S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost

I am a Normal person. Or Medium, perhaps. Or Regular. Whatever the name the developers give for the difficulty setting they expect you to play on, the one where you experience the game exactly as intended – that’s what I go for. If it’s a suitably arcade-y FPS that I’ve grown accustomed to, I’ll occasionally venture into Hardened or Veteran or Heroic or, in my Halo days, Legendary; and sometimes, if it’s a game that I’m bloody awful at (hello, entire strategy genre) then I’ll dial it down to Easy, but Normal is where it’s at.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I selected the ‘Hell’ difficulty setting when I started up Oblivion Lost; not least because OL already makes the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone more deadly, more hostile, more brutal and ruthless; but I didn’t want fairness and balance, I wanted the sensation of the whole world being against me, a world where one wrong move results in instant, unfair, unexpected death. The result? A hell of a lot of quickloading, and the most atmospheric game I’ve ever played. Never before have I experienced such brutality and malevolence in a game, and it’s usually not even the enemies that are causing it; this is a world where a fire anomaly – a pillar of flame three times the height of a man that erupts from nothingness if you wander too close – saw fit to randomly spawn right in front of the entrance to the Trader’s bunker, also known as the only safe place in the first part of the game.

Actually, the human enemies are brutal, incredibly so, but in a much less terrifying way than the world; their brutality is understandable, necessary, even inevitable. Early in the game, you’re tasked with seeking out a man named Fox, who has information related to your ongoing vague quest. When I found him, he was lying, curled up in a ball on the floor, groaning to himself and mumbling incoherently in Russian. Most likely he’d been mobbed by the wild dogs that roamed the area; I could still hear their calls in the darkness outside the ruined farmhouse. He begged repeatedly for a medkit, but I didn’t have one. And it’s been a long time since a game has made me say, very quietly, very slowly: “Fuck.” I had to get the information that he had on his PDA, and right now he was unable to tell me. I didn’t have a medkit. I could go and try to find one, and he might die before I got back, but even if he didn’t – I already knew that if I did find one, there was no way I’d give it up. The fact that I didn’t have a medkit to begin with was worrying enough. I executed him.

And that was it. I’ve done the same thing a hundred times before in loads of different games, but this was the first time my conscience didn’t really have anything to say on the matter. Somewhere between my getting savaged by dogs and limping back to the rookie camp after a bandit ambush, my conscience had apparently learned that, in the Zone, it was pretty much superfluous. So I stopped getting annoyed at the bandits that would open fire as soon as look at me – usually from six miles away – because, hey, they were doing what they thought they had to. They were products of the Zone, and I was rapidly becoming more and more like them; taking on assassination missions because I need the money; murdering every soldier at the military checkpoint because there was no way I was paying five hundred roubles to go past and I didn’t want to take a detour in the dark. It’s the only game – mod – I can think of where sheer weight of atmosphere has forced me to make choices that I never intended to make. By making everything in the Zone more deadly and more dangerous, Oblivion Lost actually manages to up the atmosphere on vanilla Stalker, to an extent where I’m always planning ahead, considering how much time I have to accomplish this or that before it gets dark, or wondering whether I can make it back to Cordon with barely a shred of health and a disorienting limp.

Yes, the dark. Night in Oblivion Lost is a horrible time in a horrible place. The picture below shows a bit what it’s like (the strange light is a particularly deadly kind of anomaly, by the way):

The very first time I experienced night in Oblivion Lost, I had just got back from eliminating a wild boar lair, and I had decided to grab some sleep just outside the rookie camp before heading back out for the next job (Oblivion Lost introduces a sleeping bag to your inventory, which at the time I thought was just a handy way of regaining a bit of health). When I awoke after troubling dreams, everything was black. If I looked up, I could just about make out a line of trees against the slightly-less-black sky, but that was it. I felt terrifyingly vulnerable and terrifyingly cold – I’ve no idea how the game manages to make me feel so cold when it’s night, but it does – and I wandered around for a while in the tiny circle of light that my torch provides, trying to get my bearings and wondering if I would need more ammo. Eventually, I spotted the campfire. It was incredible. I loved the campfires in vanilla Stalker, but more as a sort of pleasing detail than as a sanctuary against the night. This time, however, I felt genuinely safer to be sitting – well, shift-crouching – in this warm orange circle with a couple of grimly silent stalkers, just staring at the flames for a while. Then there was the crackle of gunfire from somewhere outside the camp, and they both ran off into the darkness.

I’ve not been playing Oblivion Lost long – in fact I’ve only just left Cordon, the starting area, for the first time – but it’s already had more of these memorable moments than the whole of my previous playthrough of Stalker. I’d have trouble recommending OL and its ‘Hell’ setting to everyone, because the difficulty is sometimes so murderous that a single firefight can take an hour, most of which is spent looking at a loading screen, but it remains an incredible, terrifying thing to experience.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and San Andreas

The first time I played Grand Theft Auto was GTA2 on a mate’s PlayStation, to me a slightly obscure, non-pretty driving game where running people over gave you points and tanks were liberally scattered around the landscape. We didn’t even try to understand the missions; we just enjoyed driving clumsily about and wreaking havoc on that little flat city. And here we are, four sequels later (or, according to Rockstar, two sequels later), and still the main appeal of the game is driving around doing nothing much in particular, listening to the radio. The city is still the game, the point of the game and the focus of the game, although by San Andreas it’s evolved into an entire state, massive and beautifully realised. Not in the same way as Oblivion’’s Cyrodiil, in that you want to explore every square inch to uncover it all; instead, the GTA games, and in particular Vice City and San Andreas, give you a city that just feels right to cruise around. All the sumptuous details flash by when you’re on a motorbike and listening to Radio Los Santos or FEVER 105, but those little flashes are enough to suddenly make it a place.

Vice City does this better than San Andreas; in SA the sheer scale of the thing means that there isn’t an overarching sense of “This is what San Andreas is like”, as there is in Vice City (or possibly just plain old non-italicised Vice City). Las Venturas is a very different place from Los Santos, and the rural areas of San Andreas are more different still. Arguably that could be because each individual place has enough character and identity to differentiate it from all the others – Los Santos in particular is incredibly detailed and has a very distinct sense of place. But the way the game has you travelling between all these different areas leaves the state feeling disjointed in a way that Vice City never does. Vice City just works. You enter the game, you drive around for maybe ten minutes, and you won’t have seen everything, but you’ll understand it. From then on, anywhere new you go is still familiar – it’s still part of Vice City.

The same kind of disjointedness affects San Andreas’‘ story too; there are some brilliant setpiece missions, but they’re just that – setpieces. Most of them have little – if anything – to do with the game’s central story. There’s a lot to be said for missions that are just cool – and if skydiving from one plane to another isn’t cool then I don’t know what is – but it does leave you wondering what the hell this has to do with CJ’s struggle to reclaim his home. Vice City’s story is just One Psychopathic Prick Takes Over Entire City, but all of the missions – the entire game, in fact – is geared towards this homage to Scarface, from acquiring strip clubs and, er, ice cream factories to the design of Tommy’s mansion.

All that said, however, when I want to go play GTA, it’s San Andreas that I’ll choose. I played it before I played Vice City, and the older game just feels smaller, more limited. It has a better story, but GTA isn’t about story; it’s about cruising around listening to the radio, and San Andreas has more space, more vehicles, and prettier places. It even – and this is controversial, but Atmosphere Trailer is a blog that lives on the edge – has better music (although both games have a perfect soundtrack for what they are, graciously overlooking Vice City’s omission of Push It To The Limit). The missions, too, are better in San Andreas; there’s more variety, more that stand out as good, and fewer that are horribly frustrating – though it’s all relative, and SA still has its fair share of annoyingly long missions with an intensely difficult ending, forcing you to replay the entire thing way too many times just to beat the last ten seconds, and this remains GTA’s low point. (Inexplicably, both games contain remote control vehicle missions – and both, when they are introduced, put you in charge of an impossibly hard-to-control, easy-to-destroy little toy, and then give you a time limit to complete a precise task. This is Not Good).

It’s definitely worth playing both games, especially since these days they’re cheap and easy to run, and they’re an effective way to kill some time between now and November 21st and the release of GTAIV. But coming to Vice City after the vast, sprawling freedom and dizzying variety of San Andreas, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. VC is the more fondly remembered of the two, possibly because of the greater sense of place, greater cohesion, and better storyline but in terms of what I look for in a Grand Theft Auto game – pretty places to drive around and explore and hundreds of opportunities for inventive mayhem – well, it has to be the game that lets you hijack a Harrier Jumpjet, fly above a state of deserts and casinos and forests and car chases and mountains, and then park it in your front drive while you get a haircut.

Multiwinia

I wasn’t going to write about Multiwinia straight after Darwinia; World in Conflict is still looking mournfully at me, hoping that maybe I’ll get around to finishing the campaign and talking about that particular slice of real-time tactics, and I think I’ve been labouring the whole ‘Introversion = good’ thing a bit too much, but, goddamnit, all those Russian tanks can wait and, goddamnit more, Introversion are good. So Multiwinia it is. For two reasons: firstly, it’s fucking sublime. Secondly, this blog post told me to, and everyone knows how I can’t resist doing what games journalists tell me to do.

According to Steam, I’ve only played 3.1 hours of Multiwinia, and yet I still feel perfectly qualified writing 800-odd words on the thing. In those 3.1 hours, me and my little cyan Multiwinians have been through a lot. We’ve braved dark forests, flying saucers, and ant infestations. We’ve called in airstrikes and nuclear submarines. We’ve made desperate last stand defences and equally desperate last minute rushes, running headlong into bullets and rockets and fire and lasers.

Multiwinia does something that a frankly ludicrous number of games forget to do: it makes everything fun. It’s simple to control and it’s simple to understand what’s going on, and as a result you don’t spend any time doing the fiddly rubbish things that practically all strategy games ask of you, like building bases or queuing units. You just order your Multiwinians into combat, either yourself or using officers, and watch the beautiful, harrowing, insanely frantic spectacle unfold. Controlling the Multiwinians directly is a bit weird; Darwinia made a point of making the Darwinians (who are the Multiwinians’ antecedents) free willed – it was part of the point of the game. Multiwinia is set in the same computer system, some time after – when the Darwinians have presumably become sentient and civilised enough to split up into tribes and start murdering each other (this is possibly hinted at at the end of Darwinia, now that I think about it). But the fact that, all of a sudden, you can control them and – weirder still – so can other people … well, it’s strange, and it strips the game of immersion, breaking the illusion of oh-my-god-this-could-actually-be-happening-in-my-machine that made Darwinia so compelling. In a way, Multiwinia feels like Darwinia: The Game.

But I’m looking at it the wrong way – it may be set in Darwinia, but that doesn’t mean it should be thought of in the same way as that game. It should be thought of as what it is – fun, fast, terrifyingly frenetic strategy. If I felt as attached to the Multiwinians as I did to the Darwinians, shepherding thousands of them to their deaths would be gruelling and emotional – which was the right thing to feel in Darwinia. But this is a ten minute strategy game. When the crates start falling it’s intense enough, and you haven’t got time to sit and wonder if what you’re doing is right. You just need to kill those magenta bastards.

Yes, the crates. Crates are brilliant. They fall from the digital sky, and you send a handful of Multiwinians over to reveal the technology within. It could be an airstrike, the ability to place a flame turret, reinforcements, personal shields for your Multiwinians or a UFO. They aren’t balanced. Some of the crates have dramatically better rewards than others. The game does default to weighted crate drops – if you’re losing you get more – but that isn’t much use if you’re getting five magical forests to their one nuclear strike. But who cares? Balance is great sometimes, but the matches are all so short that it doesn’t matter if you get scuppered by a stroke of bad luckand lose – and it makes the desperate last stand all the more epic if it feels like the universe itself is against you.

My favourite game type is Assault – one player (or team) has a gigantic fortress protected by walls and turrets, loads of Multiwinians, and most of the land area (so most of the crate drops, at least at the beginning of the match). The other has infinitely respawning Multiwinians, and maybe a couple of bombs to blow holes in the walls. And, for the most part, they’re pretty unbalanced – when defending, I’ve managed to hold off the enemy for the entire match without giving up any land whatsoever, and when attacking it is always, always a long, hard, bitter battle to the end. But when you come close, or when you win, it’s so much more rewarding if it feels like you’ve overcome horrifically long odds. The other player had a fortress, for God’s sake! And I almost did it!

Multiwinia is not this: Darwinia. But it is this: fun. Constantly, compulsively, unstoppably fun. Utterly crushing your opponent is fun; losing 8-1 on Capture the Statue is fun. Because every match is full of little but spectacular moments – an airstrike on a heavily populated spawn point, the last ditch attempt to stop your opponent capturing a statue, taking control of a turret yourself and stomping the enemy swarms into dust. And, yes, that moment when everything seems to be going horribly badly and then your opponent opens a Nuke crate – it’s never frustrating, because it’ll all be over in a few minutes anyway and it’s always so pretty to watch. Even if it your own little guys being blown halfway to hell.