The New Flesh

That's me on the left

I experienced one of the perks of moving to London this weekend when I spent the weekend at that Eurogamer Expo (can we start calling it E2?). I’m not going to say much about it because I should really be reading ‘The myth of sense-date’ by some berk called Winston Barnes but I want to mention a few things so I’ll just jot a paragraph or two down on each of the highlights and shove them up below. First (or rather last since I’ll post this post last to delibrately break the reverse time order blog format of the site) let me tell a bit of my story of the weekend because it was quite cool dammit.

This confuses me, why is it that people are rewarded for being first the queue? I mean really, why is it considered good to turn up to events incredibly early? Why is it a good thing to wait six bloody hours early when turning up an hour early will get you in the venue at about the same time? It makes no damn sense. However as a selfish consumer if there are freebies on offer for turning up six hours early then they’re going to bloody well be mine! So yeah, I sat in the cold on a dreay monday morning and for my troubles I got a free copy of Uncharted 2, the chance to meet Ellie and Bertie of Eurogamer, a WET t-shirt (I also tried out the game when I was in there, my impression: it’s rather shit) and an apearence on the Eurogamer website. I don’t own a PS3 which did lessen my excitement at what was theoretically the main prize but I intend to get one once my university gets round to paying me so you know, still cool and it’s great to have a physical momento of the event.

I also managed to purely accidentally sneak in early to the Split/Second presentation and for some reason nobody threw me out (maybe Eurogamer thought I was with Black Rock and Black Rock thought I was with Eurogamer? Or maybe it was just because I was wearing a shirt and thus obviously important? I dunno) but appart from the heart pounding induced form my the growing realisation that I really wasn’t meant to be there that was actually pretty dull. Apart from that my experience was probably quite normal. I went to a lot of presentations on a lot of cool games. I got to ask Tom Bramwell why the heck he changed the scoring policy in the Ask Eurogamer session and then made a right mess of my second question because two ideas got mixed up in my head. I got some hands on time with a lot of other cool games, the highlights of which I’ll write about below. I chatted to a few random people, one of whom turned out to work for a friend of mine and another turned out to be LewieP of savygamer. In short I can’t wait till next year. I wonder how much I have to write here in order to qualify for a press pass…

Now for some links to what I saw: -

Plain Sight – my personal game of the show

Split/Second – a new one for my watch list

Aliens vs Predator – very good fun so far

Heavy Rain – the other reason I’ll need to by a PS3

Okay one out of left field which perhaps says more about me as a gamer than anything else but Plain Sight was my game of the show. Shoved into a lions den of tripple-A titles this was the one game that really left me buzzing and made me overcome by shyness and chat to the rep/dev.

The stand such that it was looked oddly out of place with four very ordinary PCs (in contrast all the other PCs on show looked like this) set up in a spare corner of the show floor that wasn’t listing in the program and decorated with with some very home made looking posters (home made in the home of someone with an obvious talent for graphic design but still home made). It looked suspiciously like first time indie developers Beatnik Games had called Eurogamer at the last minute and begged for some floor space. Whoever decided to let them come made a good call because what they had on show was damn good.

Plain Sight is a mutliplayer game where you play a little insanely agile robot with a katana that double jumps it’s way around all sides of a floating level where gravity seems to be defined partly by the last surface you jumped off and partly on the centre of gravity of the object you’re jumping around on (I’m not sure, it’s weird but you get the hang of it very quickly). Combat is a bit TPS and a little bit modern flight sim because you run and jump arround in third person but spend most of the time (once you work out how to do anything but run, jump and die which does take a while) trying to get target lock-on and when you do you click again and go flying towards the other robot and bash him, at least assuming he doesn’t dodge or block. It’s very unique and enormously good fun. There’s also this points scoring system that ties back into how powerful you are which looks like where the depth might come from.

I had a brief chat with one of the devs and apparently they’re hoping to do another beta later this year, one more early next year and then release it on PC. I suspect it’ll be a bit of a cult hit to begin with because it certainly isn’t pick up and play because the combat mechanic is so odd but it has that jena se qua. I also suspect that it’ll be a huge hit on the consoles once they get a console version done because the attack system would be a good fit for a joypad since aiming doesn’t really come into it, however when that will I did not ask so cannot say.

Heavy Rain aka the other reason I need to buy PS3. Heavy Rain is in many ways the next stage in the evolution of the adventure game. First there were the text adventures, then the point and click adventures and now Heavy Rain. People have been struggling to say what genre Heavy Rain is but I think it’s fairly obviously a choose your own adventure but in graphical videogame. Narratively Heavy Rain is a traditional thriller, the son of one of the four viewpoint characters has been kidnapped by a serial killer and according to the killers modus operandi this means he’ll show up dead in exactly four days. It looks very dark and nasty like the film Seven and the stories of the four characters intertwine in a fashion that’s probably something like Magnolia.

The multiple player characters, although nothing new, is still a brilliant and underused storytelling device for a story based video games. The big problem with games is that your main character is always fine unless they’re not meant to be. The first time you watch Halloween you don’t know if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is going to survive or not, you think she is but then you think quite a lot of things and John Carpenter is far too good a storyteller to let you get away with all of them so maybe she doesn’t. When you play Dead Space you know the dude in the lower left corner of your screen is going to survive because if he doesn’t then there’s no game and you know, he’s died a couple of times in the last few hours so if he dies again I’ll just reload and everything will be fine. Not so in Heavy Rain because you have four characters they can die, they’re each expendable, it’ll change the story but if you screw up and, as happened to me during the demo level, you “fail” an action sequence and the player character gets beaten to death by a car mechanic then that’s what happened and the story moves on. Maybe he was bound to die in that scene and it was just an illusion that my lack of familiarity with the PS3 controller killed him, I don’t know and that uncertainty makes it exciting. One things for sure, when I get the full game I’ll play that action sequence like my life depends upon it.

Now let me talk Quick Time Events since they’re the elephant in the room. The action sequences in Heavy Rain are controlled by QTEs and the problem is that in my opinion most QTEs suck. However I’d argue that while these are QTEs they have a couple of vital saving graces, firstly they aren’t replayable and secondly they’re unique to the context of the events. Combined that means that during a play through of the game you never know what button you might need to press next, you never have to learn the sequence and you never repeat it until you produce it perfectly because if you screw it up then the moment is gone. When my character got beaten to death that was it. Full stop. No second chances, the moment is gone, the game goes on to the next scene with whatever the consequences your failure. There’s no practising and getting these things right and being held back until you do get them right, basically no awful QTE grinding. There’s just a story that you can control in a fairly meaningful fashion using controls that adjust dynamically to the actions the in game character wants to make, push right to roll right, move the six-axis sharply down to smash a bottle over someone’s head etc. I think it’ll work really well, I couldn’t get the full impression in the demo because I spent the whole time trying to remember which was the triangle and which was the square but I think once I can “touch type” a Playstation controller like most PS3 owners it’ll work really well. I’m really looking forward to this and you’ll probably be hearing more about it here in Q1 next year when it releases.

AvP was the most fun I had with any game on the show floor but I am slightly worried about longevity. I played one eight player deathmatch on the PS3 version and I had a ton of fun. I was playing an Alien because the Predator looked a lot more complicated (cloaking, health, multiple weapons etc) and I can’t shoot with a joypad for toffee so Colonial Marine would have been even more suicidal than normal. I also watched quite a lot of Predator play and a little bit of Colonial Marine play. Much of the game as Aliens or Predators boiled down to running about avoiding direct confrontation and pressing the Square button whenever you got behind anyone to perform a set piece stealth kill and then finding that while the animation was playing someone else had run up behind you and pressed the Square button to stealth kill you (which is great when your the last person standing in such a chain, not so much the rest of the time). Play as Colonial Marines seemed to boil down to dying a lot although if you don’t get the jump on them their guns clearly make them the most dangerous opponents for an Alien since running away is always a good option against a Predator or at least against a n00b predator who hasn’t learnt how to shoot.

The best moment was taking out both the guys sitting on either side of me who were playing semi-cooperatively as marines in an attempt to survive. I got the first with a stealth kill and the second, who had just seen me kill his buddy, by making a semi-suicidal leap directly towards him and going mental with my attack buttons. He swore. I smiles and then got stealth killed by a predator. Good times. I think the problem is those stealth kills are rather too easy. In theory they’re just like a back stab in TF2 but they’re actually far far easier than that and you get a pop-up telling you when it’ll work that’s far easier to read than the knife changing position in TF2 so it often didn’t feel particularly skilful. Still that just console multiplayer deathmatch among a bunch of n00bs based on some early code. I should think the Marines would certainly get a healthy buff from mouse control and the sneaky bastard Predator looks like it’ll be formidable in the hands of someone who knows how to use it but for a n00b like me on this code it was Alien for the mid-table obscurity. I’m still more excited by the prospect of the single player campaigns which I didn’t an opportunity to look at but I think I’ll be spending a fare few hours with both halves of this game and there aren’t many games I’ve ever thought that about. Definitely looks like a must buy when it comes out in February. I’ll be getting it for the PC but it’s also coming out on 360 and PS3.

Split/Second wasn’t even on my radar before I went along to it’s developer presentation on Friday. I went along anyway and I have to say was really impressed. I later got to play a couple of races on the show floor and see how it actually handles. It’s a racing game of course, it’s from Black Rock who are the same guys who did Pure and it’s looking pretty good. It’s in pre-alpha and set for a 2010 release on the three powerful platforms but it’s already looking very nice. The concept is that your racing on a future racing TV show and the racers, both you and the AI get to set off traps and shortcuts ahead of you to spice up the action. It’s a paper thin excuse for some big set piece Michael Bay style explosions in an arcade racing game but who cares, this ain’t Heavy Rain. I’m slightly worried it’ll be two easy to learn the tracks and all they’re traps to the point where in spite of the eye candy you treat it just like a normal racer but I think as a silly racer it’ll good generate some good moments, particularly in multiplayer. It’s certainly given the arcade racer a little bit of a shake, enough to set it apart from the likes of Need for Speed and it’s very very pretty so yeah, I’m adding this to my watch list.

So yeah… that was a bit of a pork pie as the cockneys might say. The site isn’t dead but it is rather comatose at the minute and probably will be for the next couple of weeks. I know you probably don’t want to hear about my private life but I can’t explain why I’m being so rubbish without it.

Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood is undoubtedly one of the most visually impress 3D indie games I’ve ever seen. It also plays pretty well, sounds pretty good, seems technically solid and has it’s own fairly unique style and yet none of that can save it.

I can’t shake the feeling that this is big. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is more than just a game, more than just a port of an old game onto modern computers, a paradigm for the future of video game preservation, that LucasArts has made the move to produce this game may ultimately prove as important as the Abandonware movement, Good Old Games or DOSbox. Right now it’s an amusement but culturally this is a big step forward. Also as a game it freakin’ rocks.

Oh dear, has it really been over two weeks? Thing is I’ve done something rather foolish. The fact is that in the real world I’m a postgraduate student with a thesis due by the end of September and so every moment I don’t spend procrastinating is being devoted to that right now and probably will do until I actually get the damn thing submitted on September 30th. So realistically, whatever my good intention I’m probably not going to get into a decent update routine any time soon.

Starting up a new website while writing up my thesis probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do but in my defence I never expected anyone to read it. The plan was that I wouldn’t do much with this place before September 30th and then when that ticked round I’d put some real time into it and start telling people about it and maybe get some readers after that so really this pre-October phase is a beta that I threw up to get a feel of what I would do and so I’d have some sort of short archive under my belt once I really started to devote time to it.

Anyway what I’m really saying is sorry it’s rubbish at the minute and I’m not updating a reasonable amount at the moment but come October… come October it’ll still be rubbish but there should at least be more of it.

P.S. I swear I’ll my ‘Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition’ review finished in the next couple of days.

Just a quick post to give you the good news that in an interveiw for CNET News Bill Gates himself has said that they’re bringing Project Natal to PC and also to say that I called it. It may have been obvious, sure anyone with half a brain could have called it but guess who did call it? ME! Jack Black wrote the one note song and I called Project Natal for PC.