It’s marvelous when an independent game developer creates something that gets the big dogs off their high horses. This is the case for Frictional Games, who brought onto the world Penumbra, a first-person adventure-horror series. The Penumbra games showed that it didn’t take six-digit budgets to make a great game, and that sometimes, less is more. Their next game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is looking to be a winner. I interviewed Thomas Grip, co-founder of Frictional, about Amnesia and their philosophy of design.

From the looks of it, Amnesia is an amalgamation of the elements that made the Penumbra series a great one. Aside from the narrative context, what are the features or differentiations that make Amnesia special?

Thomas: It is true that a quite a lot of things are similar in Penumbra and Amnesia. People that have played Penumbra will recognize the basic design, physical interaction and focus on atmosphere. When it comes to things that are different, I think there are four main things:

• The physics interactions have been improved. For example, it is now easier to close a door, making sequences such as fleeing from a hostile creature a lot easier (it was almost impossible to quickly close a door in Penumbra).
• The game has been more streamlined and more focus has been put on making the game an experience, instead of a challenge. This means that puzzles are not meant to stop the player but rather to increase immersion.
• There is a large focus on making the player feel like the protagonist in the story; there are no comments or such from the main character and players are forced to draw their own conclusions. We also removed any sort of cutscene.
• The story is set in a new time era and contains completely different environments. There are no connections between Penumbra and Amnesia story-wise.

Penumbra’s formula to being a successful horror game was its understanding of the environment it built; the focus is a sense of immersion as opposed to “boo” moments. Is Amnesia designed as an immersive game with the horror aspect following suit, or vice versa?

Thomas: We set out to do a horror game from the start and knew that making an immersive experience was critical to that, so I don’t think they’re separate. Once the immersive factors are in, adding the horror is much easier, and comes almost naturally. That is not really how we designed the game though, and a lot of the themes in the story are based mostly on the horror aspect of the game.

What inspired Amnesia’s (and Penumbra’s) style of horror?

Thomas: There has been many different sources of inspiration during the three years we have worked on the game, but I think a few stand out. I am an avid fan of reading about the history of science and descriptions of how different groups of scientists worked during the 17th and 18th century; this was an inspiration to the first draft of the story. Also, things like the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments have been a base for the themes that are present in the game. These elements (and more) form the basis of the events and feelings we want to provoke. When it comes the actual design of the horror, there are many sources as well. Lovecraft and Poe are of course ever present, where the readers’ imagination is played with and used to evoke feelings of dread. There is also a lot of movies such as 70’s horror flicks like The Omen, The Exorcist, etc. that work on a more psychological level, rather than just showing gore. I could go on and on about inspirational sources, but those at least give a little taste.

The Penumbra games are games I’d classify as truly immersive. As designers, what’s in the toolbox that really makes for an immersive experience?

Thomas: I think the physical environment helps a great deal in making the surroundings feel real. When you can only interact with a limited part of the environment, it starts to feel like a prop more than an actual game world. It is also a matter of creating locations that have character through story and sounds and that works with the gameplay.

You mentioned sound. Games like Thief II: The Metal Age and Silent Hill were much more effective in their presentation because of their well-designed sound dynamics. It seems to me that sound is vastly overlooked by game developers. Do you think that’s true?

Thomas: I am not sure if it’s that overlooked, for instance many shooter games have proper and authentic firearm sounds. I think it more has to do with sound taking a backseat place, behind graphics. In our games, sound is brought up front (because of the design, as well as resource issues) and I think the same is true for the games you mention. Sound is such a powerful device, since it’s much easier to make a realistic sound than a realistic visual and can therefore have a lot of impact. Also, hearing sounds makes the player imagine visuals, but the other way around is not that common, so it is a very nice tool when trying to mess with someone’s head.

Along the same lines, what makes a good horror game?

Thomas: The one biggest thing is to stimulate the player’s imagination and hint at things rather than showing them. The horror that can be created in a player’s mind will also be able to have more impact than whatever a modeler can create in our engine. In order for this approach to work, it is important to have an immersive game and to have situations that forces to player into thinking what might have happened and what might lurk behind the next corner.

Do you feel other games that attempted that sort of approach have succeeded?

Thomas: Silent Hill does some of it quite successfully, and All Alone, a text game, is extremely powerful by messing with the player’s mind. There are other more recent games that do this successfully, but it’s almost never a larger part of the game. Most games seem to focus on having a game mechanic at the core, and then just try and fit everything else onto that. Instead, we try to adapt the mechanics to support the horror design. Unfortunately not many games do this.

Why the emphasis on physics?

Thomas: It actually started out as a way to save on doing animations. When implemented, it gave a lot of extra perks. As explained previously, it is essential to us when making an immersive experience.

How much does story factor into Amnesia? Are the plans for the game to be episodic like Penumbra?

Thomas: Story is very important and something that we start on the moment we start the game. The gameplay and story must support each other to create the kind of experience we want. Amnesia will be a self contained story and there will not be a cliffhanger ending.

Frictional has a very distinct persona and style. Do you have a desire to head in a different direction for future games? Perhaps a happy, non-nightmare-inducing 2D platformer?

Thomas: Personally, I want to try out new things and not just rehash things that have already been done, so I don’t think you’ll see us making more a “standard” type of game. This is also a business decision, as the only way we can be heard is to make sure our games stand out from the crowd. If we were to make a normal first-person-shooter, we would be drowned out by all other releases. This does not mean that we will always be making horror games though; we might try out some other themes in the near future.

I love that mentality. That sense of making something unique, which might not immediately catch on is the driving force to truly innovative games. I feel it’s no coincidence that most games that enter uncharted waters are made for PC—does Frictional plan to continue being a PC-only developer?

Thomas: We would love to make a game for consoles but so far we have not had the resources for it. Hopefully we can do something in the future. As you say, PC is a very good platform for us since it is much easier to start up a project and no special equipment or contracts are really needed. As long as you have a PC, you can create and distribute your game, especially now that the digital market has grown quite mature.

What’s in the future for Frictional?

Thomas: Right now we just want to release Amnesia and get that done. We have some other stuff planned, but nothing I can really talk about at this point.

Many thanks to Thomas for taking time out for this interview! Amnesia will be released on September 8. You can pre-order Amnesia from several of the digital distribution services, but I recommend doing it directly from the site—they definitely deserve the money!

Outside the towering futuristic gem of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan, Montezuma scrambles his trump card—a monolithic spaceship taxiing for takeoff next turn. If it’s successful, Montezuma will automatically win the game by a technology victory. The Roman Empire throws up a Hail Mary in defense—a twenty kiloton nuke headed right towards the capital. The warhead decimates most of the city and the spaceship next to it, as Roman destroyers off the coast bombard what remains of the once-thriving metropolis. The turn comes to an end, and the legions of the Roman Empire celebrate their conquest victory.

For the Civilization series, anachronistic antics have always been as ubiquitous as they are paradoxical. Marketing Associate Pete Murray can hardly contain his glee towards this scene from our E3 demo. He’s the type of keen employee that makes up a company where an enthusiastic well-known modder can turn intern and then designer (in this case, that driven individual is twenty-five year old lead designer Jon Shafer). Even Firaxis’s demo room is decorated with monolithic murals of civilization leaders, with George Washington placed at an angle directly staring at all the press in the room. But Murray assures us—while the heart of the Civilization is still there, things will be different this time.

Each iteration of the series has been meticulously refined, but hasn’t evolved drastically. Civilization V intends to change this by reworking many of the series’s tactical idiosyncrasies and adding game-changing features. No longer can hasty macro-buffs amass a stack of units on one tile (the “stack of doom”, as Civ veterans call it). And, players can actually buy tiles to expand their borders. A man in the crowd cuts in asking how these changes will affect the game. Murray simply raises his hands, and says “Night, and day.”

“Combat is an area that’s seeing a big change in Civilization V, with a one-unit-per-tile combat system,” Murray prefaces right before he goes to war with the English Empire. The direction isn’t Total War or typical RTS rock-paper-scissors. This shift negates army size, and instead, encourages further tactical thinking. Limiting one unit to a tile forces players to carefully choose unit placements, as terrain can now drastically affect the outcome of a battle; during the demonstration, a unit of riflemen perched upon a hill held out against three other units. “You can take a few key forces [and] hold critical geography, like a mountain pass or hill near your city, and keep an enemy at bay.” Murray continues. This forces macro-players accustomed to winning based on their ability to output units quickly to make key micro-level decisions if attempting a military victory.

Square tiles are also being replaced with one of the main staples of many strategy games: hexagons. “Now we have this hexagonal model which is a lot more fair over long distances. Really experienced Civ war-players never move on orthogonals; they always move on diagonals. Because eventually you can cheat out distances that way,” Murray explains. “It’s the biggest change in terms of departing from what the series has done before.”

But Civilization has always given players a pacifist option—victory through diplomatic and technological means. Civilization V extends this by fleshing out a new facet to the game: culture. Your civilization’s cultural prowess is determined through what buildings and wonders you build, as well as your tech-tree research. Even for the military players, however, this isn’t an afterthought—cultural points (or currency) extends the borders of your civilization. Culturally rich civilizations can unlock the addition of social policies, such as freedom or aristocracy that can grant your empire a special ability.

“One of the very usable functions of this tech tree is that you can target a specific technology,” Murray demonstrates. “And now it will automate your technology research so that you’re working towards it. So if you want to get gunpowder as quickly as possible, you can say ‘Wisemen, go discover gunpowder.’ and they won’t come back until they do.” Firaxis builds on this with the new “citizen allocation system”, which allows cities to be fine-tuned, like the tech-tree, to auto-manage the focus of a city, whether cultural, militaristic or technological.

A.I. opponents are now programmed to adjust through the course of a single game, aiming to give the player a sense of familiarity against the computer. “Napoleon, for example, might want to build a huge ground army and conquer the world that way. But the A.I. is flexible enough, that if you keep Napoleon on the battlefield—he’ll redirect his energy into something else—and maybe try for a cultural victory instead,” says Murray. Civilization leaders are also no longer just a portrait – each leader is fully animated in a specific environment and actually speak their native language.

Based on the need for large support communities of the previous installments, Firaxis is preemptively reworking Civ V’s modding and multiplayer capabilities. “For multiplayer for Civilization V, we’re going with full Steamworks integration,” says Murray. “We wanted to make sure that modding in Civ V is supported by a really robust suite of [tools] that are more powerful than anything we’ve given out before…We have a system now where modders can upload their mod to a central depository, and then people can browse and download and install mods from within the game itself.”

Round up all these changes and additions and we might have the most accessible Civilization yet. As our demo is wrapping up, someone in the group asks “Is Sid here?” Murray tells us that he’s currently working on Civilization Network, a Facebook game. Someone else cuts in, “Is that like Civ Farmville?” Murray says “No,” smirks, and then says “Night, and day.”

Through optimization and cross-platform development, developers have adopted the tradition of designing their games for the widest gaming populace possible. This makes sense from the business perspective; the amount of customers is directly proportional to the amount of profit. Although money is made and games are developed, several problems emerge: many mediocre games which bask only in short-term success are the result, and often fail at crafting a truly great experience.

“Could we add ‘I’m a Linux’
to the debate?”

Before delving further, I’ll define the two above stated concepts with respect to PC gaming specifically. Optimization is the lowering of a game’s system requirements through the utilization of an efficient game engine. Valve’s Source engine, for example, is well-tuned and reasonably runs on systems deemed “gaming” and “non-gaming,” alike. Cross-platform development is the availability of a certain game on more than one platform. In this case, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Optimization, though an important job, is one of the most difficult things for developers to properly execute. Building an engine from scratch takes a slew of resources—more often than not, years of development. Engine optimization is usually included in this process, but not always stressed as much as it should be. Sure—it may be impossible to make a graphically-gargantuan game like Crysis run on the average laptop, but greater attempts could be made to broaden the potential audience for the game. Polygon limits and draw-distance will always be in place, but an efficient engine can raise these limits and thus allow for both good-looking and high-performance games on low-end hardware.

Modern PC games should be able to run at a decent framerate on reasonably modern computers with ‘low’ to ‘normal’ settings. Marketing a game only towards people with high-end gaming PCs is less accessible, and thus, less profitable. It should be in the interest of developers to balance accessibility with profit and creativity for an even balance.

How’s the framerate all the way down there?

The second, and arguably most important, aspect of accessibility is cross-platform availability. Developers are losing faith in the PC as a profitable platform due to its scant game sales compared to that of consoles. Part of this may be the lesser amount of actual PC gamers, or it may be that some PC gamers are harder to coax with skin-deep, shiny graphics that hide a lack of purpose and story. These tricks along with subtle gameplay mechanics commonly seen in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 work to make games more appealing to players. However, developers should focus more on crafting a unique experience and making it physically accessible to as many people as possible. This is where optimization, cross-platform development, and multiple, convenient means of purchase come into play.

PCs dominate about 90% of the computer market. The other 10% of computers use either Mac or Linux, with the amount of users utilizing those on the rise. Macs are becoming increasingly popular with students, who make up a large portion of video game consumers; if developers made Mac development a priority, more gamers would have access to the created content, and thus, sales would rise. This has already been demonstrated to work by Valve, who recently stated that after making Steam a cross-platform game distribution service, 11% of sales went towards Mac titles.

Wolfire Games, developing the upcoming Overgrowth, recently held a sale dubbed “The Humble Indie Bundle.” For it, they sought out independent developers with cross-platform games and gave consumers the ability to pay whatever they wanted for said games. During the sale, they mentioned in daily blog posts the importance of cross-platform games and how the Mac dominates 20-25% of indie and casual game sales. This obvious rise should not be ignored, but the real question is, is it the same for commercial games?

Open-source underwater caves are the best underwater caves.

It depends. As Wolfire also stated, commercial games have more money put into advertising than development, and the advertising dies off shortly after release. This is the recipe for short-term success. On the other hand, indie games usually have no advertising and are only made known through indie news sites, forums, sales, and conversations. However, there is an untapped potential for indie and commercial developers alike to take advantage of with the Mac. To quote David Rosen, “If you can put in an extra 1% cost and get 22% more revenue — why not make a Mac version?” (Wolfire blog)

Derek Yu, maker of Spelunky, recently wrote a blog post that states some of the best advice for game developers: design for the hardcore players. Don’t dumb down a game for mass appeal because success will be temporary and the game will lack depth. On the other hand, making a deep, sophisticated game requires learning and effort from the player, and once the basic gameplay is understood, the player can succeed. In no way should casual players be ignored, but, there should still be an opportunity for hardcore players to invest dozens, if not hundreds, of hours into a game in order to fully learn and appreciate its inner workings. Hardcore players always return to games, as seen in the Quake and Doom series.

Hold LMB to win. Don’t worry, no one minds.

It is easier to design shallow games than deep ones, but they offer less to potential hardcore players. For example, Bohemia Interactive’s ARMA 2 is known for being the most realistic and sophisticated war simulator on the market. Its playerbase is comprised mostly of hardcore players who learn to overlook the many flaws and glitches of the experience, but instead focus on teamwork, camaraderie, and the mission at hand. Some players have invested hundreds of hours into the experience and are server regulars, but in no way does this mean that casual players are nonexistent.

Cross-platform games are becoming more common and less of a surprise, and will eventually turn into a game development necessity. Low system requirements should be adopted by commercial developers, who should also thrive to craft unique experiences in the line of video games. The proof is clear and the start of a new generation is upon us, so it’s time for change.

Climactic battles in Deus Ex weren’t always climactic. Boss fights often consisted of a hulking augmented freak lumbering towards you with the intent to talk (and, after a few words, drawing their weapon). Experienced players with upgraded skills could often dispatch them in one shot—same with regular enemies as well. But when Eidos Montreal announced a new type of design featuring third-person elements (including instant-kill moves), fans of the series started to worry that this new action-oriented dynamic would strip away the essence and soul of the original game.

There are about five of us—all games’ press—huddled on couches in a dark room in the back corner of Square Enix’s booth at E3. The previous group ran late—but we’re finally watching the 25 minute Deus Ex: Human Revolution demo. A level designer sits in the corner, playing through the demonstration for us. Across from him stands Human Revolution’s art director.

The viewing kicks off with a nod to those clunky awkward helicopter takeoff scenes from the original. A VOTL rockets forward. Inside is the protagonist, Adam Jensen, a security specialist for a Biotech corporation, and his pilot, Fariah Malik, flying towards Heng Sha, a double-decker techno-wonder of a city off the coast of Shanghai. Our mission is to go into Heng Sha, the silicon valley of the booming cybernetics industry, and trace down a hacker named Tong Se Hong. The VTOL rears up, descends, and lands on a helipad on the top of an unmarked building right above street level. Jensen descends down a fire escape and walks out into the streets of Heng Sha. Something clicks. In my head, I’m wondering why “The Synapse”—a musical track from Deus Ex used in Hong Kong—isn’t playing.

Spread out over a wide street, the amount of NPCs and props is staggering. Almost no window, road, or person is untouched by the glow of the yellow and orange neon advertisements laden across this world. Working men go to the noodle stand and sit down to order (cue Blade Runner reference # 75); others chat on a corner and notice as you walk by; cyberpunk flanuers roam down the light-polluted streets to some calculated destination. Steam rises from the ground as littered trash blows across the world. Jensen stops to look up. Above, in the foreground, are apartment windows with possible onlookers gawking at Jensen. In the far background, spotlights glitter over the upper-deck of the city. In this “living, breathing world,” as Jonathan Jacques-Bellette, art director of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, describes it, attempts are made to make every pedestrian and ancillary character unique (and not just generated as one-size-fits-all NPC’s). “They all have stuff to tell. You can talk to every NPC in the game,” Bellette says. “You can talk about the environment you’re in, the mission you’re trying to do, or just give you the time or the weather”.

For this first part of the demo, Jacues-Bellette wants to show the social and stealth aspects, or “urban exploration” of the “four pillars of Deus Ex” (combat, stealth, social, and hacking). After Jensen makes his way to The Hive, a club that literally pulsates neon discharge into the night, the bouncer tells him he needs a membership to get past the doors. This being 6 hours into the game, Jensen has enough to buy his way in, but Jacques-Bellette cuts in to tell us “as this is a Deus Ex game, there are more ways to get in. For example, you could go into the back alley or even shoot the bouncer.” Shooting the bouncer, however, would have repercussions (earlier in the demo, Jensen pulled his pistol on a man in an alley who pantomimes his obvious fear) and take you into combat.

The club is a similar scene to the streets. NPCs each interact on their own path further than the slightly bobbing dance cycle found in the original. Jacques-Bellette explains that conversations in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are like rollercoaster rides, and can take up to several minutes to complete—momentum towards persuasion going one way and then another. After many attempts to persuade the bartender, trying to glean information about the hacker Tong, Jensen “fails” the conversation. “We’ll have to try to find a different way to get access to Tong,” Jacques-Bellette explains, “but at this point I doubt it will be legal.” As in Deus Ex, it’s impossible to get stuck—failing a conversation in Human Revolution simply spurs you to find a different (and sometimes, more illicit) path.

After Jensen eavesdrops on two guards, you learn that there’s a datacube in the bathroom with a security code for the backroom. The code is 0415—an allusion to the first pass-code in Deus Ex, which in turn was an allusion to System Shock, which in turn was another allusion. And it’s the same with earlier allusions to Tracer Tong and Versalife in the demo. Not one time do any of the developers point these out; to the five or six of us in this dark room, it’s completely dependent on that individual’s knowledge of the original for whether or not they’ll understand any of them.

The second part of the demo shows off the combat and hacking pillars. After a loading screen, Jensen starts at a shipyard that has a facade eerily resembling a certain naval yard from the original. Jensen uses his strength augmentation to move a large crate blocking a hole in the wall to bypass the main gate without notice. Jacques-Bellette cuts in to remind us again of our multiple paths, “Without the strength augmentation, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. He would’ve had to have gone through the main gate which would’ve been a much more overt approach.”

After killing a guard monitoring the security system, you can hack in and turn off cameras, control the bots patrolling the area, or unlock any of the doors on this security grid—all sure-sign staples of the original. Jensen goes on: after cloaking and making his way to the roof, he drops through the ceiling where a lengthy shootout occurs that showcases the different weaponry and augmentations. Then the demonstration ends on a cliffhanger—an ensuing fight with a colossal tough-talking augmented boss that the prior E3 trailer teased.

There was an immediate wave of concern about featuring third-person elements and instant-kill moves in Human Revolution. But here, its intent isn’t an aim towards gore (such as a game like Manhunt). Jacques-Bellette also points out that there are non-lethal moves, and that you can finish the game without killing a single person. He also stresses that each finishing move is “uniquely animated” for that context and not simply a repetition of the same triggered animation. This type of design tries to follow the combat design of the original, but just puts it in a third-person context. Instead of arming the dragon’s tooth sword and swiping down NSF grunts in one blow, you simply use your energy to do something similar, but animated in a separate and sleeker fashion. A choice that—we’ll see—aims to bring the series forward while still attempting to harness the crucial essence of the original.

Deadlines and timers aren’t just critical milestones for games, they’re also decisive catalysts that mold our everyday lives. They allow us to structure our habits and focus our priorities in the most efficient manners possible. Say, for example, the VP of Technical Oversight gives you a colossal presentation due Thursday at 4pm sharp. You wince and curse, but ultimately buckle down to get it done.

Zerglings on the verge of tearing you apart.
Just one more minute!

Afterwords, you chill with the guys over a brew, feeling amazingly relieved and proud. If Mr. VP of Douchebaggery simply told you he needed a “thing” completed at some undefined point, you probably wouldn’t have even finished it. And even if you did, the quality might be somewhat dubious. Furthermore, you probably wouldn’t even care if it ever saw the light of day at all; you’d simply mosey onto the next thankless task.

Now, if we shift our gaze towards the context of video games, timers and deadlines become something else, albeit familiar to the example above. They function as something to enrich the main part of the game, whilst existing as a part of it. Time limits or deadlines make them better,  more memorable experiences. They increase your enjoyment and give your accomplishments a greater sense of weight than they otherwise would.

Of course, there are several different methods of how a time limit can be implemented within a game. A strategy game might give you 30 minutes to defend yourself, as in Starcraft’s third mission “Desperate Alliance.” The Zerg attack you lightly throughout the first 20 minutes but then they begin to earn their namesake with massive assaults that bust your bunkers, mutilate your missile turrets, and maim your marines into turgid bloody stumps.

Boom-sticks: an essential tool for the survival of any climatic defensive mission.

Time limits force you to maximize what you currently have; to simply survive with the knowledge that you only need to hold out until the designated time. They’re powerfully effective, but only truly work in mission-focused games, like strategy titles. Although it’s not uncommon for a shooter to include a challenge such as this, with Half-Life 2’s best moments erupting when you’re trapped in a prison with the Combine assaulting your position.

Gimmick or set-piece deadlines can also arise, although they largely exist in blockbuster AAA titles to drive home a sense of player urgency that would otherwise not be faced.

In Borderlands:The Armory of General Knoxx, you’re given a massive loot-fest at the end of the story missions,but a timer goes off that only gives you three minutes to pilfer what you can. The traditional method of examining  all the stuff and only grabbing the best gets derailed as you frantically grab anything and everything before your ass gets nuked into orbit. Similarly, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare you’re tasked with halting the launch of nuclear warheads. A timer shows up, and you’d best get to the switch before it’s too late, or else it’s bye-bye U.S. of A.

Sure: I could chase them around in a car. But skydiving on top of the target is better in every possible way.

In GTA or Just Cause, the set-piece time limits appear with fleeing jackasses who decide that chase missions are a great way to show off the open-world. While immediate action is required to “capture” said donkey-butt, there’s usually no explicit timer on display. Still, you know if that guy on the motorcycle gets too far away, you’re screwed. Alternatively, a mission might just task you with shooting down a missile before it reaches orbit, tossing out a nice big 60 seconds max before you fuck it all up.

You want a gun, you get a bat boot
in the face instead. Go figure.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has strict time limits in saving individuals before a certain evil-doer decides to off Commissioner Gordon, or some other bright young police officer/candy-striper. Of course, in Batman, you also find that every time a gun locker appears you have an unknown time limit to keep guards from gaining the ability to easily kill you: an emergent urgency that inadvertently forces you step up or die and be subsequently laughed at.

Alpha Protocol utilizes time limits on all of your conversation options, productively preventing you from over-thinking your dialogue options thereby avoiding the usual dialogue mining that I so voraciously indulge myself in. Then there’s of course the good old standby. Take a deep breath: the final boss triggered the doomsday device to destroy everything and everyone you love and you have X minutes to curb-stomp him into oblivion, thereby saving said day and winning over the damsel in distress. And exhale.

Naturally, we can’t possibly forget the ultimatum where you’re given a time limit to beat the entire game, or at the very least a significant portion of it. Fallout and Pikmin immediately spring to mind. Pikmin gives you 30 days to salvage your ship before you succumb to the horrors of the Planet of Mutant Plant Things. It then gives you a limit on each day to ensure that you don’t just leisurely pick flower-people all day long, effectively forcing you to play aggressively with limited resources and not simply mass hordes of ravenous man-plants to steam roll the entire the game.

Yeah, I don’t know either. Plants eating other plants.

In Fallout, you’ve got a strict and finite set of days to save your Vault. The folks inside the underground sanctuary are going to run out of water unless you can return in the nick of time with goods in hand. Of course, something else pops up later, and the game gives you a couple of options to extend your time limit. It makes for a tense first play-through as you carefully struggle to ensure that you’re making progress towards rescue and not damning your friends and family to the dreaded wasteland.

In my opinion, this is the strongest and most effective use of a time limit, as it literally forces your hand and demands that you make difficult choices possibly, and ideally, with serious repercussions. Every game should ideally give us this option. Imagine the potential for nerve-wracking tension if you only had so long in Dragon Age to recruit all the various factions.

This guy? Not gonna help you find a water chip.
Time’s a wasting! Hurry!

What if you were forced to pick between getting the Dragon Age mages or the dwarves for your noble endeavor because you just spent 6 months (game time) looking for some damned ashes, only to have a dragon eat your face? Imagine if that horde of Darkspawn were actually raping and pillaging as you were busy recruiting and leveling up to fight them? What if your very inaction against them made the hated foe all the more difficult in the end?

Inserting such deadlines would likely upset a great many perfectionists, but then, I’ve never liked the idea of a perfect playthrough. Seriously: every game deserves to make you feel tension about whether or not you’ll be able to make it in time to avoid failure, let alone be strong enough to actually stop the plans of the antagonist. Deadlines, quite simply, make games better.

As you can imagine, attending a game convention can be quite a harrowing endeavor. You know—with the whole going outside, waiting in long lines and the inherent soreness from collecting hundreds of dollars worth of free stuff. But assuredly, gaming conventions are the places where dreams come true. Cosplay heroes can pose to be forever immortalized in the hallowed halls of Digg, digitally star-crossed lovers may meet for the first time, and booth babes manifest a symbiotic relationship with the otaku fulfilling one’s ego and the other’s hormones.

If you’ve never attended a gaming convention—I highly recommend you do. Gaming conventions are not only a fun and great way to break into the industry: they’re also a clear glimpse into video game culture that may not be gleamed from everyday life, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more accepting society. Whether you’re an expo gamer greenhorn, or a seasoned press veteran, this guide will provide you with all the necessary steps to survive any game-related convention unscathed, a little wiser, and dipped from head to toe in the free disgrace of grimy swag.

Different conventions have different standards—some are solely trade-based, or entry is limited to members of the industry and press. Others are open to the general public and completely free. Usually though, you attend under one of the following four classes listed below.

This could be you!

Attendee — The basic attendee of any conference. You’ll typically pay a small entry fee, but more than make up for it in memories and free stuff alone.

Volunteer — Conventions are fueled off volunteers. While you’ll be busy working for most of the convention, you do get some exploration-freedom as well, and 99% of the time: free entry. Check on the respective website for the convention to find out how to volunteer.

Press — Journalists get in free at most conventions. Better yet: the standards to be considered a media representative might not be as high as you think. Chances are, if you’ve written several articles online or freelanced in some capacity, you can be considered a member of the press.

Exhibitor — Exhibitors are the lifeblood of conventions. Becoming an exhibitor, however, takes weeks (if not months) of preparation, early registration, and, of course—a preexisting and lucrative product to exhibit.

Registration: It’s always best to register months in advance for a convention. Though you’ll have to set aside dates ahead of time, it’s cheaper for both ticket prices and airline fares to tackle all this early. Registration info is provided on each convention’s website (typically on the homepage), so be sure to book your passes before the available slots are all sold out.

Hotels: Often, hotels are situated at the same place as the convention, but that’s not always the case. Usually the convention website will recommend the best/nearest hotel to stay at. Make sure to book your room early to ensure availability and save money, and share it with a friend if possible.  It’s amazing how fast hotels can fill up, so unless you’re fond of a sidewalk as a pillow, get crackin’.

Travel: As fun as a road trip can be, if you’re traveling out of your state, it’s probably easier to fly. Plus: parking rates at conventions are economically brutal, if you can even find parking at all. Again, in the interest of saving money, book your plane tickets as early as possible.

Other than your usual allotment of nerdery, there are a few items that can significantly improve your attendance disposition.

A decent camera — Yeah, you may not want to whip out your fancy point ‘n click every few minutes, but when else are you going to get a chance to snap a glossy with Sid Meier or Will Wright?

Comfortable shoes — While some gamers may not be accustomed to ambulatory movement farther than the distance from their PC to the closest fridge and/or fast food establishment (myself included), conventions require you to be on your feet for hours upon hours a day. Leave your flip-flops at home and wear something with lots of cushion between your heels and the pavement instead.

Gamer clothes or costumes — Demand attention and let everyone know you value acknowledgment over aesthetics. Wear a shirt notifying the unaware masses of the gaming convention that you are, actually, indeed, a gamer. Dress yourself as an advertisement. Wear that Death Note costume in your closet that you’ve just been itching for an occasion to showcase.

Energy drinks — Who knew playing games all day and attending panels can be tiring? You’ll most likely, at some point, experience a con-crash. While you don’t need to constantly carry around your favorite caffeine fix, be prepared to buy a few in case of emergency.

Schedule —You’ll most likely get a schedule once there, but it’s invaluable, so better safe than sorry. Print out that bad boy the first chance you get. Time blazes by at conventions, and you’ll need to be aware of exactly when and where your most anticipated events, sessions, and roundtables are happening.

You’re all set.

Handheld gaming device — More often than not, you’ll be waiting in line. Unless you’re waiting in line with company, you’ll need some type of portable digital diversion, whether DS, iPad, PSP or even your phone. (You did bring your phone and a charging cable, right?)

MP3 player — Again: convention DNA is constructed of 75% snaking lines and long walks. If you’re not traveling around with someone, you’ll want to be listening to something. Say, for example, the fabulous critically acclaimed Game Central Podcast!

Magic: The Gathering cards — Not only is playing Magic a great way to chip away the minutes while waiting in line, it’s also a great way to meet new friends. Slap your deck down on an unsuspecting player, give him a harsh grimace, and he’ll know what’s up.

Cash — Finding out that a vendor doesn’t take plastic after you’ve aged eight years in a glacial-paced food line sucks. Just bring extra cash or hit up an ATM and don’t let it happen to you.

Backpack — When you’re collecting a bunker’s worth of stuff in a single convention, you don’t want to have to jog back to your hotel room every twenty minutes to drop everything off. Bring a backpack or messenger bag and stuff all the free crap in there. A backpack also serves as a wonderful storage receptacle for everything listed above. Similarly, it’s a serviceable holster for your phone’s charging cable (your phone will die on you at least once).

A friend — While it won’t fit in a backpack, this is probably the most important item on the list. Attending a convention alone can be fun, but it’s a lot more enjoyable if you have someone there that you know. Plus, if you know a friend that lives in the area, it’s probably easier and a billion times cheaper just to stay with them.

Without fail, whether you want it or not, you will get an exorbitant amount of swag in the forms of clothing, books or various trinkets. If you’re really in it to win it, when packing, make sure to leave enough space in your bag to carry more back on your return trip. The easiest way to amass a small swag fortune is to travel systemically from booth to booth and collect as much as you can. Chances are they won’t recognize you, so can you always hit up your favorite area more than once (if you really want two of those wearable billboards). And as for the high-reward number matching games—recent attendees have taken to Twitter using hash-tags to find their identical digits. But make sure to get the show floor early to get the best stuff, and don’t be afraid to ask someone where they got something.

PAX

The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has outgrown its roots of a small-time gaming convention to the largest of its kind in North America. Created in 2004 by Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe”Krahulik—authors of the popular webcomic Penny Arcade—PAX has since overtaken E3 (the prior king of conventions) in attendance. PAX is a consumer-based convention and is not limited to members of the press or industry insiders. Located at the Seattle convention center in downtown Seattle, PAX Prime’s main features (in conjunction with its massive expo floor) are guest-speaker panels, table-top games, LAN tournaments, live podcasts, and nerdcore concerts. In 2010 PAX East was added in Boston, with a respectable attendance of 52,000.

Location: Seattle, WA (Prime) or Boston, MA (East)

Attendance: 60,000 (Prime), 52,000 (East)

Dates: Sept. 3^rd – 5^th (Prime), March 26^th – 28^th (East)

Ticket Cost: $55 (3-day badge + early registration), $35 (1-day badge + early registration).

Media registration requirements: 3 of the following required: business license, company letterhead, business card, copies or links of two articles written in the last six months.

Go if: You want to attend a great, cheap all-platform video game convention.

Highlights: Omegathon (contestants battle it out for days in randomly chosen gaming events, culminating in a grand victor on the final night), popular convention for industry notables, playable demos of unreleased games.

Website: www.paxsite.com

Dragon*Con

Dragon*Con is a mecca for the old-school nerd. Created in 1987 by Ed Kramer, Dragon*Con was primarily a tabletop gaming convention but has since expanded its roots to include science fiction, comics, anime, fantasy and video games. Panels and workshops are hosted every year, making it a popular destination for those looking to break into the respective industry. Dragon*Con is notorious for its quirky culture and prevalent cosplaying. Featuring a costumed procession through downtown Atlanta and autograph sessions with notables such as Patrick Stewart and William Shatner, Dragon*Con is a must-go for any hardcore D&D or sci-fi buff.

Location: Atlanta, GA

Attendance: 35,000

Dates: September 3^rd – 6th

Ticket Cost: $80 (membership & early registration).

Media registration requirements: All of the following required: driver’s license, copy or link of an article written in the last six months, and a business card or assignment letter.

Go if: You’re a dice-rollin’ tabletop gamer.

Highlights: “Hall of fame” autograph sessions, Dragon*Con parade, great sci-fi cosplayers.

Website: www.dragoncon.org

Gamescom

Attended by almost two hundred and fifty thousand people, Gamescom is the largest gaming convention in the world. Gamescom evolved from the Leipzig Games Convention, and was first hosted in 2009 in Cologne, Germany. Though Gamescom is open to the public, Gamescom is regarded by some as “Europe’s version” of E3, and highly important to developers for reaching markets across the pond. GDC Europe takes place during the same dates at an adjacent part of the same trade center.

Location: Cologne, Germany

Attendance: 245,000(!)

Dates: August 18^th – 22^nd

Ticket Cost: $38 (season ticket).

Media registration requirements: Any/all of the following required: press ID, copy or link of an article written in the last six months, publishing masthead, student press ID.

Go if: You’ve got the raw hard cash necessary to travel abroad and want to see the largest gaming convention on the globe.

Highlights: The enormous attendance and venue, press conferences and announcements, Gamescom festival.

Website: www.gamescom-cologne.com/en/gamescom/home/index.php

GDC

The Game Developers Conference is the premier convention for any game developer. Created in 1998, GDC was originally hosted in San Jose CA, but moved venues to San Francisco’s Moscone center in 2007. While not as meretricious as other conventions, GDC’s workshops are extremely informative for anyone in the gaming business, or if you’re just trying to break in. GDC is limited to members of the industry, and tickets are much higher than other conventions, though the public is able to buy passes for the Expo floor at a non-astronomical rate. GDC hosts the Game Developers Choice Awards—an annual ceremony rewarding the best in game design—chosen by members of the industry as well as the Independent Games Festival.

Location: San Francisco, CA (main); Austin, TX; Cologne, Germany; Shanghai, China; Vancouver, Canada (sub)

Attendance: 18,000 (main)

Dates: March 9^th – 13^th

Ticket Cost: $1,400 (all-access pass), $195 (expo floor pass).

Media registration requirements: Three of the following: three published pieces written in the last year, business card, assignment letter, third-party verification of your website’s traffic.

Go if: You’re a game developer or a student trying to wiggle into the biz.

Highlights: Game industry panels and workshops, game design challenge, game developers choice awards.

Website: www.gdconf.com/

Comic-Con

Created in 1970, San Diego Comic-Con International has become the largest comics convention in North America. Though originally meant solely for the universe of comic books, Comic-Con has mutated into the more mainstream in recent years. Notable for having thousands of celebrities attend every year, Comic-Con is a popular convention for those wishing to meet their celluloid idols. The film and television industry, as well as the game industry, have both expanded to exhibiting at Comic-Con, and big-name movie and game trailers are shown off every year. With attendance reaching almost 150,000 last year, tickets sell out well in advance, so those of you planning to snag a spot need to make arrangements as much as 4 months ahead of time.

Location: San Diego, CA

Attendance: 140,000

Dates: July 22^nd – 25^th

Ticket Cost: $100 (sold out for this year).

Media registration requirements: Submit your name, title, company and address to pressreg@comic-con.org and further instructions will be sent for chosen applicants (on a case-by-case basis).

Go if: You’re a comic book enthusiast.

Highlights: Official Comic-Con guests, exclusive movie previews, artists’ alley.

Website: www.comic-con.org

CES

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the leading tech conventions in the world. Unlike its name implies, CES is paradoxically limited to members of the trade and press. Las Vegas is a fitting location for CES as the newest high-profile electronics are brandished every year. Individual video games are not necessarily shown off at CES, but rather the technology behind them.  Students can attend for a single day at the fee of a cool hundred, which is humorous, because students typically don’t have money.

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Dates: January 6^th – 9^th

Attendance: 140,000

Ticket Cost: Free to trade members / press ($100 after October 1^st ), $100 student 1-day pass.

Media registration requirements: One of the following required—link of a bylined story written in last three months, copy of publication masthead, link to bylined industry-related blog post written in last three months.

Go if: You’re in the tech industry, or trying to wedge yourself in.

Highlights: Product announcements, testable gadgets, expensive swag.

Website: www.cesweb.org

Fan Expo Canada

Fan Expo Canada is the largest convention of its kind… in Canada. Created in 1994, FEC is hosted at the Metro Toronto Convention Center every year. FEC is a multi-genre convention and includes almost all facets of geekiness. Though Fan Expo Canada has branched out from its comic-book foundation, it still hosts portfolio reviews for aspiring comic artists trying to make it big. Fan Expo Canada puts out a consistent high-profile slew of celebrity guests every year and is a great choice for anyone in Canada wanting to attend a cheap consumer convention, or for us Americans wishing to sample delicious natural maple syrups from local thrift stores.

Location: Toronto, Canada

Dates: August 28^th – 30^th

Attendance: 59,000

Ticket cost: $49 (3-day pass), $25 (1-day pass).

Media registration requirements: Contact holly@applausecommunications.com for registration inquiries.

Go if: You want to attend a big-ass convention in Canada.

Highlights: Small press, portfolio reviews, costumed masquerade.

Website: www.hobbystar.com/fanexpo

BlizzCon

BlizzCon’s thousands of attendees every year can attest to the company’s immense fandom. The first BlizzCon was in 2005 at the Anaheim Convention Center, and has been growing in attendance steadily since. While BlizzCon is rather obviously limited to Blizzard products, lucky attendees are usually able to snag beta keys for Blizzard’s upcoming sequels or expansions. Blizzard typically announces a new product each year, so attendance is highly recommended for a hardcore fan of the company.

Location: Anaheim, CA

Dates: October 22^nd – 23^rd

Attendance: 20,000

Cost: $125 (2009)

Media registration requirements: Registration requirements have not been announced at this time.

Go if: You love Blizzard and their games.

Highlights: Playable versions of unreleased games, Blizzard cosplayers, chances to meet Blizzard employees and worship them.

Website: www.blizzard.com/blizzcon

Anime Expo

Anime Expo is the enormous-iest anime convention in the United States. Created in 1992 and originally hosted in San Jose, Anime Expo moved to L.A., where it’s found now. Anime Expo is not as gaming-oriented as other conventions, but retains strong bonds to the gaming community (especially Japanese games). Anime Expo is famous for its cosplayers, and the best in the world attend every event. Cosplay award shows are hosted on an annual basis, so this might be the one convention where you’ll be in an acute minority not showing up in a cross-stitched weapon-accessorized Solid Snake outfit.

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Dates: July 1^st – 4^th

Attendance: 44,000

Ticket Cost: $75 (4-day pass).

Media registration requirements: Four of the following required by June 10^th: active employment with a print publication (or website with “significant” traffic), business card, valid picture ID, minimum age of 18 (by convention date).

Go if: You’re an anime/cosplay enthusiast wishing to behold the most grand of all anime conventions in the United States.

Highlights: Cosplay awards, guests of honor, 4^th of July BBQ.

Website: www.anime-expo.com

Tokyo Game Show

The Tokyo Game Show is, in many ways, unrivaled in its high-tech glamour. Easily the steroid-injected Godzilla of gaming conventions in size and attendance, the Tokyo Game Show is an all-inclusive show that’s open to the public. Dubbed by some as “Japan’s E3,” TGS is a force to be reckoned with. Japanese developers usually make several high-profile announcements every year due to the crazy number of attendees as well as the multitudes of salivating press covering the show.

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Dates: September 16^th – 19^th

Attendance: 185,000

Ticket Cost: $12 (2-day pass for public).

Media registration requirements: Contact tgs2010press@fullhouse.jp for registration inquiries.

Go if: If you live in Japan, or follow the Japanese game industry closely and want to travel there.

Highlights: Japanese game announcements, high-tech booths, second-largest attendance on the globe.

Website: http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/english/

MAGFest

Why spend New Years with your family when you could spend it at a game convention? MAGFest is hosted January 1^st through 4^th every year and focuses on video game music and culture. Located in Alexandria, VA, MAGFest is certainly one of the quirkier expos around. Created in 2002, MAGFest has a small but dedicated and growing following. Video game-themed concerts are hosted as well as smaller activities such as tabletop gaming rooms and a LAN party. MAGFest is one of the only gaming conventions open 24 hours a day (for certain areas of the show).

Location: Alexandria, VA

Dates: January 1^st – 4^th

Attendance: 2,200

Ticket Cost: (All passes are for all four days) $40 attendee, $80 supporter (a goodie bag with free T-Shirts, etc.), $160 super-supporter (supporter benefits, complementary food, extra badges for friends, etc.).

Media registration requirements: Email press@magfest.org for registration inquiries.

Go if: You fancy loads of video game music and want to partake of one of the most eccentric gaming conventions available.

Highlights: Video game concerts, The “Challenge Booth,” close-knit social scene.

Website: www.magfest.org

Quakecon

The self-proclaimed “Woodstock of Gaming,” (minus the gigantic amounts of marijuana) Quakecon started in 1996 as a mini-LAN attended by 100 in a Best Western’s conference center. While originally a celebration of id’s games, it has since expanded to a convention for PC gaming enthusiasts. The LAN portion of the convention has grown into one of the largest and most competitive LAN tournaments in the world as professional gamers across the world come to compete. Quakecon is hosted at the Hilton, Anatole in Dallas, Texas and has free admission for attendees and press.

Location: Dallas, TX

Dates: August 12^th – 15^th

Attendance: 7,000

Ticket Cost: Free and open to the public.

Media registration requirements: Inquire about press badges by emailing press@quakecon.org.

Go if: You’re a PC game enthusiast and want to participate in one of the most competitive LAN tournaments in the world.

Highlights: John Carmack’s 17 hour-long keynote, the Quake Live tournament, shame tarps.

Website: www.quakecon.org

E3

While the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has no doubt decreased in attendance after its switch to invitation-only in 2007, it still remains a monolithic convention. Hosted at the L.A. Convention Center, E3 is perhaps the most well-known gaming gathering. E3 started in 1995 as a tech trade show geared solely towards games, and quickly became one of the most popular destinations around. E3 has an incredible confluence of journalists, and many video game companies save their best presentations for the convention for this very reason. While E3 became much more exclusive in 2007 and only invited a few thousand lucky souls (with the creation of the now-defunct sister convention E4All), it has since returned to its old looser format.

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Dates: June 15th – 17^th

Attendance: 41,000

Ticket Cost: Free (trade members and press only).

Media Registration Requirements: Must work for a publication in an editorial capacity and registration is done on a case-by-case basis. Follow here to fill out and submit a media pass registration form.

Go if: You’re in the press, or you’re looking to get a taste of the gaming business from the inside.

Highlights: Developer presentations, game announcements, booth babes.

Website: www.e3expo.com

Origins Game Fair

While the Origins Game Fair might serve an even smaller niche (war-gaming) than the other conventions, it has a dedicated fanbase and sizeable attendance. Created in 1975, Origins is— surprisingly—one of the longest running gaming conventions around. Origins covers board games, LARPing, and tabletop gaming as well as the aforementioned war-gaming, but sadly—not video gaming. Recommended only for the hardcore of the old-school.

Location: Columbus, OH

Dates: June 23^rd – 25^th

Attendance: 15,000

Ticket Cost: $60 (4-day all-access), $30 (1-day all-access).

Media registration requirements: 2 of the following required: business card, publication masthead, recent bylined article, copy of online publication, assignment letter.

Go if: You hug and cherish war-gaming and board games.

Highlights: Origins Awards, game sessions, miniatures art show.

Website: www.originsgamefair.com

Gen Con

Gen Con has quite a history. Created in 1968 by Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax and once owned by D&D publisher TSR inc., Gen Con has passed over owners and changed locations a handful of times. After emerging from a bankruptcy restructure in 2008, Gen Con is now regularly hosted in good ol’ Indy. Gen Con is similar in features to Dragon*Con and Origins Game Fair and is considered one of the premier tabletop conventions. Gen Con is also notorious for its high fantasy cosplayers and attendee antics. Gen Con hosts idiosyncratic features every year such as Cardhalla (a city constructed out of cards), a true-to-scale Dungeon for LARPing, and the EN World RPG awards.

Location: Indianapolis, IN

Dates: August 5^th – 8^th

Attendance: 28,000

Ticket Cost: $68 (4-day badge early registration), $78 (late registration), $38 (1-day badge early registration), $48 (late registration).

Media registration requirements: Copy or link of bylined article or business card.

Go if: You want to witness a weekend of utter insanity.

Highlights: D&D Championship Series, true adventures, Gen Con costume contest.

Website: www.gencon.com/2010/indy/default.aspx

Anthrocon

This is all that needs to be said.

Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Dates: June 24^th – 27^th

Attendance: 3,700

Ticket Cost: Your dignity.

Press requirements: Members of the press must be escorted at all times by a senior Anthrocon staff member in the convention center. Dear God.

Go if: You have no hopes or dreams for the future.

Highlights: http://bit.ly/aTtRAt

Website: www.anthrocon.org

Aside from Modern Warfare 2, stimulus packages generally exist to support people. Today, I will bestow onto you, my people, a support package of free games to wither down to and forget about life for awhile.

Adventures are to gaming what Latin is to language. While “dead,” the genre still boasts a humongous and creative fan base who create adventure games of their own. One of those games is Nelly Cootalot. Developed by Alasdair Beckett, Nelly could be considered offspring to the venerable Monkey Island franchise. You play as female pirate Nelly Cootalot, “fearsome pirate and lover of tiny and adorable creatures,” and you have to find the whereabouts of the missing “spoonbeaks,” (a species of bird.) Yeah—the plot is very, very typical adventure game. But that’s a good thing! As Beckett’s first adventure game, it’s no doubt impressive what he achieved in it. Check out Nelly Cootalot to see indie at its finest.

Once upon a time, 2D was the thing. In fact, it was the only thing, and game developers made use of the limited nature of that graphical presentation and created some of the best games ever. Abuse has all that made the “old days” great: colorful, sprite-based graphics, killer killing, and just raw, adrenaline-like gameplay. It’s a precursor to the platforming games that we see commonplace nowadays—but don’t let that sway you; Abuse could potentially be one of the most fun experiences you’d had in awhile.

I proclaimed a law on our podcast. It’s called “Murphy’s Law.” It states that no matter the mood of the participants, the topic at hand, or the time of day, the 1987 movie masterpiece RoboCop would eventually and inevitably be brought up somehow in the flow of the discussion. Since that proclamation, the law has not been broken. And I intend to keep it that way. In fact, I’m going to transmigrate that law over to the editorial realm for this special case. So: RoboCop. Also, check out this RoboCop game. It’s called RoboCop 2D, and it’s very reminiscent to the old side-scrolling arcade games of the ’90s where you kill a whole bunch-a guys, thus “upholding the law.”

Any PC gamer worth his or her salt will agree with this axiom: within the microcosm of video gaming, a custom built, high-end PC reigns supreme. It is the most powerful weapon in a PC gamer’s arsenal, and becomes even more capable when married with high-end peripherals. So why is it that my computer rests comfortably on the bedroom carpet where the most strenuous activity it knows is to play music while running MS Word? Why is it that the only games installed are those scant few that came bundled with Windows 7?

Why is my keyboard a 10 dollar toss-away and my mouse some off-brand disgrace that lacks a middle scroll-wheel? Why is my monitor a cheap Gateway model—one that uses a VGA connection and ghosts when playing YouTube videos—and why are my speakers a 20 dollar bargain bin pair that fall behind my desk when I shuffle my feet around?

It gets worse: I have an Intel processor, but I do not remember what kind; an NVidia card, model unknown; and 8 gigs of RAM that I think is DDR2, but I’m not sure. Even Steam, where all my Half-Life goodness lives, is absent from the control panel’s programs’ list. In fact, the last PC game to appear there was Will Wright’s magnum opus Spore. And despite the fact that it received high marks from critics, I only played it for several weeks before uninstalling it.

Blasphemy, you say? Perhaps, but things were not always this bleak. There was a time when I played competitively in several FPSes, had multiple subscriptions to popular MMOs, and was able to rattle off the name, spec, and price of every component in my system—both internal and external. I knew refresh rates, and polygon counts, and overclocking tweaks, and how to properly optimize Windows.

I followed the development of software patches and quick-fix community Band-Aids with the same anxious trepidation that I normally reserved for those (all to) frequent jaunts to the outside world for more Doritos or Mountain Dew. I sunk hours upon hours into modding popular RPGs, FPSes, and RTSes. My reflexes were so well developed that I was able to simultaneously close Firefox and zip up my pants when I heard those heavy, anti-climactic footsteps hammering down the basement stairs.

So what the hell happened? What would cause such a staunch PC supporter to fall by the wayside? Did PC gaming become too expensive or complicated? No. Did consoles lure me away with their promises of exclusivity? No. Did I get hit in the head with a brick? Once when I was 12, but I recovered. The real reason for all the disarray is this: piracy destroyed PC gaming.

My rabbit now uses Spore’s “Galactic Edition” box as her chew toy.

Let me elaborate: It all started with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I’d previously pirated and played through The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and was captivated by its immersive world and free-form design. So naturally, Oblivion was on my most wanted list. I followed the development of the game with a passionate fervor, and I savored every screenshot and trailer that leaked out. The day it released I queued up a torrent and paced the basement as my bandwidth squeezed every last kilobyte of RPG brilliance onto my hard drive.

Now, when Oblivion released I’d already acquired a vast collection of pirated software, so while waiting for the torrent to throttle up I thumbed through my collection and came across a copy of Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic. I remembered downloading it, but could not remember playing it. In fact, 90% of the games in my collection had never been installed. The ISO images were burned to discs and then dumped in the Windows’ recycling bin. I looked at the acronym scrawled across the CD in black Sharpie marker—KOTOR—and wondered why I had never played a game that was universally well-received by critics and fans.

So once Oblivion downloaded I installed it, created a sexy female warrior and then set her loose in lands of Cryodiil. Over the course of the next week I chalked up 8 hours of playtime—rather weak considering the size of the game—before abandoning it. I never went back.

The next release I anticipated was Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. I quickly found a torrent and patiently waited for it to download. However, once it finished, I was already looking forward to the next big game: Half Life²: Episode One. I downloaded that while Rise of Nation’s image file sat unused on my hard drive. I played the opening sequence to Episode One—getting as far as being thrown back into the Citadel by Dog—before moving on to the next release. Titan Quest, Prey, Battlefield 2142, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Medieval II: Total War followed the same pattern—they were downloaded but never installed. I simply burned them to discs and placed them snugly into over-sized CD wallets.

Most of these games have never seen the inside of a CD drive.

It was then I realized something: I spent more time browsing torrent sites then I did gaming. I spent more bandwidth downloading .RAR archives then I did fragging my Counter-Strike clansmen. Something changed; PC gaming was no longer tangible, and the devotion I once reserved for it was replaced with flat indifference. Games were just worthless bits of information streaming across a CAT-5 cable, and I cared more about amassing a collection of software than I did about the actual hobby. I’d become a hoarder of executable cracks and key generators. And with that admission I managed to single-handedly destroy my favorite hobby

Someone once said, “If you give a poor man a dollar he’ll thank you because he understands the importance of money; but if you give him one million he’ll thank you because he no longer needs that understanding.” You see, I was a poor man, and my million dollars was minted in fresh, laser-etched DVD-R’s. Digital thievery blinded me, and I never allowed myself to see the importance of the culture that absorbed me.

When a commodity becomes free (and plentiful), it will often lose its appeal. Imagine that every time you turn on your computer and push the ‘escape’ button a Snickers bar pops out of the USB port. At first you’d be excited. “Boy, I love Snickers,” you’d say as you peeled back the crisp plastic wrapper. “I can’t believe I can get these for free now!” The next time you push the escape button another Snickers bars pops out. You smile and sink your teeth in. Now, after eating 20 Snickers bars you might still like the idea of free candy pouring from your computer’s ports, but your initial elation has probably subsided.

After 40, you realize that you haven’t been finishing the tasty treats and that there’s a box of half-eaten Snickers bars melting in the corner of your office. After 60 your teeth are so eroded and dotted with cavities that the idea of eating another candy bar makes your incisors hurt. Finally, after choking down 80 you swear off Snickers bars for good, and you rip the escape button from your keyboard. Now, imagine that 20 thousand other people are doing the same exact thing. Sales of Snickers would drop dramatically. The chocolate industry would crumble. Peanuts supplies would spoil. Caramel nougats would file for unemployment.

Mr. T says, “Get some nuts and stop piracy!”

That may be a bit overly-dramatic, but the fact that this is happening with PC games is still just as troubling. People on both sides tend to look at piracy in terms of dollars, either saved or lost; and while this is an important perspective, it neglects to acknowledge the underlying erosion that takes place each time a copy of The Sims 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is downloaded. The very fabric of our gaming culture is threatened because of people like me—people who cheated the system for so long that any benefits obtained from said digressions became just as frivolous as the act of pirating itself. Even now people are inventing new arguments for piracy: DRM is too intrusive and restrictive, mega-corporations like Activision and EA are too greedy or manipulative, and so on. While this subterfuge may sooth troubled consciences, it will not mend broken wings.

The fact is this: both sides of this struggle need to re-examine how piracy affects the culture of video gaming, as well as its effect on how people view video games as a product. Changes need to be made, and people need to realize that the impact from software piracy not only rattles the economy, but also the fundamental raison d’être of gaming. In the end it’ll be consumers that either thrust PC gaming into the stratosphere or bury it in the dirt. This is war, and both sides are recruiting. Where will you stand?

There are plenty of PC games out there where history’s greatest humans are given the spotlight. There’s the gamut of the entire Civilization series, wherein we see the likes of Greek general Pericles, the Aztecs’ Montezuma, and India’s Mahatma Gandhi. More that come to mind are Napoleon: Total War, which stars everyone’s favorite short dude, and Europa Universalis: Rome, sporting Julius Caesar on the damn cover. The thing about these games, however, is that the people at hand are associated with the political and military side of things—there’re absolutely no games about the great philosophers of the world. Sure, several games take the philosophy of an intellectual and make it a major aspect (think Ayn Rand in BioShock), but there’re no games of them! I mean, there’s gotta be some potential masterpieces oozing from the untouched area of philosophy in gaming. To remedy this here and now, I’ll pitch a series of game concepts starring some of the world’s great thinkers.

Publishers: I expect royalty payments within two weeks of your [inevitably successful] game’s release. Thank you.

Cave Raider is Eidos Interactive’s strongest third-person action-adventure effort since Tomb Raider. You play as Plato, and you’re out to right the wrongs of Democritus, materialist and pre-scientist who wishes to take over the universe with an army of evil atoms. Armed with the forms of love, justice, courage (and many, many more), you explore over two dozen exotic caves across Ancient Greece and fight for the knowledge of the intelligible world!

Lead those slaves out of the cave and into the light!

Recruit disciples along the way and become the true philosopher king!

Features:

• Plato voiced by Razzie Award-winning actor Pauly Shore!
• Epic narrative written by… somebody. We’re not entirely sure!
• Alternatively, play as Socrates!

Alternative Titles: Socrates 2, Crito Some More

Funded by the Catholic church, Saints’ Row is a gift from god! Play as the two most famous not-Jesus Christians of all time, St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas, in this canoe simulator. A game of competition, you race your opponent to achieve transcendence and salvation first! Avoid sin and atheists!

Plato and Aristotle serve as their coaches!

Thomas has five ways to win!

Features:

• Manual authored by St. Thomas himself—over seven volumes and 13,000 pages!
• Comes with USB Priest Paddles™!
• Languages: Latin, Italian, Anglo-Saxon!

Alternative Title: Super Catholic Bros.

Play as the bad guy in Evil Genius: René Descartes! Travel the world as the French philosopher in this real-time strategy title. Invade the universities around the globe with your evil ideas and conquer the entire population. All of the globe is under your grasp!

Build wax attack units for waximum carnage!

Tactical pause mode!

Features:

• You can think!
• Dual mind support!
• Not as bad as Command & Conquer 4!

Alternative Title: Running Shoes René

Politics is nothing but flip-flopping your way to victory. Do that in VVVVVVoltaire! Control gravity as you bounce your way through the many key issues of contemporary society as French political thinker Voltaire!

Fight the man!

Satirize your enemies!

Features:

• Chiptune soundtrack composed by Mozart!
• 2D graphics with 3D support!
• Comes on three DVDs!

Alternative Title: FFFFFFrançois-Marie

Immanuel Kant is “Cat,” a private investigator specializing in murder cases. A retired 27-year veteran of the force, Cat solves the mystery, no matter what the cost. One scotch-filled evening, femme fatale S.O. Crates walked into Cat’s office and changed his life forever. Synthesize the clues to solve the case in this suspense-filled adventure game!

Solve the mystery of moral duty!

“Gory Call: Imperative” is the most ambitious Cat game yet!

Features:

• A world-trekking adventure across Königsberg’s markets, forests, and underworld!
• Comes with collectible bald scalp!
• Full-motion video cutscenes, starring Joe Kucan, Christopher Walken, and the naked chick from Phantasmagoria!

Alternative Titles: Call of Duty: Universal Law, Noumena and Phenomnomnomena

Number of PC games I’ve burned through over the last year: 65. Number of console titles (including the Nintendo DS) I’ve bedded down in the same amount of time: 5. And not for the reasons you might think. Naturally, since Game Central is founded on the principles and bricks of a PC gaming stage, I’ll always gravitate towards my native platform. Goes without saying, really. Everyone has a favorite.

Difference is: my beloved favorite is also my most oppressive prison. At the risk of a hefty face-punching—I like console games. I really do. In fact, if you trace the deep and buried roots of my gaming heritage, you’ll unearth a rather surprising facet: my gaming DNA consists of about 75% console genes. Before switching teams, I owned 7 different iterations of various brand selections, from the original NES up to the PS1 (before Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D showed me new heavenly heights).

You released on the wrong platform sweetheart. Otherwise? We totally coulda tied the knot.

To this day, even in comparison to my absolute PC faves, the ol’ console games of yore hold lofty statuses in my gamer heart.  Of course, back in 1997, my playtime between the consoles and my ‘puter teetered around 50/50. Somewhere between now and then, that symbiotic and rather illustrious relationship disintegrated like a stationary body at the business end of a pointblank quad-rocket.

No I will not go out with you! (But I will bang you.)

And it’s a shame. There’s no reason I can’t enjoy the best of both worlds. There’s no reason I shouldn’t. Yeah, I’ve been guilty as O.J.’s bloody gloves on perpetrating and exacerbating the war between the PC and the “other” gaming machines. I’ll recognize a touch of personal hypocrisy when I see it. Still, I bought a PS3 with every intention of actively engaging it for far more than Blu-ray movie consumption. And you can bet the family farm I’d own an X-Box 360 and Nintendo Wii if financially feasible. And yet, the $50 DualShock Sixaxis lays abandoned on my living room shelf, a homeless peripheral hooker begging for my gaming change.

But why? Why do I neglect my (rather expensive) investment? Despite critical misinterpretation and undeserved malice, there are some goddamned sexy PS3 games out there. Heavy Rain, Metal Gear Solid, Brütal Legend, Uncharted. (I don’t talk about Dante’s Inferno anymore. Hey—mistakes were made!) I want to play these games! (Not Dante’s Inferno.) Shit, out of the 7 PS3 games I own, other than Metal Gear Solid 4, I haven’t even halfway completed any of them. And it’s because of the guilt. (But not with Dante’s Inferno).

But yeah: guilt. Positive, unarguable, raw, non-filtered, serious guilt. Each time I pick up the Sixaxis—rare as it is—I wonder if my PC will suddenly walk in on me, sobbing uncontrollably, with a loaded and cocked revolver trembling in its hands.  Every time a PC game crashes, or a beta video card driver blue-screens, I imagine karmatic restitution for my loose and cheating eyes. It’s like I took a vow with my computer, sealed under the sanctity of a gaming god, and I’m willfully breaking it.

Yeah I know your twin sister lives on the PC, but I like you better baby. Honest!

Of course, this is all ludicrous. My PC doesn’t love me, much as I wish it would. We hold no tangible marital bonds, and we’ve never got hitched in a glittery Vegas tabernacle (that I know of). My gaming affairs are all strictly casual-agnostic. But the shadow of guilt remains nonetheless.  Each second that falls off the clock in Mega Man 10 is a second not spent in Deus Ex. Every minute invested in Street Fighter IV is a minute lost forever from Torchlight.

I shouldn’t view cross-sampled gaming in this rather adulterous manner, and neither should you. And luckily, from perusing the forums and gathering Google feedback, it appears I’m kind of a glitch. Very few seem to share this freakishly bizarre set of singular platform-bonded morals. I’m rather relieved to see that. But this doesn’t help me with my dilemma. As great as it for you guys to be all comfy with your flirty and promiscuous dispositions, this doesn’t suddenly switch my train tracks to a more liberal view of console gaming.

Seems like a decent lay at first, but gives you herpes after.

Perhaps the most frustrating angle stems from a failure to track my behavior to a beginning catalyst. Most of the time, undesirable habits can be better attacked and treated if the source cause is located. An alcoholic can better cope (and heal) if he or she understands that the reason they began tipping back the feisty-sauce in the first place came from a stiff and sudden employment layoff. For me, there’s no such revelation. There’s no thundering epiphany. And there’s no indication that my Amish gaming-relationship morays will metamorphose into console polygamy any time soon.

I’m not ready to throw away the PS3 condoms yet though. Maybe if I cheat on the PC long enough it’ll all just numb over; I’ll justify my actions by telling myself that if the PC won’t put out in the form of Alan Wake, well, she had it coming then. I mean I ain’t made of steel!  A guy needs his freedom! What choice do I have? I got needs! Right? Damn right. Hell yeah.

Sighhh. Never mind—I’ll be home in a minute honey; yeah… we’ll watch Quake together.  Need anything from the store while I’m out?

Entertainment mediums, by their very nature, exist solely to entertain us. But alas: like all things made by human hands, they’ve become corrupted to their cores. These days, entertainment must not only thrill us with breath-taking car chases and explosive explosions, but also connect to our very existence within the human condition.

Some guy, I think his name was Jesse, decided the best way to do this was to build narrative experiences around believable characters; characters that could plausibly exist within the world they’re inadvertently thrust into. Games now rely upon the notion that we need believable evolved characters; they must develop throughout our time spent with them. However, there is a very difficult problem with this concept in certain titles.

He’s got a crowbar, a degree from MIT,
and that’s about it.

It’s one thing to watch a TV show and see how experiences can influence a character’s actions, it’s another thing entirely to place the development of characters into the grimy hands of your average gamer. This is principally the work of the “Freeman Effect,” although there are several different types of character developments present in games.

One might wonder why games even need bother with characters that develop over the course of your adventures with them. Games are fine without such innovative narrative experiences, and in fact games should spurn the advances that have been promulgated by the vixens of Hollywood and her misbegotten ilk.

But, whether or not you like where character development originated from (as I already stated: some dude named Jesse), it adds significantly to your enjoyment of the medium if you can somehow relate—or at least believe in—what you experience regardless if it’s a movie, television show, book, radio broadcast, or video game. Bluntly: character development is important for games because it makes them better experiences, but only if it actually tries. Let’s see how games can try to make character development an integral part of the gameplay experience, and in some cases, already have.

How’s that world conquest going there, Kane?

Often, a crap load of older games (but not always) fail to produce any character development at all. Possibly this might occur because you’re playing a multiplayer / sports game. On the other hand, Valve recently decided that you can have compelling, growing multiplayer characters,  as seen in their “Meet The” video series.

Shooters are also big on this, representing such luminaries such as Doomguy, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, Duke Nukem, and the ever-debatable Gordon Freeman. Strategy games also frequently lack character development, although they can often still have interesting characters (see Kane in Command & Conquer).

These games typically lack character advancement because the developers actively don’t  try to attack something they know they won’t be able to deliver, so they choose to focus simply on the gameplay. Take a look at Just Cause 2. The characters are wretched, but you aren’t playing it for a deep exploration into character study, you’re playing because you enjoy hijacking commercial airliners and using them to assassinate the populace of a small south-eastern Asian country.

‘Soap’ is Scottish. That’s it.

Of course, the game might  not even care about presenting characters at all, ala Doom. This, in comparison, allows for the player to build their own experiences about a game without being explicitly directed by the developers; see Total War & Civilization games for examples. This is the simplest way. You sidestep the issue by not even trying, and that’s fine. I’d rather have a game with solid gameplay and no story than a game with alright gameplay and crap characters.

I’m looking at you: Call of Duty. The key problem here is that with nothing ventured, nothing extra is gained. If no games tried to push developing characters than we’d be stuck with games like Crysis: awesomely brilliant gameplay, but oddly empty inside.

Our next stop brings us to the house that Hollywood built—your typical linear character development avenue. And by linear, I mean there’s only one way for characters to develop. As implied, this kind of growth is what we know from the television, movies and books. While you’d think this would be the simplest style for games to copy, coming up with games that successfully utilize it is a hard task.

Dwelling on the issue, it becomes clear that this is one of the problems games face. TV shows may take significant time investments like a game can, but TV shows are episodic and able to stand on their own. When their characters evolve, it’s the summation of a season (or seasons) of plot and character interactions, rather than over the course of a single episode.

Who would’ve thought this urine-soaked geek could become so much more?

Games, it seems, cannot do this. Episodic delivery has proved problematic at best thus far. In addition, games need to include gameplay into their experience, but how much is up to the individual development teams. Kojima, of Metal Gear Solid, clearly favors a clean 50/50 split between plot and gameplay. Some games intertwine the two, as Half-Life 2, whereby you never lose control of your character in a cut-scene and thus experience everything first hand.

The end result is the same. In Metal Gear Solid you see Otacon develop from an annoying pissant who literally wets himself, to an annoying pissant who literally wets himself but takes some brave first steps. And in Half-Life 2 we find the young and nubile Alyx a brash but capable potential love interest whose fate we’re concerned about by the game’s climax.

Another problem with this approach is that while there are plenty of good television and movie writers, there are far more mediocre or poor ones. Who do you think is most likely to end up writing for games? Not the good ones who have no trouble finding work, but the poor ones. Yep, games get the sloppy seconds, or the developers end up trying to write their plot themselves, which usually ends badly (not convinced? Check out Borderlands).

What do these sloppy writers usually lack? The ability to place meaningful realistic character developments within their plots. In general, hiring book writers seems a solid compromise; books are structured more parallel with games, with book length avoiding any kind of rigid network time slots as we see with television or the ideal 90-120 minute movie experience that maximizes theater revenue.

So while a simple linear character development might appear to be the simplest and easiest way to get decent character development in our games, thus far it has alluded us for the reasons mentioned. That’s not to say we should stop trying this method, look at a movie like Gran Torino and tell me with a straight face you don’t want more games to have characters with that much depth and growth as we see in Walt Kowalski throughout its 2 hour duration.

The closest I’ve seen games come in this linear style is with Max Payne 2’s title character, and in the same vein: Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko Bellic, both of whom we see struggle throughout their respective experiences. When it works, it’s just as effective as any movie or TV show. Problem is: it barely ever does. Really, this is just video games aping Hollywood, and as such, they can never truly resonate any deeper with a player than any movie or novel can.

BIG AMERICAN TITTIES!

Last to the party in this analysis is player driven character development; as in you’re controlling the development. This is where we come to something that gaming can truly call its own. Okay, choose your own adventure books maybe, but those were all rubbish. These video games are typically the hand-me-downs of the tabletop games.

Most Bioware and Black Isle RPGs fit the bill, although System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are worthwhile additions, but not simply traditional RPGs. The essential bit is that in a tabletop game you have complete freedom. Obviously, this can’t be replicated completely in a video game, but that’s no reason not to try. Basically the idea is that no two play-throughs should be the same.

This is the most ambitious of all forms of character development possible simply because the game needs to respond to your actions and allow the game to adapt to it. Problems arise because player driven character development is extensive and requires huge amounts of time and consideration to properly work out, but it leads to without a doubt the most involving form of characters possible. Your game is literally your game.

Any notion of canon for a game’s story becomes impossible if there is only your play-through. I played through Dragon Age and became attached to certain characters in specific ways. My sister played the game principally with the same characters but came to see them each in a different light.

We could have utilized the dozen or so characters in different ways and could have dealt with each of them in several unique manners. When this works out, it really works out, but when it fails, it’s a catastrophe. Just take a look at Heavy Rain, which gives you lots of choices, but fails to tell what any choice actually means or even is before hand. Your characters will develop in Heavy Rain—quite interestingly I might add—but it’s never really under your control.

The… no, your party. Who does what depends upon your decisions.
So if they all leave you alone you might want to seek a counselor.

Obviously, the dynamic of player-controlled character advancement tends to embrace the RPG genre, due to the inherent focus on character in such games, with much of the gameplay revolving around how you interact within the game’s world. The games that choose this path make character development an actual part of the gameplay, intertwining the entire game experience around the notion of meaningful characters who evolve and develop over the course of your adventure. The good games will present you with difficult decisions, and they don’t have to be no-win scenarios; they simply have to force you to make choices, and that those choices have impacts.

Knights of the Old Republic 2 went so far as to turn this convention on its head in the character of Kreia, who scolded you regardless of your actions. What’s interesting is that the KotOR2 never forces her down your throat and you can decide you disagree and never talk to her again. Or, if you’re intrigued by her point of view, you can keep her around and learn more about her viewpoints. It’s all about the choices.

Character development truly is something worth investing in, perhaps more so in gaming than in any other entertainment medium. The ability to connect a player to their interactions has a profound effect on the overall impact the game has. Besides, if Deus Ex did it? Seems like a good idea for me. Then again, it seems that the general trend nowadays, especially in triple-A big name titles, is to avoid character development and simply give the audience what they think they want. And that folks, is really quite tragic.

Sure, you could take one of those “physiologically accurate” online quizzes to decipher your inner workings, but rational science demands better! No, we as PC gamers balk at such abstract and menial notions. We judge ourselves by the in-game actions we make, not by some random grouping of “well researched and factually articulated” questions. But how do you know where to categorize your misfiring neurons or homicidal-inspired tendencies? Easy! Buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, play it, and then refer to our patented and 100% authentic* quick-reference chart below for insta-catharsis! Absolutely Stupendous!
*May not be patented or 100% authentic.

In-Game Action: Rather than repairing and selling your hard-fought booty, you instead routinely collect and horde every useless rusted-out piece of spider-infested crap, even if it means crawling slower than old people screw across the entire game map to do so—over and over and over, until you no longer believe in humanity.

Diagnoses: If you’re just starting the game, you don’t have any other choice. If this is the case, you’re what we in the field call “masochistically abhorrent.” You cherish pain and agony, and you chase  peaks of ecstasy in self-applied flagellation. This is probably why you bought  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the first place. What’s that? We told you to the buy the game in our introduction? Okay, fine: you’re a pathetic hopeless follower and a filthy masochist. There. Happy?

In-Game Action: You find yourself emptying cheap cans of beer at staggering rates and eating powerful doses of controlled prescription drugs during the loading screens, all to  avoid smashing your face through your monitor in irritation.

Diagnoses: You have the patience of 4-year-old English princess in a Barbie depot. What—you can’t enjoy those 10 minute interludes of staunch nothingness in-between constant map changes and frequent, frequent deaths? (Frequent.) Don’t you find those little looping gameplay tips like: “eat food to avoid starvation” positively charming? Even on the 78th viewing? No? You’re probably also the type of person that expects your  Big Mac and French fries delivered in less than 2 hours, Mr. Fastie Fast. We had people like you in World War II. We called them “Delawareans.”

In-Game Action: You swear and cuss like a salty grizzled lobster-boat fisherman when your weapons and armor jam and fall apart after 5 or 6 shots, and you punt solid objects—such as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game box—when bad guys plug your noggin from 7 miles away, and when comically small chemically- malformed antagonistic hamsters incapacitate you with one bite.

Diagnoses: You’re a textbook personality example for misplaced aggression and elevated anger through adverse stimuli. Clearly, you’ve never seen a real-life “between-the-eyes” from a low-caliber .22 pistol with 10,000 feet of distance between a shooter and his target. Actually, this perhaps makes sense, as it’s  impossible. In actuality, on a deeper level, your violent tendencies find their root cause in the prior-inspected impatience dynamic. This is because you know that if that little rat-fuck of a tiny hamster does ever so slightly nudge your steel-coated, adamantium-reinforced body armor, you get to agonize through another infernal 10 minute load screen.

In-Game Action: You find yourself slaughtering enough animals and mutants that PETA files for a multi-species class-action lawsuit as a direct result of your tasteless in-game genocide.

Diagnoses: Your personality is a twisted and evil mother earth hating middle-finger-giver-outer to Native Americans. And FYI, “Yeah, but 90% of the quests make you do it, and animals and mutants are basically all that you can kill in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, because nobody ever shoots at you except for those goddamned annoying zombies that somehow know how to aim and reload their perfectly intact bullshit dangerous shotguns,” is an unacceptable scapegoat for your tactless demeanor. That’s no excuse for your terrifying anti-bestial personal habits. Hey, know what? Instead of murdering all those poor and cuddly, uh, mutated and hideous boar-monsters? You could just avoid offing all those innocent little cuties by not playing the game. You sick bastard you.

In-Game Action: You repeatedly ask random wayward folks the same two awkwardly formulated questions to start each and every conversation piece. No matter how out of context and bizarre “Listen, I have a question for you,” may sometimes seem, you still say the words with ardent redundancy.

Diagnoses: This personality type is often found within lethargic persons of a rudimentary multi-lingual talent. You prefer ease and comfort over complexity, occasionally falling asleep mid-thought. This sometimes results in the option menu, of, say: P.U.R.S.U.E.R. : Yell of Stalin, mislabeling “low-crouch” as “always run.” The diagnosed condition is commonly classified as: “Sure, stiffly and haphazardly translating all that Russian text into direct English may result in chaotic verbal nonsense, but at least this way I’ll retain the time to make my daily coffee break, Sergei.”  Now and then, this rather longish title may also be heard in industry-slang as, “Get  back to work, Vladimir, or we’ll burn your house down.”

In-Game Action: NPCs you stumble across in the middle of the irradiated and treacherous nuclear wasteland consistently warn: “If you wanna talk, holster that smoke-wagon, comrade!” all whilst simultaneously shoving their own enormous hand-cannons directly into your trachea, even after you do put yours away.

Diagnoses: “Hostilus What-the-Fuckus” defines this particular behavioral nuance. While even a kindergartner with a corked pop-gun can ace your ass lightning quick in the Pripyat zone, your frail and timid personality and meak mannerisms nevertheless elicit (apparently) distinct fear and trepidation in your fellow man. This also explains why every other lowlife scum-crusted character in the bars and shops are allowed to openly pack some monster heat, but if you even so much as drop a cracked fingernail on the compass of your  combat knife, your chest cavity turns into a lead-injected slab of reddish Swiss cheese.

Diagnoses: Still beats the ass out of Halo 3.

Recently, Dawn of War II’s dressed me up in a lavender tutu, slapped me around, and called me Beatrice. In the best ways possible. And I keep going back for more. Unlike Daikatana, I simply can’t get enough of it making me its bitch. This makes little sense, considering my genre track record. I should hate this game. I’m supposed to be a self-described “FPS” guy, with little regard, interest, or talent for “RTS” titles. But hang on a sec—is DoW II really just an RTS? No sir. Hardly.

I’m not even sure you can classify DoW II given existing genre monikers. And brethren (and sisteren?)—this is a fabulous revelation. See, we live in a marketing and sales-driven gaming world where we’re herded into artificial genre-based chicken coops. “Bad Company 2? Get on over there in the FPS barn! Just Cause 2? You’re hayed up in the action/adventure pen. Get a move on to that RPG corral you Fallout cattle! We got us some quotas to make!”

Allegedly, games that dare to challenge the gameplay status quo typically don’t sell well, and therefore, get butchered for hotdog meat in the bargain bins. This is a sad course of events. If the PC has but a single one overpowering strength compared to the seemingly invincible armada of the consoles, it’s user-interaction flexibility. Consoles, by their very nature, are handicapped. They get a steering wheel, a flight stick, and a standard controller (I hate saying “gamepad.” It’s called a goddamned controller. Deal with it).

1) Think of genre titles in that explosion. 2) Fuck yeah!

This creates a need for distinct and rigid genres, because when you try and mix and match and throw gameplay elements into a console-powered blender, the control mechanisms end up as the bottleneck, limiting appeal and enjoyment. Brutal Legend’s a solid example of a great game design crippled by its platform and default device of manipulation. Real time strategy gameplay inspirations, even in the smallest of doses, simply don’t work on the WiiPlayBoxes due to the clumsiness of the slow-response analog sticks and directional pads.

The PC, however, revels in its bottomless swelling ocean of possible controlling options and peripherals. Hell, our basic PC “controller” is actually two devices—and one of them has over 105 buttons! If a PC developer wants to cross-blend 2 or 3 (or more) genres into a single game, it’s wholly feasible to do so because of input elasticity. And yet, only a paltry few titles take the risk of breaking out from the yucky console-flavored genre molds.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat pistol-whips its simplistic FPS branding.

This is an unfortunate dynamic, because in my rather annoyed and biased opinion, the best PC games are the ones that aren’t easily categorized into neat little labeled shoeboxes, ready to be stacked away in the attic for ease of storage. The best games are those that take the FPS, RPG, RTS, and adventure monikers out back behind the wood shed and beat ‘em with their own studded leather belts.

Worse yet, we in the “yammering on about and/or reviewing games” industry tend to unfairly label the games that do shoot for genre distinctness. Of course, this is because most folks, when hearing about a newly released ditty, immediately tend to ask (and judge): “What kind of game is it?” when they should be asking: “Is the game fun to play?” This exact behavior almost resulted in me not playing DoW II because an enormous multitude of fellow reviewers and kindred commentators called it a basic RTS.

What a literary travesty to do so. DoW II is so much more than an RTS, it’s foolhardy to name it otherwise. A far more accurate DoW II description: it’s a real-time squad-based RPG open-mission co-op-friendly atmosphere-driven loot-collecting tactics and strategy game. But of course, you can’t print that on the game box, because God forbid the consumers not be able to instantly classify it under a falsely-applied preconceived genre notion. But know what? That’s unjust incarceration! And DoW II ain’t the only oppressed class minority here. How about Crysis? S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Fallout 3? Batman? None of these gaming greats should be considered as a generic square peg to a square hole.

Behold: the insidious benefactor of rigid and formulaic gameplay elements.

Yes: games do need to be accurately explained and interpreted. Otherwise, we’ll have no idea what we’re getting into, and dropping money on a warm pile of shit tends to frustrate buyers. But games deserve more than a stumpy 3 letter acronym to sum up their parts as a whole. As an admission of loathing self-guilt, I’ve known myself to far too frequently skip articles on games that list the genres as “RTS,” or “Adventure.” Well, thank cherries and ice cream that I didn’t with Machinarium.

The more we foster and encourage our talented developers to Hulk-out of their tight blue jean restricted genre confines, and the more we avoid needless and lazy labeling of complicated but tough to classify gameplay titles—the better off we’ll be, and the more we’ll set ourselves apart from the linear tyrants of Consoleopolis.

I hope you’re nothing like me. I have no money to spend on PC gaming and over 100 unplayed games. Yeah—it’s bad. Or… is it good? Maybe it means I can abandon the newest releases for the next five years and hunker down to play them all.

…Nah. Bring on Deus Ex 3! There is a time for free games, and that time is always! Here’s a list of fabulous games for all you cheap-o’s.

No, not the 1984 classic that kick-started the graphical adventure game tirade of the subsequent decades—this is a fan-made remake. “But wait, Keenan!” you may exclaim, “I haven’t played the original game! I can’t play the remake first!” To which I’d reply, “Who cares?” This remake turns King’s Quest relevant again. In an era of the metamorphosis for the adventure game genre, a re-do of a classic game is wholly appropriate; especially when the game’s assets are formed with a craftsman’s delicate fingers. There’s professional voice acting, beautiful artistic rendering, and a brand new score. In general, I’m not too fond of remakes, but AGD Interactive’s King’s Quest I is one I heartily approve. If you’re new to King’s Quest, go ahead and try it out!

Let’s continue the remake spree, shall we? While not technically a “remake” of a game, Digital: A Love Story reconfigures the classic Amiga platform and tells a story along the way. The game isn’t a game in the traditional understanding—it’s primarily an adventure of reading. Using the old skin of the ’80s computer, Digital tells a story of “mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988.” There’s no real obviously laid goals in the game; you’ll mainly read messages and enter in phone numbers to dial places. Regardless, Digital’s presentation is superb and will most likely keep you enthralled from your first sit-down and until you finish it.

Crime Fighter is one of my favorite games of all time. I first played the game back in 1996 on my Windows 95 computer, and it was the first game where I’d consider myself  “addicted.” At that point, I hadn’t played a “just-one-more-turn” style PC game before—after all, I was just eight years old. In complete honesty, it’s hard to classify what sort of game Crime Fighter is; it feels very much like a board game and implements turn-based elements into the gameplay. Starting with a series of petty crimes such as holding up convenience stores and banks, you play as a criminal looking to forge a path to becoming top dog in the underworld. Along the way, you level up skills in intelligence, power, and recruit other people to help you in your dirty work. The game is designed with more than one player in mind, so to achieve maximum fun-ness, play with a buddy. This version is a recent re-doing of the original DOS game into DirectX graphics and modern controls. I must warn you: this game is very addicting. Imagine Civilization’s up-until-3AM propensity combined with that of Grand Theft Auto’s motif. This game has a nicotine that’s so chronic you’ll never want to stop. See you in three weeks!

Smashing things together is one key to expanding our understanding of our place in the cosmos.  Banging rocks together gave Humankind the secret of fire.  Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider busy themselves with electrons, protons, and baguettes, all hyper-accelerated to explode in a shower of subatomic secrets and breadcrumbs. In a similar vein, the indie developers at Hanako Games have applied their own genre-warping supercollider to lifestyle titles like The Sims and classic RPGs like Bard’s Tale.

The result is Cute Knight Deluxe, and not—as many once feared—the accidental creation of a charming, casual, anime-themed black hole that threatened to gobble up the planet.

Fortunately for all life on Earth, Cute Knight Deluxe instead offers an enjoyable game of life choices in a small, friendly fantasy world. A full game only takes about an hour, but it’s an hour filled with challenges, secrets, and reflections to walk away with. As such, this deceptively fun and simple game ranges into the contentious territory of being a “serious game.”

Okay, you perverted freaks: check your hentai and tentacle jokes at the door.

By “serious,” I mean that the game inspires thought and introspection on my part, and it is designed to train skills for use in my real life. Now, be assured that Cute Knight Deluxe is a lighthearted experience that I really enjoy playing. Even so, Cute Knight Deluxe is built on an insistent philosophical underpinning: choices matter. The training here is in how to live a fulfilling, self-directed life. The genius of this serious game lies in my enjoyment of exploiting a system of checks and balances, while underneath the cute surface lies a subtle engine roiling with transformative power.

RPG gamers will find very familiar ground to cover as Cute Knight Deluxe begins. I fill the dainty slippers of a teenage orphan girl about to enter the big city in search of my destiny. I have statistics like strength and stamina, skills like fighting and magic. I can fight monsters, cast spells, and charm NPCs. Straightforward role playing fare to be sure, right? The difference is that my skills are tied up in the service of a statistic I have never seen before: Dreams.

Dreams are a measure of my sense of aspiration, my confidence, and my satisfaction with my situation. They are also the axis around which the “serious” part of this game revolves. Dreams go up and down based on my successes and failures. Since failures are unavoidable and the relative benefits of my successes depend on mastery of my skills, the management of my economy of dreams is very important if I want to reach a satisfying destiny. If I run out of dreams, I pre-emptively give up my quest for a destiny and settle for whatever under-developed job I appear most suited for at the time.

This statistic delights and intrigues me to no end. Once I realized how dreams worked, I started applying ideas from the game to my own life. As it were, I suddenly felt the rocks and gravel through the silk soles of my dainty little real life slippers. It achieved the goal of the serious game genre: to affect real world behaviors by carrying over the results of experimentation in a virtual world. The game had inspired me to take my own personal choices more seriously.

Cute Knight Deluxe is as much about attitude as aspiration. If I can bolster my dreams in the face of other realities that challenge me, I can achieve wonderful things. On the other hand, if I let my dreams go, I will reach a disheartened end.

The spirit is willing, but the skills are weak.

My destiny is decided on my 21st birthday. I start at 18, so I have three years to pursue my interests and develop my skills. Sounds like plenty of time, right? Wrong. Years blow past on a head-long rush toward a fate that won’t wait. The fast pace helps me understand how my choices magnify over timescales that I don’t usually consider: another effective technique for a serious game.

There are over 100 destinies to reach; each is accompanied by an illustration and a brief summation. In my many trips through life, I’ve been everything from a modest stable hand to a beautiful ballerina. Which is weird to admit, in retrospect.

It is not just enough to adhere exclusively to my dreams, though. A few rounds of play demonstrate quickly that dreams must be carefully traded away for short-term progress. Walking around with a head full of clouds and fairy dust without challenging oneself to perform is a sure way to fail. Dreams transform over time, though: from initially vague, juvenile notions of contentment, more mature dreams ultimately find their vigor in real successes toward tangible goals.

Since this is a game about social choices and personal ramifications, I must also pay attention to another statistic called Sin: a convenient measure of my conscience. If I take moral shortcuts like lying or killing, I accrue Sin and the people of the town begin closing off their services from me. Sin can be washed away by performing good acts such as volunteering at the doctor’s clinic, working in the temple, and meditating. These penances take valuable time and generally do not provide any other significant benefit, and so I am once again faced with a choice of moral economies. Even under time pressure, is the quick solution really the effective one?

Kill the ooze, earn some XP, maybe some Sin. Is it worth it?

There are clues that hint at some grander Destiny that a clever player can uncover through unorthodox means.  This is the closest the game comes to having a pre-determined plot line.  The fantasy of discovering that I am a long lost princess, for example, rears its head repeatedly.  (And honestly, I’ve never wanted to be a princess so much in my life until the game dared me to try.)  However, I must decide if that is a likely destiny.  Is it worth pursuing at the expense of successes I gained elsewhere under my own initiative?  Cute Knight Deluxe coyly tempts players with grandeur, but it never stages the limp RPG convention of casting the player as the prophesied Chosen One.  If anything, I’m the one doing all the choosing.

The town is a typical array of fantasy tropes: a shop to buy gear, a college to train up at, an inn to rest, a temple to heal.  There’s even a little dungeon to explore.  However, I also have the opportunity to take jobs and perform services everywhere.  These are the arenas in which my choices are made.  Jobs provide money and a place to exercise skills, but they also cost me dreams and hit points in the process.  It’s possible to work myself into unconsciousness, which costs me recovery time that I just can’t spare.  The game encourages good judgment by keeping costs high and rewards hard-won.

At first, I am unskilled at anything, and so I face an inevitable period of dissatisfaction and failure. Every new game opens with hard work, occasional rest, and a testing of convictions to stick to the task without losing heart. Over time, however, things get better, skills improve, money starts to flow in, and opportunities open up. I am very much in control at all times, and I immediately feel the outcomes of success or failure. Around mid-game, I get over the development hump and start really being able to set a course for myself. That’s a good feeling. It also reinforces the lesson of the game: long-term goals are worth chasing.

I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and kick your ass out into the street if you give me any grief.

To a Cute Knight, young adulthood gleams with a wide-eyed sense of bewilderment.  Every choice seems to carry a dread significance coupled with boundless opportunity, all swirling around a semi-selfish, inwardly facing perspective.  The game is perfectly suited for 8-14 year olds, who are in exactly that emotional space.

True to its name, the game is Cute in its presentation.   The game revels in the character’s feelings, capitalizing on a flighty fantasy style geared toward young minds.  Anime portraits convey light, cartoonish emotions that are easy to interpret.  Cheery animations show the passage of time as I learn, work, and rest.

I’m so glad I found a blacksmith with a Summer palette. This armor totally brings out my eyes!

This young, feminine aesthetic may attract girls to play Cute Knight Deluxe, thereby growing a new generation of gaming girls, but I frankly think this sabotages the seriousness of the game across genders.  Let me clarify that Cute Knight Deluxe, while feminist, is not overtly biased toward aggressive struggles against baked-in patriarchy.  The feminism of the game is instead couched in a sense of gender-neutral opportunity, positive humanism, and self-development through social influences.  I love this approach and applaud it.

I’m concerned with the limitation of feminine-only portrayals, though. It’s clear that the game designers want to exploit a phenomenon of “like enacting like”: players identifying with and emulating the actions they see on the screen. If this is truly designed as a serious game, then the designer wants to encourage players to take a long-term perspective on their choices and dreams.

So far so good, but I think boys as well as girls should have that perspective. It benefits every young person who takes it to heart.  Young boys need the opportunity to see characters like themselves as responsible, social creatures capable of making choices and experiencing the long-term consequences.  However, no boy character exists for a young boy to play, identify with, and emulate. The option to play a young boy would have strengthened the transformational power of the game without pandering to a fantasy of a male-biased world.

I alone have delved the dungeons of madness to bring you this delicious lobster tail! Enjoy.

As I played Cute Knight Deluxe, I found myself thinking about choices I’ve made in my own life.  I’ve been a teacher, a student, a film producer, a performer, and much more.  I’ve developed many skills, and I want to use them toward my happiness and success.  My mantle bears the trophied heads of my enemies.  Yet, what destiny awaits me?  What choices will I face?  What shape will my dreams yet take?

Maybe it sounds corny coming from a 37-year old male, writing about a seemingly fluffy wide-eyed life sim geared toward adolescent girls.  Perhaps, though, the mark of an effective serious game is that it inspires improvement in the players through expected and unexpected ways despite its aesthetic presentation.  Cute Knight Deluxe is unexpectedly engaging, as tame and harmless as it first appears, refreshingly empty of heavy-handedness or moralistic stumping.  Whether played for fun or philosophy, the game engages in a way that aspires to be meaningful and transformational.  It’s a charming example of a high-minded serious game.

When he’s not getting his ass pinched while serving ales at the local tavern in between blood-soaked dungeon crawls, Cameron Goble reviews classic PC games at LongTailGamer.com. Follow his tweets from @longtailgamer while you’re at it.

You’ve heard his tracks, whether you realize it or not. He’s the man behind the orchestral curtain on such titles like Icewind Dale II, Fallout 3, Crysis, and Dragon Age (to name a minuscule thimble’s full). His music steals your ears away with regret and sadness when you’re fragged, and it pumps battery acid through your veins when you’re seeking cover from mortar rounds.

A nominee for dozens of awards and an all around citizen of awesome, it’s with unabashed pride that Game Central presents Mr. Zur’s sharpened ponderings and wisdom-sprinkled nuggets on the golden field of gaming music. And a special thanks to EA’s Jenny Jobring for making it all happen!

GC: So when you’re composing music, how much do you take into account that your music will be heard in a video game?

Inon: Pretty much 100%. And basically with video games, the whole media is what determines exactly how the music is going to be heard, how the music is going to be played, and how the music is going to be received. You have got to understand that when you compose music for video games there are way more components to it than just the pure music.

Of course, we would like the music to be as good as it can get, basically. But this has to do a lot with what the video game needs. And if the video game needs just one hit of the drum every ten minutes, that’s what I’m going to give it. Basically, I will first tend to the need of the video game before I think exactly about the music.

GC: So you write it specifically towards the game’s atmosphere, like what the game requires to be a better experience?

Inon: Exactly. You know, of course at any point I will try to create something that is not in the game in order to create what we call the dramatic or the emotional level or dimension of the game. This way the music is not only in the background, but it is also really creating, you know, way more depth—emotional depth—to the game. So this is definitely what I’m thinking about when I’m trying to compose.

GC: When you hear your music in game for the first time, are complete musical rewrites common? In other words do you write a song, and then actually hear it in game, and go: “Oh no! I need to go ahead and redesign the entire song.” Does that happen often?

Inon: Well, it happens, usually in the beginning of games. I’m going a lot of backwards and forwards and sideways with the developers and the director to find what will best fit and match the game, and this is a process. Once we’ve honed in on what the game needs, and defined the signature sound of the game, then we’re on our way. Sometimes it gets easy, sometimes it gets really hard, but most of the time it’s sorta like in-between.

GC: So we at Game Central think that music is probably the most overlooked aspect when it comes to game design. Do you think that it’s absolutely crucial to have music in games? Is it a huge factor that makes or breaks a game?

Inon: Well, I could answer to you with a question: do you think that music is totally essential in movies? Do you think that music is totally essential in TV? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. One thing I do know—there is no one movie today that doesn’t have music, there is no one TV show without music, and there is no one game without music.

I don’t know if that does answer the question; it’s actually a very interesting and philosophic question, but it seems like people tend to think “yes.”

GC: Do you personally feel that a game could be successful without it, without music at all?

Inon: I think (if so) it’s going to be very interesting. I think that we shouldn’t take it that radical, I mean, I don’t know if you remember that Tom Hanks movie when he crashes with his plane on a deserted island. I forgot the name of this movie.

GC: Cast Away.

Inon: Cast Away! Exactly. There is no music there until about an hour into the movie, and the point the music starts is when he actually understands that he is really in bad shape. So basically, I wouldn’t go all the way of not having any music, but I would definitely try sometimes to keep places in a game without music at all, and not play wall to wall music.

I think it could be really effective, and something that people could really experiment with that. This is one thing. Yeah I think if you have a movie, or a game, that you really want the experience to be truly realistic, totally realistic, then you might not score any music to it, and it would be like real life. I don’t know how that’d go, but it is certainly interesting to experiment.

GC: When you’re hired by a gaming studio to write their music, are you 100% free to create the tracks as you see fit? Or are you typically bound within a strict confine of a developer’s creative direction?

Inon: Again—it’s moving from one end to the other. Some games totally give me a free hand. Some games are very, very restricting. As usual, it’s somewhere in the middle. Meaning they have something in mind and I’m creating something that is my own, and then we’re sort of meeting in the middle.

And it’s not about arguing what’s better for the game. It’s more about collaboration, and meaning. I’m bringing to the table something, you’re bringing to the table something, and then we’re sort of putting it together, and from what we’ve put together this is what the game’s eventually gonna sound like.

GC: So it sounds like it’s more of a compromise than one side dictating to the other.

Inon: I wouldn’t call it “compromise.” Again, this is not something that’s “Oh, I want my music the way I want it, and I’ll be more willing if it’s gonna be more the way I want it.” No, this is definitely not the case. It is, “I think that this could work great. What do you think?” And it’s like, “I think that this will work great.”

And I will usually tend to try to cater to what the developer has to say rather than try to pitch in with my own. First, anyway, anything that I’m going to do will be mine in a way because this is my style. So, I’ll try to go as much as I can to what he’s looking for in order to match the game.

GC: So when it comes to actually recording the music, is it kind of a traditional way of recording? I mean, to our knowledge, video game music has lots of parts recorded, and aren’t really like full songs. Compared to more traditional recording, an album or anything like that, is it at all different to the process in video games?

Inon: Well, you know, it really depends on the budget that we have for production. You got to understand that most of the music is created—like for example, for TV or movies it’s the same thing—the music is being created first in the studio with synthesizers and samplers to do a mockup. Now, sometimes the mockup is so good that there is no additional recording needed.

Many times when we talk about orchestral music then we do like to bring a real orchestra to either overdub or replace the mockup score. And in this way, yes, it feels pretty much like recording an album. After you’re done, basically, with all of the preparation then you go two, three days into the studio and record the orchestra, go back to the studio, open all the tracks and start mixing everything, and there you go.

GC: Do other video game music composers such as Jeremy Soule or Frank Klepacki influence your work in any way?

Inon: I’m sure they do. I mean, we’re listening to each other quite extensively. We like to see what we’re doing. I mean the community of game composers is quite small when we’re talking about the people that are doing most of the work. So, we know each other. Sometimes we even collaborate. And so I definitely think that’s a “yes.”

GC: Is there a project you can talk about that you have collaborated on with some of these guys?

Inon: Well this needs to be decided by the studio. I cannot just decide that I’ll collaborate with somebody. I could offer that maybe the score needs some sort of collaboration. Or the studio could offer or suggest that this score needs collaboration. So, that definitely has to be decided (by them).

GC: Are you pretty big into the game music scene, like have you ever been to a Video Games Live concert?

Inon: Oh sure! You know, and they also played my music from Crysis. So I’m involved in concerts; there was a big concert in Australia, they played my music from Prince of Persia and Dragon Age a few months ago. So I think that computer gaming music to the world as a standalone product or art is very important.

GC: Do you have any plans to attend a PAX or a GDC in a future?

Inon: I don’t think I’ve missed a GDC for the last ten years.

GC: So you’ve been to every one? That’s pretty cool.

Inon: Yeah.

GC: Are there any particular video game soundtracks you’re fond of—that you’re a fan of?

Inon: Let me think. You know it’s not so much about the actual soundtrack, it’s about the game and how the music works in the game. Games like BioShock, Dead Space, or, you know, a few games—Uncharted for example—the music does a really good job. I tend not to set apart the music from the game, it’s sort of misleading.

GC: Was it by mere happenstance that you fell into video game music composing, or was it a calculated, drawn-out career plan for you?

Inon: Totally drawn out. Not calculated, not planned. In 1995 or ‘96, (my agent) called me and asked me if I wanted to do music for computer games. At this point, I had already composed a lot of music for TV. And that was about, 13 years ago. And I said “no!” Lucky enough, he was really persistent and, you know, changed me and convinced me to do stuff and evangelize that. Once I started, it was a done deal.

GC: Why the initial hesitation? Why didn’t you want to compose for the PC?

Inon: I didn’t know anything about computer games! Nothing! And definitely not about music for computer games. When I heard “computer games,” I heard: “computer,” which I wasn’t into, and “games,” which I wasn’t into. So, you know, it sounds quite electronic to me. I was like, “Ehhhh… I don’t think so.”

GC: So do you at all consider yourself a gamer now?

Inon: Oh, no! No! By any means, I am not a gamer! I wish I could! I respect the gamers, but I have never found the time. I mean, I’m a decent player, but I’m not a gamer, per se. Meaning, I’m not spending time every day playing computer games. I wish I had the time, because I’d love to do that. But am I a gamer? No. You know, a gamer would be ashamed to hear that I’m a gamer.

GC: Are there any casual games like Peggle that you find yourself playing to pass the time?

Inon: I don’t have any time to pass, that’s the thing. I wish they could create some more hours a day, so I could use that. I’m currently working on five projects at the same time; each one of them is really big! I have a family with three kids, one of them is a baby. So—believe me—I could use more hours in the day!

GC: So you’re playing the game of life.

Inon: Exactly, yeah.

GC: It’s a tough game.

Inon: Well, I do play (some) games, for example, like I’m working on a certain game right now not announced yet, and I have an Xbox with the Xbox game, so I will play the game and see how they’re incorporating the music in, yes. But that part is work.

GC: Game music has evolved substantially over the years. In the beginning, there was a limitation of hardware capabilities, each composer had to write with absolute guidelines in mind. For example, the old Nintendo Entertainment System had songs that required one minute or so in length, and the tracks had to flow smoothly.

Now, in a far more advanced time, obviously, is taking into account the myriad potential hardware strengths and weaknesses a critical issue?In other words: when you’re creating music, there are all sorts of ways that music can be played back, whether it’s through speakers our through headphones. Does this matter?

Inon: Well, we the music people and audio people in the game industry are following very closely the developments in the computer world, and we will tend to maximize every little inch of power to bring what we call the true experience of music to life in gaming. And having said that, basically I’m talking about implementation. You know in the first few games that I did, we always just played audio in a loop, over and over.

Today we’re in a much, much better situation, having engines like Unreal and other implementation engines that can just do miracles with music, bringing the music in and out seamlessly, responding in real time when the player makes (certain) moves on one hand, but in the other hand we’re really not creating any train wreck moving between cue to cue.

Of course, (the action) determines the way I compose the music, and there are techniques that seldom even I myself developed in order to make the transitions of the music seamless. Our everlasting aspiration is to create a soundtrack that will follow the gamer consistently, wherever they go, and one that supports whatever he or she is doing without interfering but still creating the prefect emotional rapport to what he or she is doing.

In order to do that, we have to use many means of technicalities, audio engines, tricks, anything we could in order to create that. And that’s a lot of work, that has nothing to do with the actual composing of the game. So, in summary, we are using all the latest developments and capabilities of the engines to do a better job making music in a game.

GC: Thanks Inon!

Inon: Thank you very much for having me!

We touched on the issue of finishing games before, if not briefly. During Captain Sir Mr. Logan Decker’s appearance on the longest (and arguably, bestest) Game Central podcast ever, I countered his seemingly bold assertions that a PC game must be fully completed to be 100% authentically enjoyed.

I debated that a level of personal gaming delight and contentment is not equivocal to a potential gameplay-related conclusion. Some players, it seems, are perfectly happy to interact with a small segment of a title, if only to disregard it soon after.

You gotta be psycho not to finish it. And yet…

Who am I to deem this behavior inappropriate or lacking? Surely, one cannot verifiably measure another’s gaming spirits without significant error in judgment. Or so I thought.

Ever since that podcast, something inside stirred and swirled in a storm of discontent. Whether through stark argumentative brilliance or insidious Stygian black-magic, Mr. Decker’s words haunted me.

The more I pondered the non-completion dynamic, the more I started to question my rather hasty prior-stated conclusions.

I started to put the topic into other contexts as a means of comparative experimentation. Do I typically read only half a novel and feel satisfied? Nope. Do I consistently appreciate half-finished daily workouts? No way. Do I routinely turn off one of my cherished TV shows in favor of half-watching another?

Negative. Hell, do I only partially drink a delicious glass of frosty iced-tea and feel altogether satiated? No! Of course not.

Un-commanded, non-conquered.

And why? Because if such events or actions are left unconcluded, no matter how seemingly minute or trivial, something noticeable is undeniably lost. Tasks, hobbies, jobs, events: these things have a natural beginning, middle and end. A built-in life-cycle inherent to the mediums intended for fulfillment. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cigar or a football game, it’s meant to be finished.

Know what? PC gaming is no different. By leaving enjoyable games incomplete, I broke the natural life-cycle, and by doing that, I sacrificed gratification and maximized delight.

There used to be a time where I  finished every damn game I owned. And folks, lemme tell ya: it felt good. It presented a sense of peace. Beating a game resulted in a noted and worthy accomplishment; a respectable filled and rounded belly, so to speak.

Back in the days of yore, when Duke Nukem 3D and Command & Conquer ruled the hard drive platters,  months elapsed in-between my gaming purchases. Months! All that time in the middle invested in the achievement of total victory per each respective title.

But now, it seems that a puny week or two without a new installation or Steam download is an eternity. I’ve got about 10 to 14 days to beat a game. And if those days expire? The executioner’s ax falls swiftly and mercilessly into the exposed neck of the falsely imprisoned.

Extinguished before completion.

I used to look forward to the next day of gaming, each sun’s setting a resurrected gateway for dedicated and ecstatic continuation of a singular engagement. But now, each and every elapsed stroke of the clock’s hands results in my nervousness of gaming abandonment by replacement of the temporary newest fad. Tick tick. Tick tick. Tick tick…

In a last-stand attempt to defend myself from my own inner conflict, I tallied up the games I failed to finish, comparing them to those that I actually have.

Surely, I’d only regret a few never seen to the end. The rather frightening results did little to calm my already waning spirits.

Half Life, Torchlight, Plants vs. Zombies, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Deus Ex, Red Alert 3, World in Conflict, Dawn of Discovery, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Psychonauts, Shadowgrounds, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Brothers in Arms, Company of Heroes, Dungeon Siege, Earth 2150 – all of them but a paltry sampling of the total casualties from an unnamed invisible battle. And make no mistake friends, this is indeed a conflict. And I’m losing it. Bad.

The heart-sinking revelation really slammed me in the solar plexuses I when I read through that seemingly endless list of bereft games. Worse, upon further honest analysis, the only titles I seem to finish at all anymore are the ones I review. The ones I have to. So that’s gotta be the cause, right? It’s not my fault. These things are beyond my control.

Non-Perfectus

We all have deadlines in this business, and sacrifices must be made. But that’s too easy a scapegoat to claim as the undeniable root factor, and in my heart, I know it’s a misfire. My gut says there’s more to it than this. I can’t just pawn it all off on some “unavoidable exterior influences” piss-ass excuse.  It’s too important for that.

So here it is, for right or wrong: there are too many PC games being released at once. Yeah. I said it. Odd, I know, especially since we’re in a dark time where the PC’s platform is consistently questioned as a legitimate contender to the monopoly of Console-vania.

Surely, the more games we have at once, the better the chances of species survival, yes? A fully loaded clip? Power in numbers? Something like that?

I’m starting to doubt it. I’m beginning to wonder if the wave after proverbial crushing wave of newly released PC games is actually—and ironically—destroying us.

Search yourself deep here. Tally and examine your own tabulation of games that fell beneath the bullets of the “New Big Title.” Go ahead – do it. Do what most of us won’t. I bet the results will scare you. The corrosive dynamic of the PC gamer “latest and greatest” culture grows like a gasoline fire over dusty hay.

We’re creating an ideology that finishing an ongoing yet somewhat older game is far less important than actively participating in the most recently released title. We’re playing the newest games simply so we can jaw it up with our like-minded friends at the watercoolers of Vent, Skype, forums, and podcasts.

This behavior loops back onto itself, multiplying exponentially, until, at some point, you begin to realize that completing a game in its entirety becomes the exception, not the rule.

Half-played.

Tell me this sits well with you. Tell me that you’d feel wholly complete if you routinely turned off Lost 10 minutes in to watch Fringe for a little bit only to quit out and behold Caprica just because it’s the most recent iteration of broadcast television.

Bet you wouldn’t. Bet you’d rather absorb Lost to its natural conclusion before flipping the channel permanently to the next show.

Well, I’m tired of leaving my comrades behind, their mangled bodies bleeding and forgotten on a deserted pock-marked battlefield.

From today onward, if I love a game I’m currently playing? I’m taking part of it until it’s done. And if a new game I simply must play rolls out of the factory assembly lines? It’ll wait its turn in the garage.

Will I lapse back into the seemingly inevitable mode of gratification-desertion in favor of the hottest, freshest popular title instead?  Maybe. But, for me, it’s an uphill endeavor well worth the “out-of-touch” sweat and blisters.

The recent rise of the DotA community is an interesting example of how a mod can become more popular than the game from which it mutated. Think of DotA as the next Counter-Strike. DotA never erupted into popularity, but rather  infected vast swathes of the gamer populace in something like a zombie attack, without anyone really noticing, until their family members dined on their bodily fluids. But the numerous gamers who haven’t played Warcraft III (and subsequently haven’t heard of DotA) are probably wondering, “What’s the big deal, and why should I care?”

Even artistic painters enjoy DotA. Clearly, DotA is enjoyed by people from all walks of life.

Well, Defense of the Ancients (you need a copy of Warcraft III and its expansion: The Frozen Throne to play it) and its newly emerged spawn reveal a compelling and unique style of gameplay that lies somewhere between a team-oriented FPS and a strategy game, both jumbled up with some of those oh-so-wonderful RPG elements served as a sumptuous side-dish. Some, desperate for a name, have dubbed the gameplay MOBA, for Massive Online Battle Arena, which is something of a misnomer. Massive is hyperbole, and while DotA may have online battles in arenas, what online competitive game doesn’t? I prefer to utilize the term DotA to associate the games that are DotA-esque.

So where did this style of game come from? Is it a gift from omniscient aliens who feel the best way to disrupt the planets’ productivity is to turn us all into cursing idiots who can’t go a single sentence without calling someone a noob? If so, they’re brilliant, and I eagerly await my servitude with my new xenomorph overlords.

It started here, sorta.

On the other hand, if we thought DotA up ourselves (which is more likely), than we should probably look at its history, and exactly what it does so right, and where its filthy dirty offspring are going to differentiate themselves from dear ol’ pop. When something new appears and grabs a sizable portion of the gaming community (DotA estimates several million players with its competitive scene, outstripping Warcraft III’s), it’s in our best interests to give it a healthy and proper once-over.

DotA, when it sprouted wings, wasn’t a new style of gameplay. Rather, it was simply a variation on a theme that Warcraft III churned out for quite some time. The original gameplay type is loosely derived from a custom map in StarCraft, specifically: Aeon of Strife. AoS featured something pretty radical for StarCraft’s day— it gave you the choice of a few select units, told you an army was coming, and that you had to kill them all, with all the other players on your side. 3 to 5 humans against an unrelenting horde of Starcraft units.

You’d get cash for killing the hordes, and use it to power up your units. Pretty simple, but the thing is, it was brutally tough; you’d be lucky to last 5 minutes your first try. Push too fast and stronger units would spawn and kill you, go too slow and you’d be overwhelmed by little weak guys. But it was addictive getting your guy beefier (I favored the Zergling myself) only to have the poor sod dashed over and over again.

Then something happened; a precedent. Rather than fighting a faceless horde, you now fought other player’s special units, and both sides had armies that clashed. When Warcraft III came out, most of the StarCraft mapmakers shifted over to the new engine and its new possibilities. Warcraft III offered a substantially different opportunity, because Warcraft III had Heroes, units with attributes and skills that would increase as they gained experience.

Getting warmer…

Further, it had a rudimentary skill and unit editor so more variety was theoretically possible, although much of this was locked until the expansion came out, and removed most limits on custom maps/units/skins. As such before the launch of The Frozen Throne, we simply saw lots of recycled default heroes and skills in the competitive AoS template.

One of my early favorites was Rival Nations, which made 3 rival sides rather than merely 2. However, it only used Warcraft III’s basic hero units. There was another that let you choose a deity to play, where you began as a little peasant guy who transformed into a bigger more dangerous entity every 10 levels (with more skills and better stats), eventually turning into the God you originally chose.

As time progressed, some young gun who went by the name of Eul (real name unknown), released a map called Defense of the Ancients.  There wasn’t too much customization in it: pre-expansion custom map editing was quite limited. The original form bears little semblance to its current incarnation, beyond the basic map layout and objective. The heroes have all been replaced or extensively redesigned. The original game was best described as a clone, and there isn’t any good reason why it gained stature while other AoS clones didn’t. As luck often dictates, it just caught on with the right people who later changed everything about it.

We’re technically very cold. I blame Arthas for that.

Then came Frozen Throne, and sometime in 2003, following approximately 3000 crap-tastic tower defense maps released, Defense of the Ancients: Allstars emerged. Various other versions of DotA also surfaced around that time period, but Allstars, with its emphasis on overpowering heroes to counter other overpowered heroes, came out the victor. Perhaps the game that came closest to usurping Allstars was a totally separate map called Tides of Blood. It had awesome custom character skins, custom skills, unique items and no recipe system. But DotA eventually felled it like any other tree in the forest.

DotA: Allstars was developed by Steve “Guinsoo” Feak (remember that name), who promoted the idea that the Heroes should be all-powerful ethereal figures capable of crushing everything and everyone around them. At least the first versions took this stance. Roughly 2 years later, around the launch  of World of Warcraft, the same Allstars advanced to roughly the 6.xx era, with the appearance of Icefrog, the map’s current “developer” who took a stance that the game was good, but clearly lacked balance. And, in his mind, that balance meant the need to weaken heroes rather than just buffing up opponents.

Icefrog is an interesting figure. He’s never publicly revealed anything about himself, or how he was granted control of the map’s development. The best thing that can be said about him is that he listened to criticisms from all sides. Mostly,  he did this by following threads in the official forums at dota-allstars.com and currently at playdota.com. Through the ancillary advice of others, he patched the game accordingly by slowly updating the code for efficiencies, adding stabilities, and somehow bringing balance to a game that was widely considered to have far too many possible heroes.

These are the objectives, lose yours and you lose the game.
Sounds so simple.

In truth, the balance issue was a widely known fault against Allstars. The game was hilariously fun, but certain heroes were vastly more useful then others. Through Icefrog the map slowly transformed into a finely-tweaked and ever-evolving beast that began to play more to the strengths of teamwork and skill above simply using the best heroes in the game at that moment in time.

Fast-forward to today. The map is currently at version 6.67c, although it’s been patched literally 6 times since I started writing this. Icefrog still manages it, with numerous retail “clones” that copy the style to varying degrees.

In DotA, the objective is destroying “The Ancient” in the opposing teams’ base. Barring this are 3 groups of barracks that produce new units every 30 seconds, called creeps. Over time, more and more units spawn, and their strength increases chronologically as matches progress. Every 2 ½ minutes a siege unit is spawned. Each group of creeps follows a path that leads to an opposing team’s barracks. Along the path there are 3 friendly towers and 3 enemy towers to push through.

The map of DotA. Green = Ancients, Black = Barracks, Blue Lines are the 3 lanes, white are main tributaries through the neutral creeps and yellow and red lines are for hiding/“juking”

The map is roughly symmetrical, although each route has differing nooks and crannies. Think of it like your limbs: they’re basically the same, but you can pick out dozens of differences if you really examine them. The game is typically played in matches of 5v5, although smaller matches can occur (but much less frequently). DotA has many different modes, from “all pick” (anyone can pick any hero, sans duplicate choices), or “all random” (everyone gets a random hero). There’s also random draft, small draft, captain’s draft, mirror match, and short mode. Switching between the different modes, in concert with the 90+ heroes available, keeps everything from growing stale.

DotA:Allstars‘ heroes are largely divided into roughly 3 categories: strength, agility, and intelligence. These are the primary attributes of your hero. Strength heroes are usually tanks, since strength boosts health points. Agility typically goes to the hero killers since agility boosts attack speed and armor. Intelligence mongers are usually casters, since intelligence increases mana points. Of course, you can even further categorize all that into many more divisions, such as stealth, nuke, disabler, support, pusher, ganker etc. Heroes may have melee or ranged attacks (possibly both), and may learn 4 skills or invest in stat points as they level up.

Early game is a lot of jockeying for position. You’ll want to keep moving, and choose your attacks carefully, and go for those denies (Find the exclamation point in screenshot).

One of the most unique parts of DotA is that actively pushing forward in the early game is discouraged. Not following this tactic leaves you open to ganks – when enemy heroes surprise you, killing your own hero off for some valuable money and experience. This is where “denying” comes into play. “Denying” entails killing your own units to slow your advance, and thus “denying” the enemy heroes experience and gold.

A solid mid-game gank, bolstered by a little luck. Yeah the screen gets cluttered pretty easily.

Successfully denying is tricky, but really just comes down to understanding how to land the killing blow, because you only get gold when you make the lethal strike on a creep. On heroes, any damage dealt before their death will net you some coin for an assist.

But what does all that “DotA-talk” actually mean? It’s not complicated: you really just have to pay attention and be proactive about your clashes with the opposing team.

This is bad. You should not let your barracks be attacked. Ever.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of DotA’s success is that it’s actually spawning retail clones developed by professional studios. The first retail carbon-copy of DotA to land upon our fertile hard drives was Demigod, developed by Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games. The next clone to step up was League of Legends – the brain child of Allstars’ creator Steve “Guinsoo” Feak, developed at Riot Games. It’s free to play, with the option to purchase the ability to play a hero whenever you want. Perhaps the largest of the bunch is Heroes of Newerth, created by S2 games, best known for their Savage series. Last to the party is Icefrog’s unannounced game in development at Valve.

Demigod kept the idea of teams facing each other, but focused intensely on balance and highly strategic team play. With only 8 demigods available at launch, it’s added a few more as well as a veritable plethora of maps to choose from. It didn’t leave the docks well: at launch, Demigod was unplayable in anything past 3v3 due to networking issues and a general failure of the player base to actually play the game online.

“Abstract floating battlefields and godly figures battling over… something? Well its gotta be important, why else would they have built floating battlefields?”

The general lack of acumen required to play Demigod, in comparison to DotA, likely hurt the game’s re-playability (there’s no denying, most of Demigod’s skills don’t require predictive movements, and the maps are at best simplistic). It nevertheless had surprisingly decent consumption numbers. It broke 100,000 sales, and landed at #3 in NPD’s figures for April 12-18^th in 2009. Demigod revealed that the DotA audience was out there, waiting to throw their precious cash at DotA titles whenever the games materialized from the mists of the developer’s mountains.

While initial impressions might give the illusion that League of Legends is merely a straight DotA xerox, the game plays more like a logical branching point from the roots of DotA, with every hero—or champion, as they’re dubbed here—serving a few vital roles. League of Legends‘ careful, strategic, and skilled use of champions has produced a game that, while obvious in its connection to DotA, truly is a unique entry. A large number of the skills require good timing and precision to have an impact on battles, and teamwork is paramount to success. They also added matchmaking, increasing frustration among much of the player-base due the system often building lopsided teams. Riot also greatly simplified the item purchasing system to make it far easier to understand for new players.

I don’t even know what’s going on here, and I was playing the game at the time. League of Legends is just like DotA in that regard.

Heroes of Newerth is DotA. You can’t get around it – it’s a direct rip-off. The items are identical (barring name changes), the heroes are mostly exact copies (again barring name changes and the occasional slight skill alteration), and the map is a perfect replica of DotA’s. That said, the game adds a much-needed back-end that DotA lacks. Built-in stat tracking, reconnecting if you lose your data line, built in voice chat, and updated graphics (with true wide-screen support). If all you want is a contemporary DotA, then Heroes of Newerth is perfect, because it’s just that. Not surprisingly, because of this, Newerth appears the current heir-apparent to the original DotA, with at least 45,000 players online at anytime in its existing beta status.

And Icefrog’s project? All we know is that he’s got a dev team at Valve and he’s working on something that DotA fans will “allegedly” enjoy. That’s all, and given that it’s Valve, I doubt we’ll be hearing anything else until they’ve got something to show us.

So that’s it, everything you never wanted to know about DotA and its ilk. Now get it there and try it; you’ll only get insulted out of every match and berated for your every action in those you don’t.

A fantasy realm steeped with history and lore, Antaloor is torn between the so-called civilized races and the savage hordes. Most notably, the animosity between the humans and orcs is longstanding and legendary. It is the existence known to all those of Antaloor; it is the way, the reality, and the life of the Two Worlds RPG series. Approaching their release of the second title in the series, Two Worlds II, the developers at TopWare Interactive seek to fully enhance all aspects of the RPG sequel so that the game not only eclipses the merits and missteps of the original title, but also revitalizes their vision of Antaloor through a more proper epic fantasy tale. During a developer-controlled demo at PAX East, representatives from TopWare explained and showed just how Two Worlds II will meet their ambitious goals.

Set about five years after the events of the first game, Two Worlds II essentially rebalances much of what was already in strife in its predecessor and largely starts anew. While even RPG fans can’t deny the stark criticisms against the first game, many will thus find a new ray of hope in Two Worlds II. Gandohar, the primary villain of the original game, has imprisoned both the hero of the series (named whatever the player calls him) and the hero’s sister. The introduction, however, depicts a highly strange turn of events: a group of orcs come to save the player’s human character, and the player then follows, even stranger still, a sexy female orc assassin named Dar Pha to freedom. In a way, both the odd nobility of orcs and the hero’s path to freedom signify redemption: a way for Two Worlds II to redeem the faults of the predecessor and hopefully write a bright new RPG future for the player’s character.

The large overworld will make way for plenty of exploration.

From the game’s outset and throughout its adventure, not only will the player customize his character’s physical appearance, but also the intricate detail and artistic design of much of the armor will always make the hero look badass. Meanwhile, an enhanced version of the “classless” advancement system, one of the strongest features of Two Worlds, places a fresh twist on traditional RPG classes, such magic users, warriors, etc. Instead of dedicating the character to a single class with a focus on skills, the player will assign points, when his character increases in level, to any of the various skill sets and thus create unique hybrids or mixtures of the traditional RPG classes. The unique character advancement of Two Worlds II grants the player great control over his character’s growth in ways largely unexplored by most RPGs, and includes the option to re-spec if necessary.

The deep customization options in Two Worlds II allow the player yet more options to meticulously tailor his equipment. The player, through an enhanced version of the interesting item crafting system of the first game, can break down old, weaker equipment into their base elements (steel, leather, wool, etc.), which allows him to upgrade his current equipment in a much faster and efficient way than traditional RPGs’ method of selling armor to buy new armor. If there’s a certain piece of equipment the player likes, the item crafting system allows the player to continuously upgrade the item so that it can stay useful to the player for a long time. With the armor, the player will also have the very intuitive option to prepare up to three different armor sets that he can switch between on-the-fly for different combat situations, such as long-range fighting, close combat, and magic combat.

Antaloor hosts both pleasing vistas and untold dangers.

The card-based magic system even further empowers the player to customize his character right down to how exactly the character’s magic looks and functions. From a base spell card, the player can effectively mold any given spell to his liking using additional modification cards that he can find during quests and raids. The player can, for example, have a basic fireball spell; add multiplier, seeking, and ricochet cards; and create spell that shoots three fireballs that ricochet off the environment and seek an enemy target. On top of all the intra-spell customization, spells can stack together, so the player, in effect, could shoot fireballs that create small, localized lightning storms. The magic system reflects an incredible amount of flexibility alone, and entails an exceptional amount of freedom for the player to play precisely how he wants.

As the player progresses his character’s growth and goes through quests, he will explore Two Worlds II’s vast, detailed depiction of Anataloor. The graphics engine makes use of advances lighting, textures, and physics effects to create complex environments, and the developers, furthermore, have fully utilized the engine to illustrate beautiful, artistic cities and landscapes. Even with areas that return from the first game, such as the Asian-themed Ashos, the developers have added much more vibrancy and style. The world reflects influences from locales like Asia, the Middle-East, Persia, and Egypt that all present thematic feels that starkly differ from the traditional fantasy RPG castles and dungeons.

With cities that look this nice, you’ll never want to leave.

In addition, Two Worlds II takes particular advantage of the PC platform: it has support for DirectX 10, with graphical improvements over its DirectX 9 mode, and even Nvidia PhysX, which supplements the detail and provides more accurate physics simulations. As Devon Smith, Narrative Director at TopWare, explained in my follow-up interview after the demo, “As a PC gamer, you should be very comfortable”; the developers produced PC titles in the past, and have made sure to optimize the graphics, controls, and menu interface for the PC.

Throughout the player’s exploration and combat situations, Two Worlds II will frame the gameplay with a main storyline and side quests. For those who appreciate directed and choreographed fantasy story moments, the narrative offers 80 to 90 minutes of scripted cut-scenes, most of which the game renders in real time, while a few minutes of CGI scenes serve as bookends for the story. Other story moments come through fully interactive, more immersive scenes where the player can move his character and choose between dialogue options. “I think what’s cool about our conversation system,” said Devon, “is it’s not like there’s a red option that’s bad, there’s a blue option that’s good, and they’re not always in the same places. So, we’re kind of forcing you to read a little bit. At the same time, with all the choices in our game…the hero [becomes] you.”

Customize again and again, and enemies won’t even keep up.

All told, the narrative combines several different types for diverse storytelling effects, such as the books with varying amounts of text that present backstory and possible side quests. As the game’s PR Director, Jake DiGennaro, described it during the demo, “With a game of this size, this magnitude, this scope, and this genre, it’s an interesting challenge to try to find a balance between people that want a crazy, in-depth, super detailed, hardcore RPG and people that are interested in the genre but don’t want to have to plug away and feel like things are kind of a chore.” The various storytelling methods potentially accommodate various players’ tastes, and will resolve together to produce the overall storytelling experience.

Altogether, Two Worlds II will hold the player through a grand RPG single player storyline, and the 2-8 player multiplayer options further supplement the game: the PvP arenas make a return from the first game while the new 5-8 hour co-op campaign provides a separate story that takes place in between the original title and the sequel. By far the most remarkable aspect of the whole experiences stems from the sheer amount of customization available to the player to dramatically control his experience. As a result of its rich story and world and its empowerment of the player, Two World II promises RPG exploits that’ll not only far surpass those of the first game, but potentially could stand alongside the fantasy RPG notables. While the game has no set release date, the game should release sometime in the third quarter of 2010.

Back when it released in 2003, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time became a memorable game that made a tremendous impact on all 3D platformers to come. The classic title’s unforgettable elements clearly provided a strong foundation for platformers up to and including Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia 2008 reboot, despite the fact that the reboot made over the hero’s, the Prince’s, acrobatic platforming and noticeably removed its predecessor’s time-control abilities.

With Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Ubisoft shows that they still have some magic sand left to go back in time to the series’ fond platforming roots. The very title itself seems telling, as if it’s Ubisoft’s admission that leaving The Sands of Time behind was a mistake they now intend to correct. While there’s certainly a place for the 2008 reboot’s new storyline with a new Prince, original take on a magical Persia, and differing style of platforming, I’m thankful that Ubisoft hasn’t truly forgotten The Sands of Time’s story and its two sequels, its beautiful Arabian Nights aesthetic, its unique narrative use of the protagonist Prince’s whimsical self-narration, the masterful mixture of puzzle solving, platforming, and combat, and most of all its innovative time rewind powers.

The playable demo on the PAX show floor and the developer-guided live demo shown during Ubisoft’s panel show how The Forgotten Sands definitely reenters the enchanted world of The Sands of Time with the full force of an “ocean in a storm.” In fact, Michael McIntyre, the game’s Level Design Director, outlined how much he loved The Sands of Time as his first point in the panel, and then discussed how The Forgotten Sands is a direct follow-up to the original. Set between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, the game tells a tale of when the Prince seeks to aid his brother Malik, whose kingdom lies under siege.

The playable demo’s tutorial level illustrates the Prince’s traversal of the city’s walls while he fights enemies that block his path to his brother. When the Prince makes his iconic wallruns on the city’s outer walls to get past small gaps in the path, I thought it felt exactly right. He doesn’t automatically wallrun like he does in the 2008 remake; the player has to time his jump correctly and then hold that wallrun button down, just as he should.

And he hasn’t even gotten to the magic yet.

In between the Prince’s smoothly animated leaps, swings from poles, and spelunking along ledges, the great volleys of arrows fly at the Prince and the vast number of warriors battling in the background complete an effect of a grand conflict. The game uses the Anvil engine in combination with a colorful art style to render expansive, beautiful vistas that look like a cross between the 2008 Prince of Persia and the Assassin’s Creed games (all of which also run on Anvil). “Very reminiscent of Sands of Time,” McIntyre said during the live demo, “it has real realism to it, but also just a hint of an Arabian Nights kind of fantasy twist.”

Siege towers ram into the wall and give the hero trouble. Appropriately enough given the game’s “place” in the series, the combat falls in between the simple swordfights of The Sands of Time and the complex, combo-heavy slashing of Warrior Within. In addition to the familiar normal slices and the graceful aerial slashes, the Prince can now charge up his attacks for stronger swipes. He can also knock foes down now, whereby he’ll perform an elaborate, contextual finishing move when enemies are on the ground or near walls.

Jan-Erik Sjovall, the game’s Animation Director, also made the Prince perform a single maneuver during Ubisoft’s live demo that looked very much like quick counterattack. Whether the combat has it or not, a good counterattack system has always been essential to Prince of Persia’s battles, so I’m anxious to see how the combat works in the full game.

The familiar moves feel like the Prince never left.

Finally, the Prince finds his brother, who, in spite of the Prince’s warnings, desperately decides to unleash an ancient Sand Army to further help his cause. Inevitably, things turn dramatically awry, as the army soon turns all of the city’s citizens into sand statues. The second half of the playable demo, as well as the developers’ live demo, takes place during the event’s aftermath, in which Malik and the Prince fight the new Sand Army threat in an attempt to recapture the city.

During the playable demo’s later game levels, the Prince has gained some more advanced platforming, combat abilities, and the vital rewind time power. As McIntyre explained, the kingdom stands on an oasis that Malik uses to adorn his city with an extravagant system of decorative waterfalls and water spouts, which is probably why the game uses energy orbs for regaining health in lieu of drinking water since the abundance of water understandably would make the game too easy. The Prince can take advantage of the water system using his newfound elemental ability to “freeze” the water, like stopping time for only the water and nothing but. Using the ability, the player can temporarily turn waterfalls into a makeshift walls, which the Prince can wallrun or climb, and solidify spouts into poles, on which the Prince can swing across gaps.

The water freeze ability adds a surprising amount of depth, complexity, and even puzzle-solving to the platforming; for example, the player will need to freeze a spout to swing, strategically unfreeze while he jumps through a waterfall, quickly freeze again to land on the next water pole, only to jump back to and off the now solidified waterfall to reach the next area. After relatively easy 2008 remake, I never would’ve thought that Ubisoft would ever again make platforming as complex as it was in the older Prince of Persia games, but they certainly did for The Forgotten Sands.

The water “freezing” allows Ubisoft to do fresh things with traditional platforming.

In combat, the Prince can use the Sands of Time to power special elemental attacks. The earth power partially surrounds him in rock armor that makes him impervious for a short time and strengthens his attacks. The ice power sends chilly waves from his sword to damage enemies from afar. And the wind power creates a massive, cool-looking whirlwind around the Prince to send foes flying and swirling. The developers’ demo also showcased a sort of homing attack, which the Prince can use to charge at enemies and thereby make his way across large gaps. Indeed the hero has a large repertoire of moves at his disposal, and he’ll need them when the game doles out a daunting encounter with dozens of sand warriors.

At the crux of all the gameplay lies the welcome return of the time rewind powers. The Prince will have no need for a magical girl to save him like his 2008 counterpart; he has the Sands, which the player can use at will, provided he has enough, to correct any platforming or combat mishap. With the complex platforming and sheer number of enemies, the rewind power will undoubtedly become essential to the Prince’s adventure.

As soon as I heard the Prince’s lighthearted, humorous remark right after Malik released the Sand Army (“A sandstorm? Well, it’s probably just a coincidence.”), I knew that The Forgotten Sands shows great promise to recapture the spirit of The Sands of Time. From the Prince’s voice, too, I could easily recognize that Yuri Lowenthal has contributed his talents as he once again reprises his princely role. Both the playable demo and the developers’ live demo greatly increased my anticipation for The Forgotten Sands, and I can’t wait for its impending release in May.

Sitting in the Main Theatre at PAX East on Friday, I knew something important was coming to the gaming world. I was at the very cusp of Nvidia’s official launch of their Fermi platform, which consists of their flagship card, the GTX480, and its little brother, the GTX 470. Needless to say, it was a great day for video games.

The expansive theater was filled to the brim with PAX-goers excited about the event. The fact soon dawned on me: these folks weren’t ordinary gamers anticipating any ordinary release. The hundreds of people in attendance all came to see a graphics card, a piece of hardware alone, launch; they can be none other than PC gamers, the very finest stock of enthusiasts. The launch of the card and the impressive PC gamer turnout are why Gordon Van Dyke, an EA guest speaker later on in the panel, says he laughs whenever hears the claim that “PC Gaming is dead.” On the contrary, the launch of the GTX 480 marks not just a great day, but the fantastic rest of PC gaming’s long life yet to come.

Drew Henry, General Manager of the Geforce team at Nvidia, hosted the launch and led the charge in the name of PC gaming. He held up Nvidia’s next generation, the GTX 480 card that will assuredly lie at the heart of PCs as it pumps out the life blood that is frames per second. Even though there was no motherboard, no CPU, no case, and no actual PC attached to the card that rested in Drew’s hand, I could tell right away that the GTX 480 fit Nvidia’s long-standing graphics philosophy: that of bigger, better, and more power. With its massive PCB, four large heat pipes, and nearly brick-sized dual-slot heatsink and fan, the GTX 480 considerably dwarfed the man’s puny hands.

1 million particles, in full PhysX and 3D, is a sight to behold.

Nvidia’s take on the graphics card isn’t one I’m personally comfortable with, as I prefer GPUs that still perform amazingly well despite their focus on power efficiency. Nevertheless, I respect Nvidia’s perspective behind their powerful behemoth cards: as Henry said, the company wants gamers to “Crank that shit up.” The GTX 400 series grants gamers that power.

The GTX 480 is, in Henry’s words, after all “The top-of-the-line, hands-down, fastest GPU we’ve ever built, the best GPU we’ve ever built, and, as well, the fastest GPU on the planet.” The GTX 470, meanwhile, maintains fantastic gaming performance despite its lower price tag. The specs Henry outlined back up his claims: the 480 has a daunting 3 billion transistors, 480 GPU cores, and a 1.5 GB frame buffer while the 470 has 448 cores and a 1.2 GB frame buffer. The performance charts he showed back up claims as well: compared to the last generation’s 285, the 480 offers a range of 1.5 to 2 times the frames-per-second performance across the board of the games shown (Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Hawx, Just Cause 2, Left 4 Dead, Need for Speed: Shift, Metro 2033, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2).

While fancy numbers and colorful performance charts are nice, the real-time game demos made the biggest impression. Starting with a demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Henry and EA’s Van Dyke demonstrated the 3D capabilities of the 480. Gaming in 3D, however, isn’t anything new, and Nvidia has supported their 3D Vision feature for quite some time already. “You know what?” said Henry, “I don’t think that quite looks good enough. I think we got to crank that shit up!” At that moment, the display turned on 3D Vision Surround, displaying an immersive, ridiculously wide, high-resolution 3D gameplay without any noticeable slowdowns. At the time, the 3D did look somewhat cool, but for whatever reason—my horrible viewing angle or the cheap, Avatar-style polarized 3D glasses—I also saw a considerable amount of image doubling.

Raytracing makes the most photorealistic cars in gaming ever.

Although the 3D also didn’t work well in any of the other demos, namely World of Warcraft, Need for Speed: Shift, Metro 2033, and Nvidia’s special Super Sonic Sled showcase, I did get the full 3D effect during my hands-on time with GTX 480-powered games on the PAX show floor. Utilizing the more expensive shutter 3D glasses, the 3D in the show floor demos looked pristine and perfect, and the 3D Vision Surround demos looked even more captivating. None of the games made use of any foreground depth, or “pop-out” of the screen, yet the realistic 3D depth looked incredible nonetheless.

I especially liked the Super Sonic Sled demo, where a man strapped to a giant rocket boosts along a rail track. Even though it technically isn’t a real game, it shows the potential capability of the GTX 480: the demo has the card run 3D, DirectX 11 with tessellation, and PhysX all at the same time. I “cranked that shit up” and dialed the particles on the track’s bridge to an extraordinary 1 million particles. As soon as the rocket blew across and destroyed the bridge, I paused the game, zoomed and panned around the bridge in mid-collapse, and marveled at the sight of 1 million particles rendered in full 3D.

The Need for Speed: Shift demo looked just as impressive. Specially modified for the GTX 400 series, the demo showcased, for the first time ever, full, interactive raytracing. While the lack of in-motion racing gameplay is an important note here, I could still pan the camera around the cars and witness how the raytracing dynamically renders highly accurate reflections of the surroundings on the cars’ shiny bodies.

If the ability to run 3D, DX 11, PhysX, and even the potential for raytracing all at great performance and high resolutions appeals to you, the GTX 400 series cards will serve you well. Furthermore, both the Super Sonic Sled and the Need for Speed: Shift raytracing demo will come free with every GTX 480 and 470, and will allow you play with the card’s new features right away. While Friday, March 26th was the “official” release for the 400 series, the cards won’t hit retail for another 14 days.

Man, I just don’t know anymore. There are so many PC games being released – is it even worth it to play the free ones? Surely they’re not as good as the $50 triple-A blockbusters!

Oh, sorry, that was my dog typing. Bad Snoopy! Of course free games are worth it. On an economic level, I’m pretty sure free makes it worth it on that aspect alone. But based on time? That’s my job! Here’s a list of some great free games to keep you occupied.

I don’t know about you, but Wolfenstein 3D was one of the earliest PC games I ever played – I marched through the game’s first episode so many times that I could probably map out the levels in snow with my pee, blindfolded. Voxelstein 3D is more of a tech demo than a game. Really, it’s a “remake” of Wolf3D using the technique of voxel graphics. It adds a unique look to the game, despite its short length. Nevertheless, it’s fun to play through just to admire the work put into it.

Speaking of Wolfenstein, here’s 8bit Killer. Imagine playing Wolf3D on a Nintendo Entertainment System. That’s what this is. It’s an FPS much along the lines as any old school PC shooter, but put into a console. There’s really no other way to describe it. If you know the old Sega Genesis game Zero Tolerance, this is a game akin to that. Also, the soundtrack is absolutely stellar. The tracks will easily stick themselves into your brain and never stop repeating.

Queue

Play

Queue borders on the definition of what one can call a game. Instead of being there as entertainment, Queue’s mission is to tell a message. It’s definitely what certain critics would call an “art game.” It tells a story through text with very little interaction (press a button to start). It may seem a little tedious at first, but the story gets intriguing with its surreal presentation. Take thirty minutes of your time for some soul food.

Keenan: That day was exciting. The amount of support the community showed by turning out to our Ventrilo server was staggering. And we’re still blown away by how loyal our readers are. We may not be the biggest PC gaming site (yet), but we surely have the best community around. I can’t imagine it getting any better than ours.

Chris: And the community’s really the stalwart foundation to the house of Game Central. Without you guys, without the strong supporting structure, we’d be back to the blueprint stages. But that’s not to say we’re done planning. Far from it! As stands, our proposed skyscraper’s got a handful of noteworthy floors framed, dry-walled, and painted. Only place to go is up! We’re looking to reinforce our existing analysis and coverage with more indie game exposure, more talented writers (including the addition of select monthly columnists), and more overall steady content. Plus, coming soon, we’re revamping the look and feel of the site’s layout with some serious ocular-sweetness. Consistent improvement isn’t just a vague semi-spoken concept here at Game Central, it’s an axiom.

Keenan: To hit more specifically onto what Chris is talking about… in the overall perspective of things, we aim to become something more than what is the norm in Internet-based games journalism. Rather than being the site constantly updating with the everyday-happenings of the ever-changing industry, Game Central takes a step back and looks at the big picture, assessing from there. In the end, we hope to have more concise and level-headed view on things, all the while promoting a good time.

Chris: Exactly. And we approach our published works as a think-tank collaborative process. There’s an unfortunate (but mostly accurate) stigma of sloppiness and lack of management that hovers over a majority of the gaming websites out there. From a gooey embryonic state, we’ve sought to attack this entrenched and insidious fallacy. At Game Central, there’s a distinct chain of command when it comes to the acceptance and editing of a given article. Often, a narrative piece will run the pointy-thorned-gauntlet of 3 or 4 staff reviews prior to going live. We’ve also recently implemented a semi-regular group examination of an article’s initial draft, where we tease out fresh ideas and brainstorm certain highlighted points. Have we popped a few boners here and there? Sure- we ain’t perfect. But it’s the pursuit of perfection that fuels our editorial desires. There’s no reason an online organization’s copy-edit process should appear inferior to its print-based counterparts. That’s just plumb stupidness.

Keenan: Last year was the warm-up for us; to get the wheels going- to get a feel of the racetrack. This year we hope to expand our repertoire on a much larger scale. We’ll be interviewing the biggest names in the biz, and the no-name bedroom programmers hoping to change the face of gaming. Our podcast will undergo changes to make it worth your ears each week. We’re in the process of redesigning the site (don’t worry, it’s not a complete makeover) to suit the advances made in web design the past year. And we’ll be putting assets back into the video portion of the site- we’re hoping to bring unique video content regularly.

Chris: The video production sphere is a sumptuous target, and one we aim to bull’s-eye. The all-encompassing plan of attack, site-wide, is a continued and ardent adherence to our core values and recently updated mission statement. To reiterate our stances: we seek to deconstruct, hypothesize, and report upon the pure fabulous spirit that’s the PC gaming specimen, all while entertaining with an easy to consume editorial demeanor and atmosphere. To coin a phrase once reviled as a young ‘un: it should be fun to learn (sort of like the Civilization series, but sadly- minus Leonard Nimoy’s ambient commentary). And at the calculated risk of functioning as a looped commentary track, we pride ourselves as gamers first, with a devout passion and platform second. Consequently, GC is all-volunteer, just as we think it should be. Of course, PayPal-ing us a cool million wouldn’t be totally objectionable…

Keenan: With all this said, we are in need of people to help us. There’s only so much a handful can do alone. So if you’re a writer, a podcaster, a video producer- anything that you think would help us- then feel free and contact us. We can’t let everyone on the staff; we need some level of organization. But go ahead and submit your talent resume to us—it doesn’t have to be an actual resume; we hate those things—and we’ll have a look-see to determine if you’re right for us. But again, remember, this is not for pay- this is out of pure passion for PC gaming.

Chris: As Keenan intuits: all talents are useful talents. Aside from the editorial sector, we also need some dedicated folks to run the important behind-the-scenes tasks that keep the fires burning strong (business development, graphic design, coding, Chris’s flip-flops’ shiner-upper, etc.). For me personally, Game Central has provided a wonderful stage to showcase my imagination and creativity, all the while introducing me to some great like-minded PC gaming folks. I don’t know where I’d be today without it. We hope you enjoy the years to follow, and we’d love to hear your feedback on the site so far. In the mean time, break out the crystal, pop some bubbly, and throw back a few swigs. It’s you—the readers and community—that have made Game Central so successful and enjoyable. My hat goes off to you, good sirs and madams! Your enthusiasm and support are the turbines to our proverbial airplane; cheers!

Keenan: This year is going to be an exciting one for PC gaming- why not spend it with us? Let the good times roll!

PC gamers have habitats. Riding the wings of our aviary brethren, we attentively plan, assemble, and maintain our nests to the archetypal stature they so well deserve. To where will we end without this constant care? The answer is simple: console-dom. The norm is not of meticulous appreciation on the other side of this fictitious gaming fence; to them, a gaming environment is not something to be crafted out of love, versatility, and personality. PC gamers require these characteristics listed to survive. For those uninitiated to the realm of PC gaming or those seeking advice, this article will dish out the do’s and don’ts for a proper gaming home.

Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten who said,
“If you label me, you negate me?”

Starting

The first task is asking yourself what kind of gamer you truly are. Are you a weekend warrior? Do you play one game exclusively? How much do you play on a weekly basis? It’s these questions that will be the groundwork for which you build your habitat. For convenience sake, here’s a small laundry list to get you started:

• Are you comfortable gaming naked?
• What does your food and beverage diet consist of?
• Do you prefer Quake or Unreal? (Studies show those that prefer the former are generally better gamers and human beings.)

There’s no mandatory or established set of questions that one has to ask when preparing their gaming place, but don’t fret – you can ask yourself pretty much any query that comes to mind. It’s really not that important. However, it is imperative to ask enough of these questions to know yourself. We can’t have PC gamers that don’t know themselves; you might as well jump the fence at that point.

Assembling

Now that you’re all zenned up, it’s time to begin the process of gathering the materials that will make up your gaming kingdom. The following tips will be incredibly helpful in beginning to construct a proper PC gaming environment.

This should be a given. If you don’t have a decent computer, you won’t have as great an experience as you ought to. Throughout the entire history of PC gaming, this is the best time ever to become  one of its practitioners. Prices are affordable, the range of choice is vast, and, in the end, it’s cheaper than console gaming. For your place to prosper, you’ll need the hardware to suit you; mice, keyboards, graphics cards, everything. No idea where to start? No problem! Check out the all-inclusive guide on Game Central’s hardware forum. Moving on.

Perhaps the single-most important piece of equipment in creating a prolific PC gaming place is the desk upon which you game. It’s the heart, the soul, and the mother lode as it were, in the PC gamer-sphere. If the desk were a member in society, it would be the leader, the philosopher, and the law enforcer. As the first building block to a habitat, you must invest a large majority of your time in the choosing of your cherished desk. Take this quote by Confucius, “If the bedrock where you build your disposition is dry, you can fuck shit up.”

Do not get a desk like the above pictured. It’s my desk in my apartment at school. As you can tell by the picture, the design of the desk doesn’t allow for any form of comfort, nor is it designed for anything besides academic activities. If you’re a gamer pursuing scholarly studies, I heartily recommend either not living on campus or burning the desk and getting a proper gaming one. (For God’s sakes, do not actually burn your college desk. -Chris)

The strongest things to look for when on the prowl for a serviceable gaming platform are the following:

• A nice and even surface.
  • It is essential to have your mouse and keyboard on the same level.
• Lots o’ space.
  • Just as a first-aid kit in the bathroom, quick and easy access to the map of Ferelden can mean life or death.
• A color that doesn’t resemble excrement. Unless that’s what you feel your personality suits.
  • Included are brown, bright red, green, and canary yellow.

Take your decision seriously, as the choosing of the desk is one that will ferment throughout your gaming life. Treat it with care, even when playing me in Quake Live, as it is very fragile.

The yang to the yin: the gluteus maximus rest-us device. Like the desk, the chair can make all the difference in the overall enjoyment of the hobby. Not effectively choosing a proper chair could result in the worst physical conditions possible, including notredameism, elephantmanism, and hangnails.

Let’s take a look at my chair.

Do not get a chair like the the above pictured. It’s the bane of my gaming existence; quite frankly, it makes me a horrible human being. The only real upside to it is how I can rock back and forth, like an old grandma. That’s probably who this chair was made for.

Now, let’s see how we can improve upon this. First and most importantly, all chairs that one should even consider for a gaming habitat must have arm rests. If you’re going to hunker over a keyboard and mouse for long periods of time (it’s safe to assume PC gamers will be doing this), a place to keep your upper appendages relaxed for such a job is vital. The only way I survive is pulling out the keyboard tray from underneath the main surface and awkwardly holding my arms in a Thriller zombie-like pose. Like this:

This is uncomfortable.

Kill me.

A chair with the ability to change its height is also  convenient. Sometimes you might like to sit higher, as the commander in Command & Conquer 4 would, and other times you’d want to sit lower, like when playing an MMO, to achieve maximum laziness. Another thing to keep in mind is the sitter’s actual material. It all comes down to personal preferences for this – but allow me to make some suggestions. There is absolutely no reason to own a chair made of leather, unless you have a back sweat fetish when gaming hardcore in mid-summer evenings. This uncomfortability is on the same level as sans-arm rests. I highly recommend chairs made of the crap that car seats are made of. Not leather, the fabric stuff. It’s not too soft, nor too hard – a nice moderation of the two. Actually, kind of like what my chair is…

This is an encapsulation of a large number of elements in the habitat. By the term “environment,” I’m referring not just to the room and space on earth where you play, but the status and materials within that realm. If you’re gaming in a closet, you’re gonna have some problems. Some essential considerations and crucial items: quick access to food/a toilet, your games, room temperature, various hand tools, clothes, etc. For the ideal PC gaming home, access to all of the aforementioned items (and many others) are highly important.

Just as with the introductory questions, the environmental factors are all subjective, but it should be no surprise that a lot of them are common throughout the entire PC gamer world. To illustrate some of these, see the images below.

This is the customization stage. Everything involving your experiential involvement with your computer falls under this category. How you place your hardware, your monitor settings, your overclocking, among others. This is the job of the technician and the computer specialist.

Lights on.

Lights off.

Comfort is the main focus of sensational change. This means adjusting your habitat according to your body’s needs and desires, based on your perceptual experience. Maybe you like the smell of Febreze© penetrating through your nostrils. Or you game whilst wearing shorts and a ballcap. Perhaps you like the temperature at a pleasant 68 degrees Fahrenheit at all times. For me, I like no lights. The less light, the more immersive a game, and thus the better an experience.

A fact of this life is the need to satisfy ourselves – not just desires, but bodily, socially, and others. To be an effective PC gamer, cutting down a handful of those processes without leaving one’s zone is the ideal approach. Here are several examples.

Pepsii & Hot Pockets.

Pringles & Mountain Dews.

Food. Food is good. As are consumable liquids for hydration fulfillment. Yet again for PC gamers, it’s down to preference, but the selections illustrated are my preferences. Finding the perfect product for optimal price and the one that causes the least bathroom breaks are recommended.

Books, games, computers.

Wallets, tissues, keys.

Having a stash of things either to replace or do aside from the activities within the gamersphere are necessities. These can be books, magazines, albums – maybe even another person. Just something for the “just in case” scenario. Highlighted on the right is a PC gamer’s requirement: tissues.

Finishing

With all of this in mind, I hope you go about creating yourself the best place to practice your favorite hobby. While indeed gaming is the most exciting and ever-changing hobby around, I hope these foundational bases continue to help you throughout the progression of PC gaming.

Of course, all of this can change when you migrate.

You may have heard about a beta that finally arrived. South Korea certainly did, much to their GNP’s dismay. Seriously people, it’s bigger than the second coming of Christ, or of the Giant Spaghetti Monster, if you float that way. It’s StarCraft II’s beta! But that doesn’t change that what lays before us is merely just StarCraft all over again.

That’s right folks, it’s StarCraft, so get over it. I see the “two” strapped to it, but if the beta is any indicator, the multiplayer remains firmly stuck in the original’s mindset. This is simultaneously great and horrible depending upon your stance. Now, I’m sure the singleplayer will have a wonderful and compellingly satisfactory narrative that’ll make the game a worthwhile investment for those who don’t give a damn about RTS multiplayer shenanigans, but for our purposes, this article is concerned entirely with the multiplayer portion of StarCraft II, as seen via the beta.

So StarCraft now with a “two,” is it a worthy multiplayer sequel? Does it deserve to exist? I suppose so, there’s an audience of millions who want it, and to them it delivers, but to everyone else? Well it’s a cold hard slap in the face. Oh sure – you can go on and say how it’s gone and given itself a wonderful new graphics engine, shiny physics and polygons with those oh-so-spiffy textures. That’s right: polygons in StarCraft, who’da thunk it?! And the new units! There are dozens of them, and clearly these units show how it’s more than your 13 year-old self’s StarCraft of 1998. But it is.

How? Well, the game focuses on the same areas of skill that StarCraft did – macro-management of an economy and knowing effective unit counters, all whilst micromanaging combat and scouting. All at the same time. Bow before the glorious APM (Actions Per Minute), and you’ll find your victor.

Giant air battles are all about huddling your units up into a ball. Just like in the original!

There is no streamlining for easy economy management, no auto-casting of your special abilities, no perma-unit build commands. Everything in StarCraft II is a deliberate action that you need to guide. Units under fire? There’s no auto-retreat or take cover command. If you were scouting or ordering your SCVs for some more starports, those units are already dead. The game is unrelenting and any mistake will cost you. Usually the game. But that’s StarCraft.

But there’s more! The launch of StarCraft II heralds the rebirth of Battle.net. And it’s perhaps Battle.net that showcases more changes to the game than anything in the game itself. For one, you have an online matchmaking system that simply works. That’s right – you click “Find Match” and within 30 seconds, you’re there. No fiddling with ports, no quibbling over routers and internet access, no checking your packets, it just functions.

I’ve utterly abandoned most recent RTS games simply because I can’t get into a match quickly. Waiting 20 minutes just to start playing a game is balls. Battle.net also added a lovely tournament system—divided into skill based divisions—which is a brilliant step forward to getting players of similar skill in a single match. These additions produce personal bouts of loud clapping; more titles need to make multiplayer components work, especially RTS games. Tragically, however, the matchmaking and ranking system appears to be the extent of innovation for StarCraft II.

Ahh resource raiding, it worked before, it works even better now!

I wouldn’t be bothered by an identical-nature of a sequel if it wasn’t for the huge strides that competitive RTS games have made in the time since StarCraft first graced us with its god-like presence. Relic showed us with Company of Heroes and Dawn of War how to end the turtling, how to get us to actively use our units to think about strategies for combat rather than merely worrying about our build orders and optimized economies.

Relic even went so far as to make combat units as tools for acquiring resources. And it’s not as though Blizzard showed us they weren’t afraid to mix it up with Warcraft III. Maybe that’s their desire – experiment with Warcraft, and then keep those legions of StarCraft fanatics happy with the exact same game as always. Perhaps that’s the root. The original StarCraft remains a top played RTS even now, hence the sequel should appeal to existing player-base. Right? So why are they even making a follow-up if so many people remain content to play the original? As for me, that goes to an entirely different place than where I want to end up.

So there you have it. StarCraft II is merely StarCraft. With a “two.” I assumed that after 12 years and numerous innovative additions to the RTS multiplayer genre, that maybe StarCraft II would take us in a new and compelling direction. Instead, the gameplay is ripped straight from the original. Which I’m not saying is bad; StarCraft is a good game.

But I do wonder why it took Blizzard over a decade to copy their own game. What Blizzard usually does best is collate ideas, toss them in the blender and make a nice gameplay smoothie with all your favorite up-to-date additions. Yet for StarCraft II, it looks like the multiplayer status quo, sadly, reigns supreme.

Imagine the Citadel—a massive superstructure in space—housing the galactic council as well as millions of inhabitants; imagine a horde of armor-clad men and women, charging back and forth throughout the Presidium and the Wards, each individual player sporting a hovering name tag directly above their avatar’s head, harboring all varieties of variations on the name “John Shepard,” the occasional Garrus and Legion, with the inevitable Legolass and several other names that’d make even hardy World of Warcraft veterans blush.

This is the world of the Mass Effect MMO, if ever actualized. Thousands upon thousands of players, scouring the planets and stations for the next kill, the next tidbit of experience, the next security locker filled with ‘uber-leet’ gear.

Bioware, the famed developers of the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age, is no stranger to the MMO market. In fact, their flagship MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, is destined for a Spring 2011 release. Star Wars: The Old Republic is already being hailed as a truly massive MMO, with hundreds of cut scenes, and fully voiced NPC interactions. Bioware pulled out all the stops for their first MMO, and fans of both Bioware and Star Wars are likely salivating.

So would this proposed Mass Effect MMO bleed success? There are valid arguments for and against the notion, with choice problems from Mass Effect cropping up again in its sequel.

The Mass Effect universe is incredibly large, and even if the space proved somehow overly restrictive, it wouldn’t be too difficult to expand. The only limiting factor to an MMO expansion is the amount of writing and voice-over work needed to bring these new planets and areas fully to life. The combat system is already in place in Mass Effect 2, and simple tweaks to the user interface would make for an amazing MMO experience.

Could this become…

As with all Bioware games, the Mass Effect MMO, if released, will be a literary masterpiece, with hundreds of side-quests, story arcs, twists, turns and ‘what the heck?’ moments. This alone would be an incredible draw to an MMO, even from people who don’t necessarily enjoy them. If the Bioware writing team can build on the end of Mass Effect 2 (or 3, which is more likely) and expand the universe into enough for the horde of potential players to enjoy, there’s no reason why it should fail. The Mass Effect setting creates an overall illusion of both grandeur and believability, which is essential for MMOs. Without the grandeur, you lose the sense that actions impact everything around you, which the Mass Effect games mastered. And without the believability— the foundation in science and astronomy, and the interaction of beings with separate motives and needs—a sci-fi MMO will be hard pressed to succeed. Since the Mass Effect setting has both of these, people should flock to this fresh game, as they did in the second installment.

The setting brings other character and story-based possibilities to question. Each species in Mass Effect often has its own ideals and goals (such as the Salarians trying to keep the Krogans in check). This multiplies the number of possible outcomes for a given mission, which will draw the players even further into the game.

And what of joining the Spectres, the pseudo-Jedi defenders of the galaxy? This lofty goal would be an incredible incentive to level up a character. And if the player decides to adopt a less-than-holy protagonist, perhaps they could hook up with Cerberus? The Mass Effect setting is a virtual role-player’s paradise.

While I’ve piled praise upon the laurels of Bioware, I’d be remiss not to consider the negative aspects of the Mass Effect duology. The first game in the series is riddled with problems—long elevator rides, predictable ambushes, painful off-road vehicle trips, and a cringe-worthy inventory system—some of which initially put me off the game entirely. Mass Effect 2 is an improvement on its predecessor, but it still can’t shake its predictability.

An inventory system is vital to an MMO, and doing away with it completely, like Mass Effect 2, is not solving the problem. A working, well thought-out inventory is absolutely required.

…this in the future? Who knows?

The load screens will need to be taken into account as well. Loading screens tend to be the Achilles’ Heel for MMOs that use powerful engines to render their games. If Bioware can figure out a better method to load sections, a Mass Effect MMO will flourish. One can understand the massive amount of data and graphical power needed to run a perpetual Mass Effect server, as well as playing it on a client, but the loading system in Mass Effect 2 fixed this to a certain extent. Glacial lift-rides are already history in the sequel, comically punched home by an instance were Miranda jams a certain lethargic elevator into overdrive.

Predictability, in an MMO, isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Predicting the outcome of a battle or an ambush is obviously advantageous. But over-predictability can prove troublesome, like in Mass Effect 1 and 2, where several waist-high barricades appear as you turn a corner, and you know something’s up. This makes the game as easy as a World of Warcraft player running around killing Kobolds— too expectable, too easy, and inevitably: too boring.

MMOs thrive on having others to fight against. The Horde fights the Alliance, everyone fights each other in Darkfall, and corporations take over corporations in Eve Online. Will Bioware allow players to play as the Geth? Or the Collectors? Or as the Reapers’ minions?

And if the bad guys from Mass Effect 1 and 2 are relegated to enemy NPC duty, how does Bioware create the sense of competition in the MMO version? Rival gangs of Shepards running through the Presidium shooting up the place? Perhaps the Spectres finally decide to clean up Cerberus once and for all? This is a major factor to consider.

Regardless, I’d love to see a Mass Effect MMO, and would probably spend the first three days playing it until I slip into a sugar-crash coma. However, there are a lot of points for Bioware to consider and overcome if they truly intend to embark on such a journey.

Of course, should this ever become a reality, we’ll probably have to wait until after Mass Effect 3, as well as the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s quite possible that the creation of a Mass Effect MMO relies on how well these other games do in their respective areas. If they flourish and prosper, what’s to say a new mix of the two together wouldn’t also work?

Since the earth’s sulfurous noxious beginnings, there’ve been two eternal constants: PC gaming, and the paper-bound wisdom-filled tomes that accompany them. Together, the game and the manual have enjoyed an uninterrupted bout of world domination. But the days of loading up Doom II via a gnarled branch and a satchel of pebbles is over.

While agreeably magnificent services like Steam and Impulse are yanking in the first light of the digital distribution age, the abandonment of physical media in favor of direct desktop-delivered game packages is eroding the once inseparable union of instructive pamphlet to respective gaming title.

Before the royal lines of the king and his tactile queen sail away like Gandalf with the Elves, we thought it fitting to bust open the binoculars, gaze into the past, and review a handful of notable gaming manuals, highlighting the victories, virtues, and vices of each iteration. Extinction may be inevitable, but their memories shall reverberate and echo throughout eternity! Mostly.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Genre/Released: RPG/1994

The Down and Dirty: Ahh, 1994. A blissful time in the history of PC gaming. A time when butchering an entire forest for a single game manual was not only expected, but celebrated. Sure, Bethesda had to relocate 17 indigenous native tribes in South America to clear the wood needed for all the distributed copies, but it was worth it (or so their lawyers say). Inside Arena’s worthy specimen of a lofty document rests 88 thick, glossy pages of tasty informative prose.

Categorical and intricate histories of Argonians, Wood Elves, Nords, Redguards as well as a dissertation-level synopsis of classes and sub-classes—like  Acrobats, Bards, Warriors, and Spellswords—they’re all here for the intake.

From your peripheral vision, you might even mistake the printed weapon tables and armor class bonuses as direct rip-offs from Dungeons & Dragons. But as the saying goes, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In this case, The Elder Scrolls: Arena robbed poor old D&D completely blind.

And yeah, its interior’s completely black & white (or more accurately: brown & browner), but we’ll forgive this little smudge-on-the-collar in favor of the absolutely terrifying RPG complexities that inflate the inside of it like an over-gorged hot-air balloon. You just won’t find manuals of this caliber anymore folks, which, if you’re fond of sustained agriculture and trees, might be a good thing.

Good For: Deforesting small countries if ever reprinted; rendering quantum physicists inconsequential.

Grade: A

Quake II

Genre/Released: FPS/1997

The Down and Dirty: Weighing in at a feeble 36 pages, you’d think this pale example of a codex might sputter out and collapse before the starting gun.

And you’d be semi-right. Sure, this thing’s got some fancy theoretical mechanical drawings that pepper the text, and it’s printed in fabulously futuristic “color,” but that’s really all this poor girl has going for her. That and she puts out; at least in the sense of providing a basic overview of such tantalizing and  interesting activities as walking, swimming, running, shooting, and—no joke—ducking. (Unfortunately, no Duck Hunting.)

The armaments grid hints at a taste of pizazz with mini-expositions of shotguns and hyper-blasters. And the booklet’s outer soft-cover casing is undeniably sexy in a sort of perverse post-industrial type of motif.

But sadly, no amount of skin-deep beauty or leaps in design can make up for the 7 total sentences of plot that call 1/4 of page 6 home. And one of those sentences literally reads, “Damn again.”

Yowza.

Good For: Tracing the cover’s logo for the placement a supremely God-like tattoo on one’s right outer shoulder.

Grade: C+

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

Genre/Released: RTS/1999

The Down and Dirty: One of the few ever “widescreen” edition manuals released, when opened, this little baby sits in your hands like a gigantic greased banana. For ease of possible     drop-related disaster, we recommend never reading this manual whilst crapping. However, once the cover and backing are planted firmly on a table (or horizontal equal), there’s some chewy delicious goodness to be masticated from within.

From the very start, you’re treated with over-the-top bios for Jame’s Earl Jones’ General Solomon and Commander Michael McNeil, complete with photo of tired out-of-work actor Michael Biehn’s rubbery Hollywood-hatred-filled face. Actually, Biehn’s burned-out hopeless grill is the perfect metaphor for the game itself, which after attempting to play, you’ll completely understand why he appears so miserable.

Still, every nuance, nook, and seemingly trivial gameplay dynamic of this unforgivably awful Command & Conquer RTS is dissected and portrayed, even if they’ll never be actualized. Plus, every odd-numbered page has lotsa detailed background pictures! Mostly of Kane’s bald head.

Good For: Hilarious practical jokes when placed in bathrooms; studying every perfect smooth contour of Kane’s bald head.

Grade: B-

Undying

Genre/Released: FPS-RPG/2001

The Down and Dirty: Undying contains some of the most spooky underwear-staining moments you’ll ever partake on the PC platform. So much, in fact, that you’ll need a pile of spare boxer shorts within arm’s reach for maximum cleanliness. Even scarier than the actual game? Just how pitifully repulsive the manual is. As thick as a playing card and about as info-packed, this proverbial piece of literary ass screams to be tossed in the trash.

Luckily, the full-color ancillary journal—describing, in minutia, the diabolic thoughts and actions of every twisted main character—more than makes up for its compatriot’s sins. Scrawled in ornate calligraphic-cursive, stained with mock bloodied fingerprints, you’ll brandish your Undying journal with pride and joy, quoting out loud at your boss’s kid’s birthday party such salary raise-guaranteeing lines as: “Keisinger carried Bethany’s corpse into the drawing room… How is it come to pass that he should be the one to carry her lifeless body home?”

Good For: Manual: using as tinder to start a small fire. Journal: reading and terrifying small children by the fire.

Grade: C

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Genre/Released: RPG/2001

The Down and Dirty: Obliterator of all other paper-bound gaming volumes, Arcanum’s 189-page Goliath of an instruction booklet stabs you in the eyes with a spear of blazing erudite fabulousness. Every spell and tech is exhaustively studied and relayed; every race and culture explained, and every skill, trait, and potential action cataloged. Hundreds of handy screen caps? Yes sir. Easily-readable period-inspired fonts? Indeed. Steamy Dwarf-on-Ogre porno pics? Hell no.

Plus, the tone and voice in the descriptions of the technological disciplines are comic genius. Take, for example, this choice excerpt from the Clockwork Decoy: “This mechanical wonder is equipped with a powerful spring mechanism, and is perfect for creating diversions and confounding the most dangerous of foes! Brain them at your leisure while their attentions are turned!”

And as if this beast of an in-game authoritative bibliography isn’t enough, there’s also a separate fold-out hand-drawn world map. The manual’s even got a drool-inducing (and actually makeable) 3-bowl “Halfling” bread recipe on the last page. Which is fitting, as Arcanum’s game booklet downright bakes the competition, past or present.

Good For: Bringing to pretentious elitist book-clubs; plagiarizing lines as your own material and acting smug.

Grade: A

Civilization III

Genre/Released: Strategy/2001

The Down and Dirty: Got a spare 17 hours burning a hole in your brain? Well, Civ III’s manual has a solution for that. Building off The Elder Scrolls: Arena’s arboreal genocidal tendencies, the fine folks at Firaxis Games exacted the practice of cutting down and skinning a crap-ton of trees to new, dizzying heights. PhD-textbook sized, the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of instruction booklets, this nasty mother-humper towers over your sanity at a staggering 235 pages of raw, unfiltered gaming detail.

In all honesty, you’ll probably learn more from this manual than you’ll ever retain from a standard collegiate history lesson. World economics, commerce, industrial production, mutual protection pacts, trade embargoes, international diplomacy, maximization of natural resources— these are but a microscopic revelatory splinter of the complete topics covered. The goddamn index is 12 pages long. 12. Pages. Long. Front and back.  We’ve seen pocket dictionaries of lesser girth.

As a gamer new to the Civilization series, you simply can’t ask for a better lesson in gameplay mechanics. And for the advanced practitioner, expert advice and strategy accompany the basics. If not for the hideous blemish in the form of a .99 cent a minute “1-900″ hint-line on the final page, it’d be damned flawless.

Good For: Acting as a barrier to stop a charging rhinoceros.

Grade: A++

Icewind Dale II

Genre/Released: RPG/2002

The Down and Dirty: Every staunch RPGer shuddered and gasped as a shard of their PC gamer spirits detached forever with the painful loss of Black Isle Studios.  However, as adept as Black Isle was at conjuring up unforgettable titles like Fallout and Planescape Torment, their Icewind Dale II manual is the anabolic steroids of the instruction booklet playing field.

See, rather than stealing ideas and content and making them their own—as The Elder Scrolls: Arena unabashedly did—the selfish, dirty, shame-ridden cheating cheater that’s Icewind Dale II’s manual goes all Mark McGuire on us. It trounces the competition not through natural talent or creative catharsis, but rather through minimizing and inserting an actual Dungeons & Dragons master rule book in place of their own. That’s just not fair.

Naturally, this meaty and gleefully complex 152-page collection of special abilities and skills will keep you entertained for eons. Hell, even without the PC game that bears its name, this booklet is handy for refereeing all those spontaneous D&D matches that could no doubt erupt at any moment in a typical nerd’s daily life.

So sure – you can poke your schnoz into all sorts of sweet details like the level, range, casting time, duration, saving throw and area of effect for every single spell (all 59 blasted pages of them), but wouldn’t you rather knock a homer out the park without the abuse and aid of auxiliary chemicals? If you’re name’s Icewind Dale II, nope!

Good For: 9 hour plane trips across the pond; using as definitive ammunition against rival geeks.

Grade: A+ (with a bolded asterisk.)

Beyond Divinity

Genre/Released: Action-RPG/2004

The Down and Dirty: In a strange and refreshing departure from source material—that being the stench-soaked crap-sponge of the actual game—this informative manual proves inspiration often arrives in multiple avenues of delivery. Tagging along in shotgun sits a mini-novel, Child of Chaos, authored by miss Rhianna Pratchett (Terry Pratchett’s daughter). This 56-page romp provides the reader with multiple layers of literary preamble, fantasy flavor, and character examination in the Divinity series mythos.

Adjoining a game-specific piece of narrative fiction in book-format is more than a simple rarity, it’s a certifiable milestone. And if not for the continuity-evaporating Elvis reference near the end of novella, it would have been a shining example of supplemental perfection.

The manual’s no slouch either. Published on high-grade photo-stock paper, your fleshy tender digits will sing songs of praise and reverence to the smooth and welcoming surface that rests atop them. The info presented ain’t so bad either.

All important items and gameplay nuances—such as manipulating the teleporter stones, choosing magic types, and initial hints to character creation—are broadcast and deconstructed with expert tutelage. A single session reviewing the material will arm you with all essential knowledge required for successful play. Of course, all this glowing praise is likely mute, as Divinity II is about the gaming equivalent of chugging vinegar, slipping on the resulting vomit, and shattering a femur.

Good For: Dual wielding as preposterously effective fly swatters.

Grade: B

Guild Wars: Game of the Year Edition

Genre/Released: MMO/2005

The Down and Dirty: There’s a quick-reference card as an extra insert, but the “manual” is a single piece of paper…

Good For: It’s a single piece of paper.

Grade: Z-

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Genre/Released: Action-Adventure/2005

The Down and Dirty: A unique hybrid of exemplary innovation, the manual for GTA: San Andreas is actually the game box. The DVD rests safely behind the final page in this bright and colorful hard-cover masterpiece, cushioned by a small foam insert, protecting the disc from your grimy Mountain Dew-laminated desk’s harmful debris. The concept of melding a game box to its manual is so provocative, you’ll be duly bound to write your senator demanding legislature to make the practice lawfully binding (punishable by a healthy, savage beating if defied).

Adding to the overall packaging shininess, a poster-sized double-sided map of San Andreas awaits your clammy mitts before you even leaf past the first page. More than just a visual gimmick, if stuck nearby your monitor, it serves as a great transportation way-finder. Brainstorming the best route from Los Santos to San Fierro, icing all the areas of interest along the way, is bucket-loads less cumbersome than constantly opening and closing the in-game alternate overlay.

As for the instruction booklet’s details, there’s some decent horsepower grumbling under the hood. San Andreas’s buildings and eateries, such as The Well-Stacked Pizza Companies and the Ammu-Nations, are each summarized and described with a humorous slant, rooted in stark social commentary. All crucial avenues of curiosity are annotated and classified, including every song and artist on each of the 11 tunable radio stations. This, dear readers, is a manual the big boys wield; carry it with honor.

Good For: Putting in the attic when you go to college, leaving for 20 years, and then losing your mind after realizing your Mom tossed it in the curbside dumpster in your absence.

Grade: A

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Genre/Released: FPS/2007

The Down and Dirty: This abhorrent travesty of a gaming (un)manual serves as a stark signpost of the PDF age. Little more than a piece of standard letter-sized paper, cut up into equal sections, and affixed in the middle by 2 cheap staples (with some faded Vietnam-quality ink blotted in for good measure), this paltry and harrowing example practically screams “We hate you!” to the battle-worn connoisseur of the legacy instruction booklet.

There’s really little here to be considered content. 3 of the astonishing 9 total pages consist of the software license agreement. The remaining essential info is equally compelling: 3 pointless screenshots, a 2-sentence thesis of the checkpoint save system, and a reality-decompiling section on your health situation explaining that if you absorb too many bullets, you’ll kick the can. Now that’s depth.

So, while page 6 does explode our literary senses with its reasoning that an ammo counter “Shows your ammo count,” there’s just no reason this manual should even exist. Just put us out of our misery Infinity Ward; releasing a published document such as this only personifies your disdain of physical reading materials. Poor. Just… poor.

Good For: Nothing.

Grade: D- (see me after class.)

Divinity II: Ego Draconis

Genre/Released: Action-RPG/2010

The Down and Dirty: When deplorable societal facets manifest into government violence and widespread oppression, there are those that kneel and bow to the tyrants, and there are those that rise to their feet and fight. Under the heavy iron fist of the growing anti-manual PC gaming regime, Larian Studios pulls a good ol’ fashioned George Washington. Only instead of gunpowder and muskets, Larian’s weapons of choice are substance and compositional talent.

Spitting keenly in the eye of such insulting gestures as COD4:MW’s entry, Divinity II packs a manual that you’ll write home to your folks about. A hearkening back to the golden years, you’ll be instantaneously greeted (well, instantaneously after the epilepsy warnings, at least) by an introduction from Larian’s founder, Swen Vincke. He thanks you personally for purchasing the game, which stands out, as most first impressions nowadays come in the form of an ugly DRM pop-up, basically assuming you’re a thieving bastard of a peg-legged pirate.

Emblazoned within this hefty specimen of a magnum opus is a 4-page prelude of the Divinity story so far, intricate presentations of every spell and potion, an appropriately heavy study on the functions and devices riveted to the Battle Tower, and much, much more.

If pitted into a grudge match against the likes of Civ III’s manual, on the stakes of winner stays / loser’s filleted, Divinity II would probably end up as fresh fish. But come on, compared to everything else in the contemporary world? This bad boy pulls their pants down, whips ‘em stupid, and curb-stomps their heads. It’s devs like Larian that keep us huddled masses burning with a glimmer of hope. For this: a basket of delicious cookies.

Good For: Righteously smothering your other modern-day instruction booklets to death, and then peeing on their shallow, treasonous graves.

Grade: B+

So how do you get players to return if you don’t offer a memorable virtual excursion? Well, you make an incredibly compelling meta-game that’s affected by the gameplay, but actually adds nothing to gameplay itself.

The meta-game does two things; It awards experience for kills (which determines your level, which controls access to weapons), assists in accomplishing your objectives, and then looks at how you achieved those kills and gives you titles and/or emblems (which are nothing more than some fancy words and pictures to brag about your overall progress).

The game, of course, is Modern Warfare 2. Let’s talk about how the lack of skill, combined with a reliance upon luck for balance, produces a game that gives you little reason to return beyond its aforementioned metagame. Not covered here: the bugs and glitches, knives, grenade launchers, shotguns or imbalances any of those have when mixed with certain perks.

There are even awards for shooting like a chump.

Any game that relies upon luck or random happenstance over deliberate actions gives pause, because in those situations little effort is required to “win.” Most games do rely upon some amount of luck to one extent or another; Team Fortress 2 calls upon lucky critical attacks to break stalemates, while Solium Infernum uses random chance to add uncertainty to your decisions, and some DotA heroes are built entirely around luck (faceless void) but you know that’s a risk you’re taking by choosing them.

But few titles force poor decrepit lady luck to fall to her knees from the sheer exhaustion of deciding all the encounters in the game. There are no intense duels in MW2, whoever sees the other first is gonna kill the other guy. You might say that’s the “modern” part of the game, but last I checked re-spawning isn’t in the Pentagon’s budget quite yet; and re-spawning is the key problem in MW2.

So it makes sense that to be effective in MW2 you need only learn a few things: spawn locations (and perhaps more importantly, understanding how the bloody god of spawns actually works), and the few good vantage points. As long as your position is serviceable and your gun is loaded, the game largely turns into a point and shoot affair.

This might be fine if the game was nothing but free-for-alls, but that’s one of the game’s roughly nine gameplay modes, and trust me: getting fragged within two seconds three to seven times in a row  because you spawned with your back to the enemy team  gets old in a hurry. You shouldn’t have to cross your fingers that you’ll live a lengthy 10 seconds. But how does luck actually factor in? Via two primary methods: killstreaks and—as you might have already guessed—good ‘ole fortunate spawns.

Lets start with killstreaks, which are intended to reward you for being “good.” You might argue that this promotes skill because if you want the killstreaks, you need to make successive frags without dying yourself. Of course, you can argue just as much that it does promote camping, as people carefully and slowly rack up those points needed, leading to devastatingly brutal god-strikes; but I digress.

“Hmmmm,” said one of Infinity Ward’s developers, “How can we possibly make it so that all players, even the bad ones, can inflict these wonderful levels of ludicrous destruction upon others with no chance of reciprocal attacks?” “Well,” his companion piped up, “People really seemed to adore grenades in the first game! Why not make one that’s just like rolling dice to get a killstreak?”

And thus the lovely care package was born unto our world. Don’t want to camp your way up to the attack helicopter or AC-130 gunship? Just grab a perk and then make 3 kills. Just toss the dice and hope you get lucky. Who needs to even learn to aim anymore? Just use the care packages and anyone can score some “awesome” kills. How? Simple: a shitty spawning system.

This is no companion cube.

Killstreaks suck, for sure, but at least players have some degree of control over them, with the ability to shoot down some, or hide from others. The spawn system, however, is utterly beyond control. The game attempts to put the player into the best spots possible: close to teammates and not overly near the opposition, unless you have tactical insertion (a flare that you place—which takes up the equipment slot—marking where you’ll spawn next) or you’re playing game modes with definitive “bases.”

Sounds good right? Not really. Most levels are built for flow rather than standing battles, so whenever you spawn someone’s liable to see you magically return to the mortal coil, and you can be sure they’ll say “Hi” with some bullets. Understanding the details and dynamics of the spawn is perhaps the most important factor to your success in MW2. All it takes is a couple of matches to get the feeling that 60% to 80% of your deaths are wholly beyond your control. By plucking choice perks and/or equipment you can be a little luckier.

And there’s that wonderful word – “luck,” and you’re at its dire mercy. Why not give players the choice of where to spawn? Or simply standardize it? Because luck is exactly what the developers are aiming for in MW2; skill is expendable. They want everyone to have what they consider “fun.”  Who cares if you actively spawn in front of an opponent’s cross-hairs? You can just retaliate by gunning down 3 to 5 players frequently without any of them knowing you were there. Ta-da! Free care package.

Woohoo, shot in back again.

The game is still compelling, to a degree, but the gameplay isn’t rewarding; the metagame is: getting all that experience, unlocking all those other guns, finding all those shiny emblems and titles watching your stats progress higher and higher. There was a time when simply winning was good enough, but this brings us back to one of the core problems at the heart of Modern Warfare 2:  a lack of a memorable community, a direct result of the exclusion of dedicated servers.

The faceless masses of a matchmaking system own little strength, but they’re always there waiting to be shot in the back when they get a shitty spawn. Infinity Ward appears to have addressed this irritation by switching the focus away from community and into stat-whoring. Everyone’s playing the game to get their titles and emblems to get a new prestige. The gameplay never challenges or encourages you break beyond its narrow boundaries, so you never have anything noteworthy to show beyond all that meta-junk above.

Thinking back over the 136 hours I’ve sunk into the seas of multiplayer so far, I can’t recall a single memorable experience. Not a single one. It’s not like I just played the opening of the newest JRPG or something, that’s a collection of five whole days. Sure, I was content most of that time, but when you play that long and the hours you’ve put in just bleed together into a blob of headshots, there’s a fundamental problem.

But then again, I do almost have the much relished Gold Skulls Famas title; only 200 more headshots to go! Damn you Modern Warfare 2.

What an exciting time for PC gaming! Huge names are coming to our computers every month of this year. But in truth, there’s no way even the hardest of the hardcore gamers will be able to complete them all – so why pay $50 for a game that’ll gather dust for months? To fill this void, I present to you some free alternatives. Enjoy!

If you’re a frequent PC gaming visitor to this cyberworld called the Internet, then no doubt you’ve heard of the infamous games critic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. Before he became the video reviewing sensation that he is today, he designed independent adventure games. And he was damn good at it. The first entry in his “Chzo Mythos” series, 5 Days a Stranger, really exemplifies his talent. It’s a point-and-click adventure game that deviates from the usually common normality in the style (comic relief) and goes for a more dark and sinister tone. It succeeds in creating an atmosphere that feels genuinely unnerving, and the plot is executed masterfully. I rank 5 Days among the best adventure games I’ve ever played, so it comes highly recommended.

Let me tell a story; I don’t know how it begins, but I know how it ends – with tears forming in my eyes, I yelled out in joy as I found a box of Chex cereal containing a CD-ROM of the new game Chex Quest. Frankly, I don’t even remember getting the desire to play such a game, all I knew is I had to get my hands on the DOOM clone. Spanning five levels, you play as a heroic/creepy Chex man shooting aliens back to their home planet after they’ve invaded another one. You see, it’s kinda like DOOM, but made for kids. That’s really the extent of it. Man, this game was fun when I was eight years old; and it still is!

This is the second time I’ve showcased a remake of Privateer, Wing Commander’s equivalent of Elite. Differing from the “de-make” ASCII Sector, Privateer: Gemini Gold takes the other route and attempts to remake the original game from scratch, all the while polishing it up to modern gaming standards. However, instead of outright redoing everything, Gemini Gold actually employs assets from the original game and does its thing to it. For the Privateer purists, Gemini Gold will feel right at home, and for players having yet to experience the space trade sim, it is a fantastic way to play it for the first time.

I’m sorry to hear that you won’t be coming to the PC. I was pretty excited when I first read about you, three or four years ago. You sound like my kind of game, what with your spooky atmosphere and third-person-y-ness.

I suppose I’ll miss you terribly when I read about all the fun the 360 folks are having playing you, Alex. I mean, I will in-between sessions of Dragon Age: Origins. I still have a shit-load of hours to go with that one before I’m done, though. Oh yeah, I just got Mass Effect 2, so that’ll help too. I bet I can squeeze a good 30 hours of distraction from the Axel Wade hole in my life.

Come to think of it, I understand Aliens vs. Predator was just released. Surely you’ve heard about it, Ellen? I may be able to find some diversion from my regret with that one, for a few dozen hours anyway. Perhaps the upcoming Elemental: War of Magic, heir apparent to the classic Master of Magic, will give me some relief from the sure-to-be-constant longing I shall be feeling for your exclusively-Xbox experience.

Oh Achmed – how? How shall I cope with thy absence from my life? Where shall I find respite from the torment of knowing that your sweet gaming loins will ever be denied to me? The answer isn’t a pleasant one. I’ll be forced to consort with low-born hussies like BioShock 2 and the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. I’ll don a trench coat and fake mustache and seek the company of… real-time strategy games! I know you don’t approve of RTSes, Abba, but have you gotten a gander at the ass on Supreme Commander 2? I’d hit it.

So you see, Anal Wape, I’m going to be pretty busy this year trying to forget about you. While my console cousins are basking on their couches in all your gamepad-directed glory, I’ll be locked in my darkened game room, sitting in my lumbar-friendly office chair, surrounded by speakers, facing down the 30-inch monitor sitting a foot away from my face, keeping company with the dregs of the PC gaming world. And if all of the above-mentioned titles aren’t enough to keep me sufficiently preoccupied to fend off any suicidal inclinations, well, don’t worry about me. I hear they’re working on a sequel to StarCraft.

Yours truly,

Me

It’s Super Bowl Sunday! The cold winter skies promise snow as clouds gather around the mountaintops. Linda and I are off to this year’s party up in the foothills around the Sandia mountains. It’s the affluent part of town where her brother—and all the giant-screen TVs—live. We’ve had this shindig planned for a week.

We reach Tommy’s apartment just as the first flurries of snow hit the ground. We walk in and shrug off our jackets; the warm air melts the crisp numbness from our cheeks. He turns on his awesome new 42 inch LCD screen, and it is sweet. This is a glow worth basking in, to be sure.

Linda and I unload our supplies, recounting the checklist of preparations. Dozens of chicken wings, ranging in spiciness from “savory with hint of Taco Bell,” to “Satan’s powdered horns soaked in the Sun’s livid core:” check. Enough beer to floor a Clydesdale: check. Tommy’s already got the nachos started, all drippy with melted cheese and jalapenos: double check.

Laptops loaded with Patrician III— total, absolute check. Houston, we are ready for launch.

A lesser man would have edited this image to make
it look like he’s holding a football. I AM NOT THAT MAN.
Ed. note: I am.

(Readers who are not familiar with Patrician III, look no further. I reviewed it at Long Tail Gamer for ya. Enjoy.)

We huddle around Tommy’s dining room table. Soon, our laptops fill the room with the crashing sounds of surf and a whistling west wind. Patrician III’s atmosphere evokes and transports: now we’re back in the 14th century, where merchants and pirates clashed on the waves of northern Europe. It’s a detailed world of cunning and opportunity: a perfect complement to the spectacle of fast-paced scrimmages and drawn-out intermissions of the Super Bowl. We snack and plot and play and watch according to our own interests.

Since Tommy’s new to the game, I decide to handicap myself in a market I don’t know very well: the northeastern seas. I’m Cam Cameronsen, upwardly mobile trader in Stockholm. Linda hails from Cologne as Helga Bonefolder, which is as rad a way of highlighting her paper-making skills as I could ever have thought of. Tommy is Oakenshield in Gdansk. I guess he misses D&D; Sunday is a day full of traditions.

Patrician III keeps crashing in WINE. Tommy’s got a replacement computer to loan me, and it’s a lurking beast of a box. The screen is easily twice the size of my laptop’s… and that was a good 17″. I feel like Ozymandias from Watchmen; I can see everything. Whenever Linda walks behind me to get to the kitchen, she gushes over how beautiful the game on my screen looks from across the freakin’ room.

We’re each into the shared gaming world now, driven by the forces of economics, politics, and sheer luck. Bonefolder likes to pay off the informant in the tavern. In the spirit of cooperation, she’s passing on to everyone else her daily updates about which ports the pirates are at. Meanwhile, I get a message from a clandestine source: for 4000 gold, an anonymous malcontent will sell Oakenshield to the Hanseatic League. I don’t know what that means, but I’m feeling mischievous. And I can spare the gold. One thing I love about LAN gaming, it’s fun to take secret risks to see what will come of them later.

In the meantime, the Super Bowl pre-pre-game show has moved on to the post-pre-pre-game show.

Tommy’s got mixed feelings about Patrician III. He’s still unfamiliar with the game mechanics, though he was practicing earlier. His gold is funneling away as he hasn’t figured out good price points for his cargo yet. Plus, the trading guild has just accused him of a crime he never committed; that’s a big fine and a slap to his struggling reputation. I look skyward and quietly whistle something to the tune of “Oh, So That’s What 4000 Gold Will Buy Me.” What can I say? Patrician III is full of surprises. Meanwhile, my only trading ship: Wayfaring Wombat, plows into a storm and takes damage. I have to spend 14 days in the dock repairing it, effectively taking me out of the game for the duration. Karma’s a bitch.

Oh, football? The pre-pre-post-game warm-up show has wrapped up, and now it’s time for kickoff. Yay!

Okay, back to the game.

Lord Vader endorses the “invisible hand”
school of economics.

Ruthless profiteering while building improvements in the hometown for political advantage later can be time consuming. An hour or so passes, and I find my lack of progress disturbing. The people of my hometown have no idea who I am. My profit margins are meager. This is not my usual free market awesomeness, so I guess the handicap we set up is working. Across the table, Linda erupts with joy: she’s found a stash of spices for 175 gold. Damn! Those usually go for at least 400 in ports near my hometown. I’m going to have to find an untapped market of my own soon or I’m sunk. Supply and demand, they take no prisoners and accept no excuses.

While my girlfriend prints money in the form of peppercorns and nutmeg near the western shores of England, I’m finally getting back on track after 2 weeks in dock. Oakenshield is trying to put together stores of food and drink for a celebration in Gdansk. Every so often, I breeze by one of his ships: either the Taco or the Sandwich. Ominously, Bonefolder’s ship is the Iron Fist. And we’re not the only ones in the world: pirates plague the seas as well. I hear Tommy clicking and cursing and laughing out loud as he tries to fight or evade one that’s got him off the coast of Gdansk. I can’t tell how his ship is faring, but I can tell he’s having a great time.

I love LAN games with everyone in the same room. The Internet just doesn’t capture this kind of immediacy.

Every few minutes, Linda gets up to watch the much-vaunted Super Bowl commercials. She cracks up every time the screaming chickens come on. And I have to admit, screaming space chicken is pretty funny.

Oh hey – The Who? Awesome. We can pause the game for that kind of halftime. The lighting design dazzles the eye, and Daltrey rocked out as only the world’s tallest Hobbit can. Has he been knighted yet? Seems like he’s the only famous Brit who hasn’t been, these days.

Sir Daltrey in his retiring years.

Finally my social climbing pays off. My marriage is arranged, and with a boatload of pickled meats, fine wines, and wholesome grains to feed everyone from, the ceremony comes off splendidly. (No chicken wings in 14th century Stockholm. Sorry.) News of the dowry I receive quickly follows: a little ship docked in Cologne. That’s Bonefolder’s part of the world, isn’t it? I christen her Flopping Dolphin and begin expanding my markets into this side of the world. Whoa, no wonder Bonefolder keeps finding great deals on the western shores; they’re practically in a famine! This is the kind of whacked-out economy that’s easy to make a fortune in. I find her little stash of spices soon enough. I’ll save those for later; right now, it’s time to feed some of these people… at very reasonable prices, considering.

Why’s everyone so happy on TV? Oh, New Orleans won. Well, way to go, guys. Good job. Seriously.

Tommy switches channels to some new noise and we continue on for a while. There’s unfinished business to attend to. Eventually, we bring the game to an end some eight hours after we started playing. The final scores: Tom 20K gold, Linda 70K, and I somehow pulled out 200K. We weren’t scoring on points or position or gold this time around. Today was all about having fun with the game in each-others’ company.

Something like 100 million viewers tuned in to the Super Bowl on Sunday. Our little audience of three players in Patrician may be undetectable in comparison, but it was still a great day of camaraderie, indulgent overeating, and shared enjoyment. What else are weekend parties like this really there for, anyway? As we drove home in the late night snow, Linda remarked that it was the best Super Bowl party she’d been to. I agree, and Tommy’s interested in getting another LAN party together soon.

I don’t begrudge anyone who watched the Big Game. The last thing I want is to have some kind of “my game was better than your game” pissing match. Get me right, sports lovers and video gamers alike: folks, we are all geeks. We love our teams, we obsess over our favorite statistics, and we share our devotion with anybody within earshot. Whatever your particular stripe, it’s fun, so go with whatever ties bind you to your friends and family. Besides, I caught sight of a few spectacular plays too, and I enjoy the excitement.

So now that the season is over—and there’s only the post-game-pre-intro-wrap-up show to go—it’s time to break out the PS2 and warm up the controllers for a sport I personally love. Baseball! I still have half a season to play out on MLB 06: The Show, after all.

Paragon or Renegade, Jedi or Sith, Angel or Demon… are great PC titles truly so morally polarizing? The ongoing trend seems to suggest so. For a while, I never questioned this dynamic. Seemed natural. You blast kindly old ladies in the abdomens with quadruple-barreled napalm-missile guns, you get a slight nudge in the ol’ evil dial. Makes sense. At first, at least.

But shouldn’t a given action speak for itself? Why do we need a right & wrong thermostat in our inventory to affirm our in-game activities and dispositions? Good and evil meters are an artificially imposed visual teddy bear – something to comfortably latch onto to verify a set of imposed assumptions. Utilizing such a rigidly judgmental barometer is fatally formulaic. As the protagonist (or possibly, antagonist), I want to do what I think is right or wrong, not what the developer thinks is right or wrong. There’s no need for a concrete confirmation of either option. And know what? Gamers are smarter than that, and we could prove it, if only allowed a benefit of the doubt.

Rescue the chick in the tower, or let her burn. Insult the bartender’s heritage, or give him a verbal pat on the back. Nuke-a-blast a peaceful town, or arrest the man in black – all with on-screen discernible tallies of “You barkin’ up the bad guy tree par’ner!” or, ” You playin’ an encore of some good guy jazz, son!” Is everlasting redundancy in ethical execution really the best a game can do? Far too often, we choose a path (The Dark Side of the Force, for example) and our choices become a narrative and pictorial version of iambic pentameter: droning and numbing all along the way. And for the most part, we’re comfortable with this (and occasionally praising).

Until a thunderclap wakes us from our catatonic slumbers. The explosion of awareness jolted me earlier today, while I re-watched the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. Lee Adama warns the President that a Cylon attack is imminent on the remaining fleet. Problem is, only two thirds of the ships can escape to safety via an FTL jump (which is really just BSG-speak for: “Get the crap out of there really really quickly.”). The other spacecraft don’t have the engineering guts required for the jump process, and there’s no time to ferry the passengers to the ships that do. President Roslin has to make a hasty decision. She elects to leave the others behind to save the rest. She chooses safety over risk.

So, for sake of argument, let’s say that this exact same situation presents itself to us in Mass Effect 7: Shepard’s Bad Back. Precisely where would Roslin’s course of action fall under the inflexible Paragon / Renegade scale? Is leaving behind a third of the fleet in fear of complete annihilation an evil act? Or is noble? Is it *gasp* something in-between? As a viewer to Battlestar Galactica, it’s up to you to decide. And that’s the way it should be. It’s time PC games took a hint.

See, the best villains and heroes are the ones that identify themselves with the audience, or in the vehicle of PC gaming, the operators. And what’s a tangible and identifiable human feature? It’s blurring the lines between a typical societal assumption of right and wrong; it’s permitting the individual beholder to exercise their own conclusions based off their own perceptions. It’s freeing the players’ minds to conclude for themselves that which is ethically objectionable or behaviorally appropriate.

Indeed, the most rewarding moral choices are the ones that border on inconclusive. And here and there, we’ve seen some notable attempted deviations from the binary blueprint. Divinity II contained a sprinkling of hope early on, but utilized the bad choice / good choice selections far too frequently thereafter to really shine.

Hey devs? We’re grownups now. We’re big boys and girls. We don’t need  training wheels for selective conduct causality. Let us judge for ourselves which courses of action merit which moral labels. Keep making your awesome games, yes; but let’s allow the deeds to unfold without the plastic good and evil gauges, ‘kay? Movies don’t have them, books don’t have them, and neither should games. Here’s to hoping this becomes an axiom.

But yeah, all that being said, if you consider dancing on defenseless monkeys’ faces with soccer cleats as a moral gray area, please seek professional help.

We goofed! As many have already pointed out, there are a few areas in the article that were reported incorrectly. See below for the updated info, and thanks for the feedback! Mostly, we blame the economy. And boats.

• Blutsauger contains the same rate of fire as the standard needle-gun.
• Natascha contains the same cyclic rate of fire as the standard mini-gun.
• Natascha contains the same amount of ammo as the standard mini-gun.
• The Razorback no longer slows the Sniper’s movement speed.
• Buff Banner, when activated, last for 10 total seconds, not 14.
• Axtinguisher hits result in half the normal damage of the standard Pyro axe if an opponent isn’t on fire.

An interesting thing happened to me this past month. For over a year I’ve been in Valve’s corner promoting their use of class updates to keep Team Fortress 2 (TF2) fresh. I commended them for their dedication to the community and a now older game. Despite a barrage of jokes and stabs at the new armaments, I yelled at my online colleagues for criticizing Valve on giving us more, free content, regardless of balance issues. But now my trust is shaken.

The most recent Demoman/Soldier update has caused me to question Valve’s method of upgrading my beloved game. They violated the main mechanic of TF2 quite severely, instilling feelings of both anger and sadness. Long considered my favorite multiplayer game due to its rich balance of class-based combat, unique art style, and more character than a Jim Carrey movie, I’ve noticed a waning interest in the shooter. The class updates were designed to fix this for gamers like me, offering new equipment, maps, and game types to keep things new and compelling. It is now painfully obvious where Valve, still my favorite game developer, has failed.

In a multiplayer game so heavily weighted towards teamwork, no single class should be a one-man army.

The progressive class updates should all have followed a succinct set a rules to help maintain the overall balance and integrity of the game. It should have looked something like this:

1) The equipment should not be upgraded in effectiveness, rather the gear should offer an alternate method of playing the class.
2) The equipment should be based exclusively on the designated role the class was designed for (Demoman for explosives, Sniper for long-range support, etc.).
3) The equipment should not alter the specific role of the class.
4) The equipment should not be designed to inhibit a specific class or group of classes.
5) There should always be noticeable disadvantages and advantages to using any select item  when compared to the other options available.

These hypothetical rules should be in place to strengthen the consistency of the game’s delicate balance that gamers initially fell in love with. Valve did a great job maintaining the overall balance between classes, but looking back, some serious errors were made that slowly but surely degraded the quality of the game. How exactly has the new equipment violated these rules? Let’s take a look at each defined class and explore the respective overarching effects of their corresponding armaments.

Note: All equipment discussed reflects the current effects granted as of the most recent patch.

Medic

Support class designed to boost the combat-effectiveness of teammates through buffed health and continuous HP flow.

Updated Gear

1) The Blutsauger – Alternate primary weapon that trades the Medic’s passive HP regeneration for HP-Leach attack. Results in a slower fire rate.
2) The Kritzkrieg – Alternate healing gun that grants 100% critical hits to target ally when fully charged and activated (omits invulnerability); faster charge-up to reach potential deployment.
3) The Ubersaw – Alternate melee weapon that grants 25% ubercharge upon hitting an enemy. Slower attack speed.

Verdict: The Medic update offers players an alternate way to tackle their class without changing the overall role. Players must still support their teammates to be effective, but are rewarded for efficient use of alternate weaponry, though at a greater risk to themselves. The Blutsauger trades damage for self-sustaining aid, and the Kritzkrieg offers a perfect alternative style of play. The Ubersaw is a little more troublesome, as its reduced attack rate does not hamper the overall improvements of the weapon, thus you would be hard-pressed finding a Medic who does not use the Ubersaw over the original Bonesaw. A more severe penalty should be present when choosing the former.

Pyro

Flexible class designed for close-quarters crowd control and hit-and-run tactics. Most effective when ambushing and patrolling set areas.

Updated Gear

1) The Backburner – Alternate primary weapon that deals critical hits when attacking from behind. Equipping it results in the loss of (new) air-blast ability.
2) Flare Gun – Alternate secondary weapon that offers a mid to long range attack; appropriately, it lights enemies on fire.
3) The Axtinguisher – Alternate melee weapon that grants critical hits when successful contact is made to immolated enemies.

This baby is perfect for snuffing out
the lives of burning enemies.

Verdict: In theory this update is flawless, offering ambushing Pyros a weapon that made them more effective at their style of play while lowering their effectiveness when attacking head-on. The flare gun is a perfect counter for Snipers and other long-range enemies, but because of its difficulty in use, it rewards only those willing to practice. The Axtinguisher and the newly added air-blast are the icing on the cake, increasing the Pyro’s supremacy as a close-quarters class. Unfortunately, the Backburner received rather negative criticism due to hit-box glitchiness similar to the Spy’s backstab, and the stigma that only “n00bs” use it. Still, the update offers players numerous styles of play without overpowering the class, and limiting his (or her?) overall effectiveness to up-close-and-personal combat. While not technically an alternate, the addition of the air-blast function completes the default flamethrower, making it one of the most versatile weapons in the game.

Heavy

Bullet-sponge tank class designed to lay down suppressive covering fire; buys teammates time while absorbing heavy damage, conserving your comrade’s hit points for both attacking and defending of key areas.

Updated Gear

1) Natascha – Alternate primary weapon that reduces damage dealt, but slows enemies upon projectile contact.
2) The Sandvich – Support tool that replaces secondary weapon. Heals 100% of hit points over a period of time. It’s damn noisy to eat, and it leaves the Heavy immobile while consuming. Can be dropped and picked up by other players for a 50% health gain.
3) The KGB – Alternate melee weapon that grants five seconds of criticals upon enemy death. Slower attack rate.

Not since Wolfenstein 3D has nutrition
been so important in gaming.

Verdict: This update marks the decline of Valve’s efforts. Natascha, in theory, is a good alternative to the faster, more potent Sasha, but it’s crippled by the severe reduction in damage per second and most importantly, the lack of an increase in total ammo. To be truly effective, Natascha should fire at the same cyclic rate as Sasha, if not faster. And, since it requires more bullets to kill an enemy, Natascha needs the total ammo increase. The Sandvich is far more effective now than it used to be, however it’s still a terribly ineffective alternate item to a class that should be utilized in the heat of battle instead of running out of the fray to replenish his own vitals. An example of a more successful  replacement would be a set of body armor that increases HP while lowering run speed. The KGB is another example of a good idea gone awry, as the Heavy has already lost the majority of his critical boost by the time he switches to and revs up his mini-gun. However, since Heavies rarely use their melee attack whatsoever, it remains a decent option.

Scout

Offensive class designed for speed and hit and run tactics at a distance; serves as an irritating distraction for the enemy to support the progress of his team.

Updated Gear

1) The Force-A-Nature – Alternate primary weapon that reduces the number of shots per clip, increases damage, and reduces effectiveness at mid to long range; knocks enemies backwards on successful hits (also launches the Scout backwards if fired while in the air).
2) Bonk! – Replaces secondary weapon. When chugged, it grants invulnerability for a short period of time, followed by a period of reduced speed immediately after.
3) The Sandman – Alternate melee weapon that launches a baseball, stunning enemies on successful hits; potential stun times are based on the distance the ball travels. The Sandman reduces the user’s total hit points by 15.

If only the product was as enjoyable as advertised.

Verdict: The Scout update marks the beginning of Valve’s attempts to improve the effectiveness of a class at the expense of its established role. The Force-A-Nature is actually a great alternate, offering players the ability to punch through an enemy line but forcing them to make their shots count, and also giving them an extra jump when used properly. The Bonk! energy drink comes out with a passing score as well, as it gives Scouts the ability to further support their teammates by distracting enemies, and players are forced to use the drink carefully as the ending effects leave you vulnerable. The Sandman is what ultimately ruined this update, and ultimately began the unraveling of overall balance among classes. While it has since been patched to be less powerful, the Sandman, besides frustrating enemies, does little to promote the given role of the Scout class (invading enemy territory and bothering enemies). A more useful and less troublesome alternate weapon could have been traps that the Scout drops (with a limited number) that slows enemies who pass over them.

Sniper

Long-range support class designed to eliminate priority threats to the team; uses scare tactics to intimidate enemies from entering into key areas.

Updated Gear

1) The Huntsman – Alternate primary weapon that trades long range precision for medium range effectiveness.
2) Jarate – Replaces secondary weapon with a throwable jar of urine; causes enemies under its effects to take additional damage when hit (mini-criticals). Reveals cloaked Spies and puts out burning teammates.
3) The Razorback – Replaces secondary weapon for a shield that covers the back of the user; blocks a single attempted backstab by an enemy Spy. User has reduced run speed while the Razorback is equipped.

A wooden shield that only blocks knives?
Actually that sounds about right…

Verdict: All things considered, the Sniper update is one of the best. The Huntsman offers Snipers who’re tired of sitting yards away from the frontlines the ability to be effective at a medium range, while maintaining the key element that embodies the Sniper: precision-based potential damage. Some argue that the Huntsman requires little skill, however, only the most effective players will top the leader board while using it. The Jarate jar, while criticized for its profane origins (it’s a jar of urine), is actually a brilliant addition for the Sniper. It allows him to further support his team in an alternate method to killing enemies; it helps teammates deal additional damage, it reveals enemy Spies and even douses the flames of charred compatriot. The Razorback is also a fine addition with the exception of a single dynamic: it’s designed with the sole purpose of countering one specific class (the Spy). It’s tempting to let this one slide, as the Razorback indirectly forces Spies into the open instead of attacking as far from behind as possible (where Snipers tend to be located), however, the fact remains that the item serves no other purpose. No spies on the map? Yeah, it’s useless. I’d be more satisfied if the shield actually blocked bullets and absorbed explosive damage, eventually breaking when a certain amount of damage is accrued.

Spy

Stealth class designed to infiltrate enemy territory, survey enemy positions, and neutralize enemy Engineer equipment and take out strong enemy forces.

Updated Gear

1) The Ambassador – Alternate primary weapon that offers pin-point accuracy on first shot; capable of critical headshots, followed by a period of reduced handling (cooldown). It employs a slightly reduced fire rate.
2) The Dead Ringer – Alternate cloaking device that, when activated, cloaks the user immediately upon taking damage, leaving a decoy body behind to fool opponents into believing you’re dead.
3) The Cloak and Dagger – Alternate cloaking device that only loses power (a necessary element required to remain invisible) when the user is moving.

The Ambassador isn’t just about looks!
It’s got great personality too.

Verdict: Like that of the Pyro, the Spy’s new arsenal is as close to flawless as an update can get. In conjunction with the back-stab, the Ambassador offers players a lucrative alternative means of attack via the headshot, which deals massive damage at the cost of reduced accuracy following the initial blast. This promotes shooting from less compromising positions – maintaining the Spy’s overall ineffectiveness when attacking head-on. Valve smartly chose to focus the other two pieces of equipment on the Spy’s methods of cloaking himself, each offering a different style of play. The Dead Ringer allows Spies to feign their own death, giving them a chance to slip behind their enemy, convinced of their demise, with more than enough time to position himself for a backstab. This is a ploy that promotes the creativity of the user, who may choose to activate the device before entering the battle, or after receiving some damage to further enhance the effect. The Cloak and Dagger allows for deeper penetration of enemy territory, permitting Spies to camp key chokepoints while simultaneously lowering the learning curve for newcomers. It greatly reduces the mobility of the user, however, as each step saps precious cloaking energy.

Soldier

Offensive blitz class designed for aggressive and mobile front-line combat; deals and absorbs heavy damage.

Updated Gear

1) The Direct Hit – Alternate primary weapon that fires a faster rocket projectile; removes more of target adversary’s health upon contact, but with greatly reduced splash damage. Deals mini-crits when tagging enemies in the air.
2) The Buff Banner – Replaces secondary weapon with a horn that charges up as the player damages opponents. When fully charged, the horn can be sounded to grant nearby teammates 14 seconds of mini-crits.
3) The Equalizer – Alternate melee weapon that scales movement speed and damage based off the user’s hit points, at an inversely proportional rate, i.e., the less health the soldier has, the more devastating his mobility and swings.

Brilliant weapon? Or overpowered insta-kill
for 1/3 of the classes?

Verdict: Overall, the Soldier update proves successful. However, it suffers from offering items that are almost too effective. The Direct Hit is theoretically a great alternate, rewarding highly accurate soldiers with increased damage, but like the Scout’s Force-A-Nature, forcing them to make their shots count. The problem with the Direct Hit is twofold. One, at certain ranges the difference in skill required to hit a target is greatly reduced. A Soldier using the Direct Hit at close-mid range won’t have too much difficulty hitting his target. He’ll also have little worry of injuring himself, since there’s a negligible area of explosive effect.  And at any range, the weapon is an absolute nightmare for Heavies. The mini-criticals are also questionable considering the weapon is already far more powerful than the default rocket launcher. Inappropriately, even moderately skilled Soldiers are scary when equipped with the Direct Hit,  as it carries the destructive potential to instantly kill four of the the nine classes  with a single blast (Scout, Sniper, Engineer and Spy). To balance this weapon the firing rate as well as the damage should be greatly reduced, further emphasizing the need for precision. I’d also remove the mini-criticals when shooting opponents from the the air, but Soldier’s everywhere will argue against me to their last dying breath. The Buff Banner is an interesting addition that gives Soldiers a more team-oriented purpose, and due to the player’s need to constantly inflict pain, using the item is well balanced. The Equalizer is another weapon that questionably allows the player a huge advantage at close range when he’s low on health. The problem is it offers no real disadvantage for usage over the default shovel. But Valve seems comfortable with this idea for all their updated melee weapons. Overall, the Soldier’s assault role remains intact, and with a few minor tweaks the update could shine.

Demoman

Defensive class designed to inflict enormous amounts of suffering, most effectively used in tighter quarters where he can dish out splash damage and set up explosive traps. Very talented at destroying enemy Engineer’s structures.

Updated Gear

1) Scottish Resistance – Alternate sticky-bomb weapon that allows for the placement of additional explosive charges that can be detonated in groups; sticky-bombs are assigned a longer arming time as a disadvantage.
2) The Chargin’ Targe – Replaces the sticky-bomb launcher with a shield that grants resistance to explosions and fire; bestows an ability to charge forward at light-speed, dealing gargantuan damage upon contact with enemies. When coupled with the Eyelander, grants criticals upon charging.
3) The Eyelander – Alternate melee weapon that initially reduces the users max hit points; deals criticals when coupled with the Chargin’ Targe (upon charging); increases health and damage dealt with each progressive kill (has a cap limit).

Verdict: The bane of the class updates, the Demoman’s attempted refurbishing is painfully implemented. By itself, the Scottish Resistance is a great alternate to the default sticky-bomb launcher, allowing players to choose to take a more defensive role and lay more traps. Players are forced to face the bombs in order to detonate them, making camping much more difficult. The Chargin’ Targe, however, is horribly designed, and when combined with the Eyelander, absolutely mutilates the Demoman’s general role on the team. Neither weapon has anything to do with demolitions, short of granting the player fire and explosive damage resistance. The Chargin’ Targe and Eyelander instead morph the Demo into a close-quarters combat class, a role prior reserved for the Pyro. Neither weapon satisfies a need that the Demo class  lacked. In fact, the updated equipment eliminates any specific role for the class while the items are equipped. Worse, the pairing of the weapons creates a close-quarters class that is arguably more effective than the Pyro. A number of preferred alternates can be thought of, for example a satchel of tossed grenades that encompass a slow rate of fire and delayed detonation time, but enjoy massive splash damage. This hypothetical weapon would be useful for displacing enemies holding an area or control point.

Last time I checked, demolitions involve explosions, not dragon slaying equipment.

Conclusion

At this point in time, the Engineer is the only remaining class that hasn’t been officially updated, and one wonders what direction Valve will take when developing his new equipment. Valve has started an unfortunate trend of designing items around the fictional narrative of the characters themselves, instead of focusing on the role the classes play on the team. For the most part, each class has received updates that have been balanced (through field-testing and minor ongoing tweaks) quite well. But sadly, it only takes a few unbalanced items to ruin the once-perfect flow of the game. Each update has rendered the Heavy even more useless than before, and his now ancient updated equipment fails to help him serve the role he was designed for in the first place.

What lies in store for the game after the final class update is released? Obviously, the addition of aesthetic items like hats, the new crafting system, and the recently announced community-made custom items (approved first by Valve to be placed in the random drop system) are all welcome additions. Ironically, the feature I most crave from is a “vanilla mode” that would remove all class updates and revert the game back to its perfectly balanced glory days before the Spy defiled the purity of the Scout’s mother, and Saxton Hale had yet to reveal his manliness to the world. Unfortunately, a vanilla mode has not been announced, nor do I think Valve is seriously considering offering a game mode that negates the years of hard work they’ve put into their updates.

Think Valve’s hats are goofy? Wait until the inclusion of community-made items.

While a lot of this is wishful thinking, I nonetheless ask that Valve reconsider some of the updates, and in fact replace or greatly modify a number of the items now available in the game.

It’s our sad and bitter nature to abuse and neglect that which was once hallowed or unique. PC gaming expressions are, by far, no exception. What was once priceless and witty becomes strip-mined, overindulged, and mass produced to nausea. PC gamers often become the belching consuming industries to the forests of phraseology. But it’s never too late for reclamation and atonement. Let us learn from our past and prevent extended proliferation of that which used to be hilarious and/or clever, but is now terrible! Together, through tutelage, we’ll make a better PC gaming world. But in the honor of literary semi-succinctness, let’s keep the analysis and education to the top four contemporary atrocities. And here they are.

There was a time where this was a sharp and impressive term, and when aptly activated, devastating to the unfortunate recipient. No longer. I now positively hate this maxim.  If ‘Epic Fail’ were a living breathing entity, I’d gladly place upon its fleshy tender head a baseball bat of hefty swinging.  No vile gaming pop-culture utterance has become more clichéd  and utterly expended than the Epic Fail. Worse yet, the Epic Fail’s vile subversive influences have leaked and entrenched itself into the standard world’s day-to-day vernacular. It’s become totally fine and proper to head into the local Ace Hardware store only to stumble across a couple of grandmas accidentally dropping a hammer onto a sack of light bulbs and hearing one of them say, “Oh my goodness! Epic Fail Gladys!”

For crap’s sakes fellow gamers, is this where the hands on the clock have come to rest? I’m imploring you all— say anything except these godforsaken stale words when a notable foul-up occurs. Make filthy love to a thesaurus or something; anything to prevent further use. I mean yeah, I realize that neglecting to include dedicated server support in Modern Warfare 2 was a bad, bad move. But why can’t we call it a monumental catastrophe, or perhaps a gargantuan error, or even a debacle of biblical proportions?  Oh and its grating antonym “Great Success” needs to go the hell away also.  Repeat after me brethren, “There is no Epic Fail, only Zuel.”

This adage was never funny, nor was it ever particularly compelling—two very good reasons to retire the phrase outright. And don’t even get me started on the nonsensical “Pwned.” Furthermore, it’s  past tense people!! I’ll capitulate that upon first irritable glance, it looks okay in all-chat after the scoreboard reads 105 – 0. But consider it in the actual context of the delivery. You used to own something and/or someone, indicating you don’t own it/them anymore. Ohhh sick burn!

Not sinking in? Okay here, maybe the below conversation between Joe and Bill will prove more palpable.

“Wow Bill. I totally owned that hot rod.”

“Really, you did?”

“Yep. Owned it big time.”

“Yeah? That’s cool. But, uh… what happened?”

“Well, I quit my part-time job at McDonald’s as a burger jockey and applied for welfare so I could sleep in everyday until 3pm, but then I couldn’t make the payments anymore, and the bank repossessed it. So I don’t own it anymore. But I used to own it! Yeah that was great, but not as great as the concept of still owning it.”

“Bummer.”

How is this dinosaur of diction still walking the earth? Gamers have hunted this damned term to extinction, and yet again and again this poor specimen of a creature finds a way to survive, and even mutate.  This defies logic, and more frustratingly, sanity. Can we as the PC gaming community truly be so creatively shallow? Have we not concocted anything to take its place after 278 years of online usage? Multitudes of 4chan memes, buckets of technological IRC advances, Ventrilo, and still the “Noob” placeholder thrives? Pathetic. The absolute travesty is that some folks still find this phrase comical and appropriate in application, all the while severely lacking any tangible qualities of social and societal existence themselves.

Example: “hahaa hey SuX0r90, checck out this dummie who sliyghtly mistimed tha rocketjump. Hes such a NOOB!!1!1 Lol Uur such a noob.”

Ho hoooo you got me good you bastard! Man that stings. Well, the Noob part doesn’t hurt, but rather the “I’m a 23 year-old legacy unemployed North American native, I don’t understand the English language, and ‘Noob’ is the ultimate fresh online insult because I’m verifiably brain-damaged, and humanity is officially un-savable” dynamic.  Yeah. That part stings.

It takes a big man to admit to his mistakes, which is probably why I never admit to my mistakes (Oh I’m sorry, probably why I never get Pwned on my Epic Fails). But under the GL HF category, I shall make an allowance: in my Team Fortress 2 days of yore, I typed out these five cursed characters with astonishing regularity. Why? Because I’m boring and unimaginative, and I find it entirely too difficult and exhausting to extend my famished fingers across the vast, vast frontier of my keyboard and spell out the goddamn words. Is it so much to ask? Apparently, yes. Yes it is. Because this stupid stump of a non-coherent sentence permeates the PC gaming multiplayer wilds like ants over sugared-honey.

Stop it! Look, it’s pretty spectacular you want me to Gather Linen and Handle Figurines, but can’t you grant me the kind favor of articulating just a bit? See, when you type out a GL HF that quick and hit enter? It tells me you really don’t wish me “good luck and have fun.” It tells me you consider the paltry abbreviation an annoying yet mandatory task, and rather than extend the letters into actual words, you’d just as soon spend those extra gained 17 seconds scratching your testicles instead. You might as well just send me a picture of a middle finger. No more GL HF! Just tell me good luck, or have fun, or when you’re feeling truly bold: both. It’s not hard. Got it? No? Newb.

Kill frenzy! GTA2 is my favorite game in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, mainly because of the crazy, over-the-top violence and the totally ridiculous world and its inhabitants. To me, the game feels like a huge joke and doesn’t take itself seriously by any means. It’s just… damn enjoyable. As the player, you travel around the game’s three main locations doing various jobs as a mercenary for three rival gangs. Jobs include a wide variety of objectives, ranging from wacky (capturing people to turn into hot dogs), to more “traditional” (drive people into the nearest water source and drown them alive). Fun!

Shadowgate meets Tex Murphy in Paul Eres’s Fedora Spade series. An adventure game similar to one on a console of the past, Fedora Spade takes a simplistic route for playability and design. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad – rather, it’s one of my favorite indie excursions of the last several years. In four separate episodes, you play as homicide detective Fedora Spade solving cases. The game’s nature makes it emphatic upon story and plot, so if that’s your thing, be sure to check it out.

Okay. So. This game is hard. Like, really hard. The kind of hard that classifies itself as “the hardest game you ever played” hard. I did not know this going into the game for the first time. I heard it was a challenging game, but not along the lines that I initially envisioned. I Wanna Be the Guy prides itself on its over-the-top difficulty, and even goes so far as to kill you within the first ten seconds of the game. It’s a platformer that takes inspiration from numerous sources of the 8-bit era and provides an experience of incredible frustration and masochism on the highest level. If you’re looking for a tough game, look no further.

Imagine a man who holds the ability of flight at his fingertips. In his suit, he can soar the skies with the speed of a jet, yet maintain the flexibility of an agile athlete. The pinnacle of a harmony between man and machine, he is both a fighter and his own most powerful weapon. He is…not Iron Man.

No, William Grey is a simple cargo pilot. But in Airtight’s latest game, Dark Void, he becomes an aerial hero and your player character through the title’s third-person shooting adventures. After crashing in the historically mysterious Bermuda Triangle, Grey enters a portal to the Void, an alternate dimension of seemingly benign, beautiful tropics that really host the Watchers, a hostile alien threat to Earth.

The demo for Dark Void sees Grey already in the Void when he first dons his iconic rocketpack. With the talented Nolan North (Uncharted 2, Assassin’s Creed II) lending his voice work, Grey expresses robust character and charm as he undertakes an exhilarating first flight. I felt just as exhilarated since I could control the rocketeer with surprising fluidity. I appreciate just how every one of my mouse motions makes accurate pitch and yaw movements, while at the same time Grey’s aerial action animates realistically and loosely with just as many bobs, weaves, and dangles as I’d imagine a flying body would do.

Falling, with style!

That said, however, some aspects of the controls appear more suited towards a controller, as a few “interesting” and ill-conceived default keyboard bindings bring a nice contortionist circus act right to your desk. Although the more advanced airborne maneuvers demonstrate the cooler and finer points of Grey’s flying, for some reason you have to hold Left Alt along with WASD to perform them. As much as I enjoy contortionists, I preferred the acrobat that arrived after I rebound the controls, which allowed easy performance of lateral jukes and other aerobatics so Grey could best dogfight against the alien threat.

Opt to hijack…

And aerial combat highlights just how much maneuverability you truly have. Even against a new rocketman like Grey, the Watchers stand no chance in their sluggish flying saucers. Sure, they may look awesome with their well-designed gyroscopic stabilizers, but you can basically dance around them as you blast ‘em out of the sky. If you’d rather sacrifice flexibility for firepower, you can also try some of the finely animated hijacking: the Watcher will try its hardest to shake you and fry you, but after a few dodges, a removed control panel, and a quick kill, you’ll have your very own flying saucer.

…for a splatter-filled payoff and a free ride.

You won’t have much time to enjoy your new toy since the demo soon takes the fight to the ground. The third-person cover-based shooting might make combat look like traditional Gears-of-War-fare, but remember Grey still has his jetpack, so he can literally boost combat back into the air. Whether the enemy has you pinned or they’re just hiding behind an annoying hunk of cover, you can break free of the constrictive 2D plain and line-of-sight: use the brief, yet useful hover ability to launch above the heat and pick off the aliens like ants. All of the combat options and full use of verticality makes combat fresh and interesting, though it does make Grey somewhat overpowered compared to his landlocked foes. While I welcome Dark Void’s take on third-person shooting, I hope that the full game will dole out tougher enemies that can counter Grey’s hovering and offer a necessary challenge.

While its combat makes the gameplay highly unique, Dark Void certainly looks familiar; at least with the on-foot action, I could easily mistake it for Mass Effect. The Unreal Engine 3 renders beautiful and expansive outdoor environments that provide great freedom to soar, but are sparsely detailed. A lack of in-game anti-aliasing support and the dull indoor structures, meanwhile, mar what’s overall a lush and finely constructed world of the Void. As far as the demo shows, it doesn’t quite reach the graphical quality of the best-looking UE3 games, such as Batman: Arkham Asylum and Mirror’s Edge, though its art style seems to focus on making the aerial action as eye-catching and dramatic as possible.

From cover-based to hover-based.

The demo shows how Dark Void places an innovative new vertical twist on the already thoroughly iterated third-person shooter by applying the classic rocketman fantasy from film that has yet only appeared in relatively few videogames. It strikes me, especially with its strange and adventure-themed orchestral score, as a title that hearkens back to beloved ‘50s sci-fi and film serials just short of having a bold-typed poster advertising “DEATH DEFYING THRILLS!” and “FLYING SAUCERS!” Though the demo brings up some valid concerns, including the controls and the difficulty, it ostensibly doesn’t showcase all Dark Void has to offer, such as the so-called “vertical cover system.” So, I look forward to how all its individual gameplay and narrative aspects weave together into the whole of the final release.

The dog dashes between the huddled group of warriors. A split second later, one of the enemy mages casts a spell of ice, freezing the dog in its tracks. The warriors quickly make do of the dog, severing it unconscious. This is not going according to plan. Frantically, I assign the rogue archer to take out the spellcasters as quickly as possible – we can ill afford another freezing. Meanwhile, my lead rogue charges forth into the thick of the warriors, keeping them busy with my mage constantly healing his wounds with magic. While watching the progress of the rogue melee, I gaze towards my archer… she’s down. This is not going according to plan.

It’s been five seconds into the battle and  two of my party are already lost. Drastic times call for drastic measures, so I command my mage to unleash a spell of earth shaking fortitude. This knocks the warriors around some, along with my melee rogue, killing him in the process. This is not going according to plan. Three down, one to go, thinks the enemy. I cast what spells I can in the amount of mana I muster, but to no avail. It takes them a fraction of a second to eliminate my last standing party member. “Your journey ends” the game tells me. This did not go according to plan.

I’m playing Dragon Age: Origins. And this story of defeat can be told numerous times through my experience of the game, yet I’m still immensely enjoying it. Usually, for me, I don’t take too kindly towards repetitive loss, which often ends in words my parents wouldn’t be proud of screamed from the top of my lungs. But for Dragon Age, I take loss as a sign of progression – on the whole, I end up fighting each battle at least twice, sometimes increasing to five or six times, before actually winning. This game is hard.

OH MY GOD I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO PLAY THIS.

The game reminds me of my gaming “golden years,” so to speak: the late-NES/early-Genesis era. Back then, I played all the challenging games of yore; Battletoads, Chakan: The Forever Man, Ghosts’n'Goblins – you name it, I played it. And I was damn good. In my elementary school years, all I’d do was play video games, and games like the previously mentioned trained me through the most brutal means possible. But all that training with difficult platforming games in the early ’90s wasn’t enough to prepare me for when I became a PC gamer around 1995. PC games of that day were difficult, but in a differing manner than their console brethren. It wasn’t about the skill of successfully pressing the jump button quick enough to dodge enemy bullets. And even if it was about that, the same process was largely dissimilar compared to what it was on a console. When I first booted up Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle, I expected it to play just like what I was accustomed to. Like Contra. But boy was I wrong. That game wasn’t about the successful string of jumps, but more about the presentation of the character and atmosphere of the game. This was directly in contrast to console gaming of the time. PC gaming wasn’t just about the challenge of the fingers, it was a challenge to the mind.

Games like WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness and King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow blew my mind. Those games and others made it clear to me that PC gaming was something totally different than the “kids games,” as I then titled them, on the consoles. PC games were brutal in a clearly superior way to console game difficulty. PC games make players think differently. Taking into account monetary funds in X-COM or bullet trajectory in ArmA II is seemingly much more a game of the mind than knowing how many lives you have left.

With the progression of technology and gameplay mechanics over the years, PC gaming has led the way for new ways to go about difficulty. With Left 4 Dead, the game forces you to work together with other people to succeed. It does it in such a way, that it completely redefined cooperative gameplay as we knew it up to that point. That made the game difficult. Even more recently with indie titles like VVVVVV taking the simple platform game concept and throwing in a hint of gravity manipulation adds to the mix of innovation that PC gaming offers.

That’s the way I like it. (Uh-huh, uh-huh).

After playing games like Bad Mojo, Rainbow Six and Crime Fighter, it was obvious to me that there was no other platform to experience this difficulty on than one of PC gaming. And to no surprise, most console games I’ve played since the PlayStation 2-era have been incredibly easy. There was no challenge. There was no charm. I could breeze through games like nobody’s business and be done with it forever.

So despite the numerous expletives and rage-quits, I’m very fortunate to be a PC gamer. I’m glad games kick my ass. Difficulty makes gaming interesting, and only the PC gets it right. I like it hard.

To start, I desire a game that absolutely refuses all forms of peripheral manipulation besides a standard mouse and keyboard. Something totally inflexible to alternative methods of internal direction. I want a game that’s built and fabricated exclusively around a singular native control device. Better yet, I want every single button on the keyboard to do something, even Pause Break and the asterisk on the number pad. Like ArmA II and the MechWarrior series, only I want the keys easily and instantaneously bound to my own assignments should the need arise, without ever having to access a main menu. I also request the option to bind all feasible actions to a single keystroke. Somehow. See? This is a pretty respectable request. Isn’t it? Okay let’s dig deeper now.

I want, no demand flat-out brilliant lifelike graphics, but I want them stylized and beautiful and gritty. With the option to go from first person to top-down overhead seamlessly. All at once. I want a Crysis-Borderlands-World of WarCraft-Monkey Island blend of fantastic super killer awesomeness. Oh and I also want all of that to run silky buttery smooth on single 8800 GTS. Also, while we’re there, I decree a need for a minimalistic yet insanely complex on-screen GUI. It needs to display all the important vitals and stats, but at the same time, it needs to be integrated into the context of the game’s continuity without ever appearing gimmicky. It needs to be exactly like Far Cry 2 only different, presenting as much info-related minutia as Civilization IV. “How in the hell do we that,” you say? Doesn’t matter how. Not my problem. Make it work. Pour Dr. Pepper onto the code or something. Be more brilliant.

Red Alert contains non-interactive cut scenes.
Therefore, it is a terrible game.

For gameplay, the perfect title must be an RPG/FPS/Brawler/Turn-Based/Real-Time/Adventure hybrid, and by golly it’d better incorporate all those styles without a hitch. It’ll be like a combination of Command & Conquer: Renegade and Savage and Street Fighter IV, only good. Clive Barker, Tom Clancy, Chet Faliszek, and Tim Schafer will pen the plot. And of course, it’ll need top-notch voice acting to accommodate the rest of its aforementioned impeccable attributes. Nothing less than Mark Hamill, Patrick Stewart, and Joe Kucan will suffice. Actually, know what? Screw all that. This game obligates nothing less than the entire cast of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. In conjunction with all of the above, the perfect game is mandated to be totally glitch and bug-free (this will no doubt necessitate 17 crazy in-depth beta tests, but these tests need to be finished a week ago so the game can come out tomorrow).

Oh and back to the story: it abso-freaking-lutely must be 100% interactive at all possible times, even when it’s technically impossible or seemingly retarded to do so in the first place. Because we all know: if we can’t manipulate the on-screen narrative as it progressively unfolds, the game cannot be considered perfect. Common sense here people. It’s your job as game creators to see through all my ostensibly abstract genius suggestions and manipulate them into rock-solid concrete realities.

Or, on second thought, maybe we could preemptively attack mass stupidity and just agree that certain games can be perfect on their own, even if they don’t necessarily fill the needs of every single opinion on the planet. Oh hi, Machinarium!

I’m not crazy! The voices tell me so!

True, I am reading into the narrator’s initial message beyond its explicit intention in the narrative. After all, the narrator speaks to you, or rather, the character you control. Akin to the narrator of Dear Esther, another Source-based indie title and one of Post Script’s main influences, the narrator guides you throughout the experience and provides commentary that complements your exploration of various salient environments. Also, you’ll hear the voices of several narrators through Post Script, as a different character will guide you in each of its five episodes.

Despite the influences of its predecessor, Post Script experiments with game narrative form far more than Dear Esther. While Dear Esther, for one, is hardly a “game,” and rather something like an exploratory narrative, Post Script fluidly incorporates light puzzle and game elements into its experience. The narrator guides often comment on your puzzle-solving actions; each unique personalities will set a tone for the exploration and gameplay experience in ostensibly different, dynamic ways from episode to episode.

Her text is pink, what harm could she possibly do?

Perhaps the most experimental aspect of Post Script comes from the nature of the narration itself, which works on multiple levels and even looks visually enticing. On one level, the well-written dialogue of the characters pop-up on-screen, and either speak to you or banter with each other, like disturbing, yet amusing voices in your head. While text doesn’t quite convey the same essence as voice acting, it makes way for the creativity of the player’s imagination, which may suit some of Post Script’s very abstract notions better than any voice actor could.

Their pop-up words, in turn, complement the second level of narration, which comes through your exploration and puzzle-solving. The world of Post Script will feel desolate and lonely as you make your way through. At least the voices in your head will keep you company, though that offers little comfort. While I enjoyed the ways the characters’ text describe the world and reminisce of lives long gone, I also thought the narrative style seemed quite jarring and altogether disorienting. I appreciate the interpretive levels of the pop-up text and the ways they apply to various details in the world, but I simply could not concentrate on moving about the levels and on reading the text at the same time.

Beautiful areas reflect a well-disciplined Source Engine modder.

The text works very similarly to that in the upcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction game, which projects both narrative text and video onto the environments themselves, as if Sam Fisher sees them there with his mind’s eye. Both Post Script’s and Splinter Cell’s narrative styles look intriguing, but I just feel Splinter Cell’s text-projection integrates much more fluidly with the game-world in ways that don’t detract from the experience.

Post Script’s experimental style takes some getting used to; nevertheless, its risk-taking with form reaches beyond more mainstream games, even including the upcoming Splinter Cell, as it aims for an artistic, character-driven aesthetic reminiscent of literary works rather than the flair of action-heavy blockbusters. Only indie games not motivated by profit, for the most part, can do this, and on some level, they must do this in order to gain attention. Like its own blunt first message, Post Script flies in the face of convention and seeks only to fulfill its artistic purposes. I’m sure I’ll get used to its style eventually; I want to, at least, because I very much hope to peer into the minds of more peculiar characters as each episode releases.

Authentic weaponry? Enemy forces that can outsmart you? Palpable sense of your own mortality? ArmA II delivers the modern battlefield to your PC – minus the combat rations. I can give you lots of reasons why ArmA II gets my vote for PC Game of the Year, but I’ve got a mission waiting so I’ll keep it simple.

Unwavering Dedication to Detail: BI Studio set out to create a modern combat simulator and they really pulled out all the stops in pursuit of their goal. Everything vital to modern operations was researched and modeled. Weapons behave accurately and the tactics are real. You can almost taste the cordite as you dive into the dirt to avoid the bullets snapping overhead.

Unmatched Co-op and Multi-player Capabilities: Whether you are playing Force vs. AI or Force vs. Force, no other game offers the opportunity to work as a team better than ArmA II. The in-game VOIP and Tactical Menu enable players to easily execute complex maneuvers.

Mod-ability: Included in the game’s purchase price are the original developer tools. Amateur developers ensure that there is a constant supply of new content being produced that ranges from uniforms to complete force conversions.

So if you think you can handle it, I’ll see you on the battlefield.

–contributed by C. Fransky

Runner-Up: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum is everything a good game should be. The controls are smooth and intuitive, the gameplay is intriguing and varied, and the graphics are gorgeously stylized. Yet above all, the game is pure, unadulterated fun. It is the most fun I’ve had in a third-person game since the original Max Payne, one of my personal all-time favorites. Arkham Asylum focuses on the strengths of the third-person genre: it takes the core mechanics of a third-person beat-’em-up, combines them with a handful of Splinter Cell-esque stealth and detective elements, and adds a dash of innovative gadgets to the mix. Pair them with the backing of over sixty years of Batman mythos, and you have yourself a recipe for a truly kickass title.

Of course, every game has its flaws. After completing the storyline and finding all the hidden Riddler items, there is nothing left to do in the game. The voice acting, while being reasonably above the industry standard, is still nothing to write home about. And combat degrades into simple button-mashing at any difficulty other than “Hard.” However, if you can look past these few (minor) pitfalls, you will find yourself with a truly fun and engrossing title that will give both the Batman veteran and average-Joe gamer hours of fun, satisfying, Joker-smashing entertainment.

–contributed by Tom “Frost” Conroy

Runner-Up: Braid

The idea of being able to reverse time in Braid isn’t just a gameplay trick but also informs the narrative. The game’s protagonist, Tim, is someone who has this overwhelming feeling of regret and wishes he could go back and do things differently. The idea of using the game as a place to explore a character’s regret, correct mistakes, and reminisce on where it all went wrong is something we rarely see in games.

I hesitate to call the game an emotional experience because I never actually got emotional over the game, but I thought it was an effective exploration of an emotion. This is something we don’t see happen much in games and, while I think it can be done with a little more skill and grace and a little less of an air of pretentiousness, Braid is a game that made me think about the potential. And there’s also some clever platforming puzzles in there somewhere. It may not be the of the highest quality but it’s the one that challenged me the most, both in terms of solving puzzles and rethinking what games could be.

–contributed by J. Ewing

Runner-Up: Dragon Age: Origins

I have not had this much fun in a Bioware game since NeverWinter Nights. I prefer the traditional RPG Fantasy of big giant swords and mages in skimpy outfits, and Dragon Age: Origins has brought me back into the Bioware bandwagon. I loved the interaction Bioware has placed into the game: your companions will talk to each other, comment about the environment around you, and, once you increase enough favor with them, some will even start questioning you. You feel like your character actually has a history in the game and the people around you will even comment on your “Origins” depending on how you frame it.

You could be the guy who’s glad to escape from home, the one who’s homesick, or even the one who hates being in the forced position of Grey Warden. The companions, like in other Bioware games, also have their own backstory that you can explore and help them solve. Some will only activate when you gain enough favor points with the characters, while others you get through talking with them; specific items given to the characters, meanwhile, open up cinematics and dialogue options for you to interact with the companions. My only wish for the game is that it would have more puzzles/riddles than fighting.

–contributed by Mike Quach

Other Nominations from the Community: Burnout Paradise; Empire: Total War; Judith; Left 4 Dead 2; Machinarium

1. Machinarium

For listeners of the Game Central podcast, this pick should come as little surprise. Machinarium takes everything we love about the PC and exemplifies the real power of the platform: creativity and ingenuity. This is truly the adventure game for everybody, even rookies like me. In fact, as I neared the game’s ending, I didn’t even care what genre Machinarium technically fell under. All that mattered was how much the game impacted me emotionally and mentally.

From the opening screen, the hand-drawn animated and static visuals captivate like no other.  You could spend hours gazing exclusively at each new scene, studying the backgrounds and staring into their gorgeous industrialized intricacies, and it would not be time wasted. And sure, it’s 2D, but when a 2D game trounces every other 3D game out there in the illustrative department, does it really matter? Not in my book.

With so many other “PC” titles falling prey to the consoles and their decidedly limited modes of presentation and malleability, our platform is rapidly losing its direction. But games like Machinarium help the PC retain its true identity. This game singlehandedly highlights the PC’s authenticity as an entity wholly separate from the land of the PS3 and the Xbox 360. For this nuance alone, Machinarium deserves the golden trophy.

2. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Any time a PC game causes me to suddenly become compelled to engorge myself on its base narrative influences and underpinnings, it has to be special. Within days of firing up Arkham Asylum, I was so intrigued by the plot and characters, I immediately ordered 2 Batman graphic novels as well as Batman Begins on Blu-ray. Lemme tell ya folks, this behavior ain’t typical.

And from the wide lens of game design and development, Arkham Asylum is quite simply a masterpiece. Rather than creating a gigantic open world such as Far Cry 2 or GTA IV, Rocksteady chose to contain the free-form nature of the game into a tightly claustrophobic interwoven environment. You can still adventure around and discover secrets, but there’s never a lull in the action, and roaming from one area to another never takes more than a few minutes.

Plus, Arkham Asylum finally legitimizes gaming voice-acting as serious business. Mark Hamill puts forth an Oscar-worthy performance as the Joker, and every supporting cast member (with perhaps the exception of the armed guards) retains similar professional deliveries. For once, it’s obvious that big-time talented actors truly love what they’re doing for a game. When was the last time that happened? Probably never.

3. Torchlight

Torchlight is the epitome of value. Releasing for a paltry 20 green-backs, Runic Games crafted an action-RPG worthy of the highest praises normally associated with only the big boys. Once you begin your trek into the catacombs and realize just how insanely entertaining and charming Torchlight actually is, you’ll feel like you acquired the game at a steal.

Runic took all the annoying parts of usual RPGs and threw them flat on their backs. Running out of potions? Drop a town teleport scroll, walk through it, purchase some gear, walk back, and you’re right where you left off before. Bam. Easy. This is one of those games that’ll have you asking, “Why didn’t they think of this before??”

And to top it all off, Torchlight’s soundtrack is phenomenal. In an era of gaming where musical scores seem a tacked-on afterthought, this game gives that notion the proverbial middle finger. The sound effects are equally noteworthy, and every spell’s explosion or shattered skeleton’s echoes accentuates the supporting melodies.  If for some reason you haven’t yet taken the Torchlight dive, do yourself a favor and grab it. Your ears will thank you, and your PC gaming spirit will be renewed.

Honorable Mentions:
Braid
Plants vs. Zombies

Shame of the Year: Darkest of Days

It’s not often that you’ll gladly choose broken bones over gaming, but Darkest of Days manages to do just that. This game is so unbelievably terrible, so ridiculously painful to play, you’ll wonder if maybe it would have been better to just spend 40 bucks on a buddy of yours to come by and dislocate your kneecaps with a crowbar. Because at least that way, you can take comfort in knowing that the pain inflicted was intentionally self-imposed. For the love of everything sacred, if someone even offers to pay you for this travesty of a title, punch them in the pancreas and report them to the authorities; your sanity might very well depend on it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you: Darkest of Days is the Insultiest of Insults.

1. Machinarium

What can I say? A lot, apparently. Chris can too. It’s funny thinking back when I first heard of Machinarium; my initial impressions pertained to something along the lines of “Oh, cool graphics.” While indeed that is true, I had no idea it would impact me as much as it did when I reviewed it. There is so much charm and pure-blooded love oozing from this game, I can’t help but give it the acclaim it deserves. Amanita obviously had an unbelievable amount of passion while creating this masterpiece. In all honesty, I haven’t seen many PC games in recent years where the developer had that much care for the end result – it seems to me that that affection died out when developing games became more of a business than a passion. Nevertheless, Machinarium shines as a pinnacle example of what PC gaming is all about, and totally deserves the accolade of game of the year.

2. ArmA 2

I had an endless debate with myself about whether or not to place ArmA 2 as my number one choice. The innovation that both ArmA 2 and Machinarium placed on the pedestal makes it one of the hardest gaming decisions for me in a long, long time. It’s like Mohammed Ali fighting Mohammed Ali: two forces to be reckoned with, neither of which have any desire to go down soon.

ArmA 2 provides an experience like no other. Following in the footsteps of its predecessors ArmA and Operation Flashpoint, ArmA 2 is a modern military simulator that is ambitious as it is realistic (and as ridiculous.) The game’s world is the biggest sandbox in PC gaming and grants you to revisit your childhood of being a soldier, instead this time, being the most brutal and in-your-face presentation of those childhood memories. The game does not hold your hand by any means – be expected to die at least once a mission, and having a hard time even learning how to control the game. It surprises me when people get turned off by this, especially when it’s from self-proclaimed hardcore PC gamers. The reason? This is the most PC PC game made in the last ten years. Games like ArmA 2 perfectly define the PC’s strengths and build off them to a point where I can’t possibly see why someone can dislike it. Sure, the controls may not be the most user-friendly or your performance may be lackluster, but ArmA 2 raises the bar so high to what PC games can achieve that I can’t see developers not looking towards it for inspiration in the future.

3. Opera Omnia

Who says we should be limited to only retail releases from big publishers when naming the games of the year? When we get down to it, it’s the game’s quality that counts. Opera Omnia turned the puzzle game genre on its head and delivered an incredibly unique gameplay mechanic of reverse logic which earns it the third spot on my list. While the production is rudimentary, it gave me one of the most atmospheric experiences I’ve had since STALKER – which, for a free game, is more than enough to trump the big dogs of this year’s releases.

Honorable Mentions:
Dawn of Discovery
Torchlight

Underwhelming Underdog: East India Company

I’m always excited to see debut games of newly formed PC game developers. This was the case when I first heard of Nitro Games’ real-time strategy economy title East India Company. The game’s historical premise of leading a company to financial success through transporting goods, forming alliances, and battling other nations across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean surprisingly captured my interest. However, as pointed out in my review, the game was plagued with generic… genericness. Or in scientific terms: “DoomThreeitis.” It introduced all what the game had to offer in the first few minutes of playing, with nothing particularly unique to the game. To make matters worse, the actual gameplay itself just got tedious. To Nitro’s credit, they did attempt to resuscitate the life out of the game with a director’s cut edition and the Privateer & Pirate Bay expansion packs, but it was just a lost cause. I really hope they pull through with another game and blows this stale seafaring simulator out of the water.

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum

No other video game this year facilitates the complete experience of the player quite like Batman: Arkham Asylum does.  The game came as quite a surprise to me, as I could never expect a licensed franchise, especially one as thoroughly explored as the Batman universe, to achieve any sophisticated level of gaming greatness.  Despite the plethora of well-defined content, the developers of Rocksteady provide a reading of the Batman mythos so meticulously crafted that their resulting game conveys an astonishingly whole of comic references and well-paced adventures on Arkham Island.

No other game, too, can match the way Arkham Asylum truly unifies you, as the player, with the player character, the Dark Knight himself.  Batman’s power, skills, high tech gadgetry rest at your finger tips, and you’ll watch in awe at the flexible animations that depict the character.  Fantastic voice acting from Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill commands the characters of Batman and Joker respectively.  Sequences caused by Scarecrow’s hallucinogens, moreover, let you control Batman as he delves into his deepest motivation and experiences his most tragic day in interactive ways that reflect a true mastery of the video game medium.  Batman: Arkham Asylum absolutely captivated me this year.

2. Braid

Braid reflects a unity, an artistry, and a vision rarely seen in video games.  Its 2D platforming gameplay hearkens back to its retro game roots, yet it parodies and innovates on those influences to create an original, pure experience in its own right.  Sure, its creator, Jonathan Blow, has enough grandiose pretentiousness as an auteur to humble even James Cameron; however, Braid stands apart as a sincere entity that successfully finds harmony between gameplay, narrative, and art in ways few other games have.

As such, Braid achieves far more than titles, such as Machinarium, that only illustrate their whimsical game narrative experiences through an old-fashioned, awkward separation between elements of story and gameplay.  The fact that you, the player, never lose control over Tim, the protagonist, throughout the adventure allows you to progress at your own pace, which contributes further towards a more satisfying experience.  Solving Braid’s time-bending puzzles felt particularly satisfying, especially since they grew progressively more 4th-dimensionally complex, yet ingeniously simple to execute.  From its expressive painted worlds, to its emotional use of music, to Tim’s desperate control of time and paradox, Braid not only pulls together its elements, it also marks an important point in the literary growth of game narrative.

3. Mirror’s Edge

Who knew companies like EA and DICE could actually give new IPs and, heaven forbid, innovation a chance?  Putting their long-standing money-making franchise, Battlefield, on the backburner, DICE developed Mirror’s Edge, a unique, surreal game about heart-pumping free running action.  The developer successfully recreated the adrenaline-fueled sensation from the first-person perspective of Faith, an agile runner.  Every leap between rooftops, every fast-paced chase from the dystopian world’s ever-present police, and every dizzying glance into the heights just beyond the edge captured the beauty, grace, and style of free running.

And DICE couldn’t give us a better environment to express a mastery of running than a jaw-dropping cityscape filled with multiple paths through skyscrapers, well-designed interiors, and even the exciting romp atop speeding trains.  Like Batman, the game makes incredible use of Unreal Engine 3 towards a stunning white-washed aesthetic filled with bright pops of solid color.  The major black mark that tarnishes the beautiful aesthetic comes in Faith’s clumsy weapons handing, though her melee skills do provide a fluid, yet challenging approach to combat.  Mirror’s Edge is also quite short, but for its brief narrative, it renders a cohesive experience worthy of recognition.

Honorable Mentions:
Left 4 Dead 2
Plants vs. Zombies

Dishonorably Discharged: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

No game, not even the travesty that was Darkest of Days, could disappoint me, as a PC gamer, more than Modern Warfare 2.  Granted, I must admit that I have not played the game, but I am well aware of its inexcusable lack of standard PC features.  Several elements are noticeably absent, including some that the game’s predecessor correctly implemented, such as dedicated servers, mod support, and advanced actions like leaning.  Combine those issues with the fact that the game requires Steam, and you’ll realize the developers effectively consolidated and “console-ized” the experience.

Unless I’m wrong, and these fundamental problems aren’t really so bad, I will stand by my initial opinion that Modern Warfare 2, as well as its developer, has wronged us PC gamers, and it clearly doesn’t deserve consideration for Game of the Year.  Please Infinity Ward, do the PC right next time and at least meet some basic PC game standards.

RED HOT GAMING RIG OF THE FUTURE (center),
accompanied by Clarance (left, accounting)
and Alice (right, Capricorn).

One of my favorite gaming memories is of playing Wing Commander with my friend Jeremy. Now, I’m not fixated on Wing Commander, despite recent evidence. It’s the game that stands out from my formative gaming years, though. Jeremy and I built a cooperative camaraderie as we played. It was easier to fly a mission with two pairs of hands manning all the game’s controls, spread between the joystick and keyboard as they were. With Jeremy as my wingman, and with me as his, we reached new heights in dogfighting performance.

PC gaming always involved a sense of performance: getting the most out of the hardware you’ve got. As a DOS game, Wing Commander pushed the technical limitations of the day’s computers, and the onus was on the gamer to step up. PC gamers had to either learn to streamline their rigs or just settle for less. Jeremy had a real facility for it: he always got the joystick hand graphic to come up, which demanded extra memory, even after burning precious kilobytes on loading his mouse drivers.

The requirement of technical tweakery made the PC an unlikely participant in the dawning age of popular video gaming. It was a such a clunky, uninspired thing, the PC of yesteryear. Put it this way: GAMING AIN’T BEIGE.

Other computers of the age were much friendlier to video gamers. The Commodore series had better graphics and sound right out of the box. And systems like the NES, Sega Genesis, and Saturn were arcade-emulating juggernauts! Plug in to your TV and enjoy. Easy! Fun! Familiar!

Gaming on the PC, on the other hand, was practically an act of masochism. Forget the cost of specialized components like “monitors” and the dim, Carcosian landscape of an alien DOS prompt. You *had* to get mired down in fancy technical stuff for it to do anything remotely game-like. Example: high-end PC video that could show more than FOUR COLORS AT A TIME didn’t hit the mass market until around 1982. And even then, setting them up felt a lot like brain surgery: crack the case, perform precise work, and never touch anything inside … even if you knew what it was connected to.

“The missing circuit’s in your head, Whorfin.
Or it’s conflicting with COM3, IRQ4.”

(And can you believe we used to have to plug our joysticks into the back of the sound card? The SOUND CARD. And sound cards didn’t even COME with joysticks. You had to buy sound cards and joysticks separately. Madness, I tell you.)

I’ve worked in IT for most of my adult life, and I can honestly say that I owe my living to my love of PC video games. Without those trials, I would not have the know-how to deal with PCs that suddenly spit out cryptic error messages, emit strange smells, or simply go ‘click’ and then die. Instead, PCs to me would be incomprehensible blinky monoliths: not tools to be exploited, but intemperate, fickle saboteurs to be endured at best and avoided at need. Much as how my user base sees them, in fact.

PC gaming has it over consoles through the gift of truly marketable IT skills. It comes at a cost, though: working with the technology professionally isn’t as fun as when I was just an enthusiast. (After all, I don’t get to play games once I get a borked computer up and running.) And I resist sitting in front of the computer when I get home from work these days. My gaming hobby is less accessible to me now.

Yet, one of the things I’m grateful for as a gamer these days is that I don’t have to be a hardcore computer geek to get the most out of my games anymore. PC systems have pioneered and adopted approaches to everyone’s “no-brainer” benefit. From USB ports that enabled interchangeable game controllers, to standardized development platforms, to abstracted libraries like DirectX that liberate PC gamers from DOS driver hell into a more modest Windows driver heck — I love the results. Even on PCs, games are easy to set up and play. At last!

If I’d spent my youth knitting instead of tweaking TSRs
in DOS, I’d be the God Emperor of Etsy by now.

Maybe it’s no surprise that PC gaming takes its cues from consoles now, ports and all. You kids frankly have it easy, what with your X-Wiis and Playtendo 420s. Your “turn it on and it goes.” Your “I never have care about what driver version I have.” Your “tell me again about how you had to calibrate your joystick every time you turned on the computer, grandpa.” Yeah. I can see how consoles have it over PCs. Maybe. A little.

Still, when the siren song of a new generation of beeps and boops calls to me sweetly from inside the PC case, I’m strangely drawn to get elbow-deep in the hardware again for the tricked-out gaming rewards. Consoles purposefully mute this sweet melody; to those of us who have heard it, console aficionados game in stoic, lifeless silence. Meanwhile, the music carries me.

My stripe of PC gaming was — and still can be — about understanding the entire system to bring out the best in it. I take pride in that understanding. It satisfies me beyond simply playing the game. Jeremy and I bonded our friendship over it, after all.

That, and a mutual homicidal attitude toward giant cats in space ships. It’s good video gaming no matter how you slice it.

Starting you at the controls behind the twin rotors of the Samson transport gunship, the demo sets the tone for all of your invasive exploration to come.  Briefly, you can gaze in awe at the sight of Pandora’s iconic (and scientifically impossible) floating rock structures amidst a serene cloudy sky before you must blast them all to smithereens with a lethal mix of bullets, explosions, and hellfire.

Only the bravest warrior would defeat fierce beasts from the safety of a protective bubble.

Known as nothing more than a “grunt” for the human RDA faction, you’re tasked with clearing a path through the lush jungle for a massive invasion force.  And if you’ve wanted nothing more than to blindly follow a mighty, progressive regime, crush that dastardly evil known and feared under the unspeakable name of “the environment,” and fight as the highly unique “space marine” character type, then the RDA grunt is your perfect avatar.

In all seriousness, the game does initially look fun to play, but then ten seconds later you realize that you basically can fly your Samson like a bird in a glass cage.  You’ll have no other choice but to land on the jungle floor, where you’ll then take the grunt through Avatar’s main third-person shooting adventures.  Unsurprisingly, the brimming, colorful alien foliage and environments just don’t seem so captivating when your only mode of interaction with them requires attack.

Some areas certainly look stunning.

Undoubtedly, Avatar’s Dunia graphics engine—the same engine that powered Far Cry 2—renders gorgeous Pandoran environments with a highly dense population of exotic ferns, trees, and lively creatures.  Avatar utilizes DirectX 10, which doesn’t add any visual improvements, but, much like for Far Cry 2, does at least boost rendering performance by about 10 to 15 percent more frames-per-second.  All the colors and details will dazzle you as you take them all at once, especially the luminous glows of the darker, more wooded areas; however, each of the individual objects appear glaringly low-res and poorly detailed when observed closely.  While the world, as a whole, nearly spans that of Far Cry 2’s expansive African landscapes, it carves disappointingly linear, narrow paths with only a few divergent forks that would provide any form of satisfying exploration.

Play Far Cry 2 Avatar and drive African alien dune buggies.

But “satisfying exploration” and “environmental appreciation” are all hippie, liberal pieces of crap anyway.  When you’re the all-important grunt, you just take what’s beautiful, put a few bullets in it, and then watch the experience points fly out.  Yes, when you upgrade your weapons and armor using the RPG elements, you surely represent the hand of progress, civilization, and humanity itself.

Ok, so the game probably won’t work as a metaphor for the arrogance of civilization and the nobility of the savage as well as film will attempt to convey.  And the RPG elements run just as deep.  Destroying countless specimens of rare wildlife racked up hundreds of experience points, but they really amount to very iterative, insignificant stat improvements and little more than palette swaps on the bland, rectangular weapons.

Playing as the Na’vi would look much cooler.

Because the combat hardly rewards your grunt’s painstaking deforestation efforts, you have no real motivation to follow through on orders or take part in the shooting gameplay.  For most of the demo at least, you can just grab an RDA dune buggy and drive past most of the action.  Even in the climactic battle between the RDA and the fierce alien Na’vi tribe, you simply spectate the fight around you; joining the fray might bring you some thrills, but the Na’vi rarely fight you back and often continue attacking other random human troops.

The demo doesn’t showcase it, but the full game apparently does let you control the Na’vi Avatars, as the title would suggest.  If I were to pick up the game, I would likely enjoy the Na’vi aspect far more than the kill-everything-beautiful human side.  Judging from the demo, I think Avatar: The Game will only appeal to me if I like the film, and I’d therefore want to further explore the potentially fascinating alien world.

Hate.

It’s time to stop the madness.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of things to dislike about some games. In a world where movie franchises are used like scaffolding in place of solid game design and titles purporting to be “X-treme” are more common than they deserve to be, one need not look long to find good examples of bad decisions. With so much to legitimately dislike in gaming, it’s easy to see why some folks may jump the gun in heaping hate on the undeserving.

You Got Your Real Thyme In My Turn Baste!

Sometimes, a gameplay feature isn’t necessarily bad – it’s just different. And if that difference falls afoul of our own rules of preference, we might react with… the “H” word. Because we’re only human (at the moment), gamers tend to incorporate their preferences into their identities, where they become entrenched and difficult to displace. Bob doesn’t simply prefer RTS games; an “RTS Gamer” is who he is. He has decided that turn-based strategy is just not his bag. It’s an innate efficiency mechanism that can simplify decision-making but has an unfortunate side-effect: we sometimes decide to dislike something before giving it a fair shake.

There are also cases where a particular feature is poorly implemented, or simply implemented in such a way that doesn’t appeal to some – say, a fast-paced RTS game that doesn’t allow order-giving while the game is paused. Let’s call this purely-hypothetical game “Order & Overcome”, or O&O for short. Now, some people prefer games like O&O. It’s fast and hectic and forces players to make quick decisions. Someone coming from a turn-based strategy background, however, who enjoys a more deliberative game might be turned off by their O&O experience. So much so, in fact, that they may decide they hate real-time strategy games–all of them–as a result. This poor sap could very well go through life without ever playing Company of Heroes or Rise of Nations and yet have the audacity to put “Here Lies Bubba – PC Gamer” on his tombstone. Are you beginning to see, dear reader, the absurdity–nay, the injustice–that blind gamer hate can wreak upon our world?

An Ignorable Hate

Speaking (or typing, as it were) of absurdity brings us to our next category of unfounded hate: stuff you can ignore. “Stop right there, o corpulent word-masher,” you say. “Wasting hate on things you can pretend not to exist– that just doesn’t make any sense!” An astute observation, shrewd one, but who’s writing the article here? Imagine what you would say to a console-only gamer who criticized PC games for their ability to save anywhere, claiming that it makes games too easy. I know what I’d say: “If you don’t want to save the game, you don’t have to save the game. It’s just an option. Now please stop digging through my garbage.” And you know what? I’d be right.

It’s surprising just how often people will pull the big “H” lever on something based on a perfectly ignorable feature. So the game you’re playing supports 64x AA and resolutions of up to 7680×4320, which is beyond the capability of your current video card? Ignore that option. Playing a save anywhere-enabled game that also offers players a checkpoint-like device, like some kind of ‘vital chamber’, that chaps your hide? Treat it like you would any other bit of uninteresting scenery and walk on by. Think fast-traveling in sandbox games is for wusses? Be anti-Nike and just don’t do it. They are called “options” for a reason.

Consider for a moment the importance of this “Options” concept to PC gaming and its place with respect to consoles: hardware options, key mapping options, save-game options, controller options. The sheer variety of titles available to the PC gamer means what? More options. Does that mean that all of the awful PC titles out there are a mark against PCs (read: a valid reason to hate)? No! Why? Because you don’t have to play them! So please, folks, no more hating things that you can simply ignore. Gosh, I wish they would make a sequel to Master of Orion 2…

Great.   Expectations.

Expectations can be a double-edged, you know, edgy-thingie. They can motivate us to better performance when they are held of us by others. They can add excitement to our lives when we know something good is on the way– be it Christmas, a vacation, or a new pizza-flavored version of, well, anything. On the other hand, when unfulfilled they can result in disappointment and worse, depending on whom the expector might be.

So who’s to blame when a game, whether in whole or part, falls short? That depends, of course, on how reasonable the expectations were. A game developer that promises, in a 137-point-font advertisement, to “make Hugh his bitch,” has made his own bed (or pwn bed, as it were), and might find him or herself on the receiving end of some serious nerd-rage. Or mockery, but I repeat myself. This type of expectation, the kind that is externally-generated, is what we gamers refer to as “hype”.

It’s reasonable to expect a certain amount of hype. Publishers have to market their games, after all; no proud papa shows off pictures of his ugly new baby (“…and he stinks, too!”). So it’s no surprise that we see advertisements and press releases making claims of “mind-blowing graphics” and “innovative gameplay” (BREAKING NEWS: Game developer claims “people are gonna like this game”…film at eleven). And people like to talk about what people are talking about. Hype begets hype. If you are a seasoned gamer and you fall for some run-of-the-mill, “this-game-will-knock-your-socks-off!” marketing, well, let’s not say that it’s your fault; let’s just say that the fault lies with someone who is not someone else. Caveat gamer.

Then there’s this other kind of expectation, the kind we create ourselves. You expect Mr. Legendary Developer’s newest game to have elements A, B, and C in them and you expect them to work a certain way because that’s how they worked in the first 6 games of his that made you such a fan. You expect to be able to enter and find interaction in any building in Big-Ass City, the setting of the latest gritty, urban-themed open-world game because that’s just how cities are. You expect your first-person shooters to have health packs because that’s just how first-person shooters are supposed to work.

Minimizing your expectations may sound absurd, but you probably do it all the time. When you go to a movie, especially those of the fantastical variety, you don’t expect 100% realism. If you did, you’d be sorely disappointed just about every time. You suspend your disbelief so that you can enjoy the movie. Suspending your expectations is akin to that. I don’t expect a vehicle to be able to travel at light speed (thanks a lot, Mr. Einstein!), but I don’t roll my eyes when the Millennium Falcon does exactly that.

Playing a game with a clean slate–zero expectations–should be the ideal. It’s practically impossible, sure, but it’s well worth striving for. You’re more likely to be thrilled by the good parts. You’re less likely to prejudice yourself against some aspect of the game that you might have otherwise enjoyed. You’ll enjoy the game for what it is rather than hate it for what it isn’t.

I Hate Conclusions

So what difference does a little more hate make? You’ve already got more games than you can play in a normal, human (for now) lifetime. Who cares if you throw a few more games onto the “Hate It” pile?
You should care. Ask yourself, dear reader, why you are here. Not “here” in an existential sense, nor “here” on this, the third rock from old Sol… but here, in the wide and wonderful virtual multiverse of PC gaming. Why do you spend your time, money and effort practicing this particular hobby? Sure, if you’re a games journalist, it’s clearly because of the chicks and the cashola. But if you’re like most of us, it’s for the same reason you called that number you found scrawled on a bathroom wall: “For a good time.” And yet, having a hair trigger on your hate gun can be a big-time impediment to achieving that most worthy goal.

In this DOS platform puzzler, you play as Thor, the god of thunder himself, and try to rid the world of the most villainous Norse mythology evil do-ers. You achieve this by going through the vibrant 2D graphical world killing baddies and solving puzzles. There’s plenty of characters to interact with too, with a large emphasis on strange humor (like Relg’s TV & Bridge Repair to fix a bridge and “McElroys” to get plenty of fat foods.) All three parts of the game have been released for free; they aren’t too long or complicated if you’re really into it, though I still get stuck on that damn puzzle with the snakes and boulders after fifteen years of playing. Though it may be nostalgia, I still highly enjoy this game after all these years. If you’ve never heard of God of Thunder, check it out for a wacky adventure of puzzle-y fun.

I had never heard of this game until GC’s Andrew Holliday reviewed it, and boy am I glad he did. In all honesty, I feel that Opera Omnia is the best puzzle game I’ve ever played. The mechanic of reverse thinking is something you don’t see too often in puzzle games. As Andrew points out, “To be able to deduce the solution of each puzzle the game presents, the player must turn the way they think about time on its head.” The game isn’t focused on just the puzzles like what you’d expect in The Incredible Machine or Lemmings, instead it has a strong emphasis on storytelling. It ain’t just some filler story either; I found myself trying to solve the puzzles as fast as possible just so I could see the next part of the story. The minimalist graphics give the game such a unique identity and atmosphere I’ve yet to achieve anywhere else. I highly, highly recommend this game.

This game is experiencing a Renaissance, starting with the free release on GOG.com, and continuing with the re-vamped remastering for the iPhone, and the rumored sequel coming in the future. But still nothing beats playing the classic 1994 point-and-click adventure game through ScummVM in all its cyberpunk comic book-ish VGA glory on your PC. Designed and illustrated by Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), the game tells a story of futuristic mystery. Just as with any other point-and-click, story and dialogue are the forefront of the presentation. Beneath a Steel Sky delivers strongly on both those aspects, and is a blast to play. The game has aged quite well, and is as relevant now as it was back then.

Too bad there’s not a spell for
“Stop Magnus from pointlessly braining me.”

No doubt about it, Arcanum managed to kick some serious ass. Unfortunately, not all asses were kicked, and the amount of rear-ends left un-booted were directly proportional to the amount of sanity-crushing existence-questioning bugs that crawled through the game’s innards like maggots in road kill. To put it short: it coulda been a contenda. Instead, upon initial release, players found themselves suddenly missing crucial story-driven items from their inventories, numerous broken quests, ridiculously frequent and save-corrupting crashes, inaccessible treasure areas, and even friendly party-based NPCs that would suddenly attack your character for no specific reason (maybe they didn’t approve of your tunic choice?).  And while many of these issues have since been rectified via a gigantic independent 3^rd party patch, that’s simply an unacceptable solution to numerous potential game-ending problems. In the end, Troika still smashed  together a great title, but  they probably should have used some better glue between the seams. Because without the 3^rd party mending kit, it might as well read as Arcanum: Of Bitter Frustrations and Desk-a-Puncha.

You know something’s amiss when battling skeletons
is potentially less risky then combining hay stacks.

It’s hard to fault a game that lets you collect hay off a barn floor, combine it together, form a makeshift bed, and then carry around the finished result as a portable cot to restore mana and health on the fly… unless by forming said improvised sleeping mat the game freezes, sends an ear-shattering noise through your brain like a lightning bolt, and then boots you to the desktop, a single tear falling from your eye in the aftermath. Yep, Divine Divinity employed some brilliant genre-bending maneuvers, but God help you if you ever accidentally accomplished quest actions ahead of time. The amount of freedom Larian Studios granted the player was impressive, but perhaps ill-thought out. For example, if you decided to savagely butcher both Yoram and Otho (always a tempting option), the game was rendered unbeatable, since no hints for Goemoe remained. Woops! The good news is that since the game’s launch, Divine Divinity has enjoyed a metric-ton’s worth of patches addressing the most heinous of the worst issues. The bad news: they had to release a metric-ton’s worth of patches just to make the game semi-playable. Woops!

“Shouldn’t we play-test this thing Carl?”
“Nah- it’s fine.”

With a name that somehow exceeds 10 syllables, what could possibly go wrong? Well, everything, apparently. Pool of Radiance, an RPG in the tradition of the Baldur’s Gate series, was one of the most anticipated PC games of 2001. And then, on the flip of a dime, it quickly became one of the most despised games of all time. Not sure why though; so what if uninstalling the game nuked your Windows system files? And yeah, constant 1 fps stuttering and bog-downs may have crippled all semblances of playability, and sure: often times the game was outright unresponsive immediately after booting, but these are the little nuances that make niche titles so special. Don’t people get it? Psh. Wusses. But in reality, this game was so horribly crippled, so unbelievably tarnished, that within a paltry week’s time a stupidly inflated patch was shoved through the gates like a battering ram to quell the rioting masses. But that’s like trying to diffuse an atom bomb with a thread and a needle after it’s already exploded.  Sorry SSI, maybe next time you oughta, you know, TEST THE DAMN TITLE before releasing it into the wild.  Brilliant!

If only our protagonist’s weapon was a
can of Raid, he might actually stand a chance.

More astonishing than the needlessly incomprehensible acronym of a moniker is just how damned artificially difficult this game could be. Unfortunately for the player, in keeping with historical and scientific accuracy, only the bugs survived the Russian nuclear meltdown. And boooooy did they. Perhaps in keeping with the context of the plot’s continuity, the bugs actually mutated and increased after the first patch. That’s right: “fixing” the game outright added screw ups rather than vaporizing them. One of the more powerfully mind-boggling glitches involved an instance where the blast-door to the main trader (the only guy that could progress the story, naturally) would inexplicably close, blocking all access. Only way to fix it was to hope to hell it was cracked open enough to toss a grenade just right (this could take hours), relying on the resulting explosion to jar the iron slab back open. Yeah, comrade, that’s WAY more intuitive than making  the door reply to the goddamned “use” button. And the code gremlins didn’t stop there. Audio errors, quests that completed themselves without any user interaction, inescapable holes and rooms, this game had everything… everything except a revolver in the game box to shoot yourself with. A.w.e.s.o.m.e.!

Nudge that lamp post and you’re a goner.

By an Alabama mile, nothing even comes close to this one. SkyNET, one of Bethesda’s earliest forays into poignant masochism, is perhaps the most bipolar PC game ever made. Or kind of made… the whole “finished” nuance is actually tough to prove here. See, on one hand, SkyNET perfectly adapted every awesome detail from the Terminator lore, putting you smack dab into the best part of the series: the future war. But on the other hand, it killed you for no reason. And often.  So often in fact, that the quick-save key became more utilized than the forward key. Most of the adventure consisted of “Step. Save. Step. Save. Strafe. Save. St… SHIT! Reload.” Jumped on the wrong nook? Dead. Fell 2 inches off a single step? Dead. Lightly brushed your shoulder on a piece of overhanging debris? Dead. And sometimes, even by avoiding all obstacles altogether (not easy, since the game was freakin’ littered with ‘em), you’d get “Mission failed, soldier!” for absolutely nothing. Yep. Nothing. You’d just die. Just because. Best part? This was all before patches and internet were widely available. Under most circumstances, you were stuck with the stock gameplay. The real tragedy here is that underneath all that psychotically homicidal digital mess is a game that could have rocked even to this day. Just don’t touch any rocks, or else you’re dead.  “Game tossed in the garbage disposal, soldier!”

I’ve played through several campaigns, and out of all my exploits, I now deliver to you the very best tales.  Memoirs from a true survivor tell each tale best.  Heed his testimony, choose your weapon, mix up your finest fiery cocktail, and join me on some fine anti-zombie crusades.

Out of all add-on campaigns, this one looks the most similar to Valve’s L4D style. In fact, it even starts in a city level much like that of No Mercy or Dead Air. The crescendo moments also don’t particularly add any original events, though the path-opening zombie attractions excite nonetheless. The most creative level design starts with the hotel; all the interconnected rooms within provide multiple ways through and often hide boss infected for some nasty surprise encounters. You’ll eventually make your way to a multi-tiered prison that makes zombie killing all the more interesting, especially if a Tank awaits in the cellblock. Death Row’s short four-level campaign feels refreshingly varied, and makes a great first taste for those looking for new user-made L4D experiences.

No cell could hold these monsters.

From the Memoirs:

As we hoofed our way here, we passed through a nice hotel just a click south of the sticks;  there was no vacancy for anyone except Charlie.  When this whole zombie craze blows over, I think I’ll book a stay there sometime. Spend some hard earned leave; recuperate some R & R.  We force-marched it through more city streets (those alleyways are murder-holes), we low-crawled it through the mosquito-plagued humid woods, and a Smoker damn near tore the cigarette right out of my mouth all so we could find rescue in a prison? What do these baby civvies call it? That’s right…ironic.  And I’ll be damned if I didn’t spend my whole life making up for that one mistake.  Sure, now we’re obliterating the criminally undead, but coming here rustles up flashbacks best forgotten.  Good idea, Francis.  Wouldn’t be surprised if he felt right at home here. Hell, if he ever wore camouflage, wouldn’t be surprised if he was stationed here.

If you’re willing to commit to an extensive campaign of epic proportions, you’d best answer when Vienna calls. Starting out at the top of a department store, you’ll explore a large square footage of vertical space as you search each floor for useful pipe bombs and molotovs. You’ll certainly need as much weaponry and ammo caches as possible because the incredibly long trek down the train-car filled tunnel will certainly test your survival skills against several infected hordes.

Despite their size, environments consistently overflow with salient European landmarks and maintain a brisk pace. Highly creative combinations of objects and triggers make for some of the most original and climactic crescendo events I’ve seen in a L4D campaign. Hit a L4D2-esque trigger to briefly open a door, and you’d better gun it. Face the horde on the other side head on or else you’ll need to do it all over again. Hit a fuse box and get to the train! You’ll love every bit of the 2-3 hours the campaign takes on Advanced difficulty; and if you can tackle it on Expert, I’ll be very impressed. Despite its great pacing, Vienna Calling is still far too long, though it definitely makes a more fulfilling experience than any of Valve’s official campaigns.

“No, Zoey, I said ‘Check out the European ads.’ Honest.”

From the Memoirs:

When they broke the news that we were deploying to Vienna, I didn’t expect the damn 3 hour tour. I mean, it’s the apocalypse – not some damn skirmish on hamburger hill, and all Zoey could think about was shopping at some fancy foreign department store. They cart my ass halfway ’round the globe, all the way across the pond, and they still drag me through a maze of catacombs and a whole damn mile’s worth of subway. My bones ached by the time we finally took that train ride; old bits of un-escaped shrapnel tickled my cartilage – not so friendly reminders of a few minor missteps not unlike this one. I tried to reason with these green rookies: the longer we humped it, the more likely we’d get dead. Jesus, I wish my ol’ Bravo company had as many Tanks as we saw today. At least this fine piece a city brings back memories of better days. No, not from WWII, smartass. I ain’t that old.

To your left, beyond the fence, you’ll see the entire path of the amazing campaign that lies ahead.  In the distance, a lighthouse spires with hope and the promise of rescue.  A disheveled prison, however, lies ahead.  You stop suddenly; at the edge of the gaping crater, you see the lay of the complex with several levels littered with the loitering hunger of the undead.  Take leaps of faith down each floor for the quick path.  Or explore cautiously to leave a bloody wake of zombies.  Through the prison and the following shipping yard, diverse, varying environments brim with detail and beckon with boss infected at every bend.

The heart of your survival journey lies within a massive shipping vessel, a barely buoyant path through to the lighthouse beyond.   A near-nausea inducing display of rumbling, creaking, and listing creates a highly impressive level design, as harsh angles add an interesting dimension to your movement and shooting.  Finally you reach the finale with the call for help at the lighthouse peak, and rescue all the way back down on the docks.  No hiding in a closet for you.  Bash the zombies, fight the Tanks, but with every lull in the onslaught, you’d better keep moving down the cliff, hold at each ammo cache, and make it to rescue.  Death Aboard’s finale, with its constantly compelled movement and action, makes for the most climactic and dynamic finales ever made, and a fitting end for perhaps the best L4D campaign yet.

The finale requires the most intense run of your life.

From the Memoirs:

Another prison, another botched mission, another zombie massacre. I can’t stand the sight of another cell block, but dang: this one was broken down and open enough to let us choose and pick our way through. For myself, I’ll take the fastest. But hellfire an’ brimstone, of course we had to saunter right onto a lopsided floating deathtrap. You think these hips were built for angles? And there I was, just climbing a ladder, when a goddamn car near takes my head off, and made such a racket every mangy son-of-a-bitch onboard wanted to join-up and enlist in our squad. Scared the bejeesus out of me! Made Da Nang look like easy-street. Sure glad I never joined the Navy. Didn’t help that we then had to climb up to a lighthouse on top of a cliff. And what do we end up with? A balloon?! That ain’t no chopper- that’s a giant un-lit Molotov cocktail. Too much goddamned excitement for this ol’ war-dog. All we need now is for Francis to start his yammering – this thing could use some more hot air.

Though an official downloadable campaign from Valve, Crash Course still provides a great final experience for us survivors before we all head on south in L4D2. Instead of designing the long, narrow and linear levels typical of L4D, Valve gives us a taste of the much wider, expansive levels of L4D2. And the exciting finale forces survivors to stay on their toes, as they’ll have to run out, risk their lives, and fix the vital generator when it breaks down. Any experienced zombie-killing group can easily blitzkrieg down a single path through the campaign in less than 30 minutes, especially since the AI Director can’t spawn the boss infected as effectively on wide maps. But the campaign’s shortness further underscores the fun of replaying, so players can try out different paths, find all the humorous graffiti, and hear the amusing character reactions to different areas.

Only Valve can provide new hilarious, pulpy graffiti and dialogue.

From the Memoirs:

If that genius was my Huey pilot in the war, I’d be pushin’ up daisies in Arlington right about now. Good news is we ‘landed’ in a decent part of town. LZ was cold. We found our way without too much trouble. There was once a time those godforsaken Witches and Tanks could get the better of me. From what I’ve seen here, these zombies wouldn’t last a day back in ‘Nam. Intel has it there’s much better targets down south. I defended these stars and stripes, dammit! Watched soul after soul take two to the head and one to the chest to keep this country free. I won’t let these abominations tear it to shit before I get a dog tag between my teeth. Christ, Francis is an ass… I don’t care how much he hates shrimp gumbo, we’re hightailing this bus down along the mighty Mississippi if I have anything to say about it.

When’s the last time you completed a video game by losing every mission? Many video games are designed with a destiny in mind: you will finish the game only by winning. I’m talking overwhelming success here. You must be the victor in every battle. You must kill (or disable or avoid) every enemy. You must overcome all obstacles. Your destiny in the game is basically to beat everyone, win everything, and be awesome forever.

That sounds a lot like “infallible” to me, and frankly, I just can’t relate to that. More often than not, I’m reloading and re-attacking a game with prior knowledge gained from a splattery death. My in-game avatar, however, would remember it differently. There’s a discontinuity between me and the avatar. He can’t see the quick saves and the rage-quits. In his story, he’s just an awesome guy with an awesome destiny.

But destiny didn’t always have its day. As game studios began to unify video games and filmic narratives, the idea of multiple endings emerged. I’m going to explore how multiple endings work in one particular game here: Wing Commander, released in 1990 by Origin Systems.

Wing Commander is a good focus for narrative exploration and variation, in part because Origin’s designers explicitly wanted to create a movie-like experience within a video game. Movies usually only have one ending, but the variability of the player/machine interaction gives video games more flexibility. That tension between singular and multiple endings, and the way it intersects with the player/avatar discontinuity, invites inspection.

Losing the war one Rapier at a time. KABOOM!

The motto of Origin Systems was “We Create Worlds.” The pride of their games was depth of emotion and range of play. In Wing Commander, Origin used an unusual strategy to exploit both emotions and exploration. They created a set of player-driven world histories: paths through victories and defeats in the Kilrathi War. It’s easy to face defeat in Wing Commander: fail to protect a transport, fail to destroy a capital ship, fail to stick with your wingman. Where Wing Commander breaks from rail games like Half-Life or X-Wing is that Wing Commander’s failures are mostly survivable– even productive. Only outright death or the conclusion of the war campaign will stop the player.

Since the game isn’t dependent on victory, the goal of winning out the war is subverted to the goal of simply surviving long enough to see it through. This difference is the axis upon which the emotionality and depth of the game can turn in unexpected directions. As long as I come back alive, I have to face the consequences of my performance. Those consequences build up over time. Fail a few times and the missions turn more defensive. A few more, and I’m scrabbling to turn the tide of the war. String enough failures together, and now I’m covering a hasty retreat from the sector– alone, if my would-have-been wingman already bought it in a furball a few missions back.

No, we’re not sending you out to try the mission again. Loser.

My avatar can now embody how much I suck at being a fighter pilot in deep space. In some strange way, I think that’s a step forward in player/avatar relations. Failure brings my story as a player more into line with my character’s story as a potential hero. We can share the same causality as well as the same fighting skills. We can explore the world in terms of cause, effect, and consequences.

It’s like playing Plinko with the fate of mankind!

Failure also enables an existentially sublime interpretation. By doggedly winning every mission, I am denied the experience of defeat. The point is that the potential experience exists, waiting to be engaged by losing. Nor is there a single path to victory or defeat. By accepting losses, Wing Commander turns mission-ending catastrophes into more missions to play.

If failure adds to the quantity of gameplay, it also adds new qualities to the characters. In the ship’s lounge, my crew mates reflect on their experiences of the war. I see different aspects of the same characters emerge as victory nears or defeat looms. The lounge becomes a profoundly affecting place upon discovering an vacant seat where a wingman would have sat, had he or she not died in a prior mission. Since wingmen can usually die only when they fly with me, the emptiness becomes personally significant: I know the cost of my failure, but I am rewarded with a richer emotional experience.

Whose got the medal of suckage? I do, bitches.

The reward of failure even undermines the determined perfectionist gamer with a Gödellian twist. Medals are collected for extraordinary wins in battle, but that collection will be incomplete without at least one critical loss: the Golden Sun medal is awarded for surviving the destruction of one’s ship.

So, to achieve victory, I first must admit defeat. But oh, what a victory for video games and the people who love them. Wing Commander creates its avatar as someone more like myself as I play. In the cinematic moments of triumph or tragedy, its hero is a guy for whom life is uncertain and death must be dealt with.

Origin got these lifelike qualities right with Wing Commander. It is a game I love to come back to, and I play as much to lose as to win.

My favorite moment in the game felt fulfilling, though not in a game narrative fashion.

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely agree with Chris’s emotional attachment with the little guy while I guided him through his whimsical adventure; every one of his somber, lonesome animated gestures cried out to my sympathies.

And Keenan accurately observed the experience’s remarkable artistic style, story, and gameplay. The setting illustrates an overbearing tone of industrial corruption and isolation, and an ingenious use of animated bubbles subtly reveals our hero’s small, yet significant story of hope in the bleak world. The adventure style gameplay, meanwhile, offers brilliant challenges and puzzles that hearken back to the height of the adventure game era in the ‘90s.

Such analyses, however, don’t go far enough. Appreciation for Machinarium flourishes on the levels of both story and gameplay. Since the whole experience fundamentally relies on story to motivate the player to solve puzzles, I’d also expect its storytelling, or narration, to shine. On the level of narrative, however, the game couldn’t possibly disappoint me more.

Animated bubbles work great, so long as you look and don’t touch.

In his work, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, narrative theorist Stuart Chatman affirms that the final outcome of a narrative depends on the interdependence between story and discourse. As mentioned, the story of Machinarium—in essence, the cause and effect relationship between events—works beautifully. Its discourse, or the way it tells the story, uses both the ingenious adventure gameplay and the charming animated thought bubbles to great effect. The disconnect for Machinarium lies within the interdependence between the story and discourse, and I’ll explain why soon.

Another approach to narrative comes from Bordwell and Thompson in Film Art: An Introduction, which explains the importance of content and form. For Machinarium, the content comprises both the excellent story and gameplay. The form of the two content elements, meanwhile, doesn’t make an effective use of the videogame medium towards a game narrative.

In the post-Half-Life videogame landscape, a game cannot reflect narrative mastery without interactive storytelling. Games prior to the late ‘90s generally kept narrative in a rigid, separated form: narrative techniques from other media, such as non-interactive cutscenes and text, often exposed story, which then motivated the interactive actions taken within the gameplay. Half-Life then released in 1998 and showed that game narration didn’t need to borrow non-interactive narration from other media. Its story and discourse, its content and form combined together in ways unique to the medium; its narrative told the entirety of its story without sacrificing the interaction that defined it as a game. For the game medium after Half-Life’s release, both the aforementioned elements of form and the interdependence between story and discourse must hinge on interactivity.

Warning – Minor Spoilers Ahead: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Braid, Half-Life 2, Tales of Monkey Island, and, of course, Machinarium.

“Feel free to look around.” Better words could not have been said.

In Half-Life 2, which obviously follows the precedent set by its predecessor, you, the player, retain complete control over protagonist Gordon Freeman in scenes of narrative salience. When you first meet Dr. Kleiner in his secret lab, you can pay attention as Kleiner talks with other characters Alyx and Barney about the resistance against the Combine, you can keep your ears listening while you explore the lab and tinker with the interesting objects, or you can pay them no heed while you do your own thing. Even moments that don’t “box you in” a room for story still use interactive storytelling: as Dr. Breen broadcasts his propaganda, you’re in Nova Prospekt shooting Combine, commanding ant lions, and choosing whether to listen to Breen’s piece of the story. In all cases, the game grants you the rights of interactivity and agency, the ability to make decisions during narrative and see the results.

Help Tim help her. This time you both will reach the last star.

I can think of few recent titles that purely use interactive storytelling throughout their experiences like the Half-Life series—namely, Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Braid, and Dead Space—and even some of them contain minor non-interactive exceptions. Braid, for example, largely uses text, a typical style of narration for games, yet still lets you control the character of Tim so you can decide to read or skip at your own will. Narration culminates in the complex final level that lets you enact events, platform, and control time through Tim’s attempt to reach his love, and ends differently depending on whether you found all the stars in the previous levels. In this case, not only do you retain interactivity throughout the game narrative, but your choices also directly impact the narrative.

Games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, meanwhile, prefer a mix of both interactive and non-interactive narration. It still clings to traditional cutscenes to tell story in its poorest use of the medium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t narrate in powerful game-centric ways. When the Joker speaks over Arkham’s video intercom system, when Batman thinks to himself, or when Batman speaks to Oracle through the cowl, the game tells story while still letting you explore Arkham Island. The most dramatic interactive narrative moments truly reflect a mastery of the medium: in a hallucination caused by Scarecrow’s poison, the setting of Arkham breaks apart and you have Batman walk down a hall of Wayne Manor as it slowly changes to the fateful dark alley; you walk to the haunting memory, the murder that defined the Dark Knight. You’re just walking—manipulating “Forward” via the keyboard, one of the subtlest forms of control—yet even from your small sliver of interactivity comes a visceral unity with Batman that could only be done in a videogame.

Walk with Batman. Remember as he remembers.

After experiencing the ways games combine interactivity and narrative towards the most effective use of the medium, I thus can’t help but feel disappointed by Machinarium. While its content is fantastic, its form uses little, if any, interactive storytelling, which should be unacceptable in a post-Half-Life world. Solving its puzzles triggers non-interactive narrative events that progress the story; thus the story does not mesh with the gameplay discourse, and instead remains separate.

While I agree with Chris when he points out the emotionally evocative style of “imaginative expressionism,” I’d argue that narration through non-interactive thought bubbles, however effective they may function towards narration, is a fundamentally poor use of an interactive medium. Machinarium’s narration might convey interpretive themes and motifs better than the “clunky” dialogue trees of Tales of Monkey Island ever could, but Tales’s interactive narration will still always be superior within the videogame medium. I don’t want to sit back and watch the story unfold, I want to lean forward and interact with story while it’s told.

It may be “clunky,” but at least I can clicky.

That being said, I could only find a sparse few interactive narrative moments in the game. Moments like diffusing the bomb at the end could, arguably, represent the narrative description of the way the character diffuses the bomb through the puzzle solving of the player, but events like these number a disappointing sum in a sea of non-interactive narration. Maybe I would’ve appreciated the animated thought bubbles more if I could somehow manipulate their figures with my cursor; in the end, however, the game’s developers chose a method best suited for a different medium.

While I can certainly appreciate the entertainment value of games like Machinarium, I mostly tolerate them in moderation. I not only can’t consider the game for game of the year, but I’d go so far as to say if more games like it went back to old-fashioned storytelling methods, I’d probably stop playing story-based games altogether. I definitely enjoyed the game, but I hope Machinarium comes as a swan song for the traditional, pre-Half-Life story-based game.

Greetings, future PC game console porter. Prior to being accepted to any accredited platform transitional university, you will be required to complete the following test and score within the top 25th percentile.  Please answer the following multiple choice questions in numerical sequential order. You will be timed from start to finish. Certain questions may contain more than one correct answer. Leaving a question blank is not acceptable. Once finished, please turn in your completed exam to the nearest refuse bin. Thank you, and have a pleasant tomorrow!

1) When describing a ported PC game as “the most PC-centric game of the entire series,” which pieces of the below presented evidence are factually accurate?

a) The game accepts basic mouse and keyboard inputs, and is therefore a milestone.

b) The game sometimes accepts basic mouse and keyboard inputs, but only to piss you off enough to the point of utter insanity.

c) The game connects to the Internet. Sort of.

d) The letters “PC” are somewhere on the game packaging. But probably not in order.

e) The game is an outright criminal slack-assed console port of a once fantastic series, and its makers should be drowned in a pile of African elephant feces.

2) “Gamepads” are to “PC gaming” as:

a) “Heart attacks” are to “awesome.”

b) “Darkest of Days” is to “a soothing peach-scented back massage.”

c) “Microsoft Games for Windows initiative” is to “compelling think tank of amazing.”

d) “Keenan Weaver TF2 7000 pings” are to “unusual.”

e) “Torchlight pets” are to “not adorable and fiscally conscious.”

3) Finish the following statement.

“Even though we were supposedly a once exclusive PC developer, we dumped 98.7% of all our available resources into the console version and then produced a hefty steaming PC turd-pile because­­­ ___________________________________.”

a) We work for Chris Taylor.

b) We secretly hate you.

c)  Carl from the janitorial department needed a new mop handle and a fresh urinal cake, which depleted our creative team’s entire PC budget.

d) Everyone knows those Mac ads are accurately researched and completely forthright, and thus the PC is dead.

e) Piracy is ruining our company, even though we use 100 dollar bills to wipe our asses and often bathe in steaming gold bullion.

Figure A.

4) Who is this legendary man? (See Figure A.)

a) Super Mario.

b) Your father-in-law’s financial securities accountant.

c) Uh… Barack Obama?

d) Irrelevant; he doesn’t make Wii games, so he can’t be that important.

e) Hideo Kojima.

5) Borderlands leaves the house at 5pm traveling at 50mph. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 leaves the train station at 70mph after 12:30am. Conversely, Batman: Arkham Asylum accelerates away from Borderlands and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at a rate of 40mph at 4:30am.  If all three continue onward at their above prescribed constant speeds, at what time will exclusive PC games cease to exist?

a) PC games? I thought we were designing a port for the Nintendo DS…

b) Noon tomorrow.

c) Unknown: I’m not intelligent enough to tell time.

d) I don’t care. Give me my paycheck.

e) Yes.

6) A certain unnamed RTS PC game designer once commented on how the analog sticks on a gamepad are far more in-tune than a mouse and keyboard for controlling multiple units and zooming in and out of the battlefield. Why would the above referenced person say this?

a) Because he drank two quarts of double-strength liquid Drano just prior to the interview, with a chaser of fresh-squeezed retarded juice.

b) Because everyone already knows that the mouse and keyboard are terrible instruments for RTS games; the NES Advantage is a far better option.

c) Because unadulterated PC gamer betrayal is more fun than a trip to meet Captain America.

d) Because analog pads can vibrate, and that’s, like, uh – pretty neat.

e) Because what the PC gaming really needs is to be MORE like a portable chemical toilet for big-name self-inflated industry prima donnas.

7) Transitioning a big-name title to a different platform is sensitive and tricky business. As such, what is the most important aspect when porting a console game over to the PC? (Use scrap paper as needed.)

a) To phone-in the entire effort and infuriate as many diehard PC gamers as much as possible.

b) To purposefully exclude crucial and expected features such as quick saving and dedicated servers (nobody nowadays uses crap like that anyway).

c) To ensure you remove as many copies of the game disc itself and instead vomit into numerous game boxes prior to shipping.

d) To mask the God-forsaken digital monstrosity you just coughed up by employing genius marketing tag lines such as, “Multiplayer available! Play with MORE than one person… ONLINE!” Or, “Comes with free DVD sleeve! And complimentary PDF instruction manual!”

e) To release the game 9 months later than the consoles, after everyone’s already forgotten about it.

8) Match the below jumbled images to the correct names and/or titles.

a) Darth Poop-Stain	1)
b) Shining proof that console players are more talented at first person shooters than PC gamers.	2)
c) Obsolete clunky control mechanism.	3)
d) PC.	4)
e) Where all our ported games should rightfully be placed. Without being opened.	5)