coconut Grove laboratory hidden under a women’s lingerie store. Go there, get in without being seen and get it back! Only you can handle this mission… Then give the two vials to my son, Kenneth. You’re my only hope.”

…and you haven’t just called the police… because?

And for finding the secret passage, Doralice was finally invited to join the Knight Sabers. Huzzah!

Unsurprisingly, the women’s lingerie store (and what other kind is there, exactly?) is another fine building built in a giant naked lady. “I can look round while I pretend to try stuff on…” decides Doralice, though it takes about a fraction of a second to find the private door to behind the scenes. Through a door protected with the most incredible security ever… a bell… she finds a wall covered with exactly what you’d expect to find in a lingerie store stock-room – pin-up posters of naked girls called ‘Greedy Fanny’, ‘Chantal the Perverse Ingenue’ and ‘Isabelle the Rebel’. There’s also one for a naked man called ‘Stormy and Tender Roland’, with a very prominent bulge. Which turns out to be a key. Behind the poster. His penis is not a key. This gives Doralice everything she needs to open a nearby safe, which in turn opens a secret passage under the store to a top-secret laboratory. Because whatever.

Fishing around in a lab coat, Doralice finds a key, and cheers that for once, it’s not hidden in a weird place. Unless you include the whole ‘Bond villain under a branch of Victoria’s Secret’ thing, which I think we probably should. This unlocks a closet full of lots of random pictures of some naked man taken by a photographer called Lou Dale… that sound you can hear is a densely woven plot weaving itself together before your very eyes… and the remaining two vials of whatever QUL’s secret project is. Doralice snags and bags them, before heading home for tea and sex, her task complete.

EXCEPT NOT!

They don't call her Dora the Ex-Hoarder for nothing.

Back at the hotel, she staggers up the stairs to her room where Rob is waiting for her. Unfortunately, he’s waiting on top of her bed, still breathing but comatose, surrounded by a completely trashed room. Doralice is deeply sympathetic until she notices he brought her chocolates, at which point she’s more interested in those. The actual damage is pretty minor. No windows broken. The phone not even moved. A couple of books are on the floor. And for some reason, her knickers are lying around. “This bra will never support anything again,” sighs Doralice. “Well, it doesn’t matter, I never wear one!”

What? Then why do you own one?

But what of the vial of mysterious liquid? Good question. Rob has apparently drunk it, though given that it was a sealed vial frozen in a box of ice-cubs, I’m not sure how or why.

“Wow, what a mixture!” exclaims Doralice. “What kind of a state will he be in?”

In probably her first sensible act all game, she calls reception to let them know, and is warned that a police inspector is here. His name is Pedro di Helgos, and he’s the man in the wheelchair that Prisca took the flashlight from earlier. And quite clearly a villain, to the point that if Fascination had music, the Villain Song would even now be playing. Everyone, sing along.

VILLAIN, VILLAIN, YOU’RE THE VILLAIN
NOT GONNA TRUST A WORD YOU SAY.
MIGHT AS WELL JUST TWIRL YOUR MOUSTACHE
GONNA KICK YOUR ASS IN THE END-GAME.

EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS BULLSHIT
WOULD NOT FOOL A DUMBASS SLOTH
YOUR IDIOT BALL HAS BEEN PRE-DROPPED AND
FRANKLY I HAVE HAD ENOUGH

AS A CROOK YOU’RE NOT TOO SUBTLE
AND YOUR PLANS ARE TRITE AT BEST
I COULD BEAT YOU WITH NO WALKTHROUGH
BUT FOR TIME, I’M KINDA PRESSED

“I’d like to question you about the death of Mr. Nichols…” he warns, and quickly interrogates her. The correct responses boil down to “None of your business, piss off,” which doesn’t seem particularly smart, but works about as well as anything else here. The detective’s presence does however reveal a scrap of paper with the second half of photographer Lou Dale’s phone number on it, so she goes upstairs to call him… idly noting that Rob’s body has vanished, but not with any particular surprise or concern. Pretending to have a job for him, Dale gives her his address.

Incidentally, have you noticed how there’s been no sex in this erotic thriller so far?

Try to remember that people paid money for this back in the day.

We could have done something, but decided... nah...

A newspaper outside Dale’s house promptly redefines the words ‘STOP PRESS’ by telling Doralice that “in the last half-hour, 13 women have brought complaints over assaults committed by a maniac running loose.’ Who is this maniac? Supposedly, Rob, though it’s hard to tell from the picture.

Clearly, time is now of the essence!

Lou, who turns out to be a woman – I’m not sure if that’s meant to be a plot twist – is tied up in her house and guarded by one of Doc’s minions. Doralice promptly mixes up poison gas using kitchen supplies, with the game skirting over the fact that she just killed a man. To recap – the villains have so far killed one person on screen. Doralice has ended two. One more, and her heroine card gets withdrawn.

'Can you hurry up? These straps are barely holding on, and we're in serious danger of sexy happening...'

Lou promptly infodumps like the story swallowed a whole pack of laxatives.

“I’ll tell you everything,” she promises, and does. “6 months ago, I was contacted for an undercover job. I was supposed to seduce Kenneth Miller, the millionaire’s son to take his photo… It was tricky because he hates photographers. Once the mission was over, I wasn’t supposed to see him any more… but I continued for a while, discreetly… he certainly didn’t mind… it was going well until perhaps 1 month later – he suddenly disappeared. When he showed up again, he was weird! He didn’t seem to recognize me, he avoided me! Perhaps he knew!”

“Incidentally, stop grinning at me like that,” she doesn’t add. “It’s really fricking creepy.”

'...and can I just check, you are planning to untie me before leaving, right?'

Doralice shows her the pictures from Doc’s place, and Lou confirms he was the client – a surgeon with several known faces, who fixes up crooks. There are inanimate objects who know where this is going, but Doralice is a bit behind the train of thought, deciding she has to run to clearly-not-Miller and warn him about what’s going on. Lou agrees, and gives her a signet ring to give to him.

“Say, do you have an idea where I can hide these vials? I’d better hide them in case I’m searched.”

And Lou does. “Yes, these Love Eggs!” she suggests. “There’s space inside. No-one will find them inside you, even searching very closely! But don’t get too involved with any men…”

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew.

Sax and death. If we get rock and roll in this game too, we're sorted!

Without pausing to say “I was actually thinking of your laundry basket or something”, Doralice heads to the Red and Blue club from the intro with her squishy bits full of secrets, trying not to think that she’s basically walking around with two balls of rape juice. Incidentally, not wanting to nitpick or anything – heaven forfend – but if both this and Doralice are in Miami, which flight did the guy from the intro die on, exactly? What was that nonsense about ecstasy and angst mingling in a frenzied embrace somewhere between there and Paris meant to be about? Also, why am I trying to make sense of this?

At the club, she either blags her way in using a pin found in her hotel room after it was ransacked, or reloads a saved game to pick it up, having completely missed it and not being allowed to just go back for another scan. In fact, no. It’s even crueller than that! There’s actually a second, identical pin at Lou Dale’s house, but you’re only allowed to look at it, not actually pick it up.

Inside, she quickly tracks down Obviously Not Miller, and expresses the sheer urgency of the situation by suggesting he take her “Somewhere we can relax a little… I could use it!”

“Okay, you win,” he tells her. “I’ll take you home with me! But you’d better not be bluffing!”

'Green knickers under a red dress? You know, my evil boss owns a lingerie shop. Can I interest you in a store card?'

Back at his place, Doralice wastes little time getting out of her clothes – though not without one reservation. “Right, I have to avoid going all the way!” she monologues. “Usually, they go to sleep afterwards. This time, he has to go to sleep first so I can search…”

Wait, so, has she worked out that this guy clearly isn’t Miller… or not? Oh, so confusing.

“Now, honey, I’d like a taste of your talents!” Not-Miller tells her, apparently no more bothered about the game’s plot devices than his dead not-father.

“You won’t be disappointed, my angel! But first, I’d like to show you something!”

“No way! You can show me afterwards! Unless it’s a concealed beauty spot.”

“Not exactly… But I think it will interest you too…”

No, of course not. She gives him a box of chocolates which she had no way of knowing were drugged… and luckily they turn out to be drugged and he crashes right out on his bed. This lets her check out a tattoo on his buttocks that shows a heart and the names Archie and Lucy, because guys often have those, and it’s not something a criminal plastic surgeon might consider worth covering up.

Heading downstairs, she finds that Miller has some unusual tastes – specifically, an office built out of a giant fish that makes the naked lady of QUL seem positively sensible. Here, there’s a secret passage opened – obviously – by stealing a cigar from a parrot and a pearl from a pirahna tank to shoot a laser across the room to reveal a secret panel opened by the skull on Not Miller’s signet ring – which takes her… back down to the lab from earlier, with nothing actually accomplished beyond blowing her cover. And her cover alone, which at least is something to be grateful for.

'No! Don't touch me! You don't know where I've been!'

The lab isn’t as deserted this time though, and she’s immediately knocked out and wakes up the next day, still in the villains’ villa lair, and up to her cleavage in trouble.

“Where am I?” she asks, having not read the location card. Also, think about how long she’s been carrying the vials around by this point. That has to be pretty uncomfortable… right?

“Well, you wanted to play the private eye!” says the host of Smash TV, or rather, the inspector in a wheelchair from earlier. “You took Doc by surprise, busting into his place like that. He’d surely have rubbed you out if I hadn’t been on his trail! But I was able to act in time!”

And you didn’t just kill her in her hotel room… because?

The Inspector asks about the vials, and Doralice tells him flat-out that she has them.. uh… ‘on’ her.

Closets, shoe boxes, bowls of pot pourri... loads of them. Snake, why are you blushing?

The Inspector hears her story in full. “Right, you did well not to give in!” he tells her. “At the moment, Doc and Archie are locked in a secret room here somewhere. You can trust me with the vials now!”

“Yeaaaaaah… no,” Doralice thinks to herself, though she phrases it “Lend me your bathroom a few minutes so I can fix myself up, then I’ll join you!” and waddles off to think up a plan. The Inspector lets her, despite the fact that the bathroom contains not only the equipment she’ll need to escape, but a jar of human eyes and a secret passage full of women’s underwear – including her own panties, for reasons I really don’t want to think too carefully about. She whips up a perfume bottle full of formaldehyde and blasts him in the face with it. Justified though, since it was kinda in self-defense.

“Now I’m sure: Pedro di Hilgos and Peter Hillgate are the same man!” she announces, which is lucky, because otherwise she’d just have assaulted a disabled police officer, and I’m fairly sure that’s the kind of thing that gets the book thrown at you until your face is completely flat.

You'd never have gotten away with that if Mutoid Man had been here!

Another newspaper in the lounge warns Doralice that Rob is still on the rampage, still being pursued by photographers who can get shots of him in his rape-drug fueled rage but who can’t apparently be bothered to stop him. Poor Rob. His penis is going to be a withered husk by the end of this game, though at least that’s not far away now. Finding out the real Miller’s birthdate from a microscopic inscription on a signet ring – I know, just go with it – Doralice opens a secret passage via one of the most needlessly convoluted puzzles ever to cap off a stupid game. It involves setting a clock labelled with the signals of the zodiac to a random setting based on the month of Miller’s birth, then playing a specific code on an organ via a close-up shot that doesn’t actually tell you what notes each key plays. Don’t know the symbols, which months correlate to which sign, or how to play the piano? You’re not going to be able to finish the game. Do know? Doesn’t seem to matter, since it won’t necessarily work anyway, and you get exactly no feedback on where – if anywhere – you’re going wrong. Because it hates you.

But don’t take my word for it! This one even confuses online walkthroughs…

You need to play B A D G E on the piano keys while the Zodiac is set for 2:00, which is the Roman Number 2. This doesn’t work the first time, and the sequence must be repeated over and over for about 10 minutes. A secret door will finally open when you do this enough times. Do not give up, it literally takes 10-15 minutes before it will work.

Make sense? Here’s another version…

Since this is a euro ware, you must know that the europeans write dates in the order of date, month, then year.So for example if the date from the ring is 13-09-50, then just click on the wheel’s left button 2 times(it moves counterclockwise) so that it faces just like a nine on a regular clock.Next play the notes that are inscribed in the flashlight on the organ.

Let us never speak of Gabriel Knight 3′s cat-moustache puzzle ever again.

I'll be honest, this is not the organ I expected Doralice to be playing with more than any other.

Opening the secret passage leads Doralice to the jail cell where Miller is hiding, which has been conveniently fitted with a smoke alarm to help her escape by just starting a fire with the newspapers of Rob’s raping spree. And then… for all your hard work… the ending…

…is perhaps the stupidest ending of any game in history. Doralice emerges in the light to find the entire cast waiting for her – the good, the bad, and the actively dead. Why are they here? And alive?

“Well done, Doralice darling! So what do you think of this life-size murder party?”

What?

“We all thought you were wonderful; you did remarkably well! Let me explain. I’ve set up a live role-playing games business with the actors here, and I wanted to try out the storyline before offering it to sensation seekers!”

What?

“I wonder when you realised that Doc and me were the same person,” chuckles the Inspector. “Good thing it wasn’t really formalin in the jar!”

“A clever idea mixing those dangerous chemicals, but do you think you can really eliminate a man of my size with so little poison gas?” adds Lou’s kidnapper.

WHAT?

“Me, I was supposed to have drunk the vial’s contents, a super-powerful aphrodesiac that brought me Miami infamy as a mad rapist,” chips in Rob. “Don’t you think that went a bit far?”

Just a little bit, maybe, yes...

And so it goes on, with Doralice surprisingly laid-back about the number of times she’s been horribly killed in getting here, getting knocked out, pushed into having sex with random strangers, seeing a loved one on the run for a horrific crime that’s at least in part her fault, the trauma that anyone not quite as sociopathic as she comes across as would be feeling at many of her actions, and pondering what kind of film The Game would have been if Michael Douglas had been forced to insert a set of anal beads to hide a microfiche. A very different one, perhaps. Though still with more dignity than eXistenZ.

Lamest, most abrupt ending ever? Lamest, most abrupt

However, Ubisoft provides a test-case. We are almost two years into its aggressive attack on PC piracy. Recently, Ubisoft called its “always-on” DRM a success, claiming “a clear reduction in piracy.”

In terms of actual sales, however, the results seem decidedly mixed. Michael Pachter told Eurogamer that Ubisoft’s “PC game sales are down 90% without a corresponding lift in console sales.”

Pachter framed the problem in terms of piracy, as I’m sure Ubisoft frames the problem, but a 90% decline in PC sales is a catastrophic number. If piracy were the problem, then their “successful” DRM policy should have prevented such a free-fall.

Instead, PC gamers have stopped buying Ubisoft games. In fact, the decline of sales even calls into question the decline in piracy rates. All we know for sure is that Ubisoft have stopped people from playing their games. Full stop.

Ubisoft is committed to blaming piracy. It’s become an emotional issue. Here’s what the developer of Ubisoft’s Driver: San Francisco said before the game came out: “It’s difficult to get away from the fact that as a developer, as somebody who puts their blood, sweat and tears into this thing… And from the publisher’s point of view, which invests tens and tens and tens of millions into a product – by the time you’ve got marketing, a hundred million – that piracy on the PC is utterly unbelievable.”

I understand the outrage. It’s frustrating to see people enjoying your work without compensating you for it. But outrage can’t drive policy. The important question is, “Why aren’t more people buying my product?”

For answers, let’s look at Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s enthusiastic review of Driver: San Francisco. Alec Meer liked the game quite a bit: “It’s Quantum Leap meets Deadman, with more than a touch of Life On Mars, but… what’s important is that the game declares it is essentially one man’s fantasy up front, which means whatever it decides to do is absolutely inarguable. Moreover, that one man believes he is the greatest wheelman in history, so the fantasy panders to that and builds its rules around it.”

Sounds great! Except before I get to that amazing pitch, I encounter the following observations:

• Lousy graphics options, requiring adjusting videocard settings
• No support for 16:10 monitors
• “The net result on a high-res PC screen is a bland and outdated-looking game…”
• “There’s no sense that love has gone into Driver 5 on PC, just a game that’s been uncaringly dragged over…”

The review goes on to give me a dozen reasons why I should buy it, but it’s also given me a half-dozen reasons not to. It ends with a reminder that the DRM has an unreliable offline mode, and I need a connection to launch it. Not a major problem for me, but it raises the likelihood of annoyance down the road.

I’ll buy Driver: San Francisco. But not now. I’ll wait until it’s heavily discounted next year. My gaming budget isn’t so generous that I can afford to pay full-fare for bad ports, and bad ports, delayed releases, and harassing DRM are what define Ubisoft’s approach to the PC.

Pachter told Eurogamer, “”[There's] no public data to suggest that DRM works, but the fact that more companies are imposing it strongly suggests that they believe it works.” Nobody can estimate how many sales are lost due to piracy. The studies that do exist show that pirates tend to be steady customers. But despite the lack of solid evidence, the problem has to be piracy. Because the alternative is to acknowledge that Ubisoft has badly damaged its PC business and completely failed to convert pirates into paying customers.

Perhaps DRM does have a place, but Ubisoft has tried harder than any other publisher to solve this problem, and business has suffered. It may well be that piracy is not what ails them, and the secret to selling PC games is to make quality PC versions of multi-platform titles. But you don’t hear that from Ubisoft. What you hear is that they have the right to protect the products that they worked so hard to produce.

And they do have that right. But PC gamers work hard for their money, too, and they deserve full-featured games that let them have the best experiences possible on their chosen platform. They deserve a publisher that cares more about its customers than its resentments.

Sony’s new PlayStation ad – “Michael” – shows live-action versions of game characters sharing stories about the things they’ve done. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil more than that – it’s embedded above.

The costumes are impressive, but I can’t help feeling this isn’t how the characters I play in PC games would talk about me – or most PC gamers, for that matter. Saving the world, facing the gods, finding the good in a conflicted hero – we’ll get to it, but we’ve usually got something else we want to try first. I don’t have Sony’s voice-acting budget, so I’ve written the PC gaming version of their ad as a screenplay.

1 – INT – BAR – NIGHT
An assortment of PC game protagonists fill the dingy bar, muttering angrily to each other. GORDON FREEMAN walks in, glances around and takes a seat – but says nothing.

In the past couple weeks, we’ve seen the Internet very nearly begin a drool flood of Biblical proportions over the beta tests of Diablo III and Battlefield 3. And why not? Select players get to take their favorite videogame juggernauts for a spin before anyone else. When you’ve coveted these things like water in a desert for ages, one tiny taste goes a long way. So we get Diablo’s all-too-brief sample of Act I and Battlefield’s one entire map (unless you’re willing to wage actual war for a slot on the Caspian Border server), because that’s more than enough for players who are starved for anything at all.

Sounds an awful lot like a demo, right? Well, that’s because it basically is. Speaking about CSGO’s upcoming beta, Valve’s Chet Faliszek pinpointed a major part of the problem:

“The PC Beta will be extended longer, because it’s not really a good model for doing betas, real betas, on the console. Other console betas have been more promotional demos. What we’re saying is that we want to do a beta that’s constantly changing and updating based on player feedback.”

Due to the fact that console certification processes are basically slow-mo mazes of red tape, constant updates are out of the question. So for multiplatform games, the beta system’s already pretty much broken.

That, however, isn’t the only issue. Cynical though it may sound, Faliszek is right: Marketing plays a huge part in these things. That’s dangerous, though, because that change in central objective brings a complete 180 in priorities. The testing mentality: “Who cares how buggy it is? Let people teleport the whole game world into the sun for all we care – just so long as they tell us about it.” The marketing mentality: “Oh no, no fiery visions of the apocalypse for you. But do pre-polish the beta to a sun-eclipsing sheen. Otherwise, players might think it’s – gasp – an incomplete game.”

See the problem there? And that’s a damn shame, because proper public testing can be hugely helpful in ironing out pesky kinks or even changing the course of entire games. I’ve spoken with gobs of indie devs who swear by it (Hello, Minecraft), insisting until they’re blue in the face that they would have churned out a different, largely inferior game without early feedback from fans.

Instead, though, we get situations like BF3′s, where the beta feedback forum has all the organization of a pie-fight/anarchy convention (No search feature? Seriously?) or a plethora of MMOs that have shipped without outside eyes even glimpsing their endgames. Disappointing? You don’t even know the half of it.

In just a few short hours, it’ll be time to wave goodbye to the 2011 series of Doctor Who until Christmas. What can we expect from the final episode? Time-bending weirdness, no doubt. Light-hearted banter. Heartwarming scenes and/or heartbreaking drama. If it followed the example of Dalek Attack though, it’d start with the Doctor saying “I use guns now. Guns are cool!” and then heading off on a universe spanning adventure to blow up every single alien who’s ever gotten in his face.

(Well, as long as he started with the Slitheen, I could probably tolerate it…)

But does spectacularly missing the point of the entire character to churn out a dreadful platform game make Dalek Attack a bad game in its own right? No, but that’s okay. The jumping, shooting, difficulty, graphics, sound and everything else are all on-board to help out, as the Doctor has the kind of day that makes repeatedly getting shot by an impossible astronaut seem positively relaxing…

Hey, that's not a Dalek! In fact, what is that? Looks like a Klingon with a handbag.

Why have we never seen a genuinely great Doctor Who game? As mentioned the last time we looked at one, the confusing mess that was Destiny of the Doctors, it seems like a great license. You have a character who can go anywhere in time and space, an amazing rogues gallery of both old and new characters alike, and some of the most iconic sci-fi images in the world.

The problem is that everything that makes the Doctor a great character makes him a dreadful game hero. He’s a guy who’s meant to know more than we do, who thinks in different ways, whose understanding of the universe is infinitely greater. The Companions are firmly the audience-identification figures, with the big wish-fulfilment to tap into typically being the idea of travelling with him and having adventures in time and space, not actually being him. It’s the same with other great fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes. On the face of it, a detective game that lets you be The World’s Greatest Detective is an obvious idea. In practice, having him stare for hours at a crime scene due to not spotting a giant footprint or something completely neuters his power. Much like with the Doctor, the sensible thing to do (and something some of the games have actually done) is to cast you as Watson instead.

They ranked Celery Boy over Tom Baker? Cue the fanboy outrage!

Dalek Attack follows a slightly different path to the license – the “create a cheap platform game and put the Doctor’s face on it” route that was so popular back at the time. It’s difficult to tell what the most horrifying part of it is – that the default characters are Sylvester McCoy and bloody Ace, that the entire plot is only the letter ‘s’ in the title away from being the entire storyline, or that the first level is a sewer level. The rules here are pretty simple. Are you making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game? Your first level may be set in a sewer. Are you making any other game whatsoever? Then the moment you start working on a sewer level is the time to put down your keyboard and back away slowly from the games industry. These levels have precisely one purpose – to make every other kind feel better in comparison. Starting in one is never anything but an “AWOOGA! AWOOGA!” alarm siren.

THAT THING WE SAY! THAT THING WE SAAAAY!

It’s not particularly clear why the Doctor opted for this. The intro kicks off with a group of slightly sickly looking Daleks announcing “THIS IS ONLY THE BEGIN-NING!” and… well… you can’t argue the logic there. Sadly, they don’t keep showing up for the other screens to clarify “THIS IS ONLY THE MAIN MENU!” and “THIS IS WHERE YOU CHOOSE YOUR CONTROLS, DOC-TOR!” From there, it’s on to the Dalek home planet of Skaro, complete with a little sticker that says “First To Check The Timeline To See If This Is Blown Up Is A Geek”, in the ‘Earth Year’ 2254. Dalek creator Davros, temporarily enjoying not having his creations turn on him due to his endlessly poor pattern recognition, announces that “Over the past 100 years, we have witnessed the human race advance their scientific knowledge to the point of becoming a threat. It is time for this problem to be rectified.”

“We must destroy the pods and reverse the beams before Davros turns the Earth into a Dalek production planet!!!” declares the Sylvester McCoy Doctor, as the invasion begins. I suppose in fairness, if you’re already in that much shit, you may as well just jump into the sewer. Still, I’m not entirely sure it’s a three-exclamation-mark level threat. Two, perhaps. But only at a pinch.

'Look down there, Professor. It's the original Love and Monsters shooting script in its natural habitat!'

McCoy’s Doctor is the official hero of this game, complete with that creepy wink he used to do in the intro as the game starts off, although you can also play as either Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton versions. A second player can walk off in a huff after being told they have to play as McCoy-era Companion Ace or a generic UNIT soldier, or take the other half of the keyboard and play too. The extra fire-power is welcome, because this game is – to use the technical term – rat-bastard hard.

The first level eases you in slowly, and by slowly I mean it has you on a forced-scrolling, cramped level where everything does damage, with a sprite that takes up about half the available room, being chased by two Daleks you can’t turn around and shoot, and with lots of walls you will smash right into. Your basic choice is to rush forwards and take damage, or take it slow and be shot in the back by the Daleks. Green globby things rain down slime from the top of the screen, spikes stab in from either side, and at the end, there’s a two-headed boss who can kill you dead in an instant if you bumble into its major attack. It’s not desperately difficult – it’s no Silver Surfer for instance – but it’s sure as hell a statement of intent from the game. “This is how we welcome you,” it whispers. “Prepare to die…”

It does have one thing I love though – the chaser Daleks. While the intro uses what sound like authentic samples, the sewer-patrolling Daleks have a notably higher pitch to them, like they’re ones who’ve already had the pleasure of the Doctor kicking them in the bumps on a few previous occasions. That would definitely explain why they’re not exactly racing to catch up and try EXT-ER-MIN-ATEing him, to the point of just slinking off when the boss arrives. “JERRY WILL TAKE CARE OF THIS,” I imagine one of them shouting. “SOD IT,” announces the other. “LET US GO BEAT UP VICTOR LEWIS SMITH!”

Red sky at night, shepard's delight. Purple sky? Crap graphics or a Dalek invasion. One or the other.

As of the second level, London, Dalek Attack really takes the gloves off and spits in your face. You start surrounded by enemies shooting at you, they can often adjust their fire to hit you even if you’re jumping around, your weapons and rubbish and the map is at least a bit of a maze, with doorways you can go through to reach different parts of the map. It’s made confusing by weird things like the Doctor being able to run across the Thames, but taking damage for it like a hydrophobic Jesus, and the design coming across as having been built by people who’ve only ever had London vaguely described to them, and described by an alien from Pluto at that. Despite being The Future, it’s full of brick buildings, red phone booths and pubs called The Red Lion promising Real Pub Food, with Chubb alarms up high, Big Ben right behind a street that leads into Piccadilly tube station, neon adverts for McDonalds and Kodak in the backgrounds of the map, and large pointy signs everywhere pointing to Oxford, as if even the town planners are desperate to warn you that “London is shit! Run! Run! RUN!”

Oh, and in classic sci-fi tradition, The Times’ cover story is “DALEKS INVADE LONDON”. Can’t argue that’s probably going to be the biggest story of the day, but you do have to wonder about the priorities of the news team that wrote that, the distributors who got it to the shops, and the civilians who stopped running for a moment to find out what the pepperpot monsters chasing them were called. But then, this is an early 90s game. There’s no way a modern Doctor Who would do anything so lame, right?

Oh come on! The bloody Daleks invading London, in the Times? Is this a homage, The Adventure Games?

Surviving London isn’t easy, or helped by the fact that while the Doctor has several lives, they all come in quick succession and it’s easy to find yourself burning through your limited continues. If you’re lucky though, you’ll end up facing off against the first boss, and from there, heading off to France.

Listen very carefully, you will play zis... only once.

Here, things change quite a bit. Instead of shooting, the Doctor opts to go undercover as mild-mannered cafe owner Rene Artois, on the hunt for an ancient artefact known as The Fallen Madonna With Ze Big Boobies by Van Klomp. The Daleks are replaced with far cuddlier Nazi and urinating cats, though the Brigadier has sent one of his colleagues, Officer Crabtree and no wait, sorry, I’m thinking of Allo Allo: Cartoon Fun, published by the same people and very suspiciously similar looking.

From personal experience, I can’t really tell you what comes next, due to completely sucking at this game. However! Luckily, the original advert is very clear on what to expect, promising enemies ranging from Daleks to Flying Daleks to… robot Sumo Wrestlers? Were they feeling nostalgic for the days when they couldn’t go upstairs, or just wanted to give the Doctor a chance against them? Weird.

If you can’t live without knowing how the story ends, seek help immediately. If you’re merely quietly curious, here’s a complete playthrough. It’s of the smelly Amiga version, but the two versions are (as far as I can tell) pretty much the same. At the very least, the PC one isn’t worlds better.

Where next for The Doctor? The Adventure Games are due start up again this month, starting with an episode called The Gunpowder Plot. Will they have learned the lessons of the first series and actually be good games as well as good publicity? We can but hope. Really though, I’d cut them a lot of slack if they just finally gave us an official game that used funky portal effects to let you walk into the actual TARDIS and appreciate its bigger-on-the-insideness for yourself. Why has that never been done? It can only be madness, because the tech to do it has been around since Unreal in 199-fricking-8.

And with that, I’m off to go kill the last few hours before the end of the series.

(waves little flag with Matt Smith’s face on it)

Gareth Garratt is demonstrating to me how he plays Back to the Future. Gareth is a cerebral palsy sufferer, with specific problems regarding motor control. He finds his neck muscles have the best acuity, so Marty McFly is clambering all over the back of a van controlled only by Gareth’s chin. The specialised kit that allows this miracle of accessibility? A multi-button Toshiba mouse.

“Developers don’t need to do much to let me play,” Gareth says. He’s right: they just need to include custom key configuration, so he can move all the controls to the mouse buttons. Of course, his is only one sort of disability and there are an infinite variety of adaptations needed to make a game work for every last person. I ask him whether he expects game developers to cater for all other sorts of disability too? “They could include options in the game menu to make it easier for all kinds of disabilities. If the small companies start doing that, then more people will buy their products and they will grow into bigger companies!”

His enthusiasm makes it sound simple, but there isn’t one single thing developers can do that makes their games completely accessible. Some disabilities benefit from just minor changes; others require expensive, custom-made hardware tailored to the individual, which can sometimes be supplied by charities such as the UK’s SpecialEffect. Blind gamers can play almost no off-the shelf games; Howard A Sherman, of text adventure developers Get Inside A Story, has found that his titles have attracted a blind community, through text-to-speech. “Our games were never designed or intended for the blind, but we’ve embraced that community and dedicated resources to properly serve them.”

Gareth Garrat just needs a mouse to play games.

Compared to that, the deaf are well served: they have no compromises on control systems and games are primarily a visual medium. Excellent sites like www.deafgamers. com rate games on how easy it is to complete them with subtitles and without sound. For example, Runaway: A Twist of Fate, an otherwise solid adventure game, got the lowest possible score because it features several primarily audio-based puzzles.

So how easy is it to take all this on board and develop games that, while not necessarily therapeutic, are at least friendly to a large proportion of the disabled? Nathan Fouts is president of Mommy’s Best Games, who are working on the sidescrolling shooter Explosionade for the PC, and who work with US disabled charities One Switch and AbleGamers. “Our games offer complete controller remapping,” says Nathan. “They have the ability to play and run menus with a single button, icons and text for in-game specific prompts, a selection of difficulty settings and a range of gameplay speed options.” The speed changes and button remapping are a hit even with hardcore gamers. “I see the disabled options as helping all gamers,” Nathan says.

At what stage do they start considering disability? “With Explosionade, I supported accessibility options right from the start, as it was a success with Shoot 1UP.”

Some of the most challenging gamers to deal with are stroke survivors, who often have partial paralysis. Dr Sergi Bermúdez i Badia, of the University of Madeira, Portugal, has developed some amazing bespoke technologies to allow them to play. His solution? “Passive exoskeletons (non-powered structures) that, by means of a spring system, help compensate for the weight of the upper limbs of the patients, allowing those with low mobility to perform 3D movements.”

Gareth and Jacqueline

His other devices are just as fascinating. “There’s an active robotic device that provides haptic feedback when the patient interacts with virtual environments – particularly beneficial to visually impaired gamers.”

His current research involves an active robot system, which aids the patient in completing movements. This approach is particularly interesting since it reads muscle activity to decode action intent and the robot helps complete the action. But this hardware is prohibitively expensive, so he’s also been looking into the more conventional technology, such as PCs, mice and webcams. With these he’s already developed Kinect-style bodytracking that reads player movements and translates them in the game.

So while it’s disappointing that so much of the kit for the physically disabled is so expensive, there is help available. The relatively new charity SpecialEffect (www.specialeffect.org. uk) specialises in helping gamers with severe disabilities. SpecialEffect’s new ‘loan library’ project has an array of kit people can borrow to see if anything particularly helps them; in the meantime, they recommend free software like Camera Mouse (that allows you to control a mouse using a webcam), CPI Killers (which slows down games) and dwell clickers (which allows someone to use all the different mouse functions without pressing a button).

Various charities help make gaming more accessible.

Of course, sometimes games don’t just need to be entertaining – they could benefit the patient too, especially mentally. Howard Sherman says: “If a game’s therapeutic qualities can be elegantly weaved into the experience, so that it’s camouflaged, that’s ideal.”

Dr Bermudez sounds a note of caution though. “The mere act of using games is not enough to claim therapeutic improvements. To be considered a therapy, the game has to be designed following medical and neuroscientific guidelines.”

Casey Wimsatt of Symbionica has taken that on board and developed a series of FaceSay (www.facesay.com) games, which treat the more serious social problems of autism. “Broadly speaking, the games are designed to help kids become aware of the social value of the movements and features of the face,” says Casey. “Attention to the eyes is important for a number of upstream skills, such as emotion recognition and imitation.”

There aren’t any hard and fast tips to allow every last person with disabilities to play a game. That said, as Explosionade shows, there are simple things that every developer can do to make games accessible to the majority of gamers. So, why don’t the big companies do them?

…

…

Sorry, but do I really need to say anything else this week? It’s called Tongue of the Fatman! In an infinite universe where every possibility exists, is there even a slight chance that this could be anything but a slice of weapons grade badness the likes of which humanity simply isn’t ready for? Well, only under protest then, and only because your Saturday won’t fill itself up automatically. Prepare to bow before the multiverse’s mightiest man-boobs in a game that, almost certainly, actually exists.

Not gonna ask. Will kill if you try to tell.

Ah, I think you clicked the wrong thing there. See, you’re still reading this. You looked at the picture up there, in all its bloated, purple-lipped glory, and you willingly subjected yourself to more pictures of a man who keeps butter under his armpits so that it’s nice and spreadable when he feels like a snack. You made the mistake of thinking it was going to get better, didn’t you? Well, guess what? It isn’t. The word ‘worst’ gets thrown around a lot on the internet, but Tongue of the Fatman is a strong contender for the worst beat-em-up I’ve played on PC – certainly the worst starring an overlord who Jabba the Hutt makes a point of forwarding his Weight-Watchers pamphlets to when he’s finished laughing.

A NEW CHALLENGER APPEARS!

In fairness to it though, it was released in 1989, and while a few games like the original Street Fighter were out at this point – including an arcade version where you had to hit pressure sensitive pads as hard as you could to realise that both they, along with your hand, were completely broken – they weren’t that great either. On PC, you were looking at International Karate, Karateka, Budokan and a few more, but it would be many, many years before the PC was judged worth developing flashier beat-em-ups for. Even our version of Street Fighter 2, when we got it, was closer to pants than any other item of clothing.

Tongue of the Fatman wasn’t a pure PC game though. Versions were also released for the Commodore-64 and the Sega Megadrive, though for some inexplicable reason, the name didn’t go with it. The C64 version was renamed ‘Mondu’s Fight Palace’, while Sega owners got ‘Slaughter Sport’. There was also a Japanese version simply called ‘Fatman’, and when Japanese developers decide your game is a little too silly… at around the same time as releasing games with names like Downtown Hot-Blooded Story (River City Ransom, in the West), well… something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

There’s a chance they may be better than the PC version due to having another chance to have things like AI and controls that actually respond to commands most of the time be more than optional extras in the great work that was Tongue of the Fatman… but I wouldn’t put much money on it.

Exactly none, in fact.

One Orion Slave Girl? I call serious bullshit. A job this big calls for a whole squad of fan-service floozies, minimum!

Awful, awful and thrice awful as the game is though, you’ve got to give it some points for ambition. Instead of just throwing you against enemies, it’s built around a career mode where you get to bet on the results of matches, as well as buy power-ups with your winnings from the insane Doctor Kadaver. A blob of Green Slime for instance can be dropped in the middle of a match and send your enemy falling on his arse, while a pair of Zan Zan Needles under your fingernails drains their strength as you hit them.

Best of all, if you enjoy making life as much fun as chewing glass bottles, there’s an invisibility item. Both players can use it. At once. See if you can spot the minor gameplay issue there…

I'd buy THAT for an Arwkanian Thwobblefhop!

Ignoring the fact that it’s called Tongue of the Fatman though, the weirdest thing about the game is how much stuff it actually contains. Fights are regularly interrupted by members of the alien audience popping their heads up, or sign-carrying Orion Slave Girls wandering past the carnage at the end of a battle. Characters have taunts to go with their tiny amounts of animation, and the roster – for this game’s era time – is huge. There are ten fighters to play as (lest we forget, Street Fighter 2 only had eight), and all of them are weird aliens. You pick a species rather than a character from Humanoid to a giant hairy testicle with fists, a colony of sentient bacteria, or a shark monster in bright red underpants.

Why? I have no idea. But it does make poor Ryu look like a bit of a dullard, doesn’t it?

And that’s before you get to how they fight. There’s Edwina, the Amazon warrior with a killer mohawk that snaps out like a whip. Or Puff Boy, whose main attack is ejaculating goo all over his enemies. Not enough? How about the hairy Behemoth, who simply clambers up on his arms, points his butt up and farts a fireball into his enemy’s face? Some of the other attacks are weird next to that…

Oooooooh. Well now the title makes PERFECT sense!

Even the basics are confusing. Your character starts on the right, which is just… wrong… and the weird tendency for your hits to land when they damn well feel like it doesn’t exactly make for the most satisfying punchy-punching action this side of a Tekken tournament. Enemies of course have much less trouble punching you into the dust and sending you back to the Fatman, Mondu, for judgement. Too many defeats, and it’s game over. I’m not sure what the winner of this surreal, frustrating tournament get as a reward for their efforts, but if – as I suspect – it’s the honour of being the one who gets to wipe clean his mighty buttocks with a screaming kitten on a stick, death is probably a kindness.

Here are a few bouts of the game, in all their glory. I should point out that this is the computer playing against itself to get as many of the characters doing stuff as possible. It’s probably the best way to play this game – run it with the command ‘FATMAN /DEMO’, gape for a few minutes, and then quit, never to be haunted by it and its… terrible, terrible existence… ever again.

DISCLAIMER: Haunting and mental scarring may last the rest of your natural life. Sorry about that.

It gets better. It’s not just that Minecraft is selling well. It’s that Minecraft has been quite cheap to develop. For a good while, Notch worked alone building the framework. There’s very little art or sound resource (read, humans making stuff to sell) required. Compared to the development teams employed on games like Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty, the costs of developing a Minecraft clone is chump change.

Minecraft is getting an official port to the Xbox and to some phones, which is great news for Mojang. But it certainly doesn’t mean that there isn’t potential for different takes on the Mine/Craft genre.

Independently developed Minecraft clones are proven successes. Terraria, a 2D Minecraft clone available on Steam went from nothing to one of the most played PC games after a six month development period. FortressCraft is an Xbox Indie game, produced outside of the normal dev/publisher relationship that’s consistently in the top five selling games on the Xbox 360.

Terraria is cheap and great. We want more games like that.

Yet the traditional publishers haven’t even lifted a finger.

I honestly think the market for games like Minecraft is far, far larger than even Mojang have been able to exploit. I’ve seen the way it grips kids and adults alike, seen the way entire families fall in love with making their own hovels/caves/daunting recreations of Stalag Luft. Minecraft’s success is entirely without marketing budget, or a retailer or publisher getting behind it.

Why the success? Minecraft is a game about exploration and co-operative construction. These are basic human activities that we all love, that are creative, that cross age-groups, classes and sexes. So why do I think we’ve seen so few Minecraft clones? The games industry has made billions from appealing only to the very masculine activities of destruction and competition. We’ve seen the industry ignore a phenomenon before; it was called The Sims, and it built an empire. It was an empire built on some of the same ideas; creative construction and roleplaying.

These funny-looking men are beating you, games industry.

I don’t think there’s a good reason why Minecraft hasn’t been cloned. I just think the industry doesn’t understand it, or even how to repeat the success. Minecraft and Mojang make people happy by being open, by encouraging creativity, by being nimble and by being extremely chilled about how players use their game. All of those qualities would be beaten out of any Minecraft like project by the layers of approval and management that are symptomatic of the modern industry, and crush the creativity from many of their products.

There is so much potential in Minecraft and Minecraft-like games. I can’t wait to see what the genre can do. But I’m impatient. Bless Notch and his gang, but they’re only a few men, and they’ve got other projects on the go. I want to see what Minecraft would be like with a passionate team of 10, maybe 20 people working on it full time.

4 million copies sold? That’s just a genre getting started. Come on, industry. Let’s see what you’re made of.

Syndicate was brilliant. You, as a ruthless corporate executive, commanding four brainwashed cyborgs on a mission of pure greed and avarice. Cyberpunk cities, filled with a terrified populace to brainwash and turn into your own personal army. A victim somewhere below, a poor soul you can almost imagine getting up in the morning and ambling to his bathroom for a quick pee, only to look out of the window and see the entire city outside, every glazed-eyed citizen clutching mini-guns and Uzis and Gauss guns, up to and including his own protectors. And as the warm trickle runs down his leg and onto the floor, you sit in your evil, all-seeing blimp, steeple your fingers, and whisper the single word: “Excellent.”

Gender Wars is Syndicate, only mixed with a Boys vs. Girls soccer match.

Talk about two tastes that go together like caviar and stupid.

Ladies, watch out! They've weaponised cooties!

There’s a basic rule in comedy, that the more offensive you want to be, the funnier you have to be to get away with it. If someone laughs, they effectively forfeit their right to complain. It’s the Law. Unfortunately for Gender Wars, there’s little chance of anyone laughing. At all. At anything. It’s the comedy equivalent of a prolonged mother-in-law joke, not so much playing off tired old stereotypes and simply holding up flash-cards. There are jokes about women drivers. There are jokes about men not being able to pee without getting it all on the floor. There are jokes about women liking to shop. There are jokes about men not being any good with directions. They are all jokes so old, we should only have them because John Hammond found them in amber and cloned them to make the world’s dumbest theme park.

Mostly though, there aren’t any jokes at all. The overwhelming majority of the game is a pure arcade shooter where half the combatants have a couple of extra lumps on their armour, and civilians are either fat slobs or mini-skirt wearing teenagers depending on whose city you’re wandering around. Still, perhaps that’s a good thing. This is what happens when the game tries to be funny, even calling in the cast of Blake’s 7 to record what has to be the world’s dullest intro. Why? I have no idea. I do however recommend putting a pillow on your desk before trying to watch this video. A very, very soft pillow. PC Gamer cannot be held responsible for you falling asleep and breaking your nose.

Honestly? I’m disappointed. A game like this should, at the very least, lend itself to lots of shouting and mockery, being castigated for its sexism and generally set on fire for crimes against gaming. But it’s not really worth that, in either sense. It’s not a great game, but there are far worse. The biggest practical problems? The lifts are awful, and the maps are too big. Neither is helped by the fact that your soldiers could frankly do with a bit of Syndicate style brainwashing to stop them running around whenever they feel like it, almost guaranteeing that you’ll leave a few wo/men behind as you try to work out where the hell you’re meant to be going, and not having a clue how to reunite the team.

If you’re lucky, the mission briefing will tell you to go to Building B or something. Usually though, you’ll just have been told to go to “the reactor”, and it’s up to you to work out where the hell that is from an unhelpful briefing map and no in-game assistance. You have to stomp round identical map after identical map in the vague hope of finding both that, and the specific rooms you need, all the while under constant siege from your colour-coded counterparts, and almost guaranteed to die as soon as you find the damn place. Quicksaves? Any in-game saves at all? Please. Not in the mid-90s…

(Yes, there’s a cheat code, but you’re not allowed to type it. Why? Because it’s “BUY A PLAYSTATION”, you traitor. Which still pales in comparison to Syndicate Wars’ unforgettable ‘pooslice’.)

Here’s a YouTuber just trying to get down to the bottom of the game’s first building.

That’s Gender Wars in a nutshell really. It’s a shooter with briefings promising your enemies will be ‘armed to the tits’ or that your own squad has ‘synchronised our natural cycles to ensure that we are all at maximum hostility’, or making plans based on ‘if men go without beer their testicles will fall off’, but what stands out? The bloody lift mechanics being rubbish. Can a game fail any harder?

Yes. For instance, it could claim to have ‘massive playability’.

Wow! I hope it has 'good gameplay' too!

Games like this, along with most ‘adult’ titles, frankly confuse me. You’d think that if you were making a game like this, you’d want to embrace the controversy you’re chasing. It’d result in utter crap, obviously, but at least it would be understandable crap. Instead, Gender Wars goes out of its way to avoid all but the most childish elements, from its futuristic setting to incredibly sterile armour whose only major sexual coding is that all the women apparently have long flowing blonde hair sticking out of the back of their helmets, to hiding most of its crudeness in optional briefing screens that are displayed a single letter at a time. There are no real characters except for the Patriarch (possibly the laziest gay stereotype in the history of gaming), and only a few minor details in the two genders’ cities to differentiate them. The men for instance have bathrooms with urinals… and no toilets, eew… a few girly posters on the walls… which seems a little treacherous, really… and the occasional pair of discarded underpants. The women have cleaner rooms, fewer bars and an obsession with splashing the Venus symbol on things.

Hmm. Thinking back, I don’t actually remember much else from their city at all. In fact, for the most part, even their briefings are far less unpleasantly charged. The men talk about their ‘Coach’, beer, not acting like ‘girlies’, lots of stuff about ‘bitches’, beer, and the other stuff you’d expect from a game that wouldn’t know subtlety if it slammed it into its own nutsack. During the female briefings, the equivalent misandry only seems to come up when the narrator remembers, with the majority of the chatter far more to the point and focused on the business at hand. Pointed social commentary, or an unsurprising consequence of an almost entirely male production team? I wonder…

…but honestly, not very much.

'Okay boys. Can't stop peeing on the floor? Try bleeding on it!' (rat-a-tatta-tat)

Only in the cut-scenes does Gender Wars reach for humour, in much the same way a man trapped in a deep oubliette in some far-flung banana republic may desperately reach for the moon. Here then is every single joke in the game… all three minutes of them… for your entertainment and enlightenment. Don’t worry about the painful sucking coming from the screen, it’s just the comedy vacuum.

As often happens, the real sexism of these jokes isn’t quite what it seems. Yes, Gender Wars does gags so tired, Rip van Winkle looks at them snoozing and calls them a bunch of lazy arseholes. It’s the non-intentional stuff that really jars though, like the fact that whichever side you play for the final mission, the camera follows the men and shows their reaction to events – or for that matter, the way the cut-scenes consistently depict them in a more battle-ready state (even if it is mitigated by them being a bunch of idiots). When the men are on the defensive, we see them rushing to protect their base, while the women’s equivalent shows them running away. Stepping down a level, it’s also notable that the men are shown as being incompetent due to the influence of alcohol. The women on the other hand are invariably seen being naturally ditzy. For all that Gender Wars tries to be even-handed, it doesn’t do a great job of hiding its prejudices – right down to the manual, where both sides spin the history of the war. The female version is called “A Tale of Two Genders”. The male version? “Get Back In That Kitchen!”.

Hmmmm. And in the interests of equality: Hrrrr as well.

Meanwhile, in a crappy adventure, not far away...

If there’s one good thing to say about Gender Wars’ take on the great divide, it’s that at least it handles it better than Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender – though with a name like that, are you really surprised? This was a dismal attempt at mixing Space Quest with Leisure Suit Larry, starting out with a scene where the main character crashes on a planet and promptly peeps at a topless native frolicking nearby, then immediately loses its balls. Most of the story involved moving between two cities, one run by women, another that used to be populated by men. The men’s city, Machopolis, had software stores and strip clubs. The women’s city had… well… psychotic doctors and lesbian bars and lots and lots of corridors, because it’s one of the most uninspired adventure games this side of Gord@k.

It’s been on the great Crap Shoot list for a while, but never enthusiastically because, basically, it’s an incredibly boring game apart from a couple of individually funny-but-stupid rooms. The weirdest thing in the game is the Gender Bender itself, not because it gives every player a chance to experience life on the other team in one direction or the other, but because for some reason it turns you into King’s Quest designer Roberta Williams. No, really. This actually happens. Look! See?

Ah, Roberta. From Softporn Adventure to... a game that dreams of being a soft-porn adventure.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Playing a rubbish Syndicate wannabe that nobody cares about.

There are fourteen missions per side in Gender Wars, both telling the same basic non-story – whichever side you’re on committing assorted acts of sabotage, before capturing an enemy agent, torturing the location of the Patriarch or Matriarch out of them, and then heading over to say hello. And then the world is yours and it’s time to celebrate your glorious victory! Yes! Or, to be more accurate, no! Because while you’d think these two sides would have very different plans for the world in the wake of their sexual conquests, in practice the only thing that changes depending on who wins is… well… this…

Yep. I think the robot sums it up at the end there. Thump. Thump indeed.

I’ll give it one thing though. It’s still better than the ending of Syndicate.

Names have power, especially the flat-out wrong ones. Who knows what went through some designer’s head when he decided to name the evil aliens of the X series the Khaak? What possessed the creators of The Tone Rebellion to look at their aquatic world of water creatures and call them Floaters? Above all else, why upon why did the Two Guys From Andromeda, thinking up a name for the venerable Space Quest series’ love interest, finally settle on Ambassador Beatrice Wankmeister?

We may never be able to say. But The BlobJob may be the king, with no fewer than four squicky definitions on Urban Dictionary. Luckily for kids everywhere, it’s not about any of them. What is it about? No idea. Meet the weirdest game you really, really shouldn’t Google for hints on at school.

'He's hurt! Get an uninformed schoolchild, stat! They'll totally learn something from this!'

Most edutainment has a simple goal: to teach something. The clue is in the name. The BlobJob has a different approach. It wants to teach kids everything in the entire world. How long does its in-depth life lesson last? Ooooh… about 20 minutes. Got to give it points for ambition, at least.

“I could smell trouble the moment my beeper went off. It was a message from Mrs Steel, the main honcho at NanoBlob Enterprises, or the Steelworks we called it in her dubious honor,” explains the hero, whose name is Joe Ridley. “My name is Joe Ridley,” he continues, pointlessly, in the gravelly voice of a man who longs to be a film noir PI, but has the misfortune of living in a crapsack world devoted to safety. “and I’m a low ranking security officer at NanoBlob. A full time punching bag for Mrs. Steel.”

“We sometimes refer to her as the Iron Lady-” he explains, to the delight of pedantic smartarse kids, “…and not only because she acts like she had a hammer in her head. The thing is, Mrs. Steel had a so-called ‘accident’ when she was a teenager. She’d overdosed on some exotic new teen drug called LBD. It had messed up her hormone system, made her limbs grow disproportionately.”

Remember kids, drugs may make you break out in shitty prosthetics!

THINGS WE LEARNED: Drugs give you Dumbo ears and a forehead that makes Klingons giggle.

Right from the start, The BlobJob adopts the somewhat unusual “Confuse ‘Em Straight” approach to teaching. Your mutant freak boss announces you’ve been volunteered for the messy task of track down five ‘skin blobs’, presumably making you some kind of Spoon Runner. These are ‘nanomanufactured human organisms’, which is a fair whack of syllables for a game that’s about to patiently explain you need to use a fire blanket to put out a fire. Then it gets more confusing.

“The blobs were supposed to deliver a supersecret nanoformula to the Central Patents Office. They never got there. If anyone gets hold of the formula, we are in deep trouble, and I don’t mean only you and me and this company, but the rest of the humanity could face extinction. Our nanoformula solvent is immensely powerful. It’s able to shrink and expand organic material on a molecular level. Someone idiotic enough to fool around with it could turn Mother Nature into a peanut. Are you following me?”

…

Let’s take this in stages, shall we?

1. ‘The’ humanity? You’re an edutainment game. For shame!
2 You want this to be a secret for the sake of ‘the’ humanity, so you’re taking it to the Patent Office, where all the details will be stored and published. Now, there are classified patents out there, which this might cover, and this being a futuristic city, there may be some other equivalent we’re simply not told about. However, I suspect that this wouldn’t apply to one simply being dropped off.
3. That is not what solvents do.
4. YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

Still, it can’t get any worse, right?

“I need you to track down the skin blobs and retrieve the cases. They are all identical, right down to the attache cases they carry. For safety precaution, only one of them carry the authentic formula, but the fake formulas contain information to determine which one is authentic. So we need all five cases.”

…sigh.

5. There is a story of a wise man who once did his king a favour and was, in return, granted a boon. “I am a humble man,” he said, “I have simple needs. Perhaps… yes… a small thing. Perhaps we could take a chessboard, and place a single grain of rice upon the first square, and then two upon the second, and then four upon the next, and so on.” The king agreed, until after much effort, the royal taxman nervously approached him to explain that he had, in effect, promised 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice to the wise man, which would have been many, many times his kingdom’s total production over the course of many, many years. The wise man promptly found out that no king likes a smartarse by promptly having a red hot poker shoved up his. And so was a valuable lesson learned by all.

But our story continues! For, as his freshly decapitated body lay in the dirt, one more person enters the story. The village idiot who, granted the good fortune to have the head roll to his feet, picked it up in triumph. “Look!” he said, roughly shoving his hand inside, through bone and gristle. “I can make it talk!” And so, in the sight of his monarch and his countrymen, did he get through precisely twelve seconds of his latest work-in-progress sketch “The King Is A Fat Scrofulous Poopy Headed Wanker”.

That was way dumber than any of this. But this is still pretty damn dumb.

On the plus side, he'll never accidentally switch over to Big Brother.

Accepting the offer, Mrs. Steele hands Ridley a portable ‘blobber’ which will shrink any objects and put them in some kind of ‘inventory’ type thing, and sends him off to investigate the intriguingly named ‘Building 42′. Instead, Ridley goes straight home to have a nap. Our hero.

He wakes up to find his TV on fire thanks to too much electricity coming out of the plug socket, because that’s how fire works. Being the hero of an edutainment though, he has a fire blanket under his sofa which can be pressed into service instead of throwing the water from his aquarium on it like some kind of idiot monster. He’s still kind of a monster though, as his response to looking at the tank is an almost anticipatory “Soon to become fish soup…”

Opening the door to his hallway he finds that the fire from his TV has “spread along the cables to the hallway,” and in the same selfless, heroic way that made Ridley action figures the hot toy of 1998, adds “My kinda luck. Time to leave the sinking ship and call the fire brigade. Adios, fish!”

THINGS WE LEARNED: In an emergency, jumping out of the window is a good way to keep yourself save. Leave all fish behind, even if they could be easily saved, because fuck ‘em.

“A beautiful fire,” growls Ridley. “If it wasn’t for the fact that it was my home in the pyre. I could only wonder… was someone trying to stop me from finding the nanoformula? If so, I had to make faster moves, and watch my back. Or share the fate of the fish.”

Don’t be left to die by a lazy, useless sociopath? Yeah. There’s a safety tip for the kids.

Remember, if you see Ridley coming, scream for your parents! We mean it. IMMEDIATELY!

What? It feels like ages since I’ve used that picture.

Kids! Don't try this at home! This game, I mean. Drink acid for all I care.

The search for the Blobs continues at Building 42, where the first of the Blobs is on the ground and choking, having taken a swig of… sulphuric acid. “Looks like he’s in pain,” observes Ridley, ever vigilant. “Hey, buddy, you got a frog in your throat? Hmm. Guess I better call the poisoning center and ask for advice. Hmm. But there is no phone in here. I have to solve this myself.”

THINGS WE LEARNED: Doing something is always better than doing nothing. Even if it’s taking a few seconds to find a phone and call someone who knows the right thing to do.

Despite not having a phone in his apartment, the unlucky Blob does have milk, which Ridley forces down his throat. Since acid doesn’t actually burn you or anything, and this totally wouldn’t be a situation that should have you at the emergency room five seconds before you even think about drinking concentrated anything acid, this perks the Blob right up in an instant. “Milk’s a heavenly gift, even to an artificial stomach that’s just been subjected to a doze (sic) of sulfuric acid!” he announces.

“Do yourself a favour and switch to 7-Up,” Ridley suggests, because that’s a good lesson.

The Blob explains that his friend went off to get help on a bike borrowed from a biochemist on the other side of town and hands over a business card. The game then forgets that you might want ‘clues’, and simply unlocks all of its other areas where the rest of the Blobs are hiding – the Hotel Zero, the Recreation Center, an Intersection and a Bus Station. Which is pretty helpful, really.

THINGS WE LEARNED: Putting effort into finding things out is for suckers.

I should go with the second... but I'd hate for him to think I'm not cool...

The next Blob is sitting behind the wheel of a car, and a pile of bottles containing that naughty stuff only mummies and daddies drink but you should never even think about. “Booze,” growls Ridley. “Bad habit.”

“Damn. The key won’t fit in the lock,” says the drunk Blob. “I can’t start the car. Can you help me?”

Obviously, you say yes. Because being helpful is always the right thing to do!

Uh-huh. How about you give that ungrammatical sentence another shot and prove you're worthy of teaching kids.

…or not. Apparently finding a coin and buying a drunk man a one-way ticket to “Las Degas” is perfectly morally acceptable though, so Ridley does that instead, collecting his briefcase from the car trunk. (The other options? “Salt Cake City” and “Sun Fundisco.” But you can’t afford a ticket to either of them any more than the writer could apparently spare more than five seconds thinking up funny names.)

One briefcase down, four to go. At a seemingly random Intersection that Ridley just happens to know about, the first Blob’s friend is lying flat out in the middle of a conveniently empty road. There are no real clues as to who might have done it, except for a piece of toilet paper marked ‘RC-WC3′.

“Is this guy a pervert?” Ridley muses, completely appropriately, before solving a quick puzzle involving putting him into the Recovery Position. This seems… unwise. Ordinarily, yes, it’d make sense. Here though, he’s had a fall that’s left him flat on his back and potentially sustained a serious injury in the process. You have no way of knowing if he’s suffered any bone damage, especially to his spine, so twisting him around seems worryingly close to the kind of thing Good Samaritan laws are invented to protect. At the very least, since he was okay until you arrived, and he’s still breathing, it’d seem like good sense to go across the road to the phone booth and ask for advice first. Except…

THINGS WE LEARNED: Putting effort into finding things out is for suckers.

THINGS WE LEARNED: Doing something is always better than doing nothing. Even if it’s taking a few seconds to find a phone and call someone who knows the right thing to do.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I forgot. After potentially cracking the Blob’s spine trying to help him, Ridley wisely leaves him lying in the recovery position in the middle of the road to call an ambulance. All you need to provide is the number that ‘everybody knows by heart’. So… 999? No. 911, since this is clearly set in America? Nope. You have to dial 112, because this is a European game.

THINGS WE LEARNED: The ‘Or’ operator is an incredibly advanced bit of programming.

Returning the bike to its owner gets you another briefcase, but more importantly marks the point that The BlobJob goes from being ‘a little bit weird’ to full on ‘what the hell?’ The next destination? A nightclub.

Floozies in an edutainment game? Roll over, Mavis Beacon!

“Get lost. This table is for me and my bits of crumpet,” the Blob warns, to the sound of eyes-popping. I’m not kidding. That’s not a joke. That’s actually what he says, followed by: “Tell you what. If you give me some advice on how to handle these… then maybe, just maybe I can help you.

“Twin motorboat engine?” suggests Ridley.

Okay, that I made up. But I’m not making this up: the solution is to find a coin lying on the floor at a nearby hotel and buy the Blob… a packet of condoms. Really. It’s meant to be a Lesson.

Here you go. Lubed for your convenience, ribbed for her pleasure, and filled with chilli powder for my amusement.

“Thanks,” he says, taking it without offering to refund the $5 it cost. “Okay, I only know that NB-3 is in Hotel Zero suffering from a nicotine withdrawal. He might talk to you if-”

Blah, blah, whatever. Can we get back to how you scored a date with two blonde hotties in the middle of an edutainment game? Dude! You may just be the most awesome guy ever! Sadly, he departs without sharing his amazing pick-up secrets, so Ridley has no choice but to seek satisfaction elsewhere; with a stick of nicotine gum now, and most likely some bootleg Carmen Sandiego porn later.

For reasons that… I really don’t want to think about too carefully… the nightclub is deserted, but its toilets are doing good business. “Hey, I need some peace here!” shouts the man in the first cubicle when you try to open the door. “Freck off!” shouts the man in the second. And the third?

“I’m the Sheriff in this town and you’re presently suspected of public disturbance.”

…

Moving swiftly on then…

The Hotel Zero. Roaches check in, but they don't check out. They're very inconsiderate guests.

“Welcome to Hotel Zero. We’ve had 13 fires in three monthzes, all cauzed by drunk or drugged people smoking in zer beds,” says ze receptionist. “People say many bad things about Hotel Zero, and most of zem are are true! But, ve are ze only hotel in Safe City.

Ridley easily bluffs his way past by claiming he’s making a delivery to the Blob upstairs. “He’s staying in Room 2,” ze receptionist reveals. “Go ahead. The bastard is in his room.”

Did you just say…? No. No, you couldn’t have. Not in an edutainment game…

Upstairs, the Blob is fast asleep next to a burning… something… and the Hotel Zero’s poor security is explained by the fact that no alarms are going off. Ridley puts the blaze out with a bottle of Coke, which wakes him up instantly. Handing the nicotine gum over to give him a hit without burning down half the city, the Blob instantly hands over his briefcase, having gotten bored of carrying it anyway.

Well, that was easy.

Since it’s the adventurer’s solemn duty to explore the world though, it’s then time to head upstairs for no better reason than that they light up when you swing a mouse pointer over them. What? It made (some) sense back in the 90s. And what does Ridley find randomly waiting for him upstairs?

OH MY GOD!

OH MY GOD!

OH MY GOD!

WHAT THE HELL?!

(And no, that’s not a joke. The BlobJob genuinely dedicates a screen to his hairy crotch.)

Ridley uses his CSI skills to flip and examine the body. “If this man was alive, his face would never be the same,” he breathes. “A kick in the temple might have caused internal bleeding and lead to his dead,” he adds, again not exactly King of the Grammar People. For the neck, covered in blood and obviously punctured, he offers “Nasty marks. Looks like someone possibly hit his neck?”

As for his wet, sticky balls? “They really hammered him,” Ridley muses, not desperately bothered. “Looks like at least one kick in the crotch. If he were alive, he’d never be able to have children.”

But who are ‘they?’ Who could they possibly be? Checking under the bed reveals a card for a call-girl service, along with photos labelled Svetlana and Natacha… also known as the two girls on the Blob’s arm in the nightclub. Oh, sleazy nightclub guy. You have most disappointed me.

THINGS WE LEARNED: There are no heroes.

Hallo. To zee boobies, please be buying sequel, Joe Ridley und ze Temple of Bukkake

Trading a lighter for the right to make a phonecall… it’s a game where you buy condoms for men who use escort services and zoom in on corpses’ private bits, nothing can be surprising any more… Ridley calls Svetlana and Natacha. “Pretty promiscuous, wouldn’t you say?” smirks the receptionist, to which the answer is: yes, obviously. Not sure people would hire their services if they just wanted to play chess and discuss the moral lessons of Corinthians. Though with Rule 34 still firmly at work around the internet, who knows? Have some Team Fortress 2 erotic fan-fiction. You deserve it.

THINGS WE LEARNED: Not to instinctively click on links. Especially this one.

Svetlana or possibly Natacha – collectively ‘the chicks that were with Nanoblob 5′ in Ridley’s mind, answers the videophone while still apparently servicing the man who was once called king of all men. If Ridley asks for a date, they tell him they’re too busy… though apparently not too busy to answer the phone to tell him. Alternatively, he can ask to speak to Nanoblob 5 directly. Without suggesting he, for instance, not be in the same room as two murderesses before he exposes them in a way that even this game can only rub itself longingly at the thought of, Ridley flat-out tells the Blob about the murder. The Blob, no less subtle, announces his plans to skip town immediately, and tells Ridley where he’ll leave a key that will allow him to get his briefcase. Of course, since the key ends up being where he says, Svetlana and Natacha apparently let him go on his merry way without any objection.

So… er… congratulations on a successful cockblock, I guess…

THINGS HE LEARNED: Karma exists. Mwah-ha-ha-ha.

'Dammit! Thanks to you I'm getting less action than a games journalist!'

That leaves just one final briefcase – in a toilet at the nightclub, now the Sheriff has finished whatever the hell he was doing in there last time, and Ridley’s mission is – almost – complete. All that remains is to visit Mrs. Steel back at Nanoblob HQ and be treated to a hero’s welcome.

And he almost gets one.

“Good job, Ridley. I suppose you’ve earned a bonus. The nanoformula is safe again.” Mrs Steel smiles. “I thought we’d celebrate the occasion with a little champagne, special a’la NanoLabs.”

Actually drinking it isn’t a good idea though. Mrs Steel grins triumphantly as Ridley starts to shrink down before her very eyes. “You just got Blobbed, Ridley,” she announces. “That glass contains the shrink formula. You realise of course, no-one must know about the formula, and I never liked you anyway. That’s why we chose such a second-class errand boy to do the job. Bye-bye.”

THINGS WE LEARNED: Women are not to be trusted. EVER.

Pro tip: Conspiracies work better when you don't actively write your evil plans on the label.

In the good ending, Ridley is smart enough to insist that she drink first, and calls her out on the illegal stuff she’s apparently been doing but wasn’t really important enough to cover in the game. To prove it, he presents a jar of nanoformula found in the laboratory earlier, which… makes her screaming face disappear into a Adobe Premiere ‘Twirl’ effect. It’d be nice if this made sense.

Right. Like the game would start doing that now…

“She got her share,” grows Ridley, triumphant, “And I got mine. For my services saving Mother Nature, along with the future of Nanoblob Enterprises-” When did that happen, and when did the company stop being Nanoblob Inc? “-and ‘a course the poor Nanoblobs themselves, the board of the City Council made me their new Sheriff in Town. The rumour was that the previous sherrif got sacked after they found him painting graffiti in a public toilet. Who knows?”

Confused Richard is Confused. Not least because that graffiti is shown to be the word “FUK”.

And that’s The BlobJob. Goodness me. I can safely say this is the strangest edutainment game I’ve ever played, but was it successful as a teaching aid to Inform Young Minds? Let’s recap what we learned. In event of fire, put it out. In event of drinking a whole bottle of sulphuric acid, a quick milk chaser will set you straight. If you find someone in trouble, leap before you look. And if you do feel the urge to call an escort service and set up a date with murderous prostitutes, at least practice safe sex.

Well, can’t argue with any of that. But if you want to, here’s proof that none of this was made up.

RANDOM EXTRA THING: It came to my attention this week that there have now been 50 Crap Shoot columns – 51 if you include this week’s descent into madness. Since reading is fun, why not check out some of the ones you’ve missed? Past classics include Les Manley and its sequel, the gleefully blasphemous The You Testament, the insanity that is the Doom novels, a return of 80s childhood horror in Granny’s Garden, the dating disaster that is Man Enough, and the only article in the world that truly understands the meaning of Bouncing Babies. Some of the others are pretty good too.

Adventure games suck. Sorry, but it’s true. This isn’t a lunk-headed action fan telling you this, nor a snotty RPG fan who wants to solve every problem with a sword. No. This is coming to you from a guy who considers beating every Sierra and LucasArts game ever made to be an amateur claim. If it exists, I’ve likely played it, or at least know of it. Broken Sword? Zork? The Last Express? Kingdom O’Magic? Les Manley? I’ve finished great adventures and rubbish adventures, and make no mistake, adventures are my favourite genre of all time. They’re what got me into gaming, the genre I’m most nostalgic about, and one still bursting with incredible untapped potential even today. Even so, today, they suck.

And that’s something that can change. That’s why I get cross. Adventure games deserve to be great once again. The catch is, they have to earn it, and almost none of them are even trying.

Sam and Max has very weak puzzles, but its cheer and imagination carried it far.

Go north. Look.

Adventures have been a backward looking genre for so long, people have forgotten they used to be one of the most forward thinking. Design, technology, ambition… they had it all. The original King’s Quest was a showpiece for IBM’s PCjr home computer. ‘Talkie’ adventures, the first to bring full speech to games, were one of the main draws for CD-ROM technology back when it was an expensive upgrade to traditional floppy disks. Adventures were the first genre to make good use of 256 colour graphics, and later, high resolution. They tested the water for video, and animation, and rendered 3D, as seen in The 7th Guest and Myst. And more! If you wanted to show off, you reached for an adventure.

Only with the rise of real-time 3D did they falter. This was primarily because the primitive nature of the technology at the time wasn’t up to providing the same visual fidelity and density of interaction that fans now expected. This, combined with an industry push toward more action focused games, usually resulted in action-adventures where lever pulling and hitting things with swords was about as good as it got. That was the fate of the final King’s Quest game, Mask of Eternity, while the games that tried to keep the faith buckled under the weight of the technology – two examples being Simon the Sorcerer 3D, which simply stank, and the profoundly underwhelming Gabriel Knight 3, even ignoring That Puzzle.

Adventures don’t actually need the latest technology, of course. As with any genre, it doesn’t hurt, and such things as facial animation (as seen in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines) and complex environments (such as those in Hitman: Blood Money, which is at least an honorary adventure, even if you are packing weapons) all help make the experience more immersive. But at heart, the best adventures were great not because of their technology but because of how they used it, and that always started with finding new ideas instead of willingly tying themselves down to What These Games Must Be. There were games that took that approach in the olden days. They were crap. Nobody cared about them. Companies like Sierra and Lucasarts were loved because they did things differently.

Starting point

Befpre we continue, let’s head back to the classics, and see just how ambitious some of them were. First though, a quick primer. Adventures are a more complicated genre than you’d think, and an unusual one in many ways – not least because the reason you sign up to play one tends to be completely divorced from what the game actually offers. Play Crysis? You sign up to shoot men with guns and be impressed. That’s what it delivers, and the story and reason for doing so is effectively a bonus. Play Gabriel Knight? Chances are it’s because you want to poke around New Orleans investigating a cult of voodoo murderers, and hang with a fun character. The puzzles are important, but they’re primarily a mechanism to facilitate that experience and make it interactive – the means, not the end. Even back in the day, bad puzzles and moon logic chafed, but they were the price we paid for getting to play in a more convincing sandbox than any other genre was even close to being able to pull off. RPGs? Oh, please…

(Note: There are of course exceptions to this rule, like Puzzle Agent and the Professor Layton games, or going back further, things like Blue Ice and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Most story based games however treat their puzzles as roadblocks more than anything else, just stopping the action cold until you’re done staring in confusion and/or have forced through. Even many of the puzzle based ones are still trying to convey a feeling rather than brainteasers though, from pretending to be a spy in Spycraft to being the world’s greatest thief in Traitor’s Gate, or a tourist in a boring land during Myst.)

As a result, ‘adventure game’ used to be more than a set genre. For the best games, it was simply a starting point, they’d take the basic ideas and spin them off in new and interesting directions that made their experiences unique and memorable. It might be something big and grand, like the real-time action of The Last Express. Or an additional element, like Quest for Glory fusing roleplaying stats and character development to the adventure core. Or something seemingly simpler, like The Secret of Monkey Island’s Three Trials structure, as stolen by almost every other adventure game ever, to widen the scope of its world and offer multiple challenges at once. More on that in a moment – it’s an important piece of history.

Jane Jensen's Gray Matter may look better than Gabriel Knight, but its flow is if anything worse.

The more you dig into the genre, the more utterly brilliant, largely forgotten ideas you find. Conquests of the Longbow, for instance, was one of the first games to make morality work. Playing as Robin Hood, you had to rescue the Lady Marian, raise a ransom for King Richard, foil the Sheriff of Nottingham and more, and often there were a number of ways to deal with situations. If you needed a monk’s habit to sneak into the local monastery for instance, you could buy one, or beat one out of a traveller, and the game would generally continue. Only at the end might it come back to bite you, when the king finally returns and you’re put on trial to see if you’re really the honourable outlaw you claim to be.

Here’s another example: A Mind Forever Voyaging. This was a text adventure from Infocom with an amazing premise. One minute, you’re Perry Simm, generic everyman. The next, you ‘wake up’ to find that your whole life has just been a simulation, and that you’re really PRISM, the world’s most powerful analytical computer, and that your whole life so far has been building a perfect simulation of the real world. Your job is to step forward into simulations of the future to test the viability of the seemingly-benign Plan For Renewed National Purpose. At 10 years into the future, you can see it’s working… mostly. At 20 years, cracks are starting to appear. 30 years on, America is a dystopian hell. The challenge of the game is to prove that this will be the case, and discredit the Senator before he can have you deactivated. It’s a game with almost no puzzles at all, simply observation, but it’s still brilliant.

NEXT PAGE: Play Me A Story

“At the very top of your seemingly benign keyboard is a row of function keys,” begins the spooky, totally spine-chilling pitch for Stephen King’s F13. “On a standard PC, they number F1 to F12. Key F13 doesn’t exist. Even on a Mac, the F13 is an unassuming little key that simply captures a displayed screen. What if an F13 with some real potency appeared? Something menacing, a merger of technology and terror brought straight to your desktop. Would you dare strike such a key? A provocative yet unanswered question for horror fans and computer users. Unanswered until now… ”

Uh… okay. Stephen King fans? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you have to see this.

There's horror, and there's horror. This is neither. This is balls.

My favourite thing about F13 is the bit in the description about Macs, because there’s nothing funnier than a story pointing out its own problems. You can almost see the guy who had to write this drivel sitting in his office, typing away, then looking down at his fingers and muttering “****” under his breath.

(Which is quite a skill, don’t get me wrong, especially without training…)

You have to pity him, really. You have to pity anyone who finds themselves sitting in front of a computer and ordered to make a function key sound scary. If you fail, your job is on the line. If you succeed, you’re opening the door to a whole career of keyboard related spinoffs. Print Screen of Persia. Backspace Invaders. Star CTRL. Start Wars. Clay PgDn Shooting. A developer could weep.

Not however as much as anyone who was suckered into buying F13.

Let me put this into some context. In 1995, there was a movie licensed from one of King’s works, and that movie was called The Mangler. The Mangler was a movie about an evil piece of laundry equipment that killed people, and it was as good as you’d expect that premise to be. IMDB currently gives it a rating of 3.4 out of 10. In 2002, there was a sequel, creatively called The Mangler 2, in which the evil laundry equipment of doom is turned into an evil virus that infects the internet and kills people from cyberspace. Yes, really. On IMDB, this unnecessary pile of King-spawned piffle scored 2.3, putting it right down there with Santa With Muscles, Leonard Part 6 and Lawnmower Man 2. Got that? Good.

In a head-to-head heavyweight crap-off between The Mangler 2 and Stephen King’s F13, it would be the existence of F13 that shat longest and hardest on the man’s legacy.

F13 isn’t a game. It’s a multimedia experience, and if those words don’t send a colder shiver down your spine than anything Mr. King could dream up, you never walked into a games shop in the mid 90s. When CD-ROM took off, developers realised that everyone was so easily dazzled by the magic of pictures AND sound moving on screen simultaneously, they only had to wave the digital equivalent of a bit of shiny metal and we’d buy it. There were interactive movies that were barely interactive. There were overpriced joke games like our good friend Microshaft Winblows. And then there were things like F13, which billed itself as an ‘interactive timekiller’, because that sounded better than ‘clicky pile of poo’. Others included Dilbert’s Desktop Games, Take Your Best Shot and predating CDs, The Laffer Utilities.

Such was the way of the 90s. And for the 90s, at least this might have had novelty value. People probably wouldn’t have taken a Shining to it, but wouldn’t have ended up deep in Misery.

Unfortunately, Stephen King’s F13 came out in 2000.

Nail biting horror? Hmm. Apparently not.

The closest F13 gets to unleashing the horror is when you load it up the first time and see exactly what you’ve bought: “Everything’s Eventual”, “Fun House”, “Deathtop Backgrounds” – oh, Christ – “Bumps and Thumps” and “Screensavers”. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting.

Well, quality always beats quantity. Let’s check them out in order…

If you want to read ebooks, buy a Kindle. Kindles are great. This... not so much.

“Everything’s Eventual” is the only thing in the pack that really smacks of Stephen King instead of simply making you want to smack him for putting his name on this, being a short story you can enjoy/endure on your very own monitor. The F13 box proudly proclaimed “Never Before Released In Book Form”, which was true. It wasn’t however written for F13, having appeared years earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and it found its way into print two years later. Reading it here, you get an ambient soundtrack that adds nothing and stops for several seconds every time it has to loop, as well as a few pictures that also add nothing. It’s about as comfortable to read as books on screen always are, which is not at all. More than a few pages have horrific typesetting, the italics are thin to the point of anorexia, and while I could only endure about half of it, that had nothing to do with any horror within.

Onto the Fun House! Here, there’s no excuse for F13 not to produce the goods. Think of all the great Stephen King related games you could make for something like this. “Annie Wilkes in… Misery Loves Company”, in which you play a crazy Kathy Bates trying to keep James Caan in your house until his willpower fades and he agrees to write the book you want. “Gerald’s Minigame”, a point-and-click adventure about trying to escape from the cabin. “Super Christine Racer”, in which you go head-to-head with a Buick 8 and the truck from Duel, before facing your ultimate opponent, KITT from Knight Rider. Why, the possibilities are endless! Some of them might even be good!

You know what you actually get?

Feeding some fish.

I’m not joking.

Piranhas. The rhino's natural predator. Apparently.

“No Swimming” gives you a fish-tank full of snappy little buggers, along with five animals to feed them – a rhino (!), a dog, a gator, a cow and a horse. You drag and drop them into the water and the fish eat them. Then you do it again and again until you can’t be bothered any more. If you don’t feed the fish, occasionally they lunge a bit at the monitor and leave cracks. In a word: NEXT!

Bloody QA. Can't have been any good to let this many bugs through.

Game 2 is called “Bug Splat”. You’re given a table. Cockroaches crawl across it. You click on them to splat them. You start out with a swatter, then move up to a newspaper and a hammer. If you fail… uh… you get a generic game over screen. Apparently the best players in the world are called Chris, Farsh, Hoser, Derek and Flano, because they’re the ones on the High Score Table, and after enduring some 10 levels in search of anything interesting, I can’t imagine anyone having the patience to beat them.

The final game is… “Whack a Zombie”. Hmm. Let me sum this up in just one caption:

THOSE ARE SKELETONS, YOU MORONS!

“Deathtop Backgrounds” would be the most embarrassing thing in F13 if not for the fact that Bumps and Thumps exists – a soundboard of screams and random horror sounds that the creators expected you to jump at the chance of setting as your Windows sounds. Who wouldn’t want to replace a beep with “CatAttack” or have “ZombieMunch” as their start-up noise? Answer: Sane people.

Oddly, the same team had previously made Star Trek: Hidden Evil. Don't remember any clowns in it.

The “Deathtops” – and I repeat that only in the way a teacher puts an object of shame in front of a pupil to remind them of what they’ve done – are as weak as Stephen King’s protestations that Maximum Overdrive was intentionally that bad. The best of them is “Big Roach” – a badly rendered cockroach sitting on a human finger. Others include a badly rendered car sitting outside a shadowy house, a badly Photoshopped advert for some guy apparently called King Stephen, though no hint as to where his kingdom is located, a clown labelled “Designing A Hidden Evil” for some reason, yet more roaches, and the graveyard background from the Whack A Skeleton game. You can also tattoo your screen with the F13 logo itself, as a permanent reminder of why you should never buy anything unless it has the PC Gamer seal of approval, except for The Thing, which I’m still really sorry about, okay?

Hey! Kid! Wake up! I'm feeling ridiculous just hovering here!

Last, and tragically not least, there are seven Windows screensavers, although none of them quite understand the point of a screensaver is to save your screen by actually having the stuff on it change, and would in fact burn their poor quality art onto the monitor as if with a flamethrower.

Terror Eyes is easily the dumbest. There are eyes. They blink. If you’re particularly scared of eyes blinking, horror may result. If not, prepare for much yawning. Slightly better is Creature In My Room, in which a sleeping kid completely ignores a few monsters who show up for a few seconds and leave. Murder & Mayhem and It’s Just Lightning tell short stories about a house of murders and an evil clown doll, respectively though both pale in comparison to the deep narrative of Johnny Castaway. Stephen King Trivia is exactly that, just displaying a load of questions and answeAAAAARGH!

…

Sorry, a moth just flew through my window and compared to this, it was terrifying.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Evil Genius At Work is a cartoon Stephen King typing book extracts on the world’s oldest computer, complete with green text on a black background. (Remember, this game came out in 2000!) And finally, there’s The Works, in which random books float onto the screen along with a sentence or so of synopsis. The screensaver doesn’t even give them the real covers, so they’re all just pompous looking books with a bit of badly Photoshopped text on the top. Rubbish.

Thanks. Very informative. Wouldn't have known that. Couldn't imagine life without you. You're like love.

And that’s it. That’s the whole F13 experience. It’s not exciting, it’s not scary, it’s not even immersive. It’s just… oh, a single word can’t sum it up. Crap, rubbish, claptrap, idiocy, poppycock, twaddle, brainless, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, dull, dumb, foolish, futile, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, ill-advised, imbecilic, inane, irrelevant, laughable, mindless, moronic, nonsensical, obtuse, pointless, puerile, senseless, shortsighted, stupid, stupefying, thick, thick-headed, trivial, unintelligent, unthinking, witless, fetid, foul, cack-handed and really not very good at all.

But who is responsible for this? What unbelievable arsewits would put their names on such an obviously dreadful excuse for a game, especially one released so many, many years after its whole genre of dreck could have hoped to be seen as anything other than the laziest of cash-ins?

WHAT? Presto Studios? But… but they made The Journeyman Project series – some of the only Myst style games actually worth playing! Hell, they made the actual Myst III: Exile, which was at least reasonable. They even made Star Trek: Hidden Evil, which… okay, well, everyone has bad days. But this? What convinced them to make this? Did they lose a bet or something? With Satan?

Well, never mind. They’re dead now, and it’s finally time to answer F13′s big question:

“What if an F13 with some real potency appeared? Something menacing, a merger of technology and terror brought straight to your desktop. Would you dare strike such a key?”

No. Because that would be stupid, and the kind of thing that leads to you being killed through cyberspace by an evil mangle. There’s only one key F13 can persuade me to push, and believe me, it’s a pleasure. But there wouldn’t have been much of a market for “Stephen King’s Delete”, would there?

It also puts more of the burden of choice on you: you can install any augmentations you have the points for, rather than just the ones you’ve found the right canister for.

So until you know how they all work, it’s not easy to plan your character. You earn Praxis points, the level-up currency, quite slowly at first, and there are no refunds for choices you regret. So I’ll talk you through the best augs, what they do, and what kind of playing styles they suit.

Bear in mind that you earn Praxis points for accumulating a lot of experience, and you get more experience for some playstyles than others. Just shooting everyone until they die, for example, is the worst way to go. Yes, you get 10 points for each kill, but that’s in contrast to 100 for every alternate route and secret area you find. When you do take people down, doing it non-lethally and in one hit gets you the most experience. There’s an extra 250 in it for you if you complete your objective without setting off alarms, and a whopping 500 XP for doing your job without being seen at all.

1. Read minds

If you’re interested in the talky side of Deus Ex, get the Social Enhancer aug as early as possible. It’ll analyse a person’s brainwaves to give you a hint about their personality. If you start losing a heated argument, you can release pheromones and exploit your knowledge of their character to smoothtalk your way out of it. Even in normal conversations, you’ll get new dialogue options that lead to information or help it’s impossible to get otherwise.

2. X-ray vision

Whether you’re planning to go stealthy, violent or both, the Smart Vision aug is amazingly useful. It lets you line up a shot on an enemy’s head before he comes round the corner, or hide before he has a chance to spot you. It also highlights cameras, locked doors and computers – perfect for finding the nearest security console without blundering into every room. Then you can turn off cameras, bots and turrets, or take them over.

3. Stay mobile

Two augs are specially designed to get you into secret areas: Jump Enhancement and Lift Heavy Objects. Jump on top of big things, or move them out of your way. The difference is that Lift Heavy Objects only costs one Praxis point, and it also lets you throw stuff to knock people down. That makes it the better early choice. Get the Jump aug later if you like exploring: a few jumps can’t be made without it, and it’s good for getting out of danger.

4. Stab in stereo

Best aug in the game? Reflex Booster. It makes Jensen good enough in close combat that he can KO or kill two foes at once. It happens automatically, so he’ll sometimes kill a civilian as well as the guard you’re attacking, amusingly enough. It still only consumes one pip of energy, and the takedown animations are hilarious. It’s also a huge strategic asset: you can headshot one guard and melee another two in the same instant.

5. Charge up

There are two ways to upgrade the energy bar augs consume: more cells, or faster recharge. Faster recharge is much, much more useful. The default recharge time is agonisingly long, and having more cells doesn’t help much: the extra ones never regenerate automatically, so it’s only an advantage when you consume a giant jar of cyberboost. Those are rare and bulky. Just eat cyber-boost bars whenever you need more than one cell.

6. Skip boss fights

A few fights suck. Don’t suffer through them. Spend the three points it takes to get the Typhoon Explosive System aug and max out its damage. Don’t bother buying ammo at a LIMB clinic – you get one charge free, and you’ll find more lying around. Now you can run up to any boss in the game and release a swirl of explosives that will obliterate it. Some bosses take two hits, but those giant Box Guard droids only take one. And it looks badass.

7. Knock down walls

A one-point upgrade to your arm aug will let you smash down any weak points you find in walls around the levels. There are actually lots of these, if you look for them, and they’re incredibly satisfying to punch down. But be aware that the arm aug isn’t the only way to do it. Any frag explosive will knock them down too. Since wall-punching leaves you standing in the hole, it’s sometimes safer to blow them up from a distance.

8. Gain intelligence

There are many, many ways to upgrade the amount of information you get about where your enemies are and what they can see. One point will upgrade your map aug, doubling the radius your minimap detects enemies, and show even those you haven’t seen in real life yet. The Stealth Helper aug lets you see the radius of suspicious sounds you make. But more usefully, a one point upgrade shows enemy vision fields on your minimap. A huge help when sneaking.

9. Grant Immunity

A cheap upgrade most people will overlook is for your eyes: immunity to concussion grenades. Enemies don’t throw that many at you, but you find loads throughout the game, and they can send whole groups of enemies flying. Normally, your own concussion grenades will blind you even if you’re round a corner. With this upgrade, you can knock down a whole crowd of enemies right in front of you, and skewer or headshot them all before they can get up.

10. Hack more

There are four hacking augs, but forget about Hacking Analyse: you don’t need to know what’s in the nodes you capture. It’s worth upgrading Hacking Capture to level three as soon as you can: that’ll get you into most computers and locked doors in the first 15 hours of the game. You may find hacking gets hard on level three terminals – if you have two points to spare, Hacking Stealth will solve that. If you can only spare one, upgrade Hacking Fortify.

11. Hack smarter

Hacking is all about being ready for the moment you’re detected. When you click on a node, hover over the Capture option to see the chance you’ll be detected. If it’s more than 40%, assume it’ll happen. The trace program captures everything it can on its way to you, and adds points onto those nodes, making them slower for you to take. So when capturing risky nodes, capture everything else you can at the same time to get it before the enemy.

12. Hack harder

You can Fortify the nodes you’ve already taken, increasing the time limit you’ll have once you’re detected. The drawback is that Fortifying risks detection so don’t do it while you’re safe. The time to Fortify is when you’re capturing a risky node – again, anything over 40%. While that node captures, Fortify your starting node, and every other one between you and the enemy. You can do them all at once, and since you’re going to get caught anyway, why not?

Medicine. How hard can it be, anyway? I may not be some kind of fancy-schmancy ‘doctor’, or even have taken Biology for a single femtosecond longer than I had to back at school, but I have seen every episode of House, and most of Scrubs. With so much experience obviously having worked its way into my brain via cultural osmosis, I’m confident I can diagnose anything. You! With the sniffles! Sniffles are boring! You obviously cut yourself on a toy soldier as a child, with a little spear piece lying dormant in your finger for years, before a ride on the teacups at Alton Towers sent it careening into your lung and now it’s cancer. Take two aspirin while I go over here and insult someone in a hilarious way.

There. See that, Dorothy? It’s easy. Who’s next for a fingering from these healing hands?

It does not, however, scan cats. Don't try that again!

Life and Death is the original surgery simulator. It came out in 1988, focusing on the abdomen. The sequel, Life and Death II: The Brain, which we’re looking at today, came out a couple of years later, starring the brain. As anyone with one probably guessed from the title. Had the series continued, I’m sure we’d have seen Life and Death: The Foot, Life and Death: Psychiatric Ward, and Life and Death: Honest, I Was Just Sitting Over It And I Slipped, in which you’d have to carefully remove vacuum cleaners and courgettes from the naughty bits of assorted embarrassed looking patients.

In a way, it’s the medical equivalent of Police Quest. It was created by a doctor, and focuses heavily on procedure, but you probably don’t want to use it as a training aid. In fact, you’re ordered not to. “Nothing that appears in or on the package, manual or the software program is in any way intended to be a statement or representation of fact or of medical opinion applicable to any situation other than the playing of the computer game,” it gasps when you quit, as if that would have done anything to stop the inevitable “SICK GAME TOLD MY SON TO OPEN MY CHEST WITH A FORK!” headlines.

Like most games of this era, Life and Death 2 takes the very reasonable stance that tutorials are for pussies. Your introduction to the game consists entirely of a quick description of the rooms available in the hospital, and then you’re kicked out and assigned your first patient. You can go back to class and page through endless tedious nonsense about saline drips and cerebrospinal fluid, but who cares about that next to the grander concern of saving lives! I decided I’d rely on good old gut instinct, then remembered I was playing the sequel, and decided to swap that for skull instinct instead.

My first patient was a 22 year old man, admitted with a severe headache. For this, he’d somehow blagged himself a hospital bed? Running tests was obviously a waste of time. I gave him a pack of aspirin and sent him on his way with a warning not to waste any more of it in the future. For this, the game’s head of neurology, Dr. Beardy, immediately hauled me over the coals. Apparently my diagnosis was spot-on, but I still failed because I hadn’t practiced ‘evidence based medicine’. Bah.

I'm afraid you have a terminal case of... 80s hair. There's nothing we can do.

For Patient 2, I wasn’t going to make that mistake. She was a 24 year old woman, brought to the emergency room unable to use her right hand. According to paramedics, she’d been found on the floor, unable to move. I immediately ordered an MRI scan, a CAT scan, a skull X-Ray and an Angiogram, which confirmed two things: that the hospital had all of those machines, and she was probably human as she claimed. Probably. After my last bollocking, I wasn’t prepared to rule anything out at this stage.

As well as the incredibly expensive scans that the patient or their next of kin probably wouldn’t be too happy about paying for, I figured some direct tests were in order. You can focus your attention on three parts of the body – four if you don’t mind being sued for malpractice. In this case, the patient claimed trouble in her right arm, so I opted to start with her legs. Skull instinct again. You get two tests here – a hammer and a pin. Whacking the patient on either knee made it pop up as expected. Repeatedly whacking them both while humming the Can-Can proved much funnier. At least, I thought so.

Madame, I'm trying to help you. Kindly stop making the wanker gesture while I think.

Moving up a bit, I had her squeeze her hands and tried the hammer out there too. Both arms responded immediately. A quick test with the pin seemed to show full responsiveness. Hmm. Her strength seemed fine too, though the right arm was a little weaker than the left. Curiouser and curiouser.

That only left the face. Here, I had a card that said “Say Alice”. Showing it to her, she said “Alice.” Impressive. Probably not a Media Studies student, I wrote in my notebook. Next, I used a black thingy – pardon the technical language – to check her eye movements, which looked fine, and a torch to check pupil dilation. Unfortunately, while fun, I couldn’t say that any of these symptoms had really given me much insight into her condition. Then I had a flash of inspired genius. Sure, it was an unorthodox test… possibly even a maverick one… but a good doctor has to try everything to get to the-

Okay, so what you're saying is it's not a GUARANTEED career killer?

“Dr. Richard, you have a patient in Room 2,” crackled the tannoy as I slouched dejectedly out of the room. It was nice of them to keep giving me patients after what had already been referred to as my “Freddy Krueger impression”, but I just wasn’t in the mood to kill anyone else just yet.

Instead, I decided to head back to my office to be alone with my thoughts for a while.

I ignored the plant. Plants can’t talk. It’s not like they’re microwaves. Instead of dealing with that, I went to my desk to brush up on my neurology via a handy textbook, but almost immediately zoned out.

Instead, I opened up the staff profile file to decide who I wanted to have my back when I finally got into the operating room. There are six assistants from various disciplines, and you get to pick two. Norah Griffin for instance is a Surgical Intern with a speciality in Neurosurgery, while Jim Slade is a Physician’s Assistant with a hilarious name. None of their pictures inspired much confidence.

No! Quarantine the hospital! The 80s hair is spreading!

Flicking through their files, it quickly became obvious why this hospital kept giving me patients. Everyone else was just as screwed up. “Dr. Schmidt’s relationship with Dr. Griffin’s ex-husband has generated a great deal of enmity between the two,” reads one file. “Due to a failed relationship, Dr. Brandt doesn’t get along with Dr. Kahn,” says another. As for Big Jim Slade? “Slade seems to have no trouble working with any of the staff, though he does have an attitude problem towards women.”

I assigned Dr. Brandt and Dr. Kahn in the hope that I might be able to bring them together through surgery, either via shared accomplishment, or as some kind of Human Centipede. Call me a romantic at heart. That done, I turned back to the computer and things turned a little… strange. And bear in mind, we’re talking strange for an office with a certificate on the wall that reads “This Space Available. Call (818) 885-0256 And Ask For Heidi.” Enter ELIZA, the digital therapist…

Spirits slightly raised, I went over to Room 2 for my next patient. 25 year old man, brought to the emergency room unable to use his right hand. According to paramedics, they found him on the floor, unable to move. Once again, I hit him with a barrage of tests, which again suggested he was not one of the Reptilian Overlords plotting to overthrow us. Just in case though, I put the pin away in the interests of interplanetary diplomacy and pondered my options. Aspirin? Codeine? A psychiatrist?

In the absence of any solid ideas, I opted for brain surgery instead, partly on the grounds that it’d be easier to see anything wrong with his head open and just yoink the bad bits out on the fly, but mostly to know whether I was missing a trick by using the phrase “It’s not like rocket science” to describe things. Of course, even after testing this, I’d have to build a rocket to be absolutely sure.

I was JOKING! I wouldn't really... um... do what it... looked like I was doing. Right? RIGHT?

Apparently brain surgery is complicated, and patients don’t like it when you make them shave their heads bald and then decide they’d probably have been okay with the aspirin after all. There are three trays worth of tools, not to mention an IV drip, an EKG to keep track of, assorted needles, and… oh… so much blood and potential for blood. Here are just a few of the tools you have to master:

Fish Hooks - Anchors the skin flaps away from the skull
Electrocauterizer – Used to cauterize bleeders
Trephine Drill - Drills the burr holes in the skull
Bone Saw Bit - Saw between the skull burr holes.
Staple Gun - Apply skin clips at the operation closing
Bone Wax - Stops small bleeders on the bone’s edges
Soap - Is Soap

Soap seemed safe enough, so I washed my hands and pulled on some gloves. Next to them was a big jug of antiseptic, which I tried to put onto the patient’s head, but was quickly told should be saved until I’d actually turned it. I turned it and tried again. While I couldn’t actually see Dr. Kahn, I took the lack of further bitching as a thumbs up. For that save, he would have the honour of being in front.

Soaking the patient in antiseptic, just to be on the safe side, I laid down some kind of blue covering, and reached for my scalpel. This seemed easy enough. Just draw down a dotted line and-

OH COME ON! Now, I may be the worst doctor in the entire world – the head neurologist’s computer describes me, specifically, as “a real bozo. I think he’s killed more people than the black plague and Jack the Ripper combined” – but even I’m calling bullshit on doctors eating pizza off my latest victim patient’s slowly cooling corpse. Unhygenic, and rude. Where’s my slice?

That’s not the only thing that seems off about this hospital, mind. Everywhere you look, you’ll see something odd. Why is there a man in the staffroom who stands around pouring hot coffee all over his hand? Why do none of my assistants seem to know what a woman is, describing all my patients as ‘him’? Above all else, why is Kim Jong-Il working on the reception desk?

It'd be more a more filling meal than most of your people are used to, you evil little git.

At this point, melancholy set in. Dr. Beardy hated me, and was never likely to become my mentor, yet nothing I did seemed to matter. Sending people off with a packet of aspirin hardly felt like saving their lives, but at least they wouldn’t die on my watch. So far, I’d practically earned my own wing of the morgue, and the doctors eating pizza were now so fat, they had smaller doctors trapped in their orbit. I was a failure as a doctor, and short of actually reading the manual instead of just doing shit at random to see if it worked, I couldn’t see any way out of that. I even took to outright murdering patients, just to see if I’d finally get struck off, but simply poking my head through the door to send them to the OR and immediately injecting lidocaine into their eyeballs was only ever treated as a minor setback. Every time, I’d be forced back to class for five seconds, then everything was hunky-dory.

Finally, I stopped seeing patients at all. There was no point. Sure, they’d die without treatment, but what could I do? Only actively avoid poking them in the eye with a pin. Instead, I retreated to my office in the hope of rekindling the one true connection I felt I’d made during my medical career.

Then I glanced at my last syringe of lidocaine, and carefully injected it into my eye. Seemed like a fitting end to the killing spree, and definitely more fun than playing the Grey’s Anatomy game.

In retrospect, maybe I should have read the manual after all.

Nah.

With the exception of Invisible War, the great shame of Deus Ex’s legacy is that almost nobody’s ever really tried to beat it. Vampire: Bloodlines got the closest, E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy… uh… exists. A few others have taken on board individual ideas, like offering stealthy options, or giving you a sack of gadgets. Nothing however has that same hook of being dropped into a world with a bag of tricks, and invited to make your own way through it. Will Human Revolution finally be the successor we’re all longing for? “Hopefully!” I say, in the shifty tone of one who finished it about two weeks ago, but isn’t allowed to give away any actual details for another week or so. Still, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Unless you follow the mod scene though, it’s likely that you’ve not played one of the best things to come from Deus Ex, and one of the best single-player mods in general. Meet The Nameless Mod, one of the coolest attempts to recreate the original magic, and a fine adventure in its own right. What better way to whet your appetite for the official sequel? Team Fortress 2 weapons? Bah! Prepare to enter Forum City, where conspiracy and intrigue aren’t simply life and death. They’re Serious Business…

The Nameless Mod is what happens when fandom a) gets its hands on a tool like UnrealEd and b) goes completely insane. It started as a simple gimmick game, not set in the Deus Ex universe itself, but in a Tron/Reboot style version of its fan community back in the early 2000s. Everyone you meet is supposedly an avatar of a real person, and many of them – including your character, Trestkon – actually are. Everything is dark and rainy and crumbling not because of the machinations of old men using the Earth as their personal stress ball, but because that’s how everyone agrees they should be. Asking a prominent figure “Is there anything in this city which DOESN’T have some secret complex in the basement?”, the response is simply “I doubt it. Everyone here is a Deus Ex fan, remember?”

Originally, The Nameless Mod was as goofy as it sounded – a few inside jokes, being put together to entertain the community. Except it grew. And grew. And grew. And finally, it exploded. The final mod took 7 years to create, with two full-length campaigns, five endings, over 14 hours of voice acting, side-missions, tons of secrets, new weapons, and much, much more, to the point that calling it a fan project honestly doesn’t do it justice. It’s a whole new Deus Ex game, period… only with more jokes, fourth-wall breaking bits and vast amounts of cheery copyright infringement as far as the eye can see.

As Tretskon, you’re a former member of the community who left a couple of years ago for personal reasons, brought back to help the moderators out of a jam. One of their number, Deus Diablo, has gone missing, upsetting the balance of power between the city’s many factions – most importantly the evil WorldCorp, as led by the endearingly mental Scara B. King. Both sides want you on your team, and both have a full campaign and modest-to-great rewards if you agree… though it’s no spoiler to say that there’s more at stake than whether or not a few trolls get bonked with the banhammer. I’m not going to say much more than that, not simply because I don’t want to spoil the good bits, but because a lot of them just don’t sound that good outside the context of the game. Like the spork. A spork is a weapon here, as is a foon. Why? Because. When mixed up with the rest of the weirdness though, in a world that doesn’t consider them even slightly unusual, the bits come together surprisingly well.

Sometimes betrayal is just another way of saying 'I thought this would be funny'.

Silly as many of the details are, the game is no joke. The early areas can be a little off-putting, at least potentially, simply because they’re by far the most self-referential or reliant on you being a hardcore Deus Ex fan. One early area for instance (completely optional) is a fan-fiction store, whose owners do nothing but reel off endless speeches about the original game’s story that you do not give a crap about. Other bits, like the newbies everywhere demanding to know how you get on ‘the boat’, are in-jokes you don’t need to understand, but will probably feel a bit alienated by not being in on. One or two would be easily ignorable. In the first map, you’ll bump into about a million and three of the buggers.

After the opening though, things tighten up a lot. The original Deus Ex never stops being important to the world, nor is the meta side or in-jokey humour ever lost… and this is probably the only game you’ll ever play where your Mission Control guy will interrupt your adventures to let you know he just did really well in a game of DOTA… but the focus soon shifts firmly towards The Nameless Mod’s own fiction. It doesn’t matter that you almost certainly have no idea who the characters are originally based on. Tristkon himself is JC Denton with a little bit more history, especially in interactions with characters like Kylie, his former colleague/lover and current enforcer for WorldCorp, or Phasmatis, his friend amongst the moderators. The others run the gamut from completely original cyberpunk characters like the sadistic AI Shadowcode to complete crazies like Ghandaiah, who immediately accuses Tresktcone of being a ‘boob suit’ and gives you a bit of XP simply for enduring his babble. Scara B. King is far and away the most fun though, bouncing from smug glee to spluttering anger, while almost never even managing to get poor Triskion’s name right. The fool. It’s worth siding with the baddies just to get more of his dialogue, though you won’t be disappointed on either path.

What really stands out about the game though is that you can see exactly where the development time went. It’s much rougher than the original Deus Ex, no question, but generally holds its own against it – and in more than a few cases, even surpasses it. Behind that, the attention to detail is almost ridiculous. You know how you can climb walls with grenades, or punch in a passcode you simply remember from a previous game? So do The Nameless Mod’s designers, and while they won’t necessarily stop you, they will call you on it. Didn’t like the way Deus Ex railroaded you into going against UNATCO? Here, you really do get to pick sides, and chop and change a bit as you learn more about the situation. And that’s not even touching the ridiculous amount of stuff on the computers and in conversations, from the barman who’ll play several rounds of “Guess The Quote” for the sheer hell of it, to the aforementioned fan-fiction store and its in-depth information on incredibly obscure stuff like Ada, the missing AI from the original Deus Ex you were originally going to go and deal with in a cut mission set on the moon.

You don't want to know. You really, really don't want to know.

The Nameless Mod is more than just a mod. It’s a love letter to a great game, and a living testament to the deserved fandom it earned. What better prize could Deus Ex receive than to inspire something that doesn’t simply revere it, but really dug down deep to understand and honour it in ways that no scores or breathless retrospectives can ever hope to match? That it’s also a great game in its own right definitely doesn’t hurt. Yes, you do have to make a few allowances for its in-jokes, rough patches and extended development, and it may take an hour or two before the world of Forum City really clicks, but if you ever loved the original Deus Ex, you won’t find a better swansong for its decade at the top.

Download it here. A copy of the original Deus Ex is required, obviously, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve got five of them already. And a finished copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Not that I’m gloating about this, of course. That would be incredibly mean. Cough. Cough. Ahem.

Interactive fiction. Text adventures. In the days before graphics, or at least graphics that didn’t make you want to poke your eyes out with a spork, they were what transported us into worlds of endless imagination, and even convinced a hitherto sane world that The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game was anything other than appalling. As technology moved on, they became more and more of a niche genre – but never stopped evolving or being developed. Today, with powerful creation tools like Inform 7 and advanced world simulations on their side, modern interactive fiction is still capable of incredibly fun, very original concepts. Want to see a quick example? Yes? Well, that’s lucky!

Here’s a quick taste of something only a game without graphics can hope to offer.

9:05 is a game from 2000, and far, far from the most advanced IF out there. It’s a… short game. I don’t really want to say more than that. I will however say that if you want to play it for yourself, do so before reading on. You have been warned. It’s one that I’ve mentioned to people a couple of times over the last month though, and I like it for its cleverness – so hopefully you will as well. We join our hero fast asleep in bed, about to be disturbed by the second worst sound anyone can hear in the morning.

What do you do in that situation? What else?

“Crap,” you think. It may not be the end of the world, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, interactive fiction often takes on much smaller scale situations than regular commercial games, if only because here, “And then the world blew up in a totally awesome fireball!” isn’t inherently that much more interesting than a well-written description of a character’s lips glistening as they lie. In a regular game, if the designer wants a plague of burning locusts to systematically destroy a castle, they have to convince a whole art and design team to make that happen. Here, “a swarm of burning locusts descended on the castle, rending it apart brick by brick…” is all anyone requires, with the player’s own mind filling in the details.

Interactive fiction means adapting to so many different rules. Nothing is given freely. You have to experiment with your senses, to probe and poke and learn the rules each time. They may generally be similar, asking you to type LOOK to see or a cardinal direction to move, but nothing is ever guaranteed. Even in the classic days of Infocom text adventures, every game could be a new experience. There was Suspended, where you interacted entirely via a team of robots, each representing senses, as you sat personally helpless in the middle. There was A Mind Forever Voyaging, an amazing game about stepping through decades of time, witnessing the fall of America. A more modern game I highly recommend is Spider and Web, about which I choose to say nothing. You’ll understand when you play it.

And that’s another thing. Forget simply moving and hitting buttons on the wall. In an interactive fiction game, everything can be interactive. You, your clothes, the scenery. When anything can be made functional with a couple of lines of dialogue, far more can be weaved into both the narrative, and there to make the world a more believable place. The smallest little touches can make all the difference.

Mustn’t forget the watch. It may or may not be plot relevant, but you never know. Besides, it’s probably-

Oooooh, hell. No time for that then…

Of course, there are games where wearing clothes is optional. Violet, for example, makes a puzzle out of simply trying to finish the main character’s homework while dealing with itchiness. This is not one of those times, but you can try randomly stripping if you want. You can verb any noun you like. Sometimes, they might work. Other times, a hollow voice may simply say “Fool.”

Playing an IF game is about more than simply solving puzzles. Sometimes, it’s about dedicated game things, like solving a murder mystery. Other times, it’s about enjoying the writing itself, as in Emily Short’s Galatea – a game about nothing more than talking to a living statue. With no price-tag, and no fixed length, you can get everything from the jokey “Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die” to the forthcoming Hadean Lands, a Kickstarter project. Its author, Andrew Plotkin, aimed for $8,000 to fund his costs while developing it and other IF related toys – for living expenses, mostly. He got it on the first day. The total now? $31,337. That’s the best kind of 1337 to be, whatever the hacker kids think.

Okay, so it’s not the most advanced puzzle in the world. Look at it this way. At least it’s not the bloody Towers of Hanoi or something with sliding blocks or – god forbid – putting a bit of newspaper under a door and poking the key out with something spiky and then pulling back the paper because in adventures games, doors always have massive gaps underneath them because nobody minds hideous draughts freezing them in winter apparently and yes, yes, okay, I’m drifting. Where were we?

Ah, yes. Then let’s continue.

…what the?

…but… uh…

Well, that was unexpected.

Still, read back. At no point does the game ever lie to you. At many points, it’s almost up-front, with talk of things like ‘the job’ instead of ‘your job’. It just takes advantage of the fact that you can’t see the face on the ID card, that you assume it’s your bedroom, your shower and your soiled clothes.

But what if you’d been less rushed? What if you’d been a bit more thorough?

And with that one little piece of information, how different everything becomes…

9:05 is obviously just a quick and dirty gimmick game, taking about five minutes to play in its entirety. It’s a great example of how just toying with a single preconception can make for something incredibly clever. Other games are equally clever, but over the space of a much longer adventure. If you’re interested in checking out a few more, you can’t do better than to head for the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition, where you’ll find lots of free games designed to be played and finished in a couple of hours, or at the very least, enjoyed to the full within that time. As for other games, you can play them on the web, you can play them on your phone, and if you’ve never played any before, you have literally decades of classics to catch up on. Just don’t trust anyone who tells you Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is good, because… really… damn. Talk about rose-tinted Stockholm Syndrome. Shudder…

In the Dwarven Year 250, the stubby reach of dwarfkind had touched every procedurally generated rock in Ruspsmata, from The Problematic Steppe to The Dune of Hermits, from The Prairie of Pregnancy to the Jungle of Conflagration. Not an inch of stone had not known dwarven steel, yet one dark depth had so far eluded colonisation. “Leave the skies to the birds,” sang the Dwarven King, probably, I’m making this bit up, “the Underworld shall be ours to keep.”

So it was that only the expedition leader Tim Edwards was told of the true reason behind the construction of the fortress of Oakfire. He had chosen the site – it was soft, quiet and dry – and he was the first to strike the earth, to form the encampment and two-bit industry required to fuel a downward dig as rapid as it was perilous In a little over two years Tim Edwards would lie helplessly in a hospital bed as the foulest and most harrowing creatures of the beneath roasted him alive. He would feel every crackling blister as his skin boiled and dripped to the soot-covered floor. He’d regret the swing of the pick.

Tim Edwards was digging a hole to hell.

Digging Below

Well, it’s me digging a hole to hell by proxy. Dwarf Fortress is several different things at once. It’s The Sims and Nethack and Dungeon Keeper and Minecraft. It’s a vast, simulated fantasy world, generated just for you, with races and religions and history and wars and dwarves whose fingernails grow. It’s also infamously difficult to play, featuring only ASCII visuals and labyrinthine menus. Yet Dwarf Fortress’s reluctance to expend even a joule of energy in prettying itself results in astonishing hidden complexity.

Oakfire’s expedition team of seven dwarves are my representatives in the world of Dwarf Fortress, and I’ve named them after the seven damned souls of PC Gamer. Seven auto-generated personalities, each with their name writ tiny in this world’s persistent records. Before we set out, the game has already simulated the 250 years leading up to the day my dwarves arrive at Oakfire. They’re specks, seven of tens of thousands of pawns in Ruspsmata’s everunfolding story. Their objective, and mine, is to reach the unfathomable fathoms of Hades.

Francis sets to work dismantling the wagon and turning the wood into beds. Edwards and Smith begin to scoop out a shallow hole. The others busy themselves by stockpiling the food, furniture and fuel they arrived with. Over days, seven bedrooms are carved out of the rock, indoor stores are created, as are workshops, kitchens and stills. Pearson happily builds doors. Francis constructs tables and chairs for an ornate dining room. His puppy is stung by a bumblebee in an attempt ironically frame just how peril-free life is.

And so the tiny settlement lurches into life. Water from the river is diverted into an underground reservoir – its level carefully maintained by two remotely controlled floodgates – and used to irrigate a healthy crop of plump helmet. Owen Hill harvests the plant, using it to brew fine dwarven wine. Oakfire has fuel. It breathes deep, rancid wine breaths.

The dining room becomes Oakfire’s attractive centrepiece, as the northwest corner has clipped a cluster of green tourmaline, creating a shimmering emerald distraction from the now daily servings of Tony Ellis’s freshly caught perch. It’s all very pleasant.

It’s definitely a shame that Graham Smith is already tunnelling vertically towards oblivion and the realms of unending torture.

Clever Dwarves

As a construction and physics simulator, Dwarf Fortress is perhaps at its least intimidating. You can’t assume exact control over your dwarves, instead you designate areas for them to work on. In these early stages, that’s a case of simply tracing out chunks of the ground to be dug. Dwarves are assigned different jobs, such as mining (which requires a pick – I’ve brought two from the mountain homes), but some labour is shared by every dwarf in the fortress, such as hauling items from one place to another.

Moving stone becomes a constant low priority task. Once you’ve designated an area of land to act as a stone stockpile, dwarves will busy themselves clearing up the fortress if they’ve nothing better to do. Later, in a future Oakfire might never see, nobles and pink-fingered administrators with opulent demands and arbitrary personal mandates will show up. Many of these guys won’t help out around the fortress.

Geologically, Dwarf Fortress is accurate enough. Minerals appear in the right shapes – clusters or seams – at roughly the right depths. That shock of green tourmaline in the dining room is a fluke, but not all that rare. It genuinely pleases the dwarves though, who gain happiness modifiers associated with the worth of the room. Decent furniture also plays a part in a room’s worth, but not in this instance. Tom Francis is a shoddy carpenter. He’ll improve with practice.

Graham Smith’s work takes place a short distance from Oakfire’s entrance hall. A roughly hewn passage leads away from the main fortress before reaching an ever deepening pit, around which a rudimentary stairwell allows access to the rapidly descending dig site. This place is like no other in Oakfire: narrow, with space barely enough for two dwarves to pass, and singular in its function. Rare minerals are struck and ignored, and when the stone below them runs out – when the ceilings of sprawling underground caverns are pierced – materials are brought down from Oakfire to build descending staircases so that the downward dig can continue. The pace is steady, the heading as crooked as their picks aren’t.

Two such caverns are encountered and traversed in this manner; two great and seemingly endless halls of fungus-carpeted rock, pocked by underground lakes, themselves spattered with their own tiny islands upon which even more fungus grows. Clever dwarves would be wary of these dark and unknowable places. Clever dwarves would build walls around their bafflingly unprotected staircases.

Oakfire hosts no clever dwarves.

There’s no one way to quantify the progression of a fortress, and some fortresses will never reach an underground cavern unless their search for raw material takes them there. Those aforementioned nobles are typically the cause of vertical expeditions, as they mandate that certain objects must be made from particular metals, requiring that you tunnel off in search of the stuff. A fortress will also require a healthy metal industry if it hopes to defend itself from the attentions of goblins – the game’s maligned native civilisation – and a truly efficient metal industry needs magma to smelt ore. Magma thrives deep underground. Wood burners will suffice in a shallow fortress, but what sad dwarf would want to depend on trees? Also, elves get pissed if you cut down trees.

Tim Edwards becomes briefly entangled in a cave spider web about 50 levels beneath the surface. Meanwhile, in Oakfire, a meeting hall is built above the reservoir, allowing a convenient well to be constructed using Craig Pearson’s immaculately crafted stone blocks. Idiot migrants arrive, and further bedrooms are chipped out of the siltstone to accommodate their numbers. They’re unaware of the grave mistake they’ve made in coming to Oakfire – one of them even brought a cow.

Unknown to all, a filthy menace is ascending from below. The noise of all the hellbound tunnelling has awoken a bugbat in the first of the two underground caverns, and now, with the entrance to Oakfire left unguarded, the flitting beast makes its way to the entrance hall. Rich McCormick is cleaning himself when the creature latches on to the calf of his right leg, bruising him through his fancy silk trousers. McCormick panics, grabbing at the bugbat and attempting to hurl it at nearby walls, only for it to return and latch on to various bits of his anatomy like some frantic, flapping, beetle-headed boomerang. He flails madly and humiliatingly about the fortress, crashing through the dining room and startling several hungry dwarves before the bugbat’s tiny mandibles finally slice through his right index finger. Dwarf blood spurts enthusiastically from the wound, spattering the walls.

Oh yes: Dwarf Fortress has a very detailed combat system.

On Thursday we mentioned a massive game of Supreme Commander between six PC Gamer writers and two overpowered AIs. There’s a write up of it in the new issue of PC Gamer UK, and we finally found time to record it as a video for anyone who wants to see it for themselves.

Graham and I do our best to commentate what’s going on – please forgive my erratic observing, our patchy memories, and the bits where our voices go too quiet. We know how to fix the latter in future. There is no known fix for my numerical skills – I manage to kick this off by claiming we’re playing against six AIs, when the whole point is that we outnumber them.

If the embed above doesn’t work for you, check it out on our YouTube channel.

For thousands of years, humanity has strived to conquer the world, to raise itself above the other animals, and to set foot in an endless galaxy of wonder and amazement and sexy green people of any gender – for these are modern, enlightened times! Sadly, unless you’re a billionaire who wants to see if he really can see his house from space, it appears we can now but sit back and take solace in the fact that, while conquering space seems to have been put on hold, our mighty technology did successfully manage to bring us a point and click adventure based on a salami mascot.

Swings and roundabouts, eh? Meet the Peperami Animal.

It's not the most annoying point-and-click interface I've ever seen... but it's on the list.

Advergaming, for such is the term for this kind of thing, as created by the geniuses behind them who will one day find themselves spending eternity in a vat filled entirely of the bullshit they spouted during life, is nothing new. As far back as machines like the Atari 500, companies were being paid to whore out their talents – modest or not – and help fill impressionable childrens’ eyes with this drivel. There were several games based on the Kool-Aid Man, for instance, and the infamous Domino’s Pizza game Avoid The Noid. There were the puzzle games Pushover and One Step Beyond, intended to make you want a Quaver, and McDonalds’ M.C Kids, Donald Land, Global Gladiators and Treasure Land Adventure with an eye on Big Macs and fries. Can you guess who was responsible for Pepsi Invaders? Can you? Probably not, because it was Coca Cola – those apparently being less litigious times. Pepsiman was a different story, appearing in his own game, and as a guest in Fighting Vipers. The list goes on.

Not everything was this blatant. For a while, product placement was the in thing. Robocod had Penguin bars, while Zool had Chupa-Chups. A number of Sierra adventure games finished every phonecall with some variant of “Thank you for using U.S. Sprint!”, and would – supposedly – have had McDonalds in Space Quest 3 had the mighty golden arched ones not insist they cut out a scene of hero Roger Wilco hurling his guts out in an airlock after sampling too much of their food. That’s the official story, anyway, though bear in mind it did come from the guys who claimed not to have realised the implications of the series’ love interest being named Ambassador Beatrice Wankmeister.

Not all advergames are bad, of course. Super Mario Bros 2 on the NES for instance started out as an advergame. Everyone knows it was originally called Doki Doki Panic, and simply refitted with Mario, Luigi, Toad and Princess Peach, but there’s another step in the story – Doki Doki Panic was originally based on a TV station’s characters, and built in part to promote a specific event.

Better known in the US, if not the UK, is Chex Quest, based on some cereal they have over in the Treason Colony, which earned both fans and sequels when it was given away for free. Closer to home, Darkened Skye gave me at least much pleasure. It’s not often that you get an advergame whose producer goes on the record to say her first reaction to the project was – literally – “You can fire me now, or not force me to do this”, before trying to make a Skittles game without Skittles in it.

Animal on the other hand is one of the few games I’ve ever played that would work better as a generic side-scrolling platform game. I’m just saying, when I think of descriptions like ‘crazy’, ‘hyper-active’ and ‘violent’, the words that spring to mind are not – by and large – ‘point and click adventure’.

And especially not this point and click adventure. Yaaaaaaaaaawn…

The premise is that the Peperami Animal, apparently named Peperami, lives in the no-less-imaginatively named city of Snackopolis, where the frankly depressingly named mad scientist Pepereinstein has gone missing during his mayoral campaign. Yes, when I think Peperami, I too think ‘detective’.

“Sources and dips close to him are at a loss for words as to the reason for his sudden disappearance,” quips the manual, before ‘hilariously’ adding: “That’s going to put a pubic hair in the butter!”

Yes, do remember that image when you consider your next snack purchase.

On the one hand, the Animal campaign was hugely successful for Peperami. I’ve never tried one, yet the mere name instantly evokes mental images of an angry, squitty poo with the voice of Adrian Edmondson. Why haven’t I ever tried one? Because the mere name instantly evokes mental images of an angry, squitty poo with the voice of Adrian Edmondson. It’s not that complicated, really.

Still! In the name of research, I decided that it wouldn’t be fair to judge the awful, terrible, obviously rubbish Animal game without at least some experience of the no doubt fine, upstanding product it’s based on. This then is what freshly purchased, delicious Peperami looks like in the real world.

Awesome. I've always wanted a snack that looks like a shit wrapped in a condom.

Rewinding time to before I took that picture so that I could be surprised as I opened one fresh, the first thing that struck my attention was how pungent the first Peperami was as I slid it out of its package – even before tearing off the condom to get at its meaty, increasingly less anticipated goodness. As for the food itself, something about it almost looked… Hmm. Picture a sandworm from Dune, its entire life spent constantly being looked down on for its pathetic girth, only to ultimately end up being captured and used as the Fremen equivalent of a tricycle by a particularly nervous young girl. Done that? Good.

This looked nothing like that at all, but was about as forlorn.

Giving my salami a quick squeeze made me realise how hard it was, which was lucky, because you’re not allowed to talk about any product like this without at least one obvious cock joke, and this way has far more honour than pretending to have a limp, flaccid sausage. Sniffing it, it seemed okay. It’s salami. Taking a bite… the taste took a few seconds to kick in, but what really jumped out was the texture. It was crunchy, filling my mouth with lots of little bits that would prove hard to swallow even before the manky taste of the salami itself kicked in, along with the spices. I finished one mouthful and promptly washed it down with Coke and a pack of Mars Planets, wondering if the slimline design was part of a worldwide contest to make a snack that would just be as enjoyable taken rectally.

Pubic hair. In butter. Tickling your throat as it slides down. Their mental image, not mine. Peperami.

But what of the game? Honestly, only three things stand out about it, and the sheer pointlessness of its existence should go without saying. The other two are that it’s spectacularly boring… and even more spectacularly unfunny. Look at a bureau in Peperami’s room, and Edmondson’s smarmiest voice informs you that it’s “The Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Is it? Other actions just go straight for pointless, random insults, like “It’s a door, you fool…” and “Well, that’s not very intelligent…” while Peperami stands around and stares, never so much as blinking or twitching. You know how the character in the adverts is a constantly moving dervish of manic, masochistic energy? Here, not so much.

The version I have – an original CD – also lacks any music, at least under DOSBox, which doesn’t exactly help the already static backgrounds explode with life. The one good thing about the snide narrator is that Peperami himself rarely has to speak, because honestly, imagine playing through a whole adventure voiced like this. Then realise it would still be better than five seconds of Al Emmo.

The interface is beyond dreadful. You can right-click to bring up a verb list – Look At, Use, Talk, Pick Up, Attack – or shortcut keys, but if you use the shortcuts, you have to right-click out of your currently selected verb first. At best, those are detour keys, and not ones that let you do anything particularly interesting. As far as I can tell, the goal of the game is to stooge around trying to work out where the fun is, before realising that you may as well sit your arse down on a chair until Godot shows up.

As ever, any hope of stomping your problems into oblivion flies away immediately. You use the attack command a few times, but more often it’s standard puzzles and very boring conversations with other snack-based characters. The funniest thing in the whole game is realising how long it is, and that presumably the creators expected people to at least pretend they gave a damn about the central mystery. Scanning a walkthrough, I’ve never seen more than a third of it before having a moment of self-realisation, ejecting the disk, and running downstairs to scrub away the stench with tomato juice. They say that bacon is great for turning vegetarians back onto the path of proper eating, because animals are delicious. I suspect that Animal is their counter-attack on OW OH GOD THERE WAS SOME SPICE GREASE LEFT ON MY FINGER AND I JUST RUBBED MY EYE AAAAARGH OW OWWW!

For an pork-based fury volcano, his house is surprisingly tidy. Way tidier than mine, anyway.

Ahem. If you do endure, your reward is to swim through lots of insulting dialogue and an even more insulting 3D shooting section that’s almost, but not quite, worse than the one in Hopkins FBI. Mostly though, you get to know that you are one of the few, the very few, who can honestly claim to have finished this game – even after your eventual release from the sanitarium!

While a failure as a game, how well did Animal do as an advert? I have absolutely no idea, but I can safely say that anyone who bought a single Peperami stick as a direct result of encountering this game needs to be taken out and shot. (Don’t even get me started on the kind of idiots who would quit out of Animal, then walk down to the local store at 9PM on Friday specifically to pick up three of the damn things as a direct result of playing it for an hour. They don’t even deserve to live…)

Yep. The perfect image for a snack that already looks made to flush.

Advergaming of course continues to roll on, not so much in full products, but ever more on services like Facebook – as a promotional tool for games (sometimes even with their own paid elements, like Dragon Age: Legends), as a way of boosting brands, and sometimes simply because a big company wants to do something nice for their loyal, devoted fans. Ha! No, just kidding. That never happens.

When I say that I hate the Myst series, I’m not being entirely fair. Oh, they are dreadful, don’t get me wrong – the most fun I ever had with them was imagining that their backstories were a lie, and really the inhabitants of these pretty-but-boring worlds died out because some idiot locked their only toilet with a stupid puzzle that required them to demonstrate knowledge of local celestial movements before they got to take a bowel one. If you put me on a desert island with a computer and the entire series, I would snap one of the discs in half and use it to slice my own wrists open. Probably Riven.

Really though, what I hate about them is what they did to adventures – convince people that no, we didn’t want characters or plotting (and please, spare me the links to a wiki about the intricate backstory of the Stoneship Age) or puzzles with an actual reason to get in our way. Now, if you could render a vaguely pretty world and put some unmarked levers and dials on it, your job was done. In the entire history of Myst-type games, I can list maybe five I genuinely consider worth having given a chance.

So when I now say that Zork: Grand Inquisitor was a wonderful surprise, I really mean it.

FREE STUFF ALERT! Our friends at Good Old Games have given us 10 copies of Zork: Grand Inquisitor to give away. Check out the competition details at the end of this post.

Whether you’ve played any of them or not, chances are you’ve heard the name Zork before. The series started as a set of text-adventures played on MIT computers back in 1977, before being retooled and released as the first games from interactive fiction legends Infocom. There were three games in the main series back then, along with a few spin-offs/semi-spinoffs like Enchanter and Wishbringer, and the adventure/RPG hybrid Beyond Zork. The series was revived in 1993 with the frankly pretty dreadful Return to Zork, whose main contribution to the world was letting adventure fans greet each other with a cry of “Want some rye? Course ya do!”, the dark and brooding Zork: Nemesis, and finally Grand Inquisitor, whose low sales put an end to not only the games, but a planned TV show.

But don’t worry about most of that. Here’s your for-gods-sake-don’t-cut-out-and-keep guide to everything you need to know about the Zork universe before you play Grand Inquisitor.

1. It mostly takes place in a magical underground world.
2. It all started outside a white house.
3. Don’t go into the dark, you are likely be eaten by a grue.

Or, if you can only learn from things when they’re presented in rap form…

Incidentally, while we’re in list-mode, I should add a few technical warnings for Zork: GI that don’t seem to have been fixed in the GOG version. It mostly works fine on Windows 7, except…

1. The spin-around mouse controls can be unplayably fast on modern systems.
2. This is Annoying.
3. You can try slowing it down from the Settings screen.
4. But it won’t work.
5. So you may end up having to use the arrow keys to turn.
6. You should probably blame Communism.

In a world full of magic, only a sucker takes the stairs.

At first glance, Grand Inquisitor looks like many, many other Myst games. Rendered graphics, spinny-turny exploration, not many characters, lots of puzzles. And for the most part, that’s exactly what it is. It’s much funnier than most, largely because you’re constantly accompanied by a wise-cracking sidekick (the current Dungeon Master, Dalboz, trapped in a lantern you carry and voiced by Michael “Hey, It’s That Guy” McKean), and everything you encounter has its tongue surgically implanted into its cheek. The closest your character gets to a background is that you’re a perpetually mute travelling vacuum salesman (and even this, you only learn via death messages), who Dalboz nicknames Ageless Faceless Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person – AAFGNCAAP for short.

Of the world you enter – literally one second before curfew – little really matters, save that it’s under the heel of a tyrant called the Grand Inquisitor (Erick “Hey, It’s That Guy” Avari) who’s banned all magic, sealed up the underground, and really loves giving speeches. “Shun magic, and shun the appearance of magic!” he demands in the intro, shortly followed by clarifying the current political landscape. “Never forget who is the boss of you!” he cries, fists pumping. “ME! I AM THE BOSS OF YOU!”

In preparation for this week’s column, I conducted a quick science experiment. According to our specially constructed Ham-O-Meter, a single word from the Grand Inquisitor is the equivalent of a whole gammon steak, plus pineapple. To properly represent an entire speech, such as one near the end of the game, you would need to construct a gigantic chessboard, place a single pig on the first square, then two on the second, four on the third, eight on the next and so on and so forth until the entire board was complete. Slaughtering all 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 of those pigs would give you a reasonable idea what we’re dealing with here, and also the single greatest bacon sandwich ever. Suck it, Epic Meal Time.

There’s honestly not a lot more plot than that. The quest is shamelessly ‘get the three things to save the world’, and that world is little but a life-support system for the puzzles. There are a few running themes, including the misadventures of a TV hero called Antharia Jack, played by Dirk “Hey, It’s That Guy” Benedict, the Grand Inquisitor’s plans to totemise (“A Very Bad Thing,” the game explains) the world’s magical creatures, and a lost scion called Lucy Flathead, played by Amy “Is Also In It” Jacobson… but none of them are remotely deep. Without all this stuff, Zork: Grand Inquisitor wouldn’t be anything like as fun, but the story isn’t the reason it’s worth jumping in and playing around in its world.

Grand Inquisitor is, to the point that there’s no real competition, the most self-aware adventure game I have ever played. Unlike many comedy games though, it doesn’t simply point out the genre’s usual rules and cliches, but goes out of its way to play with them. Many puzzles are built around cheating for instance – impossible unless you change the rules. One early example is a dam which you need to blow up by shutting all of its doors, but the default configuration won’t ever let you do that. You need to bring along the ‘REZROV’ door-opening spell to force one of the others open first. An easier example later on involves winning a game of Strip Grue, Fire, Water (no prizes for guessing what it’s based on) – which isn’t exactly difficult, since you’re in the body of a psychic at the time. My favourite of all though – the moment at which you’re officially not allowed to dislike Zork: Grand Inquisitor or anything contained within – is when you’re given a complicated looking chessboard type device housing one of the items you need to save the world, and the solution is to smash the f**king thing open with a rock.

I have played many, many adventure games. I have played good ones, and I have played bad ones, and I have played ones so bad, even Hopkins FBI dare not get close in case the smell rubs off on it. There are no words for how satisfying that puzzle was to ‘solve’. I don’t smoke, but I need a cigarette.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. That’s good puzzle.

The ones that don’t revolve around cheating are harder, but just as satisfying – almost all revolving around lateral thinking, and picking and prodding at the world’s rules. The “In Case Of Adventure, Break Glass” puzzle from the header image is a great example… so let’s see it again!

It's always nice when a world gives you the tools you'll need to save it.

See the problem? That’s right. The hammer is inside the case. How do you get it out? Simple. You just open the case and take it. You can’t just take the sword and scroll though, because that’s Not How This Works. You have to close the case again and dutifully smash the glass as instructed.

If that seems spectacularly anal… it is! But don’t worry. You get your revenge soon enough, when you use a spell that makes purple things turn invisible to turn an Infinite Corridor into a Finite one.

The one downside of this kind of puzzle is that it’s often not clear whether or not you actually have all the pieces you need, or what you’re likely to get in the future. The world isn’t huge, but even with teleporters, you’re going to be retreading a lot of the same ground while working out what’s next on the hit list. A few one-time trips out of the Underground add some extra variety, but tend to be incredibly short – a handful of new, teeny-tiny locations you only visit once, with little to actually do while you’re there.

Chipping your way through the Underground is incredibly satisfying though. It’s all effectively a single puzzle box, not desperately long or difficult to solve, but ever unfolding as you gain access to a new location, receive a spell that makes a previous dead-end suddenly click, and with a sense of fun and whimsy that makes what would otherwise be screamingly annoying filler puzzles (like Dalboz needing you to painstakingly make a mug of hot chocolate so that the smell can remind him of an important spell) seem at least more interesting. All that said, the “save early, save often” rule is in full effect. You can’t get into an unwinnable situation in Grand Inquisitor, but you sure as hell can die – and those deaths often come without any real warning. It’s worth it for the funny death messages… and replaying to find any that you missed… but any joke falls flat if you lose a few hours progress to the belief that Myst style games are all safe as incredibly dull houses. Here, everything about that thinking is wrong.

Still easier than working out how to get to Angel without going through Bank.

While Grand Inquisitor’s sales were never officially released, I choose to believe that it sold seventeen copies to gamers and one to a squirrel named Julian. At the very least, it underperformed, and at worst, it bombed. Instead of being the first part of a planned “Magic Trilogy”, it banged the nails into the series’ coffin, and if there have been any plans to resurrect it since, they’ve never been released. Short of an iOS re-release, since everything’s getting those at the moment, we probably shouldn’t get our hopes up. Besides, these days it’d probably end up as a squad based shooter or something…

COMPETITION TIME! ENTER THE UNDERGROUND…

Enjoy this cult classic for yourself, with 1 of 10 codes from Good Old Games

No purchase necessary, if you're willing to bet your soul instead, MWAH HA HA

The one good thing about Zork: Grand Inquisitor’s obscurity back in the day is that it means most people still have it to enjoy – at least as long as they don’t mind slow-paced games, and have the patience not to run crying like toddlers to GameFAQs after five minutes. (After ten of course, it’s okay.)

To check it out for yourself, Good Old Games has just added it to its growing collection of classics and also Jack Orlando, and they’ve given us 10 download codes to give away. To you! And you!

But not you, Mr. Grabby. You know what you did….

To be in with a chance of winning one, you need to leave a comment on this week’s Crap Shoot. Some copies will be awarded for good comments, especially your nostalgic memories of the Zork series and other related adventures. You can also enter with an awesome answer to the following question:

How would you destroy the world’s last ever copy of Myst?

THE RULES: All prizes are at my discretion, no correspondence will be entered into except to say ‘ner-ner-ner’ if you complain about not winning. Prizes will go out early next week, and be sent via the Private Messaging system as codes that you can redeem on GOG.com. Any attempt to find a loophole in any rule means instant disqualification, and will earn you a clip around the ear for good measure.

One of the many puzzles in Day of the Tentacle, the 1993 sequel to the 1987 adventure Maniac Mansion, is fixing a broken down time machine by getting enough money to replace the diamond at its core. The hero, geeky teenager Bernard, blinks at this, asking the mansion’s owner, crotchety mad scientist Dr. Fred Edison, why he needs to bother. The guy owns a mansion. Isn’t he already rich enough to just order one? Sadly, it turns out not. Not only is Dr. Fred broke, he’s never even seen a penny from a big TV show that was made about his family, due to him forgetting to return the contract.

Fixing that problem with time-travel makes for a fun comedy puzzle, but when I first solved it, I figured that was all it was. Like most non-Canadians/Americans, I had no idea that the TV show he was talking about actually existed. But did we miss out, or escape? Let’s finally find out…

Dr. Fred is a genius, but not very smart. Want to break in? Key's under the mat...

Before we get to the show itself though, a quick primer so that we know what we’re dealing with. Maniac Mansion remains one of the most intricate and important adventure games ever made. Its legacy stretched throughout most of Lucasarts’ time at the top, with the name of its scripting engine – SCUMM (Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion) – becoming a mark of quality, not just a description. Though admittedly, it didn’t hurt that the name was more memorable than those of, say, Sierra’s AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter – yawn) and SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter – double yawn) engines.

The premise is that a kid called Dave, along with two friends, set out to infiltrate a spooky mansion where his girlfriend Sandy has been taken by the evil Dr. Fred. Upon arrival, they find that Dr. Fred plans to strap her to a gurney and suck her brains out, that the Edisons aren’t actually evil, but have rather been driven insane by an evil meteor in the basement, and lots of other B-movie stuff. All fine and dandy. What’s impressive though is how advanced the design itself was. You get to control three characters, for instance, but while Dave always leads the party, the others are chosen from a set of six. Each kid has their own special skills and weakness, like Bernard being able to fix things, but terrified of the mansion’s more monstrous inhabitants, or Razor being able to play music. As such, which characters you have affect which puzzles you can solve and how, and which endings you can get. Neat, yes?

But that’s not all! Maniac Mansion invented cut-scenes, as named by creator Ron Gilbert, to show you what was going on elsewhere in mansion. As you wandered around, you’d actually run into the Edison family – and then have to run away from them or get locked in the mansion’s dungeon. If you rang the doorbell for instance, you had to make sure you weren’t standing on the stairs when Weird Ed Edison came down to answer it. Getting caught wasn’t a huge problem, but it was a headache. Until you found the key, one kid could open the dungeon door for the others by pressing a brick on the wall, but would have to stay behind until one of the others came back to do the same for them. It’s far from my favourite game of that period, but even twenty-odd years later, its ambition still holds up.

I... have nothing to add. Dot dot dot.

Of course, in many other ways, it more than shows its age – especially in terms of writing. But that should in no way detract from what an incredible achievement it was and remains. The sequel, Day of the Tentacle, was simpler. You only had three characters, who were separated in their own little worlds – different time zones. Ignoring that though, it’s still arguably the finest puzzle chain in adventure history, with some stunning design. To give just one example, there’s a bit where one character, Hoagie, needs some vinegar to accomplish something in the past. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem – go to the store in the present and buy some, right? Well, shut up. Adventure gamers never buy anything if they can steal it. The solution is to take some wine, then put it in a time capsule, then have the character trapped in the future retrieve it and send it back. The whole game is full of this kind of thinking, and it is brilliant.

Right. On to the show. Probably the easiest way to show the difference is to take a look at the intro to both it, and the actual game, and compare their vibes. Sound good, rather than incredibly lazy?

Excellent. Here’s Maniac Mansion the game…

…and Maniac Mansion the TV show.

In a word: Oooookay. In another: Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh….

No. No, Dr. Fred, they most certainly did not.

In case it’s not spectacularly obvious, Maniac Mansion the TV show has roughly as much to do with the original game as a chipmunk’s arsehole resembles Sweden. The original idea – pitched by a couple of what was then Lucasfilm Games artists – to make something closer to The Munsters/Addams Family, continuing the game’s horror comedy vibe. Eugene Levy was brought in to help on the project and promptly threw all of that out, with the resulting show being much more of a quirky domcom. I will now list all the major similarities between the show the TV guys made, and the original game.

1. There is a scientist character called Dr. Fred Edison

2. That is all.

Even then, it’s a very different Dr. Fred. The Dr. Fred of the games is an old, cranky scientist, while the TV show version is an absent minded, endearingly crap father type. In the games, the Edison family all have names based around ‘Ed’ – Edna, Weird Ed, Cousin Ted etc. The show’s Edison family are called Casey (wife), Tina (daughter), Ike (son) and Turner (younger son, aged up by SCIENCE!), backed up by crazy aunt Idella and their uncle Harry, who got turned into a fly during one of Dr. Fred’s experiments. Their mansion seems more of a big townhouse, and while there is a meteor underneath it, I don’t think there was an episode where it went on a talk show, before being arrested by the Meteor Police.

Ignoring the fact that Maniac Mansion has basically nothing to do with Maniac Mansion though, was it any good? Confession time. I have absolutely no idea. The bits of it that I’ve seen… we’ll get to them in a moment… are at best generic and at worst, awful. However, the show was far from a failure. Critically, it did pretty well – at least in its native Canada, though it was also shown in North America – and lasted three seasons of 22 episodes each. Good or sucky, that has to be remembered.

Unfortunately, like the surprisingly excellent Wing Commander Academy cartoon, it never got a proper home release, and I only know of two episodes available online. Worse, both are ripped from a special love themed compilation VHS – aka the worst idea to come out of romance since His and Hers branded gonorrhoea medication – and taken from very, very early in the show’s run. One is the second episode, the other the fifth. Are they bad? Hell yes, they’re comedy vacuums. Specifically, they’re the Dyson DC26 Multi Floor asking “What’s the fastest cat on the world wide web? The hyper-lynx!”

Even so, I can’t in good conscience condemn the whole series because of them, especially when the things people who liked it usually reference are things like fourth-wall breaking jokes, outright parodies like this Twin Peaks riff, and wacky sketches, none of which are anywhere to be seen in these two episodes. Far from it. Replace lines like “I was in my lab” with “I had to work late” and the second episode, Fred’s Gone A Courtin’ could be absolutely any dom-com ever. Fred forgets his anniversary. His wife Casey feels under-appreciated. Fred wins her back with some token gesture. All very generic, and very, very dull. Oh, except that the uncle character is a fly because… why not? Maniac Mansion!

As for the other one, Flystruck, it goes a little something like this…

While pretty lousy, it’s worth remembering that some of the problems here are a product of their time, especially when it comes to the pacing. Even accounting for those though… this isn’t very funny. True, the game wasn’t a comedy classic itself, but at least it had design on its side, while these episodes just fall flat and never figure out how to climb up again. I’m willing to admit that the show might have gotten better, but not remotely bothered I never got the chance to find out for sure back in the day.

For a better idea of what made the original game so impressive, here’s a Let’s Play of a fan remake (since all the ones I can see on YouTube are either the original C64 version or the heavily censored NES one, and we always prefer to stick with the One True Platform around these parts) The interface and music are taken from Day of the Tentacle and the graphics are redrawn VGA versions of the original sprites and rooms. Unfortunately, legitimate copies are hard to find these days – Lucasarts having stamped on the remake – and most abandonware sites won’t carry its old games to honour its wishes that they not. There’s always a chance that it and the TV show will get a re-release at some point, but you shouldn’t hold your breath unless you really, really think you’d look better blue.

(Oh, and one more thing. If at any point during this you said “But the royalties in DOTT were for the TV show’s ‘spin-off game’, not the show”, congratulations. You are a true adventure game geek.)

BloodRayne 3 is a movie that clearly didn’t need to be made. Same goes for BloodRayne 2. The first film though, I can at least see the attraction of the license. Nobody could ever make a good BloodRayne movie, and no matter how much love and money was poured into the project, it would never lead to, say, Dame Judi Dench walking down the red carpet, Oscar in hand, gushing over the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play the Queen of the Lecher Bitches. You could however make a fun BloodRayne movie – a knowing, confident, trashy action flick that slammed its first reel down on the table and said “Look, it’s a hot redhead vampire chick in leather, killing Nazis. You in? Bring popcorn.”

So of course, Boll opted to make a historical piece set in the 1700s. Then he did BloodRayne 2 as… a western. Only now does he turn his attention to the horrors of the Third Reich, as seen in the original game. Can this change be shot in the arm the series needs? You may be surprised!

No, of course you won’t. It’s rubbish, and that’s why you’re here, reading this. Not for nothing is Boll considered one of the worst directors ever, even though – honestly – that’s not true. His films are dreadful, no question, and every game license he lays his hands on seems doomed to turn to shit… but he’s still light-years ahead of directors like Coleman Francis, Hal Warren and many others.

What marks Boll out is that he snaps up licenses that might otherwise have made for acceptable movies, and also Postal, and… does weird things to them. It’s not simply that they’re bad, though yes, they stink to high heaven, but that they’re bad in really, really weird ways. Alone in the Dark for instance used this song as the backing for a sex scene. In The Name Of The King was a Dungeon Siege license of all things, despite the only connection being that both worlds were called ‘Ehb’. The sequel is a time-travel story in which Dolph Lundgren gets attacked by ninjas and sent back in time. House of the Dead featured the immortal exchange “You did all this to become immortal? Why?” “To live forever!” And let’s not forget that he later took that turkey, foleyed in lots of fart noises and jokey captions, and regurgitated it back onto the market as House of the Dead: The Funny Version. Shudder…

If you're a guy, score 10 points if you noticed the fire first. Also, you've now basically seen the whole movie.

The problem is that the more Boll’s done, the more he’s moved from making entertaining turkeys to just plain boring movies. Far Cry for instance is a snorer. BloodRayne 2 had no soul. He’s tried to compensate by ramping up his own personal level of crazy, from challenging reviewers to boxing matches (unless they actually had combat experience) to appearing on screen, but mostly with stuff that just comes across as a little bit sad. For instance, he appears as himself in the Postal movie as the owner of a German theme park, announcing “my movies are funded with Nazi gold” and paying people in gold teeth. Yes, it’s an offensive joke, but only in the same way as a drunk hobo bellowing obscenities from a bench. The only proper reaction is to shake your head and sigh “Oh, Uwe…”

Picasso famously had his Blue period. For Boll, 2010 was his Nazi period. Filming in Croatia, he churned out three different movies: this one, a straight historical piece called Auschwitz, which is a mix of interviews with schoolkids and One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, and – just in case you thought he might be turning over a respectable leaf – a parody of BloodRayne 3, with Rayne swapped out in favour of a fat superheroine called Blubberella. Shocking precisely nobody, critics responded about as well to all of them as if Boll had personally shat on their chocolate cake and handed them a fork.

'Eyes up here.' 'And icicles down there. Just saying, if you want a coat that fits...'

My rental copy of this calls the movie BloodRayne 3: The Blood Reich. Needless to say, that’s a terrible name, so it’s not surprising that it snaps back to simply “The Third Reich” for the title sequence – an opening that starts on a cheery note by replaying the rape of Rayne’s mother back in the 1700s, followed by about five straight minutes of prisoners in trains being taken to a concentration camp. In case you weren’t aware, Rayne fills us in on the fact that the Nazi regime wasn’t a particularly pleasant one, ending with a declaration of “Fucking Nazis…” that carries all the emotional weight of “I broke a nail.”

Knowing that these sets and actors were doing double-duty in a film called Blubberella doesn’t do much for the sinister atmosphere here, though it’s quickly broken as La Resistance shows up with explosives and automatic weapons to seize control of the train. Rayne herself runs in across the top of the train and… oh dear. She’s only on screen for about two seconds, but that’s plenty of time to burst out laughing at both her incredibly silly little hat, and the realisation that as far as this film is concerned, Rayne’s actress is little more than her own cleavage’s costume. The Germans barely even seem to notice her, even when they could simply shoot her from behind, and opt to concentrate their attention on La Resistance instead. Thanks to the power of clumsy editing though, everyone is soon dealt with. Rayne seizes the initiative and pursues their commanding officer into a train car, where he quite clearly swings a metal bar down for her to catch in her hands and twirl a bit in front of him.

“And who shall I say has the honour of besting me today,” he asks, which seems a little self-defeating when he still has a knife. “Honour?” demands Rayne. “The last thing this is about is honour.”

No. It’s about being the clumsiest piece of staging I have ever seen in an action movie. Behind her, unnoticed, a German guard has survived the massacre… and somehow walked right past La Resistance to get into the train… and is sneaking onto the scene, side-arm in hand. He could simply shoot her at any point from almost point-blank range, but instead he opts to keep tippy-toeing around.

Be vewwy, vewwy qwiet. I'm hunting wampires...

“Let’s just make this short and bloody,” growls Rayne, completely oblivious until he pulls the trigger. The bullet rips through her, splashing the commanding officer with her blood, though not… bizarrely… hitting him with the actual bullet. Good thing he made sure he fired it at the only angle that could possibly have happened, otherwise this would have been a really short movie!

Wait, what am I saying? I just found a brand new reason to hate the Nazis…

Rayne jumps so hard she almost falls out of her corset, spinning around to smack him one with the metal bar, then impaling the commanding officer on the other end of it. Then, despite the fact that she saw all this and should clearly know better, she leans down to drink his blood. The title card finally appears: BloodRayne: The Blurred Third Reich. But the drama has only just begun! To suck!

See? This is what you wear when you want to be inconspicuous. Y'know. Clothes.

Rayne emerges from the train only to end up with a face full of guns, as it becomes clear that La Resistance has absolutely no idea who the hell she is. They demand she gives up her incredibly fake looking swords. Rayne declines, and the guy with the gun dials down his request to merely “Don’t cause trouble!” It’s an odd request for the sword-wielding woman with blood dribbling from her lips and piles of dead Nazis at her feet, but one that turns out to be an acceptable middle-ground. Luckily, the leader of La Resistance, whose name is Nathaniel, is slightly better informed than his partners, Vasyl and Magda.

“I’ve never seen anyone move like you do,” he tells her. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” replies Rayne, along with absolutely everyone watching this movie, in various different tones of sighing inevitability.

Nathaniel identifies her as a ‘dhampir’, which in folklore referred to human-vampire hybrids, often suffering from physical conditions like not actually having bones, but has long-since entered the dictionary of fiction as “Dhampir (noun): 1. Ass kicking vampire hunter that still dresses like a goth ninja but doesn’t suffer from all the stupid weakness, 2. Probable rip-off of Durham Red’.

Rayne doesn’t confirm this, though since she’s licking blood from her lips while standing in the sun, it’s clear that either he’s right, or she’s a seriously creepy goth. She tells Nathaniel that she’s shish-kebobed the Commandant, and the two agree to team up before anyone starts querying the use of that rank in this context. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, opening up the train reveals that instead of the guns and explosives he was expecting, he’s merely saved the lives of hundreds of terrified prisoners. He smacks the train and storms off in a huff, before Rayne comes over and feels the need to tell the head of La Resistance what extermination camps are, and that they’ll likely be killed if they keep milling about like bored extras. Nathaniel shrugs and decides that in that case, they’d better save them, probably.

As the party leaves through the snow, Rayne does another quick monologue about what she is, though when she gets to the bits about “my natural magical abilities allow me to withstand the elements that eradicate vampire kind,” you have to imagine her actress wishing she had similar protection against cold, or at least a costume not cut to expose enough cleavage to lose a nuclear submarine.

'At least I'll leave... an ethnically pure corpse...'

Back in the train, the Commandant – who never gets a name – wakes up and pulls the iron bar out of his chest, while Rayne heads off to La Resistance’s base. Here, one of the three big problems with her character quickly becomes obvious: for a two hundred year old huntress, forged in battle and used to living on the edge… Rayne is a really ungrateful, whining brat who’s often more valley girl than vampire. Her first act at Resistance HQ is to complain that her dinner isn’t ready, despite Nathaniel taking the time to organise and specially cook her pigs blood to drink and regain her strength.

“I don’t mean to be ungrateful,” she tells him. “Well, then it certainly comes effortlessly to you,” he sighs, and doesn’t look any more impressed when she ends up storming out of a meeting where she keeps telling him that they’re losing the war and there’s no end in sight with a scornful “I’ve lost my appetite!” From the look on his face as she departs, it’s all he can do to avoid dumping the whole damn pot of blood over her head while shouting “Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me, princess!”

And no. As we’ll soon find out, she has absolutely no reason to be this arrogant.

How sad is it when you make this and Blubberella at the same time, and it's not clear which has more dignity?

Meanwhile, at a concentration camp not far away, the Commandant’s lieutenant shows up to recruit the help of this film’s special guest villain, Clint Howard, from its own… um… commandant. Just to remind us that the Nazis are evil, the lower-c commandant takes the time to randomly shoot a prisoner in the head, before we cut to a messy medical lab. Clint is playing a Dr. Mengele/Ilsa, She Wolf Of The SS type, only painfully experimenting on vampires instead of prisoners. He puts in his typical performance, poking and prodding and torturing one unlucky vamp FOR SCIENCE!, despite the Lieutenant asking if he really has to ruin so many perfectly good prosthetic effects in his presence.

Not for the first time, all this medical malpractice exposes a key problem with most vampire mythology – that it really doesn’t work in the real world. “They are very difficult to kill,” breathes Dr. Clint. “Only by stake, fire, sunlight or holy water…” And decapitation, assorted bullets, regular water, assorted bladed weapons… Nevertheless, while he may come across as an insane mad scientist who only enjoys the pleasure of hurting others, it turns out that the harsh face of Dr. Clint hides the soul of a dreamer.

True, his specific dream is “to make Hitler immortal!”, but who are we to judge?

“I have no authority in these matters,” begins the Lieutenant, which doesn’t strike me as the best opener, “But I will not stand idly by as you kill that… creature as part of some mandated experiment of yours.”

I wonder whether it was the writer, actor or director who didn’t know what ‘mandate’ means…

Kids! Don't try this unless everyone's too terrified of you to complain about the smell.

Back at Rayne’s secret lair, which she has apparently, things instantly get confusing with the revelation that she apparently sleeps quite comfortably in her regular clothes, boots, and push-up corset, but for some reason draws the line at wearing her coat to bed. Waking up with a start, she slips it on, heads out into the chilly day and… nothing. That’s the end of this utterly pointless scene.

I hope you’re paying attention. There may be a test later.

Over at Nazi HQ, Dr. Clint and the Lieutenant appear slightly busier. Dr. Clint steps out of a room, announcing – apropos nothing – “It is a science I don’t understand!” Not understanding things ends up being a bit of a theme here. By their dialogue, they’ve clearly been inspecting the Commandant, in the process of transforming into a new kind of vampire due to being splashed with Rayne’s blood before she drained him. We cut back to another pointless scene of Rayne, this time hiding her blades in a gutter for some reason, then back to the two of them walking down some stairs, where they walk into a different room on another floor to meet… the Commandant, whose appearance surprises them.

Dammit, this isn’t a movie. It’s a bloody Moebius Strip. And speaking of stripping, back the camera goes to Rayne, who after waking up with a dramatic glare and hiding her blades, turns out to be in… a brothel. She sneaks around uncomfortably, hiding from sight of the customers, never filling us in on the why. Is it to meet a contact? A secret stash of weapons? To assassinate a prominent German officer?

No! It’s CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGED RANDOM LESBIAN SEX TIME!

Since the life of a dhampir Nazi hunter is difficult, Rayne starts out with a relaxing naked oil massage from one woman, only to be interrupted by the sound of another screaming. Cue Rayne reluctantly getting up and pulling on a dressing gown for the first of many scenes where she gets to overpower someone in an attempt to boost her soon-to-be-fading hero credentials. She bursts into the other ‘masseuse’s room to find her lying topless on the floor and being punched by a big German man in white Y-fronts, who she grabs by the balls until the celery can’t be twisted any more. This bit of right-on grrl power not even slightly diminished by the way she pushes the topless girl out of the room ahead of her in order to maximise the number of tits in this movie, the others thank her in the only way they know how.

Yes! It’s CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGED RANDOM LESBIAN SEX TIME! PART II!

While Rayne enjoys her free all-over tongue bath though, one of the other ‘masseuse’s hurriedly nips out to betray her to the Nazis in the building across the road, where Dr. Clint and the Commandant are having one of those symbolic chess games that villains think makes them look smart. Surprising nobody but her, she promptly gets the standard traitor’s reward – being bitten and drained by the Commandant. Well, I say ‘drained’. Really, he takes a mouthful and decides he’s had enough, before dispatching soldiers to stop Rayne. They conveniently show up just as she’s finished getting dressed and surround the building, though are no match for her ability to just run away. One of them does land a shot though, splattering some of her odd syrupy blood on the concrete for Dr. Clint to scoop up.

Counting this as a victory, he heads back to check the now-vampired ‘masseuse’, who wakes up looking rather more gothic than before, but no better at acting. He splashes her with a bit of holy water, which burns her, but apparently not as much as if she’d been turned by a real vampire instead of whatever the hell the Commandant is, saying it would have “crushed your hand like papier mache.” No, I don’t know what he’s talking about either. I’m not sure he does, since he immediately goes on to add “The times they are a-changin,” despite that being a song from some twenty years into his future.

More like FUNdead, amirite?

Much pointless exposition follows, interrupted only by the Commandant in the middle of another Symbolic Chess Game without an actual opponent – unless he’s playing with the camera-man between takes. Soon enough though, we’re back with the ‘masseuse’, who decides to try putting the ‘vamp’ into ‘vampire’ and giving it a capital V. For Vampire. Which is what she is, to be clear. I know this sounds obvious, but Dr. Clint is going to forget it in roughly two sentences time, so I want to make sure.

“You’ve jettisoned your human foibles,” hisses Dr. Clint. “Your mortal coil, as Shakespeare called it. you’ve managed to both evolve and regress at the same time. You’ve become subservient to your primal instincts. Hunger. Thirst. Bloodlust. Sexual urge…”

The ‘masseuse’ points out… I think, it’s difficult to tell without subtitles… that many of the men she’s served in the past have had at least three of the four, and asks if he’s a gambling man. “It appears that I am,” he grins, unlocking her cage and getting in with her. Amazingly enough, she fangs up and goes for him, only for him to pull holy water and a stake out of his pocket and turn her into a pool of slime.

Now you listen to me, young lady! You're not slaying anything out there until you agree to stop wearing that hat!

Back at La Resistance, Rayne is in full Valley Girl mode, demanding grenades and explosives.

“Rayne, you don’t know what you’re doing!” Nathaniel tells her, which is probably meant to sound a bit patronising, but in the circumstances is actually pretty damn appropriate…

“I’m going home to sharpen my knives!” she pouts, flouncing away like an angry teenager.

“He’s not just a vampire, Rayne!” shouts Nathaniel, resisting the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “Now he’s a vampire with an entire German army behind him!”

Wait. There’s more than one?

Nathaniel glares her down, telling her that she may well have had two hundred years of fighting vampires her way, but now she has to work as a team. Rayne points out that when she does that, the team usually dies, but Nathaniel shouts her down by saying that that’s their decision to make, not hers. He then follows up by pointing out that he’s already set scouts to watch for information and has people in place to actually take on the Commandant in a sensible way, rather than – for example – her stuffing her already over-stuffed bra with plastic explosives and charging in with a Xena style yell.

“I need you to understand something,” Rayne kicks back, somewhat feebly. “I have spent my whole life hunting down the undead, and I promise you, it’s about to get seriously fucking complicated.”

“I was sick of killing just Nazis,” Nathaniel replies. “An undead will fire things up around here!”

Ignoring the fact that it’s a fairly stupid resistance leader who even considers his enemy mutating into hyper-powerful creatures of the night to be ‘a refreshing change’, this scene hammers home another basic problem with the BloodRayne movies. Rayne is incompetent, and constantly reliant on being bailed out by the mundanes. Boll shows nothing but contempt for her as a character, repeatedly stripping her of both heroism and authority, with everything from the scripting to the constant cameras pointed straight at her cleavage making it clear that Rayne is in the movie for precisely two reasons: Leftie and Rightie. Even when dealing with hyper-sexual characters – and done well, they’re fine – heroines worth watching are way more than that. Rayne can’t be, because Boll never lets her.

And no, her killing the occasional mook isn't enough to compensate for any of that.

As if to prove the competence gap, Nathaniel explains that Magda is about to start an operation in town. (“Who’s Magda?” demands Rayne, despite having been introduced just after the title card). She also takes the sexual-wiles approach to success, only smarter – honey-trapping a German officer and getting him off guard in a bar. He checks her for weapons with a very slow pat-down, and finds nothing… because she taped the gun under the table earlier on. When she pulls it, she takes him totally by surprise, backed up by first the bartender, who also has a gun, and then Nathaniel and the rest of La Resistance. This done, it’s revealed that she’s a world-class code-breaker who single-handedly cracked Enigma. And then, she pours herself a quick victory drink before taking the lead on the interrogation.

And Rayne? Rayne just stands awkwardly behind her, like a Halloween party reject.

“Looks like you got things tied up,” Rayne admits, shuffling out in the street. The movie takes pity on her by giving her a couple of random vampires in a smoke filled street to take care of on her way home, but that’s a minor sop at best. And her humiliation is far from over.

Cue a quick dream sequence – obviously so, thanks to wibbly wobbly camera work and effects. Rayne stumbles through it, though it’s not clear exactly where she’s meant to be, with ominous music playing. You’d think that at the very least, she’d be in prowling huntress mode here, independent and dangerous – a functionally immortal 200 year old warrior ready for anything.

“Nathaniel!” she shouts nervously. “Nathaniel!”

Of course. But she’s out of luck. Instead of Nathaniel, she finds that she can’t even kick ass in her own dreams, as a leather clad vampire Hitler… repeat… a leather clad vampire Hitler… shows up to treat her to a curb-stomp battle, hurl her around and drain her. She wakes, sitting bolt upright and actually shrieking. Bow before the mighty dhampir! Truly, she deserved three movies of her own!

'My perfume? Competence, by Calvin Klein.'

Now things just get sad. The Commandant tracks down the Lieutenant and drains him, turning him into another half-blooded vampire type. For some reason, he emerges from the process as more of a sniffer dog vamp, and is sent to track down Rayne so that the Commandant can get his hands on all of her blood and make an army just like himself. This turns out to be more than a little pointless, as Nathaniel doesn’t just beat him to it, but does so saying “Don’t have to be a bloodhound to find you…”

(I’ll bet. She’s been to bed several times now, but still not actually changed her clothes.)

Rayne and Nathaniel take advantage of the calm before the storm to reinforce the illusion that they actually belong together. Rayne takes a moment to rub his face in the fact that he just performed a cold-blooded execution during Magda’s sting operation, but then changes her mind and adds “He put himself in that situation as soon as he donned jackboots and fell into rack and file.”

“…donned?” asks Nathaniel, smirking.

“Yes. Donned,” Rayne repeats, crisply. “I’m considerably older than you, Nathaniel.”

“Yes. But still. Donned?”

Um. Two things. First – what’s wrong with the word ‘donned?’ We use that today. It’s not as if she suddenly started speaking in ye olde English, or began scheming to infiltrate the villains’ demesne to rescue prisoners from their oubliette. Second, with the amount of stupid in this movie, should it really be highlighting that the supposedly French, German, Polish and other characters are all not simply speaking in English for our benefit, but now canonically speaking in English? Just saying…

The romantic meeting is broken up by the rest of La Resistance, with the Lieutenant in hot pursuit. For the second time, Rayne completely forgets having been introduced to one of Nathaniel’s team, Vasyl, despite having worked with them for at least a couple of days, and has to be reminded who he is. Then, it’s fighting-time, and finally she gets to show off what she can do. It’s Rayne vs the Lieutenant, two vampires locked in mortal combat, fighting with super reflexes, experience and…

…ha ha, no. Vasyl leaps up and beats the shit out of him with a crowbar instead.

Well, that's reasonably disgusting. Not sure it's 18-rated level disgusting, mind.

The Lieutenant quickly breaks under the weight of Rayne shouting and wobbling her chest at him, and tells the group that the Commandant have already gone after Magda for her code-breaking abilities. Nathaniel promptly goes ballistic. “If they’ve got Magda, they’ve got everything!” he screams. “They’ve got Allied troop positions, they’ve got safe-houses-”

Wait. How have they got these things? Why would she be cracking Allied codes? For that matter, why is La Resistance set up so that one person would have all of this information. Isn’t that why these things are usually split into cells, in case of things like… say… capture or torture, or being turned into a vampire by an evil nameless Commandant? Planning, sir! I know you’ve been hanging around Rayne for quite a while now, but you mustn’t let her tactical thinking rub off on you like this.

'I am going to tickle you mercilessly now. But if anyone asks, tell them it was something more... manly.'

In a secret lair that it takes the good guys about five picoseconds to find, the Commandant has Magda tied up and blindfolded, awaiting interrogation. Even helpless and restrained, she still manages to have more dignity and defiance than Rayne usually manages with two giant swords in her hands, but it’s all for nothing. The Commandant drains her, and when La Resistance shows up, it’s to a trap. Oddly, though, it’s not the trap that would actually make sense. They find the vamped up Magda still bound and tied for no apparent reason, but she can’t even hold back her fangs for even as long as it takes to cut her down, never mind take any of them out. Rayne stakes her, and then the group spends ages searching the entire building without finding anyone… until Rayne makes the mistake of actually pointing this out, at which point the Commandant and a whole battalion of Nazi soldiers magically teleport in behind them.

They choose a poor place for the trap though, giving La Resistance plenty of cover. Not having any ranged weapons of her own, Rayne stumbles around in the middle of the fight, occasionally punching someone, before climbing up to a catwalk high above the battle where she fights a couple of vampires one-on-one. Not mentioned is the fact that she defeats them by flipping them over the edge, so technically all she’s accomplishing is raining down vampire death on her own allies.

“Shoot the windows!” she finally shouts, her 200 years of vampire hunting finally reminding her about the whole vampire/sun feud, though once again, it’s technically La Resistance that saves the day.

But then! Through the magic of off-screen teleportation!

OMGHAX!!!

Dr. Clint and the Commandant hang Rayne upside down, draining her blood and occasionally using her as a punchbag. Being generous villains, they’re nice enough to let her keep her sexy uniform during all this, as well as explain their plan to “infuse our Fuhrer with your blood!” Here’s where if you’re paying attention, you start noticing a bit of a problem with this storyline. Actually, several. First, as plans go, trying to introduce the unholy blood of a 200 year old vampire into the veins of a eugenics fiend seems like, if not a non-starter, then a relatively tricky sell – especially since it’s only been tried once before and not entirely successfully. Second, it’s not remotely clear why in a world where vampires are largely feral hunting types, the Commandant has retained his loyalty to Hitler to the point that he’s willing to do this plan instead of, to take a purely hypothetical example, try and conquer the world himself.

Third… well, we’ll get to that in due course…

Okay, you're totally not getting the vampire thing here.

First, we have the stupidest scene in the movie, barely 15 minutes from the end. The Commandant loads Rayne and Nathaniel into a truck, in the middle of a convey, to take them to Berlin. He assigns… wait for it… no guards. None. He doesn’t shackle them. He doesn’t tie them down. He doesn’t have anyone watching them. He puts the leader of La Resistance – it’s suggested the entire La Resistance – into the back of a truck with a supposedly super-powerful dhampir, and just gets on with his day.

Rayne is unconscious after being drained and beaten, but Nathaniel is absolutely fine. He glances around a bit as the truck drives, and then after an entire movie of somehow managing to not even glance away from her eyes in conversation, casually lets his fingers run across her stomach… and then up a little higher… and actually lifts up a cup of her corset for a quick peek. Sleeping Booby wakes instantly and goes for his throat, before deciding… oh… what the hell? The two start kissing, then ripping their clothes off and banging each others’ brains out, with Rayne getting squished up against a window.

And yes, in case you needed to ask, Nathaniel is indeed the more dominant of the two.

It's not that Boll didn't put competent female characters in the movie. He just didn't make Rayne one of them.

Between shots, the remains of La Resistance… who apparently aren’t all dead, work out a plan to stop the convoy before the inevitable ‘the pass’, though timing spares them the sight of their leader and his undead girlfriend’s naughty bits zipping past their faces at 30mph. As in the brothel earlier, they both get dressed just in time for the attack, which sends the convoy crashing off the road. Gunfire erupts. Rayne and Nathaniel escape from the truck by… uh… opening the door – yes, it wasn’t even locked – and join the fray. Dr. Clint is taken out with a sniper shot, while Rayne arms herself with knives.

The Commandant watches this and decides he’s had enough. He grabs a vial of Rayne’s blood and drinks it down in one go, and now it is on! How can Rayne possibly go up against a villain dosed with an alcopop sized charge of her blood and oh wait she has an entire body of the stuff as well as two hundred years more experience using it. It’s almost like this plot makes no sense…

For some reason, the Commandant reacts to it anyway, getting a bit black-veined and over-enthusiastically yelling “I AM POWER INCARNATE!” Nathaniel stabs him in the back with a knife, but he’s now officially the End of Movie Boss, so it only knocks off a few HP. Rayne gives it her best, and in a stunning change of fortunes… gets shaken around like a doll, smashed into the side of the truck, and dropped to her knees in a couple of seconds by her hulked out childe.

Then, she gets up, kicks him to the floor and drops a rock on his head. Splat.

Believe it or not, it’s even more abrupt than it sounds.

Well, at least she doesn't have to worry about staining her outfit.

And that’s BloodRayne 3, bar a quick coda about how much more work Rayne and Nathaniel still have in front of them, none of which will hopefully be coming to a DVD near you any time soon. It’s far from the worst game-to-movie conversion, but if you think that’s high praise, remember that Mortal Kombat is generally held up to be one of the better ones. It’s not exciting, the plot makes no sense, it’s not even an eighth as sexy as it thinks it is, and if you’re a fan of the BloodRayne character, this will do even more to turn you against her than the fact that her games weren’t that good. Really, they weren’t.

As for our friend Uwe Boll, In The Name Of The King 2 is coming relatively soon, but after that, no more game conversions have been announced. Long may this state of affairs continue.

Sitting on the floor of Benaroya Hall in Seattle, I’m depressed as hell. I’ve come to the Casual Connect Conference 2010 to hear the makers of casual and social games share their ideas, but in three days of lectures I haven’t heard a single idea about games.

Instead they’re talking about how designers don’t matter. They’re talking about how psychological tricks can turn their audience into zombies. They’re talking about how to use metrics to better monetise your mum. This isn’t just the industry’s business men and women talking, either; these are the people who actually make the games. At a point in history when a new and huge mainstream audience is trying computer games for the first time, our ambassadors aren’t interested in talking about how to make something fun.

The scene couldn’t have been more different three days earlier, just a few blocks away from Benaroya Hall at PopCap’s headquarters. They’ve been playing Risk with their office space for the past ten years, starting with just a couple of desks and expanding through their skyscraper in all directions. They showed me the workmen putting the finishing touches to their most recently conquered floor, where every wall is coated with IdeaPaint. It turns every surface into a whiteboard. Designers, programmers and artists will hole up inside each room for years – as long as it takes to make something great – and will literally cover the walls with game ideas.

Since 2000, PopCap have grown from three guys working from their homes to an employer of hundreds with offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Dublin and Shanghai. Along the way they’ve made some of the most successful and beloved games on the PC: from Bejeweled to Peggle to Plants vs Zombies.

I came to Seattle not to be depressed, but to speak to the founders and designers of PopCap. Who are they? What makes them tick? How did they get to be so huge, and where are they going? What is the secret behind this very silly company? Like so many great stories, it starts with a game of strip poker.

In 2000, John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka left their jobs at large online gaming companies to start their own. It wasn’t going well. The idea was to create browser games and make money from ads, but the dotcom bubble had burst and their first game was garnering complaints.

The game was Foxy Poker. “This is not in our corporate histories,” admits Jason Kapalka. “We thought, ‘We can do this thing, then we can sell it and take the money to do whatever.’ But we were still trying to do this advertising stuff where they wouldn’t allow nudity, so there was always some object interposed. There’s no actual nudity. We did get a lot of complaints because you had to play a long time to get to the final stage of undress, and when you did there were some vases and things.”

If strip poker seems an odd fit for PopCap, keep in mind that their company was called Sexy Action Cool. The name was taken from a Rolling Stone review quote for the movie Desperado: ‘Antonio Banderas is the ultimate in sexy action cool.’

PopCap’s history is filled with discarded names.

“It was a pretty good strip poker game,” says Jason, “But we found we didn’t really have the heart to deal with any of the porn companies because they were just too scummy. We abandoned our short-lived effort to be a company like that.”

Their first success came in the form of their next game: Diamond Mine. Today it’s called Bejeweled.

“I’d seen a game that used some similar rulesets to Bejeweled,” says John Vechey. “But there was no animation, no sound effects, and they had very indifferent rules. We simplified it and changed it and then I sent a link out, Brian did a version that was just circles, and then Jason added the gem graphics. So it was three days of boom, boom, boom. And then we had it.”

Is this just another case of a casual game developer making a derivative dollar? Sort of. Bejeweled certainly wasn’t the first of its kind, as John admits. The first match-three PC game seems to be Shariki, a 1994 DOS game by a Russian programmer called Eugene Alemzhin. On top of that core concept, Bejeweled added a timer and bonus points, but PopCap’s largest contribution was polish. Even in its most basic version, Bejeweled is testament to the human mind’s ability to be endlessly entertained by things that tinkle.

Struggling to make their advertising model work in the short-term, they tried to sell Bejeweled outright for $60,000 to EA. EA said it wasn’t even really a game. They turned to MSN Games, offering it for $30,000. Microsoft said no.

But they had a different idea. “Microsoft said they would do a licensing fee for $1,500 dollars a month,” says John. “We had two games at the time, we had Bejeweled and our second game, Alchemy. $1,500 a month times two is $3,000 a month. If we get about ten of these we’re actually OK, right? And our third game we licensed exclusively for $10,000 a month.”

Licensing instead of selling the game outright meant that they weren’t losing complete control. While Diamond Mine appeared on the MSN Games portal, they could also put it on their own site. The founders realised they needed a more public face, and that meant a company name that better matched their intended audience. They settled on the lid to a bottle of soda: a pop cap. PopCap was officially born.

“We ended up not being a great business, but for three guys it was OK. But then Bejeweled experienced disproportionate success to any money we were making, I think it was getting 50-60,000 peak users during the day. A lot of people were playing it, and it took a while for us to find the financial success behind that.”

They found it by offering a premium version of the game. You could play Bejeweled for free at any number of online portals – you still can, even sometimes still named Diamond Mine – but if you liked it, you could grab a downloadable version. After an hour’s trial, you could pay $20 to unlock it.

“Now we were making $30-40,000 a month just from that one downloadable version on our website,” says John. It provided stability for the company.

Rather than trying to build on that stability and grow the company, the founders were more concerned with having and making fun.

“Brian and I moved to Argentina for a couple months,” says John. “We were making money and we wanted to learn Spanish, and they had good steak and wine and we could work there.” At the time, PopCap still didn’t have an office. The three of them worked from home.

“We were having fun. We were making games. We’d spend four days playing Counter-Strike,” says John. “Well, Brian and I would spend four days playing Counter-Strike and lie to Jason. We’d tell him what we were working on was really hard. He didn’t understand technology at the time.”

Given such humble origins, it’s important to put the game’s success into perspective. Bejeweled has now sold over 25 million copies, and the series as a whole – which includes Bejeweled 2, Bejeweled Twist and Bejeweled Blitz – has sold over 50 million. It is a gaming juggernaut.

When their first office opened in 2002, they focused on hiring artists and other game designers. “We didn’t want to be anything more than a game developer. That was really the focus,” says John. They contracted George Fan – who would later make Plants vs Zombies – as employee number five. Sukhbir Sidhu, the designer of Peggle, was employee number eight.

“The first conversation I had with Jason when I talked about coming to work for PopCap, we talked about the kinds of games they wanted to make,” says Sukhbir. “I actually mentioned pachinko at that time.”

Pachinko is a Japanese sensation. The player fires a ball up into the machine as in pinball, and the ball then cascades back down, striking dozens of small pegs as it falls. There are no flippers to send it back up, but if it falls in certain pockets at the bottom, it triggers a jackpot that drops more balls. The balls that are won are then exchanged for tokens that can be traded for prizes.

Sukhbir had played a Godzilla pachinko machine that Jason had in his apartment in San Francisco. “It was really mesmerising and I couldn’t believe how fun it was. That experience always stayed with me,” says Sukhbir.

“The problem was it was all luck. The fun in pachinko is the gambling aspect of it – the thrill of it – even though it’s mesmerising it’s hard to get that same feeling in a game.”

We’ve covered the Heavy, Medic, Sniper, Scout and Soldier. Today’s lesson is in Team Fortress 2′s most unusual class, the elusive Spy.

Getting Started

Silent. Deadly. Mocking. If there’s a class whose role in TF2 is slightly fuzzy, it’s the Spy. He’s physically one of the weaker classes, but has a one-hit kill, can disguise as the enemy team and can turn invisible. He’s technically a support class, alongside the Medic and Sniper, but in the wibbly world of TF2 classes, I’ve no idea if what you do could be classed as support.

As a Spy, you need to be where your team isn’t and where the enemy is. The Spy’s Knife is one hit-kill, but only from the back. The Invisibility Watch and the Disguise Kit are how to get into the correct position to take advantage.

An unseen Spy is still pretty vulnerable. His invisibility cloak is constantly ticking down, he can’t shoot, when he bumps into an enemy or he gets hurt he’s briefly visible and when he cloaks and uncloaks there’s a noise and a period where you can be seen but not attack. So why do it? Because there are places to hide: invisibility is about placement, using it to get behind enemy lines is necessary. And it’s fun.

You can boost the cloak’s duration by collecting ammo, so a good player will know where those dumps are before making any kind of move. Stay off to the side and check doorways before stepping through. Most people run a path of least resistance to where they want to be, so skulking in the shadows will mean you’re unlikely to be nudged.

The disguise kit is for when you want to get out of the shadows. It allows you to approach enemies and engineer nests without being instantly recognised, although it has its vulnerabilities. A Pyro will be able to light you up, and when you do attack it drops the disguise. Timing is critical when in the disguise: attack when you’re part of a large push towards your own team, so people will be focussed on your team. Aim for Medics about to drop Ubercharges, then Heavies, Soldiers and Demos.

The third element of the vanilla Spy is the Sapper. This device is used to disable and ultimately destroy the enemy Engineer’s buildings. Unlike the other weapons, dropping a Sapper while disguised won’t drop the disguise. An Engineer can knock off the Sapper, but you can spam it by holding down the fire button. Running around the building as you do leaves the Engi in two minds: if he tries for the Sapper, you could stab him. If he goes for you, you might lose your life but he might lose his build. It’s no good doing this in isolation, though. Ensuring you’re backed up by Demos, Heavies and Soldiers pretty much guarantees destruction.

Don’t forget the Revolver: it’s a valuable tool for sniping sapped buildings, and helping you escape when your disguise drops. It’s a slow firing gun, but as long as you’re accurate you’ll be able to make most people think twice about pursuing you.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Spy

The Spy’s greatest tool is his situational awareness. I’d aim for the Cloak and Dagger to be your first unlock: it’s a replacement for the watch that drains the cloak on movement, and replenishes it while standing still. It drains more quickly than the standard cloak, and you can’t use ammo to replenish it.

But if you’re still you’re invisible, so it lets you watch how fights play out. I use it to take stock of the enemy movement, watching out for their building placements, looking for any particularly insistent Spy checkers. Just watching where people tend to be, gives you a good idea of where you shouldn’t be.

Is the Spy Bundle worth buying?

If you want a hat, the Fancy Fedora is worth owning at 49p but both The Ambassador and Dead Ringer are probably best left until you’re more comfortable in the Spy’s skin.

How To Help a Spy

Don’t stand anywhere near him. He’s a vulnerable target, and I’ve had a huge number of deaths occur thanks to people drawing fire into my cloaked body. Also, follow through on his sapping. Quite often if he’s sapped an enemy Engi’s equipment, he’ll have died in the process from a wrench to the skull. Don’t let his death be in vain.

How to fight a Spy

Spychecking is a skill the Pyros are best suited to. Flame corners and protect ubercharging Medics – they’re often the target.

We’ve covered the Heavy, Medic, Sniper and Scout. Today’s lesson is in the most versatile class in the game: The Soldier.

Getting started

As a Soldier, you’re defined by your rocket launcher. It can hold four rockets at once, and fire them out in reasonably quick succession to damage and knock enemies around. Its true strength is that each rocket does splash damage – it hurts everything near where it hits. That makes it a phenomenal damage dealer against tight groups of enemies, and it also means it’s hard to miss at close range.

The trick, of course, is to aim at the ground: you want to hit your opponent’s feet, so that if they’ve moved by the time your rocket hits, they’ll still get caught in the blast when the rocket hits the ground.

It’s actually pretty hard to hit a specific point on the ground in front of you, because the low angle means one or two degrees inaccuracy can translate to several metres’ difference. You’ll have a much easier time hitting enemies if you’re above them: when you’re looking down, your angle of attack is steeper, which means you can afford to be a few degrees off and still hit the right spot.

How do you get above your enemy? It’ll sound stupid, but if you can’t manoeuvre to higher ground, you can always just jump. Try it against some Easy bots in Offline Practice mode: jump, aim at your opponent’s feet, and fire. It becomes instinctive very quickly. It also makes it harder for Snipers to hit you, and since you have a lot of health, they’re one of your biggest threats.

Rockets are easy to dodge, and do less damage, at long range. And it’s not a great idea to fire them when an enemy’s point blank, since the splash damage can hurt you too. So you’re king of the close- to mid-range fight. When an enemy’s too close, switch to your shotgun. When they’re too far, reload: any time you have less than four rockets in your launcher, you should be shoving some more in.

Lastly, you can use your rocket launcher to jump ridiculous heights. Look directly at your feet, then do the following, in this order:

• Jump
• Hold duck
• Fire

 
You’ll know when you’ve done it right: the boost you get is enormous, and you don’t take that much damage from the blast. If you do it whilst running forwards, you can soar over barriers or up to high vantage points. Once you learn the maps a bit, you’ll get a sense for where the medkits are. Any high ground with a medkit is worth rocket jumping to, because you’ll repair the modest damage right away.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Soldier

The best weapon for the Soldier depends on your own skill set. If you’re a precision player with excellent mouse skills and judgement, you want the Direct Hit. It’s a rocket launcher that does much more damage, its rockets travel much faster, but the splash damage radius is much smaller. So if you hit an opponent directly or the ground beneath them, you do much more damage. But if you miss even a little, you’re useless. You can unlock the Direct Hit by getting 10 Soldier achievements, or buying it for £0.29 in the in-game store.

If you’re less dexterous than that, you can still be a great Soldier. The Black Box is the weapon for you: it can only hold 3 rockets at a time, but every time you deal damage to an opponent, you gain 15 health. 15 health isn’t much on its own, but it’s so easy to glance someone with the generous splash damage of the rocket launcher that you’ll be gaining that every few seconds. It makes you almost impossible to kill by attrition: only massive doses of damage like Sniper headshots, Spy backstabs and close-range Heavies can really take you out. You can’t unlock it with achievements, but it only costs £0.49 in the store.

Is the Soldier Starter Bundle worth buying?

To be honest, not really. Unless you want the viking hat. The two items it gives you are the Equaliser and the Buff Banner. Both are excellent, and go particularly well with the Black Box. But you can earn the Equaliser easily for just getting 5 achievements as a Soldier, something you’ll inevitably do before you’re ready to mess around with alternate weapons. And while the Buff Banner is harder to earn (15 achievements), it’s only £0.29p in the store. The bundle is £0.49, so I’ve just spent an entire paragraph on how to save 20p/30c.

Once you have both, you become an amazing Soldier. The Equaliser is the best weapon idea Valve ever stole from me: a melee weapon that makes you run faster and do more damage when you’re low on health. When you get hurt, switch to it, and run away. By all means hit someone with it in an emergency, but its main use is making you as fast as a Scout when you need to run for a health pack.

The Buff Banner gives you a Rage meter, filled by dealing damage. When it’s full, you can switch to it (same slot as the shotgun) and press fire to blow a bugle. As well as being funny, this makes you and everyone around you deal lots more damage for 10 seconds – a huge advantage.

It means you’re much more effective if you live for a long time – something both the Black Box and the Equaliser really help with. Play cautiously, stick with your team mates and just keep pelting enemies with rockets. Never risk your life to close in for the kill: if they’re weak, your team can finish them off, and you’re much more useful alive.

How to help a Soldier

Obviously if you’re a Medic, topping up their health is much appreciated. They generally don’t need you as a devoted life partner as badly as a Heavy does, but a pair of Soldiers with a Medic keeping an eye on them is an almost unstoppable force.

As the other classes, pay attention to when your Soldiers are reloading: when they’re out of rockets, it’s really helpful if you can put pressure on the enemy and keep them occupied. Often you’ll be rewarded with a surprisingly easy kill: if a Soldier’s fired all his rockets, someone’s probably on death’s door.

How to fight a Soldier

Since Soldiers are always trying to shoot your feet, jumping a lot helps. In general, don’t engage them at medium range unless you’re sure you can heap a lot of damage on them at once. If you can’t, keep your distance: their rockets are easy to dodge and low-damage at long range.

If you come face-to-face with one and can’t get away, try doing the opposite: get in their face. They’ll usually rocket you point-blank, seriously hurting or killing themselves. If they switch to their shotgun, just back off: they’re not going to kill you quickly with that.

Click through for epic accommodation, pixel art and more.

Be sure to click to enlarge and get the full impact of the image.

1. Stately Terraria Manor

My Terraria house is a functional tower of brick built mainly to keep the guide from letting zombies in at night, but Epionx has gone just a little bit further. This elaborate castle includes a dining room, a library and a huge bridge leading up to the entrance. Swanky.

2. ‘Mage Tower’

What I like about Hyp_kitsune‘s ‘Mage Tower’ is the simplicity. There are more impressive constructions, but this one didn’t require mining the dungeons of three worlds and beating the game several times over. He used simple, widely available materials and still makes something that looks great. It just goes to show that anyone can create cool stuff in Terraria, not just the hardcore fans.

3. Mario vs Bowser

One of the great strengths of Terraria’s 2D, blocky construction is that it lends itself to a kind of pixel art Jorrd ran with concept and created a retro game scene. This one depicts someone called ‘Mario’ who, as loyal PC gamers, we have obviously never heard of.

4. Kingdom Hearts

Lantistos is a true master at building things to an epic scale. This Kingdom Hearts sculpture is not only truly massive in scope, but also impeccable in detail. The use of rear and side walls to simulate shading is fantastically clever. Click through for the full thing.

5. Biodome

TauQuebb‘s Biodome is a masterpiece of Terraria house design. The glass dome encloses an internal forest, while a lava moat below ground keeps the earthworms at bay. The best part though is that each each NPC has a personalised room. The Dryad’s sports a plant filled lair while the Nurse’s infirmary is filled with bottles and beds for patients. That’s real attention to detail.

6. Stop Motion Snake

I’ve always known that there are some people out there who can do amazing things with a bit of video editing and a creative game. This video has to be one of the coolest I’ve ever seen come out of Terraria. It brings back fond memories of playing around with my old Nokia 3210 in High School and spending more time playing Snake than listening to what the teachers had to say in class.

7. Biome Castle

Sometimes you just have to respect the sheer size of a building project, and Evilrazzberi09‘s Biome Castle is truly exceptional in scale. The castle is constructed to encompass as many of Terraria’s different Biomes as possible. If you look closely you can see green, pink and blue dungeon bricks have been used in it’s construction, meaning Evilrazzberi09 has made it to the end dungeon of three different worlds in order to build this project, a truly dedicated builder.

8. The Vault

The Vault, created by Meal Ticket is absolutely the last word in Terraria storage. This mammoth construction contains clearly designated storage space for every commodity found in the game, along with mushroom and plant farms and even an obsidian generator. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and what’s more you can download it yourself and use it as a storage space for your own characters.

9. Terraria City

While most people build one giant house for their NPCs, Rho decided to go a in a different direction entirely. He’s built a small town of individual red brick houses, with bedrooms, dining rooms, balconies and cobweb strewn attics. Others house the NPCs above the ground floor so that they stay put, but Rho has created a place where NPCs happily wander to and fro, popping into each others houses whenever they feel like it. After all the huge intricate towers, there’s something charming about this quaint little village.

10. Protoman

Update – It’s Protoman, of course. Sorry guys.

While some embrace the blocky nature of Terraria art Kurobei went a different route. Minimising the effect by making his statue of Protoman utterly massive. How big is it? It’s so big the sun only comes up to his shoulder. It’s so big you’ll need to click the image to see the full thing, but trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

Find more fantastic creations at Reddit Terraria or The Terraria Forums.

If you’re new to the game, why not check out our beginner’s guide and for those of you who want to experiment a bit more, check out our list of top mods and tweaks. Or see if you can do something similar on our Terraria servers.

What about you readers? What have you made? Or have you spotted anything else worthy of inclusion?

We’ve covered the Heavy, Medic and Sniper. Now it’s time for the game’s ultimate asshole: The Scout.

Getting started

You’re fast, you’re violent, and you get shit done. Don’t let anyone tell you the Scout is weak – he’s a ferocious combat class when you use him well.

The first thing to understand is that you can double-jump: hit jump again any time you’re mid-air, and you’ll leap as if from an invisible platform. Combined with your ridiculous speed, this lets you get to perches no other class can reach without hurting themselves.

Just as importantly, it saves you from fall damage: any time you throw yourself recklessly off a high capture point, just hit jump before you touch the ground and you’ll lose all your downward velocity without taking any damage. For that reason, don’t use it needlessly: it’s handy to have a double-jump ready for if you’re knocked into a chasm or off a dangerous height.

The other special rule for the Scout is that he captures objectives twice as fast as the other classes. Exploit this. Capturing on Control Point maps is vital to your team, and gets you lots of points. On Payload maps, standing near the cart makes it move as fast as if two people were on it. You get things done.

Your style, though, should always be tricksy. Never run directly at a combat class like a Heavy if they’re facing you and ready to fire. You don’t have to – you’re so goddamn fast no-one can chase you if you run off and take an alternate route. Get deep behind enemy lines, so you’ll always be coming from angles they don’t expect. Engage enemies from behind, or when they’re busy fighting someone else, or best of all: both.

You get a massive damage bonus for firing at extreme close range with your Scattergun. Since you’re also usually attacking from an unexpected angle, it’s a good idea not to fire at all until you’re physically touching the enemy. Almost nothing can survive two point-blank blasts from your weapon, and almost no-one who’s distracted can find and kill you before you can get those two shots off.

You’re slow to reload a full clip, though, so don’t waste shots randomly: fire when you’re sure you’ll hit. If you find you’re missing a lot, try the bat for a while: it’s faster to hit with than any other class’s melee weapon, so you can just hold down fire while circling your opponent and beating them. You’ll be amazed how effective that can be.

Last point: run around the map and look for medkits. When you know where these are, you become incredibly hard to kill: you’re so fast that you can leave any engagement as soon as you’re hurt, and get to a medkit before anyone can finish you off.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Scout

The Force-A-Nature is a hell of a thing. It’s a replacement for your Scattergun that does more damage and knocks both you and your victim back. Miles. It can only hold two shells, but it can fire them in even more rapid succession and is quick to reload.

The upshot is that is that in the 0.4 seconds it takes a surprised enemy to react to you getting up in his face, the Force A Nature can get both shots off and inflict 226 damage, where the normal Scattergun would only do 105. Since 8 of the 9 classes have more than 105 health and less than 226, that’s a pretty important difference.

Even if it’s a Heavy you’re blasting, the knockback will send him so far away that you can escape before his gun can cut you down. You can even use the gun to triple-jump, by firing it downwards any time you’re in mid-air.

Bonk is the other essential. It’s a drink that replaces your pistol – quaff it, and you’re invincible for 6 seconds. You can’t attack during this time, but it’s just long enough to get you past Sentries, which are usually the one thing on the battlefield you can’t do anything about. Once you’re behind the enemy lines, it’s hilarious to ambush them when they come out of their spawn.

Is the Scout Starter Bundle worth buying?

Yep. You get the Force-A-Nature and the Sandman, a bat that can stun people by hitting a baseball at them. It’s only £0.49p. Unfortunately you don’t get Bonk, but you do get another drink: Crit-A-Cola. It amplifies all the damage you deal and take for a short while: good for making that first shot count, but horrible once the enemy spots you.

The hat you get is pretty naff.

How to help a Scout

Keep enemies busy. Even if you can’t win a fight, it’s valuable to ambush classes like the Scout if you just fire a few shots off at them then hide again. They’ll concentrate on you, and the Scouts on your team can get the jump on them.

How to fight a Scout

Most classes can kill a Scout if he’s running straight for them – get into a corner or tight corridor so the Scout only has one direction to come at you. That way all your shots will probably hit, which is usually more damage than a Scout can afford to take. If you’re still having trouble hitting them, switch to melee and swipe constantly – Scouts find it hard to resist getting close.

Nitro Family, or to give it its true name, NITRO FAMILY!, is one of Those games. You know the ones. They’re the games you play on demo discs or similar, just the once, from some budget label or obscure shareware company, instantly quit out of because they’re crap, and uninstall, never to think of again. Except! Years later, you’re in the bath or walking through town when suddenly you think “Wait, did that actually exist, or did I just dream it?” It seems like a distant dream. Surely, no game that bizarre, that strange, that… that stupid could ever really have existed, right? I’m almost sure that NITRO FAMILY! did though, even if after several hours of playing it, I still feel the need to go back and check.

I just checked. Yep, NITRO FAMILY! exists, and in a nutshell, it’s Serious Sam, only METAL.

Too bad that metal is shititanium.

Aw. Always good to see a minion enjoying his work.

Many years ago, subliminal advertising was a huge deal. It never actually worked, but the idea of it mentally reprogramming people to obey like sheep was enough to get the world into a tizzy, just as instructed by the media. A couple of games were caught up in this too, notably a puzzler called Endorfun, which angered the tabloids by slipping messages like “You Are A Good Person” onto their screen in the name of subliminally raising their spirits. Those bastards! NITRO FAMILY! doesn’t feature any such form of mental-nudging, but I think it probably should. Nothing major. Just quick messages. “YOU ARE NOT INSANE” would be a good one. Or “YOU ARE NOT DREAMING”, perhaps.

The plot is best summed up by the fact that the manual’s explanation starts with “Um… maybe the near future” before going on to explain every major plot point in the whole game. (Two. It explains two plot points.) An evil company called Golden Bell has made a drug called Healthy Family, which accidentally turned into the Rage virus and took over the whole world. Its CEO, Louis, following instructions in that classic evil executive tome ’7 Habits of Highly Successful Douchebags’ (authors A. Wesker, C. Goldman), promptly decided that if life gives you lemons, you make ZOMBIES, and set about working on a brand new, improved version. For some reason – direct quote from the story there – this requires experimenting on children. Which brings us to our heroes, the NITRO FAMILY! itself, whose son has just been declared Most Unwise Kidnapping Victim Of The Year, Whichever The Hell One It Is.

See if you can guess how they react. Go on, guess. (Hint: It involves the kicking of so many asses that the toes on their feet all turn into calloused hell-stumps, then more ass-kicking with the stumps.)

I *think* this is probably racist, but honestly I'm way too confused to be sure.

Here’s where it gets strange. You play as Victor Chopski… yes, really… a hulked out man-mountain capable of dual-wielding rocket launchers, shotguns and machine-guns, with a backpack of even more powerful guns. This bit is as normal as NITRO FAMILY! ever gets, with the cool twist that you can cycle through both hands individually. Shotgun in left, rocket launcher in right? No problem. Two of the same? Rock on. But wait! Dual-wielding is for sissies. Chopski is a MAN. He triple-wields.

And his third active weapon? His wife. His equally badass, whip-wielding, scantily clad, Las Vegas animal trainer slash showgirl huntress wife, Maria. Who rides on his back in a specially constructed chair for the entire game, whipping the heads off anyone who gets too close. And whenever she takes a head, you get a ‘Turtleneck’ bonus. Whose heads does she whip off? Please. Fat women in tight black latex, evil Mexicans riding death pigs, machine-gun toting men in black… whose heads doesn’t she whip off? By the end of the game, when you’re fighting topless Vegas showgirls who throw knives from trapezes and do the Chicken Dance for an empty auditorium, it just doesn’t matter any more.

Did I mention you can also launch her off your back, at which point she carpet-bombs the entire area before flying back and resuming death and discipline alike? I didn’t? Well, she does that too.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the NITRO FAMILY! in action…

(Quick disclosure – God Mode is on here, mostly for annoying technical reasons involving frame rates and wanting to show the whole first level without any quickloading or similar interrupting things. In the real game, you die incredibly quickly, often through absolutely no fault of your own. Unless you count willingly playing this game, which is crime and punishment wrapped up into one neat little bundle…)

Well, wasn’t that something? It’s often said that the devil is in the details, but NITRO FAMILY! takes it to such lengths, you half expect to see Satan listed as the Executive Producer. Sadistic doesn’t begin to describe it, from the strength of the enemies compared to yourself to the map designers’ apparent phobia of health kits. Take damage here, and it’s going to be with you for a long time. You take damage from your own rockets, hits come from behind, enemies bounce you around like a pinball, and that’s before you get to the stuff that’s actively unfair, like being killed by nothing, not being able to progress without finding a hidden trigger, or in some later levels, not having the faintest clue where the hell you’re meant to be going. The final level, set in a casino hotel, is simply a joke. You’re trying to find a single elevator in a huge sprawling mess of psychotics, and bear in mind that this is a game where even angry chickens want a piece of you. You know what this is? Not Fun. Nor is the headache afterwards.

And that was the end of Saxton Hale.

And then there’s… the music. If listening to that loop for eleven minutes was painful, imagine playing through the game again and again and again, forcing your way through the monsters in even this first level. Every death, the music restarts. Every few seconds, the music restarts. And when you finally finish, when you think you’re finally free, you get to the second map… and the ****ing thing starts playing again! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! KILL ME! KILL ME! KILL ME! PLEASE!

(Thankfully, yes, it does change after that. Small mercy, but I’ll take it…)

It’s a similar thing with the level list. One of the first things you see in the game is a map showing the areas you’re about to hit up – the town in two forms, a boat, and a laboratory. “Okay,” you think, “Short game, but the quicker the better.” Hahaha. No. Finish the lab and a whole new series of maps appears. And then another. And another. The NITRO FAMILY! travels all over the globe, from the port of Bloodivostok (yes, really) to Las Vegas, and the only possible reason to enjoy the trip is because you’ve come down with Stockholm Syndrome or really long to sample the delights of a spiked enema.

Or maybe it’s the allure of finally witnessing the mighty Chicken Dance…

Even when NITRO FAMILY! tries to cut you a break, it feels spiteful. One of the weirdest features is that epic fights sometimes snap into slow-mo, with the ghastly pop music fading away to be replaced by… for no good reason… something light and classical. In this, you can take aim at enemies while they mulch around in treacle, but more often than not it’s just annoying. You can’t trigger it yourself, so your rhythm is instantly thrown off, and more often than not it happens at the worst of times, like when all the enemies are dead, or you’re trying to run away instead of standing to fight. Hypothetically.

A sexy girl offering a 'special service' in her room? I hope it's use of the Corby trouser press. Creases suck.

Easily one of the weirdest bits though is Lisa, the hoochie-coochie arms merchant who shows up throughout the game to sell and upgrade weapons, but mostly to wiggle her hips at Victor. It’s not simply that she bounces around coquettishly and leads him on with talk of special services if he finds 20 cards scattered throughout the levels, but that she does so while his whip-wielding, blood-soaked, equally murderous wife is actually sitting on his back. I’m no expert, but this doesn’t strike me as the greatest evolutionary survival strategy. Honestly though, is this random fan-service really necessary? It’s not like anyone, at all, is likely to care about this stupid throwaway character who-

Oh, internet. Really? For this game? THIS? Shame on all 29 of you. Shame...

Actually finding 20 cards is a hell of an achievement, or would be if you couldn’t just type in a cheat code. I stress, this was purely for academic purposes – genuine curiosity about what the big reward actually was. “I will offer a very special service just for you,” she promises, right from the start. Finish tracking down the cards, and this bit of teasing changes to a scrap of paper with a hotel room number on it, which again, Victor here takes while his wife is still sitting on his back, flexing her whip. He may be the most deadly force in the universe, but a subtle adultery maestro, he is not.

What happens when you get to the hotel? Conveniently, the NITRO FAMILY! run into a keypad just by the exit, and Maria hops off Victor’s back to hack it. This gives him the time to amble down the corridor to Lisa’s room, where all that work, all that searching, and all that fully erect exploration literally explodes into the sexiest bit of sexy-time in the whole sordid history of sneaky sex! With sex!

Truly, this is the treasure all heroes ultimately fight for.

Wow, that would totally have been worth waiting the whole game for. Right? Right.

Two funny things about this scene. First. Despite all the traditional stock-footage coitus, Maria barely notices her husband’s absence, putting The Flash’s claim of being the Fastest Man Alive into serious jeopardy. Second, this happening right at the end of the game really puts a new spin on the ending, barely a few minutes later, which is an interactive thing about Victor walking through a village to deliver Maria a bouquet of flowers. Feeling guilty about something, Mr. Chopski? Hmm? Hmm?

Hi sweetie, I got these for your boobs. No, sorry, that was crude and inappropriate. They're for your breasts.

As cack-handed shooters go, NITRO FAMILY! does at least have some laughs on its side, intentional and otherwise. It wants to be funny with its fat giants gurning as they throw rocks. Really though, the funniest parts are round the side, where things just went wrong, like finding the bathrooms in the casino, where the urinals are on the women’s side, and neither actually have toilets, or the deeply inappropriate music choices. As the voice in the opening level screeches “WHAT HAVE I BECOME, WHAT HAVE I BECOOOOOOME!”, it’s hard not to hear a cry for help from some poor designer trapped creating budget shovelware. It only gets worse in the ending, as credits scroll over the odd lyric “Take something new and make it mine, I’m wasting money all the time, couldn’t stop if I wanted to…”

Besides, everyone knows that’s Team Bondi’s corporate anthem now.

There are definitely worse shooters than NITRO FAMILY!, though that’s not much for it to brag about. If you’re interested in trying it out, check your local bargain bin. Then slap yourself around the face with something heavy, sit back down, and wait for Serious Sam 3 to come out. Obviously.

We’ve covered the Heavy and the Medic Today the spotlight in on the Sniper. Australian killer for hire and thrower of his own urine.

Getting Started

The Sniper should be at the back of the team, slightly obscured by a stack of crates or lurking in the shadows, quietly taking out the rest of the enemy team with a steady stream of headshots. He’s the kind of efficient, calm, entirely stable mass-murderer you want behind you, rather than in-front of you. His starting sniper rifle does excellent damage when charged, but it takes a few moments to power-up. A fully-charged head-shot will kill every class, regardless of their current health.

Snipers, though, are extremely fragile. Not only do they have a minimal health-pool, they tend to get focused on peering down their scope, making them easy prey for spies, or other snipers. If they can close to range, a Sniper is easy pickings for nimble classes like the Pyro or Scout; their alternate machine gun is weak, only really useful for finishing off the wounded or infirm.

To zoom in with the Sniper’s rifle, click the right mouse button. The meter in the bottom left of the scope view shows how charged your next rifle shot will be. You’ll lose that charge if you fire, or if you unscope. While it’s tempting to wait until fully charged, if you’ve got a clear shot on the head of a stationary enemy, unless you’re absolutely sure he’s not going to move, it’s usually better to take the shot now, rather than waiting.

When you’re defending, the Sniper should be behind, or near to the capture point, with a clear view of both where the enemy will approach from, and the capture point. When attacking, the sniper should be, again, just behind the front line, supporting the other classes in their push.

While the Sniper is lots of fun to play, your team only needs a couple of them at most. If there are more than two Snipers on your team, think very carefully before switching the Sniper. You almost certainly don’t need any more. Snipers should also be very wary of being caught in a sniper-duel, or entirely focusing on kills to the detriment of helping your team. Just because you’re fragile, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t capture points when you spot the opportunity. Just because you fight from range, it doesn’t mean that you can’t throw yourself at the Payload map in the final seconds of a round. Remember that your kill count means nothing if the team doesn’t win.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Sniper

Jarate is a jar of piss that can be thrown at your enemies (in which case it will turn any damage done to them into mini-crits – a significant increase) or your friends (which will douse any flames). It will also ritually humiliate them. It’s basically brilliant, and a far more entertaining alternative to the Sniper’s boring sub-machine gun.

The Huntsman is a bow-and-arrow that replaces the sniper rifle. Huntsman arrows don’t hit instantly, unlike the rifle, and drop slightly in-flight, so it requires a slightly higher level of skill to hit with. Because of that, Huntsman snipers tend to fight closer to the front-lines, and fire head-level into crowds around a capture point or Kart, playing the law of averages, assuming that an arrow at head-height is likely to score a kill. While it’s arguable whether the Huntsman will make you a more effective Sniper, most of the PC Gamer team prefer it to the standard rifle, or any rifle alternatives. It’s awesome to kill with.

Is the Sniper Starter Bundle worth buying?

Definitely. It contains the jar of piss (Jarate) and a bow and arrow (the Huntsman). It’s the recipe for a very, very exciting evening’s entertainment.

How to help a Sniper

If a Sniper is scoped, he’s focused entirely on what’s at the end of his gun. He has no idea of what’s behind him, or to the side. He’s outrageously vulnerable to being backstabbed or flanked. Do everything you can to warn him of impending doom; shoot the baddie, or just tell the Sniper via voice-chat that he’s in danger. All it takes is a word, and he’ll thank you for it.

How to fight a Sniper

Fighting a Sniper at range is pointless; his rifle is more accurate, it hits instantly, and the damage it does has zero drop-off due to range.

In fact, you might not even need to fight him. The reality is that most Snipers aren’t very good, and miss far more often than they hit. Duck, weave and jump and they’ll almost certainly miss. And if they’ve missed once, they’re probably going to miss again.

So get in close, and fight them where they’re uncomfortable. Get a Pyro to harrass them, get a Spy to backstab them. They’ll become so frustrated that they’ll ragequit in disgust. Job done.

Previously we talked about the Heavy. Today the spotlight in on the Medic; a German Doctor of dubious medical ethics, and purveyor of the feared ‘ubercharge’.

Getting Started

The Medic is the lynchpin of the Team Fortress 2 team. He is the healer, quarterback, scrum half, and mid-field genius. He should be just behind the front-lines, healing the wounded, uber-charging the most valuable players, and directing the team to victory. Even if the Medic isn’t an effective combat soldier compared to his peers, make no mistake: Medics win matches.

The medic’s main weapon is his medigun. Firing it at a friendly player, or enemy spy, will heal him or her to their maximum health over a period of time. The healing that the medigun isn’t on a linear scale; heavily damaged troops will heal faster than those that just need topping off. You can also ‘overheal’ – taking a friend or enemy spy to 150% of their normal maximum health. That’s great for the start of rounds while everyone hangs around, waiting for the gates to open, or when you’re not directly in combat.

All of the mediguns have an overcharge secondary ability. As you heal, you’ll fill a meter at the bottom of your screen. When that meter is full, you can deploy an ubercharge or a kritzkrieg (depending on which gun is equipped). An ubercharge gives you and your target a brief window of invulnerability. It’s perfect for breaking down a tough siege or turret nest, or for pushing back against a relentless team of attackers. During an ubercharge, you and your target won’t count towards capturing a point; you’ll only start to count once the Uber wears off. You can tell an ubercharged player by the bright red or blue metallic skin. And their fiery eyes.

The question is; who do you uber? When you’re ubering to break through a specific point, it’s best to plan ahead and pick a class that you know can take down a group of sentries. Heavies at close to medium range, Pyros at extreme close range, or Soldiers and a pure explosive Demoman at any range are all decent targets, but talk about it before you deploy, either on voice chat or text-chat. There’s nothing more embarrasing to leap out with an uber, only to discover that your soldier doesn’t understand the goal, or the Heavy has run out of ammo.

You soon learn that your ubercharge is an extremely powerful weapon in the game, and learning to build and preserve that charge is one of the most vital skills to learn. Keeping yourself alive needs to your number priority; a medic with an 80% charge could win the game if his charge reaches 100%, or lose it if he dies. Stay alive, and stay aware of your current charge.

The Kritzkrieg and Quick Fix are alternate healing weapons, and each have a distinct overpower ability. The Kritkrieg gives the target a brief period of crits, while the Quick Fix boosts your healing power for a few moments. Many non-Medic players prefer and expect medics to have the ubercharge and don’t really know how to play to take advantage of the alternate powers, but you’ll develop your own style of healing in time. Playing on a regular server or within a regular group of friends should help in finding your own style.

The most valuable alternate weapons for the Medic

The melee weapon for the Medic is a simple bonesaw. Upgrade it as soon as possible to the Ubersaw – it will recharge your uber meter on every hit.

The secondary slot weapon is a syringe gun. Upgrade it to the Blutsauger, and every shot that connects will heal you for a small amount of health. Just be aware that the Blutsauger slightly drains your health when you’re using it. But as long as you’re hitting something, you’ll get that health back with significant interest.

Medic Starter Pack: worth paying for?

Absolutely: the Medic starter pack contains the Ubersaw and the Kritzkrieg. The Ubersaw is essentially a straight upgrade to the Medic. And you get a hat with a point on it. Winnar.

How to help a Medic

Don’t get hit, and stand in front of him. If a medic is healing you, don’t run too far ahead, or you’ll be out of range of his beam. Be considerate around medkits. A Medic can heal you, but he can’t heal himself. If you take the medkit, but leave your friendly medic hanging, you might cost the team an uber-cycle. Don’t assume that just because the Medic is healing you, and has 100% uber, you’re the main target. Talk to him/her, and call for the charge when you’re in a good position. Finally, turn on reload at all times in the advanced settings menu – that means you’re not going to be stuck with an empty weapon just as he triggers an uber.

Also note that if the other team is smart, he’ll be their first target. He’ll be the prime target for any cloaked or disguised spies, too. Spycheck regularly, and if you see a supicious friendly player hanging around a medic, kill him good. Remember that if the medic feels like he’s not got the protection he needs, he’ll ragequit. So be nice, and look after him.

How to fight a medic

In any situation, your first target is the Medic. Unless he’s dead, any damage you do can be quickly healed away. He’s actually pretty fragile and goes down quite quickly. Classes that can should splash damage from their rockets and grenades to whittle down their health, even if they can’t be sure of a direct kill.

If you see an ubered Medic paired with an offensive class charging forward, some classes can use skills and items to separate them. The medic will remain invincible, but their target will be open to attack. Pyros can airblast them apart using the alternate fire on the Flamethrower. Soldiers and Demomen can use rockets and explosives to blast them apart. Scouts with some of their alternate shotguns can push them back, while the Sandman can stun an ubered character. If you don’t have one of these abilities, hide.

Stay tuned for more guides for the rest of the TF2 classes!

But I didn’t always love e-sports. If I went back in time to exactly one year ago, found myself, and said “YOU WILL LOVE E-SPORTS IN A YEAR’S TIME!”, year-younger me would’ve scoffed in my face. I’ve been aware of e-sports for as long as I’ve been a PC gamer: I lived through the false dawns of the early 21st Century, the Sujoy Roys and the Jonathan Wendels coming so close to pushing the activity of pro-gaming into the spotlight, then falling short at some intangible hurdle. Time and again I was promised the rise of Quake, or Counter-Strike, or some other competitive game in the televised market; time and time again they failed to ignite among the wider gaming community.

I could well have reacted like Kotaku’s Jen Schiller did, when she repurposed an interview between Team Dignitas‘ David ‘Zaccubus‘ Treacy, and top-end PC hardware types Alienware. Her post treats e-sports as weird and unnatural: a vestigial limb on the wider gaming animal that we’d all do better to hide under a coat. She makes her feelings about pro-gaming clear:

“Don’t get me wrong, I love watching people who are better than me at video games play them for money, especially when I don’t know those people.

Oh wait. No I don’t.”

Jen penned another response, after seeing the reaction her original post dredged up from the e-sports community. Jen defends herself by claiming ignorance of the scene. A year ago, I could’ve claimed the same.

For me, that year’s length – and the month of July in particular – are key. StarCraft II came out on July the 27th, 2010. I bought a copy, installed it, and left it alone. I’d played the original’s single-player for a spell, and had become vaguely aware of a kind of mad, otherworldly pro-gaming industry that had built up around in off in South Korea. It sounded strange to my western ears, like those Japanese shows we see Youtube clips of where a man attaches himself to a bungee rope and tries to run at some meat. Why would they play StarCraft, of all games? Have they not heard of TF2?

I can’t remember what it was that called me to StarCraft II’s multiplayer – boredom, sirensong, my overtly competitive nature – but I’d built the mythical South Korean scene into a monstrous mass of talent, all ready to smash my tiny face off should I step into the online ring. Something weird happened. I won my first game. I won more. I lost lots, but I lost because I failed at completing an observable task. Here was a game I could demonstrably get better at.

And I did. Perhaps the defining moment in my attitude switch toward StarCraft II – from multiplayer timewaster to genuine practice – was my first foray into e-sports.

I began to watch other people play. People better than me, people playing videogames for money, people I didn’t know. I had no illusions that I’d ever join their ranks, but the sheer pleasure of nabbing tips and tricks that high-level players used, reappropriating them in my games, and watching myself get better was one that I couldn’t replicate.

That’s largely in part to the community. The old e-sports organism survived as contained cells – little pockets of internet that the general wanderer would come across, get bewildered by, then quietly close down. With years to get acquainted with their games, the news posts referred to mysterious tournaments, their forums dropped arcane terms like they were real human words. For the outsider, these places were scary. That was old e-sports.

In this space-year 2011, more new personalities have arisen in the world of competitive gaming than (I’d wager, not technically knowing) have ever before. In my personal StarCraft II sphere, we’ve got figureheads like Day[9] (who I had the pleasure to interview), djWHEAT, JP McDaniel, and commentators like Artosis, Tasteless, Husky and Diggity. League of Legends has a similar range of figures, people like Reginald from Solomid.net, Phreak, and FourCourtJester often allowing other players a window into their world by streaming their games. Even Street Fighter IV – with its focus on the coughspit consoles – has mini-celebs like Mike Ross and Gootecks pushing their infectious enthusiasm and hardcore knowledge.

E-sports is currently the healthiest it has ever been. There’s always the fear that these are famous last words, the things inscribed on the gravestone in two years time when the sponsorship deals dry up, but I’ve been to the future and I can tell you that’s incorrect. Here, I brought back facts to back me up.

Fact one! We’re currently blessed with a set of triple-A quality games that at an early stage in development set out to be sports. These games – with StarCraft II, League of Legends, and Street Fighter IV leading the charge – were tested to the ninth plane of hell, and came back near-perfectly balanced (quiet with the “imba!” chatter). Previous e-sports darlings weren’t. Counter-Strike was a great mod that got lucky. Blizzard never knew StarCraft would explode in the east like it did. And Quake III – while it has the best claim – didn’t benefit from the on-the-fly game adjustments today’s internet connections allow.

Fact the second. Most previous pro-gaming titles were shooters; modern heroes aren’t. It’s incredibly hard to present footage of a classic team deathmatch game. As the observer, you’re either tied to a player, or stuck floating around the map like a flustered ghost, late to the action. Recent pro-gaming vehicles are strategy or fighting games: much easier to watch from a detached, overhead view while still receiving all pertinent information.

Third fact. Current e-sports are bright, colourful, and surprisingly easy to read. Take StarCraft II as an example: common sense says ten men kill five men when they’ve both got the same guns. A child could make the connection, and see why one player is doing notably better than the other. A particularly alert dog probably could. There is, of course, infinite layers of nuance behind each unit, action, and decision – but for the basics you don’t need a rulebook. Man shoot, other man fall down, everyone cheer. Yay!

The Kotaku article references a downturn in e-sports. Zaccubus – who I’ve had the pleasure to get absolutely robo-pwned by – has a history in professional shooters. This corner of the market was propped up by pro-gaming behemoths Counter-Strike and Quake III: both of which are now well over a decade old. A mild lull, while players get reacquainted with new games, set their talents loose on similar mechanics encased in prettier games, or move onto new sectors, is to be expected. Jen, in her article, equates the slow decline of games released in the 20th Century with a general death of an entire sector of entertainment.

To suggest e-sports is declining is empirically incorrect. Not when companies across games and across oceans competing to give away the largest prize pot – Riot Games handing $50,000 to their season 1 LoL winner, GomTV giving $100,000 to GSL winners. Not when 1.7 million people tune in to watch the very first televised League of Legends professional season. Not when 15,000 people turn up in the city of Columbus, Ohio, to attend the travelling Major League Gaming event – joined by 22 and a half million stream views from people across the globe. This kind of basic research undermines Jen’s point that it’s not something she’s interested in, and therefore has no exposure to it: these tournaments have pushed so far into the mainstream space that they’re no longer confined to their own little hospice wards.

Gaming’s rapidly shedding its social stigma. Over half of the people in the UK are considered active gamers: our hobby is not the preserve of the maladjusted or socially weird. Why then, articles like Jen’s feel the need to disparage a rapidly growing, incredibly exciting offshoot of general gaming, purely because it’s not a traditional prism through which to view games?

When I spoke to Sean ‘Day[9]‘ Plott about the social attitudes to gaming, he said that he’d always responded to any insults with genuine enthusiasm: “oh, do you play games? Let me tell you why they’re great.” This is the approach we should take – particularly us as PC gamers. I am so very glad I discovered e-sports. The pro-gaming community is passionate and knowledgeable like few others, and they grew from our platform. A year ago, gaming at large could’ve claimed ignorance. To do so now is inexcusable. Watching people ‘better than you at video games play them for money, especially when you don’t know those people’ might not be your cup of tea, but dismissing the subject out of hand is exactly the kind of closed-minded reactionary behaviour we rail so hard against when it’s directed at gaming as a whole.

You never know, you might grow to love e-sports. I know I did.

I’ve had high hopes for Zynga and the social game market they’re pioneering for a while now. I’ve always believed that Facebook games could and should be amazing to play. I’m a platform agnostic, but anything that helps me play games with the people I care about should be a good thing. Sid Meier’s making a Civ game for Facebook. This is the inflection point, right? The time when these games suddenly become good, and interesting, and exciting?

No. Maybe. Yes. Oh god no.

Empires and Allies is horrendous. I think it’s the worst game of 2011. It makes me simultaneously horrified and furious that such a game can fund such lavish and extraordinary wealth generation. But I can’t stop playing it. And occasionally, I think I might be having fun. But that fun is preceded and followed by feelings of shame, betrayal and loneliness.

Here’s how it works.

Think of it as Farmville with an Advance Wars style tactical layer. You start with a small plot of land which, in the tutorial of the game, is being invaded by little cartoon men with little cartoon machine guns, accompanied by little cartoon tanks. You fight them off in a rock/paper/scissors turn-based animated battles. Fire cannons at the tanks. Fire tanks at the men. Fire men… Let the men fight the cannons.

Then, it’s time to repair, rebuild and eventually expand your empire, by placing farms, barracks, homes, airstrips, docks, lumber mills, ore mines, nodding donkeys to suck the oil from the ground and an occasional government building.

Managing your resources looks like a hard problem. Units, which you use to attack and defend in the turn based battles referenced above need to be built. They need oil, ore, lumber and gold. All resources are dished out using Farmville’s click and wait mechanics. Plant corn in your farm, and the next day you’ll have a big pot of gold.

There’s a kind-of single player campaign to go with the game where the units you create are put up against AI opponents of slowly increasing difficulty. They two separate fields of view combine to provide a very carefully escalated increase in player power that’s held in check by the health-pools and power of the computer opponents. These are all decent, smart mechanics. They’re almost conventional.

Almost.

I thought this was brilliant. Look! It’s like a PC game, I can play everywhere, and my wife can join in. At one point, I had a choice between playing Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, League of Legends or Empires and Allies. So strong was the pull of dominating my friends with tiny little men, I chose the Facebook game. It was going so well. I’d got lots of friends ticking over. We’re trading every day, we sharing resources, and watering eachother’s gardens. It’s a happy time.

There’s something else holding every player back in Empires and Allies. And it’s Zynga’s evil genius. It’s why the game has pulled in so many players so very quickly. And it’s why it’s so hateful.

If you want to get bigger, want to own a bigger island, get more stuff, own more expensive units, you need to build Government buildings. Government buildings increase your population cap, which leads to you building more houses, which leads you to getting a steadier incoming.

But you can’t just construct the government buildings and be done with them. No. They have to be staffed by friends. Each building needs three friends to function. If you want to grow, you need to become a viral marketer. You need to invite them in to your game, or you need to pay to have a bot to play with you. Once they’re in your game, there’s no mechanic, no work they have to do. They’re just there. Existing. Being something that happens while you mindlessly click.

And once you start thinking about it, that’s the same for all the mechanics in Empire and Allies. They have no weight, no choice, no impact. Want resources? Want to optimise or micromanage your Maybe you do the maths and think about what the optimum time to leave your farms for, is? Don’t bother. There’s no real optimisation. Just click and wait. Want to figure out the optimal selection set of units to take into a fight? Don’t bother. That rock-paper-scissors subtlety never gets any tougher than… rock-paper-scissors.

You can’t even complete these fights at your own pace; you’re gated by the number of ‘allies’ you can bring to the fight. If you want to complete more battles in a day, you need more allies. You need to market the game to your friends.

Here’s the business of Empires and Allies. If you want to skip the gates; want to progress a little bit further than the carefully placed social obstacles the developers at Zynga put in your path, you need to invite your friends. Empire and Allies is ferocious about spreading. The first option on near every screen is to share the game, or to invite a friend in. It posts to your facebook wall incessantly. The game even posts what other players are up to to your own wall.

But the viral spread is just a means to an end. Eventually you run out of friends. Friends who are willing to join into the Empires and Allies pyramid.

It’s at that point, that inevitable point, you need to pay. You need to pay to grow further. You need to pay to complete more missions ever day. You need to pay to keep your fleets growing, to keep your armies expanding. You always need to pay. Or you stop playing.

Empires and Allies doesn’t offer you decisions. It doesn’t offer you entertainment. It doesn’t offer you social interaction. And it doesn’t offer you fun.

But even so, at the top of the Empires and Allies landing page, there’s a counter showing how many ‘Likes’ the game has received.

It increases by nearly half a million every day.

That’s obscene.

I know all this. I understand the business, I understand how its turned me into a piece of viral marketing. I hate it for it. But I’ve barely played anything else for a week. I’m probably playing it right now as you read this. I hate Zynga for doing this.

If you have aluminium, copper or uranium please come and find me on Facebook.

This morning, I’ve been tinkering around on Wicked Wake, Battlefield: Heroes’ take on Wake Island, via a private server. Wicked Wake is going to be added to Battlefield: Heroes tomorrow – in the meantime, we’ve got a screenshots and a few first impressions below.

First off: I’d forgotten how cheerful Battlefield: Heroes is, and how catchy the theme tune can be. For the play-session we’d been gifted a few personalised heroes. I fell instantly in love with my Royal Pirate Gunner. He has a beard and a hat.

Then it’s into the game. I spawned next to three planes, and shot straight into the sky. And then immediately remembered that I can’t fly planes for toffee, and that I’m almost certainly dead.

I was dead.

Next step – go for a drive around the new map, and poke about its corners. It feels like an ever-so slightly more compact version of the original Wake Island, with points about 30 seconds walk from each-other. At this point, I was a passenger in a jeep with two new friends, dancing around in the back seat while taking pot-shots at the constantly circling fighters overhead.

I have to say that I love Battlefield: Heroes’ art and posturing; it has some of the same qualities we admire Pixar for; it’s clearly made for kids, but has enough style and wit to keep the adults entertained. In Wake Island, they’ve found the perfect setting, and the perfect map. The sunshine, the beaches, the blue sky make for a happy place. But more importantly, they make for a better game.

Even if I loved the art, the actual mechanics of the original Battlefield: Heroes didn’t bite me. The movement feels sluggish, the weapons spammy, any tactics boiling down to a war of attrition between two points. Two years on, they haven’t changed drastically, but they do feel significantly tighter. More importantly, Wake Island is a better environment for them to flourish. Battlefield: Heroes’ original maps just weren’t that good – too much dead space in the case of Seaside Skirmish, too many blind corners in Victory Village. Wake Island doesn’t have either of those problems and because it’s liberally dotted with airfields, you don’t get stuck in linear wars of attrition. You can simply hop on a plane and shortcut the ongoing battle.

I do hope, though, that the launch of Wicked Wake helps Battlefield: Heroes. While it’s clearly not failing, it doesn’t seem to be succeeding in the way other free games have done. Why? I don’t think the development not creating enough new content to keep their community coming back. Wake Island should be the start of a new push.

Wicked Wake should be online from tomorrow. If you’ve got a Battlefield: Heroes account, why not take a second look?

The Princess Bride Game

Introduction to the 3rd Anniversary Edition. Not by William Goldman.

It’s still my favourite casual game in the world. And more than ever, I wish I had designed it. Sometimes, I like to fantasize that I did, that I came up with the idea of relegating one of the most entertaining battles in the 80s to a quick, badly animated cut-scene, that my imagination replaced its awesome, quotable banter with a trivia game that wouldn’t even challenge an intellectually sub-standard chimp.

Alas, Goldman remains swimming naked in his money, and I must be contented with the fact that my novelisation of the game of the movie (though burned by librarians to keep it off their shelves) at least brought this game to a wider audience. What is stronger than childhood memory? Nothing, at least for me. I still have a recurring dream of the time I swallowed a live wasp. I believe it is this memory, more than anything else, that empowered me with the ability to write the words you are about to read.

This is my favourite game in all the world, though I have never unlocked the demo.

I am not, after all, a complete moron.

Yes, the game of the book is... a book in the game. Don't think too hard. You'll give yourself a migraine.

Want to play along? Why? Why would you want that? Well, here’s a 60 minute demo anyway…

Extracts From The Princess Bride Game: The Book Of The Game Of The Movie Of The Book: A Tale Of True Love, Epic Adventure, And Mad Confusion If You Don’t Know The Plot

Chapter One: As You Wish

Excuuuuuuuuuuuse me, Princess. But I have to get back to work. Farming. And stuff.

The year that Buttercup was born, the most beloved casual game in the world was an American ball thing called Peggle. Peggle worked because it was simple yet complex, and it did not escape the world’s attention that it was awesome. This was something that would never be said of The Princess Bride game. Buttercup of course knew nothing of this, and if she had, she would have found it totally unfathomable. How could someone care if she were the star of the most childhood-raping casual game this side of Adult Swim? What difference could it have made if you were only in the third most hated, or the sixth? What she liked to do, preferred above all else really, was ride her horse, and make the farm boy do stupid, tedious chores to test his Diner Dash honed time management skills.

The farm boy did whatever she told him to. Actually, he was more an avatar now, a badly drawn sprite whose voice sounded almost but not entirely unlike Cary Elwes, when he spoke at all, which was rarely. More often, his lines were simply given in subtitles to save on filesize, as were hers.

“Farm boy!” she would say, and give him a silent task.

“As you wish.”

That was all their voice actors had bothered recording. “As you wish.” Fetch this, Farm Boy. “As you wish.” Water the carrots, Farm Boy. “As you wish.” As the clock ticked away, the Farm Boy made the carrots grow and chopped wood for the fire, constantly distracted by the prattling of his master’s daughter, who would likely have found herself mysteriously beaten with the flat side of his axe had she been a he, and not a pretty blonde too innocent to know the meaning of the word ‘cocktease’.

“I’ll let the lad do something interesting after ten more levels,” Buttercup’s father was fond of saying. (They had not seen the later chapters, and as such still had some sense of optimism that this would get more interesting at some point. Their deaths would come as sweet release.)

“You’ll spoil him,” Buttercup’s mother always answered.

“He’s slaved for many minutes; optimism should be rewarded.”

Then, rather than continue the argument (for even a few megabytes on the download could have scared away the infamously fickle casual gaming market), they would both turn on their sprite-based daughter, and dream of the day she might star in a free-to-play RPG, ideally a really profitable one from Korea.

“You didn’t pad your bra,” her father said.

“I did, I did!” from Buttercup.

“You must pad your bra, Buttercup,” her mother joined in. “The boys don’t like their girls to not look like they’ll topple over in the slightest wind. You’ll never hook people into your Item Store like that.”

And in the yard, the Farm Boy continued slaving away in the hot sun, harvesting carrots in the hope that, just once, Buttercup might appear at his door with a kiss, or a smile, or something other than more pointless chores for him to do against the ever-ticking clock that was his only true companion.

This never happened, but over the years, her shrill bitching digging into his tortured soul still apparently turned into something else. Something beautiful. Something called… True Love…

Apparently. It’s not like it was any more convincing in the movie.

Chapter Five: The Battle of Wits

You know, you'd have made much better time if you'd left the picnic behind.

Inigo never panicked – never came close. But he decided some things faster than he would have hit the A button in an action game QTE. The man in black kept attacking. “You are most excellent,” he said. His left foot was at the cliff edge. He could retreat no more.

“Thank you,” the man in black replied. “I have worked very hard to become so. The time management skills I learned on the farm were vital in organising my… but no, ’tis not important.”

“You are better than I am,” Inigo admitted. “At Empires and Allies as well.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“Because,” Inigo answered, “I know something that you don’t know.”

“And what is that?”

“There is no sword fighting in this game!” Inigo replied, and vanished until his next cut-scene.

The man in black blinked, and looked around. “No swordfighting? No interactive version of one of the most entertaining duels in the 80s? Do I not even get to face the giant?”

“Only non-interactively,” rumbled Fezzik, politely lying down on his mark to be defeated.

“Then what,” demanded the man in black, “am I doing here, exactly?”

There was a cough. He turned. “Welcome!” Vizzini cackled, knife pressed up against the blindfolded Buttercup sitting placidly by his side. “Now it is down to you. And it is down to me.”

The man in black squinted. “You actually sound like Wallace Shawn.”

“Unlike your actor, THEY COULD AFFORD ME,” screeched the Sicilian. The hunchback pressed his knife harder against Buttercup’s throat. “If you wish her dead, by all means, break that forth wall.”

The man in black froze.

“Better,” Vizzini nodded. “I have no doubt you could kill me. Anyone who can get by Inigo and Fezzik, even in a cut-scene, would have no trouble disposing of me. However, has it occured to you that if you did that, then neither of us would get what we want – you having lost your ransom, me my life.”

The man in black looked at the unimpressive hostage situation, which he clearly had the skills to resolve in roughly seventeen ways without either breaking a sweat or endangering the increasingly bored looking Buttercup. But that would have been dishonourable, or something else that made sense.

“We are at an impasse then,” he lied.

“I fear so,” said the Sicilian. “I cannot compete with you physically, and you are no match for my Ferengi lobes. Brains. I meant brains. Damn you, I’m a respected character actor!”

“In that case,” said the man in black, “I challenge you to a battle of wits.”

Vizzini had to smile. “One split into a million stages to stretch out the longevity of this bit?”

“Just so,” acknowledged the man in black.

The Sicilian threw down his dagger. “I accept!”

The man in black was silent for a good long time. “You’re… you’re shitting me, right?” he finally answered, rubbing his hand against his sweaty mask in abject disbelief.

“The battle of wits has begun!” cried Vizzini. “It’s so simple! All you have to do is deduce, from what you know of me, the way my mind works. Am I the kind of man who would give you a question that would not lightly trouble a dead cat, or is there some trick to it you are not seeing-”

“No. There isn’t. It’s-”

“For example!” continued the Sicilian, “You are a cultured man, so you would obviously know that liquid goes into a bottle! But! In being cultured, your tastes are refined and higher than a mere prole, so you would not know if the common folk were now using bottles to store their potato chips in the name of longevity, therefore, you cannot choose the sane answer that is obviously correct. But-”

“It’s the first one. It’s obviously-”

“I’M NOT FINISHED!” screamed Vizzini. “But, I hear you thinking, why would a man as brilliant as myself insult you with such a ridiculous question? Might there be other uses for these crisps that you, as a foreigner to these shores, would find strange and unusual? Might they be crunched up to be sprinkled on salad, or used as a cheap form of cologne for those who cannot even afford a supermarket brand Lynx knock-off? Or am I bluffing, knowing that you know that I know what I know you know to be true? Or not! All these fiendish conundra and more are even now rattling through your tiny brain as my question takes flight, therefore you cannot in all conscience choose the answer that is-”

“I’ll take my chances,” said the man in black. “Upon my life, the answer is the first one.”

The Sicilian’s face darkened. “Yes,” he conceded. “But now you have fallen into my cleverest trap! For you see, by answering correctly, you have only foreshortened your doom-” He paused.

“I’m not saying the line,” said the man in black, arms folded sternly.

“Spoilsport,” sneered Vizzini. “Where was I? Oh, yes! You may have bested me once, my friend, but I assure you, this next fiendish question will be the very harbinger of your doom!”

The man in black stared at him. Slowly, he reached for a thermos flask. “Your throat sounds sore,” he said. “Would you care for some of this delicious orange squash I just happened to have with me?”

Also Chapter Five: But Later, In The Fire Swamp

80s movie. 80s platforming. SEE HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER?

Westley led the way. Buttercup stayed just behind, because she was a girl and therefore had no particular skills to offer here except looking pretty and jumping a little bit higher to collect the gems floating in the air. The main thing, she realised, was to forget your childhood dreams of being tough and awesome like Lara Croft, for only Westley had a sword, and it was her role to merely lower vines that he might clear her path. The odour of the miserable controls, which at first seemed almost totally punishing, soon diminished through familiarity and boredom. The sudden bursts of flame were easily avoided because, even before they struck, they’d seen them go off enough times to learn the patterns.

Westley carried his sword in his right hand. “To tell you the truth, I’m almost disappointed,” he told her. “This platforming is bad, but it’s not that bad. Don’t you agree?”

Buttercup wanted to, totally, and she would have, but she’d played The Lost Vikings and a million other platformers that revealed this as the substandard drivel she feared would now make up the whole rest of her time as a playable character. How long had she been jumping around in this forest? Minutes, it seemed, and she was in pain just keeping her eyes open. “You must collect gems until we get on the high score table,” her Westley had said. But how much more tedium could she possibly suffer?

Pausing and pressing play on your DVD player. A more entertaining way of making the movie feel interactive.

Westley stood, buckled on his sword, replaced his long knife.

“Come,” he said. “We have another ten levels to go.”

“Not until you tell me,” she replied. “Why must we endure this?”

Westley sighed. “Alright,” he said finally. “I’ll explain. But first, you must lower that vine for me.”

When she had returned, he told her. “Anchored out in the deepest waters of the bay is the Great Ship Revenge. The Revenge is the sole property of the Dread Pirate Roberts, of whom I am he.”

“I don’t think that’s grammatically-”

“Shut up. I am often surprised at life’s little quirks,” continued Westley, stabbing a ROUS to let her past. “For the last three years, I have been conducting myself as the world’s most terrifying pirate, yet those adventures were not deemed of any interest for a mini-game. I was thinking perhaps something like Sid Meier’s Pirates, or treasure hunting. But no. There were insufficient hidden objects to find, you see, and though the Dread Pirate Roberts of course fears no man, I dared not go up against Nancy Drew on Gamezebo. The focus groups were most clear on this. I’m sure you can understand.”

Buttercup nodded, though she did not.

“Then,” Westley continued, obvious as that should be, “I was summoned here. A full platform game would never wash in the casual market, of course! But as a mere fifth of one’s minigames, there to give the illusion of actual action in a game based on a film that everyone secretly knows becomes more than a bit rubbish after this scene, would serve well for the trailer. It would hint at actual adventure, when really all that awaits us if we continue working through this travesty of a license is-”

He fell silent, missing a jump by a pixel and running into a ROUS.

“Are you hurt?” whimpered Buttercup.

“Only my pride,” said Westley. “Also my balls.” And so they stumbled on, until eventually they saw the great ship Revenge, far out in the deepest part of the bay. Westley, still within the confines of the Fire Swamp, sank, beaten, to his knees. For between him and his ship was yet another badly animated cut-scene that would skip through almost every potentially interesting scene in the entire film, including his torture, wedding preparations, Inigo and Fezzik doing stuff to rescue him, the Zoo of Death that was only in the novel but might have been fun, and finally his death. Or his nearly-death, at least, in which state he was ultimately destined to be dragged to the doors of the one they called…

Chapter Seven: Miracle Max

Max opened the door a peek’s worth. “Just so you know, my house is a hidden object game,” he told the strangers outside. “You’ll have to give me a minute while I trash the place and dig out the four-foot high pen to put by the window and find my special tennis racket that looks like a teapot.”

“Oh,” the smaller of the two strangers said. “In that case, I believe we shall wait.”

“Wait for what?” demanded Max, as the two dropped the mostly dead body to the ground like a sack of spuds and began staring intently at their wristwatches. “Fifty eight,” rumbled the giant one. “Hate.”

“That is right, Fezzik,” said the smaller one, smiling with relief. “Fifty nine. Fifty nine and a half-”

Thanks, but I'd rather insert copies of the DVD, VHS *and* novel up my anus and sit down heavily on a rock.

Today the spotlight in on the Heavy, the giant Russian bear of a man with a great big gun, a great big grin and some of the best lines in the game.

Getting Started

The Heavy is the brute. He’s the player who should be in the midst of the fight, his mini-gun firing solidly, cutting down multiple enemies in a single life. He has some of the highest damage output, the highest health, and his gun decimates enemies at medium to short range. His big fat health pool means that he can survive for a long, long time – and with a few community drops, he can hide behind cover and heal by eating a sandwich or chocolate bar.

A Heavy’s weakness is his slow-speed and big fat head. His minigun takes a few seconds to spin-up and deal damage. When he’s firing, a heavy walks even slower than usual. And his big fat head, fat back, and slow speed mean he’s extremely vulnerable to sniper headshots (which, when fully charged, kill instantly) and back-stabs from the Spy (which, again, will kill him instantly.

A Heavy can spool his mini-gun without firing by holding down the right-mouse button. He’ll walk a little bit slower. It’s useful if you’re defending a capture point and know that enemies will soon be coming into your field of view.

Medics love Heavys. They have a nice big fat health pool, so they’re easier to keep alive. When uber-charged, the Heavy’s minigun is a frightening beast – the Heavy can afford to run in close and let rip from a very, very short range, killing everything in sight.

If you’re attacking, a heavy should be near the front of the action, using an engineer’s teleports to quickly enter the fray. A Heavy should never fight alone – a lone heavy is vulnerable to being overwhelmed. Instead, Heavy should wait until they two or three team-mates to make any push. Team-up with a medic and charge forward – you’ll carve a giant hole through the enemy ranks that the rest of your team can easily flow through. On payload maps, attacking heavies should be stood right by the little Kart, PUSHING.

If you’re defending, a Heavy is best teamed with an Engineer or Medic. An engineer’s dispenser can both heal the heavy, and refill their minigun, meaning a Heavy need never stop firing.

Recommended Items

The Sandvich is a replacement for the Heavy’s shotgun, which lets him heal himself to full over four seconds. While you’re snacking, you’re unable to move or shoot, so enormously vulnerable. And the other team will hear you “Om Nom Noming your way through the snack,” so try and eat out of the line of fire. Once you’ve got the Sandvich, you’re unlikely to use your shotgun again. The sandvich can also be dropped by right-clicking – letting you heal a friendly medic, for instance.

The Brass Beast is a mini-gun that does increased damage, but requires a longer spool-up time, and you’ll much slower when firing. It’s a riskier prospect, because you’re far more vulnerable to surprises. But it’s extraordinary how much extra damage you’ll see yourself do.

The Heavy’s bare fists aren’t particularly useful – the damage they do isn’t great. The Gloves of Running Urgently let you move a little bit quicker when equipped (like the knife in Counter-Strike) while the Killing Gloves of Boxing will give you a brief window of extra-crits if you land a killing blow with them. Aim for the Gloves of Running first. The Fists of Steel let you close to melee distance while taking less damage, but they’re too specialised for normal use.

The Heavy Starter pack gets you Natasha; a mini-gun that does reduced damage but slows down your target, and the Sandvich, alongside a Football Helmet. It costs peanuts. If you like the Heavy, and have just started playing, go for it.

How to help a Heavy

If you’re stood next to a heavy, watch his back. He’s going to die by backstab, or by sniper-shot. So stop shooting at the scout that’s waving a fish in his face and start shooting at the snipers at far range, or check that the suspicious looking sniper isn’t actually a spy by shooting at him.

Remember that if your engineers have put teleporters up, you are always faster than a heavy, so let him get on it first.

How to fight a Heavy

It’s entirely pointless to go one-on-one with a heavy from the front at short and medium range. They just have too great a hit-pool, they do too much damage, and they’re probably being healed by a medic. Instead, back off, and find a way around, hitting them from the side or back. When a heavy is in a firing rage, the player will often be so focused on what’s right at the point of his cross-hair that he won’t notice what’s hitting him from behind.

If he is being healed, kill the medic first. Always kill the medic first.

Stay tuned for more guides for the rest of the TF2 classes!

Yesterday we talked about how to get weapons and hats, and on Friday we took you through which classes to start with and how all the modes work. Today we’ll go through the basics of all the nine classes, and how to find out more about their weirder variations.

How do all the classes work?

 
This has changed a bit over time, and it depends on which items they’re using, but it can be handy to have a basic guide to the vanilla versions to get you started.

Scout: The fastest class, and you can capture objectives twice as quickly. But combat is a risky business: your weapons are best up close, but you don’t have enough health to get shot much at point blank range. You can double-jump and take alternate routes to get to places enemies aren’t expecting. Attack them when they’re focusing on someone else.

Main thing to worry about: the Engineer’s sentry guns. They’ll shred you and there’s almost nothing you can do against them. For this reason, you’re actually better at defending your team than invading an entrenched enemy position.

Soldier: Tougher than most, slower than most, and armed with a rocket launcher. Reload any time you’re not firing, aim at your enemies’ feet so you’ll catch them with splash damage if you miss, and retreat when you’re low on health. You’re tough enough to escape most dangerous situations, and if you keep doing damage and staying alive, you’ll notice you start to score more critical hits. Critical hits with a rocket launcher are a hell of a thing.

Main things to worry about: Heavies at close range out-damage you, and Snipers at long range can headshot you and dodge your rockets.

Pyro: Harassment class – you are amazingly annoying. Your flamethrower sets people alight, which is usually enough to make them run for a health kit or water. Spray some attackers then get out of the way: you’ll often stop their assault and survive.

Most importantly, the secondary fire on your flamethrower lets you bounce rockets, sticky bombs and grenades back, so you’re great at defending your team. You can also use it to put out allies who are on fire, or shunt enemies away. Engineers love having you around to defend their Sentries and check for Spies – there’s no friendly fire, so torch team-mates indiscriminately.

Main thing to worry about: Heavies kill you so fast that it’s hard to get away in time.

Demoman: Ambush class. Your grenade launcher is a good way to make a corridor a bad place for enemies, but the Sticky Bomb launcher is even more devastating. Shoot stickies on corners or above doorways, then right click to detonate them when enemies come through. You can also pile them up near sentry guns to take them out in one fatal blast.

Main thing to worry about: Soldiers and Heavies will kill you in straight combat.

Heavy: The slowest class, but the absolute deadliest in a straight fight at anything from medium range to point blank. Your gun takes a while to spin up, and you can barely move while it’s firing, but everyone immediately in front of it will die or run away.

Main things to worry about: Snipers at long range, Spies behind you.

Engineer: Can build turrets that attack enemies automatically, dispensers that refill allies’ health and ammo, and teleporters to get people from the spawn point to the front line. These all cost metal, which you get by picking up ammo and weapons on the field.

Because you need so much metal to build, upgrade and repair your stuff, it’s good to get a dispenser up somewhere safe where you can sit near it, and build your Sentry gun right there. Once it’s up and upgraded, it’s the most powerful defensive weapon in the game.

Main things to worry about: Demomen piling stickies up on your stuff, Spies sapping your equipment and backstabbing you.

Medic: Fire your healing beam at anyone who’s injured, then at Heavies and Soldiers who are in combat. Always stay behind your patient: smart enemies will try to take you out first, because you’re what really makes the team hard to kill.

Main things to worry about: Snipers, Soldiers and Pyros targeting you – don’t be afraid to run for a healthkit if you need one, you’re the only person you can’t heal.

Sniper: Find a quiet spot with a long line of sight to an objective, wait for your shot to charge up a little, then click on peoples’ heads. You have to be scoped for your shot to charge up. Target Medics first, if you can.

Main things to worry about: Spies creeping up behind you, other Snipers being better at headshots.

Spy: Switch to your disguise kit and use the number keys to dress as an enemy of that class. Engineer or Sniper is often a good choice, since it’s not suspicious to see those guys out of combat. Right click to cloak, and get behind enemy lines before decloaking. Your knife kills anyone instantly if you stab them from behind, but is almost useless if you don’t. It also breaks your disguise, and you can’t fire or attack while cloaked.

Main things to worry about: bumping into people – it reveals you if cloaked, and tips the enemy off if you’re disguised. And steer clear of Pyros entirely: their flame only has to touch you once to reveal you as a Spy.

Tom, I’ve been playing for a few hours and I’m still pretty goddamn confused. What does slapping someone with a fish do? How does that guy have a guitar? Why am I covered in milk?

 
Yeah. There are a lot of weapons in this game, and not all of them make a hell of a lot of sense. The game tries to tell you what killed you, but when that thing is a golden statue of someone called Saxton Hale, it sometimes raises more questions than it answers.

Luckily, there’s an awesome official wiki where you can look up anything you don’t understand. Bookmark this, because for some reason it’s still not the top result for ‘tf2 wiki’ on Google. It should be, so allow me to SEO it up a notch: tf2 wiki.

Look up the class you like to play, and look up the class that kills you most. You’ll find all the info on the various weapons they can have, how to get them, and what they’re good for.

In our last few guides we talked about where to start with classes and game modes, and how to get new items. You can always find our latest Team Fortress 2 guides and browse them all here.

Yesterday we took you through which classes to start with and how all the modes work. Today we’ll tell you why that man has an octopus on his head and how you too can unlock a sandwich.

How do I get items?

 
As you play, you’ll randomly be awarded new weapons every few hours – it happens more often on busy servers.

Every class also has a set of weapons that can be unlocked by earning a certain number of achievements, and these are the quickest way to get something specific for a class you like. You can see what the achievements are by clicking the rosette icon at the bottom of the main menu: there’s a dropdown list that’ll let you browse by class. Doesn’t matter which ones you go for, these items just unlock when you have a certain number: usually 10, 15, or so.

Eventually you’ll start finding items you already have, or that you don’t want. You can reduce these to scrap metal by crafting them together, and then use that – and other weapons – to craft ones you don’t have yet. There are hundreds of recipes for this stuff, the best place to browse them is over on TF2Items.com.

To get this sword, spend fifteen years of your life developing Team Fortress games.

You can just pony up and buy them for real money. Almost everything is available to buy in the Mann-Co store accessed from the main menu. You’ll have to put some money in your Steam Wallet to do so, but you can do that when you check out. The cheapest items are only £0.29 or $0.49c, but be aware that the minimum you can add to your Steam Wallet is £4.

As soon as you buy anything, however cheap, you become a Team Fortress 2 premium player, and you’ll be able to find and craft rarer items. If you care about items at all, it’s worth putting that first £4 on. Buy a £0.29p gun, then spend the rest on a cheapo indie game if you don’t want to buy any more in-game stuff.

Once you are a premium player, you can trade items with others by going to the main menu, clicking Items, then Trading. You can trade with anyone on your friends list when you’re both online, or anyone in your current game.

No, I mean how do I get hats?

 
Oh. Well, you can’t unlock most hats with achievements, but once you’re a premium player, all the other methods apply. They’re just much, much rarer to find, much, much harder to craft, and much, much more expensive to buy.

The easiest ones to get are rewards for buying other games or achieving something in those. There’s a full list of all the promotional items and how you get them over on the official wiki.

Tomorrow: How do all the classes work? What the hell is going on?

LA Noire is coming soon to the PC. But crime? Crime has always been with us. Laura Bow’s notebook saw her through two major cases back in the 1920s. Discworld Noir was funny, clever, and a brilliant spin on Terry Pratchett’s most famous creation. On the indie side, The Blackwell Legacy games are doing a great job of telling mysterious ghost stories. During the FMV era, it turned out The Dame Was Loaded, and then of course, there was a game simply known as ‘Noir’ – and a personal favourite of mine, the (later, not sucky) Tex Murphy games, which took those classical stylings into the Future. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? We do. We’ve painstakingly dug it out a million times.

But few of those cases are stranger, quirkier, or just plain messed up as gaming’s original interactive police procedural adventure. Prepare for the insanity that awaits… In Pursuit of the Death Angel.

No sir! No bathing, appealing to women or eating anything with less than 200 calories, sir!

Maybe it’s just me, but I never could take Police Quest very seriously. I know I probably should. It’s certainly a serious game – an interactive police-procedural adventure, written by a real cop, and supposedly used by others as a training tool. For me though, it was always something else – closer to the dreams I imagine good cops having after eating too much cheese before bed. It’s like a fevered nightmare of repressed paranoia and self-doubt, lessened only by a little guilty wish-fulfillment to round off a long day of being abused and unappreciated by the world they serve.

I'm Jim Walls, and I have never crossed a street without fear.

But I may be wrong.  I’ve never been an American beat cop myself. I don’t even really know how American cops work outside of TV and movies, not just because I’m far too boring to ever have gotten on the wrong side of the law, but because – as you can probably tell from my accent – I’m English. Yes, from England. God Save The Queen, and all that. It means I grew up with a very different kind of police force. Our police don’t usually get to carry guns for instance. We don’t have many donut shops. Instead of Miranda Rights, our officially approved caution is “You’re bloody nicked, mate!”, to which our villains admit “It’s a fair cop…” and resignedly hold out their wrists for the cuffs… 

…okay, so some of that may be, as we apparently love to say, ‘bollocks’. Still, it’s a different world. Even ignoring that though, Police Quest is a goofier game than people credit it for. I think the moment that clinched it for me (in the original version, which used a text parser rather than icons) was when I realised that you can type ‘remove uniform’ at any point and main character Sonny Bonds actually will get his little nightstick out in the middle of a crime scene. And then die. Of shame. 

Dammit, Bonds - even Leisure Suit Larry won't strip off just because you tell him to!

Here’s why Police Quest was so special. Sierra contracted an actual police officer, Jim Walls, to design them a realistic police game. He did. Unfortunately, Walls was trained to catch crooks, not create adventure games, and so the game he created was… initially… eh. It assumed the player knew the police procedure that obviously came naturally to him, and had effectively nothing to point you in the right direction, or any extra bits and pieces around the side. It needed fixing. Who did Sierra assign to fix it? Al Lowe. Yes, the creator of Leisure Suit Larry. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing, really. Yes, the two styles – by-the-book policing and by-Christ-who-came-up-with-this Sierra design – clash at every turn, but that’s what makes the result so much fun. Later Police Quest games lacked same quirky charm. In the second for instance, you had to keep practicing with your gun and making sure to use proper ear protection or you’d die when you actually had to use it, but that was firmly more ‘annoying’ than quirky. By the third game, the last that Walls worked on, the main plot was ridiculously silly, with the series’ early star Sonny Bonds finding out that the drugs kingpin he put away in the first game now has a family with their own satanic style cult (which was oddly less deadly than a naked lunatic in the park who he also arrests), but not particularly interesting.

After that, there was one more game set in Los Angeles, which nobody liked very much, before the series morphed into Police Quest: SWAT – an FMV adventure, one of the worst strategy games you’ll ever play, a pretty solid squad-based FPS, and finally SWAT4, which was excellent.

Oh, thank god they missed the donut shop!

The basic structure of Police Quest 1 is that you, as basically good cop Sonny Bonds, just patrol the streets of the fictional, decaying city of Lytton, fighting crime by pretty much leaving the manual open in front of you and doing everything it says. In a way, it’s Copy Protection: The Game, especially in the original version of the game, which used a text parser interface. In the VGA remake (where most of the shots here come from, obviously), it was Sierra’s standard SCI point-and-click interface, and you could – just about – muddle through everything, apart from looking up your locker code in the manual at the start of the game, the arrest codes when you book someone, and having to check the map.

By Sierra’s standards, the series is about a 0.4 on the Sadism Scale. It will kill you for the slightest mistake, and believe me, we’re talking slightest mistakes here, but at least it generally has the decency to do it immediately rather than letting you play into a no-win situation. Generally.

The actual plot of the game does technically link most of the cases you investigate, but it’s not very well done. There’s a new drugs boss in town, Jesse Bains, better known as the Death Angel, which doesn’t sound like a guy I’d choose to buy my illegal drugs from, but what would I know? I don’t even drink. Sonny visits a few crime scenes which turn out to involve his activities, another cop’s kid dies after taking drugs from his supply, and eventually Sonny is sent undercover to put an end to his reign of peripheral villainy. The most dramatic moment prior to that is when one of the Death Angel’s minions is arrested but due to be released on a technicality, and Sonny has to rush over to the court with… the paperwork to stop that from happening. Call Police Camera Action!

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

The Case Files of Sonny Bonds, Volume Only

Being the adventures of a Good Cop in a Bad City. Except when he’s not.

Chapter 1: Sonny Bonds vs. Health And Safety

You know what, I'll just walk. Safer. Faster.

Playing Sierra games, the basic rule to remember was that anything that could even theoretically kill you would totally kill you, as would pretty much everything else. Cross a completely empty road? A car will suddenly appear to knock you over. In King’s Quest 2, the portal that took you to the different areas was on the other side of a bridge that would only let you cross it a handful of times, for no better reason than to screw you over when you got to the end of the game but were unable to reach the ending. Stuff like that. Here, you have a gun. Shoot that gun without drawing it, and Sonny will blow his own feet off. If you expect anything different, you don’t know Sierra. In Quest for Glory, an inexperienced thief could kill themselves by typing ‘pick nose’ and promptly stabbing a lockpick up one nostril and into their brain. A gun? No way are you going to be let off screwing up with that in your inventory.

Words to live by, Mr. Narrator!

But Police Quest takes this to a whole new level. Here, mild embarrassment can kill. Aside from being able to strip naked and die instantly, the shower room lets you change into a towel and walk out into the station, at which point a female narcotics detective, Laura, appears, has a bit of a giggle at you being out of uniform, and… you die. This, despite the fact that Laura is the station’s resident prankster, who spends the entire game torturing your Sergeant with things like putting Mace on his memos and releasing a live chicken into his office, and clearly wouldn’t give the faintest shit.

Right from the start, Sonny comes across as that straight-A student throwing a tantrum at getting a B+ in PE, almost to the point that Walls and co felt afraid he would be seen as the avatar of all police work, and must never, ever, be permitted to get away with even the smallest infraction in the line of duty, be it taking a bribe, or slightly increasing the odds of a fellow officer seeing his cock before filing the necessary paperwork to request permission to propose, marry the no-doubt terrified maiden in a traditional church service, and finish the manual on what he’s actually meant to do with it.

In case you’re wondering, yes. This will indeed make it all the more awkward when his love interest turns out to be a prostitute called Sweet Cheeks. But that’s for later! First, there’s… the car.

Fun fact: If you switch the siren on, you're allowed to pretend it's a bumper car!

The VGA remake is slightly more lenient, but the original version of Police Quest was merciless here. Simply getting into your car and going out on patrol without doing a safety check was insufficient. Fair enough, you might thing. Except! You didn’t just type ‘perform safety check’ or similar. You had to manually walk to all four sides of the car and check them out in turn, otherwise as soon as you left the station… your tyre would explode. The really cruel bit though… the cruelty that made Sierra “Sierra”… is that this is Schrodinger’s Cockup. If you actually perform the check, the car is fine.

The driving is completely different in the EGA and VGA versions of the game, mostly because the EGA one is Hell, and the VGA one simply boring as it. In the VGA one, Sonny races along and very occasionally you have to stop at an intersection to avoid hitting something. The biggest pain is circling round the map to be on the right side of the road for the building you want. The EGA version gives you full control, but a tiny, tiny little sprite. Nudging anything will kill you, shooting a light will kill you, and the pixel-perfect precision you often need to stop somewhere will simply make you pray for death.

You’ve got to wonder whether Jim Walls lived like this, in a constant state of paranoia. I imagine him putting on plastic gloves to switch his bedside lamp off at night, just in case of a loose wire, and putting rubber around his keys, just in case he tripped while going down the stairs and impaled them through his eyeball. Both of them. At once. Which shouldn’t even be possible. But you never know!

Chapter 2: Sonny Bonds and the Last Temptation

Sorry, ma'am, but you're only qualified to be a seductress during the 80s.

Before the plot proper kicks in, Sonny has to attend several incidents – a crashed car, where the job is largely to call in the big boys to handle it, a drunk driver who will smash you over the head if you’re silly enough to handcuff him from behind, and a stolen car where you have a shoot-out. And then, there’s Helen Hots/Tawnee Helmut (depending on EGA/VGA), who doesn’t carry a gun, but does have a couple of other deadly weapons at her disposal. By which I mean she has breasts. Two of them, in fact.

Sonny turns out not to have been particularly well trained for this, practically slobbering against her car. She notices. “I’m so sorry, Officer,” she simpers. “I just didn’t see that stop sign. I’m so embarrassed. I promise I’ll never do it again. I’ll do anything if you’ll let me go. Anything.”

Time to play our first round of Good Sonny, Bad Sonny!

Good Sonny: Despite his ‘vitals turning to jello’, Sonny resists her sultry siren ways and writes her the ticket she deserves. “I’m sorry, Miss, but running stop signs is very dangerous,” he tells her, drawing a line in the sand. “I’d like to let you off with a warning, but I can’t.”

She nods sadly, realising that her gambit has failed. Having met an honest policeman, she resolves to drive away, maintaining the speed limit, and buy a cardigan. This experience sticks with her for the rest of her life, which she devotes to building homes for orphans in Africa, until finally being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for services to humanity. Unfortunately, she’s too busy rescuing kittens from a burning tree to accept, but her doting son does so in her name. His name? Sonny Bonds Jr.

“YOU LITTLE NAZI!” she shrieks. “All you care about is making your quota! You don’t care about PEOPLE! You just joined the force so you could carry a gun and feel like a man! You worthless little sack of brass buttons! Get your butt out of my sight, Officer Scummy Bonds! If you think I’m gonna pay a red cent of this ticket, you’re dead wrong! What’s your badge number? I’m gonna report you for harassment! They’re gonna hang your butt out to dry! By the time I’m through with you, you won’t be able to get a job as a rent-a-cop at a trailer park! Go on! Beat it, you stupid piece of white trash!”

“Have a nice day, miss,” Sonny replies.

“SHOVE IT, PIG! Kiss your job goodbye! OINK OINK OINK!”

And so she vanishes, as Sonny ponders: “You’re doing your job; you’re trying to discourage reckless driving. Sometimes it seems it’d be a lot easier to let these people kill themselves off.

But what if… what if he hadn’t been an honest cop?

You're just lucky I have a thing for blue hair and second-degree sunburn.

Bad Sonny: “Two breasts, hmm?” thinks Sonny’s alternate universe doppleganger, stroking the goatee that he obviously has, before reaching out to test the merchandise.

“Well, how rude,” says the smiling woman, attempting to be offended. “But if that’s what it takes, I suppose it’s all right with me!”

“Your heart slips up into your throat,” says the Narrator, unbiased in his view of this sordid little dealing. “You quickly trade your integrity for a shot at cheap thrills and torrid sex!”

“My phone number is 555-4369,” she says with a smile. “Give me a call some time!”

And with that, Sonny waddles off, truncheon standing straight and true. Oddly (for Police Quest), you get to leave the screen alive. In fact, as far as I know, there’s no repercussion for this at all. Unless of course, you push your luck. That sexy number? Find a phone, and you can call it.

“Hello? Helen speaking.”

Sonny immediately asks for the date he was promised. “I don’t know who you’re trying to call, Sonny Bonds, but I recognise your voice!” shouts the woman on the other end.

“Oh my gawd!” Sonny realises. “It’s Police Commissioner Hacker’s wife!”

And thus, tricked, humiliated, and with his career in tatters, he retreats back to his empty apartment of failure in the certain knowledge that tonight, the only boob he’s going to be touching… is himself.

Chapter 3: Sonny Bonds in: A Case of the Crabs

Desist, villain! You are clearly both a bounder and a cad! Give yourself up immediately!

Not long after getting blue-balled on the Thin Blue Line, Sonny is called in to the local cops’ pet coffee shop, Carol’s, to deal with a complaint about some bikers causing trouble in the less salubrious bar next door – Wino Willy’s. Sonny gets out of his car and heads in, realising too late that he’s the main character in a Sierra adventure game and he’s just allowed himself to be surrounded.

“Please move your motorcycles,” he tells them anyway. “You’re interfering with the business next door.”

“Well, if it aint Little Boy Blue,” spits the head biker. “Hey, Little Boy Blue, how’d you like me to help you swallow your tongue? Then you’d REALLY be blue!” HAR! Come to poppa, piggy!”

Bad Sonny: Sonny grits his teeth. “Sir, people do not talk this way.”

“What? We’re authentic crooks, the likes of which police officers like you might face in your-”

“You’re as convincing as the average angel in a nativity play, only with a stupid beard, a tiny penis, and a brand new airhole,” says Sonny, drawing his gun and shooting the guy dead.

I may possibly have changed the dialogue there. A little. Still, even if Bad Sonny does opt to shoot him dead, it doesn’t end well for him. The all-knowing Narrator is unimpressed, to say the least.

“You pull your revolver and shoot the unarmed biker right between the eyes. (No, we’re not going to reward your violence with animation of blood and brains hitting the back wall.) The biker’s old lady brings you up on charges and sues you and the Lytton police department for several million dollars. Internal affairs finds you guilty. You spend the next 30 years of your life as an alcoholic shoe salesman, before drowning in a puddle of rainwater in the gutter.”

Wow. Harsh. And somehow, I suspect Bad Sonny’s last thoughts were along the lines of “But there were four of them, they were armed with pool cues and god only knows what else, and they just directly threatened to murder me in front of witnesses! This was so unfaiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-”

Ask about my friends and family deals. First's a discount. Second's way extra.

Good Sonny: Good Sonny instead reaches for his nightstick.

“I’ll make you eat that, pig,” growls the biker, but Sonny has Right on his side. One smack to the balls, and it is the other man down on the ground squealing.

“Hey, uh, we’ll move the bikes, okay?” mutters one of the other bikers, totally not suddenly flaring up with adrenaline and attacking the intruder. “We’ll just do that now, okay? We’re leavin’.”

As they go, Sonny sees a friendly face at the back of the bar – his old high-school crush, “Sweet Cheeks” Marie, who also has two breasts, and a clear willingness to let him touch them, no charge.

“Well, Marie, what’s new on the street?” he asks, and immediately regrets his choice of phrase.

“Tell ya what, Sonny, I heard rumours about some new drug lord comin’ in and takin’ over everybody’s action. The word is that he’s really bad. A vicious dude, y’know? But I’m not sure I buy into that.”

Stunned at the concept that a predatory druglord might be both ‘bad’ and a ‘vicious dude’, the average kingpin being cut from the same cloth as a Care Bears doll, Sonny listens on. “I met this guy who claimed to be him. The Death Angel. He was one weird dude, but he treated me okay.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about him? Did he mention any names?”

“All business, ‘aint ya, honey? This dude was a real sharp dresser. One thing I noticed about him; he had a tattoo of a little red rose over his left nipple. It was kinda cute, actually. Most of the stuff he said was just B.S. You guys will say anything to impress a girl, wont’cha?”

Yeah, but when we hire one for a party, mostly we all just stare at the table until she leaves.

Sonny ums-and-ahas over this, and then pretty much immediately proves her point. “Ah, listen, Marie, you’ve been a big help. Let me give you a tip. We’re going to be starting a weep of local- um- ladies of the evening. It’s called Operation Trick Trap. The streets are going to be crawling with cops. You’d better lie low for a few days. I’d hate to see you behind bars.”

And yes, we’re still following Good Sonny – a cop who just passed secret information about a forthcoming sting directly to a prostitute, and thus we can assume, all the others as well. Once again: Being seen in a towel = Game Over. Directly sabotaging his own department’s operation because he wants to recreate Pretty Woman on a street cop’s budget? Eh. The universe understands.

Officer of the Year, everyone. Officer of the Year.

Chapter 4: Sonny Bonds Does A Little Undercover Work

Hey, Sonny, when we're done arresting this guy, wanna catch a skin flick?

But it turns out not to matter. Sweet Cheeks doesn’t follow his advice, and is soon banged up. Then she’s arrested and taken to jail. Luckily for her, the investigation into the Death Angel has swung into high gear by this point, and the net is closing in on his hideout – the Hotel Delphoria. A series of illegal poker games are taking place behind the scenes, and the bartender in charge of sending players/suckers to lose their money is one of Sweet Cheeks’ friends. Sonny, now officially working in Narcotics, cuts a deal – if she helps him bust Bains, the Lytton PD will be far too busy to care about prosecuting yet another random streetwalker. She accepts, and a plan is formed.

Alright, alright. For old times' sake, you can copy my Biology homework.

The plan is this: Stupid. Pretty much the first thing that happens in Police Quest is that you read a newspaper announcing that Sonny has been nominated for Officer of the Year. He’s also been present at every single major Death Angel related crime scene in the city, as well as been the pivotal reason that one of his lieutenants was jailed. In short, he’s about the most recognisable cop in the city right now, especially to anyone smart enough to have been watching his own intricate criminal network.

The Lytton PD’s solution? Sonny should bleach his hair white, go and play high stakes poker, and then promptly draw attention to his disguise by calling himself “Whitey”.

Idiots.

Wow, that peroxide worked really well, Sonny! Nobody's going to recognise you now!

The slightly more detailed plan is that Marie will go and pretend to be touting for business in the bar. Sonny will pick her up, at which point she’ll ‘recognise’ him and start loudly telling her bartender friend just how awesome and rich and good at poker not that there are any illegal games going on round here of course oh no of course not cough he is. The bartender will promptly invite him to the games, at which point all he has to do is beat a roomful of poker players who are probably armed and dangerous and most likely cheating, in the hope that the Death Angel will conveniently show up, be impressed by Whitey’s balls instead of cutting them off with a serrated scalpel, and invite him up to his penthouse.

Once again: Idiots. Never mind that yes, it works. Or does it?

Bad Sonny: This is probably the best ‘death’ in Sierra history. As before, Sonny gets his invite. However, the poker game isn’t for a few hours, and he and Marie head upstairs to debrief. That is not a euphemism. Now that “Whitey” is officially invited into the games, Marie’s part is finished. He’s supposed to call her a cab (“Marie?” “Yes?” “You’re a cab.”) and get her out of the way.

But there’s… another alternative.

I’m starting to understand why Sonny gets so nervous around women…

Good Sonny: Good Sonny once again puts duties ahead of boobies, and sends her away. Unlike Helen/Tawnee though, she understands. In fact, their love quickly blossoms. In Police Quest 2, Marie officially puts her Sweet Cheeks behind her… metaphorically speaking… and she and Sonny get married, just in time for her to be knifed in a parking lot in revenge for what’s basically about to happen right now.

Their relationship would later be chronicled further here, in Leisure Suit Larry 6.

Chapter 5: Sonny Bonds Saves The Universe Slightly Inconveniences The Drugs Trade

Of course, if you'd waited for the War on Drugs to start, we'd have given you a medal.

With Marie dispatched, it’s time to take out the Death Angel once and for about ten seconds before he shows up again in the next game, “The Revenge”. Sonny time-travels forwards a few hours for the poker, and hands over the entry fee. The bartender takes him around the back, carefully pats him down for weapons, and immediately realises that there is no way his main one should be in its current position after several hours in an expensive hotel room with a reasonably priced Marie.

No, of course not. But what happens is no less silly. Sierra’s VGA adventures especially were actually pretty good about their mini-games, and you very rarely had to bother with them if you didn’t want to. The same is true here. You can play all-stakes poker with the gangsters, or you can just assume you won and get on with it. Or you can click the most pointless button in the history of adventure gaming:

No! Winning scares me! The pressure... it'd just be too much! Please! Just this once, let me lose!

Having won the poker game, “Whitey” is promptly invited back for another high-stakes game, where the Death Angel puts in an appearance. Another skipped poker game later, and just as planned, it’s up to the penthouse. Despite being wired and with a backup team standing by, the bartender’s pat-down means Sonny can’t actually be armed himself. Except that she doesn’t bother this time, so he could have been. Still, there was no way anyone could have known that. Soon enough, it’s just him and Bains.

“You play a good game of poker, Mr. Bankstein,” says Bains, using the nom-de-plume ‘Frank Magpie’ for no particular reason. “That proves to me you’re sharp. There’s something I want to tell you. My name isn’t Frank Magpie. It’s Jesse Bains. I tell you this, a complete stranger, to point out that no matter how accurate this game’s police procedure happens to be, never mind the repeatedly demonstrated lethality of our world, its writing is going to be weaker than week old piss right to the end.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, you may have heard the name before. No? Maybe this will help. Some of my men have coined an amusing little nickname for me: The Death Angel. Starting to sound familiar?”

“Um… yes, I think so. You’re becoming famous, Mr. Bains.”

“Yes, unfortunately, I’ve gained a little too much notoriety lately. Consequently, and against all the evidence, I just can’t be too careful. I’m sure you understand the need for an occasional alias, Whitey, the man I know nothing about except that he just cheated to beat me at Poker.”

Speaking of that, was it absolutely necessary it be *strip* poker?

“Oh, yes, I know exactly what you mean,” says “Whitey”.

“Of course you do, Whitey. I have a nice little operation here, as you may have noticed. And there’s more going on here than meets the eye. I’m in the process of expanding, and could use a good man. This can be quite a lucrative deal. What I had in mind for you…”

And then the phone rings. “Excuse me for a moment, won’t you? I’ll take the call in the other room. Help yourself to a refreshment at the bar. I’ll be back momentarily, undoubtedly to kill you.”

And of course, he will. Thinking quickly though, Sonny uses his wire to call for back-up, just before Bains returns – with a gun. (In another great Schroedinger’s Cockup moment, if you do this, you get a box saying ‘Five Minutes Later’ to compensate for the fact that the backup team is not in fact The Flash. If not, Bains walks back in about ten seconds later, having apparently gone from “What? He’s a what?” to “But before you go… what are you wearing? You watching the big game this Saturday? Nah, I’m just chilling out. Maybe killing a hooker. Y’know. Stuff. Anyway, better go. You hang up. No, you hang up. You hang- The asshole hung up! I WILL TORTURE HIS FAMILY TO DEATH.”)

By the way, why don't I have a character portrait? I'm the villain of this game, damn it!

The backup team moves into position, and despite hanging over his table and sofa in the most obvious way possible, Bains is oblivious to them. “I just got a most interesting phone call,” he tells Sonny. “It seems that one of our playing partners recognised you from somewhere, Mr. Banksten. Fortunately, he happened to be glancing through the newspaper and son-of-a-gun, he recognised the big winner at our poker game. Mr Banksten, a.k.a. Officer Sonny Bonds of the LPD. Officer of the Year, eh? How impressive! What a shame you’ll be receiving that award posthumously.”

“Yeah, now I think about it, that was dumb,” Sonny doesn’t say. Nor does he add: “Wait. I was assuming this whole game was time-compressed or something, that I’d been home a few times and been on a couple of different shifts. You’re saying that in one day, one single day, I’ve arrested three people, been in two major gunfights, attended a birthday party, cleaned up an entire gang, been promoted to Narcotics and taken part in multiple sting operations, one of which directly resulted in your No 2 being murdered about five seconds after being incarcerated – which happened like five minutes after I arrested him – and still had several hours when I could have been screwing my hooker love interest before coming down here, having a drink and arresting you? In a single day? I’m the Jack Bauer of proper proceedure!”

What Bains does say is “I do hope you’ve made peace with whatever gods have abandoned you here, Mr. Bonds,” and to his credit, that’s not an awful supervillain line. Unfortunately, he immediately ruins it by either adding “In other words: KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE!” or getting shot several times by the backup team, depending on whether or not you screwed up calling them or not.

Assuming everything went well though, Bonds heads over to the body, shuddering at the sight of the first person he’s seen gunned down in front of him… at least, the first that didn’t lead to an instant Game Over… only to realise… to nobody’s surprise… nobody’s surprise at all…

“Detective Anglin! Call for an ambulance! This man is alive!”

POSTSCRIPT

Please whistle your favourite badass cop music here. Thank you.

JESSE BAINS, aka THE DEATH ANGEL, was convicted of numerous felonies, including the attempted murder of a police officer and posesession of narcotics with intent to sell. “It’ll be a long, long time before Jesse Bains sees the light of day,” announced the Mayor. Police Quest 2 came out the next year. So much for that. He died in that one, but that didn’t stop him being a pain in Police Quest 3 too.

MARIE “SWEET CHEEKS” WILKANS gave up her life of prostitution, because there was no way she could continue that and be the love interest in a series that actual cops were starting to use as a training tool – as terrifying as that idea should be. She quickly resigned herself to even fans of the series remembering her as “Marie Wilkins”, occasionally sharing a sympathetic drink with the other oddly named characters of the PQ universe, including President Hickle, Willy Wily and Chief Whipplestick.

Haha! It's funny because she's a whore!

SONNY BONDS was promoted to the Homicide division just in time. His former partner, Laura, never did get to see him in a towel, but was soon drummed out of the police force with the discovery that she was the Gremlin. He later started the Lytton PD’s very own SWAT team, where he passes his days waiting for either a sequel to come out, or his wife to be kidnapped for the fifteenth time.

SCHRODINGER’S COCKUP has yet to be accepted as a term on TV Tropes.

HELEN HOTS and TAWNEE V. HELMUTT still have two breasts.

MR WHITMAN made this awesome collection of how it could all have gone wrong in EGA

SCRAP104 did the same for the 1992 VGA remake, which was a fair bit more forgiving.

BAD SONNY BONDS regrets nothing, bitches.

Update: part two is now up, covering how you get new items.

Which mode should I play?

 
First of all, have a play around with the offline training mode – it’s good for the very, very basics. When you’re ready to go online, click Start Playing – you’ll have to choose a game mode. The default is Payload, but it’s a little complex. Click the arrow on the right and pick King of the Hill. It’s a mode where there’s only one control point to fight over, and whoever holds it longest wins. It’s Team Fortress 2 in its absolute simplest form, so it’s a great place to learn how all the classes work.

If Start Playing fails to find you a game, go back to the main menu and click Browse Servers. This is a big scary list, but once it’s finished loading, look for one that has a number less than 100 in the Latency tab. If they’re all jumbled up, click the Latency tab to sort by that.

You can make this list easier to browse by setting a few filters at the bottom: you don’t want full servers, empty servers, or password-protected servers.

Which class should I choose?

 
Once you’re in game, pick either team. You usually can’t join the one with the most players. Then you’ll have to pick a class.

A good starting choice is the Medic: you heal people on your team by firing a beam at them, and that’s immediately useful and appreciated by your team mates. At the basic level, it’s all you need to do. And that gives you time to watch how your team mates play, see who beats whom, and learn a bit about what the weapons do.

When you fancy a change, switch to Heavy. You’re slow, and your gun takes a while to spin up, but once you start firing someone’s usually dead by the time you stop. You’re also the first person Medics will think to heal, and since you just played Medic yourself, you know how to be a good patient and keep them protected. It’s a really satisfying relationship.

After that, it’s mostly personal preference. Soldier’s the best all-rounder, so another good early choice. Don’t stick with any of them for too long until you’ve played all nine: each new one you try helps you understand the role of the others better too. Spy is probably the hardest to be effective with when you’re a beginner, but he’s worth playing just so you understand roughly how they work.

Some classes, particularly Spy and Demoman, work very differently once they unlock certain items. To describe all the differences would be long and pointless. But if a black Scottish cyclops charges at you with a giant sword, get out of the way. And if a you hear an electronic crackle shortly after a Spy appeared to die, he’s alive, and he’s behind you.

Bored of King of the Hill now, how do the other modes work?

 
Payload: the attacking team must escort a cart along some railtracks to an objective. The more of then stay near the cart, the faster it moves. The defenders can stop it by killing them, or standing near the cart themselves.

Payload Race: same as Payload, except both teams have a cart. Up to you whether to focus on escorting your own cart, or stopping the enemy escorting theirs. First cart to the finish line wins.

Control Point: much like King of the Hill, but with five control points. You fight over the central point at first, then whoever gets that can try to take the next point along on the enemy’s side. You can’t capture a point if you don’t own one next to it, and you lose the game if the enemy team captures all your points.

Attack/Defend: just like Control Point, except the red team owns all the points at the start. Only the blue team can capture: once they take a point, it’s theirs forever. Red wins if they can hold out for a certain time.

Capture the Flag: each team has a briefcase in their base. They have to capture the enemy briefcase, and bring it back to their base. If their own briefcase has also been stolen, they can’t score a point until it’s returned. First team to a certain number of captures wins.

Next: How do I get items? How do I get hats?

When I first started playing Deus a few minutes ago, I played with a rule: steal Tom Francis’ gimmick. If I die, I have to start from scratch, or secretly load a save and hope nobody notices. This is the first and only part of this diary, in which cries for realism in games are finally heard. Meet Deus. It’s the FPS where you can get a lethal sore throat, die of insect bites, and sometimes have to amputate your own limbs. Oh, health kits. We never knew how important you were to us until you were gone…

Life 1: In Which Cake Is Not Provided

TOO MANY BUTTONS! I CANNOT CLICK THEM AAAAALL!

As I parachute down onto the world of Alcibiade in the body of mercenary survival expert Trepliev1, I have three burning questions. First, what the hell kind of hero name is Trepliev1? Am I a man or an AOL account? Second, why do I appear to be landing on a hostile planet with no weapons, and no equipment except a Tron costume and half a medical kit? Even the guy from Far Cry 2 was better prepared than this. He may have forgotten his malaria shots, but at least he remembered to bring a gun. Third, I wonder who that man waving at me from the ground is. Is there any chance he’s just… forgotten… he’s holding a knife? Maybe it’s to cut a slice of special Welcome To Alcibiade cake. I hope it’s chocolate.

CAUSE OF DEATH: Stabbed by non-cake offering bastard.

Life 2: In Which There Is Revenge

Healthy Health Tip: Never dine on a dead man's carrots.

“Call that a knife?” I tell him. “This is a fist! Because I don’t have a knife!” He doesn’t seem particularly impressed, but since he follows the ‘jump around like a loony’ method of fighting, I quickly beat him down to the ground and liberate him of his weapon. Inside his hut, I figure he won’t be needing his possessions, which turn out to be a T-Shirt labelled ‘AWE’, a tin of carrots, a flask, and a fish.

AWE stands for “Alien World Exploration”, and since nothing in the game has told me what I’m meant to be doing, I decide this would be a good time to check the manual. It turns out that Trepliev1@aol.com is a former “Robinson” – a scout officer for the interplanetary government who recently got up to all kinds of hijinks in this game’s prequel, Robinson’s Requiem, only to decide that he was a sucker for punishment and wanted another chance to have his eyes torn out by birds and leave him staring at the side of his own nose. (This could actually happen in that game.) He promptly signed up with the titular DEUS, which stands for… and this is the sound of a scenario writer trying way too hard… DEfend US. They’re effectively bounty hunters, and Trepliev1@aol.com’s latest mission is to track down and take out all the members of an evil terrorist group called the New Crusaders. All five of them are on Alcibiade, and presumably were smart enough to bring along some actual weapons and robots and things instead of a pack of aspirin and a relatively decent right hook. I’m just saying…

By the time I’ve finished reading that, it’s night time. I head back into Mr. Nocake’s hut for forty winks, but wake up in the middle of the night. Unable to sleep properly, I go for a moonlit ramble and-

CAUSE OF DEATH: Fell into swamp. Drowned.

Life 3: In Which I Discover That Medicine Is Hard

Having a serious sense of deja joue here...

“Me again!” I tell Mr. Nocake, flooring him in a single punch. I collect his stuff and arm myself with the knife, this time being extra careful to watch my step. Not far away, I meet an equally unfriendly native armed with a bow, but he doesn’t seem to understand the whole concept of ‘ranged combat’ and barely manages to nick me before I stab him. Things don’t go quite as well with a guy with a spear, who appears practically immune to knives. I finally take him down, but not without my health screen turning several unhealthy shades of doom-red. To the medical kit! That will… oh.

This is what a full medical kit looks like later in the game. Welcome to Hell.

Healing in Deus isn’t a case of glugging down some futureworld health potion or slapping on a bandage. You have antibiotics and aspirin, disinfectant and plasma, thread and more… and that’s barely a sample of the full kit you have to assemble during the game. The scanner to the left shows you what’s broken, but only if you have power. On the right, Trepliev1@aol.com is shown in his full glory. Nowhere does the game simply tell you how to cure what ails you though, only which parts require treatment.

In this case, I appear to be bleeding from the gut, so my gut reaction is to put a bandage on it and hope the problem goes away. I sleep. It does! Hurrah! I’m the best doctor ever. I do seem to have splotches appearing in front of my eyes, but I’m sure that’s nothing. I forge on and soon find some more supplies on a dead body even worse prepared for this planet than I am – a packet of antispasmodics, and a can of throat spray in case I get a bit of a cough. Feeling pretty good, but suddenly breathing quite loudly, I continue exploring, and find a village of cave people who say hello by hurling rocks at me. I kill them with some well aimed shots from my bow, pausing only to open up the medical scanner to find out why I suddenly appear to be having an asthma attack. It doesn’t say anything useful though, so-

CAUSE OF DEATH: Hypotension (Low blood pressure)

Life 4: In Which I Perform Some Science Experiments For Science.

Dude, you live on a planet with LASER GUNS and GRENADE LAUNCHERS. Lose the damn bone-club!

“Do you have any salt?” I ask Mr. Nocake before killing him, but he doesn’t answer. His friends are all on a low-sodium diet too, so I check my inventory. Even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have any hypertensive pills in my medical kit. This time, I resolve to keep my blood pressure high by running everywhere and thinking of boobies. If the game isn’t going to provide me with the equipment I need to survive though, maybe I need to think a little outside the box. Opening up my first-aid kit to re-examine my equipment, I take a moment to remember my years of intensive medical schooling…

So, you're saying it's not a *complete* deal-breaker?

In this case, the best idea I have for beating low blood pressure is to tie tourniquets around all my limbs, so that the blood will be more ‘concentrated’. I use the syringe to extract it from those limbs and pump it straight into my manly chest. I pop a quick sleeping pill to give the blood a chance to get used to the New Order, but wake up with a head infection. I pop an aspirin for that, and some vitamins, because why not? In an attempt to hurry up the healing process, I also take another sleeping pill. And then five more, because I often have trouble with insomnia on alien planets.

CAUSE OF DEATH: Natural

Life 5: In Which I Take A Cyanide Pill

Man, I hope that mouse cursor isn't a suppository.

“Hey,” I said, ” Is that a cyanide pill?”

CAUSE OF DEATH: Took a cyanide pill.

Intermission: Meanwhile, In The Next World

It’s worth mentioning that Deus has one of the – if not the absolute – strangest death sequences I’ve ever seen, especially considering that it’s a game with no supernatural elements. You die a lot, and this is what happens every time Trepliev1@aol.com bites it. Just… just watch…

Life 6: In Which I Explain Interesting Things About Gangrene

Hello, I'm a dwarf in your sci-fi game for some reason.

Mr. Nocake’s corpse doesn’t seem moved by my lecture on first-aid, but I see it as part of my duty to share what I’ve learned. How else will he, or any of his other grunting friends, ever know these things?

“…so if you do tie tourniquets around all your limbs and they go rotten, even a whole pack of aspirin won’t cut it,” I finish. “Oh, and stop attacking people or or I’ll empty your skull with an ice-cream scoop.”

This swampy death-course is looking very familiar as I make a bee-line back for the caveman village with a stockpile of arrows. “You should put a bandage on that,” I shout, nailing one in the eye. “But disinfect it first! It’s just common sense! And you? Yes, the one dying at the back! Take more vitamins!”

Next week, learn how to perform a home tracheotomy with a drinking straw!

Having earned the right to, as we mercenaries like to think of it, ‘loot their shit’, I loot their shit. It turns out that one of the natives was actually one of the terrorists I’m hunting, which is handy. Their chief was equipped with axes, and I decide they’ll probably help too. Using the first to find a nearby cavern and the second to ward off the pterodactyls en route, I find myself surrounded by lizard men. Then, by lizard men corpses. Then, in victory, and for no apparent reason, I suddenly find myself screaming at the top of my lungs and running straight into a bonfire. Paging Dr. House!

I suck it up, swallowing some aspirin for the pain, and following the path ahead into a series of dark caverns full of rabid dwarves. My immediate response: “Bugger.” They’re a good deal tougher than anything I’ve fought so far, but not even close to the ultimate threat lurking: a random crash.

CAUSE OF DEATH: General Exception #DD4534543

Life 7: In Which I Cheat Like A Bastard

SURPRISE!

Mr. Nocake seems surprised to see me land with a grenade launcher in my hands. In fact, he rather goes to pieces. The lizard men don’t know what to do when faced with a laser rifle, but quickly work it out. Some might say that punching in a cheat code isn’t in the spirit of this kind of survival game, but I beg to differ. You’re meant to use all the resources at your disposal. Google is a resource at my disposal.

As part of my ‘access all stuff’ cheat, I also have a full medkit, along with all the toys I might have collected during the game. Atropine! Blood analysis! Bone repairing tools! The kind of stuff that you’d expect Trepliev1@aol.com to take with him by default, if he wasn’t such a total clutz. Just looking at it all laid out makes me angry at him. In fact, I decide to punish him for his stupidity. I make him pick up his laser blade and amputate his own arm. Normally, this is something you only want to do when a limb gets gangrenous or bitten by something hyper-toxic. Here, as with making him suck blood out of his leg and re-inject it into his arm with a rusty syringe, it’s all in the name of sadistic entertainment.

CAUSE OF DEATH: Annoyed God. Was Smited.

Conclusion: In Which Things Are Concluded

The absolute best thing about Deus is that the final boss is called 'Cyberfrank'.

And that is where I left poor Trepliev1@aol.com, a bleeding corpse in the middle of a swamp, his last words a non-comprehending “…why?” Deus isn’t a good enough shooter to be worth forging through, nor does it have even close to enough story to make it a compelling RPG. Really, it’s more a novelty than anything else – a reminder of just why most games are happy to say “Here’s a medkit” or regenerate health instead of actually worrying about putting your leg in a splint after a long fall. Deus Ex did however take at least a bit of a leaf out of this game’s book (though not consciously, I’m sure) with its damage system. There, as here, you could break a leg and be left crawling around the map. In both cases, it proved less fun than it might sound. About as much fun as a broken leg, in fact.

A broken leg with gangrene. Covered in leeches. As you slowly drown. In a cave. Alone.

Again.

1. Steklo

I used Steklo back in last year’s Football Manager and this year’s version is as good as ever. Steklo has a sort of dark, simple, well laid out design that reminds me of the steam interface.

2. Pastel

For those who prefer things a little tamer, a little lighter, a little more Ikea style, there’s Pastel 11. Which replaces FM’s bold colours with a more washed out, easy-going look for a more relaxing experience.

3. Flex

One of the more popular FM skins, the perennial Flex skin is as strong in FM11 as ever. The current edition comes with both left and right sided menu versions for the sinister lefties out there.

4. Onepiece

Another popular FM2010 skin returns, Onepeice is simple, classic and clear to read, exactly the qualities one could hope for in an FM skin. Comes with or without the calendar for those rebellious souls who just don’t give a damn what date it is.

5. Windows 7

One of the more unusual efforts in skin making, this skin re-imagines Football Manager to resemble Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. The result is surprisingly pleasant and easy to use, just try not to confuse it with your real operating system, or you’ll be trying to sign Eden Hazard to your hard drive.

6. iTunes

For those who prefer Apple Interfaces to Windows, this skin dresses Football Manager up in the clothes of iTunes. Given how popular Apple’s UIs are it’s almost surprising more games don’t try this.

7. Flexion

Don’t care for all this faffing about with new skins? Prefer things how they were in the old days? This skin has you covered. Flexion is a retro skin based on the FM2007 menus, because change isn’t always for the better.

8. Neue.2

Enough retro! Out with the old, in with the Neue… New… Newey… Neway…Nyuu… honestly I have no idea how to pronounce the name of this skin, but that’s thankfully no barrier to using it.

9. Netbook and Netbook Dark

Football Manager doesn’t require a high end machine, and it’s easy to drop in for a match or two if you’ve got a free moment, so it’s the ideal game to load onto your netbook. The trouble is that most skins aren’t optimised for smaller, lower resolution screens. This one changes all that, being specifically calibrated for Netbook play (although for some reason the tactics wizard screen doesn’t work very well). Also comes in a dark version.

10. FM -View

Made my the community website FM-View, I really like this skin’s striking appearence. The light blue against the gray background manages to be extremely eye catching without being gaudy.

Check here for more good skins. What do you use managers? Do you have any more to recommend for us? Please share in the comments.

Imagine a version of the Star Wars universe where you can become almost any kind of character, explore dozens of worlds, even acquire your own spaceship and recruit a crew. Now try not to imagine Star Wars: Galaxies – the first awkward take on that vision, which drove itself into the ground trying to attract new players with endless unsuccessful redesigns.

The Old Republic won’t have that problem: it’s a BioWare game, and BioWare already have an audience. Mass Effect is becoming this generation’s Star Wars. Everyone already knows they love its story-driven structure, the way it builds a cast of interesting companion characters, and the freedom it offers to play an asshole or a saint.

The Old Republic has all of that, and it actually is Star Wars – albeit 3,500 years before the films. But it’s also a massively multiplayer game: thousands upon thousands of players will all be playing through these stories together in the same world. ‘Story’ means major developments, unique to your character, with permanent consequences. How on Earth do you make that work for 5,000 people in the same place? Aren’t the consequences going to conflict? Won’t they realise their personal moments are the same as those of hundreds of others?

He was a cold-blooded killer. She was a warm-hearted waitress.

A lot hinges on those questions. Big singleplayer RPGs are expensive to make, but gamers don’t pay more for them than the next five-hour shooter. BioWare’s games thrive on being huge, while financial pressure is shrinking other mainstream games around them. About the only thing gamers are happy to pay more than £30 for is a massively multiplayer game.

If BioWare are at all nervous about their approach to making story work in an MMO, it’s not showing. They invited me to play it not for an hour, or an afternoon, but for two days.

As it turns out, the answer to the big question is easy. How do they make personal stories coherent for thousands of people at once? They don’t.

Anyone's guess what the Smuggler's ship is based on.

Let’s split up

 
You choose from eight classes when creating a character in The Old Republic: The Republic Trooper, Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Smuggler are the good guys, and the Imperial Agent, Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor and Bounty Hunter are the Empire’s. Writing director Daniel Erickson says the faction you belong to “is very much about where were you born, more than anything else.” Virtuous people on both sides try to save lives in their line of work, and cruel people everywhere are never short of excuses to kill.

Your choice of class, however, is crucial. Your main quest, your occupation, your reason for being, the people you’ll meet, the ship you can get and the overall story of your character from start to finish are all specific to your class. It even influences your voice and your personality. To that extent, The Old Republic does give different players different stories. But of course, thousands and thousands divided by eight is still hundreds and hundreds, so it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of people playing through the same content in the same world.

And Palpatine was all, 'lol'.

Bounty Hutta

 
I picked Bounty Hunter, because I liked the wrap-them-in-string ability shown off in the class trailer. Josh, playing alongside me, chose the other class available to us: Imperial Agent.

That put us both on Hutta, a wretched swamp of scum and villainy run by things with names ending in ‘the Hutt’. And yet we scarcely crossed paths. Since class determines your main story, players of different classes are playing different games. There are plenty of sidequests scattered around that we could have done arranged to do together, but your class story is always the focus.

As a Bounty Hunter, my class story was all about The Great Hunt. It’s an interplanetary contest for mercs like me to make a name for themselves by going after the most elusive targets in the galaxy. But it’s exclusive: I needed a powerful sponsor to put me forward. I needed Nemro the Hutt, and he is not a good space slug to need.

Rather than run between my story and Josh’s Imperial Agent one, it made more sense to team up with a fellow Bounty Hunter. I say it made sense, it made no sense. The plot hinges on the fact that Nemro can only endorse one aspiring hunter in this competition, so the idea that we’d help each other earn his favour is a complete contradiction of our characters.

Pureblood Sith rarely go into accounting.

That’s what I mean when I say TOR doesn’t attempt to reconcile players’ stories to each other. But in game terms it was convenient: we were always heading to the same place so we could fight side by side.

Bounty Hunters can only use blaster pistols, small weapons that fire in quick bursts, so the real damage is done by gadgets like your wrist-mounted rocket launcher. Many Bounty Hunter abilities have no significant cooldown time, and there’s no energy cost to worry about, but they do generate heat. Once you hit your heat limit, you’re stuck with your basic blaster-burst ability until you cool off.

Early on, it’s painful. The Old Republic has a cover system, but oddly it’s restricted to certain classes. The Bounty Hunter isn’t one of them, so when you’ve only got a few abilities you’re really just standing there in a large open area hitting number keys. I’ve heard BioWare call this ‘heroic combat’, but I wasn’t really feeling it. When I hid behind a nearby wall to cool off during a boss fight, the boss couldn’t figure out how to get to me and immediately went into ‘Evade’ mode, rendering him invincible and healing all the damage I’d dealt so far.

'Hey, I'm just the stims vendor. Racist.'

Rocket science

 
Around level 8 your abilities round out. It’s still awkward to be out in the open, but the combinations you can pull off are fun. For a tough mob, I’d start by hitting the most dangerous enemy with my missile launcher. That knocks him and the surrounding enemies to the floor, giving me a chance to close the distance while blasting them.

If the threat has got back to his feet by the time I’m there, I hit him with a stun dart to immobilise him, then Rail Shot him – a sniper blast that does extra damage to stunned targets. Then I move to the edge of the mob, target the nearest enemy, and let off the flamethrower. It catches everyone in its cone of effect, first hurting then immobilising them as they thrash around in the fire. If anyone’s left alive, I can use my jetpack to deliver a thruster-powered uppercut.

Playing with another Bounty Hunter is just the same formula multiplied. Our favourite tag-team move was to both open with Death from Above: we launch into the air on our jetpacks and rain missiles down in tandem. It knocks everyone to the ground and deals damage over a wide area – not much, but significant when doubled.

Control the turrets, control the... turret fire.

Working for Nemro the Hutt tends to involve quest dialogues that end with “…his head on my floor!” Some of the quests are interesting, some are straightforward, and most of them feel very BioWare. It’s a lot like playing Knights of the Old Republic in co-op – not like playing a specially made co-op version of that game, just literally having another player there in the singleplayer story.

Once we’d secured Nemro’s endorsement for the Great Hunt, we were done with Hutta and headed to the spaceport. Every class eventually gets their own ship in The Old Republic, but not just yet: you’re told to leave the first planet by public transport. But a droid informed us that an Imperial vessel was on its way to our destination, Dromund Kaas, and we might like to hitch a lift.

Player vs player scraps get chaotic.

Moff to a flame

 
That led to a Flashpoint, a very actiondriven longer quest that takes place entirely in an instance. An Imperial Grand Moff contacted us to say that the captain of the vessel we were on had disobeyed a direct order, and we were to kill him. You’re probably supposed to relent and spare him once you discover his reasons, but I like friends in high places, so I kicked him to the floor and shot him.

Soon after the ship is boarded by Republic forces, which you fight as their transports punch in through the hull. We then took a shuttle to the Republic capital ship and fought our way through it from the inside, defeating an Admiral Ackbar-type commander, a giant defence droid and ultimately a Jedi.

It’s an excitingly swashbuckling adventure, though with an exhausting amount of combat. Some journalists playing on their own struggled with it for a long, long time. It was easier with two, but I’d still plan on getting an even larger group together for these in the final game. Although it was part of our class story as Bounty Hunters, the Imperial Agent story includes the same section. Josh spared the captain, which apparently saved him the whole ordeal on the Republic ship.

Most of the rest of the game takes place in public spaces, where you might run into any of the thousands of other people playing on the same server. When you’re approaching a key moment in your plot, you go through a green barrier that puts you in your own instance. If you’re in a group with other classes, they can come through with you and join in. If you’re grouped with others of the same class, as I was, they each go into their own instance of the event, and rejoin when they come out.

My fellow Bounty Hunter Andy and I, for example, were asked by an admiral to kill his daughter – for reasons I won’t spoil. We fought through the compound to get to her together, but once we reached the room itself, we each went into our own separate versions of that encounter alone. Andy froze the daughter in carbonite instead, as any reasonable person would, while I shot her as instructed. We each came out and fought our way back to the admiral with completely different stories to tell.

Classes can drop in to help others with plot lines that aren't their own.

Group chat

 
Where it gets slightly awkward is the combat: that room has three extremely tough bosses in it, ones who completely trounced me on my own. I needed help. You can choose to join someone’s instance even if you can’t join in with their plot, which Andy did to help me with the fight. It meant he went through the whole emotional confrontation with the daughter all over again, the daughter he also had as an inventory item frozen in carbonite. BioWare would be wise to avoid putting challenging fights in plot instances, because grouping up to defeat them makes for some awkward story moments.

Less important plot points can be played through together, in ‘multiplayer conversations’. The mechanic is pretty rudimentary: everyone picks the dialogue option they want to say in response to the line you all just heard, and a die is rolled for each player: highest number is the one whose line gets said. If you agreed, you get some mysterious party points that don’t seem to do anything yet.

If you’re not near the NPC a teammate is talking to, you can appear as a hologram proxy and join in anyway. BioWare realise they still need to disable options like “[Kill him]” for holograms – we had some funny moments with those.

Lens Flare unconfirmed as new Sith ability.

Dating twins

 
Even if you play alone, your character always has company. You acquire companion characters throughout the game, your first after just a few levels, and you always have one with you from then on. Mine was Mako, an Asianlooking human tech expert. Andy’s was Mako, an Asian-looking human tech expert. You can see where this gets weird – same class, same plot, same companions. Since we didn’t get to create our own characters, Andy and I looked almost identical ourselves, so the four of us trundling around together started to freak people out.