The graphics are okay, the AI sucks, the plot sucks, the UI REALLY sucks, the music sucks… Good grief. This is just an awful game. Who on earth thought this was ready to release?
Well it’s another election where the opinion polls were disastrously wrong. The campaign had been deadlocked for the entire duration, but the result is anything but.
There’s always a movement towards the incumbent at the end of a campaign, but could it really be this much? Perhaps Tory voters were even shyer than polling models had allowed? Hardly surprising given the destructive nature of the Conservative party, I suppose. I imagine the pollsters are frantically re-evaluating their models even as I type.
Labour wiped out In Scotland? I never thought I’d live to see the day. They weren’t helped by Jim Murphy being slightly less charismatic than an axe murderer, but there’s no doubting that the SNP have made huge strides since the referendum. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now they have such a crushing mandate north of the border.
For Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and David Laws, there’s one simple message: THIS is what happens when you break a promise. Don’t give me this guff about not being able to achieve some things in government – you could have said no on tuition fees and you know it. The party for which I used to work now has fewer MPs than at any time since before I was born. The near death of the party was caused by your idiocy. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
And I hope the British people are proud too. You’ve given a bunch of uncaring bastards free rein to continue their war on the poor and disadvantaged and to put money in the pockets of those who already have it.
Roll on five years from now.
BBC saying the Greens and UKIP will win 2 seats. I remember ’97 where for most of the night the BBC were claiming the Tories would win two seats in Scotland. Then they lost Edinburgh Pentlands and Eastwood… and still claimed the same. I can just about see UKIP getting two seats but where is the second Green seat?
BBC reporting rumours that Danny Alexander has lost his seat! Now let’s get rid of Laws, and the night will have a silver lining.
Wow. If that’s even close to being right, that is a devastating result for Labour and the Lib Dems. Could there be a Con/LD/UKIP/DUP coalition?
Well that was a let down.
I’ve wanted to play a Fable game ever since I heard about the series, but not being an XBox owner I’ve been denied that opportunity because the game has always been exclusive to that platform. Always until last Friday, because Fable III has finally been released for the PC – months after the XBox version. From a few reviews I’ve seen it appears that Lionhead Studios have used the time to fix a number of bugs and irritations from the XBox version, so even though we PC users will have to put up with being called out-of-date by XBoxers, at least we got an error-free game, and frankly that suits me fine.
Part of my desire to play Fable came from the subtle dig that Bethesda had M’aiq the Liar make in Oblivion, where he was heard to say “People always enjoy a good fable. M’aiq has yet to find one, though. Perhaps one day.” Lionhead return the favour at least once in Fable III: there’s an odd quest where you end up as a character in a roleplaying game, and pull a lever only for a swarm of butterflies to appear. “Butterflies?” remarks one character. “Worst. Game. Ever”, says another; a not-so-subtle reference to the start of the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion.
One of the first things a Brit will notice when playing the game is that it’s a who’s who of British stars in the voice acting department. John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg, Sean Pertwee and Zoë Wanamaker all appear – and that’s just the biggest names; there are loads more. All this talent isn’t necessarily a good thing though. It means there’s a pressure to overuse them, leading to another thing, and one that emphatically does not change as the game progresses: you spend an awful lot of time in cutscenes. These come in two types: obvious cutscenes where you can’t really do anything except watch the cinematics, and ones where you can move around as normal, but can’t do anything except go where you’re supposed to go and listen to whoever you’re supposed to listen to. There’s far too much of this. Very often your only feeling of interactivity comes from a small amount of running down a corridor to another cutscene, which can get incredibly boring.
The next things anyone will notice is that the graphics aren’t that great and that the controls are awful. Okay, I got the hang of the controls a bit more as I got used to things, but at first it was like trying to steer a shopping trolly with several wonky wheels. The graphics… well okay the backgrounds are nice, but the NPCs walk an odd line between reality and cartoon, and it doesn’t work for me. They all end up looking… odd. And almost identical.
After a while, you get given the tools you need to fight. As in most games, combat comes down to melee, ranged and magic, but the twist is that magic comes from the gloves you wear rather than spells, and that the ranged combat is done using guns rather than bows. It’s still either a sword or a hammer for melee though. At first I tried my hand with a sword: during the tutorial section you have to practice combat against your mentor for a little while and it seemed pretty simple. Unfortunately, one-on-one combat in Fable III is as rare as a sequence of ten minutes without a cutscene, and you can’t use all your fancy moves because someone will stick a sword in your back while you’re trying to deal with the thing in front of you. After a while, therefore, I switched to magic, because as well as a one-on-one spell, you get an area-of-effect spell that helpfully hits any enemies in a certain radius around you but not allies. The problem is that this quickly becomes unbalanced: when you find yourself charging into the middle of a crowd of enemies just so you can kill more of them with your ultra-powerful AOE spell, something has clearly gone wrong. The gun can be useful in some places because you can use it to aim from a distance, but generally charging in worked just fine for me.
You don’t level up as such. Rather, you acquire points called Guild Seals that can be spent on upgrades to your weapons or spells, or on perks that let you buy shops, chat people up, have kids and so on. In a few places you also need to acquire enough of these seals to convince a faction to join up with you. I’m not going to go into why because I don’t want to start spoiling things if you’re going to play the game.
But this raises the question: why would anyone want to play this? You can talk to the various NPCs who fill up the towns and villages, but they’re all totally without personality so after a few times I stopped bothering. You can get married to these NPCs and have kids, but again I didn’t bother. All the quests boil down to “Go here, kill this thing, collect this other thing, come back again”. Some people may claim that because I didn’t bother much with the NPCs I missed out on the role-playing aspects of the game. I disagree. Since the only point of getting married is to have kids, there’s nothing to role-play. It’s just another game mechanic. The only places where any kind of roleplaying occur are in one or two laughably black-and-white choices where you have to either a) murder a sackful of puppies, or b) pet them and make sure they all go to good homes. Anybody calling Fable III a roleplaying game needs to be made to play Oblivion or Morrowind for a few hours until they learn the difference.
I finished the first part of the main quest in less than 8 hours only to be presented with the prospect of tedious grind spending the next in-game year raising money to avert an apocalypse, at which point I stopped and went to bed because I really couldn’t be bothered. It’s not even like you can really go off and explore the world: the game is similar to Dragon Age in this respect in that it looks like a sandbox but isn’t really. Compared to TES games where there was always something new and interesting just over the next ridge, it’s a really small world. This means that if I decide to go back and bother with the grind-fest, I’ll have completed the whole thing in around 15 hours. That’s not very long.
The good news for me is that I’ve finally played a Fable game so at least I’ve got that off my chest. I can’t see myself bothering with Fable IV though. If Bethesda return Lionhead’s compliment and insert another reference in Skyrim, I hope it’s a suitably insulting one.
I think it was about 18 months ago, or it might have been even longer, that Timenn and I were chatting in IRC about books. It turned out we both share similar interests in fiction so were swapping titles to give each other a few new items for their wish list. I think I recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky’s (then new) series Shadows of the Apt – and I recommend it to anyone who likes good fantasy novels – and in return, he suggested George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series.
Somehow, I’d never heard of this guy, and I have to confess that after a couple of searches had informed me that he was known as “The American Tolkien”, my heart sank. I love J. R. R. Tolkien’s stuff. I got a copy of The Hobbit on my 11th birthday. I know this for a fact because my copy has the message “For Robert on his 11th birthday & for passing to L.R.G.S. 26/4/84, From your father and mother – We hope it will not be too hobbit-forming!” Unfortunately, this last hope proved false, because Tolkien was to prove hugely habit-forming over the years. Since then, I’ve read Lord of the Rings over 30 times, learned huge chunks of The Silmarillion by heart, read all the Unfinished Tales and every other book Christopher Tolkien released, and generally become a bit of a Middle Earth nerd – although not, I must emphasise, enough of a nerd to learn Elvish. The reason I mention this is not just to establish my nerdly credentials, but to help you understand why somebody described as a Tolkien has got a hell of a lot to live up to.
It doesn’t take you long to realise that the comparison is total rubbish. It always is. Whenever anybody is described as “The New X”, it’s merely lazy journalism. Lionel Messi is not “The New Maradonna”, Wayne Rooney never was “The New Michael Owen”, and George Martin isn’t “The New Tolkien”. He and Tolkien both write rather good fantasy novels, but that’s all they have in common – apart from the two “R”s in their initials. When I read A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, I was impressed. A lot of fantasy books seem to have been written from a cliché checklist: ancient fight between good and evil? check; low-born character eventually saving everything? check; improbable love interest? check. Many books fall into the trap of thinking they’re mysteries, so we get sudden plot twists for no good reason. This isn’t necessary: was anybody really expecting Frodo would fail to destroy the ring, or that Harry would fail to kill Voldemort? An ending that you’re expecting isn’t a Bad Thing by default – a book is about the journey, not the ending.
Anyway, so the books were good. That’s not why I’m writing this. The point is that the books have been made into a ten-part TV series on HBO called Game of Thrones after the first book. For once, we can see it in the UK with only a 24-hour delay instead of the usual months or years, but only if you subscribe to Sky Atlantic. Obviously, if you don’t subscribe it would be totally wrong to download the episodes using BitTorrent from the huge number of sources that appear within minutes of the program ending on Sunday evenings (US time).
The series gained a lot of hype on the Internet, and when you see the sort of clips that were released ahead of time, it’s not difficult to see why. It stars Emperor Martin Boromir Sean Bean, who gives a typically good performance as Lord Ned Stark. A lot of the other cast members are British too, the locations are all in Europe (Ireland and Malta, mainly), which raises the question “Why can’t the bloody BBC make stuff like this?” Unlike most of the BBC’s output these days, which seems to target the 10-15 age bracket and hopes that adults will be interested too, Game of Thrones sets out its stall from the first moments as Adults Only. After about ten minutes of the first show, the corpse count is already in double figures and we’ve had two beheadings. That’s not even the most outré moment, the award for which probably goes to a scene where a dwarf is in bed with four naked prostitutes. Yup, this isn’t for the children. Now I’m not advocating sex and violence for the sake of sex and violence. It’s just good to see a program that doesn’t set out to be safe for once. The disregard for safety can be felt in the story too. It doesn’t take long before you have three or four different stories all progressing at the same time. Too many films and TV shows assume that the audience can barely follow one story, so this is a major departure.
I’ve waited until three episodes have come out before saying anything because I wanted to make sure that the quality stayed high. So far, so good. If you don’t watch this program, you’re missing a real gem.
The penultimate post about Steam’s Potato sack sees yet another game I hate, one I quite like, and one that’s “Meh”. In this case, though, the “Hate” was “Meh” for a while, and the “Meh” is so close to being both a “Hate” and a “Like” that it’s almost in a category of its own.
The Wonderful End of the World
For a while, I was going to give this a “Meh” rather than a “Hate” but 1) I hated to break the pattern, and 2) Since I never actually enjoyed this game and was only going to give it a “Meh” because it was a little different, I decided to play it again and realised that what was different after one 5-minute play was already boring after a 10-minute play.
You start out each level as a tiny little…. thing. No idea what. It’s probably specified somewhere but I really can’t be bothered finding out. You gain size by eating things smaller than you, and because there’s a set of objects in just the right sizes you keep getting bigger and bigger until you’ve consumed the whole level. Now that might not sound enough even to justify a “Meh” but I did quite like the way in which the perspective shifts pixel by pixel until you realise that what was small is now tiny and what was big is now munchable. The trouble is that it’s so repetitive. On the second screen you find yourself in a maze filled with eatable pills and ghosts that will hurt you (make you smaller) until you get big enough to eat them. And the walls. Yes – you’re playing first-person Pac-man. Now I’m just about old enough to remember Pac-man the first time around. I wasn’t old enough to go to arcades and play it for real, but I had a Mini-Munchman during my primary school’s craze for them (this would be… 1981ish [and BTW – Wikipedia is dead wrong: the ultimate achievement was to get HHH with six lives without completing a level, but I can’t add that as it would be original research]) and I really have no desire to go back to it now.
It’s worth pointing out that this makes a perfect 3/3 on “Hate” for Dejobaan games. I’m sure they don’t care, but I certainly won’t be thinking buying anything from them in the future.
BIT.TRIP BEAT
I live in a small flat. Very small. But I appreciate it a lot more after having played this game because the bathroom has a great feature. When you turn off the hall light, close the bathroom door, and turn off the light in there too, it’s dark. Perfectly dark. Pitch black. There’s not a single photon by which to see. I discovered this phenomenon a little while ago by accident, but I’m incredibly grateful my house has such a feature because I needed it after playing this game.
Last time’s “Like” was Audiosurf, a game that starts with one of those “Flashing lights can be dangerous” warnings that are always so annoying (unless, presumably, you suffer from epilepsy, when they’re probably quite useful). I don’t suffer from that particular condition, but I came damn close to a seizure while playing this baby. On my first playthrough, the relentless flashing lights got the better of me after about 10 minutes, and I had to quit and head to the afore-mentioned bathroom to stand in total darkness for a short time before my head cleared.
At first glance, BTB is a Pong game missing a paddle. Blocky balls come from the right of the screen and you use your blocky bat to hit them back. In the background, things start to explode, fire lasers, flash and do anything they can to put you off. Eventually, you’re trying to return balls that fly through elegant parabolas, in groups, with changing speeds whilst doing it all through a fog of pixels caused by the various explosions going off in the background. If you miss enough hits, the same level continues but in black and white form and without the music. In other words, the sensory overload is part of the whole deal. It’s intended. If you miss too many balls while in BW mode, the game is over.
As well as just hitting back a ball when you hit it, you play a note in an 8-bit style tune that goes on throughout the game. This is a brilliant feature, and the way in which incoming projectiles are scheduled to hit particular beats is genius.
Scoring is the ultimate bitch. When you hit your first ball back, you get a point. Your second gets you two; your third, three. You can probably tell where this is going. By the time you hit your 250th consecutive projectile back, you’re getting 250 points per hit… which is roughly where I stop being able to do it. As soon as you miss one ball, it’s back to 1… 2… 3… so obviously the big scores come by never missing a hit. I completed the first set of levels with a score of around 77000. The leaderboard showed that two people had got scores of ~68000000 – that’s getting on for one hundred times higher than me. In other words, I suck.
You might have noticed that this is longer than any of the other reviews so far, and it’s because – as I said from the start – I’m not trying to give you a full review, I’m just trying to write down my thoughts, so let’s do that now. If I was playing this 20-25 years ago, I’d probably be awesome at it. One’s reactions slow down with age, and a predilection for neat whisky doesn’t help. This is a game at which I know I will never be any good. The constant flashing is enough to drive me to a darkened room. The graphics consist of big blocks of pixels. I hate this game. Every time I quit, I do it in a feeling of high dudgeon. On the other hand… I keep coming back. The music isn’t brilliant in itself but the way in which the blocks you hit influence the tune is damnably clever. It’s… fun! And why else do we play games?
Defense Grid: The Awakening
I’ve saved the best until last. This is the game that wins the rpeh “Nobody Cares What I Think” award for best game in the potato sack. The concept is fairly simple. There are MacGuffins called Energy Cores. Most of the time you need to stop some bunch of aliens stealing them but occasionally you have to steal them from the aliens. To achieve this, you build towers. These towers hurt the aliens in some way, and when hurt enough the aliens die, dropping any cores they hold. These towers start with simple guns that fire bullets, go through “Inferno” towers that are big flame-throwers, lasers that fire… lasers, to advanced things like “Temporal” towers, which cause enemies to slow down, and “Meterors” that hurl huge balls of energy at the invaders.
There are several catches. First, towers can only be build in certain places. Next, they only have a certain range – that varies from tower to tower – so you need to work out your killing zones. A gun tower only costs 100 “resources” but a laser costs 200, so you need to judge when to buy the expensive towers. Towers can be upgraded, so you also need to judge when one cool tower is better than two new towers. Later levels let you upgrade twice, but the cost is huge.
As you progress, you get enemies that can fly, and are immune to certain weapons; enemies that have shields, and are immune to “heat” weapons like lasers until those shields are gone; and huge powerful enemies that just take a huge amount of hittin’ to kill.
Early levels are easy to complete, but there’s a medal system that means you have to save a certain number of cores and get a particular score to really win. For instance, though I completed it on my first go – and it’s almost impossible to fail – it took me seven goes to get a gold medal on the very first level
So far my one complaint is that the difficulty curve isn’t quite right. I was doing pretty well until I hit a level (fairly early on – I’m really not very good at computer games!) where almost every square let me build a tower. I got my pasty white ass kicked all over the map.
You can learn from your mistakes, though, and there’s a “checkpoint” feature that even lets you rewind within a level, so you can play around a bit with your strategy.
I suppose you can argue that this is another case of me liking the logic games, because when you only have a small number of options, it boils down to a set of choices that can be determined through fairly logical choices. There’s much more to it than that, though. Definitely my favourite game. In fact, I feel an urge to play it again.
Part three of my trip into Steam’s Potato Sack sees the same formula as the last two. Three games; one I hate, one I like and one that comes in the middle.
Killing Floor
I suppose this might actually be quite a good game, but I hate it. The trouble is that you need to play it with friends and I don’t have any that play this game. You can go on the Internet to find people willing to play with you but I’ve done this kind of thing before, going right back to playing Quake over a 28.8kbps modem back in roughly 1997. You can find people it’s worth playing with, but it’s much more likely you’re going to run into a bunch of idiots instead. I tried to play it on my own and was overwhelmed after about two minutes, and quit. Sorry, but games need to have a decent single player mode so that misanthropists like me can enjoy them. This doesn’t so it goes on my hate list. Tough.
Super Meat Boy
I almost put this game in the “Hate” category, but it’s got just about enough going for it that I put it in “Meh” instead. The story is that you’re Meat Boy and someone called Dr Fetus has captured your girlfriend, Bandage Girl. You have to guide Meat Boy through a series of levels and rescue her. It’s a platformer, and I’m not a huge fan, but there’s quite a lot of skill involved, so it’s more than a simple Mario game where jumping around at random will usually get you quite a long way. If you’re interested in platform games, the Wikipedia article will tell you more. Apparently the game has a rating of over 90% on MetaCritic, so there must be plenty of people who like this kind of thing, but I’m not really one of them. The music’s good though.
Audiosurf
To be honest, this is a pretty dull game with a really good twist, but the twist makes it brilliant. The idea is that you are moving along a road that twists and turns, and bounces up and down, and you have to pick up different coloured blocks to form groups of colour that then count for points. The fun part is that the shape, incline, and length of the road, as well as the location of the blocks, is determined by a music track that you give the game. If you play some kind of thrash metal in the background you’re going to be in for a pretty busy journey, while playing Clannad is likely to produce a largely empty one. When I gave it Yes’ version of Simon and Garfunkel’s America, the road bounced up and down like it was full of potholes. As one final twist, you get to see who else has played on certain tracks, and it’s interesting to see that there are obviously a load of old rockers like me out there because even Yes and King Crimson tracks had been played before. So the idea is really basic, but I can see it being quite fun to play at parties, and it’s a good excuse to bring out some old tracks from the ol’ MP3 collection and hit the road. This is one of the few games in this set I can see myself playing again and again, so it’s got to get a “Like” rating, hasn’t it?
One of the features of The Elder Scrolls from Daggerfall onwards has been Factions; organisations that you can (often) join, each with an associated set of quests, and a hierarchy of ranks through which you can progress. Fighters, Mages and Thieves all have guilds; Daggerfall and Oblivion allowed you to join the shadowy Dark Brotherhood while Morrowind featured the slightly more honourable Morag Tong; Daggerfall had Knight orders and Temples of the Eight Divines; Morrowind had the Great Houses of Vvardenfell; Oblivion had several small factions such as the Order of Virtuous Blood and the Knights of the White Stallion.
What can we expect in TESV: Skyrim? Todd Howard seems to have confirmed that the Dark Brotherhood is back, but there’s no word on the others. Presumably we’ll see the Fighters Guild again. It would be a real shame to have stopped the Camonna Tong taking it over in Morrowind and the Blackwood Company driving it out of business in Oblivion only for it to gently fizzle out during the next two centuries. I imagine we’ll see the Thieves Guild again. The increase in visibility and prosperity brought about by the ending of Nocturnal’s curse should help keep it going, and its only serious rival, the Camonna Tong, is almost exclusively a Morrowind operation, although we did see a couple of its operatives in Cyrodiil so you never know…
The Mages Guild, of course, is a different matter. We know from The Infernal City that the guild is no more, and has split into the “Synod” and the “College of Whispers”. Of course, Skyrim is set over 150 years after TIC, so the guild might have reformed, but either way I hope we’ll learn more about the split and the reasons for it. It seems likely to me that necromancy was the cause, and “College of Whispers” has a more necromantic sound to it, so my guess is that’s where the necromancers went with the Synod being the anti-necromancy faction. We shall see.
The problem I’ve always had with the factions is that, apart from giving you some extra quests, a free bed, and a quantity of free goods… there’s not much to them. The members hang around their guild halls or hideouts complaining about the lack of work, or how there’s no time for research but don’t do anything else. Why can’t I bring along another Fighters Guild member on a quest? Yes I’ll have to split the fee, but so be it.
In the Mages Guild people were always reading books, mixing potions and so on but never learned anything new. How about letting them teach players new skills? Not just the sort of ability training we had in MW and OB, but – for instance – why not make it a requirement to talk to a guild alchemist when you level up to learn about the new properties that are available with plants? It doesn’t really make much sense when you hit 75 alchemy you suddenly know ”all” the properties, having had no idea about the fourth property mere moments ago.
For the Thieves, let me hire one to steal something for me. Or to open a door I can’t unlock yet. Or sneak up and pick somebody’s pocket.
The other problem is that you can gain ranks too quickly. In about two weeks, you can go from a prison ship/prison cell to champion of the Fighters Guild, Arch-mage of the Mages Guild and head honcho of the Thieves. I know you can’t really slow this down too much because it’ll be annoying, but how about introducing rough timing rules like you can’t become Arch-mage in less than two months? On a related subject, gossip and rumours shouldn’t spread instantly: you can complete a quest in Cheydinhal, run faster than any other living entity straight to Anvil, and find people there talking about it like it’s old news.
Anyway, back on topic.
I can’t really begin to speculate as to what the faction quest lines will be about – or even if there will be an overarching quest line for each guild. The reunification of the Mages Guild is one idea that springs to mind, or a huge battle between the two successor factions, perhaps. It’s difficult to see anything more engaging than the Dark Brotherhood story from OB – the secret internal traitor idea was perfect for that faction. Perhaps this is the time for the showdown between them and the Morag Tong?
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Ramblings of a Diseased Mind 
