Hi all,
The site has been moved to my new domain at http://city.citizen16.com/ along with all current posts and comments.
There’s plenty of new content on the way so head on over and get your bookmarks / rss feeds updated. There’s no stupid large empty space to the right hand side of the posts and the post titles all have capitals, so things are looking better already.
I hope to see you all in the site’s new home.
Phil
It turns out that when you’ve not been able to play the games you wanted to write blog posts about because you’ve spent the week playing a different game, you should write a blog post about that instead. Logic! With that startling revelation comes a new featurette, Mega Bites: shorter posts about games that, while good, don’t need huge walls of text devoted to them.
Reviews of Katamari Forever*, the next game in the series that sets you in the role of the son of the King of All Cosmos and tasks you with using a magical ball to roll up items in order to create ’stars’, seem to have focused on a couple of issues:
You see, for all the silliness, Katamari Damacy was at heart a didactic condemnation of the developed world’s rampant consumerism. Takahashi never wanted to make another Katamari game. Not only had his point been made elegantly by the first game, but also the core idea had been fully explored.
Rolling a katamari is as charming as ever, but you may have rolled most of these katamaris before.
The first point is easy enough to address: Takahashi made a sequel thus fully opening the doors to the series expansion into a franchise. The second is a little more complex, but in my opinion, still somewhat unfair. Named Katamari Tribute in Japan, Forever is essentially an HD re-make of levels from the previous games. I may be starting to sound like the traditional ‘fanboy railing against the mean journalists’ here, but it seems unfair to criticise KF for re-hashing old levels when it’s entire purpose is a greatest hits of the series to date. You don’t criticise a band’s Best Of compilation for using previously recorded material.
As with previous games the final few levels reach a ridiculous scale.
That gripe aside, Katamari Forever breaks down like this: For newcomers to the series it is, pretty much, an essential purchase. Katamari remains a brilliant concept and, unsurprisingly, it’s as fun as ever here. Series veterans, however, will have to weigh up whether the game adds enough new twists to justify the asking price**.
There’s certainly a lot of content on offer. Each level can have up to four different modes in which it can be played. The Endless mode, which allows Katamari’s to be rolled independent of time constraints, is a feature so obvious it’s staggering this is its first inclusion. The soundtrack has also had some attention, consisting of some excellent remixes of previous songs in the series (and some that make you pine for the originals to be included). While not the most visually stunning game you’ll ever see, the graphics are charming and, as with everything on offer here, in keeping with previous games. Of special note is the filter applied the first time you play through a level in the King’s memory: at first everything is black and white, with colour returning to any object in the level that matches something you have already rolled. Not only is this a nice visual representation of the story but also a helpful gameplay mechanic highlighting potential routes that would be beneficial to your growing size.
On successive level playthroughs different graphical filters can be selected.
Some will argue that there still isn’t enough new content to make the game worthwhile, and that’s fair enough. For me, especially after the deluge of ultra-violent, ultra-murky (I’m looking at you Prototype) games I’ve played recently, the passive, peaceful atmosphere of Katamari Forever has been exactly the game I’ve wanted to indulge in over the last week.
*On browsing some of the review summaries from Metacritic I noticed one that read, “Katamari Forever is the penultimate game in the series thus far”. Hey, Metacritic: How about you don’t count the opinion of people who don’t know what penultimate means?
**Actually, don’t pay the asking price which is a staggering £45 RRP. It’s available, with a little digging online, for about 20 notes, a much more reasonable price.
I seem to have amassed a large collection of what I’d call ‘guilty pleasure’ gaming. These are the games that will not be remembered in times to come as gaming classics. More often than not they’re flawed, stupid and the embodiment of simple, pointless fun; in many cases deliberately so. For me they generally come in the form of sandbox action titles, a genre which seems to value content over coherence. I bring this up because I’ve finally found an example of the genre that, despite falling squarely into the mould, I don’t consider to be a ‘guilty pleasure’. Prototype, or [PROTOTYPE], is actually quite good.
The difference is that most sandbox games that favour the playground element of design, in which you’re given a tool set and set out to wreak havoc on the world, have one element that seems to detract from that very purpose. Take Saints Row 2, a game I’m about to be very unfair to. Many praised Saints Row 2 for giving the player the ability to enact the hyper-cartoonish destruction and violence that was present in the PS2-era GTA games but very much missing in the fourth. This is a worthy and noble pursuit for a game but the way in which Volition implemented it left me cold. If you’re anything like me there came a moment when playing GTA3, or one of its sequels, in which you stood your character on the roof of a passing car and used it as a mobile base to terrorise the streets. The character would slide backward motionless once the car hit any significant speed, forcing you to course correct every couple of seconds, but that was part of the charm and simply the fact that you could do it, when the developers clearly hadn’t put in any coding to allow you to, was cool. In Saints Row 2 doing the same action triggers a mini-game in which you can pull off a variety of poses and gain a rating for how long you can keep your balance. If I remember correctly, gaining the top rating gives you a traffic cone you can wear on your head. It’s Cool™. This was my problem with Saints Row 2: the developers had a mini game ready for any stupid action you could think to undertake. All very well, but if I’m messing about and avoiding the missions of the game I don’t want to be constantly reminded that the fun I’m making for myself has been authorised by the developers.
This is the vapour that is the apparent result of punching a guy into pieces.
Prototype understands this. Killing civilians draws no reward or penalty, I can’t even remember if you get any experience bonus for killing uninfected civilians, and even the infected ones draw such a small amount of points that they aren’t actually worth bothering about. In fact there’s absolutely no reason why you should be able to unlock a Curb Stomp upgrade that allows you to stomp on dead bodies (or even why this would be an upgrade as opposed to something you can just do) but there is and you can, if you really want to. And I did.
The unlock system is another reason why I warmed to Prototype over other, similar, games. It’s a centralised system which allows you to upgrade your character at any moment once you’ve gained the right amount of experience (something which builds up at a ridiculous rate). It was the lack of a centralised system that proved to be the main flaw in another game, one I enjoyed more than most people. In Mercenaries 2 progression led to the ability to buy more powerful airstrikes which could be used to destroy absolutely any building in a game. However, unlike in Prototype, and, more unforgivably unlike in the first Mercenaries game, these airstrikes could only be bought by visiting specific military bases located across the map. When you start a mission you’re given a list of recommended items and in order to actually obtain that list you’d need to quit the mission, find which bases were selling which items and travel to each individually to buy them. Frequently I’d do none of that, instead turning up to the mission location unprepared and having to wing it based on what I could scavenge. All very well, perhaps, but this meant that there was no sense of an escalating growth of power, a key feature in almost any mission based game. It was also a bizarre move considering the first Mercenaries gave you access to the Russian Mafia through your PDA, allowing you to call in any airstrike or package from any location with a couple of button presses.
For a while I was worried I might start to tire of kicking helicopters to death. Luckily that point never came.
Because Prototype’s progression of power is intrinsically tied to the escalating powers within the character the game is much more accessible in terms of growth. The sheer number of powers means that there is always a reason to complete the high-experience objectives or side quests. As well as the upgrades that are necessary for survival, like the ability to shoot hundreds of tendrils from your body, are a bunch that serve no purpose than to increase your ability to mess around, like the power that allows you to surf a body along the ground while blood smears along behind them.
The game is also geared to reduce the time spent searching for those survival essentials. The consume mechanic means that civilians, and this game is set in New York so there are thousands of them, essentially act as health packs. Guns can also be taken from any member of the large military presence, although I can’t think of a time in which I actually needed to use one, and, eventually, any tank or helicopter can be stolen at any point. It’s one of the few true playgrounds in the sandbox genre, with little of annoyances that so often plague it.
Here are the innards of some guys. Prototype's primary colour is red.
It is, of course, flawed in its own right. Some of the upgrades are so powerful as to render the others useless, the story isn’t in the least bit memorable, any hints at character morality are instantly destroyed when I start punching hundreds of people into bits, a lot of the missions aren’t particularly inventive, the movement system isn’t anywhere near as interesting as Infamous’, and, from a technical standpoint, it looks like a bit of a dog (although this places it as a pretty normal example of an open-world game). That said there are hours of fun to be had kicking helicopters to death, tormenting the local populace and running up the side of a wall in order to chuck cars at water towers. For these reasons Prototype is clearly the best stupid game I’ve played in a long while.
I seem unable to start a new feature without first explaining its exact nature and limitations, and it remains so here. Match 3 posts are designed to highlight interesting elements of different genres. How good they are in relation to other examples from those genres will depend on my familiarity of them. With interactive fiction, or text adventures for the more plain-speaking, I’m not even close to experiencing the majority of classics that have been emerging over recent years. Instead I’ll be highlighting three games that serve as a good introduction to the genre.
Here are a few of the reasons why IF should be celebrated as a genre:
Convinced? Then try these:
Aisle
The other two games in this list are from the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition so starting with a game from 1999 might seem like an odd choice. Not so, Aisle is not only a great IF game in its own right, but its primary mechanic also makes it a great place to start getting used to the text parser.
Aisle takes place in a supermarket aisle. You’re given an opening paragraph, which is always the same, and asked to make your move. Assuming the parser understands what you want to do you’ll be given a closing description of you carrying out that action and the game is over. Congratulations, you won! Well not quite. There’s a surprisingly deep story lurking within Aisle. Actually, if memory serves me correctly, there are at least three different story paths and any action you choose might fit into one of these, or just be a generic standalone event. The trick to uncovering the story is to make your move and then go back and try something else. Each action will reveal a little bit more and give you more ideas as to further actions you can try.
This means that while every move is an ending, there is no complete ending. The non-linearity of it also means its hard to predict how cohesive of an experience you will have with the game. My first experience was an afternoon in work trying to get the character to unlock his memory of what happened in Rome. After a while I finally noticed a phrase in one ending that led to another that, eventually, led to quite a touching recollection of the trip. It was only later, looking at a discussion of the game, that I realised there were many other, completely contradictory, recollections that branched out in different ways.
Everybody Dies
Pictures! Everybody dies, the 3rd place finalist of the 2008 IF Comp, features a few illustrations to highlight its narrative. They’re pretty integral to the story, which I really don’t want to spoil, so I’ll only say a few brief things about the game.
Everybody dies probably has the strongest linear narrative of all the games here. It’s not a difficult game, most of the actions are very natural and require you to go to a place and perform an action to move the story along. The key to progression is not in finding out what you should be doing but noticing the characters’ reaction to what it is you’re doing.
As a short game with multiple viewpoints it also does a good job of differentiating the characters personalities in the time that you spend with each one. I thought Graham’s colloquialisms were over-egged a little, but I’m probably just being unfair to people who do still genuinely say “Whatev”.
Violet
My favourite game on the list and the most puzzle based of all these entries. This was the winner of last years IF Comp, and with good reason.
A couple of things set it apart from the somewhat mechanical nature of most IF games. Firstly, the text parser narration is done in the second person by the protagonists girlfriend Violet, or, more accurately, by the protagonist imagining how his girlfriend would respond to the situations he is in. Secondly the game concerns a situation I’d imagine most people have faced at one time or another: The protagonist must write 1000 words of his dissertation by the end of the day.
It sounds simple enough, but it’s already noon and the room in which he is working is filled with distractions. The number of times, through the course of the game, in which you’ll sit the character at his desk and type ‘write’ only for him to be distracted by something else after a few words is both frustrating and brilliantly true to life. Violet’s exasperation at the characters penchant for procrastination and the ridiculous lengths that are needed to solve it (you can’t just unplug an internet cable to stop him from browsing the internet, as he’ll just plug it in again after you tell him to write) give the game a charming humour.
Notable Mention: Galatea
Galatea could well turn out to be your favourite IF game, even your favourite game. It takes place as an interaction between an art critic and an installation, with multiple endings depending on your actions and questions toward Galatea throughout the game. Personally I found that at every stage I was battling with the limitations of the text parser and just couldn’t get drawn into the story.
The 2009 IF Comp is nearly underway. When the results are announced I may do a piece looking at the winners. In the meantime if you’ve got any IF favourites not mentioned then post them in the comments.
As my immune system does battle with the virus that, as I write, is causing mucus to pour from my nasal cavity it seems only apt that the game being given an hour of special attention is named Pathologic.
What is it?
An action (apparently)/adventure game from Ice-Pick Lodge. It’s Russian, badly translated and wasn’t exactly held aloft by the mainstream gaming press so you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it.
Why’d you buy it?
Why did I go for an informal second-person phrasing for this question? Surely ‘Why did I buy it’ would have been a better title. Oh well, I bought Pathologic thanks to Quintin Smith’s epic three piece article on the game for Rock, Paper, Shotgun as well as John Walker’s Eurogamer review in which he gave the game 6/10 and described it as “Oblivion with cancer” and still made it sound essential. Gamersgate frequently have it on sale.
The Playtest
0:01 – It takes me a while to get into the game while I have an argument with the settings menu over my PCs specifications. It’s auto-detect system has decided that I need the lowest settings for everything but I’m pretty convinced my machine can handle a Russian adventure game from 2005.
2:00 – Yeah, I wasn’t wrong. Jesus Christ the character models are ugly. The opening cutscene is showing creepy children burying what I assume is a baby. The children look creepy as fuck but I’m not sure if that’s because they are meant to look creepy as fuck or they just don’t have any animated facial expressions. Probably both.
4:00 – There are three people talking on a stage. I can move during this bit but can’t really do anything except walk to a door. I do that, because I can’t really make out what the people are saying.
4:30 – I’ve been given three character choices. I pick the first, The Bachelor, purely because I’d heard that the most effort had gone into translating him.
6:00 – Another cutscene. I assume that’s my character walking down the street, interspersed with shots of other characters. I’m not getting much sense of anything happening. [Tense-break alert] Actually the only thing I’ve got written on my notepad for this cutscene is “This cutscene is running at 2600 frames per second!” which should give some indication of how enthralled I was by it [End of tense-break alert]. Skip.
9:00 – Oh dear God, the loading! I’ve not actually got into the actual game yet.
10:00 – I finally have a mission: Find Simon Kain, a man of “remarkable longevity”. It seems Simon could help further my research, whatever that may be. I’m starting to regret skimming over the character profiles.
13:00 – I’ve just spent a couple of minutes fiddling with the mouse sensitivity which, despite being about 1/8th of the maximum by default, seemed to replicating the sensation of having a character on a hyperactive Segway. I then spent an entire minute looking for the door out of my room although, to be fair, that could be a result of my current diminished sense of anything.
14:00 – I think the woman I’m talking to is meant to be attractive. I also get the impression she’s flirting with me although I can’t exactly confirm this from the dialogue: “I hope you didn’t feel any lack of something because I am very happy you are here, Daniel, did you?”
15:00 – Ah, it appears my character is searching for a cure for death. That’s bound to go well.
19:00 – I’ve been advised to see Victor and Maria before approaching Simon, advice I’m all too happy to follow. As I step outside two figures are stood at the gate. They look as if someone once described a fancy dress party to them but completely missed the part about not being creepy as shit.
19:30 – The birdman has just got all meta on me. “I have a few words to tell you about the circumstances of time and place. These are just technical information. It has nothing to do with the matters at stake, but it is tradition to tell the actor what to do, when he comes out onto the stage, otherwise he’ll fall off it.” The two main points seem to be 1) things can be irrevocably missed and 2) you can’t trust anyone (even the birdman). This is actually quite exciting. It’s all too rare these days for a game not to make every single detail available. Open world games, especially, seem to always leave the ability to attain that 100% completion. Now I’m being told that if I’m not careful I can miss whole events.
24:00 – A conversation with anyone, especially creepy masked people, seems to take a long time. I’m finally free to head to the Kains’ house, where I fully expect to be greeted with more conversation. Also, and it really can’t be avoided, as much as I hate tiresome graphics whores, this game is seriously fucking ugly. Every texture and model screams bland and low-res.
The draw distance is staggering.
29:00 – I’ve met with Victor who has told me to go and find George. He didn’t feel it necessary to tell me where George was.
30:00 – I’ve met with Maria who has told me to go and find George. She did tell me where George was, but her explanation didn’t make a lot of sense. Fuck it, I’m going to the wing that houses Simon.
32:00 – Ah, George was there instead. Apparently Simon, the immortal, has been murdered. That’s a bit of a shitter.
36:00 – George is asking me to find Simon’s killer. He’s taking a hell of a lot of words to do so. I’ve not yet been given an option to tell anyone I think Simon is a rubbish name for an immortal, but I’ll keep a look out.
39:00 – Victor has even more words for me. Highlights include the fact that Simon worked in a room that didn’t technically exist; that Simon did exist, but it would have been a lot simpler if he didn’t; and that I’ll find Simon’s killer if I look for him, which I suppose makes sense.
40:00 – The last person to see Simon alive is a man named Isodor, who is also the colleague that wrote for my character to come to this place. Unfortunately he lives miles away and the motion speed in this game is somewhat glacial.
47:30 – Maria has given me a list of ‘Adherents’ whom I need to keep alive. Somewhat conveniently she’s put her own name on this list. I only bring it up because the pictures that go with each name are genuinely hilarious.
I must point out that Mark Immortal is my new favourite name for any game character, ever.
48:00 – As I walk out the door to head toward Isodor I find the two creepy masked dudes stood waiting for me. They’re becoming a little unsettling.
51:00 – I’ve just talked to a character named ‘Woman’. The creepy birdman wasn’t lying when he said I’d be able to tell who wasn’t important.
54:00 – Dammit! Fences! Until developers realise that real people can climb, fences will remain the game character’s natural enemy. So will rock formations and low walls.
57:00 – Oh come on! I arrive at Isodor’s house only to be told he’s been murdered. Can nobody in this stupid town stay alive for 15 minutes?!
58:30 – I can’t inspect Isodor’s house until I get permission from some person who isn’t on my ‘must live’ list and, as such, may end up getting murdered to appease my annoyance at all this walking.
1:00:00 – I take a slight detour to my next location, more by mistake than any desire to enjoy the scenery, and come across a group of locals burning a woman. They seem upset when she dies because, apparently, she wasn’t meant to do that.
Conclusion:
It’s fairly clear that I’ve not even uncovered the mystery of the story yet, let alone come close to resolving anything. I’ll probably continue with Pathologic at some point as, despite all its problems (bad translation; shit graphics and character models; the fact it takes an age to walk anywhere), there are some interesting key mechanics at work that I’d like to explore further. Of course, during my hour I didn’t experience anything that would even remotely resemble action. Whether I’ll persevere with the game or not is going to seriously depend on just how sucky the combat ends up being. Either way, I’ll probably write more on this as the game starts to reveal itself.
UK gaming site TheSixthAxis has published a guest writer piece, Consoles Vs PC, arguing that some PC gamers are elitist. I’d like to argue that some sweeping generalisations are tired and inaccurate.
Lets deal with the main purpose of the article straight off: Yes, some PC gamers are elitist. So what? Specifying a trait exhibited by some members of a massive community of people is neither helpful, revelatory, nor the basis of a post. For instance: some Led Zeppelin fans make good lasagna; some console gamers are both immature and borderline illiterate. For example, as a beta tester for SCEE I often have cause to visit the European Playstation forums and, in a misguided attempt to engage the community, started a PC gaming thread. To quote one post to the thread:
EPIC GEEK FEST! sorry, i’m just not a fan of PC Gamers, they mostly seem really nerdy and those sort of poeple [sic] who take deep breathes [sic] after saying something. and talk really loads [sic] with enthusiasm and lie all the time about stuff. and think there no [sic] EVERYTHING.
I’d be offended if I could even decipher what he was trying to say. The point, though, is that I have no desire to go on about the attitude of console gamers because it would be a pointless generalisation that bore little in relation to the attitude of the majority.
Back to the original article and it appears that the writer’s main problem with the PC elitists is how they always keep banging on about how much better a mouse and keyboard is for FPSs than a control pad. That this is his only criticism of the attitude of PC gamers seems strange given that I can think of three or four ways that some PC gamers can be elitist that have nothing to do with control systems. The control system argument is a somewhat flawed criticism for the simple fact that it is largely true. Developers themselves seem pretty convinced of this as evidenced by the fact that they will generally implement aim-assist in the console versions of their shooters. They also tend to avoid online shooters that have cross platform play between the PC and a console, because of the assumed advantage it gives PC players.
None of this actually comes close to my main problem. My main problem is this: Don’t criticise PC gamers of being elitist by being elitist toward PC gamers through use of the same old repetitive clichés that don’t stand up to even the most basic scrutiny.
If they want to play a brand new game, they need to buy that, as well as have a half-decent graphics card and the likes. We don’t need that, all we need is the relevant console, so they must be very bitter about having to upgrade all the time, and it’s not cheap either.
Actually the majority of PC gaming is done on pretty basic machines thanks to the indie and casual gaming scenes, as well as the two most popular games in all of gaming-land: World of Warcraft and The Sims 2. Even if you don’t take that into account his statement simply isn’t true. My current PC is 18 months old, and the graphics card in it was released 3 years ago. It is still more than capable of playing all modern releases on the highest settings and when that stops being the case I’ll still have the ‘high’ and ‘medium’ settings to look forward to. One of the advantages with an open platform is that it requires developers to tailor their games to suit a range of graphical settings. Can you live with slightly lower detail shadowing? Do you really need to have full anisotropic filtering? No? Congratulations, you’ve just bought yourself another couple of years of life out of your graphics card. This is unlike when a new generation of consoles are released and you’re forced to upgrade or miss out on the majority of new releases.
Also, [consoles] give you a standardised control input system, which is fantastic; developers can map functions and moves to pre-defined buttons and combinations, and it just feels better holding a hand-sized controller, instead of a flat keyboard and a cheap mouse from Tesco’s.
I don’t even understand the point he’s trying to make about mapping functions, as this is something I’ve done on both console and PC games. As for the cheap mouse jibe, my mouse came with my computer for free and was designed by someone who understood ergonomics so I fail to see the problem.
This is probably starting to sound like the rantings of PC gaming fanboy but, owning all but one of the current generation of platforms, I probably do the majority of my gaming on consoles. Had I seen an article bemoaning how bad consoles were compared to the PC I’d probably be writing this article from the opposite perspective because, at any level, fanboyism is a tiresome fanatical allegiance to something that is, essentially, nothing more than a personal preference.
In a bid to encourage more discussion on this site I’m asking the ultimate gaming question: Just what are the best games of all time?
Obviously this is a relatively personal question. I’m not saying you wont get chastised for your answers, just that the ‘IMHO’ element of the discussion should really be taken for granted. I’m also advertising this as a Top 10 but you should feel free to list as many, or as few, as you like.
To get things started here is my list, with descriptions slightly expanded from the original version I posted in the comments:
If we get enough people sending through their lists (unlikely, but I can dream) then I’ll collect them together and create an official City 16 Top 10 using complicated formulas! In the meantime feel free to add your lists, and comment on the lists of others. Maybe you can explain to me, in very simple words, why Primal isn’t the sixth greatest game of all time.
It’s a familiar scenario: After making the seemingly endless trek to your objective, besting numerous foes on your way, you are finally on the home stretch and boom. Headshot. In online games the sniper is always there and always ready to punish rash moves and errant mistakes.
“Dirty snipers” is the rallying cry of whoever in the house happens to be playing, or watching, as the familiar sniper rifle icon separates your username from that of the person you are currently cursing. When done badly the sniper can be the single biggest frustration in a game. Battlefield Heroes, for example, was pretty much ruined for me almost solely because of snipers.
Technically that’s not fair. It’s not the fault of players sporting the sniper rifle that they are ruining Battlefield Heroes; characters simply move to slowly. As a byproduct of the players unurgent gait across the landscape any half-decent sniper can, of course, be a persistent annoyance. The match that forever turned me against the game consisted of the large Coastal Clash map, two snipers spawn camping and multiple deaths. At this point, especially at the early levels, you are pretty much helpless if you spawn away from cover.
This is less of a problem if there is an easy method of countering a persistently pesky sniper. Team Fortress 2’s Heavy class is, unsurprisingly, a sniper magnet. He’s slow moving, large and his gun has no accuracy against far away targets. The difference between Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield Heroes is that, during those times when you find your Heavy is being consistently taken out by a sniper in the distance, the fix is surprisingly simple. In Battlefield Heroes any solution you engineer to get rid of a tricky sniper has to be done with your existing class and environment. In Team Fortress 2, however, if you have a similar sniper problem you can choose any of the other 8 classes to fix it. Particular fun can be had as the Spy as your new Sniper friend is often not expecting to be troubled from the safety of his base, at least the first couple of times you kill him.
If snipers are such a frustrating part of online games shouldn’t they just be removed? Categorically: no. As I said at the start the sniper is always ready to punish a rash move. Good, rash moves should be punished. Death is cheap in gaming with the penalty being a simple spawn timer and a reset to base. Unlike spawn campers, grenade spammers or turret hoggers the sniper enforces care and attention in an environment that breeds the opposite. Snipers bring back the risk that balances the reward. In TF2 you may find yourself legitimately having an issue with them as the lumbering Heavy, but if a sniper was giving you a consistent problem as, say, the Scout then you’re not paying enough attention to your surroundings and the means you go about completing the objective.
More importantly sniping can be a lot of fun. It’s a slightly different mindset you have to adopt to be effective with the class. Perhaps ironically, given my issues with Battlefield Heroes, the best fun I’ve had playing a sniper has come from Battlefield: Bad Company*. In Bad Company the sniper class, and in particular the ghillie suit, is fantastically realised. It was Bad Company in which I learned of the concept of safety bushes: whereas many snipers may prefer the perceived safety of a building or roof, the real thrill comes from crouching down and moving from bush to bush getting as close to the action as you possibly can. There is genuine pleasure gained from the fact that as long as nobody sees your muzzle flash you are practically invisible. There have been moments hidden away in my bush in which an enemy soldier has run directly past my ear or a tank has rolled past oblivious. A good sniping position increases the tension tenfold: death is suddenly less cheap as you’ll lose your spot but at the same time you have a limited number of times you can operate from the same place before you’re spotted.
Just a little closer.
This is the perhaps the source of the frustration, and joy, of the sniper: they are playing a different game, aloof and distant from the main ground war. It’s the ultimate griefer class of the traditional class-based shooter dynamic. Frankly, if you don’t hate them then they aren’t doing their job right.
*I’m going to lose some respect points here by mentioning I’ve never played one of the main PC Battlefield games.
In the spirit of best laid plans I have declared September productivity month… sorry, Productivity Month. A big part of this will involve going through my list of planned articles for City 16 and actually writing them. This has, in turn, set me about thinking about what exactly I’m aiming to do with this site and where I plan on taking it going forward. While it’s all well and good me deciding on a bunch of new features and ideas to introduce over the next few months, it’s not me that actually reads this site. In the interest of fairness and community I’m appealing to the people that do. Think of this as the site’s quarterly review: What works? What doesn’t work? What should there be more of? What should there be less of? What should be added? If you were stuck on a desert island with a bag of potatoes, a Ben Stiller DVD box set and Mr. T just how would you pass the time?
I dislike posting without some kind of image so, apropos of nothing, here's a tip from Penny Arcade Adventures.
One feature I’ve been toying with is a weekly round-up of the week’s news from around the web. This idea came about with the announcement of an episodic series of Dan and Ben adventures; not enough to justify a post in its own right, but certainly worth mentioning somewhere. Again I put it to you: would this be a useful feature or a waste of time? I’ve even given semi-serious thought to actually doing a genuine review or two.
Just to reassure that I’m not being entirely lazy about deciding what to post, here are just some of the articles that should, nay will, make an appearance during Productivity Month:
Finally I’d like to point out that this site is always welcoming of guest contributions because I often get tired of the sight of my own words. If you’ve got something you’d like to submit to the site the just get in touch. You will gain many City 16 Trademarked Love Points (non-transferable). As always thanks for reading the site, I get a warm, tingly feeling from knowing that you do.
There are many reasons to praise Fallout 3 but my favourite thing about the game is that it genuinely rewards exploration. Too many games these days create vast open worlds purely to pad out the distance between missions, with the odd collectible scattered here and there. In Fallout 3 whenever you enter a building you genuinely don’t know what to expect. Aside from the general missions are little vignettes; opportunities to gain some small reward, embark on a silly little mini-quest or learn background story about previous wasteland travellers. To prove this point I present an extract from the diary of Pliskin, my cannibalistic, kleptomaniac, saintly main-character:
I’d been clearing out the Marigold Station of fire ants when I found Grady. He wasn’t in great shape; maybe they’d got to him, maybe he couldn’t take the pressure and decided to go out on his own terms. It didn’t matter either way, his brains were dried into the walls now and I was the bastard lucky enough to find his last message to the world.
If you’re listening to this tape, then my brains are splattered all over a wall somewhere and you’ve got a job to do. You need to retrieve the package and get it safely to Ronald Laren in Girdershade. Tell him Grady sent you.
To get the package, you’ll need the key. I’ve stashed it inside an old fire hose case in some maintenance closet in Marigold Metro Station. The key will unlock the safe that contains the package. Look for the room marked by a spinning light… you can’t miss it.
Good luck, and hopefully they won’t find you too.
Sure it sounded dangerous, Grady could tell you that if he’d been able to tell anyone anything any more, but I was betting Ronald Laren would pay good money to get this package back. Luckily for me Marigold is a pretty small station; finding the firehose that hid Grady’s key didn’t take a whole lot of searching and pretty soon I’d found the spinning light that marked the location of the package, assuming no-one had got to it first.
In the room was a safe that seemed a likely home for the package. A quick check confirmed that it hadn’t been tampared with and I was the first to get here. As I unlocked the safe my pulse raced, the anticipation was almost unbearable. What could be inside? There’s always the chance that it would prove far too valuable to sell. If so Ronald Laren would be free to track me down. I’d be waiting. I opened the door.
What the fuck?
WHAT THE FUCK?
Before I’d had time to regain my composure I heard a sound from the door. Someone was coming.
You’ve picked a really bad time to be giving demands, buddy.
As Lug-Nut’s head exploded I’d made my decision, one way or another Ronald Laren was going to pay dearly for wasting my time. Money or blood I didn’t care, there was a cost for my services and he was getting the bill.
On the other hand the ‘Naughty Nightwear’ was surprisingly comfortable.
The journey through the wasteland to Girdershade was largely uneventful. I may have been sporting erotic pyjamas, but I find people rarely judge your fashion choices when you’re carrying a giant plasma rifle.
Mutant bears, in particular, are non-judgemental.
Finally I make it to Girdershade, with one thought in mind.
This place looks like a shithole. Ronald had better have more caps than his humble abode might suggest.
Luckily he’s a desperate man. I manage to extort 300 caps from him; partly for the nightwear and partly to avoid finding out what the business end of a fully charged plasma rifle feels like.
With that my personal odyssey was complete. I had searched high and low through an fire ant infested underground station, trekked the entire length of the Wasteland all to extort a large sum of money from a desperate pervert. All in all it had been a good day.
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