Settling in with Bad Company

Re-creating war in videogames is a bit of a minefield when it comes to the fun to realism factor. In a first person shooter we all expect it to be fast paced, balls nailed to the wall style action that leaves death and destruction on the scale of genocide in its wake.

Of course the reality of war is that two or more opposing sides take pot shots at each other for hours at a time until someone gets the business end of an air strike tearing up their rectum. Such engagements don’t generally make for interesting gameplay material and so a lot of artistic license is used when portraying the horrors and boredom of war.

This leads very nicely to my current flavour of the week, Battlefield Bad Company 2, EA DICE’s latest foray into the world of tanks, guns and explosions, lots of explosions.

Adrenaline pumping, edge of your seat, bowel loosening action seems to be at the top of the agenda, as the feeling of war is really brought alive all around you because everything can be blown to bits at a seconds notice. It’s this arcade sense of war that has been introduced for ages in shooters such as Modern Warfare and Ghost Recon, but with the chaotic situation-o-metre cranked up to 11.

My gentleman bits have been shuffled around so much by all of the random destruction that I have re-entered puberty at least five or six times since March 5. Trees falling down, walls turning to concrete mist and showers of brick and mortar are so commonplace that it often feels like people are actively trying to bring on the apocalypse themselves.

With nowhere being safe to hide it means you actually get a very dynamic battlefield with most camping hotspots being rather blow-up-able. Of course you’ll still get the cheeky scamps lining up on the hills with sniper rifles, but they stick out like sore thumbs at an uninjured hand convention.

DICE has completely nailed the formula here as at no point do you generally feel a sense of downtime in a fight. With the walls around what you are trying to defend exploding, gunshots cracking overhead as all of the near misses ring in your ears and the beautifully crafted sounds of war simmering in the distance, it really feels like you are up the creek without a boat, much less a paddle. It feels brilliant.

It’s a real breath of fresh air from what I feel is starting to become a bit of a stale genre. I love online shooters, but they are all starting to feel quite samey these days. I tend to expect more than just the basic run around and shoot each other in the face style gameplay that has been around for so long. It’s part of the reason why I absolutely hated the BioShock 2 multiplayer. It was really boring and offered nothing new.

The random destruction that Bad Company 2 throws at you really makes for some interesting split second gameplay decisions that I think we need to have more of in online deathmatch arenas. Let’s start abandoning the tried and tested formulas that are now becoming the same peddled bolt-ons for existing games. I want new stuff.

Just blow on it

With the recent cock up of older PS3 units thinking we had a leap year, and Sony’s savoury consumer advice of ‘don’t turn it on for now’, it makes me think back to a simpler time when blowing on things was usually enough to solve the problem.

I’m ashamed to say that I arrived relatively late to the console party, with my lovely Nintendo 64 being the cherry popper that first put a game pad in my hands. I was always a PC player before this as for some reason my parents decided I wasn’t going to have a games console, until one day it happened anyway. But that’s a whole different story filled with tiny violins and tears that is now being sealed in my Pandora’s wall safe.

The absolutely brilliant thing about the N64 was how seemingly easy the thing was to maintain. Today the news is full of red ring of death this, Playstation clock exploding that, and this is just from normal playing conditions. I’m actually afraid to keep my Xbox on for more than two hours at a time in case it does throw a wobbly and abruptly decides to smother itself, demanding a return to the mothership for some CPR.

My N64 was dropped, sprayed with water, tripped over, pulled on to the floor via the controller trip wire effect and it still works today. I don’t know if I am lucky, or if my particular console is protected by voodoo, but I do know that if this treatment was given to the 360 or PS3, it would be a much different story.

This might be as much as anything that the machines are now a lot weightier and therefore have more things in them to break. A fall that the relatively small N64 would have just bounced back from with no interruption might be enough to reduce today’s machines to a small pile of circuitry rubble. More components also means more things that can overheat or cause various other problems.

The biggest technical advantage of the N64 however comes when the games themselves stop working. If you were unlucky enough to encounter a black screen when trying to play a game, just take the cartridge out and blow into the connector slot at the bottom.

It didn’t always work the first time, but after multiple goes, 99 times out of 100 it would play as good as new. I like to think that the blowing technique helped a little in this process, as when blustering like you were a hurricane didn’t work, my mind immediately decided that you had to treat it more sensually, and tickle the protruding piece of circuit board with a light whisper of air. Whatever volume of air was blasted or teased in, it always seemed to work.

Fast forward to now, and somehow I don’t think that blowing on an Xbox would do anything to prevent it red ringing. If anything you’d be blowing the hot air back in and making the problem even worse, making you feel terrible as it would just be something else in your life that you flirted with, only to be treated to a show of no affection and a break from happiness.

The dying art of the game manual

“If all else fails, read the instructions” – the mantra of a true DIY god. I find that the same line of thought applies to games as well, usually after ten minutes, three finger nails and a couple of accidental suicides when trying to find how to toss a grenade.

I remember the golden age of game manuals, when I was a younger lad being brought home from the shops, eagerly fondling the game box to try and get it open. Of course on the car journey you can barely enjoy the game disc itself beyond the roundness and the smell, so a pre-emptive flick through the instructions was always in order.

The Command & Conquer series has always given me a warming sensation in my eyes when it comes to their game manuals. The way that once the technical stuff, that probably warrants more of a read than I allow is out of the way, each of the game’s structures and units are laid out like an Argos catalogue for my eyes to peruse.

The original had a 3D rendered mock up of what each building and unit would look like if it wasn’t so pixelated by the now dated graphics, with some of the infantry units even having an actor posing for the profile shot. Just flicking through the 15 year old manual now brings up nostalgic treats, and an interesting scandal, where the GDI grenadier and NOD rocket infantryman are actually modelled by the same person. Where do his loyalties lie?

Jumping forward more than a decade and a quick flick through Red Alert 3’s manual shows that there are still unit descriptions there, which is a nice tradition that the series seems to be holding on to. It’s nice when you can see that some effort has gone in to a game manual as it gives you something to read as a game installs, or loads for the first time.

What I can not forgive however is manual like Modern Warfare 2’s, a piece of game literature that has been treated with the same respect as a goldfish’s lavatory burial. It is nine pages long, with four of them being legal-ese, one being the contents page, and the remaining leaves listing controls and menu functions.

Fair enough, it still kind of fills the role of an instructions manual, but it’s about as appealing to read as the obituaries section of your local paper. There was absolutely no attempt to dress it up, flesh it out or make it remotely interesting. It might as well have been scrawled on a paper napkin and tucked inside the game box, at least then it would double up as a hanky.

I realise that this might not be the most pressing issue in the world, but occasionally it is nice to flick through a game manual and learn something new, such as a basic function that you missed out in the tutorial, or where your trusty fictional battle rifle was cobbled together, and the wars in which it changed the outcome.

Can we just please try to avoid game manuals turning in to nothing more than a calculator instruction pamphlet look a like. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it an art (well, actually I did), but at least try and sex it up a bit, even if you just stain the pages with a tea bag to make it reflect the old fashioned setting of a game, or have a corrugated metal border design around the edges to represent the future. A bit of extra padding to the fiction wouldn’t go a miss either.

Have EA finally done something that all gamers won't be upset about?

I think that something really big and world changing has just happened. Maybe hell froze over, the planets aligned or George Lucas choked to death on a Jar Jar Binks action figure. Whatever the heck has happened, it was something powerful, as I might, dare I say it, actually start to think positively of EA.

Long have I ranted externally and internally about how they are a company out, would you believe it, to make profit from their customers! I have usually been a gunner on the front lines, spouting anger at their poor choice of DRM and completely pointless and endless releases of The Sims expansions that give people a few new tables and hats.

Lately however, I think they have started to get things bang on, and are letting other people cock up. Yes, we’re all looking at you Ubisoft.

For example, their approach to anti-piracy measures in Mass Effect 2 using the Cerberus Network is brilliant. In a nut shell, the Cerberus Network is an online component for Mass Effect 2 that lets you download new content for the game, such as new characters, weapons and missions.

To access it you need a code that comes with the retail copy of the game. If you pirate it, you will of course not get the code to join the network, and lose out on a lot of the content (which admittedly, there is not a huge amount of at the moment).

Now, this might have upset those who acquire a second hand copy of the game, but fear not, as you can buy a unique code to join the Cerberus Network for around a tenner, meaning you will not miss out. The true genius in this however is that pirates will be able to buy the code to access the new content for their copy, therefore becoming less unlawful, and instead, some kind of pirate/customer hybrid. A pustomer if you will.

Offering incentives, such as the Cerberus Network to try and combat piracy, I believe is the best way to go about it. That way you are not challenging the pirates to break your ridiculously intrusive software safe guards that usually upset genuine paying customers.

I can appreciate that for one man to start truly appreciating EA, it would take something more than this. Well, how about some free content including five missions and a vehicle (please let it handle better than the angry shopping trolley with a wonkiness fetish we know as the Mako).

As the friendly people at Eurogamer reported yesterday, the new pack is called Firewalker and will be available over the Cerberus Network free of charge in late March. How lovely is that?

Please keep it up EA, as I’m sure a lot of people will agree, you have a lot of upset gamers to make up with. Remember what happened with Spore? You hurt us.

I was so excited, I coughed up my spleen

Well, my Mass Effect total space bastard experiment has come to an end for now as I’ve just finished Mass Effect 2. Don’t worry, I won’t be spoiling anything in this blog, I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun for you, but my Commander Shepard probably would. In fact he’d tell you all of the possible endings, then kick your wardrobe door off, urinate on your favourite jeans and then murder your favourite pet.

I generally succeeded in keeping up my total streak of evil. When someone asked me to do something for them, I’d usual find a way of saying yes that was counter productive and got a lot of people killed. It was fun and I enjoyed being bad.

My main concern all of the way through was if I would actually survive the end of the game, being this completely self involved, mercenary space dick who would sooner sell his grandmother to pirates than remember her birthday. After completing it last night I am happy to report that I will continue my dick-ish streak in to Mass Effect 3.

The most brilliant thing about Mass Effect 2 though, in my opinion, was that I knew there was a possibility that my twisted embodiment of Commander Shepard might not make it all of the way through. This is no spoiler as the game box and various adverts all make you question your survival chances in the game. The developers even went as far as calling the final mission ‘the suicide mission’, just to really brand the point on both brain hemispheres that your adventure might end more abruptly than you would like it to.

Not knowing what would happen to my character or crew meant that every time control of the characters was placed in the hands of cut scenes, all of my internal organs would jump up and down, writhing inside of me, wondering which bump, scrape or flesh wound would kill who.

It was probably the most exciting, tension filled, final mission of my gaming career thus far, and the sheer exhilaration of it all was nearly enough to make me vomit pure chunks of astonishment, peppered with flecks of dismay and relief.

Many games will say they have multiple unique endings, but not many can claim to be as dynamic as Mass Effect 2 manages to be. The game remembers all of the judgements you made throughout your play through, and then uses this as a rule book as to who gets a bullet sandwich, and who can dance away to live with even more of your charming self another day.

I just hope that the threats of your poor judgements having a serious impact in the third game of the trilogy are carried out properly and noticeably. If it just leads to hearing a few additional sound clips of how irresponsible I was to let her do this, or how it was ‘monstrously wrong’ to solve all of my disputes with some fancy shooting, then I will be severely disappointed.

BioWare have set expectations high for number three, but judging from what they achieved in their latest game, I have quite a bit of confidence that they will pull it off. Just let me continue to kick unarmed people out of windows and rummage through the wallets of the various corpses lying around and it will all be fine.

Playing a role

I’ve never been a huge RPG man. There usually isn’t enough blood, guns or projectile limbs to hold my relatively one tracked mind, but trying to spread my gaming interest wide, I let the odd one through the net to try and tease my senses with an erotic feather dance of dialogue options.

Just lately, as I’ve made no attempt to hide, I’ve been going through Mass Effect and thoroughly enjoyed being the biggest prick in the universe. I was short, to the point and generally believed in sacrificing other people for the greater good. So ruthless, so efficient, so hilariously unfair.

But to what point did I play the role, as the name RPG strongly infers I should be. Yes, I influenced Shepard’s dickish tendencies and unhealthy lust for the homicidal solution to everything, but it didn’t feel like I was in total control of the decisions. I was the puppet master with a list of instructions, not the man on screen reacting to the situation.

To me, the term ‘role playing game’ infers more control and consequences from your direct actions, rather than selecting something to say from a list of good, neutral and bad dialogues.

Whilst not branded as an RPG, I feel that the Half-life series puts you in a role to be played a whole lot more directly. Everyone talks to you, everything is done by you and you have total control over everything Gordon Freeman does. Sure, this makes you a mute because you can’t input speech, but with the game not pushing any character motivation upon the player, you are free to fill in the blanks of what drives Mr Freeman. It just reinforces that you are playing as the crowbar swinging, science abusing physicist whose bad day at the office sealed his fate.

Now compare this to a Final Fantasy game or indeed Mass Effect, and it seems quite obvious how much narrative is laid out in these titles, simply leaving the player to choose which maze to weave through when it comes to NPC interaction and moral decisions.

I know that the Half-life games are fairly linear shooters, but when playing them, you feel a lot more involved in what is happening as the character you are playing doesn’t dish out any dialogue indicating a prior knowledge of the area, or which path to go down. He only knows what the player does.

It is entirely down to the person wielding the mouse to explore the dark tunnels and come to a conclusion for themselves. This is the sensation that makes me feel that I am playing a bigger role than just funnelling a conduit character model around a map.

Perhaps being the silent protagonist is the main force behind this feeling. Half-life, especially the original, is quite famous for having very little character interaction, with only one way conversations to the player being possible. The trouble with this is that when an RPG wants to spawn a realistic world full of choice and dilemma, it needs to be filled with people that have speaking parts, rather than a few hundred aliens that want to hump your face in to oblivion.

I guess we need to decide if a role playing game is about making a choice from a pre-prepared list, or consciously making the choice to go there ourselves, without a prompt, even if there is only one path to follow. The definition set by the current RPG market definitely hints at the former, but choosing from A, B or C, just doesn’t seem like taking the role of a game character, that jumping blindly into option Z does.

Somehow I managed to be a nice bad guy

As I said earlier this month, I’m trying to be evil on my first play through of the original Mass Effect, just because I am nice in all other games. I thought I was doing really well, until I realised that I was using my evil for good.

Whilst running around, being deliberately brief with everyone and blaming them for whatever just went wrong, I have also found myself pandering to their every whim. If they said jump, I would give a callous response to the tone of ‘up yours’, before giving an eager hop and asking for another order.

For example, whilst wandering around a space station I came across a fellow who was down on his luck as the military would not release his dead wife’s corpse, thus denying her a proper funeral. I probably said something like, ‘she had it coming to her’ and thought that was the evil thing to do.

Somehow though I still managed to find the guy responsible, who to his credit had a fairly good reason for not releasing her body, and then I pushed him up against the wall, demanding he give the corpse back to the grieving husband. Whilst trying to be the meanest guy ever, I still managed to do the morally right thing.

What I should have done would be to tell the husband an outright ‘no’, before going to retrieve the corpse for myself, attaching strings to each limb, and then making it dance around in a rather morbid puppet show for all to see. Unfortunately the dialogue options were slightly restrictive for a response like this.

It is clearly against my gamer nature to be evil. Whilst being unpleasant to everyone, calling them names behind their back and trying not to be helpful, I would still end up cooking them all a roast dinner somehow, not entirely understanding how or why it happened.

I’m determined to not be good in Mass Effect, I want to see what happens when you push evil to the limits. I guess I should just run through crowds screaming at the top of my lungs in the future, in a vain attempt to avoid agreeing to do things for people. That’s certainly not the good guy mentality, but it hardly shouts ‘evil genius’ either.


Update: Well, looks like I've managed to balance this out with a spot of acid assisted genocide of an alien species. Go me!