Monthly Archives: January 2010

Snow Diary

Day fourteen. The snow has finally been beaten back. Despite its seeming invulnerability in the face of the best efforts of humanity, it turned out to have a fatal weakness to common heat. Occasional heaped piles stage futile rear-guard efforts, but should be finished off soon.

The infrastructure left in tatters by the white death is not so quick to return, though, still no phone or internet. Apparently an engineer with a hoist is needed (I offered a variety of alternatives including stilts, several sets of garden jenga or a trampoline, but apparently none are suitable), and there’s a backlog of problems caused by the bastard sky ice.

I’d been hoping to take a look at the beta of Kung Foo!, but lack of broadband has driven me to a new diversion, utilising the eyes to gaze upon and interpret patterns printed upon cellulose pulp; I’m dubbing this “Singularly Individual Offline Printed Narrative Consumption” or SIOPNC (pronounced “see-oh-puh-nuck”), though some luddites seem to refer to it as “reading a book”. The single user instancing is absurd and clear evidence of lazy programming and backward thinking by these so-called authors who don’t even appear to be aware of the work of the earliest MUDs in terms of interactivity, though the graphics are similar. Still, it’ll have to do for now.

Luckily Christmas is a time of book-giving so I’ve got a few to hand; after finishing off the rather good Phoenix Squadron I’m now on Neal Stephenson’s latest, Anathem, which sounds a bit odd, but is incredible so far.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to primally scream into a hedge for a couple of hours.

Skip to the end.

One of the earliest and most popular AddOns for World of Warcraft was a simple little LUA script that made the quest text appear instantaneously instead of scrawling its way line-by-line across the screen in an achingly slow fashion, as though being received in real time from a Morse code operator on the other side of the world and then translated behind your screen by an arthritic octogenarian who was two-finger tapping it into a teletype interface. This AddOn was simple enough on the face of it, but it instantly broke a part of World of Warcraft’s quest system; any pacing of content that the Blizzard team had planned based around the fact that players would have to wait for, and therefore probably read, the quest text was nullified as the majority of players voted with their AddOn folders and chose to be able to click ‘Accept’ before the NPC had even had the chance to inhale a breath in order to speak. The standard motto for MMO questing became ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’. Later this evolved into ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Stick the objectives in my tracker’, and later still — ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Stick the objectives in my tracker and mark where I need to go on my map’.

One assumes that, given a few more years, it will eventually become ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Why don’t you go and kill the ten rats and bring them back here to me, and then you can just give me the reward’. It seems to me that there’s a perverse trend in the evolution of the genre, where we’re slowly and inexorably taking on the role of the NPCs. Next we’ll be running around desperately trying to give quests to any NPC that we can find, watching them run off and come running back to us, whereupon we hand them a reward; even that will be too much like hard work though, so we’ll eventually get to the point where we simply log-in to our character who stands stationary and waits for an NPC to come running up and ask for a quest. Groups of players will gather together and form camps or villages or towns, and our game will simply consist of logging-in, standing around and doing nothing while NPCs speak to our characters to gather quests and collect the subsequent rewards. We’ll have optimised our game-play time into the absolute purest essence of effortlessness.

True story.

The thrusting point of all of this, if you could call it such, it’s more like being poked gently with the blunt end of a large marrow, is with regards to Bioware’s fully voiced MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. I imagine the point has hit home, probably because I’ve not so much poked its soft marrowy hide gently at you so much as clubbed you brutally around the head with it. Alas, marrows never were a subtle instrument of enforced learning.

To wit: Bioware is spending quite a lot of money and effort on voice acting talent, these are resources that could be spent on other things, say, for example, game-play content, and all evidence points to the fact that the majority of players in MMOs want to ‘skip to the adventure please’. Case in point: the reason for my thinking about this was due to my recent play through of Dragon Age: Origins; this is a game where all the dialogue has voice-over, but at the end of each segment of speech, when you inevitably have to respond with a dialogue choice, Bioware sensibly places on the screen a text version of the sentence the NPC has directed at you so that, should you miss the spoken question, you can read back over what was said and answer appropriately. I would assume that Bioware will do something similar for TOR, and of course what this means is that you have instantly created a way for players to ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’ their way out of it. The problem with voice dialogue is that it is easily as ponderously slow as the tip-tapping octogenarian of Blizzard’s original quest text interface, because to provide any sort of immersion with voice acting you need to have dramatic pauses and drawn-out inflections and character defining twists and turns to the speech, otherwise you end up with a bunch of robotic NPCs all alike, as though every quest hub was a franchise of some quest awarding super-conglomerate, “Hi, welcome to Questbucks! What can I get you?”, “Thank you for buying from McQuestalds. Have a nice day!”.

I think the Esc key (oft used to skip dialogue in Bioware games) will become the most overused button in an MMO. Even in Dragon Age, where I don’t have the peer pressure of a party of several other players all waiting for me to get through the dialogue so that they can “GO GO GO!!1” and get on with their game, and where I want to immerse myself in the world that Dragon Age presents, I find myself yawning every now and again and, as Zoso said to me when we were discussing it last week, “sometimes I find myself thinking ‘Summarise, man, summarise!”. Don’t get me wrong, the voice acting in Bioware games is always most excellent, and fantastically immersive in most cases, but it is a thing that is utterly at odds with the direction that the general MMO play-style has developed. Perhaps Bioware’s game will be the next jump in that evolution, something so at odds with what is currently taken to be the norm that it takes the genre in an entirely new direction, or perhaps it will be a lot of wasted effort on the part of Bioware, effort that could have gone in to making a better and more expansive game. The pacing of voice-over in a game can sometimes appear ponderous even to a player invested in the world of a single player RPG, I just hope that Bioware have taken in to account the inbred impatience of the itinerant MMO player.

In summary: do you think that mice would evolve the ability to wear lederhosen if they were slapped on the thighs on a daily basis?[1]

1. Yes, I think they probably would. Shall I go and slap ten mice for you?
2. Are you mad? You can’t slap mice, it’s against the religion of the land!
3. Ah ha! I’m working for the Mouse King, and now your plan is revealed. Prepare to die!
4. I like cheese. Do you like cheese? Mmmmm, cheese.

[1] This is here just to freak out all those people who skipped the main post text to get to the dialogue question at the end.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

I’m suffering from a bout of that irrepressible excitement one often feels with regards to creating a new character; this time however, it’s for Dragon Age: Origins and not another of my innumerable MMO alts. It’s something I haven’t felt in an MMO for quite some time and which I dearly miss, but I think that’s more likely down to my general quietus with respect to MMO hype at the moment, than anything that MMO developers are doing specifically wrong.

To clarify: it’s that feeling you get deep down when you are inspired with a character concept and want very badly to plan out that new character and, more desperately, to see how your new concept pans out within the game. It’s that frenzy of creation that gets your text editor all hot and sweaty, and where Imagination, Anticipation and Expectation throw caution to the wind, discard their clothing and have a frolicking good roll around together between the spreadsheets.

City of Heroes used to drive me to distraction like this when I was playing it; the sheer number of archetype, powerset and costume combinations meant that I could latch on to the smallest thing, be it a single costume item, a combination of a couple of powers, or something else, and build an entire concept around them. Then out would come the spreadsheet and the lists of powers and levels and slots and enhancements, and a build would be meticulously planned. What was worse, as that character was being built, another powerset combination would leap out at me and I’d put the current character plan on hold whilst I built up that concept in my mind; each new idea was like the innocent trickle of snow that is in fact the prelude to an avalanche, a small idea popping unceremoniously into your mind, and before you know it you are buried alive beneath a metres-thick carpet of densely compacted thoughts on costumes and names and builds and all of the overwhelming potentialities.

World of Warcraft did a similar thing but on a smaller scale, with every class appearing deeply appealing, as though they were all attuned to some fundamental primordial genetic trait that is inherent to MMO adherents. Talent specialisations initially served to expand the horizon to the good ship Customisation, offering tantalising hints at new lands that players might discover with their characters, but alas in this case the world turned out to be flat, and players who did not follow the tried and tested paths were doomed to fall off the edge of the world and be lost to the game forevermore.

Many other MMOs have offered the same: EQ2 almost drove me insane with the options and potential for my character. Maybe it did. I wouldn’t be entirely confident in denying the fact that I’m actually still sitting on the floor of my room, rocking back and forth while surrounded by a cityscape of sheets of paper, some crumpled into balls, others folded into obscure shapes, all of them covered in tiny blocks of illegible scrawl and connected by crisscrossing lines and arrows which, unknowable to anyone but me, attempts to plot my perfect character in the world of Norrath. I also expect that other MMOs would provide similar excitement if the game itself appealed to me, Fallen Earth’s expansive skill trees sound like a potential Petri dish of breeding material for the rapidly multiplying bacterial disease that is my desire to build new and interesting characters, for example.

I’m glad that I have, for now, found the bug again through my enjoyment of Dragon Age. I’ve just recently completed the game on its easiest setting whilst skipping many of the side quests, just in order to get to the end and experience the core of the game, something I am notoriously bad at achieving; I am not a game finisher, in the main. However, having finished and got an ending that was pretty much all that I had hoped it to be, I am left wanting more. Thankfully there is plenty more to be had: I have many side quests to complete, party character personal quests, and other such content to explore. I can also try the game now on a harder difficulty, knowing that it won’t put me off entirely if I have to replay a fight a few times and attempt to be more tactical about things rather than just charging blithely in and hoping that it will turn out for the best.

And of course I get to create a new character. I played a Warrior the first time around, a feisty noble lady who become a Templar and a Champion and swung a huge two-handed sword at her foes. Now I’m tempted by an Arcane Warrior, a mage who can get into the thick of melee and mix it up with the best of them. So there are spells to consider now where my Warrior had none, and which armour would be best, and what weapon. I won’t be able to wear my beloved Templar Armour this time around – the most gorgeous looking heavy armour outfit I think I’ve ever seen – both because it’s restricted to Templars only, and also because it is not the best armour in the game; I could afford to wear what looked best when playing the game on the easier setting, but the rules of the Maxminati come in to effect at greater difficulty levels, and so style has to be eschewed for stats, as is regrettably the way in so many RPGs, MMO or otherwise.

So here’s to you, Velkyria, Grey Warden and champion of the people of Ferelden. Enjoy your retirement travels with your dear Leliana, and I will see you again with the coming of the next DLC and Dragon Age 2.

VelkyriaVelkyria in Templar Armour

Until then, I have a spreadsheet and a few text editor windows burning a hole on my desktop.

Perfection would be a fatal flaw for evolution

Delving into the zeitgeist of the week, Brian Green’s got an excellent blog post up on The Innovation Paradox. Alongside Melmoth’s dictionary heroics I pondered the line “I think most thinking people agree that MMOs have evolved over time.” Obviously that’s “evolved” in the general “gradual change over time” sense, but I thought it might be fun to consider MMOGs in terms of evolutionary biology, an idea with only two flaws: firstly everything I know about evolution comes from flipping through Wikipedia for five minutes (this is how I know evolution is a quadruped with four legs, a heart and a beak for eating honey, which lives in large rivers such as the Amazon), and secondly any posting about evolutionary biology and innovation in MMOs tackles a ferociously controversial subject which almost nobody can agree on. And evolution (aaah, I confounded your expectations and from thence the humorous allelomorph arose).

Something that struck me from an Introduction to Evolution was:
“Evolution is not progress. Evolution is not “improvement”; it is simply change. These changes can be positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the situation. Evolution may seem progressive at times, because beneficial traits tend to out-compete less helpful traits under selection. However, evolution does not aspire toward any goal; there is no such thing as ‘backward evolution’ or ‘de-evolution’ because there is also no ‘forward evolution’ — evolution does not move in any particular direction.”

Change “the situation” to “the player’s perspective”, and that’s an interesting take on it. Obviously there’s an instant problem in that changes in MMOGs tend to be deliberate design decisions rather than random mutations (despite the theories of forum denizens about the number of monkeys and typewriters employed by dev teams), but as soon as you try and map that back to evolutionary biology then terms like “eugenics” and “intelligent design” start bubbling around and we have to deploy the emergency inflatable badger. Look everyone, a badger! Focus on the badger now! Look at the lovely badger!

Phew. Think we got away with that.

Another interesting snippet was about peacock tails. Evolution has resulted in big, flashy tails, despite the fact that they don’t instantly appear to help out in “survival of the fittest” stakes; they’re a hindrance if anything, but (and I paraphrase ever so slightly here, apologies for the highly technical terms) chicks dig the crazy feathers. I’m not sure if that works a parable for the importance of graphics in a game (people might say gameplay is king and flashy graphics aren’t everything, but… chicks dig the crazy feathers), but it’s kinda fun.

Then there’s role of environment; traits which are highly desirable in one set of circumstances prove catastrophic in another, typified by island birds that thrive with an abundant source of food and no predators but are virtually defenceless when predators do turn up. Has the landscape changed around the traditional MMOG as feral online consoles and browser games snap at its heels, and if so is it destined to become extinct like the Dodo, barely cling on thanks to conservation efforts like the Kakapo (hero of one of the greatest moments of the recent “Last Chance to See” with Mark Carwardine & Stephen Fry), or evolve a new defence mechanism?

Weaving in another strand, there was another excellent post on Vicarious Existence about the danger of nostalgia, which made me wonder if, in a hypothetical future where a very distant ancestor of the Kakapo had learned to fly to evade predators, you’d get a couple of them sitting on a branch reminiscing:
“Man, remember when we walked everywhere? That was brilliant wasn’t it, none of this knackering flapping business, why does nobody walk any more? Things were so much better in the old days, I can’t understand why it got much worse, let’s start walking again Geoff, come on!”

Snow Diary

Day eight without a phone line and broadband. More snow today, just as things were clearing up, which will probably stop anyone getting out to try and fix the phone line. We lost Johnson on Sunday after he was watching a film, couldn’t quite place where he’d seen an actor before, and flung himself through the window when he realised he couldn’t look it up on IMDB. A small cult have formed in the spare bedroom worshipping a cache of printed web pages: recipes for butternut squash risotto and baked vanilla cheesecake, and a map showing the hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I dusted off an old modem, plugged it in, and shouted “bleeeeeeeeeepFRIKangFRIKangFRIKang” in a bid to emulate a data signal, but to no avail. Am coping by playing single player games with a post-it note stuck to the screen reading:
“this game sucks wow is way better”
“lol no wai wow su><" "this game sucks" "chuck norris su><" "your mom su>< chuck norris"

to simulate a general chat channel, but I don’t know how much longer I can last…

I’d just been getting back into Champions Online as well, hopping around for a quick blast now and again. A group of us were working through Left 4 Dead 2, the Friday night DDO group was going great guns… Star Trek Online was also in mid-download as the line went down, I’d had a quick tinker in the closed beta a while back (space combat was fun, running around starships was a bit standard MMO (textbook) and not so exciting, but I gather more stuff had been patched in around that), hopefully the phone line will be back in time to download the open beta client.

Oh well, better head off now. McMillan has heard that a house two streets away has working cable and a router, we’re forming a raiding party. I’m just going out; I may be some time.

The man on top of the mountain did not fall there.

I’m wondering what Blizzard will release as a counter to Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic; it is still my belief that they aim to time their game releases around those of their major competitors in order to cause maximum disruption, and thus not allow said competition a free run at gaining a foothold on the subscriber mountain. Many companies have tried to climb that mountain, and always there has been Blizzard, a few feet above, putting the Boot of Marketing in their faces and firmly but relentlessly pushing until yet another pretender to the title of King of the Mountain falls. Some MMO companies are sensible enough to not climb too quickly and use safety ropes on the way up, and thus when they fall they remain swinging, albeit helplessly, at the lower levels. Many others have fallen to their doom.

With SW:TOR looking to be heading towards an ’11 release date, what wrench will Blizzard throw in to the machine? Will they reserve Cataclysm for the duty, announcing later this year a delay to the expansion in order to ‘further improve the content’? I think that’s entirely feasible given the much-vaunted scope of work that is being undertaken.

Or will they, towards the end of this year, drop the bombshell announcement of their new MMO to be put into beta next year?

I imagine it will be the former, but I do wonder just how seriously Blizzard are taking the competition from Bioware: should they choose to use Cataclysm as their wrench and find that SW:TOR crushes it effortlessly between the cogs and gears of its own intractable machine, Blizzard will have that much more difficult a time regaining a footing with their new MMO against the newly established King of the Mountain.

The recently rumoured details of Blizzard’s new MMO, be they truth or fiction, come to light now, after Blizzard have managed to keep things pretty much entirely under wraps up to this point. Could this be the very first trickles of water leaking through those gigantic bulging, straining walls that dam the potential flood of hype water sitting behind? Did Blizzard themselves make the hole; have they armed the charges at the base of the dam; do they stand poised, detonator in hand, ready to unleash hype hell?

I think 2010 will probably not be a great year for MMO releases, but as far as MMO hype is concerned it’s going to be biblical, and the company that has built the biggest ark will find itself perched on top of the subscriber mountain when the floods subside.

Innovation in World of Warcraft.

heroic [hi-roh-ik]
–adjective

  1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a hero or heroine.
  2. suitable to the character of a hero in size or concept; daring; noble: a heroic ambition.
  3. having or displaying the character or attributes of a hero.
  4. having or involving recourse to boldness, daring, or extreme measures.
  5. dealing with or describing the deeds, attributes, etc, of heroes, as in literature.
  6. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the heroes of antiquity: heroic mythology.
  7. used in heroic poetry. Compare heroic verse.
  8. resembling heroic poetry in language or style; grandiloquent.
  9. (of style or language) lofty; extravagant; grand.
  10. larger than life-size: a statue of heroic proportions.
  11. (in World of Warcraft) quotidian; apathetic; perfunctory; mundane, e.g. heroic dungeon.

Why it’s the very dictionary definition of dictionary definition innovation.

Saints Theft Auto: Guerilla

Snow is blanketing Britain at the moment, at least 20cm here, bringing everything to a grinding halt. The perfect time to be wrapped up cosy inside and gaming away like a mad thing, except the snow’s taken out the phone line, and thus broadband connection, and the engineer can’t get his van up the road to sort it out. Still, having a 3G connection on the T-Mobile Pulse at least provides a tenuous connection to sanity (or Twitter and Google Reader, as the case may be), and at least Steam works in offline mode.

With a shiny new PC capable of moving the Grand Theft Auto IV graphics sliders off the bare minimum settings I’ve picked that back up (now slightly over a year since first installing it), and the complete THQ pack I bought in a Steam sale at the end of November includes Red Faction: Guerilla and Saints Row 2. All three are very similar games; GTAIV and Saints Row obviously so, RF:G taking that template to Mars. You run around, grab vehicles to drive, shoot stuff and perform various missions/tasks/activities. Each has an over-arching story, but lets you freestyle around between chapters.

The strengths of Grand Theft Auto IV are the characters, atmosphere and setting. It looks absolutely fantastic, even on the lowest detail settings, there’s the usual Rockstar attention to detail like the adverts, trailers and news on radio stations, and though I wasn’t really sure when I first heard about the protagonist, Niko Bellic is a sympathetic character and I really empathised with his struggles.

What really stands out when firing up Saints Row 2 is the character creation, especially coming from the fixed character in GTA. More akin to City of Heroes or Champions, you get sliders aplenty to control just about every aspect of the character’s appearance, a selection of voices, even different walking styles. The results are great, apart from facial expressions where anything apart from the default makes you look like you’ve escaped from some sort of institution. That diversity continues in the variety of activities available to you in game, from fairly conventional racing, stealing certain cars or acting as a hitman to more unusual offerings like deliberately getting hit by traffic, and spraying slurry over everything.

Red Faction: Guerilla excels in destructableness, which definitely is a word no matter how much the computer underlines it in red. Though the other two games let you smash a few windows, knock over a couple of lampposts and blow up any number of cars, buildings prove more resistant even to rocket propelled grenades. In RF:G, as a demolition engineer and with “salvage” as a form of currency, demolishing buildings is not just allowed but encouraged, and setting about structures with a hammer, demolition charges, rockets or convenient vehicle is immensely satisfying.

I was looking forward to completing Grand Theft Auto; it turned out I was only a couple of missions away from the end, but unfortunately it concentrates many of its worst aspects in the final mission. Firstly the story that was such a strong feature to begin with really tails off, especially once the mafia get involved. “Eh, it’s a turf war, badda bing, they don’t show us no respect”; the game really crowbars a relationship to try and give you a big motive for the last mission, not particularly successfully from my point of view, it all feels a bit well-trodden. Then there’s the traditional problem of the general GTA structure: drive to mission; start mission; drive somewhere; do some shooting; do some more driving; die at any point, back to the start. For the most part I don’t mind it too much, if you’re able to quicksave every couple of seconds it can render challenges far less meaningful, and in the mid-part of the game you’ve usually got plenty of options, if a mission is particularly frustrating you can wander off and try something else for a while and come back to it. The last mission, though, you’re automatically kicked on to, so there’s nothing else to do; the first part is a particularly dull car chase where you’re not even tearing around in sports cars, you’re in some wallowing luxury car following a Range Rover. GTAIV has more realistic car behaviour than Saints Row 2, in which you can spin around tight corners with ease; I didn’t mind for much of the game, as most of the time you can nick something with decent handling (usually one of the cars based on a European or Japanese make where the concept of “turning” isn’t utterly alien), but you’re forced to use this terrible car for the last mission, and haul yourself off to some warehouse. Fine.

Once at the warehouse, it’s a big old shootout. Not a problem, apart from the first time when I didn’t realise the game had left the character crouched behind a car rather than “in cover”, the difference being when you fire a rocket propelled grenade from the latter you automatically pop out for a clear shot, but in the former with pinpoint precision you hit the bonnet of the car you’re crouched behind, and destroy both it and yourself in a huge fireball. GTAIV does shooting really well with mouse and keyboard control, the horde of mooks with assault rifles you face are a decent challenge but not too tricky, but it takes a while to work through them all without exposing yourself to undue risk, so eventually you confront the bloke you came to kill and… he naffs off in a speedboat. You hop onto a bike to follow him, and after a while have to hit a certain jump with enough speed to throw yourself into a helicopter (as you do). Not expecting it at all the first time I gently toppled off the side of the ramp, so… back to the start. A couple more attempts and I got the ramp right, threw myself off the motorbike onto the skids of the helicopter, and was told to tap the space bar to pull myself up. Not the toughest challenge on the face of it, but somehow I didn’t manage it. Mission failed, back to the start, shoot, shoot, ride, jump, tap space… This time I was ready for it and tapped space like the very fury, giving a space-tapping performance such as has never been seen before. Nothing. A quick Google revealed a few others had had the same issue, and one of them had fired up Fraps to record proof, only when recording he’d climbed in successfully. I tried it, and sure enough that did the trick, possibly something to do with the way the framerate dropped from 60 to 30 when recording started. So there I was, flying the helicopter, except I couldn’t remember the flying controls and plummeted into the river, and the prospect of repeating all the earlier sections, again, doesn’t really appeal, so I haven’t been back to it since.

Over in Saints Row 2, things are slightly more comic book, both in appearance (though not to an extreme extent, it still looks good) and plot, when you start off by breaking out of a prison by stabbing someone and climbing around a bit. Getting hold of a pistol didn’t really make a great impression, the weapon sounds are distinctly underwhelming and I hardly realised I was firing (or being fired at) half the time. Having made it out of jail, though, and not being overly impressed, one of the first things the game does is pack you off to a clothes shop. GTAIV had a disappointing lack of clothing options, a step back even from GTA3: San Andreas; there are a few coats and trousers and two different hats at the first Russian shop, then a bunch of suits, jackets and slacks at the “smart-casual” and “smart” shops, and that’s it. It also had a horribly clunky wardrobe interface when changing clothes that took a couple of seconds to load each item up so it’s a faff just to browse through the options. GTAIV tends to go for a minimalist interface, which does help with immersion in the world; to save a car you park it in a particular space, when shopping you walk up to the item you want on display, a nice pair or shoes or an assault rifle, and it handles a lot of in-game options as menu choices on a mobile phone. Saints Row 2 doesn’t really care so much for realism and uses conventional text menus, which work far better for the array of choices. Where GTAIV had a few sets of clothes, Saints Row 2 has undershirts, overshirts, wombling free shirts, coats, underwear, jewellery, tattoos, shoes, socks… Things really picked up fast after the not-so-impressive start as you’ve just got so much to do. Cars can also be heavily customised and stored in a garage that actually remembers what’s in there, to the point that if you take one out and leave it somewhere in the city, it’s available back at the garage when you return. It does lose out slightly in the immersive world stakes, and suffers from an issue the GTA3 series had whereby things don’t exist unless you observe them; look down the road and see a car coming up, turn and look the other way, when you turn back there’s nothing there. It might be a commentary on solipsism, or perhaps the measurement problem of quantum physics; it’s a bit annoying on an insurance fraud activity where you’re trying to get hit by traffic and the damn stuff keeps vanishing, but it’s not generally too much of an issue. The overarching story is also fairly lightweight, pretty typical gang feuding, but it keeps things moving. Despite the massive (slightly cartoony) violence, it’s a hugely fun, light, frothy sort of game, not something to really sink your teeth into, but where GTAIV got progressively more stodgy towards the end Saints Row 2 never let up.

Red Faction: Guerilla is a funny sort of beast that falls between the two; set on Mars, obviously “realism” isn’t an issue, but it tries to give a bit of weight to things. The story is more or less Total Recall without the interesting ponderings on identity, Mars is controlled by Horrible Big Corporation/Nasty Imperialist Earth Types (EDF), you’re recruited into the Good Guy Resistance Freedom Fighters (the titular Red Faction) opposing them when your Heroic Noble Brother is killed by the EDF about two minutes into the tutorial and there’s a deep, involving storyline about a nano-something or other. Oh, wait, no, it’s even less convincing that Saints Row 2 in story stakes, but that doesn’t matter ‘cos you can knock down buildings. You progressively liberate sectors of the planet by reducing EDF control in a zone through your choice of various activities (destroying key installations, defending Red Faction areas, even “racing” when you pick up certain vehicles that have to be returned to a rebel safehouse in a certain, very tight, time limit), then play a couple of story missions to finally drive the EDF out. A lot of the gameplay is functionally equivalent to GTA or Saints Row, but with a twist to emphasise you’re a Good Guy Resistance Freedom Fighter and not just blowing a load of stuff up for giggles; you can “carjack” civilian vehicles as per the other games, only instead of throwing the driver out and nicking his car you wave at them, they carefully park up and hop out of the car shouting “yes, take my vehicle to help liberate our planet!” There are “mayhem”-type missions where you’re given a tank or (if really lucky) an exoseleton-type walker thing which is *brilliant* and told to destroy a certain number of EDF vehicles or troops, but you’re not doing it for a laugh, oh no, you’re causing a diversion so other Red Faction forces nearby can ferry orphan kittens to safety. Course none of that really matters at all, the main thing is: you get to blow stuff up. The first thing I’d look at in a new zone would be the key EDF structures, headquarters, garages, guard posts etc., and set about demolishing them with anything to hand. Pitched battles on foot are quite tricky, the EDF respond to threats mob-handed, and you’re fairly limited in the number of weapons you can carry and the ammo that each has, but vehicular destruction is rather splendid, either with liberated military armoured personnel carriers, or when you can get hold of them the exoskeleton-type walkers. The military variant with rocket launchers is the more powerful but the “civilian” version is most fun, you can flail away independently with the two arms, or smash both of them down, or use a sort of flinging motion to launch vehicles into the air. Red Faction feels a bit smaller than the other games; though you can choose different objectives it doesn’t have the sheer range of Saints Row or the depth of world of GTA, but it’s still fun.

So, three splendid games, though the end of GTAIV is a bit of a let-down, RF:G and Saints Row were great value in the complete THQ pack (from which I think Dawn of War II is going to be my next game). If forced to just choose one, I think it’d have to be Saints Row 2, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for Saints Row 3 news from E3.

Little things.

When items go into your bag in World of Warcraft they make different sounds depending on what they consist of. You can tell if something substantial has landed in your bag without even having to look away from what you’re doing.

I’m sure it’s a subconscious thing for many players in WoW, like a sixth sense; I know it is for me, because I can play a game like LotRO and have no idea what I have looted until I go to sell everything at the vendor. I rarely spend time reading over the loot window, and in WoW I don’t need to. I imagine there are many features like this, the little things that often go unnoticed, but when implemented well can make for a smoother experience in general, and a massive difference in experience to a new player.

Is it really any wonder that WoW attracted so many players from without the genre?