At my Secondary School, for a few months at least, our teenaged politics was defined by who was kissing whom, who had insulted whom, and who was sending spaceships to defend or attack whom. My friends and I were all playing Planetarion, a browser-based massively multiplayer game of long-term space domination. Each player was given control of a planet and would strive to gain the most points by mining their asteroids, building ships and capturing enemy planets.

What allowed the game to consume us was the glacial pace it moved at. The world would update once every ‘tick’, where a tick was a single hour. When you did anything, you would be given an ETA: it will take this number of ticks for your ships to be constructed, it will take this number ticks for your ships to reach their target.

The delayed response between performing an action and seeing its conseqeunces meant there was room in between for nail-biting obsession. More importantly, it meant we could log on to the game in the school library, make a few discrete moves and log off again before any disapproving teacher could catch us.

Unfortunately, my friends and I were all young teenagers. It wasn’t like we needed an excuse for bickering or Machiavellian backstabbing, and Planetarion simply provided a platform for our worst compulsions. Plus, disclaimer: I was kind of a dick.

While I’d long forgotten the specifics of my old Planetarion games, a quick check of my hard drive revealed an MSN chatlog from the time.

Oh boy.

It seems my friends and I had just been sent a general message from the Minister of War (of, I guess, our coalition/group), saying that defences should always be provided to attacked comrades. However, after committing 500 ships to defending one friend, and sending a 1500 ship counter-attack against his enemy, two other friends needed defending. They were angry I wasn’t sending ships to help them, too. I’ve obscured the names that could be in any way identifiable, except for my own:

Graham says:

im defending [Friend] with 500 ships and attacking the guy thats attacking him with 1500 in the hope he’ll racall. this is what i was asked to do, wga

Graham says:

what more could i do??

Officially Well Known Again! says:

currently there is no orders in the gal

Graham says:

[Friend] asked me on icq to attack the guy and see if he recalls, and asked me to defend. so thats what im doing

Officially Well Known Again! says:

[Friend] says “Jump under the bus Smitz!”

Bye Smitz ure dead now!

That’s some real nice typing skills you’ve got there, “Smitz”. And does anyone know what “wga” means?

Graham says:

im not defending [Friend #2] or you because im worried about being attacked my self

Graham says:

my points went from 300 thousand to 1.1 million

Graham says:

i have the most roids in the galaxy and am second in points

Officially Well Known Again! says:

smitz thats is mince

I had forgotten that “mince” used to mean bad! Now it means I’m having delicious Bolognese for dinner. Conversely, I remember that the concern for my planet at the time was genuine, but trying to explain my tactics by bragging about how great I was probably wasn’t a great idea.

When bragging didn’t work, I tried name-calling, branding those complaining as “little shites.” The use of plural prompted requests for who the other shites were, but I refused to name names. There aren’t timestamps in the log, but I can only imagine this went on for hours. Until!

[Friend #2] has been added to the conversation.

[Friend #2] says:

why the fuck are u saying we’re all shite smitz?

My log ends here, but these choice extracts are meant to illustrate the type of conversations we’d have, where my friends and I would re-enact scenes of palace intrigue over badly spelt MSN chats.

I’ve been thinking about Planetarion recently because I’ve been playing Neptune’s Pride, a similar multiplayer game of space domination. Unlike Planetarion’s three-month long rounds featuring hundreds or thousands of players, the Neptune’s Pride match I’m playing has only eight.

I’m friends with almost all of those players, and since the match began, I’ve betrayed four of them. Similar to my Planetarion experience, our actions and plans within the game have been discussed at length via IM conversations. Many messages have also been sent through the in-game mail system, forming inevitably broken alliances.

But when we talk about the match online or in person, we do so unemotionally. Equally, when we each come to write about the match, in PC Gamer or on Rock Paper Shotgun or on our personal blogs, we’ll write with the understanding that it is a game, and we were role-playing, or simply playing, and that our actions weren’t personal.

But this wasn’t the case when I was a teenager, and it isn’t how a lot of people experience gaming. The experiences I had in Planetarion would spill over into school the next day, and there would be further arguments, accusations, name-calling and eventual fuming silence. We’d fall out with one another regularly. The game wasn’t just play. It mattered to us in a real and powerful way.

I think this is something that’s mostly forgotten about in games writing: for a lot of the people who play games, there’s not much separation. The games get mixed up with the same insecurities and pettiness that exist in real life and the experience is emotionally heightened as a result. Planetarion is forever imprinted in my memory entirely because of these arguments, and despite the immaturity of fighting, it’s heartening to think of gaming as such a direct extension of real world relationships and emotions.

My school friendships ultimately survived Planetarion, but they were changed by the experience.

Around Christmas I started to lose interest in Wurm Online. The PC Gamer village was well established, with little remaining undeveloped land, a complete system of roads and lights, and plentiful supplies of tools, materials and food. There was little more left to do but polish, tweak and gradually improve our surroundings and characters. That proved not to be enough to maintain my interest, and with the adventure, the excitement and the constant newness gone, I moved on to other games.

Getting to this stage took me probably a little over three months, but in that time I played the game for roughly 200 hours. Few gaming loves burn that brightly and quickly for me.

In that time, as a semi-work/mostly-spare-time project, I began the PC Gamer Wurm community website. A simple blog and forum where the PC Gamer Village – which had started without our guidance, it’s worth noting – could discuss the game. In four months the forum has reached 80,000 pageviews and 2700 posts. That’s not bad for a community of, at any one time, around 30 people, some of which never take part in anything outside the game.

After not touching or even thinking about the game for almost a month, I dropped in on the messageboard last night to see what people were doing. It turns out they are doing very well.

A village member called Jekev started a PCG Village Wiki, which people have been updating with information about their homes and themselves.

A village member called KGB has been mapping the village in Google Sketchup, with some great early results:

The screenshot that tops this post was taken by member Arkatufus and edited just slightly in Photoshop to make the game look better than it has any right to.

This is just the tip of what they’ve been doing. They’ve also been continuing to update the PCG_Wurm Twitter account to a gradually increasing audience, and the IRC room has a dozen or so regular visitors at this point. The forum contained pages and pages of new projects and friendly discussion when I returned to it.

Best of all though, they’re planning a move to the Premium servers after the game’s creator, Rolf, hinted at letting free and paying players exist side by side. Premium currently contains things the free Golden Valley doesn’t: PvP combat, vastly more challenging enemies, territorial deeds, stone houses, a higher skill cap. Those changes combine to turn the world into something far more dangerous.

Moving there would be an adventure, and exciting, and new, and already the forum discussions involve screenshots of prospective land and 3D maps proposing the new village’s structure.

The thought of starting fresh has re-energised my love for the game. Coupled with the wonderful things the community has been creating – on their own, unprompted, on a polite forum of human beings with next to no moderation – and I’m powerless to resist. I cannot stress enough how fantastic these people are.

I spent some time tonight making changes to the layout of the forums, splitting the previous mega-board into a few more managable subject-specific areas. I’ll spend some time soon jigging with the website, as well.

If you’re interested in checking in on the progress of the existing village, this board is the place to do it. For discussion of the coming switch to the Premium servers, check out here. ]]>

Around Christmas I started to lose interest in Wurm Online. The PC Gamer village was well established, with little remaining undeveloped land, a complete system of roads and lights, and plentiful supplies of tools, materials and food. There was little more left to do but polish, tweak and gradually improve our surroundings and characters. That proved not to be enough to maintain my interest, and with the adventure, the excitement and the constant newness gone, I moved on to other games.

Getting to this stage took me probably a little over three months, but in that time I played the game for roughly 200 hours. Few gaming loves burn that brightly and quickly for me.

In that time, as a semi-work/mostly-spare-time project, I began the PC Gamer Wurm community website. A simple blog and forum where the PC Gamer Village – which had started without our guidance, it’s worth noting – could discuss the game. In four months the forum has reached 80,000 pageviews and 2700 posts. That’s not bad for a community of, at any one time, around 30 people, some of which never take part in anything outside the game.

After not touching or even thinking about the game for almost a month, I dropped in on the messageboard last night to see what people were doing. It turns out they are doing very well.

A village member called Jekev started a PCG Village Wiki, which people have been updating with information about their homes and themselves.

A village member called KGB has been mapping the village in Google Sketchup, with some great early results:

The screenshot that tops this post was taken by member Arkatufus and edited just slightly in Photoshop to make the game look better than it has any right to.

This is just the tip of what they’ve been doing. They’ve also been continuing to update the PCG_Wurm Twitter account to a gradually increasing audience, and the IRC room has a dozen or so regular visitors at this point. The forum contained pages and pages of new projects and friendly discussion when I returned to it.

Best of all though, they’re planning a move to the Premium servers after the game’s creator, Rolf, hinted at letting free and paying players exist side by side. Premium currently contains things the free Golden Valley doesn’t: PvP combat, vastly more challenging enemies, territorial deeds, stone houses, a higher skill cap. Those changes combine to turn the world into something far more dangerous.

Moving there would be an adventure, and exciting, and new, and already the forum discussions involve screenshots of prospective land and 3D maps proposing the new village’s structure.

The thought of starting fresh has re-energised my love for the game. Coupled with the wonderful things the community has been creating – on their own, unprompted, on a polite forum of human beings with next to no moderation – and I’m powerless to resist. I cannot stress enough how fantastic these people are.

I spent some time tonight making changes to the layout of the forums, splitting the previous mega-board into a few more managable subject-specific areas. I’ll spend some time soon jigging with the website, as well.

If you’re interested in checking in on the progress of the existing village, this board is the place to do it. For discussion of the coming switch to the Premium servers, check out here. ]]> http://www.zeitgasm.com/?feed=rss2&p=713 0 http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=698 http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=698#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:07:08 +0000 Graham http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=698

I’m trying to be less controlled/obsessive about things I write here, as I think it’d be more useful as a loose notebook of ideas not yet fully-formed. And I’ll go less insane when updating it this way.

From Tom’s recent post about how to create a good open world:

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

There’s an area outside World of WarCraft’s Stormwind City called Elwynn Forest. I haven’t played the game in years, but I still remember the area. It’s beautiful, still and packed with tall trees. When I first visited it, I dearly wanted to stay there. To move in, build a hut, pitch a tent, make camp. A large part of my eventual dissastisfaction with World of WarCraft came from the inability to place meaningful roots anywhere in the game.

(Screenshot from the World of Warcraft wikia).

In any game that creates a convincing world, I want to nest. It’s rare that games let me do that, instead favouring progress and movement. There are obvious reasons: staying still is boring, no? Well, no. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress all prove otherwise, but also largely jettison the environmental exploration of a first or third-person action game. I want both. I just want my progress and exploration to be grounded and given meaning by a consistent and reflective central home.

There are great examples of this in other mediums. In comics, Batman ventures out into Gotham to fight crimes and then returns to Wayne Manor and the Batcave below. Each is a symbol filled with memorabilia commemorating his own life: a giant penny, a playing card, Jason Todd’s old Robin suit, Batman’s car.

Television does it, too, in part out of the financial necessity to build fixed sets. Buffy’s house, the library, the magic shop, all carry emotional significance. In fact, step back to the mythological underpinnings of vampires: they can’t enter your home unless you invite them. Homes have meaning.

Open world games in general demand a base of operations to make sense. I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a sleepless, foodless hero who fights with pause night and day, but I don’t like the disconnect of being a permanent tourist moving Jason Bourne-like through an emotionless landscape. I don’t want to always be gripped by a sense of otherness. I want to connect with my environment and imbue a part of it with meaning.

Frustratingly, this seems like such an obvious, natural desire. I spent endless hours as a kid using chairs, pillows and duvets to build forts, or finding clearings amongst trees and bushes into which to project personal, private hide-outs. Still, even those open world games that give you a base, like FarCry 2′s save houses or Grand Theft Auto’s apartments, don’t let you make them home.

This is why I connect so immediately with Wurm Online. It’s an MMO almost entirely about settling down. The world provides resources (trees, iron, fish) and obstacles (goblins, bears) and you have to survive and flourish amongst it all. The only way to do that is to set up camp: a place to store your items, a place to cook your food, a place in which you’re safe, and in the premium servers, a place to defend. A home!

After building my house in Wurm, fixing it up real nice, I eventually let it decay. I’d dug a cave underneath the house and decided to live in there instead.

(Screenshot from the Half-Life wikia.)

I remember Black Mesa East in Half-Life 2. Your first objective in the game is to get there, and after battling your way out of the hostile, dangerous City 17, you arrive to a haven of friends. You are welcomed with open arms by people who seem to know you and love you. It’s tragic when you an attack forces you to leave. It’s supposed to be tragic – that’s another reason why games could benefit from having more homes – but I can’t help but wishing I’d had more time there.

I want the Half-Life game where you’re not a constantly chased Christ-figure, but simply an ordinary member of the resistance. You perform your work within an oppressed city via a series of safe houses, lashing out at the Combine forces with strategic attacks, but always returning to a hide-out of friends.

(Screenshot from the Lord of the Rings wikia.)

Two final things: I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t annoyed by the long, 30-minute coda at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, where Frodo and Sam return the Shire. I had just spent ten fucking hours over three years watching them venture across Middle Earth for the sake of their home. I was glad to spend time with them when they got back there, because it gave the journey further context and meaning.

Dwarf Fortress does almost everything I want wonderfully, except it’s an inaccessible jumble of letters. Still: you build a home, and that home changes to reflect the events that happen as you play. If your dwarves are attacked and gored by angry, rampaging elephants, then they will carve the walls of their home with giant, blood-smeared elephant effigies.

That’s all I really want.

In no particular order:

1. Went to the Cologne Games Convention. Had almost 40 meetings in three days. Wore wedding shoes the whole time and bled till my socks were stuck to my feet like a second skin. I turned up late a lot.

2. Was promoted to Section Editor of PC Gamer, after three years as Disc Editor. Continued to make the coverdisc anyway. In fact, made the PC Zone coverdisc for a while, too.

3. Went with Lisa to America, my first time there. Spent five days in Chicago eating room service, then took a two and a half day train journey across country to spend a further five days in San Francisco. Saw the Colorado rockies, the Nevada desert, snow in Utah and cornfields in Iowa. Saw a Nun holding a devil-baby with an erect cock in San Francisco, and lots of screaming shirtless people. Loved all of it.

4. Wrote my first cover feature for PC Gamer: an eight page preview on Command & Conquer 4. Did it twice more.

5. Apologies for the namedropping, but an enormously fun part of my job that I only began this past year is meeting and interviewing interesting people. In 2009 I met Jeff Minter, Chet Faliszek, Dave Jones, Ed Stern, Peter Moore, Ray Muzyka and Michael Simpson. I pissed off only some of them, as far as I know.

6. Wrote two things I’m still mostly happy with now: a preview feature on APB and a review of The Sims 3. Both are available online, but are best read in the magazine with the original screenshots and formatting.

7. Was promoted to Deputy Editor of PC Gamer. Stopped making the coverdisc. Did some things well, other things poorly. Commissioned, edited, wrote, called, called again, called a third time, emailed, and shied away from too many things. Loved all of it.

8. Started a website dedicated to the PC Gamer community in Wurm Online, a massively multiplayer game set in a fantasy version of the New World: lots of resources, lots of threats, and unspoiled land waiting to be developed. Sat back and watched as the community wrote entertaining blog posts, designed maps, made mock newspapers and formed a friendly messageboard. Played Wurm Online myself for hundreds of hours, helping to dig tunnels, build houses, plant trees and construct paths. Right-clicked a lot. Ended the year by giving up my own house and moving into a cave. If ever I needed an example to explain why I write more about PC gaming than console gaming, this is what I’d use.

9. Loved Spelunky more than any other game this year, though frustratingly failed in my attempt to capture why.

10. Wrote my first comic script. Astral Airlines currently has four drawn pages available online. Just these few taught me a lot, the main thing being: WRITE MORE COMICS.

Which is part of the plan for 2010. Happy New Year, everyone.

Lotus 3 was released in 1992 and developed by Magnetic Fields. They had probably my favourite logo of any Amiga-era developer. It sounds so epic, and seemed so grown up to my childbrain.

Returning to Lotus 3 prompted three weekends spent playing Amiga games, including Lotus 2, Overdrive, Ruff ‘n’ Tumble, The Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Walker, Prince of Persia and Flashback. Observations so far: Superfrog is as shit as I remember, and Lotus 3 is even more awesome.

Playing it now, I’m realising that I never really made it beyond stage 3, even on the easiest difficulty settings. I think there are a whole bunch of games from my childhood that I absolutely love, but that I never got further than the first twenty minutes. I sucked, but didn’t care. I had no competitive drive in most games; no idea that there was an end to be reached, and very little sense of my own failure.

It’s also only now that I realise that the race tracks are randomised. The string of letters displayed on the screen before each level, which I always mistook for some far-off Scandanavian location, were actually a code representing the track. Lotus 3 comes with a track editor called RECS, the Racing Environment Construction Set. You don’t place specific pieces of road, but instead play with percentages: 60% corners, 15% obstacles, this weather, and so on.

Create your track and you get an XX-letter string with a two-digit number, which you can then enter at any point to return to your created track. It’s pretty powerful.

The result is that you’re never able to learn the tracks. Fail, and the next time you play it’ll be different. While in something like Spelunky, randomly generated levels stops the repetition becoming boring, racing games normally thrive on that repetition. It’s how you improve: learning the corners, perfecting your time. So Lotus 3 isn’t about cornering.

This is made even more obvious when you consider that the game does most of the cornering for you. Even on the hardest difficulty, the car still automatically moves most of the way around each bend. You’ll go off the edge slightly and slow down if you do nothing at all, but it still shifts the challenge to other areas.

The challenge – the ultimate challenge, I guess – instead lies in overtaking. I can’t be sure, but I think the other cars in the road deliberately move in front of you to block your path.

It lies in managing your fuel load. Longer races mean having to stop off at designated areas to re-fuel, something which the computer drivers don’t have to do.

It lies in dodging obstacles. In the woodland areas, these are puddles and fallen logs. In the desert areas, it’s sand dunes. In windy areas, you’re fighting against a gust pushing you off the track (visually indicated by rolling tumbleweeds – who needs Fuel for weather effects?). And, in the futuristic sci-fi races – yes – you’re at the whim of timed laser shields that flash across the track.

Removing the focus on cornering is maybe a consequence of the limited technology of the time. Racing games from the era – those with Lotus 3′s perspective, at least – normally had your car sitting stationary while the track moved around you. That changes the feel of taking a corner. There’s certainly no sense of the backend of the car swinging around, or powersliding into bends. There are no physics, there couldn’t have been. So Lotus 3 facilitates fun in other parts of its racing simulation.

This is helped by the fantastic music. Before each race, you’re presented with your car radio, through which you select what music you want to drive to. This had such an enormous effect on me as a kid. This car I’m driving, it has a car radio, like a real car. The music? I chose it. The soundtrack is what I’ve remembered most about the game for the last 15 years, particularly the title track. It’s had me dancing in my kitchen for weeks now, and listening to it via YouTube videos at work. ]]>
Fuel is unplayable on my home machine, due to scenery pop-up so bad that the ground beneath my car doesn’t appear unless I stop and look directly at it for 15 seconds. The only natural response to this was to start playing Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge.

Lotus 3 was released in 1992 and developed by Magnetic Fields. They had probably my favourite logo of any Amiga-era developer. It sounds so epic, and seemed so grown up to my childbrain.

Returning to Lotus 3 prompted three weekends spent playing Amiga games, including Lotus 2, Overdrive, Ruff ‘n’ Tumble, The Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Walker, Prince of Persia and Flashback. Observations so far: Superfrog is as shit as I remember, and Lotus 3 is even more awesome.

Playing it now, I’m realising that I never really made it beyond stage 3, even on the easiest difficulty settings. I think there are a whole bunch of games from my childhood that I absolutely love, but that I never got further than the first twenty minutes. I sucked, but didn’t care. I had no competitive drive in most games; no idea that there was an end to be reached, and very little sense of my own failure.

It’s also only now that I realise that the race tracks are randomised. The string of letters displayed on the screen before each level, which I always mistook for some far-off Scandanavian location, were actually a code representing the track. Lotus 3 comes with a track editor called RECS, the Racing Environment Construction Set. You don’t place specific pieces of road, but instead play with percentages: 60% corners, 15% obstacles, this weather, and so on.

Create your track and you get an XX-letter string with a two-digit number, which you can then enter at any point to return to your created track. It’s pretty powerful.

The result is that you’re never able to learn the tracks. Fail, and the next time you play it’ll be different. While in something like Spelunky, randomly generated levels stops the repetition becoming boring, racing games normally thrive on that repetition. It’s how you improve: learning the corners, perfecting your time. So Lotus 3 isn’t about cornering.

This is made even more obvious when you consider that the game does most of the cornering for you. Even on the hardest difficulty, the car still automatically moves most of the way around each bend. You’ll go off the edge slightly and slow down if you do nothing at all, but it still shifts the challenge to other areas.

The challenge – the ultimate challenge, I guess – instead lies in overtaking. I can’t be sure, but I think the other cars in the road deliberately move in front of you to block your path.

It lies in managing your fuel load. Longer races mean having to stop off at designated areas to re-fuel, something which the computer drivers don’t have to do.

It lies in dodging obstacles. In the woodland areas, these are puddles and fallen logs. In the desert areas, it’s sand dunes. In windy areas, you’re fighting against a gust pushing you off the track (visually indicated by rolling tumbleweeds – who needs Fuel for weather effects?). And, in the futuristic sci-fi races – yes – you’re at the whim of timed laser shields that flash across the track.

Removing the focus on cornering is maybe a consequence of the limited technology of the time. Racing games from the era – those with Lotus 3′s perspective, at least – normally had your car sitting stationary while the track moved around you. That changes the feel of taking a corner. There’s certainly no sense of the backend of the car swinging around, or powersliding into bends. There are no physics, there couldn’t have been. So Lotus 3 facilitates fun in other parts of its racing simulation.

This is helped by the fantastic music. Before each race, you’re presented with your car radio, through which you select what music you want to drive to. This had such an enormous effect on me as a kid. This car I’m driving, it has a car radio, like a real car. The music? I chose it. The soundtrack is what I’ve remembered most about the game for the last 15 years, particularly the title track. It’s had me dancing in my kitchen for weeks now, and listening to it via YouTube videos at work. ]]> http://www.zeitgasm.com/?feed=rss2&p=603 0 http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=600 http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=600#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:48:34 +0000 Graham http://www.zeitgasm.com/?p=600

Fuel marks the re-invention of the level designer as a geographical mash-up artist. It’s 5000km² world is created using topographical data of the western United States, re-mixed and re-organised as a greatest hits compilation of it’s most famous and impressive vistas. America the Theme Park! A Main Street, USA for the natural environment. The boring between removed to create a Las Vegas casino’s version of the great American landscapes, a miniaturised Grand Canyon thrust up against snowy Mount Rainier sat flush against Crater Lake. It’s the America of the collective consciousness, of disaster movies, all scale and potential and awe.

These vast open spaces have been criticised for feeling empty, but there’s something terribly evocative about the stark, barren world. It’s epic, devoid of wildlife, inhabited only by aimlessly rumbling zombie trucks and a warped subspecies of humans unable to leave their go-fast machines. It’s a future so devastated by environmental collapse that there’s literally nothing left to do but move.

The main concern of Fuel’s populace doesn’t seem to be the basic necessities of survival or the re-construction of society, but entertainment. The world has been ruined by global warming, yet you toil in races to win fuel simply to buy new cars to race. The few concessions made to re-building the devastated world are turning the world’s roads into race tracks and its buildings into ramps, modifying the architecture of the past to combat the boredom of the present.

It’s got that gloriously single-minded Warhammer thing. IN THE FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY DRIVING.

I’m being knowingly forgiving. It’s unclear how many of Fuel’s limitations are the result of deliberate focus, and how many are caused by lack of time, resources, money. The driving model is unremarkable. The races are easy. It is buggy.

I don’t care. I’m not convinced a world of considered escarpment is inherently more empty than a world of man-made metropolitan streets. Fuel threads a needle through enough of my interests – architectural futures, solitude in games, exploration, level design – to make up for its shortcomings.

(The screen above is a press shot, because Fraps wasn’t working for most of my time playing the game. I’ve only eight lame screenshots of the starting area).

As of this moment, I’ve died 156 times on this PC alone. I have two other installs with another 100 deaths between them. Yet despite infinite failure, I keep returning to try again.

Spelunky is a free 2D platformer inspired by Rogue and its ilk. You’re an adventurer – in this case, a Fedora-wearing Indiana Jones type with a bullwhip and ophidiophobia – and your goal is to delve as deeply as possible into a cave, to collect gold, steal golden idols, avoid traps, kill enemies and rescue people. The scenery changes after five levels or so, and the enemies shift from spiders and bats to monkeys and man-eating plants. I’m guessing it changes twice more after that, but I’ve yet to reach further than level seven.

Like every other Rogue-like, Spelunky is hard. Since starting to write this the death count has reached 165. Yet I keep returning, just like I did with other platform games N and Punishment, and the racing game Trackmania. I compulsively want to do better, gather more gold and reach higher levels.

Being a Rogue-like means there’s greater depth here than most 2D platformers. You start each game with bombs and ropes, letting you blast paths through the cave walls or climb back to higher levels. Travelling deeper, you discover shops selling new items, or find chests containing free tools. Parachutes, springy boots, sticky bombs, bows and arrows, a compass, and other more outlandish tools aid your quest and add variety. I find that you’re better off relying on pick-ups than purchases, but the stores are fun all the same. I’m particularly fond of those that are equipped with giant, tossable dice, where you can gamble some of your gold.

The range of objects and enemies allows you to make fun choices.

Example #1: Each shop is run by a shopkeeper. If you don’t feel like paying for what he’s selling, you can steal it. Pick up and run away with any of the items and he’ll chase after you with his shotgun, and won’t stop till your dead. Light a bomb in his store and he’ll immediately scream “Terrorist!” and gun you down.

Example #2: Levels occasionally begin with a message. “I hear snakes. I hate snakes!” indicates that the level contains a snake pit. “The dead are restless,” indicates that the level is crawling with zombies. But sometimes you’ll enter a level that’s shrouded in darkness, the message prompting you to light a flare. While your pockets have plenty of space for bombs and rope, you can only carry one thing in your hand at a time. This is bad. The big money is earned by carrying an idol to the exit and health is regained by carrying a person there, so flares pose a challenge. Getting an idol to the exit on a level that’s dark means alternating, carrying your flare forward to deposit it in a safe place before returning in to the thickening darkness to grab the idol and bring it forward. This process repeats, moving the flare forward bit by bit, ensuring a safe path before returning for idol.

The computer is providing a different adventure every time, remixing the same elements to create a different scenario.

Example #3: The game I just started ended about 15 seconds after it began when I opened a chest to reveal an already armed bomb. It promptly exploded in my face.

I’ve been intentionally vague about one element. The people you can rescue in the caves are, more specifically, women. You find them standing still and screaming endlessly for help. Carrying them successfully to the exit point earns you a kiss, and this kiss gives you a health point.

I don’t want to be that person. The person who reads race or gender issues into everything. The women in Spelunky aren’t a comment on women in general, but a fond reference to characters like Princess Peach from the Mario series: the eternal damsel requiring your rescue. Spelunky shows fondness for a lot of games; those chomping plants are similarly familiar.

Still, it’s worth noting. If you set a woman down on your journey to the exit, she’ll run crying back and forth. You can use her as a weapon, tossing her at enemies to kill them. Some of the shops you encounter contain nothing but a woman from whom you can pay to receive a kiss, and thus a health point. Should you pick up and run off with her, the shopkeeper – or, I guess, in this case her pimp – will run after you just as if you’d stolen some shoes. The women are more Willie Scott than Marion Ravenwood.

Like N and Punishment and Trackmania before it, Spelunky has become the game I turn to in between other things. While writing this, whenever I pause to think, I alt-tab over to it and play a little more. Throughout the day I’ve been playing it while watching television, while browsing, while talking. The game fills every crack it can find.

Hey, I just reached the next stage! I can now tell you it features ice, abominable snowmen and spaceships. I almost immediately fell to my death.

As far as I can fathom, the crux of these games is this: I fail a lot, and every time I fail I know explicitly why. It’s “I should have stood still during that attack,” or “I should have tossed the bomb sooner.” I know what I did wrong and reasonably come to the conclusion that I won’t do it again. Next time, I’ll toss the bomb faster.

Except, the levels are procedurally generated, so next time the situation is different. That giant spider is no longer there. I don’t even use a bomb. I’m set upon by bats. I die in a completely different way.

And again I’ll think, “Oh, I should have used my whip. I’ll do it differently next time.”

I am constantly convinced of my own ability to improve, but I’m never given the opportunity to overcome the specifics of my last failure. So I’m never fulfilled, but constantly surprised.

[Note: In its original form, this post was accompanied by a 'death counter' that ran in a column alongside the article. It charted how my number of deaths stretched into the hundreds as I wrote, and nicely illustrated death's importance to the game and my obsession with playing it. Unfortunately, the HTML/CSS to design that chart was messy and fiddly within WordPress, and it discplayed incorrectly in most browsers. I've now removied it.]

Oblivion was an open world game, but in practice it amounted to a few linear storylines arranged in separate piles. The Thieves Guild was one pile, the Dark Brotherhood was another, the main storyline another still. You could alternate between them or stop one completely when bored, but there was no significant connection or overlap between them. Fallout 3′s biggest advance on Oblivion is that it does away with guilds and instead scatters its missions liberally across the landscape, allowing you to form a storyline made of modular parts that can be plugged together in a huge number of ways.

The best examples are the quests surrounding Big Town, Little Lamplight and Paradise Falls. Spoilers to follow. My first mission was to deliver a letter and, wandering across the Wasteland, I stumbled in to Big Town. It had been raided by Super Mutants repeatedly and those left explained that some of the residents had been dragged off. After telling the remaining guard I planned to murder everyone in town, and sprinting away when he took me seriously, I set off towards an abandoned police station to rescue two of the captured people. I do the quest and return victorious, having saved a female doctor called Red, and some other person I can’t recall.

Hours later while exploring the South-West corner of the map, I stumble across a town called Girdershade. Here, through methods I also can’t recall, I find information about a nearby town called Little Lamplight. It’s a society of children, from which people are exiled upon reaching a certain age. Where do they go? Big Town. Red is one of the exiled grown-ups from Little Lamplight. While I’ve already discovered Big Town, it’s possible to come across Little Lamplight first and, from there, gain a quest that leads you to Big Town and, in turn, that aforementioned quest to save Red.

Still more hours later, I hear of a slaver town named Paradise Falls.  I’m told  that to[/column]get inside I need to capture one person from a list of VIPs. Who is on the list? Red, of course. If I hadn’t already saved her, I’d have to go do that now. As it is, I can just head straight there and put a collar around her neck. Which I do. Once inside the slavers camp, I balance my karma by helping free a bunch of child slaves who, though I can’t quite remember, I’m pretty sure head off for Little Lamplight. It all links.

While I was playing through this, I knew that Tom had found Little Lamplight first, and it’s from there he found his way to Big Town and then Red. He came to these quests from a different angle and our stories and experiences are distinct.

The game ultimately aims to thread everyone through the same needle – we both eventually ended up in Big Town – but the way the game leads you to these events feels natural. None of what I just described was consecutive or necessary.

In Oblivion, you’d reach these moments of existential crisis where you’d have nothing to do and no motivation to go anywhere. The world wasn’t interesting enough to make pure exploration worthwhile, as the dungeons you’d find were too often generic and unremarkable. Having the quests in Fallout 3 form a lattice makes sure people constantly have a route toward the next cool thing, and the next thing is always cool.

The main storyline is the exception. It not only stands off in a corner, alone and disconnected as ever, but it prevents you from continuing with the rest of the game after its completion. Bethesda need to work out how to weave a compelling central plot through their game in a manner as inventive as all their side quests. Maybe by removing the idea of a “main storyline” altogether, and establishing that the game’s plot is whatever the hell your character chooses to do during his or her existence in whatever interesting world they’ve created.

The set covers every area of the game, contains 541 screenshots in total and includes spoilers. I’m mentioning it here because I like the how the pile of thumbnails looks for the set, switching between blue sky and sunshine, grey and cloudy, indoor, outdoor, daytime, nighttime. It’s the experience of the game boiled down to its shifting colour scheme.

It also reveals how bad I am at taking screenshots. I took almost 800 of the game for the review and although I’ve removed the worst of the duplicates, there are still dozens that are nearly identical. I seem to like hammering the screenshot button repeatedly. Popular moments of which to take screenshots include: my dying, cutscenes, and hiding behind a brick wall. It’s hard to press the screenshot key in the middle of the action, so I end up with lots of shots of the in between moments. The moments least illustrative of the game.

The full set of screenshots is viewable here.

Along with Far Cry 2, Mirror’s Edge is one of the most interestingly designed games of last year. Both games focus all their mechanics on creating a very particular rhythm. Tweaking any one of those mechanics feels like it would produce a dramatically different game.

I find rhythm the biggest barrier to entry with most new games. There’s enough standardisation of interface and controls now that I can assume a lot of knowledge, but most action games demand they be played at their own pace. So the first two hours of Brothers in Arms 3 are spent being mowed down by machine gun fire until I remember that, oh yeah, cover, survey, flank. “Run and gun” is almost never an apt description.

Mirror’s Edge’s problem, again like Far Cry 2, is that it has a rhythm that feels jarringly irregular at points. When you’re running, making decisions quickly, it flows beautifully. When you pause at a particularly challenging obstacle, it’s enormously satisfying to work out a solution. They’ve created a place I want to explore and a method of exploration I enjoy.

Yet they’ve populated the world with enemies that slow and impede when you’re running, and which harry and pester when you pause for thought. But I’m torn when I think about what I’d change, because there’s that moment when you’re sliding down the side of a glass skyscraper while being shot at from a helicopter. It’s exhilirating. It’s the one section of the game where being chased enhances rather than diminishes the experience, because it seems to strike the correct balance between making you feel threatened and making you feel powerful.

For more on Mirror’s Edge, my positive review for PC Gamer is now online. I mention much of what I’ve just written here, but I want to stress that it’s a positive review.

For all its faults, Mirror’s Edge is a game that I hope everyone at least tries. The enemies might feel incongruous, but the game still feels pure in vision, like those involved were able to make the game they wanted. Which is to say, creative people were allowed to be creative, and the result is a game with the kind of boldness, visually and mechanically, normally reserved for concept art and if-only messageboard daydreaming. This is why EA are the best thing in PC gaming right now.

Or, you can simply look at Tom’s screenshots, which are far prettier than my own.

Anyway, this post mostly serves as an excuse to use the re-designed blog. The last design had a single post made during its tenure. I’ll aim for two on this one.