Monthly Archives: August 2008

Comparison is a death knell to sibling harmony.

I’ve recently been trying to work out why I just can’t seem to get along nicely with Guild Wars; it’s like some sort of truculent sibling, where we both pretend to get on amiably when there are adults around who might clout us around the head as a reprimand for our rambunctious wrangling, but as soon as we’re out of sight, we set-to like a wild west bar brawl: all swagger and posture followed by a short frantic battle of head grabbing, arm flapping and tumbling off of elevated platforms into piles of cardboard boxes, or in my case when I was younger, onto piles of Lego bricks, whence I’d spend the rest of the afternoon explaining to adults that my face wasn’t presenting a strange new version of the pox that consisted of uniform rows of dots in 6×1, 4×2, 2×1 and 4×4 formations.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Guild Wars is a good game, but this only makes it all the more frustrating to me as to why I can’t play it for any length of time before abandoning it. The graphics are not the problem that’s for sure, the environments are beautiful and detailed, and the characters are not the most unattractive I’ve ever seen. Admittedly they do all have this weird hunched shoulder thing going on, as if they’re all trying to make themselves more intimidating in PvP by drawing themselves up higher, like a cat arches its back, only they’ve done it one too many times, the wind changed direction, and now they’re stuck with their shoulders up around their ears. Also, in profile many of the faces look as though they have been worked over with a rolling pin until flat enough to make pasta. Regardless, I’ve never stumbled at the character customisation options, and have always managed to create a character pulchritudinous enough to satisfy my sad desire for an abstractly attractive avatar.

Character creation is fine as well, there are plenty of interesting classes to choose from and the fact that you get another of these classes as a secondary, and can vary it at will (after reaching a certain level), means that there’s plenty of variety to be had with a character’s fundamental abilities. Abilities though, I think this is where things start to unravel for me. The abilities themselves are fine, excellent in fact, so many interesting skills that often can be combined with other skills to create a combination that is more powerful than the individual skills taken on their own. No, it’s the lack of ability to employ many of those skills in a given mission that begins to give me that itch just behind my eyes that tells me all is not well in the mind of Melmoth. The short of it, for me at least, is that eight skills in Guild Wars just isn’t enough when you have so many excellent abilities that you’d like to have to hand. To quote Lazarus Long:


A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

For each mission you are forced to specialise from a vast range of varying and potentially useful skills into a very limited set, and once you take into account that to be effective you’re usually looking for several of these skills to combine into a manoeuvre that is more powerful than the individual skills themselves, you seemingly end up being able to do only a couple of things each mission. Press 1, 2, 3 and that gives you effect X, press 4, 5, 6 and you get effect Y, and then abilities 7 and 8 are often reserved for emergency use: resurrection abilities and such. At least this is the way things have played-out for me in the limited time I’ve managed to stick with the game, and if it gets better later on I’m in a catch-22 situation, where I’ve got to continue with the thing that puts me off playing in order to get to a stage where I’ll continue playing.

To be honest, I’m disappointed with myself, because if there’s any one thing that I want to see in future MMOs its a deck building sub-game involving a character’s abilities, such that you learn skills and then find interesting ways to combine them in order to create a ‘deck’ of skills as per many collectible card games, and thus have the ability to surprise opponents with unexpected and unusual combinations. And this is what Guild Wars does (I hear the proponents of the game screaming at me, but only in eight different ways), and I recognise this, but it just doesn’t work as well as the CCG mechanic and I’ll tell you why I think this is: chance and variety. In CCGs you build a deck of, say, forty cards and within those forty cards you select a raft of cards that combine with one another in ways that make them more powerful when combined (it’s the Captain Planet way), but because of the number of cards available, you can often include many combinations that work with several of the same cards while keeping within the general theme or purpose of the deck. The joy and excitement, and sometimes frustration, comes from the fact that you don’t know which combinations might come to the fore due to the random drawing of the cards, and the fact that there is a variety of things that you might be able to do, but there is also an equal variety of things your opponent might be able to do to counter you or to make you have to change your strategy. I think this is where I end-up frustrated with Guild Wars, it comes so close to my ideal of a slightly random, wildly varied skill combining combat system, and yet falls far enough away from the mark as to make the contrast between my ideal and the reality of the situation that much more jarring.

The other thing that often drives me from the game is the frenetic pace of the combat. Perhaps I’m just a bit slow, or L2P U GIANT N00B as they say on the streets of downtown Ascalon, but combat for me goes a little something like this:

Ok Melmoth, this is it, come on now, there’s the enemy and there’s only five of them, you’ve got four henchmen backing you up, you can do this!

Right, here we go, move forward a little bit to try to get into range so that I can select them, then I can call a targ… oh lord they’ve spotted us already! Where’s all my health gone?! I, uh, what skills did I pick to heal with?! Too late, I’m dead for sure… oh wait, the healer henchmen has me back to full health! Huzzah for you Mr Healer, you’re a credit to your professi… hey where has everyone gone? Oh crikey they’re all over there attacking the enemy.

Ok, in combat range now, I’ll start my first combo, 1. Pow! 2. Clang! 3. 3. 3? What do you mean I don’t have enough energy?! Oh gods my health is almost zero again, how did that happen?! Mash the heal button. Still not enough energy? Damnit I’m dying here! Ok, enough energy now, Melmoth heal thyself! Damnit the healer henchman got a heal on me first, so that was a total waste of a heal. Never mind Melmoth, never mind, there’re still a few enemies to mop up. Let’s start our combo. again. 1. 1? 1?! Not enough energy? What?! Oh right, my heal used it all. Tum te tum, just wait for a bit of energy. Ok there we go, right, time to attack! 1! Yes! 2. 2? 2?! My target is dead? Oh for fu… ok, never mind I’ll just run over to the last mob and have a go at him, right, almost there. Hello my henchmen! Your beloved leader is here to help! Stand back and watch the master at work, aaaannnnd 1! Oh, you’ve killed the mob.

I seem to spend every combat either trying to get to a new target because my current one has died before I have managed to reach all the way from the ‘w’ key to press the ‘1’ key to start an attack, or I spend time waiting for my energy to regenerate because I’ve already used TWO WHOLE skills, by which time the mob is dead and I have to find a new target. If it’s not enough that I’m limited in a mission to just eight skills from the vast array of excellent skills that my character has learnt, half the time I can’t use many of those skills because my energy supply is so short. I’m basically reduced to being an auto-attack automaton, or so it seems, and I find this very frustrating.

The curious thing is that although I enjoy combat in WoW, when I’ve come to analyse what I actually do during each fight it basically amounts to using probably no more than three or four skills over and over, whilst sometimes throwing in the odd extra ability from the five thousand little used powers that I have spread across half my screen on twenty different action bars. City of Heroes likewise, where you probably have ten abilities that you use over and over, and you don’t get to swap them between missions for other cool and exciting abilities like you do in Guild Wars! Yet combat in City of Heroes is more enjoyable to me, it’s still fairly frantic and it can be quite scary when you’re facing a group of mobs large enough that they can quantify their gross domestic product, but it doesn’t leave me with this feeling of frustration and inadequacy at the end of each fight, more one of elation and power.

For me Guild Wars is one of those curious anomalies in a gamer’s experience, a game that on paper has everything that I could want in a massively multiplayer game, and yet for some reason fails to capture the imagination or present a hook large enough to reel me in. For now I’ll just have to sit quietly next to Guild Wars in the back seat of the car and sneak in gut punches to it when the adults aren’t looking in the rear view mirror.

We have all the time in the world

I’m totally hooked on Mass Effect at the moment, really enjoying it. Exploring the galaxy, Killing evil constructs a-plenty, Achieving the Achievements and Socialising with NPCs (particularly a couple of members of the crew, if you know what I mean), it ticks all the boxes. It strikes a nice balance, giving enough side quests and options that you don’t feel you’re totally on rails without being so open that you’re overwhelmed with choice. While the side quests are entirely optional I’m always drawn to them just in case there’s some especially shiny reward, which can lead to some slightly odd situations plot-wise: “Commander, the GALAXY is in MORTAL PERIL and TIME is of the ESSENCE! You must find the EVIL MASTERMIND with ALL SPEED before he DESTROYS US ALL! Oh, and some cult has gone a bit mad, there’s maybe twenty or thirty people in mild peril on some godforsaken planet nobody cares about.” “Really? Mild peril you say? Sounds like loot to be had, call the Evil Mastermind and tell him to hold off on the galactic destruction, I’ll be round later…”

Guess if you can, choose if you dare

I know, I know, you should use special visual filters, or ideally some form of direct projection or display screen, but like a fool I looked directly into the Paul Barnett and have thus developed an unquenchable desire to play Warhammer Online. There’s a strong argument for not leaping into a new MMO at the very moment of release (see Van Hemlock‘s three month rule), but as Jon pointed out at the ChilliFest the lower level regions might be somewhat empty (chickens apart) after a while, which would put a bit of a crimp on the early tier public quests and RvR scenarios, so there are rational reasons for playing from the start. As well as OOH SHINY NEW TOY WANT GIVE GIVE GIVE ok bored now.

Having decided to play, it’s time to start making choices. Or at least time to start researching some choices, draw a tentative initial conclusion, become wracked with indecision over every piece of information that emerges suggesting it was a terrible decision before finally, when faced with the actual options on screen in the game itself, going to pieces, forgetting everything and blindly clicking in panic at random buttons until something happens. Or is that just me?

Though vast swathes of the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere are engulfed in the raging flames of informed debate, at the smouldering edges there’s some decent information to start working with, so first up, what ruleset? Nice easy starter for ten, Core ruleset for me, never been a fan of Open PvP and it doesn’t sounds like there’s any shortage of RvR options on a core server when you want them.

Next the faction, Order or Destruction? Call me a hippie but I’m in favour of peace and fellowship for all, and if I have to wipe out every creature of Destruction in a bloody frenzy to achieve that then so much the better. Order it is. Reports so far suggest Destruction has the edge in numbers on beta servers, but that might not carry through to release, and even if it does it could be quite fun to encourage that plucky underdog spirit. Or it might be a never-ending nightmare of continual invasion with the capital being burnt down on a daily basis (twice on Wednesdays), but hey…

Race and class; now comes the difficult stuff. I’m erring towards a DPS class, after interesting but ultimately not-entirely-successful forays into tanking and healing in various other games. The Bright Wizard seems to take a similar approach to my beloved Fire/Fire Blaster from City of Heroes (try and set stuff on fire before it kills you), so that’s the current plan, though I’ll try a few other options in beta.

That’s a start, at least. Still to come: The Great Server Debate (trying to predict what a server community might become based on the name alone), The Epic Quest of Guild Seeking, and The Agony of Career Mastery Indecision.

Warhammer Online: The Age of Cogitating.

For those of our readers who are too busy to trawl through the many blog posts out there, here’s a brief summary of the current ‘debate’ circling the MMO blogosphere concerning WAR (and what it’s good for):

WAR Orchard

——————————————————————————–

(Opening music)
Announcer: MMO Blogger Theatre comes live tonight from the Evon MMO Blogger Theatre near Guildford. L. D. Blogger, M. J. Blogger and R.S. Blogger star in The WAR Orchard by Mythic Entertainment. The action takes place near the real world in the 2000’s.

Bloggers: (War song, knock knock)
COME IN!
(Crash)
NO, OPEN THE DOOR AND COME IN!
SORRY!
HELLO!
SORRY!
SHUT UP!
I GOT MY HEAD STUCK IN THE CUPBOARD
SORRY!
SHUT UP!
I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING
HELLO!
(Smash)
I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING
HELLO!
SHUT UP, MR. BLOGGER
(Smash)
UHH, MY BRAIN HURTS
SHUT UP!
SORRY!
OOOHH!
(Smash)

Announcer: Meanwhile in another area of the blogosphere several bloggers await news of the beta NDA being lifted.

Bloggers: HELLO
(Crash)
I’VE BROKEN IT, I’VE BROKEN IT
GET OFF MY FOOT
SHUT UP!
SORRY!
MY BRAIN HURTS
MY BRAIN HURTS
(Closing music)

With apologies to Monty Python’s Cherry Orchard, and no apologies to the ‘controversial’ and ‘informed’ blog debaters out there.

Finale for Fantasy?

As the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere holds its collective breath, ready to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of post-NDA Warhammer Online impressions, and the behemoth that is Wrath of the Lich King stomps slowly towards release, I was idly contemplating what might follow in their footsteps once the novelty has worn off.

With the dominant MMOGs over the past ten years including Ultimate Online, Dark Age of Camelot, the Everquests, World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, commentators frequently pondered the lack of non-fantasy games; EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa had varying degrees of success (notably EVE’s continuing growth), but fantasy has always been top dog as a setting. After WAR, though, are there any more big fantasy MMOGs in development? Champions and DC Online promise superhero fun, sci-fi TV fans have Star Trek Online and Stargate Worlds in the pipeline, Knights of the Old Republic Online gives Star Wars another bite at the massively online cherry, APB and The Agency have contemporary settings. Not much in the way of Elves, Orcs and wizard hats, though there might be a bunch of forthcoming games I haven’t come across, my research didn’t much stretch past trying to remember what’s been showing up in the blogroll recently.

Is WAR the last throw of the fantasy MMOG dice (2d8 to hit, 3d4 damage)?

Reviewlets: Fateful Choices, Farthing, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

A quick round-up of some holiday reading. As encapsulated in the subtitle, Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 examines ten key decisions of World War II, such as Britain deciding to fight on in 1940, Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union and Japan’s decision to attack the USA. It’s well written and thoroughly researched with copious footnotes, no [citations needed] here. Though world-changing, Kershaw deliberately doesn’t look at the “what if?” scenarios of different decisions being made; in almost every case the conclusion drawn is that even though some of the actions may have seemed to be based on little more than a whim, especially those involving Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, they all had such a weight of events behind them that they were all but inevitable.

Many of Kershaw’s decisions have been used as points of divergence for alternative histories, such as Jo Walton’s Farthing that I downloaded as part of Tor.com’s freebie bonanza (since finished, I’m afraid). In Farthing, Britain made an “honourable peace” with Germany after the Battle of Britain, and the book is set in the resultant 1949. It starts off as a cosy country house murder-mystery, a la Christie et. al., with twin narrators: Lucy, daughter of members of the “Farthing set” (loosely based on our timeline’s Cliveden set) and the Scotland Yard Inspector sent to investigate the murder. As the Tor website didn’t give much information past book titles and authors for the free downloads, I knew nothing else and expected it to continue in this vein, but it turns much darker as it progresses, and I don’t think it spoils things too much to say that it doesn’t conclude with everybody gathered in the library for the murderer to be unmasked. The setting is very interesting, though I didn’t really engage with the characters, but I’d be interested to see what happens in the next two instalments.

Finishing off the alternative history theme, Michael Chabon’s Nebula-, Locus- and Hugo-winning The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Not too much else to add to all the awards, it took a little while to get going but once I got to grips with the language and setting I really enjoyed the hardboiled story.

Bonekickers: Week 6

A brief digression back to week five to start with, being on holiday at the time and only just catching up; I thought the World War I plot generally worked, apart from the Genius Plan of nudging Germany and France towards peace by finding the remains of Joan of Arc (apparently because they’d been smuggled away from the English by a German monk). Maybe my appreciation of the political situation in 1917 is somewhat lacking, but that seemed a bit like suggesting the real driving force behind the armistice between Italy and the Allies in 1943 was a crack team of bakers who’d been parachuted in to make a load of Garibaldi biscuits as a symbol of the historic links between the nations. Hmm, I have an idea for an episode for series two… I like to think the episode started off with a half-sane plot, but the writer was ordered to crowbar in a reference to a Special Sword, and eventually managed to tone down the initial suggestion of Winston Churchill standing atop a tank, hurtling into battle at 4mph waving Excalibur before leaping off and having a swordfight with Kaiser Wilhelm II, into the Joan of Arc idea.

So on to the finale, and we discover, sure enough, that the Special Sword oh-so-subtly crammed into each of the preceding episodes is, of course, Excalibur, forged from a meteorite in (mumble) BC, passing down through history, but only into the hands of people involved in previous episodes of Bonekickers. Handy, that. There’s also Staggering Revelation II, from the end of episode five, that Magwilde and Viv are sisters, that the audience cares about less than going “ooh, look, it’s that one from Press Gang” when Dexter Fletcher turns up. Then we get a bunch of tedious waffle on Tennyson, Magwilde’s mothers notes, some secret society called The Disciples of Good Use whose primary purpose appears to be to stand around wearing white masks for no good reason and definitely *not* being the Masons or the Illuminati or anyone else who might sue (or send white masked assassins) and a general chase around sub-3-2-1 riddles to find Excalibur, which of course is in a lake. The episode finally picks up pace for the inevitable confrontation between Our Heroes and The Pointless Society, the absolute highlight of the entire series being ‘Dolly’ Parton advancing on knife-wielding cultists shouting a bunch of dates at them (this may seem like a really stupid idea, but it is of course a well-established technique from Fisher’s Guide To Non-Physical Violence) before yelling “don’t mess with me, I’m an archaeologist!” and hitting someone with a torch. Excalibur is plucked from the depths, seized by Chief Bad Guy, and, like every other historical artefact the team have come within a three mile radius of, destroyed when he swings at the team and misses. With the sword shattered, he promptly hops into the lake, and it’s home for tea and biscuits again.

The problems with Bonekickers really start with the main characters, the right team can carry off daft plots, but Magwilde in particular must be one of the least sympathetic lead characters of recent history, with emotions ranging from Quite Cross to A Bit Crotchety. Still, underneath that gruff, angry shell there was a heart of… angry gruffness. Were we really supposed to be rooting for her, or just hoping each week for some catastrophic misfortune? Viv and Ben barely got anything to do past being The Naive One Asking Questions and The Sensible One, the attempt at sexual tension between Ben and Magwilde was laughable, the amazing revelation of Viv being Madwilde’s sister was dull and pointless, only ‘Dolly’ Parton showed a few glimpses of character. Plot-wise… well, the less said the better, really, and that’s before trying to tie Excalibur into everything as a series arc. Still, the utter absurdity kept me watching, if only to find out quite how bad it could get. If it does make it back for a second series, I really hope they scale things back, focus on (some new and watchable) characters more, and less on finding (and setting fire to) AMAZING HISTORY and being pursued by a SECRET CULT for it on a weekly basis. Either that, or just abandon any pretence at even a nodding relation to reality and go with Boudica and Joan of Arc having a lightsabre fight in a lost nuclear submarine in Atlantis.

You’re Not The Boss Of Me

Melmoth’s overwhelming joy at the finely balanced ending of Assassin’s Creed surely strikes a chord with any seasoned gamer out there. Haven’t we all got a bunch of Stupid Final Boss/Mission stories? Maybe you spent the entire game collecting an arsenal so vast your character must have a wheelbarrow piled high with military ordnance, the game glossing over the couple of minutes between pressing “3” and “4” where you chuck your shotgun on top of the pile and rummage around for an assault rifle (“… crossbow, nope, tripod mounted heavy machine gun, nope, oh for heaven’s sake I had it just a minute ago… I’ll be right with you, sorry for the delay… under the flamethrower, there it is! Right, thanks awfully for waiting *BLAM*), only just before the end you’re conveniently captured, and pitched into battle against the most fearsome opponent ever seen armed only with whatever you can grab from the room you were locked in (if you’re lucky and the enemy were following The A-Team’s Guide To Encapturement, this would be a fully equipped workshop with enough power tools, hydraulic components and advanced electronics to whip up a rudimentary Battlemech; more often it’s someone’s office, and you have to do battle armed only with a stapler and a mug emblazoned with “You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Try And Fight Someone Armed Only With This Mug, But It Helps!!1!”) Maybe it’s a battle that defies any previously encountered logic, so instead of just shooting someone a lot you have to start up a generator to provide power to a PA system, insert the right CD, find a hat and cane then do a quick tap dance routine to the sounds of “From Enslavement To Obliteration” causing the boss to lower his guard. At which point you shoot him. Maybe it’s just a monster with fifty times the health/armour/firepower of anything seen up until that point.

There’s a couple that stick in my mind. In Knights of the Old Republic I spent many happy hours slicing down waves of evil Sith with a couple of lightsabres, then got pitched into a boss fight where (as far as I recall) only a certain subset of force powers were any use at all, all of which I’d entirely ignored in favour of the Stab People With Lightsabres A Lot abilities. Then there was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where the final mission starts with fighting through the mansion of your mortal foe, shooting your way through a couple of hundred of his minions, not a cakewalk in itself. Then! The boss himself, in the grand tradition of all games ever insanely tough and heavily armoured, requiring a solid half hour of being shot right in the head before he’ll contemplate shuffling off this mortal coil. The end, right? Oh no. Now the mansion’s on fire, and you have to get out of there within a fairly tight time limit. Not really expecting that, I was lightly flame grilled the first time, and had to fight through the minions *again*, and the boss *again*. So you escape. And then! AND THEN! There’s only a bleedin’ car chase or something, where you have to catch a Ferrari, starting from a bicycle. Or you might have had your feet nailed to a block of concrete, I can’t remember the details as I was a bit busy smashing a keyboard into fragments at the time.

I can see the theory, you want your players to have a sense of achievement at the end of everything; without a Stupid Boss Fight there’s the risk of The Great Anticlimax, where you give some ruffian a light slap only to discover he was the Evil Mastermind Of Everything and you just defeated him. I have a habit of saving up consumables in RPGs (potions, wands, rings with limited charges etc.) “just in case”, so there were a couple of instances (especially if consumable effects stacked) where I’d find myself in the final battle pumped up on more alchemical narcotics than a participant in the Tour de France and followed by as many summoned minions as would fit on screen, so maybe the old “I’ve been captured” routine does have its place. Every game also has its really hardcore fans, some of whom can complete a level blindfolded. Using only two fingers of one hand. While suspended upside down in a straitjacket. In a tank of water. Sometimes you get the feeling they were the ones doing QA on that final encounter, and it was tweaked until they stopped filing bug reports reading “LOL EEZY!”

Preferable to a Mandatory Stupid Boss Fight is some sort of optional insanity, like unlocking a new ludicrous difficulty level after completing the game. That way normal mortals get to see that last cut-scene, and That Guy subsequently gets to work up a light sweat against three times the normal number of opponents, constantly respawning. Guitar Hero III is an excellent example of this, after defeating the final boss in the game, the credits roll and you unlock and get to try and play along to Through The Fire And Flames by Dragonforce, which is a very silly song on many levels. At least, Guitar Hero III *would* be an excellent example… if it wasn’t for the fact that the final boss battle is really, stupidly hard itself. So near, and yet so far…

Ass arse in screed.

I finished Assassin’s Creed the other day. The more observant and pedantic amongst you will note that I said ‘finished’ and not ‘completed’, and you would be well within your rights to raise such a point, and I would give you a look of sheepishness in response, because I have merely uninstalled the game and placed it on the shelf of ‘games that I pretend I might play again some time but secretly just leave out on display because they give me gamer cred’.

As the name suggests, it’s a long shelf.

I have to confess that I didn’t complete the game, as far as the official version of completing a game goes anyway, which is generally accepted as seeing some sort of preposterous feel-good cut scene followed by half an hour’s worth of credits, unless the game is Portal, in which case, as we all know, the credits are the best part simply because of that song. What I did do was complete the same set of missions – in slightly different areas of a couple of cities – about one hundred times, which generally involved seeking out information on an assassination target through my being a sneaky assassin sort of fellow, and then once I had the details down, I would toodle off and assassinate said target by, again, being quite the sneaky stealthy assassin. So it came somewhat as a surprise to me that the final missions (and readers should turn away for the rest of this post if they don’t want to learn of any spoilers) involve a full frontal assault on the entire first division of the army of King Richard I of England, aka the Lionheart, aka Coeur de Lion, aka that Giant Nutter Who Conquered Half the Holy Lands With His Army of Crusaders. It was at this point that I had to go back and have a quick look at the game box, and yes, there on the cover were quite clearly the words ‘assassin’ and ‘creed’, and unless I am very much mistaken, there are not many known assassins who have decided to ‘bugger all this stealth and intrigue nonsense’ and instead whipped out their long sword, which has up until now been mainly for show, and charged headlong into the front of the enemy, Braveheart style. Now there’s a reason that there aren’t many assassins known for this tactic, and that is because all of the ones who have tried it have been turned into a bloody pulp in the time it takes to say “I’m wearing the armour equivalent of pyjamas!”.

I thought I was missing the big developer’s joke, and that somewhere along the mountain path where I was fighting tooth and nail (mainly my character’s teeth against the soldiers’ bloody great six foot steel nails) there was a secret route that I needed to find, one that would allow me to stealth around the back of the army, almost like an assassin you might say, and that I merely wasn’t thinking like a ninja, or an insurgent, or a small seven year old child with enough common sense to not wade in to the pack of fourteen year old bullies blocking the path ahead. But no, apparently after having spent tens of hours as the elite parkour champion of the middle east, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with the lissom grace of an alley cat in its prime, I was suddenly unable to scale even the tiniest boulder; I mean, these boulders were so tiny there were seven year old children hopping over them and thumbing their noses at me as they escaped away from the inevitable beating that was barrelling its way up the Tedious Railroading Path of Lazy Level Design. It was more through attrition than anything else that I finally found King Richard and the man I had been sent to assassinate, and instead of just jumping the bastard the first chance he got and stabbing him squarely in the face, my character decided at this point it was best to have a little heart-to-heart with the Conqueror King. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, keep reading and I’ll tell you.

Despite believing that the story you’ve told him about his traitorous right-hand-man could well be true, the king doesn’t decide to lock-up the traitor and yourself, do some investigation of his own in order to find out the truth of the matter, and once he realises you were right, release you with a full pardon and a huge reward of gold, ale and whores. No, instead he decides to let God decide. Fair enough, we’re in the middle of the crusades after all, and God will apparently decide through a trial by combat. Sigh. Ok, I’m an assassin, and although I’m trained in the sneaky-sneaky stabby-stabby school of combat, I can probably take this over-armoured meathead, even if I am only wearing pyjamas. But wait, apparently God has decided that before I can face the traitor in one-on-one combat, I get to fight fifteen of his best heavily armoured mates first. All at the same time.

There will now be a short interval in this post as we are experiencing some Melmoth-related technical difficulties.

Melmoth:OH. FUCK. OFF. YOU ALMIGHTY BUGGERING ARSE PORRIDGE FLANNEL PANTY VITAMIN BEARDED PERCOLATED BADGERGING COCK.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Suffice it to say that I decided, after about ten attempts, that I was decidedly bored with these shenanigans and I went and had a quick look at a FAQ to see if I was missing anything obvious. Apparently, I was missing the fact that:

a) There’s one specific move that you should spam over and over in order to try to win, but even then it will be difficult.

b) There’s no other way, be it using stealth, subterfuge or suspenders, to circumvent the fight.

c) The developers are related to small developmentally backwards marmosets.

Having read the FAQ and decided that I wasn’t going to play their version of Heavily Inebriated Streetfighter, I read on further to see how much of the game I was going to miss by throwing my arms up in the air, shouting ‘Why God, why?!’ and then launching the DVD across the room at the cat in a final attempt at bringing the game back to its assassination roots. As it turns out I was quite near the end, and the only bit left should I have decided to bang my head against the brick wall of the token pre-boss combat smack down, was to fight my former master, who it turns out can use ancient Christian relics to turn himself into a super-powered being of celestial might.

There was a phrase I uttered at that point, involving porridge, percolation and panties, but I think we’ve already reached an understanding of my feelings in this regard so I won’t repeat it.

And so, as I mentioned at the start of the post, I’ve finished Assassin’s Creed and have now moved on to Gears of War, which I may talk about at some point, but if you want to know the short version: I find it very hard to play games which involve a group of over-doped American wrestlers trying to act hard whilst grunting sounds no longer than a syllable, all of which is being presented in the nausea inducing wonder that is sHakkky CaMMmmm.

ChilliQuest: The Burninating.

It was with some trepidation that Zoso and I packed our adventuring gear (Sat nav, spare sat nav, iPods, wallets, umbrellas, chewing gum, chain mail vests and six-foot claymores) and set off on a dreary, wet and windy Saturday morning with the aim of undertaking the quest to travel to Mount Doom and destroy the One Ring that had been entrusted to us, but that all seemed a bit like hard work so instead we took the somewhat easier quest of making our way towards Chichester, seeking out other like-minded adventurers and then unleashing hell on the chilli people of West Dean.

I mentioned that our journey commenced amid an atmosphere of some trepidation and the reason for this is that getting lost in real life or in MMOs is not just a mere possibility for the duo of this tale, there are legends of their lostness scribed in lore, ancient dusty tomes will be found by future generations who will read tales to their unbelieving children of two curious souls who have managed to get lost in their own living rooms on occasion.

So it was with some surprise that we found ourselves close to our goal about an hour later and with only a few minor unintentional detours.

It must be noted here that on the long and tiresome journey, for what quest is complete without an inordinate amount of travel time, we did pass through the village of Cocking. Good old English village names, if ever you thought that an MMO had curiously named villages and that perhaps they were slightly too fanciful and unbelievable, just run through a few English place names and you’ll suddenly realise just how mundane your MMO really is.

And so, after arsing about in Cocking for a brief while (which would get you arrested in more conservative countries) the mini map announced that we had reached our destination. Having reached the festival we abandoned our trusted mount and equipped ourselves for a glorious time out in the countryside on an English summer’s day: Zoso with his waterproof jacket and industrial size umbrella and myself in a snowboarding jacket and woolly hat. Once we had stacked enough water resistance gear to get us through the day’s raiding schedule, we made our way into the Chilli Festival instance proper.

It was with some dismay, however, that we realised shortly upon entry to the instance that there was no summoning stone available in the West Dean area to enable us to gather all party members together with our usual consummate ease. Also, Zoso had failed to scribe and memorise any teleportation or telepathy spells for the day, and so it was that we stood outside the nearby temporary tavern, myself sipping on a rather pleasing pint of ale while Zoso desperately tried to force his thought waves into the brains of passing mobs in the hope that one of them was friendly to our cause.

Apparently West Dean is to mobile phone signals as black holes are to light, which is kind of unfortunate when you’ve arranged to meet everyone by standing near the beer tent and then giving them a quick call. There was so little signal that my phone, which is temperamental and stubborn at the best of times, basically imploded in on itself and started to transmit various lethal radiations over a wide spectrum, hence why everything relied, as always, on Zoso performing some minor miracle to get things back on track.

We did eventually find the rest of the group, thanks in the main to Changling Bob’s stand-out hat, and a lucky answerphone message which Zoso managed to pick up after somehow getting a signal on his phone for a few seconds, I’m not quite sure how, but apparently it involved assuming the martial arts posture of the praying mantis whilst simultaneously pointing his umbrella at a tangent to the Silbury Meridian Line. I thought that he’d just eaten a rather explosive chilli and was trying to work it through his digestive system.

Having met up with the splendid band of merry folk who were our adventuring partners for the day, and avoiding my plan of going up to the Tannoy operator and getting them to make a “LFG for the quest [33]Where the hell is Van Hemlock?” announcement, we started on our quest to drink, eat chilli and try not to have embarrassing explosive bowel movements. We certainly managed the first two with great aplomb, and I’m assured that we also achieved the latter and that the noise I heard was just the rumble of thunder from the storm passing overhead; I still think that certain party members looked a little sheepish as they gave this explanation, but it was only part of a sub-quest and not the main quest line of the day, so I let it pass.

We made relatively quick work of the instance, taking on the forces of chilli in their various guises without too much trouble, the jam and relish minions were little bother, and although we were thrown somewhat by the tactics of the fudge generals, they too eventually fell to our gaping maws. I once had a bit of trouble with a particularly nasty elite chilli dog, and Van Hemlock was at one point caught unawares by a stealthed kiwi fruit assassin who was hiding in plain sight inside a rather innocent looking dipping sauce. Jon, Zoso and Changling Bob were unassailable however, and the chilli horde was soon left reduced in strength and numbers as our group made our way to the rallying point under the shelter of a large tree so that we could take stock and attend to our maw wounds.

Alas, it was at this point that Changling Bob, perhaps buoyed with confidence with our successes so far, decided to single-handedly attack the boss of the chillis: the Capsaicin King. It was with horror, and not a small amount of awe, that we watched Bob sacrifice himself to the chosen of the chilli deity so that the rest of us might live.

There are World of Warcraft rogues who have lost loot rolls on epic +Agi +Stam swords to a warlock, who have looked less pained than Bob did at that moment.

Bob got a rez, and after a little more banter under the Tree of Suitable Shelter, the group decided to quit the instance, instead finding a safe retreat to undertake some crafting, which predominantly involved Van Hemlock and Jon skilling-up their podcast trade skills some more. After which we all mounted up and made our way across the local lands to find a tavern where we spent an enjoyable evening reminiscing about old times, and the potential future adventures that lay ahead, before heading off to our respective bind points and logging for the evening.

And what’s most impressive is that Zoso and I even managed to find our way home afterwards without getting lost.

Although we did take a short Cocking detour.