As you probably may have noticed, the usual updates have stopped. Why? Because we’ve moved. I may sporadically update this site when stuff happens, but for all intents and purposes, please go to http://eongaming.net to see our usual output. Subscribe to the feed at http://eongaming.net/feed. Comment on everything. Tell your friends. Make us feel loved.

And of course, send us cookies. We’ll be looking for writers who can commit to one post a week on any gaming subject (PC or console) in the coming month so send me an email at patrick[at]eongaming.net.

Also, in a delicious sense of irony, this is my 100th post. Whoopie.

10 minutes is actually an adequate time to play about with the part of the city that’s available to you which is about 1/6^th. Going round and looking at the shops and stuff will probably only take you about 6 minutes, and it was rare for my shoot-outs with the police that I started for the sheer hell of it to last 10 minutes. Not because they got bored, but because they were better shots that me.

It’s worth pointing out how the wanted system works. Usually you can outrun/gun the police and get 5 seconds of respite before someone else appears. This time, if there are no police there, you’re still wanted. But they don’t know where you are. A description of the vehicle you were in or your description is relayed around, and if a police officer sees something matching that description it all starts again.

This doesn’t disappear until you do something about it either. The clothes shops, the garages or just a plain bribe to someone in the police force will get rid of it and you’ll be free to play as usual. Or you could just keep going round and continuing the shoot-outs because it’s fun to cause a high body count.

I’m in two minds about the combat though. Melee fights are as simple as you’d imagine (Light hits, heavy hits, dodge), but the cover system makes it slightly too easy. In the actual mission, where you’re moving through a distillery, flanking didn’t take a part for most of it and I’m worried that most missions will be the same. In the city police officers occasionally flanked me, but I don’t know whether that was just a blip or it was planned.

The other thing that really worries me is the Playboy collectible. I don’t mind random collectables like GTA’s hidden packages, but this just looks like 2K are trying to get sales through porn. I can also see the headlines already that ‘games are just selling porn to children’. I don’t think we shouldn’t include adult content, but I don’t think including licensed Playboys is a good idea.

For the first time in a sandbox game, I felt like I was actually in a city. There’s a sense of realism here that I’ve never seen in any other game, and I can see many hours of joy in the city alone. It isn’t as hard as the last game by a long shot and I’m very grateful for that, the voice acting and writing was impeccable, plus the city really does feel alive.

I’m pre-ordering Mafia 2 without a doubt. If the rest of the game is as well written and fun as this little snippet was, it will have been money very well spent.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Why we all do the things we do? To do what we like in a satisfactory way?

So I’m here. Graciously given a chance by DrugCrazed to write.

And that is what will happen.

But first, let’s drop the srs bsns.

I’m currently an engineering student in the States with a huge interest in games and music. I’ve got very little to my name barring a review on the brazened Gaming Daily and probably random comments on the ever lovely Rock, Paper, Shotgun (random adjectives may have been used in the construction of this post). To give perspective, I’m essentially a no one. I’ve got several games I’m collaborating on, and a personal one I really hope I do eventually get out, but certainly not for a while.

It’s safe to say I have too many hobbies; I think this is because my mind is weird like that. It likes to take a passing interest in everything. My “feature” post, in fact, will be around what everyone in PC gaming can do to further improve its state, with a bent towards economics. My entire interest in economics and business is voluntary. Besides the obvious games aspect I’ve noted, my other huge interest is in all aspects of music. Finding music, making it (albeit I have issues getting it out of my head and onto a file), selling it (though just in theory), and for the last couple years, breakdancing to it.

And the best part, is that all of it can be applied to games, and vice versa.

If there is, indeed, wisdom I can part, it’s that everything is connected. One thing is all other things. And all things can be one thing.

Try that out for size.

This Penny Arcade strip, while aimed at the current Big Evil Boss of the gaming industry, accurately sums up my feelings about the new Bioshock game that Irrational have just announced. Bioshock started out as a spiritual successor to one of the most claustrophobic, terrifying, brilliantly written FPS/RPG hybrids in PC gaming. Yes, it had to come out on 360 to be financially viable. Yes, it pulled back from showing the consequences of the most important moral action in the game. But it was a solid, well put-together shooter, with well written characters and, until the finale, an interesting antagonist.

And it should have stopped there.

But it didn’t. 2K liked the sales figures so much, that we got Bioshock 2. Except, now that we’re done with the truly interesting, we’re going to gimmick-land. BE A BIG DADDY! MORE POWERS! MORE GUNS! WALK AROUND UNDERWATER! And it had to have multiplayer, and it was considerably shorter than the original game ( I have finally pushed myself through the equally turgid ending), and it was a bit shinier. It was sequel-itis. It was something we frankly didn’t need. Just as SHODAN can no longer be terrifying, having fallen twice, Rapture, even new parts of Rapture, could never generate that cloying, art deco atmosphere properly.

And now we have Bioshock: Infinite (Please, dear Gods, let this be a working title, like Bioshock 2’s “Sea of Dreams” prefix was dropped…).

You’re in the airborne city of Columbia. It is the World’s Fair city of 1900, a technological marvel… except it went wrong (again). There are… things, going wrong. Early trailers have hinted at steam-punk monstrosities that are just human enough to be scary (again), a ideology taken to horrific extremes (again – in this case, it looks all very Manifest Destiny and Might is Right), and fantastical (genetic? not currently clear) powers (again).

But this time, we have A BUDDY. Her name is Elizabeth. You have to protect her and get her out of the city. She can do, as a trailer showing her brewing up a rainstorm for your electro-zaps to exploit shows, rather impressive things – which, as the same trailer shows, cost her – she suffers a heavy nosebleed after such a leverage of power, invoking thoughts of Pratchett referring to magic as using your mind to push a bloody big lever – push too hard, and your brain might come out your nostrils.

Forgive me, but right now, it basically sounds like Bioshock: 1920: Air City. With a buddy.

I appreciate as much as the next person that publishers exist to make money, but we are slowly but steadily coming to the point where, outside of big franchises that are molested to the point of no return, the only people doing a huge amount of innovation are indie devs, modders and freeware types.

I’m not dismissing Bioshock: Infinity out of hand. It’s not coming out till 2012 at the very earliest, and we don’t know much. But please, Irrational, 2K… do something else afterwards. Let sleeping monsters lie.

I seriously can’t believe this is the plot for this game. “Hey Bob, I’ve got an idea for the new Driver game. Instead of just having one car, you can like, take over people’s minds and shit.”

I could say that I couldn’t care less about the fact that people really thought it was a good idea, but that would be a falsehood. Game plots get done to death, with a new post every 20.35193 minutes from at least one person, all complaining about the poor writing on show in the gaming world. With this amount of negativity on show, why hasn’t something been done to rectify it? I think it’s an easy enough question to answer, and it boils down to this:

Writing is hard.

Well actually, it isn’t. Writing well is hard. I could write a book in about 1 month if I wanted to, but I can guarantee that it would be rubbish, the storyline would be all over the place and it would make little sense. It takes time and effort to create something that’s worth reading and enjoyable. My uncle is a published writer and he’s spent the past year (and probably longer) on the sequel to his début book. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why it’s so difficult for a developer to have a good plot.

Development isn’t geared towards creating a brilliant plot. The team behind Generic Shooter 20 haven’t gone into development thinking about how they’ll break the known limits of storytelling, but have just thought “I know! Let’s make a gun that fires kittens which scratch at the baddies before exploding!”. As many people have speculated, plot and/or story is an afterthought, not a forethought.

The kings of plot

That’s how this will ever be solved. The first stage of Dragon Age’s development was the creation of the world. Not the pretty effects or the gameplay, how the world was shaped, how it became what it is now and such. Bioware have always been the exception to the rule, but their stories are the best because they take their time with it. Dragon Age would only be a good game if that world didn’t exist and that’s the bare truth of the matter.

This isn’t to say that the developers should be the writers themselves. That wouldn’t solve much, unless they are actually writers themselves. Neither does it mean don’t start developing the game until you have this world nailed down. I doubt that is feasible unless you are funded by a very rich and very patient publisher, and you could then end up with a story which isn’t gameplay orientated.

That’s the fine line that needs to be drawn. Open world games need the conviction of a good plot to force you to take the main route and see it to completion. However, add in a plot that requires you to be constantly moving means all hope of freedom is lost. Of course you can do the Bioware approach and just let the player do what they want, breaking up the main quest. However, that causes the big plot hole of “If event x is so important and needs dealing with, why the hell should I help these farmers?”.

Of course, shouting about the pathetic crap that is the plot in Generic Shooter 20 isn’t worth it. Like I say, the developers don’t care about the storyline. One of my all time favourite games (Burnout) has no story, or any real reason to do all that racing/crashing. It’s just fun to do so. If the game is fun, why bother spending time on a story? The plot of GS20 is the same as the plot of Space Invaders, but people will still play both. They fill that little gaming hole we all have, where we just need to relax and watch explosions.

Not only do you get a great showering of bright colours, you get Ode to Joy! What's not to like?

I would argue that Dragon Age and the Bioware epics aren’t fun. Just wait a minute before you send that hate mail. They are enjoyable/epic/brilliant and all other positive adjectives, but I wouldn’t use the word fun to describe them. Baldur’s Gate is also on my list of all time favourite games and I wouldn’t use the word fun to describe it at all. It’s a bugger of a game, with too many rules that I don’t understand. But I enjoy every second I play it.

A good plot takes away those baser instincts that are fun, instead changing it to an experience akin to reading a book. Saying Reading is Fun makes you sound like a pathetic child that needs a kick in the face to learn how harsh life truly is. The same principle applies here in the book world as in the game world. They aren’t fun, but they are enjoyable.

The distinction between the casual and non-casual games are obvious. The hardcore gamers complain that the casual games aren’t real games, and the casual gamers complain that the hardcore games aren’t friendly. Gaming needs both. We can’t live without those short bursts of mindless entertainment, or people wouldn’t still be playing Bejewelled or Plants Vs Zombies. But we get our nourishing gaming food from the hardcore types like Dragon Age.

In the end, the clincher is this: Do we want games that are fun, or games that are intellectual? I can’t tell you what I’d choose as my answer.

Okay, I’m kidding, but let me make it clear where that joke is coming from. The US health reforms that are still slowly being pushed through to American citizens have been widely derided by the far right, Glenn Beck and Tea Party types, as socialism or communism because, according to them, it’s poor people being given stuff for free, which is evil and dirty and NOT THE AMERICAN WAY. That’s ridiculous, of course, the money for those reforms is being taken from other taxes (at which point those same right-wingers cry “TAX AND SPEND! TAX AND SPEND!” until you remind them most taxes are at their lowest for 40 years in America…). And the same thing is happening with a fairly hefty chunk of PC gaming right now: from “free to play” games with optional buy in extras, to the giving away of freebies in order to entice people on to your service. Poor people (you lot) being given stuff! For free! But, uh, if you want to get anywhere, or validate your use of this service for more than one game, you’ll need to buy this, this, this, and this…

At one end of the spectrum, we have Farmville (and, yes, for the sake of this discussion, it IS a PC game – it’s played on a PC, and it’s – just about – a game – that’s good enough for me), which sells shortcuts (bigger farm plots, oil to fuel time-saving tractors and seeders); at the other end we have the upcoming release of the Source-powered Alien Swarm remake for free, which will no doubt result in a noticable upswing in new Steam accounts, and new customers; and somewhere in between sit games like League of Legends (although I don’t actually recall seeing a similar business model anywhere – feel free to correct me on this) where you can either learn to adapt to the new free heroes each week, and grind away on the in-game currency, or drop $10 and pick up any top-price (and not necessarily the best) hero and a skin or an XP boost, with spare change.

Increasingly, I can see PC-exclusive games and distribution platforms leaning towards these kind of money making gimmicks or micropayments – after all, every major Steam sale, or at the start of the Portal giveaway, the servers appeared to fuse into lumps of molten metal, as if Gabe Newell had sat on them after an extra hot vindaloo. Likewise, logging in as League of Legends’ Season One update hit, I was struggling to reach 30kb/s downloading the patch on a line that usually manages 5-600kb/s. A couple of days later, having played for a good couple of weeks, I realised that if I wanted Cho’gath (a bastard ubertank who grows stronger by eating creeps), I was probably going to have to play a lot more LoL than my ADHD-filled head would accept. 2 minutes and $5 from a disposable card I had left from my last holiday later, I had him.

Similarly, when a Mac-owning friend downloaded Steam to try out Portal at my behest, a week later, I looked at his profile to see he had bought the entire Orange Box, both Left 4 Deads, and GTA 4 and the Episodes. “Well, they were there, and it was cheaper than getting them for my 360, so I thought… why not?” he said. And a fair chunk of those who just downloaded Steam for Portal probably thought the exact same thing while perusing the Steam Summer Sales – “oh, Generic Manface Shooter for £3.50… why not?” (They then probably cried when their piddly little Mac couldn’t run it, but that’s another topic…) And those of us who, instead of sneering in hipster-esque self-derived superiority, have Facebook, have probably had to block dozens of Farmville-a-likes, most of which are made by Zynga, all of which aim to make profit by dragging you into that “just one boost to get this next level/crop” mentality.

Now, I don’t for a minute imagine that all PC games will be like this – we’ll still be getting our lovely multi-platform releases (read, for most developers: shitty console ports full of mouse acceleration, intolerably draconian DRM, low-res graphics, or all of the above), and I don’t doubt that indie devs, Stardock, and to a large degree (because it’s where most of their business is, despite going multiplatform) Steam, bless their cotton socks, will continue to knock out old-fashioned games where you, y’know, buy them. For one fee, once. And get the whole game. Maybe some DLC or an expansion pack later. But there’s a big market of people who will take stuff for free, and a sizable chunk of those will, like me, probably jump at the chance to buy the big damn hero or harvest their… THING quicker. So expect to see it get a lot more widespread, and expect to see more choice tidbits “given away” to get people onto digital distribution platforms, soon.

All of the above reviews can be simplified into one paragraph:

APB is a brilliant game. The customisation is brilliant, the concept is fascinating and someone should have tried this before. However, the combat is horrible, the new user experience is hell and it doesn’t work properly.

I was already fairly non plussed about APB after the beta didn’t do anything to make me want to play, but after reading the reviews (And foolishly reading the comments on some of them), I saw no reason to spend my money on it. I was already worried when Real Time Worlds tried to put the review embargo on until a week after release*. If it was 3 days or less, then I would have accepted they were trying to create the chance where the game would be reviewed properly and not rushed out. A week just makes me think that they are almost certain it is going to get panned.

And panned it is. Metacritic (Which to be honest isn’t the best indication of a game) takes the average score to be about 59, with most reviews hovering over that area. I didn’t have the time to read through them all properly (Hence the selection above) and I foolishly took part in the comments on the PCGAMER review. Every review is full of criticisms, though most agreed that it would get a patch and be sorted within 6 months.

Why I haven’t gone and bought it is because the reviews didn’t show there had been a difference between the beta experience I had and the finished product. The driving was awful in the beta, with the game lagging as soon as you started to move. It was finally fixed so that there wasn’t this slow down, but the cars felt unresposive, which apparently makes it ‘realistic’.  I don’t drive, but I’m almost certain that moving the steering wheel makes the car respond immediately.

You may be asking why I’m writing this if I’ve only got reviews to go off, and that’s because of the comments that I’ve seen from the community who rushed to defend it. I’ve spoken before about reviews before,  and firmly believe that it’s impossible to review MMOs completely**, but the outrage that the community has shown has been the main muse for this post. A lot of people suddenly insulting the reviewer and saying “He isn’t a good player, he’s such a noob” and much worse made me feel like there was another reason for me not to try the game.

Communities are things that are very precious to a developer. A community will see through the flaws in your game, see the product it could become and stay with the game until said product arrives. Everyone knows that APB has flaws, but it seems that you get used to the flaws after 20 hours play. Using that logic when writing a review can’t be done in any good conscience. Every review of APB has been right: The reviewer can’t recommend a game in that flawed state, hence the low scores and the negative reviews.

Of course, reviews are very influential. We all have favourite reviewers, and we tend to like what they like. Metacritic is used by so many publishers to decide whether a developer’s next game will be funded. So these poor reviews are telling EA (The publishers) that they haven’t done a good job, and even telling Realtime Worlds that most people didn’t like their game. There will be people who see the Metacritic rating and say “No, I won’t buy this”, which may decrease the player base since there won’t be new players. Though the fan boys will continue playing it…

What this could cause is APB being shut down which I don’t think anyone wants that to happen. MMOs are the most patched of all games and all these problems can be fixed. Its just a matter of time until they are. I personally would love to play it but I really can’t see a reason to purchase it at this present time, which is a problem for a game where groups new players are needed to make the actual start interesting.

At the moment, buying APB isn’t advisable. It’s shoddy and you will die or have very little fun at the beginning until you get a better gun. In 6 months time APB might be fixed and be recommendable, but that’s only if enough people can get past that first hurdle of non-fun to see what could be a brilliant game. I’d rather wait for that than spend my money waiting for that stage.

*The reasons cited for the embargo told us that the Key To The City beta event wouldn’t be representative of the full game. I call bollocks on that. That event was 2 weeks before release if I remember correctly all that could really change was balance. If the game doesn’t work by then, its your own fault for not hitting your own deadlines. Return to reading.

**The latest issue of PCGAMER includes a review of the Age Of Conan expansion. The first line acknowledges that the review isn’t going to cover everything that is available because it would be folly to try and the review wouldn’t be finished on time. Which is fair and honest. Return to reading.

It’s not that I couldn’t do it, but the fact I have to delete old drivers, and install new ones. And restart after both of those events. I do not like turning my PC off. I like to hibernate, and so does my PC. So it is a bit of pain when software updates tell me to restart my machine, because it just bugs me. All I was thinking during this was “Why am I having to do this manually?” while I was making coffee and cookies as it downloaded and installed.

Now, I know that Windows Update is a pain to use. I also know that Windows Update can include drivers for 3rd party software. Imagine if your graphics drivers were included in Windows Update?* No more thinking ‘Erm, what graphics card do I have?’ or downloading some other software to tell you which you have or annoying sites which don’t allow you to update drivers easily. Just a nice simplified experience for everyone to use.

Of course, Microsoft would charge for that, and drivers are patches which should be free. But what’s stopping the distributors when they give you the driver disc to have an extra tool that checks your driver every few days and tells you “Oh, you don’t appear to have the latest driver. Would you like me to go and get it for you?”. Then it can trundle off and sort it all out, with a quick note saying “You will experience some craziness on your monitor. This is normal”.

So why haven’t they? I really can’t see a reason why nobody has. Place all your devices in a damn MySQL table, with a field saying when the last driver was released and put a timestamp on every driver. Then a quick check when someone checks their driver and when a new driver is released, the table gets updated. It can’t be harder than what is currently used, and it certainly should be more complicated.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say all that. I have no idea how often drivers are updated, or how to actually write those sorts of programs (Though I imagine a check for updates tool would be simple, Piriform do it easily). Though if either of the big two companies implemented this approach, I can tell you that I would be buying from them and them alone. Sod the fact that ATi are cheaper and only slightly worse, if nVidia do a tool like this that makes driver updates quick and painless, I will be buying from them everytime.

As I said before, I can easily do all of the above steps. But someone who doesn’t know that you have to uninstall your last driver to prevent any chance of it not working and crying in your face could easily just download a new driver and install it. Yes it might work, and when it doesn’t I tend to get a call meaning I get monies, but I think it should be on the to do list of all graphics card manufacturers.

*Thoughout all of that paragraph, I had to quash an urge to type _TM after every time I typed Windows. Does that means something is wrong with me? Return to reading

I’m as willing as the next average gamer to accept minor holes in the plot if they facilitate gameplay, but Bioshock 2’s plot was, frankly, awful. A city that was falling to pieces during the first game has somehow not only held together in almost identical condition, 10 years later, but the Splicers (and those few inhabitants who appear to retain the majority of their humanity) have willingly swung about face from Andrew Ryan’s Randian city-state to an almost anarchic, collectivist unit, bound together by Wales’ and Sophia Lamb’s “Rapture Family” – religious zealotry where none was ever even hinted at before. Not only that, but the protagonist is now “Subject Delta” – the first successfully paired Big Daddy. Of course, the existence of these prototypes was never mentioned once in the first game, and yet we’re expected to acknowledge and accept their place in Rapture’s timeline. Oh, and the first successful Little Sister just happens to be Lamb’s daughter. In short: it sucks. The writing of the first Bioshock wasn’t hugely better, but it was tolerable, and it made some small sense because the city was clearly on the very edge of collapse.

Similarly, we have the 2 Modern Warfare games. In the first, you chase down Al-Asad, after he desposes the rightful leader of some Middle-Eastern fundamentalist hell-hole (or at least that’s how it’s painted), then chase down Zakhaev and his Ultranationalists through Russia. You kill him, the nukes he launched “only” take 30,000 lives instead of tens of millions, world is safe. Except when we start Modern Warfare 2, it turns out the naughty Ultranationalists won the war and now control Russia, regardless of having their entire leadership except one man, Makarov, decimated. We then go through the improbable ability of a US Marine to successfully (or not…) infiltrate Makarov’s leadership circle, US-sanctioned acts of terrorism (IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM), and a full-blown war between Russia and America where the only nuclear casualties are a few poor mooks on the International Space Station, and some Russians who just really wanted a burger. (Incidentally, the ISS is just about the only place the player is NOT ordered to go by some other bugger throughout the game – there’s a “RAMIREZ! PERFORM ACTION X!” meme floating around 4chan and meme-generator for a reason…). And then * SPOILERS AH-oh, fuck it, everyone who’s actually interested has played it anyway, it turns out the mastermind behind the whole plot was the guy giving your Task Force 141 orders, because he didn’t like America not being able to play World Police without getting a smacked bottom any more. It was shit, and the only reason I finished it was a) I was at a friend’s house, playing his copy on his 360, and therefore losing nothing, and b) It was SHORT. 5 hours, all the way through, on Veteran.

Video game stories have always been… leaning to ludonaucy, but it’s getting ridiculous, guys. We’ve reached a point where a 5 hour long singleplayer campaign with one “shocking” (Your mileage may have varied, I certainly didn’t give a toss – IT’S NOT REAL, DAILY MAIL) scene and every single Tom Clancy wet dream crammed in is praised as “one of the best video games released all year” (Daily Telegraph), and “hands-down one of the best first-person shooters out there,”(IGN UK). When I play God of War 3, I know what I’m getting into – I’m a guy with swords on chains that have been seared onto my flesh, and I’m going to fuck the Greek Pantheon over like Sasha Grey in a porno where she was being paid by the orgasm. But a title like Modern Warfare 2 implies some vague stab at realism, to me at least – that’s what the Call of Duty games set in good old World War 2 had going for them, they were massive setpieces with improbable victories, but THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Open a story up to games developers these days, and it becomes “how many TOTALLY AWESOME EXPLOSIVE CINEMATIC MOMENTS can we fit into this without having to put too much effort in?”

And then, amazingly, when we lean towards realism, game stories are denigrated for being “too depressing”! Grand Theft Auto 4 wasn’t true-to-life, but it was a hell of a lot closer than most games have come recently, and it’s tales of backstabbing, gang intrigues, loss and revenge were, for me, far easier to connect with than the plight of Ramirez, Soap, Price et al.

I’m not saying the ludicrous is bad. But at least make it contiguous within the universe you’ve created, guys. That, or invent a universe, like we used to do. Sam and Max! The Day of the Tentacle! System Shock! All their fictional tales are so much better for being in an original, well-crafted universe that their stories fit into, where they make sense – because they’ve been developed around the story. Nowadays, we take our AAA franchise, we see the world, and we shoe-horn stories into it – look at poor Sonic, or the dying embers of the once great Crash Bandicoot series. They, like Bioshock 2, are proof it doesn’t work. Bioshock 2 is what is wrong with modern video game plots. Good stories need to be in the right place, at the right time. Subject Delta was in neither.

Seeing as these are all rehashes, you don’t get a big long explanation telling you whether to buy the games today. I don’t really see the point. There is:

• Trine, £3.40
• ARMA 2, £12.49
• Red Faction Guerilla, £3.75
• Thief: Deadly Shadows, £2.09
• Killing Floor, £3.74
• World of Goo, £4.25
• Bioshock 2, £9.99
• Left 4 Dead 2, £6.79
• Borderlands, £6.79
• Mass Effect 2, £17.99
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2, £20.09
• Tales of Monkey Island Complete Pack, £8.49
• Grand Theft Auto IV, £4.99
• Civilization IV: Complete Pack, £6.24
• Just Cause 2, £14.99

And now normal service will resume. Enjoy.