Recently, the Internet noticed a file named hl3.txt was included in a DOTA 2 update, and everyone had a massive brain aneurysm and died. Or something. Later, everyone noticed it was probably mostly inconsequential.

OR WAS IT

Below, you’ll find some excerpts from what appear to be subtitles for Valve’s trademark Developer Commentary that were hidden away in the file. The’re not labelled by name, so it can be hard to know who’s saying what, but some bits are easy to guess. Don’t read on if you don’t want to see massive spoilers, obv.

When we left Alyx and Gordon, Eli had just been murdered by that giant worm thingy and things were pretty much in the toilet for our heroes. One of the things that delayed the sequel for so long was Erik’s insistence that Dr Kleiner’s headcrab couple with Eli as he dies, and a resurrected ‘Zomb-Eli’ be your comic foil for this game. He clung to that pretty hard. And since we have this whole Valve Culture thing going on and none of us could really overrule him, we basically had to wait until he stopped finding it funny. It took six years.

We were super excited to have Clint Hocking on the team. Unfortunately, he left for Amazon in the meantime. I think he’s just gone back to Ubisoft? There actually aren’t many obvious signs that he ever worked on Half Life; probably on account of he spent most of his time here rocking back and forth in his chair, messing with the enemy respawn timer.

It’s not that we ever stopped loving Half-Life – we just got hugely excited about other games. You’ll see some shoutouts to those games hidden in Three. For instance, if you look closely, you’ll notice that this skybox is made entirely of recoloured TF2 hats.

We knew that when we took the players to Aperture Science, they’d be expecting the Portal Gun. So we had the G-Man drop some hints about it before you go; in this interruption, he predicts your excursion will be a ‘huge success’, then notes that he’s ‘still talking when there’s mysterious-alien-man stuff to do’. Just really getting the player excited to get to the chambers. That way, it makes the fact that we didn’t include the Portal Gun and instead filled that section with Ant Lions even more of a fun twist.

Once it was clear that Zomb-Eli wasn’t happening, I pitched a bit where Eli’s ghost possesses Dog, and for some reason that turns Dog into a mech that Gordon can pilot and just stomp Combine ass with. It was around then that Gabe told me he’d give me a raise if I wrote Team Fortress 2 comics forever and never talked to the Half-Life team again.

Foley work for the new alien enemies was a lot of fun. You really end up finding the perfect sound in the most random places. That low menacing drone of the Impure Combine? The one that sounds like the inhuman bugle call of an alien apocalypse? That’s actually a completely untouched recording of Gabe’s reaction when legal told him we’d have to start offering refunds.

I did leave a post-it on Laidlaw’s monitor suggesting that Judith Mossman become “Queen of the Ant Lions’, because they somehow emit the same pheromones. It even had a little stickman drawing of Gordon riding Dog into battle with Judith, who was charging around on one of those Antlion bosses. Then another post-it note underneath that just said “WOW” in big block letters with little stars around it. That was when everyone wheeled me, and my desk, into the men’s room.

So, I really feel like that Combine battle explains exactly why this game’s development became such an extended thing. Not because it was difficult or time-consuming to make, but because in the time it took you play through that, we made more money from DOTA and Steam than you’d see in three full lives. Singe-player is dead, and someday you will be too, but Steam? Steam lives forever. Gabe out.

In a post-Witcher 3 lull, I went back and finally finished the Most Forgettable Game of 2011, id Software’s Rage. OR DID I?

Yes. I did.

Some thoughts.

1 — The shooting is mostly really good, all loud, purposeful shotguns, and chuckable wingsticks that make you feel like Xena throwing her Whatsit Circle around. The mutant enemies’ twisty attack patterns make solid connections especially rewarding, especially since they go flinging their bodies around madly thanks to the game’s wonderful animations. Then the human enemies start wearing fifteen layers of armour and it sadly becomes something of a slog; they don’t get smarter or more interesting, they just take longer to smack down. Purchasing oodles of the Authority’s armour-piercing ammo does the trick, but it does make certain weapons (including that shotgun) feel impotent in the latter stages. And some of the enemy spawning is about as subtle as Kanye West wearing a golden kimono at an egoists’ convention on the moon.

2 — id appear to have promptly forgotten that the shooting was very good, and in a drunken panic, padded out the game with hub towns packed with irredeemably awful textures, some pretty (vacant) models that say nothing of note, and mini-games straight out of a 1991 Atari compilation. “Mini-games”, with a strong emphasis on “mini”, and a derisive, hacking laugh strangling “games” mostly into unintelligibility. One supremely awful standout in Subway Town (cleverly imagined, these place-names) has a guy playing guitar one note at a time, each corresponding to an on-screen arrow. He plucks a sequence of notes, and you attempt to repeat it, in a memory game so insultingly banal, it could be Mumford & Sons’ complete discography. On cassette.

Also filling in time between the all-too-rare shootery bits is a lot (A LOT) of pointless driving twixt points A and B in a beautiful, empty, beautiful, boring, boring, beautiful, boring post-apocalyptic open world. This insufferability is made worse by the introduction of the game’s vehicular combat, which is akin to a Young Republicans meeting in that you know people worked hard at it and really believed in it, but it’s still the most depressing depiction of not-fun in the world. It tries so very hard to be Mad Max, but the cars are entirely devoid of any feeling of weight or heft or violence or fun, and then the enemy cars start using shields, so you end up just stocking up on rockets and one-shot-kill pulse ammo and trying to get through it as fast as possible. Or better still, ignoring enemies altogether, and just pounding nitro to stay ahead of them as they pepper you with ineffectual bullets, paying the Repair fee once you’re back in the garage as a kind of Boredom Tax. That could be Rage’s subtitle. Boredom Tax.

3 — id’s games used to have simple, one-line stories, ranging from “There are Nazis, and you kill them”, through “There are monsters, and you kill them”, and of course Quake III’s “There are other people, and you kill them”. Elaborating much further would have dispelled the magic: no one needs to know the Cacodemon’s origin story, or which exact feudal system the Baron of Hell and Hell Knight exist in. (Is the Cyberdemon their Satanic King, leasing out portions of Hell to his Barons? Do Hell Knights get to live on that land in exchange for hurling green deathbolts at the player? Where are the Hell Villeins? Y’know what, forget what I said before—Doom 4 should have the Shadow of Mordor Nemesis system in place, with all these politics realistically simulated.)

When id Software reach for an actual story, we end up with Rage. (Or Doom 3, both of which were given to – nay, inflicted upon – us by the same external author, one Matthew J. Costello, whose oeuvre also includes Just Cause 2 and… um… the 2003 Starsky & Hutch video game of the 2004 movie of the 1970s TV show. And a SeaQuest DSV novelisation. So.) Rage’s story is best described as this: Fallout 3’s story, barely remembered and badly retold by an Alzheimer’s-stricken elderly relative. “There’s a barren wasteland… and you step out of… a thingy? A thingy. Then the shooting. And the people talk a bit. Mutants.” And nothing substantial to fill in the gaps, just lots of first-name-only characters that say “Hey, you’re a guy that did a thing just now” when you press E on them.

And the story gets the ending it probably deserves. After a few missions taking on bandits, and another few taking on mutants, you make your first tentative strike against the Authority, the big bad oppressors with all the armour and the under-explained motivations. You immediately receive another mission from your allies: strike deep in the Authority’s base, and you can activate all the Arks (you emerged from an Ark – the aforementioned “thingy” – at the start of the game) across the Wasteland, thus giving your team an army of confused soldiers to rally against the regime. They pack you up with Rage’s BFG-equivalent, because this is id, and send you on your way. So you go and you do that, and the game forgets to give you any big enemies to use your new gun on, and the Arks spring up in a cutscene, and then the game craps itself and dies, and the credits roll, and you slump incredulously in your seat. Imagine if The Lord of the Rings ended with the formation of the Fellowship, but without any of the interesting stuff that happened before that, and you’re about halfway to comprehending the absence of anything resembling an ending here. It’s like if this blog pos

9 facts about Splinter Cell that are so hard to believe, you probably shouldn’t.

• Splinter Cell Conviction was, at various times throughout its elongated development time, both a Jason Bourne game, and an adaptation of popular murder movie, Taken. These earlier builds can be accessed via the main menu by selecting “New Game”.
• No one has ever played Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Everyone took one look at the demo, and said “No. No. It’s okay. Try again.”
• Sarah Fisher, Sam’s daughter, was originally going to be named “Samsdottir”, but Ubi were talked out of it by a passing Tom Clancy ghostwriter.
• The Mark & Execute feature is a holdover from an abandoned Ubisoft concept for a co-op game, starring hard-luck New York cop Mark Cooper and his loose-cannon partner, John “Execute” Doyle.
• Clint Hocking, lead designer of Chaos Theory, didn’t just go on to head up production of the similarly best-in-franchise Far Cry 2 – it’s a little-known fact that he gave a cheeky cameo to the super-sneaky master of stealth Sam Fisher. See if you can spot it.

• Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s three play-styles of “Ghost”, “Panther”, and “Assault”, had the respective in-studio nicknames “Ugh, this guy, I dunno, let him use a drone or something”, “This is the game, this is how you play the game, this is the actual Blacklist” and “Why would you buy a stealth game?”
• Inexplicably reversing Fisher’s ageing process for Blacklist was intended to give the player a measure of revenge on Grimsdottir for her Chaos Theory “You are old, Sam” jibe. The Sam-assaults-Grim scene in Conviction was also designed with the same purpose, but testers suggested that friendly ribbing probably wasn’t enough justification, so Ubi shoehorned in some storyline excuse or something, I forget. The important thing is that you definitely get to see Sam punch Grim in the face for some reason, so Ubi are happy.
• Voice actor Michael Ironside’s departure for Blacklist was seen as an opportunity to freshen up the Fisher character. Unfortunately, everyone forgot to think of anything to do about that, leaving Sam a fugue nothing person.
• Conviction’s storyline was conceived as an avant-garde attempt at a gritty action thriller without any stakes. “Your daughter’s dead! Joke! She’s still alive really. And I’m keeping her where you’ll never find her! Except I won’t really – she’s here. AND SHE’S IN DANGER. Nope, wait, she’s fine.”

There’s nothing I can really add to the recent Peter Molyneux controversy. So, very quickly, here’s what I’m adding.

In the days before that RPS interview was published, forum and comment threads on the the topic of Godus’ false promises were chuckling amongst themselves at this Memento reference. Molyneux lied about Godus – of course he did! It’s Peter Molyneux! Decades of over-promising and under-delivering conditioned gamers to consider him, in the bluntest of terms, a liar.

So there’s an unpleasant tone of cowardice to those questioning RPS for asking the man outright if he thinks of himself as such. Do we believe him somehow oblivious to his online reputation? Are we okay with the idea of saying it “behind his back”, but not to his face, like cliquey schoolkids?

This is important: journalists asking unpleasant questions should not be considered impolite, unprofessional, or even out of the ordinary. Hounding the interviewee for a straight answer is not any of the above. Nor is calling the interviewee out on a discrepancy. It is, actually, their job. As Jeremy Paxman put it,

“I just ask the question that the average, reasonably intelligent viewer would like to see asked. And by and large, I think you should ask it straight and direct. And if you ask the question, you should get an answer.”

The problem in games journalism, in fact, has been the lack of this dogged questioning. Publishers and developers have held access and info at ransom from journalists, hiding behind fluff interviews, controlled preview events, and day-of-release review embargoes. That Molyneux respected John Walker enough to forego any PR handlers, and that Walker respected Molyneux enough to ask some tough questions – without feeling the need to actually apologise for it – should be seen as a step forward, not an ugliness.

Especially now, as we move into an era of Kickstarters and Early Access games, and publishers become less ubiquitous, it’s often the case that the games media are the only ones who can hold these developers accountable. (Not that major devs should be exempt – cases like SimCity, DriveClub, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and Skyrim’s console calamities should absolutely be investigated.) That the tone might get uncomfortable is a good thing – people’s money, reputations, and careers are at play. It’s not the time to pull punches.

Yes, Molyneux is passionate about his work, and that’s admirable, but let’s not pretend there aren’t dozens upon dozens of equally passionate developers not spouting off whatever interesting, imaginary feature pops into their head to keep journalists interested, and instead being open about their games’ development and delivering high-quality games at the end of it. Molyneux’s passion doesn’t earn him a free pass, nor does his history – and if more people had unapologetically called him on his nonsense years ago, this furore probably wouldn’t have happened at all.

Shutting out an honest, no-holds-barred interview accomplishes nothing except condemning everyone to the same conveyor-belt campaign trail interviews we’ve bemoaned for years. Instead? Let’s relish this.

As a mobile game, the title “Hoplite” doesn’t immediately call to mind the spearmen of Ancient Greece, instead sounding a bit like the free trial of a cheap Hopscotch knockoff with numbers upwards of 4 locked behind a paywall. Hoplite is a bit like hopscotch, come to think of it, only rather than numbered squares, you have a hex-grid, and in place of childhood laughter and frivolity, you have a spectacular turn-based strategy game. So.

It’s the only mobile game to ever come close to scratching what can only be described as the “Spelunky itch” – it sounds like a rude rash, but it’s actually a desire for a randomly generated game (thus infinitely playable) with clear rules, interesting systems, and utterly predictable consequences. In Spelunky it’s learning the movement of the bats, the timing of the bombs, the terror of the Temple Priests. In Hoplite, it’s knowing how many hexes will take you out of an archer’s range, or learning the difference in distance between a Bash and a Mighty Bash when you’re hoping to nudge a bomb explodingly towards a demon sorcerer.

Where Spelunky has shops with jetpacks and shotguns and climbing gloves (the holy trinity), Hoplite has an altar on every floor. On your journey to rescue the Golden Fleece on the 16th floor, you choose a prayer at each altar, granting basic abilities like a longer jump or a faster cooldown on your shield bash, or more advanced ones, where three kills in a row grants you a nifty bonus or some such.

And as is the fashion in today’s post-Souls world, it’s ruggedly and punishingly fair. Rush a move, and you’ll miss an enemy’s angle of attack, losing a precious heart. It never obfuscates: you can tap an enemy to see exactly where and how far he’s aiming, and holding down on a potential move will show you exactly whom you’ll attack and whom you’ll ignore.

But, as anyone who’s played Spelunky knows, predictable consequences don’t lead to predictable games. Because all the necessary information is always at hand, most levels start with you feeling in control, manipulating enemies into the right positions, or nimbly manoeuvring yourself betwixt sightlines. But before you know it, it becomes a matter of damage limitation – when every possible move lands you in trouble, you have to figure out which is the least damaging.

See? Fair. But you’re human. You’ll slip. Concentration will lapse, and you’ll suffer. You’ll do something stupid. And you’ll kick yourself, and do better next time. I’m crap at it sometimes, and you will be too. You live, you learn. You love, you learn. And I recommend trying this game, free, to anyone, I certainly do.