Let me attempt, by the all-powerful medium of anecdote, to explain what it’s like to play Mirror’s Edge: you are sprinting down a piercing white hallway, with a sharp blue carpet. Ahead, there is a bright red door, and then you’re at it, and then your forearm has smashed it down and you’re standing on a stone balcony awash with pale gold light. There is a city, dark in the night, and just below you, another rooftop; you run to the edge of the balcony, and leap, leaving the pale gold behind and landing, with a thud and a roll, into dark blue criss-crossed with red laser sights. You’re running; you’re vaulting over a fence, scrambling up a wall, sliding under a pipe; as you run, a sniper shot hits you, and your vision darkens, but you don’t stop; you’re flying, they can’t get you. You reach the end of this roof, and there is another, waiting for you, and you leap again; and in mid-air, another shots thuds into your body. You die. Your broken corpse slams into the pristine flagstones that had been your target, and the colours fade from your vision.

In other words, Mirror’s Edge is stunningly beautiful and constantly exhilerating, except for those moments when it presents you with a huge pile of repetitive deaths that are never – never – entirely your fault. You play as Faith, a free-runnin’, wall-hoppin’, fence-vaultin’, elevator-waitin’ future-courier and central character in some kind of story involving sisters, cops and 2D cutscenes, all of which are instantly forgettable. Partly, of course, because it’s general videogame story fare, but mostly because as soon as the level starts all thoughts beyond running, jumping, sliding and climbing fly out of your mind. Mirror’s Edge, y’see, is a game about movement. No other game, and I suppose I should include the caveat “that I am aware of”, has ever made the first-person perspective as physical or as dynamic as this. DICE attempted to make platforming work in first-person, and, wonderfully, it does. It suffers from some problems that are less common in its third-person brethren – it’s difficult to exactly gauge when to jump without constantly looking at your feet, for instance – but it makes up for it with the sheer unhinged joy of experiencing high-speed acrobatics through your own eyes.  Every level plonks you down at the beginning of a stunningly beautiful assault course full of over-saturated colours and conveniently placed planks and just says … “Go”.

Oh, how I wish that was entirely true. In fact, it says “Go, but by the way here’s an impenetrable jumping puzzle or two and also a couple of rooms full of guards with weapons that can kill you in two hits, sorry”. These are the two epic – mammoth – frustrations in Mirror’s Edge. The jumping puzzles are usually fairly transparent – this is a first-person platformer that works, remember – but on those few occasions when they’re suddenly impossible to fathom, the sound of Faith’s bones crunching on the concrete below becomes an inexorable mantra that drills away at your very soul. I started composing this post in my head while playing through one such sequence, set in a gorgeous yellow-and-black under-construction atrium, and I can report that had I written that post it would have had many, many more instances of the word “fuck”. To be fair the game provides a “Runner’s Vision” path that guides you through the environment via red objects, and hitting the Alt key automatically centres your view on wherever you’re meant to go. Which is helpful, or it would be if both mechanics weren’t petulant teenagers that have a bad habit of disappearing at random or simply being obnoxiously useless (there is one red object here. It is a beam. It is seven convoluted levels above you). Bear in mind, however, that I am a moron that is rubbish at games, and if you are a parkour savant then feel free to sneer at my dependence on such mechanics.

But even a parkour savant cannot outsmart bullets, and it is the combat in Mirror’s Edge that is the real cause of the gnaw marks on my lower lip. Sprinting through a  giant room crowded with assault rifle wielding SWAT squaddies or avoiding the free-running police chasers are the greatest parts of the game, so it is a great shame that frequently there is no obvious way of avoiding your enemies – and Faith dies far, far too quickly under direct fire. If you have the twitch reflexes of a squirrel then you can disarm and takedown the bads in a single move; the rest of us mere mortals can use the bullet-time mode to make things a bit easier, but there are still three other guys in the room and they’re still pumping lead into my fragile courier frame. Most galling of all is when the game suddenly decides that, for instance, suddenly doors are going to take five seconds of valve-twisting to open rather than a quarter-second of forearm-bashing, making the hasty non-violent escape completely impossible.

To sum up, then, the movement and free-running in Mirror’s Edge is eye-meltingly good, and the combat is stomach-crunchingly awful. Hurrah for Time Trial mode! Suddenly there are no enemies, just you, the aforementioned beautiful assault course, a timer in the top right hand corner, and a TrackMania-style ghost to race against. Suddenly Mirror’s Edge realises why it’s a fantastic game, and it just lets you get on with the ferociously pleasurable business of moving as fast as you can through the bleached-white towers, shaving a few seconds off your time as you find the perfect route. Suddenly it’s everything it should be, and the frustrations of the story mode are lost in the brightly-coloured haze. Go.

Even if you’ve no interest whatsoever in playing Dead Space – which is reasonable, because it’s a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter – you owe it to yourself to at least try one thing out. Find someone who has it or whatever – it only takes about half a second. Just fire up the game, make sure you aren’t aiming at anything, and then tap the spacebar.

Did you hear that? Hruuugh WHUMP. A determined, desperate war-grunt, followed by the always-satisfying sound of a half tonne boot slamming down onto the steel deckplate. Try it again on an enemy and instead you’ll hear rotten flesh exploding, with a truly repulsive liquid sucking sound. Without question, Dead Space has the best feet in gaming, easily wrenching the crown from Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, in much the same way that a space engineer occasionally has to wrench dead flesh from his face and bash it repeatedly with a mining laser.

The space engineer in question is one Isaac Clarke, whose name is unfortunate only because it means someone at EA Redwood Shores decided against Arthur C Asimov, which would have been approximately a thousand times better. Isaac is the generic-est of a small crew of generics investigating what’s going down aboard the USG Ishimura, a ‘planet cracker’ spaceship that has been rather quiet of late. Let’s not mince words when we could be mincing monsters: the ship is crawling with weird fleshy things with horrible mouths and big spiky limbs that have been munching their way across the ship for some time when Isaac finally places one house-sized boot down onto the bloodstained decks of the Ishimura, probably crushing a skull in the process.

Save for its innovative use of stomping on things, Dead Space’s main unique selling point is the fantastic-sounding ’strategic dismemberment’; your enemies, you see, are monsters, and not the kind of monster that can be easily disposed of with a quick shot to the head. That usually just pisses them off more, and these are monsters that were already phenomenally pissed off . Instead, you have to slice them and dice them, soliciting fountains of gore and some truly unpleasant sound effects, before finishing off the legless maniacs with a few quick, bone-shattering stomps to the arms or shoulders (or, if you’re boring, shooting them some more). It’s a clever mechanic: in games like Dead Space, which trade so extensively in the shock appearance of enemies from vents and … well, just vents, the player will practically always just spray thoughtlessly with whatever weapon they’re currently clutching when a pile of dead tissue crashes down upon them. Dead Space forces you to aim – there’s no reticule without holding the right mouse button – and select which limb offends you the most before you fire. If you don’t aim and bring up the reticule, then tapping the fire button makes Isaac execute a flailing melee attack, swinging his gun around in an insane arc in his desperation to keep the horrors away from him.

Isaac is horribly mistreated throughout Dead Space. It’s not a particularly difficult game, but over the course of my playthrough he was blown up into a shower of red meat, burnt to death, dragged flailing into a tentacle’s lair, sliced in half, torn to shreds by asteroids, and had his head eaten. Dead Space, in my experience, has the best deaths since Crash Bandicoot 2, and in terms of sheer horrifying gore it outdoes even that. This is a game of gore, and it makes no attempt to hide it. Despite its reliance on precision aiming in combat, Dead Space is, in many respects, more blunt force than scalpel subtlety: the enemies are mindless bags of viscera, the story is meaningless, the characters are instantly forgettable, and Isaac’s progression through the ship is strictly linear, though the brilliantly atmospheric vacuum and zero-gravity bits break things up nicely.

However, in those places where it is more subtle, Dead Space excels; and almost all of them are centred around Isaac himself. I couldn’t care less about the missing girlfriend that may or may not be still wandering the Ishimura, but I do feel a certain sympathy for Isaac the beleagured space engineer. He never says anything, but he’s the least mute mute protagonist since Gordon Freeman last winced his way through a fire: Isaac screams, he grunts, he moans, and – best of all -  his breath becomes laboured and rattley as his health drops down into the red. Academically, Dead Space shows you Isaac’s current health on a segmented meter along his spine, as part of its moderately successful crusade against the HUD, but really Isaac’s ill-health is displayed to you by his desperate, lurching limp, his painful breathing and groaning, the way he looks like he’s always about to collapse when you force him to run. I symapthise with the man because, God, he goes through some shit. At the end of the game, he was knackered, and so was I.

Dead Space is not, exactly, fun to play.  The game has some rudimentary RPG elements – you can buy new stuff from a holo-shop, and power up weapons, armour and abilities – and as you progress and get more powerful, there’s a certain primal thrill to be had from carving your way through everything in your path, leaving nothing but oddly resilient torsos in your wake. The game even lets you start a new playthrough with all your fully levelled up gear, though only if you’re playing on the same difficulty as before, which further enhances the I-Am-Become-Death feeling that I’m so fond of in RPGs. But, seriously, fighting your way through a derelict spaceship crawling with malevolent and terrifying looking creatures, stumbling over eviscerated corpses every couple of steps, watching your avatar get torn apart by organic blades; it’s pretty bloody unpleasant. But who said all games had to be fun? Dead Space is a shattering, nerve-tearing experience within a horrendous world, full of unpleasantly atmospheric touches, and that’s what makes it worthwhile, even amongst last autumn’s deluge of quality. And that seriously isn’t bad for a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter.

So – after a nightmarish time trying to get Operation: Anchorage to work, it turned out to be wholly disappointing – only bribing its way into my favour by showering me with pretty loot at its early conclusion. My experience attempting to install this newest downloadable content for Fallout 3, the Pitt, was several orders of magnitude less painful, but we’re still talking fraught, unsuccessful visits to the Games for Windows Live forums here.  Eventually, after installing various Windows updates that may or may not have had anything to do with GFWL, I was able to boot up the game, sign in to Microsoft’s increasingly offensive service, and, y’know, play the content that I’d bought several hours earlier. And now I have four hundred superfluous Microsoft fun points.

Happily, the Pitt manages to redeem itself. Unlike Operation: Anchorage’s brief foray into pure FPS territory, the Pitt is consistent with what makes Fallout 3 great – namely, wandering around a lovingly constructed post-apocalyptic environment, rummaging for loot, and leaving a trail of destruction, or at least change, in your wake. You’re summoned by an emergency radio signal to a point at the extreme north of the Capital Wasteland’s map, and, after stumbling around on cliffs and in radiation pools for a while, you find the radio tower and an eyepatch-wearing, chain-smoking escaped slave named Werhner, who whisks you away to post-war Pittsburgh post-haste, aboard a railway handcar.  Unlike Washington DC, which in Fallout’s vision of the future was pretty much levelled when the bombs fell, Pittsburgh escaped largely unscathed, only to become a breeding ground for disease and decay in the years that followed. It’s home to a colony of raiders and their slaves, ravaged by a disease that transforms its victims into inhuman Trogs. When you casually stroll on to the scene, a cure is close to being developed.

In other words, the Pitt is a meaty and satisfying slice of true RPG goodness – it’s got factions, it’s got conflict, it’s got choice, it’s got proper characters, and it’s got the opportunity to have a dramatic effect on the world around you. Lovely – that’s the way to do it. The main quest is still a little on the short side for your £8.50, but the open levels leave a lot of opportunity for wandering, and there are couple of side distractions chucked in there too. My level twenty character – a charming, silver-tongued psychopath that moves silently, kills indiscriminately and fetishises assault rifle mechanisms -  breezed through Pittsburgh without difficulty, defeated only by a suddenly immaterial handrail on one of the higher gantries. Arguably it is a little too easy, given that most of the people interested in the DLC will probably have higher level characters, but honestly I just enjoyed choosing all the threatening and hubristic dialogue options, knowing that, when the time came, I could make good on my word and visit death upon the decaying colony. Which I did.

None of the new loot is as lovely and shiny as the Chinese Stealth Armour or Gauss Rifle from Operation: Anchorage, but there’s a lot more of it, and it’s all pretty cool in a grimy, rough’n'ready sort of way. Commanding centre stage, of course, is the Auto Axe, a giant spinning whirly death arrangement that fits in so snugly with the Pitt’s aesthetic that it’s hard to imagine playing through the add-on without lugging around half a tonne of bladed metal  and using it to chop up mutants, raiders and uppity slaves. Better still for a compulsive loot-whore such as myself, however, is the host of new armours, a new unique weapon, and a handful of other bits and bobs to spend hours meticulously stacking onto the shelves of my apartment. People that are even more obsessive than me can perform a fetch quest for steel ingots to get even more new stuff, the extent of which makes my excitement at Operation: Anchorage’s paltry-if-awesome offering look a tiny bit stupid.

The Pitt is one of the best environments I’ve seen in Fallout 3 so far, possibly the best – a ramshackle raider settlement clinging around and atop the empty, rotten buildings, all cloaked in thick orange pollution from Pittsburgh’s one working steel mill. It’s not merely an extension of the base game’s barren, green-grey nuclear wasteland, but a separate and internally consistent place, with its own tone and its own feel. This was one of Operation: Anchorage’s greatest strengths too, but where that storyline took place in pretty-but-narrow snow corridors, the levels in the Pitt are wonderfully open, complicated and sprawling – particularly the breathtaking steelyard. It even has new music, some of which is brilliant – and if Operation: Anchorage had any new music then it can’t have been very memorable.

The best part of the Pitt is this: it’s very Fallout-y. My experience with the first two games is still limited, but it fits in perfectly with Fallout 3’s vision of the future; the Pitt is masterfully crafted, very obviously a departure from the Wasteland while still feeling like part of the same world – a place where the same events have had a radically different impact. There’s even a pretty good story spun within it, and one that was intensely gratifying – I waltzed in, did my thing, and waltzed out, leaving the settlement reeling from my actions and my presence. Where Operation: Anchorage was a largely unsuccessful attempt at the FPS, the Pitt is a triumphant return to the RPG.

(Credit where it’s due: my character’s hair in the pictures is from this mod)

In Burnout Paradise, you can end an event at any time by stopping your car. Did you know that? I didn’t bloody know that. Possibly it’s in the manual, but that’s not the point: the point is that I played Burnout Paradise for twelve hours without ever discovering what happens when a car’s wheels stop spinning. This, brilliantly, is a game specifically designed to inundate you with a constant flow of vehicle-based insanity, and I never had time to stop.

Burnout Paradise is essentially all the driving from GTA, ripped out, made faster and more vicious, and then plonked into a sprawling utopia of ramps and things to break. You have five events, which can be activated at every crossroads in the city: straight up races to a specific point on the map; Road Rage, in which you smash people up; Marked Man, where you avoid people smashing you up; jumping off ramps and doing handbrake turns in Stunt Run; and car-specific time trials called, for some reason, Burning Routes. None of the events have prescribed routes, which is great if you know all kinds of fancy shortcuts – and when you skip out a huge loop of road by jumping off the roof of a building and over a ravine it is pretty awesome – but terrible if you don’t know the layout of Paradise City initmately. I ended up spending most of my time peering intently at the minimap, until I inevitably ploughed into a Gillette-branded van coming in the opposite direction. This triggers an unavoidable, unskippable, occasionally impressive but all-too-often boring crash sequence where you get to watch your car tumble about a bit trailing shrapnel, with all of your competitors flying past in the background. This, believe it or not, is kind of annoying.

The events are only important in that they let you unlock more cars, though. The real pleasure of Burnout Paradise is racing at breakneck speed around a huge, beautiful city for no particular reason: doing barrel rolls off ramps at the beach, jumping off the roof of a carpark to smash into a bright red billboard, seeing how spectacular a crash you can create. It’s fortunate, then, that the multiplayer lets you do just that. Paradise City is a playground, and therefore goes from entertaining to utterly intoxicating in the always-pleasurable company of random strangers from the Internet. All the events from the single-player are present and correct, save Burning Route,  but better still is the inclusion of hundreds of challenges, tailored to the number of players you have, ranging from ‘Use your boost’ to ‘Jump off the broken bridge and crash into each other in mid air’. It’s entertaining simply by virtue of how completely pointless is it is: there are, probably, achievements tied to the challenges, but there is no in-game gain from doing any of them. Awesomely, it’s just a laugh.

San Andreas has long been my go-to game of choice for when I just need to cruise around listening to music; and while Paradise City never feels as well realised or alive as Rockstar’s masterful creation, it has managed to usurp it for a single simple reason: enthusiasm. This is a game that is in love with driving ludicrously quickly and crashing into things, and even someone as utterly apathetic towards cars and driving games as I can’t help but be caught up by the sheer breathless excitement of it all. Smash this! Beat this time! Take this guy down! Jump off this! Your friend’s just come online! I have now played Burnout Paradise for much longer than that first twelve hours, and not once have I thought: what shall I do now? You start your engine, the game gathers momentum, and then you never stop. The forced-slow-motion crash mechanic is sometimes completely infuriating, but at the very least it dumps you straight back onto the road with your engine running, rather than making you spend ten minutes trying to extricate yourself from a bollard; being forced to stop would be much, much worse. Burnout Paradise isn’t perfect, but it’s brightly coloured and fast and constantly trying to please, and it’s hard not to find its giddy enthusiasm infectious.

(this has been an attempt at writing a slightly more ‘reviewy’ review. Let me know what you think)

]]> http://atmospheretrailer.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/burnout-paradise/feed/ 2 maybenexttimex capture_02032009_183634 capture_02032009_200834 capture_02032009_184653 capture_02032009_185253 http://atmospheretrailer.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/fallout-3-operation-anchorage/ http://atmospheretrailer.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/fallout-3-operation-anchorage/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:25:28 +0000 maybenexttimex http://atmospheretrailer.wordpress.com/?p=169 ]]>

Before you read my long, directionless thoughts about this first piece of DLC for the actually rather amazing Fallout 3, I need you to remember one thing: £8.50. Have that fixed in your mind the entire time you’re reading this. You could also try to remember “Five Reinstalls”, but anyone who cares about the overpowering awfulness of Games For Windows Live can probably imagine the hell I went through to slot three hundred megs of content into a highly moddable RPG anyway.

£8.50. Okay? Let’s go, then.

Operation: Anchorage, brilliantly referred to as Operation: Anchorage! in-game, is a great big lump of barely-downloadable content that is crowbarred somewhat brutally into the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3: the Brotherhood Outcasts want to open a door; the only way to open the door is, for some reason, to participate in a training simulation of the Chinese invasion of Alaska; the only people that can interface with the simulation are those with a PipBoy clamped permanently onto their forearm; the only one of those not cowering underground behind several feet of steel is, well, you. Which is fine, really, because the second best thing about Operation: Anchorage is the fact that there’s a whole bunch of new textures and new stuff to look at that would have been very difficult to fit into Fallout 3’s ‘real world’. Wartime Alaska is a very different place from post-war DC; where the latter is mostly a brown, open plain studded with run-down shacks and ruins, Anchorage is full of jagged outcrops, sheer cliffs and monolithic fortresses, with bombers flying overhead and shells exploding in the distance. It’s a genuine departure from the rest of the game, and in this respect at least, Operation: Anchorage is more of a bonus extra than a deleted scene.

Of course a consequence of all those cliffs and canyons is that you never really get any choice of where to go. There are some open areas, but you’ve still only got one place to get to and, generally speaking, that is towards more enemies. If you put all your skill points in Barter, Speech and Lockpicking then you will not enjoy Operation: Anchorage: it’s shooting, perhaps mixed in with some punching and exploding, from beginning to end. I can think of one Speech check, a handful of locked doors (all with ‘Easy’ locks and achievement fodder ‘Intelligence’ briefcases behind them), and a couple of hackable terminals, although all you could do with those was deactivate some weak turrets. On the other hand, there are hundreds of Chinese soldiers, always shooting at you. Even the Sneak skill – and my character is a catlike ninja with a hundred Sneak skill points – proved mostly useless when fighting through Anchorage’s narrow, brightly lit trenches. Compared to the dizzying scope and scale of the base game, Operation: Anchorage just feels a bit limited and confined; and never more so than when my decidedly female Wasteland wanderer was referred to as ’sir’ and ‘him’.

Fortunately, the combat is pretty fun. The Chinese soldiers are fairly ordinary, and you will find yourself slaying them by the bunker-load, but the Crimson Dragoons – some kind of elite special forces unit clad in stealth armour – are completely unlike anything else in the game. They have a similar invisibility field to the Stealth Boy, and, where every other adversary in Fallout 3 essentially runs at you screaming, the Crimson Dragoons are predatory, silent killers, lurking quietly until you’ve passed them before opening fire with a sniper rifle or jamming a sword into your spine. Plodding through the corridors of the Chinese-occupied buildings, I found myself peering carefully into darkened corners or warily avoiding spotlit areas, even occasionally firing wildly into thin air in the hopes of uncovering them. They’re a disciplined, efficient fighting force, and they make a happy change from the merry chaos of the Capital Wasteland itself. As well as the Crimson Dragoons, there are a couple of boss fights, one passable and the other wretched, especially considering the limited arsenal afforded to you as a foot soldier in the US Army.

Operation: Anchorage does well at evoking the atmosphere of a larger war taking place, with grease-monkeys and medics wandering around the base camp and soldiers cowering behind cover out in the field, but it also does well at evoking the atmosphere of a simulated war taking place. Interactive objects flash red, dead soldiers fizzle out of existence after a few seconds, you occasionally teleport to your next objective, and attempts to shatter the fourth wall by asking questions about the simulation itself are met with confused or uncomprehending responses. Which is all pretty great in its way, although it may perhaps have benefited from some more ‘Hey! This isn’t real!’ moments, but of course it also means that you can only interact with flashing red objects, you can’t loot corspes, and you can hardly ever just do your own thing. That word again: confined. Just about the only RPG-ish aspect of O:A is the constant drip feed of experience – my character went from low level seventeen to almost level nineteen in the three hours or so that I spent playing it (for those that don’t know, Fallout 3’s level cap is twenty, so that’s a fair  amount of XP I got from offing those pesky Commies).

So: Operation: Anchorage is an entertaining diversion from the main game, with a very different feel and focus and some entertaining-if-shallow combat. But do you remember what I said at the beginning of this post? £8.50. Atmosphere Trailer is by no means a buyer’s guide, and I’m hesitant even to be writing this paragraph, but … Christ. Operation: Anchorage costs 800 of Microsoft’s supremely idiotic and obfuscating ‘Points’, presumably used because we can’t be trusted with real money, which weighs in at about £6.80. But, of course, I can’t buy 800 points, or indeed pay in any other currency; instead, I have to pay £8.50 for a thousand points and then spend my days glaring viciously at the two hundred points I have left in my regrettable Games For Windows Live account, which I can spend on precisely fuck all. The end result of all these shenannigans is that Operation: Anchorage effectively costs more than its already high price. The only other time I’ve paid three pounds per hour of play time is Portal, and I think I can say with some confidence that Operation: Anchorage is not as good as Portal (and I’ve played through Portal about eight times now anyway).

There’s a but. I don’t really regret spending my despicable Points on O:A, because I have a weakness for something that Operation: Anchorage does well at: stuff. I adore stuff in RPGs, to the extent that my apartment in Tenpenny Tower is crammed full of very carefully arranged weaponry and armour, and the new items introduced in Operation: Anchorage prod viciously at all the right buttons to make me go ‘Oooooh’. The Gauss Rifle is fantastic, the Stealth Armour is fantastic, the Winterized T-51b Power Armour is amazing and nostalgic for a past I never experienced … there isn’t that much of it, but what is there – lining the shelves of the secret vault I spent so long trying to open – I found tremendously exciting. It’s new things! For me! It is for this reason that I will never attempt to play World of Warcraft, and it is for this reason, despite the ludicrousness of the pricing, the horrible-ness of the download service and the relative slightness of the product, that I liked Operation: Anchorage.

SWAT 4! Man, it even sounds exciting. One day I’ll do a negative review on this blog, I promise, but those that are hoping that I’ll finally crack out the gently ironic bile will have to wait a little while longer while I get super enthusiastic about a police simulator from 2005. (To be fair, I don’t buy games that I don’t think I’ll like, which pretty severely limits my choices for game-hate. For some reason I haven’t got to the point where publishers will send me their games for free to review).

SWAT 4 is a no-nonsense tactical FPS in the vein of Rainbow Six, or at least what I imagine Rainbow Six to be like, which is full of shouty men, jargon and flashbangs. And by ‘no-nonsense’, I mean ‘SWAT 4 is a game about shouting at people until they do what you want them to do, and hoping they don’t just say “Fuck off” and shoot you in the face’. It’s a game where it’s illegal to kill someone who hasn’t directly pointed a gun at you, even if you know – from replaying the level ten times and recognising the character model – that they’re about to pull out a MAC-10 and spray bullets over everyone in the room. I almost failed a mission for that very reason; while my squad were securing one room, I rather foolishly wandered into the next, to be confronted by three terrified hostages – or, rather, two terrified hostages and one grey-suited suspect pretending to be a hostage, who staggered towards me mumbling for help. I had played this level many times, and, even though it’s populated differently in every playthrough, I recognised a perp when I saw one;  lacking any kind of non-lethal weaponry, I fired a single bullet into his leg, while mashing the shout button – “POLICE! Get down on your knees! NOW!”. He kept coming towards me, now dragging his useless right leg behind him. I put another bullet in his leg. He kept coming. I fired again, and he fell backwards, dead. And, sure enough, there was the SMG he had been a few seconds from pulling on me, lying next to his body. I reported the death, took his weapon as evidence, secured the hostages for extraction, and rejoined my squad.

I completed the mission, and received by far the lowest score on completion that I’d ever had – 57%. Normal difficulty requires that you get 50% or higher to progress. Why was it so low? ‘Unauthorised use of lethal force: -10 points’. I had killed a man without knowing that he was a threat to me, a fellow officer, or a hostage, and that is not a thing that the police do. In the next mission, I outfitted my team with pepper spray and ‘less-lethal’, beanbag-firing shotguns, and subdued an entire tenement’s worth of crazy, M4-wielding cultist-martyrs without a single injury (after numerous times of being shot in the face and starting again, obviously). It’s a great to play a game where you are, utterly and unambiguously, the good guy; any game that features widespread slaughter of living things is always going to be morally dubious to some degree, even if it’s just my dad wandering in and asking if I have to shoot all the aliens, but in SWAT 4 it’s your job to save as many people as possible, and it’s brilliant.

(I’ve just trawled Wikipedia, and ‘beanbag rounds’ are bags full of lead shot that are fired out of a shotgun at a person. Man! No wonder it’s ‘less-lethal’ and not ‘non-lethal’.)

The AI for the squad mates is fine – they get stuck on each other sometimes, but get into a reasonable position when clearing a room, and know when to shout at someone (all the time). The system for ordering them about is smooth and fairly intuitive, and they’ll almost always do what you say immediately. Sadly, though, they don’t realise that one of the best things about playing a no-nonsense tactical FPS is when you accidentally hit yourself in the face with a flashbang and then tase the officer in front of you, all the while hitting the shout button over and over again. It’s fortunate, then, that SWAT 4 allows you to play through all the single player missions – there’s no story, just “We need a SWAT team! NOW!” situations – in co-op, with people that appreciate the funny side of a CS grenade bouncing off a door frame and back into the room you’re standing in. Fortunate, and amazing. Alternating between giggling hysterically at some unfortunate mishap – on one mission I never once managed to deploy a sting grenade without bombarding everyone in the team with rubber pellets – and this-is-serious-business breaching and clearing, the co-op mode in SWAT 4 is, quite simply, brilliant gaming. Pulling off a perfect arrest – checking for hostiles with the Opti-Wand, blowing the door open with a breaching shotgun, lobbing a CS grenade into the room and then stomping in, finger poised over the shout key – is great fun in single player, but doing the same with a friend or two over the Internet is vastly more rewarding.

SWAT 4 is, in its hardcore way, a very rewarding game. Not the first few times you play it, and not when the first suspect you see shoots you through the eye within seconds of starting the level; but it’s a game that rewards patience, consideration, tactics, and the kind of compassion that only capsaicin to the face can deliver. There’s a common conception in games, and it’s what I told my dad when he asked about my mass alien slaughter, that it has to be them or us. Them or me. Yes, I have to kill them all, because otherwise they’ll kill me. SWAT 4 feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least it would if it wasn’t from 2005, because it says: Yes, they’ll kill you, but it isn’t you or them. It’s both. Every death in SWAT 4 is a genuine defeat, and it feels like it. For the most part, the people you fight in SWAT 4 aren’t evil; they’re misinformed or brainwashed or terrified or high or have genuine grievances, and when you save them, you win.

(in games, not all of which were released in 2008, but I did play them for the first time).

Bled to death in a sleeping bag, surrounded by darkness and mutant dogs, cold and alone. (STALKER: Oblivion Lost)

Betrayed three of my friends by setting fire to the only route onto the boat, separating myself from them and the gigantic Infected horde that was tearing them apart. Didn’t regret it. (Left 4 Dead)

Set myself on fire with the back-blast from an RPG; I was saved by the timely intervention of a mustachioed Kosovan, who died shortly afterwards, surrounded by blood and fire and dirt outside a despot’s safehouse. (Far Cry 2)

Herded thousands upon thousands of sentient, innocent, naive, trusting beings to their deaths. It was genuinely disturbing, genuinely affecting, but I didn’t stop. Won in the end. Came dangerously close to crying. (Darwinia)

Punched a journalist in the face; saved the Universe; looked awesome. (Mass Effect)

Designed a rocket-powered, gong-covered, blinking-lights religion machine on mechanical legs. Painted it yellow, black and barbie pink. (Spore)

Destroyed the Statue of Liberty and erected a statue of Lenin in its place. Levelled a volcanic fortress. Blew up a red light district in Amsterdam. (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Co-ordinated a single attack on a single enemy base that somehow still ended with at least four nuclear detonations. (Supreme Commander)

Received a mission to transfer 900,000 credits from one bank account to another. Completed mission. Siphoned the 900,000 credits from my client’s account to my own. Spent it on extra CPUs.  (Uplink)

Razed Constantinople. Razed Cairo. Razed Rome. (Medieval II: Total War)

Giggled uncontrollably at the sight – and sound – of a friendly looking bear flying through a cloudless sky with an umbrella. Never managed to land an awesome high score run. (Sunny Day Sky)

Clocked 916,981 points of damage as Pyro. That probably isn’t that good, but every single one was awesome, especially the ones against snipers. (Team Fortress 2)

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Far Cry 2 was supposed to be rubbish, wasn’t it? As someone who was slightly interested in football and Championship Manager in the 04/05 era, I know how these things happen: developers and publishers split, the developers go on to make a fantastic game with a slightly different name, the publishers desperately try to cash in on the established name with a completely different development team and end up making something vastly inferior. That’s how it works in the world of Football Manager, anyway, so surely that’s also how it works in the world of open-ended shooters with oddly irrelevant titles featuring the word ‘Cry’?

Apparently not. Far Cry 2 is lots and lots of things, many of them awesome, some of them irritating, but one thing it is not is a lazy cash-in. The game is reeling with new ideas, tottering under the weight of adaptive storylines and realistically propogating fire, and, yes, occasionally it collapses in on itself and you’re stuck driving around the map doing the same thing six times in a row; but when it all comes together, it’s sublime.

Time for an anecdote, then. (Spoiler warning: the bit that I’m going to talk about is in the endgame, although I’m leaving out all the details and, at any rate, they might be different for you – it’s that adaptive storyline again – but if you really care that much then skip to the next paragraph).  I have entered a ceasefire zone, a clearing in the middle of dense jungle, tasked with assassinating two men that are powerful within the factions that are warring over our tiny Central African nation. My reputation precedes me; the guards watch me edgily, conversations hushed into silence as I approach, whispered references to a ‘psycho merc’ heard in the distance, and when I casually knock one of them with my shoulder he practically leaps back in terror, apologising profusely for getting in my way. It’s midday, and outside the cover of the forest the sun is overpowering, casting sharp, short shadows and reflecting blindingly off my skyward-pointing Desert Eagle. I walk casually through the camp, ignoring the other mercenaries and the prickly tension, until I come across the small shack where my targets are planning the next move in their increasingly complicated war. As I enter, I holster the Desert Eagle and pull out a slightly rusted light machine gun, a powerful one with both letters and numbers in its name. The two men know something is wrong, but don’t mention it; they owe everything to me, and greet me with forced politeness, acting as if I’m just here for a contract. I open fire. Three bullets tear into my first target’s stomach and then – ‘Fuck!’ – my ancient LMG jams. The second man is already outside, yelling at the guards, and within a few seconds red lines are appearing all over my vision as the mercenaries open fire, still shouting orders at each other. I bash desperately at my gun, eventually unjamming it, then finish off the first man and sprint outside, still under heavy gunfire. I duck behind the shack and dig a bullet out of my leg, and then rush around the corner, throwing a Molotov cocktail before gunning down the first merc I see. My LMG jams again, so I stab the merc through the chest and then grab his shotgun, using it against the others. Eventually, I find my second target, crouching behind a fence, pistol in hand, and – after unjamming the shotgun as well – I fire a single shell into his face. Around me, the flames from my Molotov ignite fuel tanks and (naturally) red barrels, sending them flying into the air before they explode into fragments of twisted metal.

Something like that could happen in pretty much any shooter, I guess, but here’s what makes it such a big deal: it didn’t have to happen. The only part of that whole overlong story that was scripted was the dialogue; everything else was a result of Far Cry 2’s immaculate world responding to my presence and my actions, and then chucking in a few random events to see how I handle it (answer: with fire, obviously). Every objective you have – and, to be honest, you’ll either be destroying something or killing someone – can be approached differently: with a dart rifle, silenced MP5 and IEDs; or with grenade launchers and flare guns and mortars. Much (virtual) noise has been made about the checkpoints full of perplexingly hostile, respawning mercenaries, but at the very least they allow you to try something new every time you attack, and at any rate a shooter where you don’t have to shoot anyone would be more than a little weird.

As your missions and objectives will quickly establish, Far Cry 2 is a game about being a bastard. I can think of perhaps four or five individuals in the game that aren’t utterly contemptible, and you certainly aren’t one of them. Not a mustachioed villain either, all thrilling charisma or broiling anti-heroism; you’re just a prickish thug. A thuggish prick. Defoliating fields, destroying water pipelines, blowing up anti-malarials, needlessly exacerbating a senseless conflict between two utterly generic factions that spout near-identical drivel, sabotaging peace deals; pretty much everything you do in Far Cry 2 makes things vastly worse for our unnamed country. The whole ‘unnamed country’ thing is reminscent of a criticism I made of Call of Duty 4; namely, that the story and setting were so hopelessly vague that I didn’t care that I was saving the world, and I never really felt very heroic (except perhaps during That Mission In Chernobyl). In Far Cry 2, the combatants – the Alliance for Popular Resistance and the United Front for Liberation and Labour – are even more vague than those in CoD4, and in fact are pretty much indistinguishable, but that’s the point: this is a senseless, meaningless war fought by greedy men for greedy reasons, for whom war is more profitable than peace and the civilians don’t matter one bit; and you’re the worst of the lot, not a hero out to save the world. You’re a mercenary, in the dirtiest, crudest, most despicable sense of the word, and you better get used to it.

Whether you can play a game where the protagonist is so loathesome, in a human, muddy, ugly kind of way – rather than entertainingly evil a la BioWare’s moral compasses or Tommy Vercetti’s undeniable style – is up to you, but it’s a brave decision from Ubisoft Montreal. They give you a staggeringly beautiful country, full of wheeling birds and dusty roads through buffalo-studded savannah, or mud villages on a hillside, and then they say: it’s you, and it’s people like you, that have doomed this place to constant and arbitrary conflict.  Driving around the deserts or jungles, from the very first taxi ride to the endgame, it’s impossible to ignore the violence and brokenness; it bubbles away just out of sight in the ceasefire zones, and explodes in your face outside them, into thrilling, grim, dirty, unpredictable combat. Too much combat? Arguably; an open world starts to feel a lot more closed and a lot less atmospheric when practically every NPC acts like Generic Space Alien X from any other shooter, attacking you on sight and chasing after you with ridiculous determination. For a game where you have to cauterise your own wounds, it’s weirdly gamey at times. But Far Cry 2 is a game, and it’s a first person shooter, and despite the apparent expectations of certain sections of the internet, it was never going to be anything else. It pushes and prods at the FPS, yes, and drags the apparently very stubborn genre forward a few more yards, but at its heart it is just an FPS, albeit an incredibly beautiful, incredibly volatile, and incredibly good one.

As someone whose sole experience of Doom was four minutes about three months ago, I am always on the look out for that most magical of things: the best shotgun in gaming. The one in the original Half-Life has long been the holder of this accolade, although recently it has been challenged by the steam-powered, whirring-gears contraption in Bioshock (it shoots lightning!) and Stalker’s hilariously deadly sawn-off. In Left 4 Dead, Valve have reasserted their dominance: the starting pump action shotgun is easily the best shotgun I’ve ever used in any game, ever. Technically, the auto shotgun is a more efficient zombie-killer, but it doesn’t go BOOM kchkchk BOOM, nor does your flashlight swing wildly upwards with every shot, so in terms of sheer physicality the lower-level weapon wins. And Left 4 Dead is all about physicality (actually, it’s about many things, but physicality is important, so let’s run with it). Earlier today I played through the whole of the No Mercy campaign using only dual pistols, in a misguided and ulimately unsuccessful attempt to earn an achievement*, and there’s nothing quite as awesome as whacking a zombie in the face with the butt of a pistol and then emptying a clip into their chest. They don’t just die. They stagger back, interrupted mid-sprint, twitch and spasm with every impact, and finally fall backwards. They – their bodies, at least – react exactly how they’re supposed to react. And I defy anyone not to giggle with glee the first time they headshot a leaping hunter and watch its harmless body fly past them into a wall.

Giggling with glee is a relatively common occurence in Left 4 Dead, considering it’s a game about the hopeless struggle of the last few survivors of a planet-wide outbreak of zombie rabies; I’d say its the third most common response on voice chat, after Swearing Repeatedly and Genuine Heroism. Except in Versus mode, of course, which is pretty much just one long nefarious cackle from beginning to end, at least from the Infected’s point of view. For the Survivors, it’s more about knowing that you face not only the creeping malevolence of the AI Director but also the far more overt malevolence of other human beings, and what is a pretty bloody desperate situation in the co-op campaign suddenly becomes more desperate still. The dread is mitigated, though, by the fact that you switch sides at the end of each map; Valve should take an idea from Introversion and call playing as the Infected ‘Retribution Mode’, or possibly ‘Let’s Screw Some People Over Mode’. Had a horrible time as the Survivors? Covered in Boomer vomit and Smoker saliva? Well then, you’ll be glad to know that now you’re a Hunter and it’s time to fuck them up. All of the Infected classes are like the Spy in TF2: it’s all about knowing that, somewhere in the world, someone is slapping their keyboard in frustration because of you. And that’s why you cackle.

So, just like when you spark up a spy that’s inches from backstabbing a fully-charged Medic, actually winning a map as the Survivors in Versus mode is one of the most awesome experiences in gaming. Not quite as awesome as it is to completely screw up someone’s day as the Infected, perhaps, but it’s still high on the hypothetical list. It’s the feeling of knowing that, goddamnit, not only was the horribly evil Director trying to murder us, but four random strangers were as well, and we only went and won.

However, Left 4 Dead also manages to make losing – almost winning – fun in a way few games do. You remember that bit in Nova Prospekt in Half-Life 2, where you set up the three turrets and have to hold off waves of Combine soldiers while Alyx buggers about, doing nothing much other than telling you that more are coming? You remember how utterly infuriating it was every time you died? Maybe that was just me. But Left 4 Dead puts you in that situation all the bloody time – every campaign ends with a gigantic finale where you must hold off an infinitely respawning horde of zombies, as well as dozens of boss zombies, while waiting for rescue to arrive. The No Mercy campaign finishes with a finale on the roof of a hospital, where you must survive long enough for a helicopter to come and pick you up; and the first time I played it, I was knocked off the roof by a Tank shortly before the helicopter turned up.  It wasn’t annoying or frustrating at all – it was hilarious, and even more so when the rest of my team made it to the helicopter and a message appeared on screen: ‘In Memory of MaybeNextTime’. And then the credits roll.

Whoever at Valve it was that decided to wrap the whole campaign up in this action movie veneer is an absolute genius (I am getting a bit tired of thinking of everyone at Valve as a genius, but it can’t be helped when they make games like this, can it?). Going through an entire campaign with three other people is a pretty serious undertaking – it’ll usually take between forty-five minutes and an hour on Normal difficulty, and you’ll go through a lot – and to be dumped back into the lobby straight after being rescued would be horribly anti-climactic. Instead, you get this rundown of all the things you’ve done in the last hour – Hunters Killed, Damage Taken, Molotovs Thrown – in the style of the credits at the end of a film. It’s always satisfying – a campaign on Left 4 Dead is something memorable and significant, full of moments to recount at great length on a barely-viewed games blog, and to have a game actually recognise and record how many crazy-rabies victims you shot in the face is a brilliant touch; it’s like the game is saying to you “Yeah, that was awesome, wasn’t it?”. More games should do that.

The only complaint I can think of is that, it being a co-op game, Left 4 Dead becomes a lot less fun when you get lumbered with a tosser on your side. It does a good job of encouraging everyone to stay together – all of the boss zombies, even the Tank, can be easily defeated if everyone’s together, but they’re the player’s worst nightmare one on one – so if someone is forging on ahead they’ll probably end up dead soon enough, but it still can’t auto-detect when someone’s being a whiney stereotypical online egotist and get them to shut up. We can dream, I guess. Still, it’s not that big a deal – Left 4 Dead is about survival and shotguns and four friends against the horde, and at its best it’s just incredible: flames, explosions, constant gunfire, someone screaming for help over voice chat, zombies everywhere, the Director chuckling as he throws a Tank into the mix. It would be astounding if it was single player. Throw in three other people, and, even if one of them’s a bit of an idiot, it’s the best online experience to be had right now.

*Don’t worry, I wasn’t that guy, the one that ruins the game for everyone by trying to earn an achievement. “But I want to headshot the Witch!”, etc. I was playing with the bots. Also, I rule with dual pistols.

Fallout 3 has the best tutorial/character creation bit that I’ve ever seen in a game – which I’m sure everyone will agree is high praise indeed. It’s spread out over sixteen years of your life, which is just genius: you make yourself, properly, making choices from the age of one, rather than being lumbered with somebody that’s already lived half their life, doing a quick plastic surgery job and randomly upgrading the astonishingly few skills that they’ve managed to accrue over the years. Playing through a handful of major events in your character’s early life lets you start defining your personality straight away, and even makes the tutorial bit less annoying – you get told all about the delights of WASD while learning to walk, which is a hell of a lot more reasonable than being taught how to move around when you avatar is a full grown adult.

So, a fantastic start, at least on the first run through: what else is there to say about Fallout 3? There is a problem, which is this: the bad things in Fallout 3 are extremely easy to spot and describe, whereas the good things are apparently so big that you just don’t notice them until one of the bad things comes along and disappoints you. When you’re alone, wandering the wastes with a small department store’s worth of equipment in your pockets and a hand-crafted-from-junk weapon in your hands, listening to tracks from the 40s – this is when Fallout 3 is at its best; amazingly, and brilliantly, Bethesda have managed to make an environment that is supposed to be grey and uniform really quite beautiful and fascinating. Wandering around the Wasteland isn’t exactly pleasant – this is a far more hostile world than that of Oblivion – but it is always rewarding, even if the reward is only pretty screesnhots. If anything, it manages to make you feel more free than Oblivion ever did, because the world is more chaotic, more unstructured and far, far more bizarre: beating to death a Fifties ‘This Is What The Future Will Be Like’ robot with a baseball bat while listening to Bob Crosby is an experience I won’t soon forget, and that was within my first few hours.

My character in Fallout 3 is quite unlike any of the characters I’ve ever made in an RPG; an unambiguously good, endearingly stupid combat expert with an unhealthy fascination for gun components and sledgehammers, that once developed an addiction to mental stimulants while trying to open an Easy lock. She bumbles through the world, unparallelled in the field of assault rifles, frag grenades and, er, swords that are on fire, but endlessly outclassed when it comes to tricky things like ‘Speech’ or ‘Science’. She always attempts to convince people to be lovely and peaceful, and is almost always far too stupid to convince them; and suddenly the naive, slow girl with the trilby and the slightly bluish hair reveals just how slow and naive she is when it comes to shooting people in the face with a shotgun. Her path through the Wasteland is littered with good intentions and severed limbs.

In other words, she’s my favourite RPG character since her namesake in Mass Effect, although she’s completely different from that alien-seducing, journalist-punching cynic. In Mass Effect, it was my choices, combined with, er, good animation, excellent voice acting and well-written dialogue that made the character. Fallout 3’s voice acting and dialogue … is better than Oblvion’s, in my opinion, but it’s all relative. What makes my Fallout 3 character is very, very simple: statistics. Melee Weapons 100, Small Weapons 100, Speech 17, Science 15: she’s defined by what she can do. She’s the kind of character that will fight her way through hordes of irradiated monsters only to find a computer terminal with Easy encryption blocking her way, but she’ll usually find a horrifically violent way around it. Well, not horrifically, exactly, more necessarily – as I’ve said, she’s a lovely person, just unable to convince anyone else of that fact. The Perks that you choose from each time you level up, or just get given as a result of something you’ve done in the world, also help add to this uniqueness: my character drank huge amounts of water from a pool surrounding a 200 year old atomic bomb, then, perhaps unsurprisingly, developed a genetic mutation. That was the point when she became a proper character, not merely an avatar: statistics, a handful of Perks, and – alright – some of the dialogue options had somehow managed to craft a genuine personality in my blue-haired lady of the Wastes.

The bad things, that I mentioned several hundred words ago? There’s the dialogue and voice acting, which I find passable at best, although the dialogue gains some plus points for allowing you to respond to a request for help from a seven foot tall power armoured commando with “Fuck off, boy scout”, and the in-game radio is quite entertaining, if only because I was repeatedly referred to as the Messiah. Worse is the animation; I abandoned my usual RPG habit of playing in third person so as to avoid watching my character floating down stairs or running in that really stupid way, but sadly that doesn’t stop the NPCs from doing it too. Finally, something feels a bit … off about the combat outside of the brilliant and gruesome VATS mode; I don’t know if it’s weirdly unresponsive controls or a deliberate attempt to make you use VATS as much as possible, but I found it annoyingly difficult to hit things in real-time. It’s strange to find my by now well-honed FPS skills a bit lacking, but it’s not really a massive issue: the action points that you use up in VATS restore reasonably quickly, so you can soon be merrily picking and choosing which specific body part you want blown off and letting the computer do all the tricky bits. And, maybe it’s just me, and I’m an idiot.

But the good things about Fallout 3 are just huge: the entire setting is just astonishing, and absolutely everything in the game world – the clothes, the choices, the 200-year-old washing powder – ties into and builds on its vision of a post-apocalyptic ’50s America. I found myself desperate to see as much as possible, because so much of what I discovered was joyously bizarre or atmospheric, but also desperate to finish the game and start again as an evil character, because, man, some of those evil dialogue choices were tempting. As has probably become obvious by now, I haven’t played either of the first two games – I tried once, but the isometric view and turn based combat, coupled with my complete lack of any kind of manual, was too much for my modern gamer sensibilities (actually, I’ve just noticed that GOG.com has a version with a manual, so maybe I’ll give them another go some time).  I have no idea if it lives up to the legacy of the Fallout name, although I do try to disagree with Angry Internet Men at every possible opportunity. What I do know is this: Fallout 3 is a bloody brilliant Role-Playing Game.