Uplink

Games are about escapism, right? So imagine a game that lets you play the role of a person sitting at a PC in a darkened room. Sound thrilling? Now imagine that it has no 3D graphics. Still thrilled? Now imagine that said game deletes your savegame when you fail. No warning. The screen goes black and that’s it, game over. You took thirty seconds too long on that last hack, and therefore you fail.

Uplink is somehow the most weirdly engrossing game I’ve ever played. That little countdown timer in the bottom left hand corner – your Trace Tracker – shows how much time you’ve got left on that system, and beeps ever more urgently as you come closer to being traced. It’s terrifying. Nine seconds left, and you’re screaming at the system to delete those last few files or clicking desperately to authorise an innocent man’s arrest.

In most games, that would be it. You click the disconnect button, fight through the Combine, take down the Big Daddy, and you’re out. Safe. But every hack leaves great muddy footprints all over the internet, that any decent mercenary hacker can follow straight back to your machine, and before you know it you get that black screen again. So you’ve successfully completed whatever malicious deed you were paid to carry out – but you’ve only got a few minutes to delete the logs of where you’ve been before you get traced back anyway. And Uplink doesn’t tell you straight away when you’ve been caught. It waits a few hours, maybe even a day. You managed to delete the logs – but were you fast enough? All the time when playing the game, there’s that little worry that complete and utter failure is very, very close indeed. There’s no respite from the tension – you just have to hope, and carry on hacking. Even when you pull of a ridiculously difficult hack, navigating your way through a LAN with the admin forever on your tail, destroying the central mainframe with three seconds left before that black screen – you may be triumphant, but only briefly. No time for celebrating. I’ve got work to do.

The final stroke of genius? One of the story missions – without spoiling anything – requires you to hop around the internet at high speed, tracing and hacking dozens of systems. There is nowhere near enough time to delete your logs, and, man I haven’t felt this desperate to complete my task and escape since the Lab sections in Stalker. The game always forced you to hope, but now it’s forcing you to carry on in spite of it being completely hopeless.  By this point I’d upgraded my remote rig to have a motion sensor and a bomb, to destroy it if Federal agents got too close. But I’d spent almost 400,000 credits on that machine – it was the product of my most successful bank hack ever. It had 1600 GHz of processing power. I’d spent almost as much on all the software on it. And what did the game say? “Yeah, you’re probably going to have to blow that up”. How many games force you to personally destroy all of your equipment, just so you can carry on? This is the Weighted Companion Cube six years early, and without all the crappy memes afterwards.

Sound and visuals are both pretty basic, as befits a game made by one person, but the sparseness (sparsity?) of it all is what makes it great – there’s music, but it’s little more than a background to that incessant beeping in the bottom left hand corner, and the graphics are just what you’d expect to see when travelling covertly around the Net (with a nice veneer of Hollywood style hacking – like the scrolling letters as you crack a password or the bloody great progress bars everywhere). It’s functional. Hackers are hardcore. They don’t do phong shading.

This makes it quite tricky to pick up – the first time I played it, I was a blundering idiot, leaving my tracks all over the internet and paying fines for Unauthorised Data Access every few days (my actions as yet weren’t significant enough for the Feds to try and track down my rig and end things permanently). After a few hours of playing, though (and, I admit, a couple of trips to the Real Internet), I was flicking through servers and mainframes and LANs with ease, and the experience of crippling a system from within and escaping without a trace is, well, awesome.

At least, I hope it was without a trace.

Mass Effect

Before I get into all this: I realise that this is yet another review with no pretty pictures in it, but I have a reason beyond mere laziness this time: I fired up Mass Effect to get some pictures, and it promptly destroyed my computer, ‘orphaning’ every file on my Games hard drive with cold, clinical brutality. (Note: I have no bloody idea what that means). I am going to do my level best to keep the fact that Mass Effect murdered the parents of Team Fortress 2, Darwinia, and other adorable games out of this review.

So anyway.

I’m beginning to suspect that Mass Effect is horribly bad from a value-for-money, replayability perspective. I played through the game once, in five days of insulting aliens and sleep depravation, as an uncomplicated, bullets-to-the-face Soldier named – like all my female RPG characters, for some reason – Freya. Freya was awesome. She solved traumatic moral issues by threatening to strangle people, but usually the people that were in the wrong. She had no qualms about rendering a species almost extinct in the pursuit of her goals, but begrudgingly accepted that genocide out of spite was over the line.  She hated arbitrary and unfair authority, but respected those that earned it. She valued her humanity, but shouted down the xenophobes in her crew. She had sex with aliens.

She was, in other words, the character that I spend practically every RPG trying to make: the ruthlessly pragmatic but good-at-heart antihero. In Jade Empire, my character became despicably evil; in KotOR 2, even more despicably good. In Oblivion, as has already been established, my character is a bastard. Worst of all, in Fable, my character was neutral, the gaming equivalent of being called bloody indecisive. But Mass Effect’s character progression is so elegant, and the choices are so meaningful, that by the end of the game Freya had such a strong and well-defined personality that it was weird to think that she was, essentially, my creation. In some RPGs, choices amount to little more than: shall I help this poor, stranded orphan child, at no cost to myself, or shall I ignore her, at no gain to myself? That’s not a moral dilemma, that’s asking the player if they want to make a good character or a bad one (and that is a choice that you get in Jade Empire). Mass Effect, very occasionally, falls into a similar trap, but at least they ask you if you want to be a ‘Renegade’ or a ‘Paragon’ rather than just ‘Sickeningly Good’ or ‘Unbelievably Malevolent’, and you aren’t penalised for choosing one over the other: each alignment has its own scale, and you don’t lose Renegade points for doing Paragon-style actions, meaning that there’s a far greater range of possible alignments and – as a result – characters.

This all sounds brilliant for replayability. Loads of characters? Surely you can enjoy playing it again and again, choosing a subtly different personality each time? This is what I thought when I came back to Mass Effect a couple of weeks after finishing it for the first time, after BioWare released the Bring Down the Sky questline for download, and made a new character. And, man, I hate him. He’s boring. I wanted to make someone distinct from Freya, but everything that he does just pales in comparison to what she did. I find myself thinking, ‘Pah, you simpering idiot, Freya would have punched six people in this situation, and here you are being polite, reasonable and diplomatic’. I don’t think this is a sign that some choices make the game better than others; rather, I think it’s simply because the characterisation on my first playthrough was so strong that seeing someone else wandering around in Freya’s universe was just … wrong. The warm RPG glow at the end of Mass Effect is more like some kind of internal inferno, and coming back to someone else after all that was just a bit disappointing.

That said, the game is still presenting me with new opportunities, new surprises, and if it ever becomes more stable on my machine then I’ll probably play my new character through to completion as well, so as to see everything I missed the first time round and play as a different class. It has a lot going for it: the new dialogue wheel is far, far better than the old static dialogue options, and the conversations are so smooth and natural that, again, it seems wondrous that I’m controlling it at all; the combat is more varied and tactical than KotOR’s or Jade Empire’s; and the entire universe is beautifully realised, from the massive Citadel space station down to the look of the assault rifles. But this is Freya’s universe, and I know that when Mass Effect 2 comes around that it’ll be Freya’s story that I’ll continue, not one of her many pathetic imitators.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – First Impressions

Man, Oblivion worried me. For the first, oh, fifteen hours or so of gameplay (and believe me, only playing fifteen hours definitely warrants that ‘First Impressions’ in the title), it was compulsive, compelling, and full of glorious fantasy, but it worried me. It didn’t make me feel like a hero. I was a thief, an assassin, an endangered herbs collector, an amateur psychologist, an armourer, a horse-rustler, a sleuth, and generally a bastard – but I couldn’t shake the feeling that, deep down, my character was just some guy. Obviously, RPGs often start you out as just some guy, so that you can progress to being the Messiah or whatever and get the previously mentioned RPG-glow. But I had been playing Oblivion for fifteen hours – that is, two and a half times longer than the entirety of Halo 3 – and I still felt like I was busying myself mostly with MMO-style oddjobs.

Fortunately, the blame lay not with Bethesda but, squarely, with me. I didn’t feel like a hero because, up till that moment, I had been completely ignoring the main questline. I had, in fact, forgotten about it. For the whole of that fifteen hours I’d had the opportunity to go away and be the hero, but instead I’d been pottering about Cyrodiil doing minor favours for NPCs. It was intoxicating – well, I’ve got to go assassinate this bloke, and then steal a 100 gold pieces’ worth of stuff from someone, and retrieve this ring, and clear out these bandits, and ooooh there’s a cave there, I wonder what’s inside – and never once it had occurred to me that maybe I should go and, y’know, save the royal line from extinction at the hands of otherworldly demons.

So off I went, and soon I was battling daedra scum in (essentially) hell, in an attempt to close a portal in the middle of a ruined town so that I can save the dead emperor’s illegitimate heir … that’s more like it. After that I went and picked pockets for a while. I mean, I’d been told repeatedly that this was Serious Business and We Cannot Tarry and so on, but I just wandered off once the quest was over to go do some side missions, safe in the knowledge that the surprise ambush or equally surprising tidal wave wouldn’t occur until I came back to the main quest. This isn’t so much a criticism of the game as it is a problem with the genre – forcing a linear storyline into an open world creates weird breaks like this, where nothing happens unless the player is actively on a quest where it has to happen, and any sense of urgency to the main story is completely destroyed, which kills the atmosphere a bit. Stalker went around this by refusing to give the main story any urgency whatsoever – everything that happened in the main story did so because of your actions, not because you turned up and triggered a cutscene.

My favourite thing about Oblivion – and there are a lot of great things about it – is the Loot Rummaging System. Mass Effect’s is oddly disconnected from the action, Stalker’s gets a tad repetitive after a while (Wow! He has sausages and bread!), and Fable (if I remember correctly) didn’t let you loot corpses, but Oblivion’s is immense. At the beginning of the game, loot rummaging is intsensely exciting – you’re constantly searching for some slightly better armour, or a slightly better sword, or a katana that isn’t broken in half – and with practically every enemy you kill and every chest you search you’ll find something pretty, shiny, sharp or all three to add to your rapidly swelling inventory. After a few hours of playing the game I was wandering around with callipers, shears, inkwells, paintbrushes, funny looking plants, a dozen pairs of shoes, lockpicks, torches, apples, beef, crockery and a hundred other things which turned out to be entirely useless to me, simply because of how compulsive it is to hoard loot.

Oblivion is massive, and addictive, and strikingly beautiful – especially considering that it’s now two years old. It never really feels like you’re taking part in a breakneck race to deliver Tamriel from the forces of evil (I should say, it doesn’t yet), and that’s a shame, but that’s a minute price to pay considering the often bewildering, occasionally terrifying, always thrilling feeling that you do get – that of having a horse, a sword, and an entire continent, and being able to do whatever you like with them.