It's good to be back!

Last week I had one of those urges that only a pregnant man can have, to step back into the shoes of Tommy Vercetti and relive the delights of Vice City. This 2003 Rockstar outing was easily one of the best games I ever played, everything about it simply oozed style and polish. It’s almost as if the developers took a standard checklist of things that get rated in a game, made sure every area got given the works, and then spent the rest of their time filling in the gaps. Because it’s exactly that which nails it for this game, the attention to detail that makes playing Vice City like stepping into the ’80s: the clothes, the music, the cars, the giant mobile phones, heck, even the intro scene features the game being loaded on a Commodore 64. Rockstar’s particular sense of humour is also here to see by the bucketload, from the tongue-in-cheek nature of some of the missions, through the fantastic dialogue and hilarious radio stations, to the small jabs and puns that little the streets of Vice City.

All of which is without even touching on the gameplay. Sitting firmly in the sandbox genre, Vice City gives you a wonderful feeling of being able to go about things your own way. Goofing around, stealing cars, running from the police, there’s plenty to do in the game when you aren’t really doing anything! But fortunately that doesn’t mean that Rockstar skimped out on the main storyline, which is by all means fantastic, and features all sorts of mission types, from starting riots, racing through the streets, to knocking off banks and delivering numerous methods of ‘persuasion’ to various denizens of the city. Aside from the main plot, there are plenty of other side missions and extras to discover, which add ample distraction to the standard mayhem generally meted out whilst driving between missions.

Censorship

Unfortunately, on account of where I currently live, the copy I got hold of was one of the draconian censored versions designed for people with severe mental disabilities and no wish to stand up for themselves. Frankly, the censorship wasn’t immediately conspicuous: it’s been long enough since I last loaded the game up, that I didn’t notice the lack of blood under the tires, or the inability to kick people when they’re down. Even in a mission involving a chainsaw and a nice Hawaiian shirt, it didn’t immediately occur that there were no droplets of blood on the screen.

Eventually, however, I found my way to a location where I knew there to be a hidden rampage, one of Vice City’s mad little sub-missions involving a mad psychotic killing spree against the clock, only it wasn’t there. After a quick search on the web, I realised that this was in fact on account of the censorship, and not any corruption in the game or an error on my part. Fortunately, whilst searching for the reason I also found the solution: the BlutPatch replaces the game’s main executable and restores all of those missing features hacked out to try to put some kind of moral fibre into this hellraiser of a game.

And honestly, what is the point of it? On installing the ‘patch’ I realised just how many little details had been taken out of the game. Like the ability to rob the people you’ve killed was entirely removed, so what exactly is the message we’re supposed to get? Ripping someone from the front seat of their cars and being them to death with a hammer is fine, but taking $20 from their wallets afterwards is beyond the pale? Or the issue of sex. The game revolves around the criminal underworld, it kicks off with a drug deal, ends in a massacre, and has everything in between, yet it was the ability to hire a prostitute and sit in a squeeking car whilst your health goes up that was deemed unfit for polite society. Unfortunately I didn’t play the game long enough without the BlutPatch to tell if the censored version also touches on those other likely offensive areas in the game, namely the strip club and the porn studios.

Vista Issues

Sadly, the game hasn’t entirely lived up to the test of time. Whilst the gameplay, humour and polish of the game are still as fresh as they were on its release, getting the game to run with any degree of reliability is a bit of a trial. I was running it under Vista, which wasn’t necessarily the greatest problem, but no doubt the BlutPatch did nothing to help matters. Fortunately after a bit of tinkering I got the game to run fairly smoothly, albeit with a couple of annoying issues:

• Mouse sensitivity was unfortunately rather crazy, and affected the vertical rather more than the horizontal. This mouse has a few buttons for tweaking the DPI, but there are also some tools below which may help.
• Occasionally the mouse would refuse to function at all, generally fixed by pressing escape, or restarting the game. This would not happen mid-game, only when moving from the main menu screen and back again.
• The game would occasionally crash outright after some kind of collision involving a police/military vehicle. Not entirely sure what this was caused by, nor if it was restricted to police vehicles, and it was fairly infrequent, though highly annoying when reminded of it on Vigilante level 15.

For most of these and many other problems, there is an excellent guide over on the GTAForums. Some of the solutions call for the use of some tricks produced by the ToCA Edit team, sadly rather hidden away on their website and so reproduced below.

There are also a couple of patches originally produced here (original website now defunkt) for fixing two specific bugs, namely the never-ending slow motion camera on doing Unique Jumps, and the unreachable Cuban outfit on doing missions in a certain order. Using the patches is a simple matter:

All game fixes are meant to be coding fixes for common game issues. As their role is intended to be fixes, they are in fact plug and play. That means you drop them into your data folder (AFTER backing up your original main.scm), rename it to main.scm, and you load your save without having to start a new game.

Steam

I’ve been using Steam for a fair while now, in fact pretty much since the beginning, and have seen the program grow on from its fairly humble origins. There are now hundreds of titles available, including games from big-name publishers and independent game houses alike, and the usual crashes and quirks that afflicted the early releases are pretty much gone. Nevertheless, there are still a number of key areas in which Steam continues to live up to standards, at times making using the system a bit of a nightmare. This is a list of some of those issues which in my eyes prevent Steam from becoming a really top class product, delivering everything the platform really promises. Some of these issues admittedly have their origins outside of Valve’s headquarters, but the way in which they are dealt with only compounds the problems further, for both customers and clients.

Steam Friends

It’s an instant messenger on a budget. Think of your favourite system, but without any of the frills. There are no file transfers, no webcams, none of the various add on junk you find with most of the big name instant messaging clients. And let’s face it, Steam Friends is all the better for it. It’s a simple service that does what it needs to. At least most of the time. Which is exactly where this little service fails to live up. Steam Friends suffers so much downtime, it makes you wonder what the system is actually running on; it crashes about as often as Windows 95.

For the most part, that downtime isn’t much of a problem, since few people use it for anything important, and even if the service is up and down like a yo-yo, the periods of downtime generally aren’t particularly long. But the outages are sufficiently frequent to leave you wishing that Steam really did have some of those standard added extras common to other instant messaging services. The lack of being able to send offline messages means you end up having to hold staccato conversations trying to keep in time to the downtime conductor’s baton. And with no chat logs there’s no recourse to checking what was last said if you happen to close the window. Which can be doubly troublesome if you happen to have the Steam overlay open at the same time, since the messages people send might appear on the window on your desktop, but not on the game overlay, meaning you’ll still have to ALT+TAB out of the game you’re in to read the messages, one of the supposedly key advantages of using Steam Friends in the first place!

Why hasn’t this API been opened up to third party clients? Why can users navigate the Steam Communities pages, leaving messages and reading profiles, but have to run Steam as soon as they want to send a live message? The downtime, exclusivity, and lack of ‘regular’ frills leave Steam Friends to be a last resort mechanism, when it has the potential to be a very promising communication tool.

Steam Group Chat

Similar to the Friends service above, Steam’s Group Chat provides every group on the Steam Communities page with their own little chat room. Very generous, very appealing, but does anyone actually use it? I’m sure there are some groups out there in the dark corners of the gaming world who actually pop into those chat rooms and spout some drivel, but for the rest of us, I really can’t see the point. Most other groups have already come up with their own solution to such problems, using IRC or other such technologies, and those who haven’t will have difficulty finding the Group Chat options anyway. If group administrators had the ability to tie in their chat rooms to other pieces of software, particularly IRC for example, these rooms actually might find some use, but as it is they stand pretty exclusively neglected among Steam’s various other appendages.

Steam Prices

One of the key supposed advantages of buying games via an online content distribution service such as Steam is that the savings made by the ‘publisher’ are passed on to the customer. And not to do Steam any discredit, the customer has certainly had the opportunity to benefit from some great prices and bargains, in many cases undercutting in-store prices considerably. But that isn’t always the case. Particularly since the introduction of prices in Euros and Pounds in December, 2008, customers have been able to see the discrepancies between the various zones. Especially in the Eurozone this could leave games for sale that were actually more expensive than their box-and-disc in-store equivalents, and significantly more expensive than the prices listed in pounds or US dollars.

Whilst Valve cannot be held to blame for the price differences of many of the titles chosen by other publishers and distributors, the discrepancies can often also be seen with Valve’s own titles, most especially when games are put on limited-term offers. Of course, some users can work around the restrictions, by having others buy them games as a gift (see below) or else logging in themselves in another country, and making their purchases in the relevant currency.

Steam Payment

Of course, giving your money to Valve for Steam purchases should be one of the easiest things in the world, but unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. Probably related to the differences in pricing mentioned above, Steam has some pretty pernickety requirements when making purchases above the payment method used and the location you’re buying from. I’ve had my Steam account locked from purchases on two or three separate occasions, without notification, for using a payment option on another account (these were the days before Steam Gifts). Clearly that’s one step away from money laundering. And only recently, my payment was refused because the address of my payment option wasn’t in the country I was buying from. This despite there being a clear option to check a box whether or not I was currently in the stated country; quite what this option is for if it is irrelevant to them, I can’t say. Is there something particularly insolent about making purchases from another country that I wasn’t aware of?

Steam Geography

As a system capable of delivering content to pretty much anywhere with an Internet connection, it’s perfectly reasonable that Steam acknowledges local laws and adjusts its own system to abide by them. This applies to a large extent to the pricing issues mentioned above, where various distributors only have the right to publish games within certain geographic locales. In which case, it’s up to the people of those nations to find workarounds, or to complain to their governments if they feel they are being unfairly treated. But it does lead to some rather irritating and odd situations when using Steam’s services. Take one of Valve’s own recently released titles like Left 4 Dead 2. The game generated a little controversy with its content, and ended up requiring Valve to publish milder versions for customers in Australia and Germany, according to the laws in those countries. Naturally the government of Germany feels that its citizens are a little more puerile and paramnesic in character than the rest of the world, and didn’t want to risk having a few people see a bit of gore. They might have been incited to invade Poland again, who knows. Anyway, buying a copy of the game in one of those countries will result in the customer having a permanently crippled version of the game,¹ which as far as I’m aware, cannot be fixed easily. On the other hand, loading up an account with a copy of the game purchased in another country will present the full flavour version that was supposed to be banned.

Steam Gifts

As mentioned earlier, I had my Steam account blocked from purchases in earlier days because I had the audacity to use my payment methods to log in to other people’s accounts and buy them games. Fortunately, with the introduction of Steam Gifts, this no longer became necessary. When buying a game, just tick the box that makes this available as a gift, and the copy will go to the person of your choosing; similarly, should you buy a game that you already own in a bundle, you can simply give the extra copy away.

The idea is all well and good, except for the limitations listed above about payment options, added to the problems of products only being available in certain versions in certain countries. But this is compounded by the fact that buying a gift means delivering that gift on the same instant; if you actually do want to buy someone a present for a specific occasion and want to keep it as a surprise, you’ll either have to concoct your own time-delay private email address, buy the game on the special day, or just apologise your gift is coming early!

Steam Accounts

Buy a game, a book, a car, a house, or a tube of toilet paper, and you generally find you have the right to sell it on to someone else. Alright, second-hand toilet paper is still a growth market, but you get the picture. With Steam, buy something and Valve reserve all rights for you to resell your items, including the account you bought the games on, refusing you even the right to “sell, charge others for the right to use or otherwise transfer [an] account.” Some might consider this to be a reasonable condition, for the lower prices and level of service Steam offers, but for those of us used to selling off old copies of games, the physical versions of that software does maintain some of its appeal. Perhaps more disconcerting is the fact that tying the serial keys of games bought in the shops to a Steam account can render them similarly unsaleable.

Steam Files

Just how does Steam organise the files it puts on your system? Is there actually meant to be some method to the madness? Whilst I can see that for the most part, Valve have little say over how its clients utilise the Steam system, Valve’s own titles are about as confusing as the lot of them. Most of Valve’s titles appear in the Steam\steamapps directory as compressed .gcf files, whilst third-party titles appear under the Steam\steamapps\common directory. Valve’s Left 4 Dead title, however, does the latter. Some of the titles store their user files in sensible places under in the user directory, others store them in their own folders in the common directory, whilst most of Valve’s titles go one step further, creating extra files per Steam account under the steamapps directory. That’s difficult enough when trying to backup your savegames, locate your screenshots, or edit a config file. But the latter variety causes even more problems if you have even just a few Steam accounts being used on a single PC; since each account creates its own personalised files, items such as cached models, sounds, third-party maps and extensions are all replicated, swelling the size of the installations entirely unnecessarily. I sometimes wonder how LAN centres which have several users signing in per day deal with the associated cruft (ignoring for the moment Valve’s Cyber Café Program).

Steam Backup

One of the obvious (dis)advantages of Steam, depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting, is the ability to download your games from wherever you are logged in. If your Internet connection is fast enough, you can get your games downloaded ready for play the moment they are ‘released’; faster than it can be delivered in most cases, certainly faster than having to get your copy from the shops. But for those of us with slow connections, downloading items from Steam can be a slow and painful experience, and one that you don’t like to have repeated every time you decide to switch hardware. Which is why the implementation of a backup system to Steam was pretty much a no-brainer. Select Backup games from the main Steam menu and you can have your downloads all neatly arranged in CD or DVD sized chunks, ready to be reinstalled at the touch of a button.

Not a bad idea, except it functions about as well as combing your hair with barbed wire. The backup process is fairly slow, slower than simply copying the files manually, but that’s reasonably forgiveable since it does at least chop up the files in reasonable sized chunks. The real problems come when trying to reinstall games using the backed up files. Installing more than one game at a time left my Steam program actually trying to download the games from the Internet, exactly what the backups were supposed to avoid, and actually left the program so unresponsive I had to kill it. Trying to install the programs one at a time often threw up the error that the servers were too busy to handle my request; when I looked again, the games were being updated from the Internet. Not too busy to suck up my bandwidth I see! Third time lucky and the game actually did start installing from the backups, albeit as slowly as it was backed up in the first place, and for each game I had to go through the same rigmarole, which would have been even more painful had I actually had the backups spread across half a dozen DVDs.

Valve

However, the number one thing holding Steam back is Valve. You can normally draw a line in the sand separating companies into those with decent moral standards, and Microsoft, and Valve would almost certainly fit into the former category. They listen to their customer base, they generally keep their products up-to-date, fixing bugs and releasing new content for free, and they opened up the Steam platform to what are essentially their competitors. Each title released is like a mini-celebration in the industry, and is generally met with decent reviews and rewardingly good sales figures.

Yet the power they wield with Steam is not to be underestimated. Since no sales figures are actually published, one can only speculate, though it is bound to be a considerable proportion of the online distribution market. This monopoly type situation is particularly problematic when you consider Steam to be a marketplace run by one of the main competitors. Even if there is no deliberate attempt on Valve’s part to give themselves pride of place, with such power comes great responsibility that should not rest in uneven hands. I’ve seen days in which one of Valve’s titles will take pride of place in their store front, ahead of game of the year winners and new releases. And I forget now where I read it, but the number of people Valve actually has working on Steam is incredibly small, something like half a dozen staff. If it were properly managed, all of the above issues with the platform could no doubt in some way be addressed, for the benefit of customers and clients alike.

Summary

Fair play to Valve, they had the idea and they ran with it, dealing with the early teething problems and creating a popular and successful piece of software, and they deserve the financial reward for it. Ideally, however, Steam should now be hived off from Valve as a separate, independent company, to focus on the equal online distribution of titles from all software houses. It’s surprising in fact that many of the larger publishing houses haven’t already pushed for such a move, or made overtures to the courts. Who knows, with that bit of extra development, they could even get round to porting the Steam platform over to other operating systems and opening up the market further. As things stand, however, that little development push on Valve’s part is lacking, and this potentially well functioning, open marketplace is slightly stifled by the monopolistic nature of Valve’s position. Steam is not a bad product. Far from it, the complaints in this list are mostly areas lacking polish, oversights that a little more focused development would soon fix, or issues that arise from Steam’s interaction with national laws and distributors rights. But the basis is certainly there, for a free, open marketplace that gaming enthusiasts and developers alike can benefit from.

1. As an aside, I’ve tried the crippled version of the game’s demo, and have to say the changes are pretty drastic. Instead of reacting bloodily when challenged, dead enemies instead disappear unrealistically into the ether, an effect which is rather surprising and at times quite confusing. Do German soldiers in Afghanistan get a shock when Taleban soldiers actually start bleeding when shot?

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Play for free

How do you turn a free product into a profitable enterprise? That’s normally the challenging issue to be faced in today’s increasingly competitive online market. Internet giant Google continues to have issues attempting to monetise its expensively acquired YouTube daughter. Yet game developer Turbine is looking to do exactly the opposite, converting their current business model into a subscription-supported free product. But does ‘free’ pay?

It certainly appears that Turbine’s decision to offer their MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online for free has paid off. Hundreds of thousands of new players have signed up to take advantage of the new offer, and despite the ‘free’ price tag, subscriptions are up 40%. In addition, many players are taking advantage of an in-game payment mechanism to buy additional items and open up new sections of the game. Previously the game had required players to pay a one off purchase price, followed by a monthly subscription fee. Now just about anyone can download the game and be playing within half an hour, paying or otherwise. Turbine also maintain that some players are paying even more per month than the previous subscription fee alone, removing an important cap on how much individual players could pay into the game. Rather than seeing players who play without paying as freeloaders, Turbine are confident that such players bring their own benefit to the company, generating interest, advertising via word-of-mouth, and thereby generating new subscriptions and one-off payments.

Just how successful this move will prove to be in the long-run is difficult to estimate. It’s clear that the business model has worked to some extent, generating plenty of fresh interest in a game that is already over three years old. But will the benefits dry up once the hype is over? What is clear is that this move represents yet another step away from traditional methods of sale, and is another example of a trend away from that classic method of promoting games—the demo.

Indeed, it would appear that there is plenty of evidence that offering games for free, if only for short periods, acts as one of the best methods of advertisement. Figures produced earlier this year by Valve boss Gabe Newell suggest that offering their action zombie-fest Left 4 Dead at a discount price over a free test weekend boosted sales figures to such an extent that they beat launch figures. The same source reveals that the release of new content for their other key title Team Fortress 2 also boosted Valve’s sales significantly.

Of course, in the case of games sold via Steam the main impulse for the impressive sales figures lies in the buyer’s perception of the short-term heavy discounts being offered. But the principle of no cost gaming models isn’t limited to only short-term probation periods, nor is Turbine unique in pursuing their policy of a combined free and subscription service. Gaming giant EA recently entered the market with Battlefield Heroes, a comical extension to their successful Battlefield series, this time free to play via browser, and supported by player micro-payments for upgrades and vanity items. Certainly an experimental move on EA’s part, recent figures do suggest that there has been some success, with players who make use of the game’s extra features paying an average of $20, and the total number of players recently tipping the 2 million mark.

And it’s not just the big players who are experimenting with new sales tactics. 2D Boy are taking a leaf out of Radiohead’s books, and offering their award-winning World of Goo title for a limited time at whatever price the buyer wishes. Whilst I can’t see such a risk being taken by any of the larger games producers any time soon, regardless of how successful 2D Boy’s trial proves, it does represent yet another departure from the traditional sales models.

As ever, however, failure remains an important component of every experiment. Whilst systems of in-game micro-payments are providing some evidence of success for EA and Turbine, it appears other alternatives to direct subscription gaming aren’t bringing home the bacon. id Software’s Quake Live was to be a free browser-based game funded via in-game advertising, however earlier this year John Carmack revealed that a premium subscription service would be have to be offered in addition, an honest admission that their advertising model alone won’t foot the bill.

Nevertheless, it is clear that games companies are becoming increasingly willing to try new tactics when it comes to funding their productions. Direct payment and subscription methods are being gradually supplemented in part with micro-payments, and attempts are being made to integrate in-game advertising, although to date it seems with little relatively success. Valve’s Steam content delivery system is proving to be an able testing ground for offering short-term probation periods for gamers, and the different levels of discounts and their positive effect on games sales will provide plenty of food for thought for games publishers and psychologists alike. Whilst we are still some way from seeing such methods commonly applied to mainstream games, it will be interesting too see whether these current examples remain profitable, and if they will inspire others to do the same. It seems even a free product can turn a profit.

Left 4 Dead (PC)

For whatever reason, Valve deemed last weekend to be worthy of celebration, and in addition to offering a welcome discount, offered a free trial for their action-packed zombie fest Left 4 Dead. Never one to pass up on such offers, and having a few friends who’d already bought the game, I spent a fair few hours last weekend testing the game out, enough so to have convinced me to actually buy the thing!

Whilst Left 4 Dead sits firmly in the survival horror genre, it is without a doubt a shooter through and through. Whilst the genre may have its early origins with games like Alone in the Dark, Left 4 Dead is to that what 28 Days Later is to Night of the Living Dead. It’s a high-energy bloodbath, which is well and truly the game’s essence. Forget setting, plot or character development, the game boils down to an assault course for four, through levels strewn with zombies to some method of escape, with occasional safe points along the way.

That might not sound particularly novel, but the game’s central tenet is its co-operative side. Whilst there are plenty of games past that have featured zombies in one way or another, none have quite provided the experiences associated with the stereotypical zombie genre. Left 4 Dead clearly owes a lot to the zombie movie, from the opening intro to the closing credit sequences, and the gaming world has been truly aching for such a game. Mods such as Zombie Panic! or Zombie Master filled a gap, but Left 4 Dead has made full use of the Source engine to create a movie experience built for four.

Teamwork

Over the trial weekend I was lucky enough to have had 3 experienced veterans to guide me through the game’s four campaigns. Each features the characters making their way through a typical dystopian setting, liberally sprinkled with the living dead, towards some form of rescue. Generally the levels are punctuated by minor set pieces, and an occasional pause whilst something important happens, during which time the characters have to hold their ground as a horde of zombies is thrown at them. Whilst that might sound simple enough, and nothing that a player couldn’t manage on his own, without those extra three guns a player would quickly find it difficult if not impossible to withstand the tide of brain eaters.

In terms of the teamwork element, Left 4 Dead is quite probably one of the best co-operative gaming experiences to date. Although there are plenty of other games with co-op modes built in, these tend to add nothing to the single player mode save having to find extra weapons and health packs for your companion(s), and you might as well be running around on your own for all the use that the extra players bring. In Left 4 Dead, however, running off on your own will likely soon find you lying under a rugby scrum of zombies all trying to take a memento of your flesh. Players can easily become ‘incapacitated’ by being trodden down under the weight of too many fiends, or else attacked by one of the few special zombies each equipped with certain abilities. Without another player handy to rescue them, it would soon be lights out.

Instinct

Stocking up whilst there's chance

If the game owes so much to its shooter heritage and zombie film inspiration, then we can thank Valve that it plays like it should. That is to say, if you’ve played other FPS games and seen a zombie film or two, you should know what to expect. The game is peppered with time- and thought-saving features that generally go unnoticed, but which all serve to make the game run so seamlessly. Take the weapons, for example. Each player immediately comes equipped with a pistol with unlimited ammunition, which for anyone who’s experienced being reduced to playing an FPS with nothing more effective than the tattoos on your knuckles and harsh language as a means of defending yourself, immediately appeals as a good idea. The player chooses their main weapon from a small selection of the usual suspects arrayed out at each safety point in the campaign (i.e. the beginning of each stage), and ammunition is available in occasional piles scattered throughout the levels, regardless of weapon. Aside from those two guns, players can take one medikit, one grenade and one packet of pills (a temporary health booster), all of which prevents players from stockpiling weapons from their teammates, or having to constantly swap around guns for lack of ammunition.

The clever level design is another efficient time-saver. Rather than have players walking around as headless as the zombies they’re trying to avoid, the levels are laid out fairly simply and intuitively, each section leading to the next. When there is an occasional set piece, the task is highlighted so that the players know exactly which lever to press, which lift to climb into, or which radio to use. This highlighting feature is also used to show players where their teammates are, by displaying bright blue outlines of the players when they would normally be out of sight behind objects, a really excellent idea that serves to prevent players from getting completely lost and separated from the group, and really comes into its own when a player finds himself incapacitated or smothered by a wall of undead flesh. Without that ghostly blue outline to help find him, a player might as well put his calls for help on hold and enjoy the cheesy lift music.

Mr. Hyde

The regular campaign mode, although perhaps the highlight of the game, is only a part of its repertoire. When you’re fed up of running through the campaigns as a survivor (of which more later), the option is there to put the boot on the other foot and play as one of the opposing ‘special’ zombies against a team of survivors. Each of the four zombie types has its own special ability to cause general mayhem and suffering, ranging from the Hunter, a nimble, springy beast that might remind players of the alien mode in Aliens vs. Predator, through to the rarer but more dangerous Tank, a lumbering beast that takes some serious firepower to stop, somewhat resembling the untoward appearances of Mr. Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The way the zombie players spawn in is another nice feature of the game, having them able to see the ghostly outlines of the other zombie players before they choose their spawning location, as well as being able to follow the survivors around, seeing their outlines through walls, thereby being far more able to set up ambushes and the like.

Although an interesting idea, from what I’ve seen the mode really doesn’t have all that much to endear itself. The zombies, although now perhaps a little more coordinated being human controlled, are still just as easy to spot and kill as when controlled by the AI, with the zombies making the same giveaway noises they normally would: the projectile vomiting Boomer zombie eliciting sounds dreadfully similar to those heard in most British city centres on a Friday night. Added to that are the sadly long spawn times between lives, and the players on the zombie team inevitably end up feeling rather more like spectators than participants. Fortunately the teams are usually swapped at the end of every segment and the two quartets compete as to who can complete the levels with more of their brains unchewed, but it still doesn’t add very much to the original co-op mode, and feels rather much a cute novelty than a real gaming mode.

In fact, Left 4 Dead at times appeals to the rather more cynical side in me, which suggests that the name for the game really came about when the developers stopped working on the project and moved on to other things. The original four campaigns in their co-op mode are thoroughly enthralling, and the versus mode at least offers some variation on the theme, but playing through the same four segments repeatedly soon gets very tired. Naturally there are different difficulty settings—but which FPS doesn’t have one of those—and the so-called “AI director” does at least ensure that the segments aren’t entirely predictable, by changing the locations of health, ammo and special zombies and calling in zombie hordes occasionally. But honestly, whether a horde of zombies appears a third of the way through the level rather than at the half-way stage isn’t exactly the most radical alteration worthy of a repeat performance.

Conclusion

A molotov cocktail in the right place can decimate a zombie horde

With the help of a team of experienced zombie fest veterans, I managed to play through the four campaigns in the one evening of the free trial, arguably exhausting a good chunk of the game’s playability. And despite that fact, still went out of the way to buy the game. In fact, as ever with Valve, actually parting with my money was a more difficult feat than pre-loading the game and taking advantage of the free trial. Apparently, purchasing from them using a payment method that isn’t tied to the country you’re in is considered somehow suspicious by Valve, a completely retarded policy if ever I heard one, which I swiftly outmanoeuvred through a bit of remote administering of a computer in another country. This wasn’t even the first time I had difficulties paying via Steam, having had accounts locked in the past for using payment methods in ways deemed incompatible with their policies.

But I digress. Although I was persuaded enough by the trial (and the discount!) to buy Left 4 Dead, as the package currently stands it really doesn’t live up to its regular price tag. The original co-op campaign modes are really well made, and easily one of the best four-player co-op experiences available in an FPS, but with around an hour’s playtime for each, the game weighs in extremely short in terms of regular play, replayable though it is. The versus mode on the other hand has its moments, but in general doesn’t live up to expectations, and really feels more like a way of distracting four players whilst the other team actually plays through the game.

What Left 4 Dead really does have on its side, however, is Valve’s reputation as developers. Their dedication to adding features and fixes long after a game’s release is certainly to be factored into the game’s longevity. There was recently a new game mode introduced, which I haven’t yet had the time to try out, and no doubt there are many other ideas swimming around in their fertile little minds. As with many developers today, Valve’s development cycle really has shifted much further beyond the release date than ever before, with Left 4 Dead being a perfect example of a game released in a half-complete state in terms of content, albeit that half being well polished and gruesomely good fun!

Pros

• Graphics—perhaps not the prettiest graphics around, but still looks very authentic
• Co-operative mode—grab three friends and have some of the most fun you can have with your clothes on
• Gameplay—set off a car alarm by mistake, and hear the howls as the entire zombified neighbourhood comes to dine

Cons

• Length—the four main campaigns last perhaps an hour each, and apart from replaying those, there isn’t very much extra content
• Versus mode—more of a gimmick than an extra playable mode

And if you came here mistakenly expecting to read something entertaining, here’s a saving grace in the form of Yahtzee‘s wonderful 4 minute Left 4 Dead review.

Classics of their medium, but which will have a harder time in the future?

In comparison to a medium like cinema, computer games suffer from a particularly poor level of longevity. The vast majority of films can still happily be viewed today, often in an updated format, though keeping to the original production. That isn’t to suggest that films do not become dated, nor that more than just distribution formats are updated in later productions. Only recently I had the privilege of watching a once lost silent Polish film, A Strong Man (Mocny Człowiek), rediscovered in 1997. As there were no hints as to what musical accompaniment was meant to be played with the film, the DVD was released with a modern ambient style, that took a short while to get used to, but actually fit the film’s plot and style rather beautifully. On the whole, however, a film produced fifty years ago can be viewed with much the same clarity today as on the day it was released.

With computer games this issue is all too obviously unsolved. Not only do games age, as with any form of media entertainment, but they do so astonishingly quickly. The systems in place to support many of them gradually fade away, the communities surrounding them normally dissipate before too long (if there even is one), and in many cases the hardware and software required to run them simply move on.

To compare games to cinema is perhaps unwise, but many of the principle facets remain the same. Older games may not have the same visual complexities of today’s successors, nor the scope of their worlds or the detail of their mechanics, but their storylines and gameplay can remain as fresh as ever. A game such as Tetris will never die, on the basis of its blinding simplicity and addictive gameplay – but most importantly thanks to the myriad of rewrites, updates and clones that have kept the game alive to this day. Even the signature theme tune will live on as a classic example of gaming heritage.

Yet for every classic such as Tetris that has survived or been adapted for the modern era, there are simply thousands that have been essentially lost under the rolling wheels of technological advancement. Worst of all is that whilst many games become unplayable as operating systems and hardware develop, and as publishers stop producing them, copyright holders generally maintain their grasp on the games and consign efforts to keep them alive to pirates. This is quite frankly one of the more maddening aspects of computer game development, that golden classics should be consigned to history or piracy, since they cannot legally be made available for free, and cannot be purchased in any store that isn’t still anticipating the Millennium bug, is in my eyes simply a crime. All power to the outfits that make their games available after a certain period, or like id software have a policy of releasing their source code for free after a certain period.

Nevertheless, all is not Doom or Gloom. This post was originally inspired when I came across the remake of a classic of the 1980s game Ghostbusters, entirely rewritten for today’s machines. No doubt the original is out there somewhere, and playable via one of the many decent emulator programmes available, but trying to acquire and run these things can be a challenging experience. The more popular platforms have well developed, stable emulators with a lot of support, and finding ROMs for these isn’t particularly challenging, but for the more obscure platforms and titles, this can still be a frustruting and fruitless search.

Fortunately, some really great work has been done on a number of projects to keep certain niches alive. The ScummVM project has done some excellent work to make a number of classic adventure games playable on today’s operating systems. Quite how they’ve run into battles with the LucasArts legal team when trying to rescue their back catalogue from the dustbin is beyond me. A number of projects have also arisen around the selection of older id software games, such as Doomsday, which providing an updated game engine for Doom, Heretic and Hexen, helped in large part to id software’s laudable policy of releasing the source code (not to mention having the temerity to port many of their games in the first place). With a more general aim, the DOSBox project empowers a great many classics with a new lease of life, although this can be a tricky process, made much easier by the D-Fend Reloaded frontend. As per the recent entanglements with Worms, however, even this can cause some headscratching.

My favourite project of this ilk, however, has to be the astoundingly good OpenTTD. The ultimate goal being to create an entirely free re-working of Chris Sawyer’s classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, the project certainly sits on shaky legal ground for attempting to present a copy of the game, but that aside the software is able to utilise the original game’s graphics and sounds, and not only recreate the original experience, but also improve upon it. Amongst other merits are the plethora of options, the feature additions which are well within the tone of the game, and of course the brilliantly updated multiplayer options which has given this game a decidedly extended lease of life. I could happily go on raving about this project, but that’s probably best left for another post altogether.

One might like to believe that the future looks brighter as far as gaming longevity is concerned. Distribution platforms such as Valve’s Steam allow games to be ‘published’ long after the traditional cycle, and has even been in large part responsible for resurrecting some old classics (e.g. Commander Keen). It may also spur developers to keep their catalogues ‘current’, at least as far as running on the latest Microsoft operating system. Nevertheless, the modern computer game has certainly moved far from its humble origins. The classic games of yesteryear that have remained with us on account of their unique simplicity, are mimicked today in the largely plotless gameplay oriented multiplayer games of the Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament ilk. There are of course more recent and highly successful moves in the direction of more immersive and detailed worlds, and although World of Warcraft alone probably accounts for well more than half of all players of MMORPGs, clearly in terms of gaming attributes the multiplayer aspect has grown to highly significant proportions.

Ultimately then, whilst there are numerous well-intentioned projects out there to attempt to rescue many classic games from the grave, will the future of gaming make that job actually harder rather than easier to achieve? Certainly any multiplayer gaming experience relies to some extent on the quality of the players involved, but setting up a multiplayer game of Doom is probably easier today than it was when it was released, the only thing needed are the players. But for games that rely on servers and a myriad other players cannot really hope to be recreated in the future, in the same way that an old DOS or Amiga game can be rewritten or emulated. In the future, will we be forced to look back upon a game like World of Warcraft as a phenomenon?

Basic tools

For simplicity we used D-Fend Reloaded, a handy graphical frontend for DOSBox. This emulates the DOS environment that allows Worms to run exactly as it did when it was released. The installation should be pretty straightforward, simply download and run the latest installer package.

Installing the game

Depending on your source, the game itself will need to be installed. It may be possible to find this game on abandonware sites, or lurking elsewhere in the tubes, but I’ll assume you have the game on CD.

1. Launch D-Fend Reloaded.
2. In the window which pops up, double-click the entry “DOSBox DOS”. You should be presented with a classic C:\> DOS prompt.
3. Enter the following commands, replacing “d:” with the drive letter your CD is loaded in:

   mkdir WORMS
   mount d d:\
   d:\
   install

4. This should run the Worms install programme. Install the game, ensuring to choose C:\WORMS as the installation target.

Install the game via DOSBox

Setting up

Assuming the previous stage completed successfully, you now only need to set up Worms in D-Fend Reloaded.

1. Press F3, or select Add –> Add with wizard…
2. In the ensuing guide, select DOSBox if it isn’t already highlighted, and click Next.
3. Select the programme to be run (normally .\VirtualHD\WORMS\WORMS.BAT) and optionally the setup programme (this will depend on your version of the game) and click Next.
4. The programme should automatically choose a template that matches your game (either Worms or Worms Plus). If this isn’t the case, you can choose one of these templates from under the Use user-defined auto setup template list. Click Next.
5. The next screen simply contains details of the game and how it will be displayed in the D-Fend menu. Alter these if you wish, otherwise click Next.
6. The final screen should list the drives mounted by DOSBox when the game is run. Currently this should only include .\VirtualHD as the C drive, but we also need to mount the CD. Click Add… and in the following window change the Type to CD-drive and select the root of your optical drive as the Folder for mounting. The Drive letter should be D and the Label can be WORMS or anything else for that matter. Click Ok.
7. Before closing this wizard, tick the box labelled Open profile editor when wizard closes, and then click Ok.
8. For some reason, the sound is disabled by default, so in this final menu, we need to select Sound and then tick the box Activate sound. Click Ok.

Worms listed in D-Fend Reloaded

Play

There should now be a second entry in the D-Fend menu in addition to DOSBox, which should run the game in virtually all its former glory! We still ran into a few problems with our version, namely that the intro FMV sequence had to be skipped (by pressing S when prompted) and the few little FMV sequences in the game itself ran extremely jerkily, and were better off being by-passed altogether (pressing Escape). More disappointingly, the CD music refused to play, an ingredient sorely missed! Otherwise, the game failed to disappoint any of those expectations heaped upon us by nostalgia.

Worms menu screen

The gaming elements are simple enough that the rule booklet, which is clearly written, can be read through and understood virtually in its entirety immediately before play. Each turn of the game runs through four phases. Firstly, power plants are bought at auction, each player proffering an available plant in turn, with the plant going to the highest bidder. Purchased plants are replaced from a visible ‘futures market’, allowing players to plan ahead with their bids. The second stage involves buying raw materials from the market. Each plant produces energy from one of five sources: coal, oil, garbage, nuclear or renewable. The latter plants require no raw materials at all and are oft hardest fought over at auction. The other fuels become increasingly expensive as supply dwindles, forcing players to either diversify their sources, or stockpile for future shortages. The third phase has players building an electricity network to supply power to their consumers. The network costs are based on proximity, and as players can only initially build in unoccupied cities, good initial placement can be a crucial factor. The final phase of the game is called the ‘bureaucracy’ phase, dealing with the supply of electricity (and thus generating profits), and various bits of setup to keep the game flowing.

Far and away the most crucial and successful element in the game’s mechanics is the turn order. Players in a leading position are essentially penalised in every phase of the game, enabling players who are lagging behind to catch up. Going first means having more competition during the power plant auction phase (since you may only buy one power plant each round, other players may bid on your choice, but you may not bid on theirs), and then the turn order is reversed for the following two phases, meaning buying raw materials last (generally more expensive) and building the electricity network last (also potentially more expensive). A final ‘cap’ on players’ advance is the increasingly poor return on electricity sales, the more consumers are supplied, so that the player with the network twice as large as anyone else may only receive an extra sixty percent of earnings over the others if he is able to power it all.

Of course, this turn order isn’t decided by human invention but by the game’s mechanics, meaning that it can (and should) be manipulated by the players to avoid having to be in pole position. Turn order is determined by the size of a player’s network, and thereafter on who has the highest rated power plant in the event of a tie, and players often end up deliberately underdeveloping in order to stay their hand until a later stage in the game. Whilst some might decry the unrealistic way in which this serves to level the playing field a bit, it does mean that players cannot turn an early advantage into a runaway success quite so easily, simultaneously adding an extra tactical element to the game.

The German board

Although playable with a minimum of just two players, Power Grid really benefits from bringing extra players to the table. The game comes with a double-sided playing board, with a map of Germany and the USA on either side, with each country being split into regions, with the number of adjoining regions played over corresponding to the number of players. Furthermore, the resources are restocked at a rate relative to the number of players taking part, and other restrictions are made on the power plants market with fewer players present. In these ways, the game attempts to increase competition for games with few players, but these measures cannot hope to replace the competition that can be provided by thinking players. With just two players, every city is open to be built in, there is more chance that specific resources can be monopolised, and the competition in the power plant market is largely negated. With six players, cities can easily be blocked (a maximum of three players can supply electricity to a city, and that only at the latest stage of the game), resources monopolised, power plant competition becomes more vocal, and in general the game becomes much more involving and less like a game of multiplayer patience.

Nevertheless, the game isn’t to everyone’s liking, and isn’t too forgiving on beginners. The rules which allow players doing badly to catch up can often times be manipulated, to such an extent that a player gaining a reasonably early lead who can then artificially maintain a low position will go on to win the game later as long as he times his move right. The key element to the game is the auction stage, which relies on players being aware of what power plants are potentially available, as well as calculating their paper worth against the available resources. Whilst this is a strong central characteristic, it relies on players being able (and willing) to keep track of their finances, and can often be the cause of many a headache, as those carefully laid plans are altered by another player sending the price of coal up. Furthermore, as this isn’t an elimination game, players who make an early mistake and find themselves beyond the game’s built-in rescue mechanisms will end up going through the motions in last place till the game’s conclusion, entirely unable to make up for their earlier mistakes. Whilst not so common when players have a few games under their belt, this unforgiving element can easily put beginners off playing the game again.

Overall then, Power Grid offers a decent business game that has enough elements to keep the game quite tactical even after several plays. The mechanisms in place to ensure the leading player doesn’t run away with it, and the collateral ability of players to manipulate this element, work quite nicely, with the whole ruleset in general feels quite tight and well tested. Unfortunately, that does leave the game to be quite precise on the financial side, forcing players to continually plan ahead and keep up the arithmetic to ensure they’re getting the best deals and still have enough money left over to do all they wanted to. With a smaller number of players, the game doesn’t force enough competition between the players, and players are unable to directly impact on others (particularly not without detriment to themselves) leaving the game all too often a foregone conclusion well before the end. With more players, the competition increases in a number of areas, and gives players behind in the rankings a chance to at least retard the big players between them. Nevertheless, the final result very rarely comes as a surprise, and in my experience the game always ends on something of a low ebb, checking to see that the player expected to win actually did, with the peak in excitement coming somewhere in the middle. And given the unforgiving nature of the game for beginners, this isn’t one that works well when integrating new and experienced players.

Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in the field of board games, but that serious lack of diversity in most UK households makes most games evenings feel like you’re stuck in the same old rut again. Take a look at Wikipedia’s list of popular games, and you might see what I mean. Ignoring those that aren’t easily or commonly played in groups, there’s Cluedo, Monopoly, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit. And let’s face it, if a household has anything, it’s probably one of those. Of course, there’s plenty of fun to be had there, but to be honest there just isn’t enough variety in what’s usually available.

A lot of this comes down to British culture. There are in fact plenty of games available, and most families with young children will probably have a great many more board games specifically designed for the youngsters than those suitable for the whole family. One can only presume that board games are seen as belonging to the realm of childhood, but there doesn’t need to be a specifically adult genre of games to counter this. What should be avoided, however, is the mass-produced clone versions of the very same games, which add mere seconds of novelty value to the overworked formulae. Oxford Monopoly? Scotland Monopoly? Star Wars™ Monopoly?

Another key problem I have with the majority of the games mentioned above is the strong, pervasive element of luck. Since most adults are perfectly capable of deducing the murderer in a pretty efficient way in a game of Cluedo, the roll of the die and the luck of the draw come into play far too heavily for much enjoyment to be had. In a game of Risk, a strong strategy should triumph in an average night of dice rolling—but when everyone has a strong strategy?

The Escapist has summarised a number of key areas in which German-style games make an improvement over the typical offerings available in the UK, and just why they do so well. Some of these might be seen as undesireable, such as the inability to eliminate players, or the rather less open-ended scope of the games, but these factors together with the easy to pick-up rules, high level of interaction and more measured amounts of luck tend to make the games more appealing to that more grown up audience.

Carcassonne

Take a game like Carcassonne. You can learn to play it in minutes, involves plenty of player interaction, a splash of luck with drawing tiles, and yet has enough scope for developing tactics that the game has decent longevity about it. Players can’t ‘die’ part way through, nor is the victor generally known long before the game’s end, and you can generally work out how much time to set aside for a game. Plus of course, there are a number of expansions and reinterpretations which can add even more variety to the basic game.

But who knows? Perhaps there’ll be something new on the table this year. Or maybe there’ll be enough alcohol to numb the pain of continually rolling snake eyes in my defence of Siam!

I had originally written this post, long lingering in the limbo of the drafts bin, pointing out a number of weaknesses with the game as it stood. The most recent patch has done much to address those problems, and is a welcome and rather unexpected update, given Valve had denied there would be any releases for Team Fortress 2 until 2009 on account of the amount of work going into their latest release, Left 4 Dead. I’ve gone through and added some comments or changes where necessary, to reflect the recent update, though on the whole this post retains its original state.

Balancing issues

Whilst I stand by my initial view from earlier in the year that Valve have done a miraculous job when it comes to balancing the various classes, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out, hopefully in future edits and packs. Of course it would be impossible to make a truly level playing field without removing the many classes’ uniqueness, and there will always be situations and maps in which one or another class will show a clear advantage. And it would be unfair to decry Valve’s efforts in creating a balanced game, since there are no classes which go unplayed, and each pack does a lot to reinvigorate them, as well as ironing out some of the more glaring inequalities between them. The welcome improvements to the Pyro class in fact led some players to argue that the Pyro was now overpowered, though the majority of these statements to my eyes came from those predominantly playing Soldier or Demoman, and thus are used to being in a more dominant role.

Engineer has some sapping problems
photo credit: Nitevision

Yet there are still some problems that need to be solved, and until the relevant pack arrives, can detract from game’s balanced playing field. Engineers in particular have a tough call. Whilst they are the backbone of many a successful team, their actions are rarely merited with just reward. I think it would be fair to say that a large proportion of Übers are used against Engineers’ sentry guns, a worthwhile respite for many a team, yet the Engineers’ reward is to have his hard work destroyed by something he can almost never avoid. Similarly Spies can often be the bane of an Engineers’ existence, destroying his teleporter entrances with no one around to defend them, sapping his buildings and leaving them prone to attack from every other attacking class, and particularly if he’s the only Engineer on the team or in his area, killing him directly (even at the expense of the Spy’s life) and leaving all of his buildings unprotected for a period of time. Another source of grief for Engineers comes from the fact that one of his major sources of points, that is to say teleports, relies on his teleporters being in appropriate locations. Since many maps change spawn locations according to the state of play, Engineers often find themselves constantly shifting teleporter entrances/exits if they want to earn points, all the while neglecting their other sentry duties.

This particular point of contention will be a difficult one to solve, and it will be very interesting to see how Valve approaches the Engineer in its class update. One simple addition to the Engineers’ current points source would be to award him for ammunition handed out by his dispenser. The tweaks made to the Soldier and Demoman classes in particular mean they are constantly needing a resupply, a fact that could be awarded in addition to the usual health bonus (taking into account of course the common occurrence of Pyros and Heavies standing beside dispensers and firing wildly). There are of course numerous new weapons with which the Engineer could be equipped, beyond alternatives to his regular weapons, such as decoy buildings that explode when sapped, or extra sentry guns of a smaller size, or perhaps even two-way teleporters, the possibilities are limited only by the developers’ imaginations (and bravery). Yet one of the key problems with the Engineer class is its stacking effect. A single Engineer at the moment often has a terrible time dealing with Spies and Übercharges directed against his buildings. With each extra Engineer on the team, however, these problems diminish, as Engineers can help to check for Spies, remove saps placed on other Engineers’ buildings, and generally provide backup that no other class can provide. A concomitant effect is that whilst a single sentry can easily be overcome (and takes time to be rebuilt), two sentries can not only be rebuilt faster (with competent teamwork between Engineers), but also provide greater firepower that may prevent certain classes being able to reach and destroy them even whilst Übercharged.

Of course, this issue and many others might be addressed when the relevant class update arrives. Also, whilst certain classes find it difficult to do well in the open playing field of the public server, there are few that are not played in this basis, and the Engineer is a prime example of a class that is not underplayed despite its deficiencies, on the basis that it is an important constituent of a balanced team. Today’s update has certainly gone some way to improving the Engineer’s lot when it comes to supporting the team, though until the update arrives the points issue will probably remain. Whilst upgradable teleporters offer some scope for improvement, their use is still limited by the choice of map, still hampered by potential Spies destroying the entrance (who have also been given a great boon in this recent update), and their cost in terms of time and metal spent upgrading them might outweigh the benefits in most situations. The upgraded dispenser is of more obvious benefit to the Engineer and team in general,¹ and becomes both a prized possession and greater target for the opposition team, though it would be nice to see points being given for dispensing ammunition to teammates. Hopefully this class will gain some further tweaks in a future pack.

The market for explosives

The other obvious gripe in the game as it stands is the nature of the Demoman. As many players point out, the class is overpowered on a number of levels, particularly when compared to his nearest rival class, the Soldier. In large part this boils down to the class essentially having two primary weapons, in particular with the secondary being preferred by most players as the primary weapon, and in sum having thrice the explosive ammunition than the Soldier. In addition the Demoman can perform maneouvres similar to the Soldier’s ‘rocket jumps’ enabling him to get into hard to reach places. The class is faster than the Soldier, and only marginally slower than the Pyro and Sniper classes, whilst losing little in terms of health points. With his sticky bombs, the Demoman has the ability to defend control points and particularly doorways and other bottlenecks,² or alternatively provide backup to a friendly Engineer through mining his buildings as a deterrent to enemy Spies. Against enemy Engineers the Demoman is a particularly bane, with the ability to lob grenades or sticky bombs from an angle out of range of his sentry guns, and with an Übercharge can generally cause more destruction of enemy buildings than any other class. This indirect fire can also be an advantage in normal combat, with the further benefit that the Demoman’s weapons are the only ones apart from the Sniper that do not suffer a decrease in damage dealt over distance. Thus although technically a defensive class, and particularly where maps have severe bottlenecks a very potent one, the Demoman is equally adept in an attacking role. At least at medium range, the Demoman is thus well equipped against the vast majority of classes, with the exception perhaps of the underplayed (and underpowered) Scout.

Cyclops survives again
photo credit: Crypticommonicon

Quite how Valve will approach the Demoman issue remains to be seen. One thing is for certain, however, and that is that they are not short of options. Any number of alterations would help redress the balance, from changing the class’ core statistics (i.e. reduced speed or reduced health), through alterations to the weapons (either changes in damage or ammunition levels), to giving other classes the boost needed to combat him. Personally, I feel one of the simplest modifications to the Demoman would be an increase in the delay that currently exists between firing a sticky bomb and detonating it – and in fact altering the delay such that it is one between the sticky bomb touching another surface and subsequent detonation. The purpose of the weapon is principally to lay traps for other classes to walk into, being a special secondary weapon, but instead is more commonly used as an offensive, primary weapon, with sticky bombs all too often being detonated as quickly as possible, often even in mid-air. His other core advantages described above would remain the same, but the alteration would force players to use the class’ secondary weapon more intelligently, and the primary weapon more routinely.

A critical issue

A more open and contentious problem with Team Fortress 2 has to be the presence of ‘criticals’, regular shots that are by random chance upgraded to do double the damage of a regular one. With the increase in the number of unlockable weapons released by Valve that affect the generation of critical shots, it may be the case that in future criticals will become a factored feature of the game, rather than a purely (or at least predominantly) random one. For the time being, one of the most frustrating moments in the game can occur when you are killed by a ‘random’ critical having just built up and used the charge on the Kritzkrieg which would give the person you’re healing a flurry of critical shots. Predictable beaten by random.

It’s certainly a good thing that Valve has listened to the community and allowed server admins the ability to turn off criticals without the need to resort to third party mods or plugins, and no doubt this would arguably increase the skill level of the game, though as I wrote in the previous post I still stand by criticals as an important element in levelling the playing field. Which is precisely why the other issue regarding their implementation remains a problem.

Heavy like crits
photo credit: Pentadact

Predictable criticals obviously add an extra level of skill to utilise that is a welcome inclusion, I’m sure many would agree. The various trade-offs imposed on the weapons which bring predictable criticals to the fold are generally sufficient to prevent their overuse or abuse. Yet random criticals enjoy a sense of positive feedback, in the way in which the chance of firing a critical shot is determined by the amount of damage a player does in a given period of time. I have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate how exactly the statistics are determined, but the general sense is that certain classes benefit more from this effect than others (particularly those like Soldiers and Demomen who enjoy splash damage from their primary weapons), and in particular, players who are doing well are more liable to fire more criticals, leading to something of a runaway effect. There is a natural logic to this manner of execution – players are justly awarded for playing well, and in particular situations this idea is well vindicated. Take for example a situation in which a Soldier approaches a Heavy and Medic from an oblique angle: firing the first rocket at the Medic, who then takes shelter behind the Heavy, the Soldier would be able to fire all four rockets (probably more), dealing plenty of damage but without killing anyone. Yet the increased chance of criticals might just result in the Soldier being rewarded for his efforts. Unfortunately there are situations in which this system can look simply rediculous. Two Heavies with Medics at medium range will probably be able to fire at one another for upwards of 10 seconds before one or other finally succumbs to the onslaught: instead, a more common result is that one of the two is rewarded for the damage dealt in the previous seconds with a barrage of criticals, determining the winner of the encounter on a coin toss.

A problem of attitude

This last complaint is much more of a personal gripe than a complaint with any basis on the game’s mechanics. It’s more a question of players’ attitudes to the game than a problem with the game itself, and TF2 is no more guilty of it than any other multiplayer game. Alongside the problems mentioned earlier about balancing issues is the number of players who don’t appreciate the efforts of their teammates. This link pretty much sums up the issue. I’m sure this is a small, vocal minority, but the fact is that basically every server has players who think that Engineers are only useful for building them dispensers and teleporters, that a Medic’s job is to heal them constantly and only ever use their Übercharges on them (as they are obviously going to be MVP) and generally every other class is either useless, overpowered, overplayed, or for noobs. These are the players that constantly mash the button to cry “Medic!” and even have the gall to demand someone else should be their (personal) Medic when the team doesn’t have any.³

In summary then, since I can only think to elaborate on two major issues, both of which will probably be at least partially remedied in future updates, it seems fair to assume that Team Fortress 2 is a pretty well-rounded game. I can only comment on the game from a public server player’s point-of-view, and consider that this is probably the game’s mainstay anyway. Despite my complaints over balancing issues, there are no classes which go unplayed as a result, and all of the game’s nine classes are often employed, some being virtually essential to a team’s success. With such diversity in the classes, the game has an excellent longevity factor, and Valve’s continued improvements and additions only solidify that appeal. The recent update offers some welcome tweaks and additions that were quite unexpected, and with news that the Scout’s update is in the pipeline for next year, I wish the people at Valve a pleasant festive season and look forward to future TF2 updates in the coming year.

1. Particularly as ammunition now has a further heavy duty user in the form of the Spy.
2. Although the recent update has given other classes at least some defence against laid traps, through having bullet projectiles able to destroy sticky bombs.
3. Fortunately, today’s update has provided a simple yet effective way for Medics to filter out the demanding players, through indicators of a player’s health status when they call for a Medic.

The release of Team Fortress 2 came as something of a surprise, after so little news about its development, with virtually nothing concrete after the initial revelations in 1999. The finished version bears absolutely no relation to those initial screenshots, instead maintaining much stronger links to the original modification Team Fortress Classic, with a strong glossy coat of The Incredibles style graphics and an uncut, Columbian-strength injection of humour.

The game relies strongly on teamplay, and one of the greatest assets in Team Fortress’ arsenal is the balancing act Valve have worked between the classes. Many games with far fewer variables don’t manage to create as level a playing field as this. With nine different classes to play that was no easy feat, with each having different weapons, movement speeds, skills and strengths. That’s not to say it’s perfect—some classes enjoy obvious advantages with very few setbacks—but each one has its uses, and with some practice can be used to great effect. Some require a lot more fiddling and practice to master than the others, for example spying can be a deadly and irritating activity in the hands of those with an innate love of hide and seek. For those with an addiction to pressing ‘W’, however, it turns into more of a kamikaze class than anything of any particular use to the team. By contrast the role of sniper is much more intuitive, which as Yahtzee so brilliantly put it is reduced to the classic point-and-click adventure game style of “use gun on man.”

photo credit: Sam Kindler

And teamplay is well featured in Team Fortress 2. Whilst other games in Valve’s arsenal purport to rely on the teamplay element, there are annoying aspects of these that their latest game has thankfully worked to eliminate. The classic public server ‘tactic’ of many a Counter-Strike: Source player, that of hanging behind a doorway as your teammates are shot to ribbons, before charging in guns blazing to finish off the softened up enemies who are now busy reloading to claim all the glory simply doesn’t find a place in Team Fortress 2. This partly results from the fact that players can ‘assist’ in killing enemies (and score points for doing so). Similarly the Medic class is poorly armed and weak when alone, but when backing up other classes automatically scores points for kill assists, and extra points for healing injured players, extra incentive for Medics to heal all of their teammates rather than follow the top scoring player around like a dog on a leash. The Engineer meanwhile finds a supporting role and scores points through building well placed sentry guns and teleporters, whilst to some extent relying on other teammates in dealing with spies attempting to destroy his buildings.

Another attribute of the teamplay incentive lies in the nature of defeat. The defeated team finds itself unable to shoot, reduced to a crawl, and opens up all of their safe zones (i.e. respawn points) to the enemy, leaving their enemies free to ritually hunt them down and massacre them. In comparison public server gamers in Counter-Strike: Source are free to ignore teamplay objectives and look after their own skins, and are even able to go ‘frag hunting’ for some seconds after their team has lost the round. Day of Defeat: Source takes a middle ground between the two, with losing players unable to fire, but still able to move as normal and make use of the safety of their spawns, and it would be nice if those aspects could be made more like those in Team Fortress 2 as an encouragement to teamplay and a focus on objectives.

photo credit: roBurky

One of the refreshing features of Team Fortress 2 is the great injection of humour. Released alongside the ravishingly humourous Portal, it is clear that Valve’s intentions with The Orange Box were to create a selection of games intended to make us laugh and enjoy gaming, rather than take it too seriously. The cartoonesque graphics provide a beautiful setting to the gaming mayhem, and whilst slightly limited in scope, the richness of the characters more than makes up for this. Each of the nine classes has a particular persona representing one or other stereotype. The Demoman is played by a black, Scottish cyclops, the Heavy by a simple Russian obsessed with his gun, and the Soldier a madcap American with more than a passing resemblance to George C. Scott’s Patton. Each has a large number of one liners that pop up during the game, such as the Sniper, after shooting someone in the head saying “Thanks for standin’ still, wanker!” or the Heavy on hearing a dispenser being built exclaiming “I hear someone building diaper changing station!” Valve have created cute introductory videos for some of the classes, and of course the community have made many more. (Especially worth checking out the gorgeous Ignis Solus from Lit Fuse Films.)

photo credit: Bryan Sutter

A contentious issue that many criticise and drives some players to distraction is the inclusion of ‘criticals’. These essentially give weapons a random chance to do triple the amount of damage normally dealt. This is often enough to kill a player outright, and can lead to many a frustrating situation where an evenly staged fight is determined by the random number generator. It’s almost akin to a gunfight in the wild west in which you suddenly find your gun was replaced with a water pistol. Whilst this can make many a pitched battle appear to be decided on a dice roll, in my opinion that element of luck means the game is ultimately more playable for players of different skill levels. A decent player in a competent team (and with a decent medic to back him up) could probably play many a map without dying, particularly if he outclassed his opponents. The random criticals to a large extent negate such domination, and enable poorly skilled players to have a chance to enjoy the game to a greater extent. However, the system is not without its problems. Given the variety between the classes, the critical hits manifest themselves in different ways: Spies and Snipers benefit from non-random critical hits from backstabs and headshots respectively, Medics can do ‘critical healing’, Engineers’ buildings are resistant to critical shots (consolation for the fact that their sentries never fire criticals) etc. However, whilst Soldiers and Demomen can fire off critical shots and stand a fair chance of the explosion killing someone or causing major damage without hitting anyone in particular, classes like the Pyro in particular have little chance of doing mass damage with their critical flame except on more compact maps. The biggest gripe I have with that system, however, is the manner in which the random nature of critical shots can be affected by a player’s performance. In particular, as this forum post seems to demonstrate, players are rewarded with a higher percentage of critical shots for a limited time, the more damage they do. Of course since the better players tend to deal the most damage, this leads to a runaway effect, as they fire more criticals, dealing more damage, leading to yet more criticals. In defence of my previous statement I would consider a far better employment of that critical ramping to work in favour of those dealing the least damage, or being killed more times consecutively, or dominated by more players etc.

photo credit: Bryan Sutter

One of the aspects of Team Fortress 2 that prompted this post was the recent release of the Medic Achievements pack. The game originally came with a number of fun achievements for players to unlock whilst playing, such as killing a certain number of people without dying, healing a certain number of health points, setting a certain number of people on fire and so on. With the latest addition, Valve clearly intended to cater to the more long-term gamers for whom the initial Medic achievement of 25000 healing points wasn’t challenge enough. By comparison, the new achievements included one for a million healing points, together with a much greater variety of odd rituals to perform. Unfortunately some do tend to detract from the gameplay and initially led to whole servers of medics running around attempting to gain one achievement or another, hopefully an ailment that will be avoided should future achievement packs be released simultaneously. The achievements have been given some purpose through the introduction of unlockable weapons, which slightly alter those the Medic is already equipped with. The changes are small enough that the unlocked weapons do little to alter the game’s balance, though add a further bit of variety and some small advantages. Given the length of time the Medic Achievement pack took to be released it is questionable whether Valve will ever finish what they’ve started, and indeed how they can introduce new weapons to the other classes without balancing issues, though that remains to be seen. In the recently announced update to Day of Defeat: Source, a similar set of achievements have been touted, though hopefully the unlockable weapons will be left to the Team Fortress 2 crowd.

Another feature that made the crossover to the new Day of Defeat: Source Beta is the so-called freezecam which leaves the player a freeze frame shot of the player who killed them. In Team Fortress 2, this is often humorously supplemented by little signs pointing to various giblets littered around the frame with indications such as “Here’s a little bit of you!” and “Another piece.” Whilst this feature adds to the ethos of Team Fortress 2, it could certainly prove to alter the game dynamics in Day of Defeat: Source, which already has the camera aim towards the killer on dying, but would not reveal a hidden sniper to the same extent that the zoomed in freeze cam does. However, it would be nice if that feature could be expanded, in a similar vein to the “Killcam” found in Call of Duty games—a five second replay of the killer’s last movements—a very nice way of seeing how you died, and indeed a great aid to identifying cheaters.

Interesting though is the reaction of many regular Day of Defeat: Source players to the update news. Many have complained about the changes, claiming that it will only ruin the game dynamics, or that the game is becoming too much like Team Fortress 2. It appears to be a rather typical reaction to gamers who become accustomed to their particular niche and fear any changes that would upset their familiar skulking grounds. However as far as I can see, the changes bring welcome freshness to a game that was otherwise on the gradual decline, and indicates that Valve are committed to bringing fresh content and updated engine performance to games in their portfolio even a number of years after their release. Certainly welcome news, given that the touted changes are probably unlikely to improve sales figures in any significant way, beyond the reassurance that gamers may feel from knowing that the developer hasn’t given up on the game.

Overall Valve really pulled off something brilliant with Team Fortress 2. The game is well balanced, despite the massive variety afforded through the class system, beautiful to look at, comical in more than just aesthetics, and most of all—fun! The news that Valve intend to overhaul their older multiplayer games with the tricks tried and tested in Team Fortress is welcome, and shows that they have given a commitment to these older titles that gives the gamer confidence. Who knows, may we even yet see the reintroduction of the British to Day of Defeat: Source? You almost feel like forgiving them for the constant delays to Half-Life 2: Episode 2! But let’s not get carried away…

100 Best Last Lines from Novels – How great can a last line be? I’ve read some of the works on the list and can’t say any are particularly memorable, but here’s an arbitrary list of the top 100 anyway. (PDF)

The World’s Spookiest Weapons – Starting with the A-bomb and working through mind control, crowd control and animal manipulation, this little list illustrates some of the craziest weapons designed or researched in the years since the last war.

Boxhead 2play – While away some moments (hours!) with this mad flash-based zombie fest. Can also be played cooperatively or in deathmatch mode from the same machine.

Company of Heroes

With some of the highest scores awarded for a real-time strategy, being one of the Top 20 Metacritic All-Time High Scores, Company of Heroes ended up being one of those games I had little excuse not to try out, given that my PC could (just about) run it. Admittedly I’m unable to comment on the graphical splendour which seems to have charmed so many gamers’ hearts, as every setting on my screen reads either ‘low’ or ‘off’, but I’ve played a fair few strategy games over the years, and despite my early cynicism, Company of Heroes has warmed to me after a little experience on the online battlefields.

Whenever a game is released with a major historical theme, such as the ever popular World War II era, cries go up about the loss of realism to the gaming gods. Such and such would never happen, this and that never existed. Of course, many strategy games don’t even attempt to pander to the pedants of realism, and have been all the more successful for it (take the recent Supreme Commander, or any in the Command and Conquer series). Company of Heroes is no saint in this regard either, but its efforts to create a game at once realistic and fun have to be admired. There will always be players who complain about how developers could have stayed truer to real life, but Relic have done a good job in creating a game which at least seems realistic enough, and in ways which make the game fun to play. Shells fired at tanks have a chance of only glancing off the armour, and depending on the situation might even miss altogether; units under heavy fire become surpressed, limiting their movements and actions, or even pinned, leaving them helpless unless pulled out or relieved; and the variety of weapons and vehicles keep the tactics fresh and varied.

Infantry suppressed by tank and artillery fire

This focus on squad-based combat does run the risk of having the key moments in a game hinge on that little bit of luck and making the early openings seem all the more important. Yet the openness of the maps generally serves to ensure that victories are warranted, with players able to pull out and redeploy as necessary, and at least in my experience avoids that seemingly autistic level of control required to play to any decent level in WarCraft III et al. The two sides also seem fairly balanced, which is no doubt a key benefit of excluding any other factions.

Infantry capturing a Victory Point

The game’s single-player campaign is perhaps the biggest disappointment, being at once too short, and too one-sided. The storyline follows the typical pattern one comes to expect from the American campaign in Europe, but it feels somehow empty, given the ample scope for including other Allied forces and theatres, or even simply a German/Axis campaign to complement the fairly short Allied one. However, that being said the AI can be a decent opponent, even on the skirmish maps, combining their troops well, flanking your positions, and pulling back if the pressure gets too hot. Of course it is not without its flaws, and will often get what a friend of mine terms ‘a hard on’ for a specific point on the map, and repeatedly rush headlong into disaster. That being said, the campaign is entertaining whilst it lasts, and in combination with the skirmish mode, is ample preparation for the online game where there should be some decent longevity, particularly with the expansion due out later this year.

Full-scale battle underway

The online experience seems to be a bit of a mixed bag, but thankfully doesn’t suffer from the same pitfalls that afflicted C&C Generals. Players get ranked separately according to the type of game they play – a 2v2 specialist might not have the same punch in a head-on meeting. In my very limited experience, there does appear to be a good mix of skill levels, plenty of scope for new players to learn the art, and the very mechanics of the game mean that few encounters feel so one sided as to make the experience joyless – though the better matched games probably feel quite stressful!

If there was one area in which I felt Company of Heroes truly fails, it would have to be the inclusion of a ‘base’. It would appear that the concept has become so vital to the real-time strategy genre, that developers can’t bring themselves to exclude it. Some have complained that the base element in the game is too lax, too incomplete, whereas I would argue its inclusion is entirely superfluous. In the multiplayer game, the annihilation mode requires the destruction of all enemy buildings, which often times comes as the final blow to an already defeated army. Otherwise, the base is simply an area for troops to arrive and heal, but the concept is open to being exploited by the trickier or less principled player. The game could simply rely on an area for troops to enter the battlefield, akin to that used in the Sudden Strike series, with an upgradeable technology tree behind the scenes akin to the building of separate structures for the different unit types.

Overall though, Company of Heroes offers something we wish all RTS games could deliver – a well-balanced, good looking, fun, themed game, which awards merit in good tactics and clever troop movement. Whilst some players bemoan the fact that multiplayer games are always fought Allies versus Axis, the restriction does ensure that the designers had to ensure the teams were balanced. And although I can’t take full advantage of the game engine, the way troops make use of the terrain for cover, using fresh craters as foxholes, occupying houses and church towers, certainly does add a level of depth and detail lacking in most contemporary RTS games, so at least you have something fun to watch even whilst your troops are getting massacred and overrun.

Settlers of Catan

Occasionally there’s no better way to spend an evening than sitting down around a table with friends and family, having a few drinks and playing a board game. That stands particularly true when the game is something new. Every player goes into the game trying to learn, meaning everyone is that little bit more focused, that little bit more bewildered, and tactics have to be picked up along the way. Although I wouldn’t call any of us board game connaisseurs, this wasn’t the first time we’d learnt a game from scratch of an evening, nor presumably the last time we’ll be up past midnight trying to play one out!

The Settlers of Catan advertises that it can be picked up in fifteen minutes, and with a bit of concentration there really is nothing too complicated about it. The object of the game is to score 10 victory points, which can be gathered in a number of ways, but the key to all of them stems from the same basic root. The island of Catan is divided into various regions or ‘hexes’, each representing a type of landscape which will produce a certain variety of good. Precisely which of these regions will bear fruit on any one turn is determined by the throw of the dice, adding that little element of luck which thankfully doesn’t marr any feeling of player involvement in this game. Placing your settlements and roads wisely should ensure a decent windfall of the produce from the dice throws, and it isn’t necessary to be in control of the dice in order to profit from a roll. Using various combinations of goods produced, a player can expand his network, building more settlements and roads, and creep towards that victory point tally.

Board and pieces

These elements alone would make for a pretty decent game, as one which would require the triumph of strategy over the fortune of the dice. But designer Klaus Teuber adds an extra couple of aspects which add the icing to the cake. The various options open during the building phase of the game require various combinations of goods to be collected, as a result of which players often find themselves in a situation whereby they are short of one item or another. The game allows for a stage of open bartering between the players, akin to that which you might find used ad hoc in any other game, but which given the prevalence and even necessity for progressing in the game, opens it up to all sorts of swindling and conniving to get what is required. On top of all of that is the shady figure of the robber, activated on the play of a card or the throw of the dice, who not only decimates the supplies of anyone hoarding goods, not only prevents any hex he occupies from producing goods, but also enables players to literally steal cards from one another. No man is an iland, intire of it selfe!

Overall, The Settlers of Catan is an excellent combination of luck, strategy and player interaction, which is neither complicated nor particularly time-consuming (typically the first attempt will no doubt be twice as long normal). It is perhaps unfortunate that one of our previous favourites has been Puerto Rico, a game that also comes highly rated (although not a winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres) and in many ways develops upon the elements involved in Settlers. But where Puerto Rico is a much deeper strategy game, requiring players to focus on their own ‘islands’ and indeed on their own games, Settlers is at once less-involving through its simplicity, and more-involving in its player interaction. Whilst the former removes any real external elements of luck and places the onus on players to make their own, the dice in Settlers could have your strategy in tatters, as the little black figure makes his way over to your end of the island.

The Settlers of Catan is the extrovert’s Puerto Rico. If you prefer to be in control of your destiny and left to ponder your own strategy, then Puerto Rico is definitely the choice, but if you want a simpler, more involving and more vocal game, my suggestion would be that you really can’t go far wrong with The Settlers of Catan.

Nevertheless, the presence of advertising in games has been pretty low key, considering the industry’s growth over the past decade or so. Advertising is not usually so slow to find its way into new forms of media entertainment, Internet advertising being the biggest example of recent times. So the news that in-game advertising rights for Counter-Strike (the ‘big one’ as far as non-MMORPGs is concerned) have been sold to IGA should only come as expected. Previously adverts for Valve’s flagship had been reserved for brief loading screens, an idea which apparently never took hold. Where Internet advertising has had much reaction to the point where many people block out adverts as a matter of course, this will be more difficult to achieve in such a gaming environment, and should it succeed, might result in future games featuring truly hard-coded advertising avenues.

What will the gaming community’s reaction be? Many gamers defend the principle of advertising in games on two counts. Firstly, the revenue generated for the developers and publishers can only help improve their gaming experience through improved financing support services and providing more money for future game development. Secondly, the adverts themselves improve the gaming experience. Advertising is a massive part of our everyday lives, and their inclusion is seen as natural, helping to improve the general immersive gaming experience. Yet for some, whether blended into the environment or not, the very presence of adverts will be seen as an incursion into their territory, just as web adverts are perceived as intrusive and unnecessary. An issue of perhaps greater contention in the Counter-Strike case, is that whilst gaming servers are run at much cost by their owners, Valve will be earning advertising revenues based on these servers’ continued operation and popularity, and generating these extra revenues from a product that has already been purchased by the end-user.

But do gamers even take notice of the adverts? A recent survey suggests that current in-game adverts are failing to garner the recognition expected. Sadly, this survey is unrepresentative of the gaming community as a whole, and its sample size is bordering on frivolous. It might indeed only be expected that in racing titles the gamer will take less notice of the surroundings as the focus is on reaction speeds and racing skills, with a constantly changing reference point in the virtual world. In comparison, Counter-Strike’s gamers often have to spend idle minutes between rounds in ‘spectator mode’, leaving them essentially free to explore the environment as they choose, whilst the game does not rely on fast-paced action and constantly changing environments as a racing title does.

It is important to bear in mind that the game is built on an aging engine, and as a result the graphics cannot compare with some of the more recent offerings. Nevertheless, the game looks decent enough, actions are well modelled, and aside from the occasional invisible wall there is little in this department to detract from the gaming experience. The most important feature in this regard must be the realistic viewpoints available to tank and vehicle crews. With no out-of-body viewpoints available, players will find their visibility restricted as real life crews, and the alternative of opening the hatch and taking a broader sweep only makes them a bigger target to the enemy around them.

In a similar vein, the lack of any crosshairs on the game force players to generally rely on their weapons’ iron sights for any accuracy in shooting, bringing a real test to the most basic of skills in any ‘shooter’. Unfortunately, however, this feature which offers a much improved reward for the skilled aimer has a number of side effects which can detract from the realistic feel the creators were trying to develop. The necessity of using iron sights means that the up close battles can feel extremely clumsy and unrealistic. Often is the case where a perfectly poised player will miss a shot with his rifle from 2 feet, because he wasn’t using iron sights. Furthermore, the length of time it takes to enter and leave the iron sight ‘mode’ means players often feel unrealistically exposed, as this mode restricts their movement to a virtual crawl. The more experienced players therefore can often be seen using the game’s lean feature, but in such a manner that it seems like the front line troops have learned more from the contortionists than the drill sergeants, as they lean over backwards whilst aiming their rifles and walking around a corner.

Nevertheless, this feature does allow the game some realistic balance in the manner in which the different weapon types excel in their own fields. This is particularly enhanced by the standard of the level design in the game. Whilst not particularly mind-blowing or inventive, and there are of course the obligatory few terrible ones (ro-baksanvalley springs to mind), the maps are pretty solid and interesting to play, with multiple routes, objectives and plenty of scope for the different infantry classes. Whilst some maps are limited solely to tank or infantry combat, the combined arms maps offer a further dimension of play.

In so short a trial, however, it was difficult to see the game’s merits beyond the novelty factor. The realism of the vehicle’s viewpoints and compulsion of iron sights for infantry certainly adds to the realism, but certain other factors (such as the indication of kills in the top right of the game’s HUD) remind that this is a game like any other – it has its tricks and its weaknesses, and these will be exploited by the experienced players. A few personal gripes with the engine (TAB is not for say) and a strange bug with the sound system further detract from making this a worthwhile purchase.

Overall then it is still difficult to find any other word to sum up the game than ‘different’. Whilst no revolution in shooter or soldier titles, the game does what it says rather well, the size of the maps suites the number of players on most servers, the vehicles are not allowed an overwhelming dominance (except on the tank maps, of course), and the system is much more meritocratic then many other currently popular titles (although the scoreboard could offer a breakdown of a players’ performance instead of a mere score). Perhaps another trial will persuade more players…

It should be pointed out that these observations take into account only a low-to-medium standard of play. Naturally at the top end of the game, the rules change almost beyond comparison. But the basic point is that C&C Generals still has regular players of all standards, and as a result, gamers can expect a wide variety of different tactics being produced on the field. The closer one gets to the top, of course, the more emphasis on the ‘real-time’ strategy elements of the genre, i.e. time management – the rush. Getting troops onto the field, micromanaging them, and using them to the greatest effect is the essence of the game, and new players will often find a number of variants in this line being used against them. But to make comparison with WarCraft 3, where nearly every game for the beginner will end in a high-level undead hero and an army of crypt fiends storming into their base, whilst they are yet fighting some local creeps, new C&C Generals/Zero Hour players can expect to at least put up a fight, even where this may sometimes feel to be completely ineffectual.

Multiplayer Muddles

But here is where we find some of the biggest problems with the game. Simply organising a multiplayer game can be a feat in itself. Leaving issues to the game’s netcode aside for the time being, mention has to be made of the deplorable state of C&C Generals’ multiplayer lobby. Whilst in principle everything a gamer could need is in place, simple and easy to use, there are simple too many ‘minor niggles’. Focusing on the game’s “custom game” option, all of the rooms a player could want are present, and whilst a number of these are for the most part empty, this can only reflect the game’s declining status and the natural tendency for gamers to set up games in the busier rooms. The problem comes when setting up a game: the length of time between a game being created and players subsequently being able to join it can vary from a matter of seconds to sometimes over a minute in length. When attempting to coordinate a game with friends therefore, this can be a painstaking process. If the game should fail to work, for whatever reason (more on that later), the players will be exited back to the lobby screen, occasionally into a completely different room than the one they created or joined the game, adding another delay should the player fail to notice and go on creating a new game.

Which brings us to the game’s built in buddy list. Aside from an unconfirmed bug regarding the number of ‘buddies’ a player can safely have before it introduces problems starting games, this has to be one of the most ineffectual implementations of a feature of this kind since Steam’s permanently workbench-bound Friends. Whilst the system works beautifully to allow players in different lobbies to find one another, and indeed to chat with players currently playing a game, the list maddeningly allows users to see when their buddies are hosting games – but not join them! It does not even indicate which lobby room the game is hosted in, forcing players to either search the various rooms (hoping the game has already appeared) or else ask.

Unfortunately, at times one of the game’s major flaws can mean that the game is only ever fun if one has similarly skilled friends to play with, namely the difficulty which arises trying to find suitable opponents. Trying to tag up games based on players’ skill levels is all very well, but what lies between the well defined ‘noob’ and ‘pro’ levels? Would that be ‘noobish’, ‘semi’, or simply ‘not pro’? Ultimately these labels require players to exude a modicum of honesty and decency in their play. Whilst EA cannot be blamed for the immaturity of a large number of players, they should be apportioned at least some of the blame for the difficulty of judging a player’s skill level. Many players on their introduction to multiplayer Generals will no doubt find themselves crushed comprehensively in what they believed to be a beginners’ game by a skilled veteran, only to then be jeered as a ‘noob’ or some other insult thrown before the final volley artillery barrage ends the game. But didn’t the game say that was his first game? Sadly there is nothing to prevent players creating new ‘accounts’ using a new name and then tricking their way into games below their standard. Fortunately this applies to only the most unscrupulous and immature of players, but that is only the most extreme example of problems in the ranking system. In judging a player’s skill there is only the barest of information to go on; how many games they’ve played under that name (in wins, losses and disconnects), and any hints they can glean surreptitiously from their name or choice of team. Why is this insufficient? Because even as one gains more experience in the game, the win/loss statistics give no representation of how those results were garnered. Has the player been playing only against strong opposition to accrue so many losses? Perhaps the player is a master of the 1v1 rush, but will be lost in the greater scale of a 3v3 battlefield. These amongst other issues often result in it being difficul to find adequately skilled opponents for a game, problems which do not dissipate as a player gets more results under the belt.

Options, options, options!

With the RTS species advanced as far as it has, it seems crazy that such a representative of the genre should come with many of the default options available to the gamer removed. Of course, there are meritted arguments to removing some of the features common to the game’s ilk, such as making for a much simplified interface, allowing the game to be picked up much more easily, and rewarding the better players for micromanaging their troops. But is this any reason to remove the options altogether? Why could they not be hidden not unlike the rarely used ‘guard’ and ‘formation’ features? Changing a unit’s in-game stances, for example, has been a common features since the days of Total Annihilation – Generals makes do with a catch-all ‘retaliation’ button in the options menu.

This endemic lack of options extends further into the multiplayer game. It seems reasonable that to play a customised game, players should not be able to record the result in their statistics, but this largely ignores the fact that the game can hardly be altered anyway. Aside from a few general options as regards starting money, and severely restricting team options or superweapons, there is nothing a player can do without using a mod. This results in players making informal decisions before the start, often writing rules in the titles of their games which to players new to the game often seems at first glance to be some sort of insider code. Yet due to limitations in the game’s design, these informal rules can never be anything more than gentleman’s agreements, and are often quibbled over mid-game. Indeed with no solid game restricted definitions, some rules seem widely open to interpretation. Does “no superweapons” mean they cannot be built at all, thereby removing certain upgrades, or does it merely restrict their being used? Does “no rush” include building offensively placed structures? Indeed one other key issue with the game’s design means that when an informal agreement is made dictating how long a moratorium on offenses should last, this cannot hope to take into account any slowdown in the game caused by one/more slow computers amongst players, as there is no time feature built into the game.

Bugs and coding

Some final mention should be made to the game’s few remaining bugs, particularly as regards netcode. To EA’s credit the game generally runs quite bug free, thanks to the fixes included in the expansion pack, and other subsequent patches. The few that remain, such as an unconfirmed bug in the total length of players’ names prevented a 4v4 game from starting, are relatively minor annoyances which do not detract from the gameplay (the difficulty of getting a 4v4 in the first place negates the effect of this added potential bug). However, there are still a few which gameplay bugs and exploits which should have been fixed by EA in what would probably prove to be a final patch.

As regards the game’s netcode however, problems would appear so deeply ingrained as to be insoluble. For anyone who has enjoyed the ease of playing a WarCraft 3 multiplayer game, a few clicks away from the main screen, the difficulty of getting a system successfully set up for Generals might seem more complicated than it is worth. Indeed it often appears that where a system has been correctly configured, it might only work in certain situations: often a player will find 1v1 games work a charm, whilst games requiring a larger number of connections (2v2 etc.) might faulter. Were it easy to distinguish which player is incorrectly configured, this would not be much of an issue, but as the game often will not load if a single connection is not made, this can be a frustrating experience (worse is when the game does load, only for a player to subsequently be eliminated as certain connections have not been made). And yet the number of ports apparently required for multiplayer Generals play would seem quite overkill, as a quick search on the Internet suggests the following: TCP ports 80, 6667, 28910, 29900 and 29920, plus UDP ports 4321 and 27900. Why any game should require port 80 to be open is unfathomable.

Overall then this game has offered a fairly balanced experience to the RTS genre, and its longevity is only evident from the number of players still to be found on its online system. This is despite the number of problems and poor design features of the online system which detract from playing quick, decent games. The problems of player skill levels could easily be remedied using any number of available models from other ranking systems, and whilst preventing players creating new accounts is perhaps to be avoided, allowing different people to play on the same account (albeit not simultaneously), some form of limit to the number of accounts allowed might deter skilled players from creating new accounts purely for the purposes of ‘noobie bashing’. Of course, before one can even get this far, it is often necessary to have set up some port forwarding or firewall rules to allow the game to even connect to online multiplayer games, which works contrary to what has obviously been an attempt to create an easily playable game. Whilst the purest in me demands options, we can always look to Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander for that, but the numerous problems associated with Generals’ online system and netcode are unforgiveable. Some may blame the corporate centralisation within that EA monolith, and if they are right, we can only hope that distribution platforms such as Steam will redress that balance. It may be too late (and no doubt too uneconomical) to fix the problems which hound Generals. We can only hope for better in the future.