Darwinia

It’s going to be hard for me to write about Darwinia because, in my information-hungry net-roaming, I’ve had it repeatedly drilled into my head by a certain kind of games journalist that Darwinia is completely exceptional. To say I came to Darwinia with preconceived notions of how good the game would be is something of an understatement – the combined joy of practically every single person that had played it made me slightly concerned that I was going to be blinded by Divine Light as soon as I launched it. That didn’t happen. However, in all my time of playing Darwinia, and despite all those rapturous journalists and bloggers, I haven’t once been disappointed. It’s a very, very good game, in everything it does. It uses two-dimensional sprites and fractal environments, and it makes the majority of modern games look stupid. Which, of course, they are.

It’s a game about souls and life and intelligence and what it means to be a god, and it features tiny little Death Squads, Space Invaders, Triffids, and way more game references than I will ever, ever get, being as I am someone that had no interests outside Civilization II for most of my gaming existence, and I’m not sure I developed consciousness until after the ZX Spectrum died (not that they’re related). However, going through a great big list of everything that’s amazing about Darwinia would paint the picture of a truly bizarre game. And while that wouldn’t be totally inaccurate, Darwinia’s strangeness is like CoD4’s inanity: it’s only there if you think about it. Unlike CoD4, however, thinking about it just makes you realise how incredible Darwinia is.

Instead, I’m going to try to summarise a little bit of what happens in Darwinia. You’re sitting at a computer. Sound familiar? Uplink does the same, and so, to an extent, does Defcon. Introversion seem to realise that to make a truly immersive game, the easiest thing to do is not to pretend to be anything else. If I were slightly pompous I would probably mention the Uncanny Valley at this point, but this is slowly twisting away from the stated aim of this paragraph, and I’m probably going to have to start a new one now. Good gods, I’m pretentious, and self-referential about it too.

You’re sitting at a computer, quite possibly yours, and it contains Darwinia, a virtual theme park populated by a single-polygon life form and experiment in intelligence, appropriately enough called the Darwinians. It was created by Dr. Sepulveda, probably a reference that I don’t get, and he is your guide throughout the game. Darwinia, you see, has been infected. By viruses. They’re evil and red and insidious and every time I see them on moving into a new location they make my skin crawl in revulsion – the scritching sound they make, the way the centipedes writhe all over the place or – urgh – the ants pouring from their repulsive hills. How dare such disgusting things exist in this universally beautiful world? Dr. Sepulveda quickly tasks you with wiping out the lot and restoring Darwinia, and this is where the Death Squads come in.  Apparently, you control them in a similar way to the squads in Cannon Fodder and Syndicate, so that’s nice. If you’re as ignorant as me, what that means is this: you order them about as if it were an RTS, but you also do most of the shooting yourself, complete with lovely old school zapping sounds and calling in airstrikes by Space Invaders. Later on you also start indirectly herding the determinedly free willed Darwinians into combat, in a way not dissimilar to Lemmings, an olden-days game that I have played. Finally, every killed Darwinian or virus leaves a soul, a little glowing square in the world. You collect these up with Engineers and use them to make more Darwinians, but after a while left uncollected they silently float upwards and fade away, and it’s beautiful and melancholic and serenely peaceful, in startling contrast to the carnage below.

And it is carnage. Darwinia is frenetic and complicated and full of things that you have to do. It’s a game that asks a lot of you, and it’s incredibly rewarding when you succeed. Not just because it’s sometimes bloody hard, but also because of the Darwinians themselves: they wander around, looking aimless, and being kind of annoying – and then you realise, quite suddenly, that they’re free willed beings and they’re doing what they want to do, and quite possibly with some purpose. They provoke sympathy like few games with a million more polygons have ever managed. A horrifying virus has invaded their world, and they need your help. They need you to play Darwinia.

And you should. So far on this blog, I haven’t really made any outright recommendations. I don’t have any pretensions that this is a ‘buyer’s guide’, because it isn’t. But I think it’s important that people play Darwinia, simply because it shows that games can be beautiful. Not graphically beautiful, although Darwinia is, but beautiful in the way that – say – a particularly incredible piece of music* is beautiful: because of the way that it can mess with your emotions and leave you feeling slightly bewildered about what just happened.

*Radio Protector, by 65daysofstatic.

Why I Play the Pyro

In the ultra-narcicisstic vein of all bloggers everywhere ever, I have decided that instead of writing a review, and going through the tiresome slog of playing a game that I (probably) love, today I would subject you all to a deeply personal tirade about one-ninth of the playable characters in a well-known multiplayer game. And by well-known I mean ‘well-known by gamers’, so in other words little known.

The Pyro is Team Fortress 2’s ‘ambush’ class. This does not mean standing just to the right of a doorway, flamethrower nozzle most likely visible, waiting for someone to walk through. TF2 is not Counter-Strike. Try to ambush a soldier that way – especially before the massive update Valve released – and the soldier will quite calmly turn, blow the pyro to pieces, and be left with more than enough health to survive the flames. These days, thanks to the flamethrower’s damage being fixed and the soldier taking more damage from his own rockets, the soldier will probably die too. When I first started playing TF2, playing as a pyro was vicious. There were no cheap pyro kills. The most perfect ambush – looping up above the vulnerable half of a heavy/medic team on 2fort and dropping down through the grate, spewing flames – could easily be foiled by a blutsauger and a medic running backwards. Back then, it was the sense of desperation – only heightened by the pyro’s muffled voice and generally weird nature – that was appealing. Now it’s all the fire.

Since the update, the damage dropoff of the flamethrower has been greatly reduced (this means that someone at the edge of the flame will take almost the same damage as someone right by the nozzle), and some of those blutsauger wielding medics complained that the pyro was now overpowered, as is the gamer’s way. If you do an ambush right, and there isn’t a heavy wielding bloody Natascha around, then there’s a reasonable chance that the pyro will survive.

Reasonable, not good. The pyro is the last-stand class, the do-or-die class. The anonymous, oddly melancholy, lonely figure on the sidelines that neverthless is always up in the face (or, more likely, the back) of the other team, because that’s what he was born – designed – to do. While engineers are shooting the four players capping their last point from half a map away, the pyro is on there, spreading mayhem, probably dying, but, Goddamnit, I bought us some time and I took that medic down. And that is what makes playing as the pyro awesome: every kill you get, you were right up next to them, spraying burning gasoline all over the place, laughing manically. It’s a world away from the disconnected, impersonal kills of the sniper or the spy or the demoman’s stickies or the engineer’s sentries; it’s intense and insane and you’re always, always very close to death. Executing a perfect ambush – dropping down from above, watching the screen suddenly fill with particle effects, taking out the medic before he can react, the weird sound the flamethrower makes when it crits – and getting out alive is one of the best experiences in gaming.

The pyro is in many ways a support class. He takes out the medics and the spies, or the soldiers and demos and heavies (if you have the Backburner) that aren’t paying attention to what’s around them, and most importantly, he spreads confusion. A medic that’s on fire is likely to hit uber, especially if they don’t know if the pyro’s still there. When half your team’s on fire, you have to switch priorities: get the medic to a health pack, get everyone healed up, fast. Set enough people alight and you can break up a heavy/medic combo, because any half decent medic puts out people that are on fire first. And a heavy without a medic will probably just run off to stand in the corner, crying into his sandvich.

The next best thing about playing the pyro: spies. The greatest irony of the Spy class is that it’s convenient and easy to disguise as a pyro – the speed matches, it’s not weird to see them running around in odd places, and they practically always have their primary weapon out – and yet the pyro is the class most suited to taking down the spy. On account of the fact that, cloaked or not, you’re not invisible if you’re on fire. Every time I see a spy called ‘MaybeNextTime’ I giggle with glee as I spark up. The fear of the pyro is burnt so deep into the spy unconscious – possibly the ones that weren’t afraid never survived to breed – that spies don’t even come near pyros a lot of the time. I’m too impatient and twitchy to hang around with an engineer the whole time while the battle happens elsewhere, unless it’s somehow vital that the engy stays alive, but seeing a pyro standing next to a sentry farm is quite the deterrent to spies. A spy not seeing the pyro standing next to a sentry farm is just hilarious, but it still doesn’t match the huge sense of satisfaction you get when you see yourself wander nonchalantly up to a sentry or hanging around near the heavy/medic team. Just for that, just for impersonating me, I am going to ruin your day. What’s more, I’m going to ruin it with fire.

There’s a complaint about the pyro – that you can do a good deal of damage and get a ton of kills by just holding down W and pressing the left mouse key. Since, as mentioned earlier, I’m a hideous narcissist, I’m going to assume that this a personal assault against me, and mount some kind of defence. Firstly, if you see a pyro coming from a good distance – in a straight line, since presumably A, S and D are out of the question – you should be able to take it down, or do a good deal of damage while you get away to a sentry farm or medic or spawn. Every single class in the game is more effective than the pyro at long range – even a sentry-less engineer has his pistol. Possibly because pyros die a lot people feel hard done by when they feel a pyro should have died but didn’t, and it sticks in their mind, and they go make a thread about it in the Steam forums, and find people to agree with them, and feel a bit better about themselves.

It’s true that pyros don’t need to aim much unless they’re using the shotgun or fighting another pyro (where you have to keep the crosshair on the enemy as much as possible), but, thank God, TF2 is not a twitch-aiming game. You can do reasonably well with all classes except sniper and scout even if you can’t aim for shit, which is what makes it so accessible for the likes of me. And, yes, once you’re in flamethrower range – and you’re not facing a soldier, a demo with excellent aim or a heavy (especially a heavy with bloody Nastascha) – holding down W and the left mouse button is reasonably effective, though circle-strafing is better. It’s getting within flamethrower range without being shot to pieces that separates the non-gender specific, fireproof maniacs from the, er, slightly younger non-gender specific, fireproof maniacs. Everyone that complains about the pyro is just jealous that he has all the best taunts in the game anyway.

Thank God for the Internet. I would never have gotten away with writing all that anywhere else. Now I’m off to play a game that I’ll (probably) love, and, who knows, maybe I’ll write about it.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Had someone asked me prior to reading the Wikipedia article on CoD4 what the plot of the thing was, I would have given a haphazard shrug and perhaps hesitated a guess that the President of the Middle East (?) was executed during a revolution (or military coup?), and that the leader of said coup had bought (?) a nuke from a Russian (?) arms dealer (?) and leader of an ‘Ultranationalist’ group (if pressed further I’d have to admit that I had no bloody idea which nation they were being so ultra about, although I suspect Russia. Though why they’d be fighting ‘Loyalist’ Russians is beyond me. Is it possible to be disloyal to Russia and a Russian nationalist? Hmm). Anyway, clearly the SAS and United States Marine Corps have to go and shoot people until the nuke doesn’t go off. Oorah.

CoD4 is full of brilliant ideas. The singleplayer campaign is a procession of one jaw-dropping cinematic setpiece after another – shuffling through Chernobyl’s brown undergrowth wearing shrub-camouflage; watching a huge invasion from onboard a helicopter, the smoke trails from RPGs filling the sky; and desperately legging it through the level while everything falls apart around you, being yelled at by SAS types with moustaches all the while. Even the hiding behind cover and popping off a few shots now and then feels varied enough, thanks to the different environments and weapons the game throws at you. It’s just a shame that the plot of the game isn’t strong enough to provide much justification for what you’re doing – especially when you’re given ludicrous amounts of power over people that can do nothing but run for cover. Which you can subsequently blow up. I mean, obviously stopping the maniacs from destroying the world is a justifiable cause, but with a bit more depth and detail to the plot, the greater sense of desperation and, hell, the greater emotional impact of some of the (horrific) things that occur would have made CoD4 exceptional. As it is, it’s exciting, and smooth, and slick, and pretty, and very, very fun, but it isn’t involving in the slightest.

The inclusion of an ‘Arcade’ game mode, that very obviously flouts this (to the point that every kill sees numbers – points – spiralling out of the ragdoll-ing corpses), makes me think that probably Infinity Ward didn’t have any pretensions otherwise – although there is one brilliant sequence that does have quite the emotional impact. Somehow it doesn’t sit uncomfortably with the usual shoot-shoot-kill-kill, which just serves to make it all the more brilliant. But the cold, clinical way you just chew through hundreds of people – especially given how absurdly efficient modern warfare is – is really pretty chilling when your reasons for doing so are so ordinary. My my, those Russians and Arabs have nuclear weapons again? Am I really expected to just think ‘Those sneaky bastards! Let’s GET them!’?

Still, those of you looking for a review will be glad to know that I have an overall opinion: CoD4 is a very good game. Not incredible – in fact I was amazed to see it was winning Game of the Year awards in the same year that BioShock and the Orange Box games came out – but definitely very good. The setpieces in the singleplayer campaign are universally stunning and the gameplay is suitably fast, twitchy and violent. And it can do atmosphere: being part of a tiny, ruthless and efficient SAS squad is completely different to being in the midst of a colossal invasion, and both are meticulously crafted. In particular, the USMC sections do brilliantly at invoking the feeling that you’re part of something much wider, from the troops you see setting up blockades as you go about your business to the jet fighters flying overhead. The military chatter and the actions and animations of the troops are suitably authentic (or at least, they seem authentic to the likes of me), and – as I said earlier – it’s all incredibly, beautifully cinematic.

I haven’t played it online, where presumably my complaint about the plot doesn’t matter even the slightest. Apparently it’s very good. I bloody hate online shooters with grenades in, but when I’ve given it a chance – and I will – I’ll maybe make a separate post for that. Until then, CoD4 is thrilling, incredibly well-made, and awesome fun. It’s fortunate that the campaign never gives you time to stop and think, because if you do, the whole thing reveals itself to be little more than polish. But when it’s this polished it’s still worth experiencing.