Killed in a Smiling Accident.

Crayon Physics Deluxe does exactly what it says on the tin: you draw stuff with Crayons, it’s subject to Physics, and it’s Deluxe. The object is to navigate a red ball into a star, and the method is with whatever you can draw: weights, ropes, pivots, hatstands, marmots, members of Alec Douglas-Home’s 1963 cabinet…

It’s a very well realised game, technically ran absolutely fine on the laptop, but it never quite clicked for me. I think I have two main shortcomings: a lack of crayon-based physical imagination, and a lack of drawing ability (not that you need to produce masterpieces, but even my blocks and rectangles were a bit wonky), which results in a combination of not really being sure how best to approach a level, and then having some difficulty executing those plans I do come up with (I just can’t get Reginald Maudling’s hair right). Perhaps the mouse is a bit of an obstacle, and either an iPhone version or some sort of graphics tablet would work a bit better with the central drawing motif of the game. At £15.99 it’s pretty expensive for an indie game, I don’t think I’d personally be too tempted at full price. Overall, a slightly ropey crayon drawing of a horizontal thumb.

Due to the unseasonal clemency of the British summer I didn’t get a chance to fully explore several games of the pack, so a few fairly brief impressions: “Just like that, ahh.” “Oooh, Betty.” And now a few brief thoughts on the games: Mr Robot is a charming isometric puzzler that, at a dramatically lower resolution and with fewer and more garish colours, could be from the 8-bit era (in a good way; Knight Lore and Alien 8 are quoted as inspirations). You’re a little service droid on a spaceship where the humans are in cryogenic storage, overseen by HEL 9000 the central AI. I’ve only played the first few screens (HEL 9000 still appears to be in full possession of its electronic faculties, and I don’t think it would be a massive spoiler to predict that might not last too long) so can’t make any grand pronouncements, I haven’t even collected any party members or seen the “Ghost Hack” abstract RPG, but it’s definitely a game I’m looking forward to getting back to. It ran absolutely fine on the laptop, and £5.99 for the whole game seems most reasonable. A provisional robotic thumbs up.

Another not exactly first impression, as I bought World of Goo on the Wii back in January. One of the potential annoyances with packs of games is if you already own some of them, and although you can sometimes “gift” extra copies of games on Steam, that’s not the case with any of the indie pack. On top of Audiosurf if I already had the PC version of World of Goo, or it wasn’t a very good game, it might have raised the irritation level from “small piece of grit in shoe but only for a minute until an opportunity arose to sit down and empty shoe” to “small piece of grit in shoe but in circumstances where much walking is required and it would be considered rude to expose your be-socked feet to all and sundry like perhaps a guided tour of a large workplace with dignitaries”, but as it is I’ve been loving getting Goo-y again (as a metaphorical actress may or may not have said to an entirely hypothetical bishop).

Once again I’d direct you to John Walker’s lovely Eurogamer review for a full assessment of the game. I’d agree that the Wii version of the game ever so slightly shades the PC version by virtue of how well suited the Wiimote is to the control system (though the mouse has a slight edge for precision), plus support of up to four players simultaneously, but it’s the slimmest of differences, a mere few extra chocolate shavings atop the magnificent baked cheesecake of goodness that’s common between the two platforms.

Having finished the game on the Wii I didn’t compulsively play through the PC version, but it was always a joy to drop into for a quick level or two; apart from anything else it reminded me how great the music is, from the first joyous “pompompompompompom”, and being available from the author’s website you can even play through it in Audiosurf.

Technically, no problems at all, it ran absolutely smoothly on the laptop. It’s the most expensive of the pack at full price, £16.99, but well worth it. Three thumbs up, comprised of goo balls, floating on red balloons.

Bit of a cheat, this one, as I bought Audiosurf when it was released a year and a half ago. In Audiosurf you “surf” down a track based on a song picking up coloured blocks into a grid, matching colours together for points. When I first got it, deep in the throes of Guitar Heroism, the gameplay didn’t quite click for me; Guitar Hero note tracks are carefully hand-crafted by skilled editors, whereas Audiosurf automatically generates its game tracks from any MP3 you throw at it. The tracks reflect the music they’re generated from, swooping downhill when the tempo is quick and climbing uphill when slow, the block colours changing from cool purples and blues to warm yellows and reds with the intensity of the song, but it’s a fairly broad impression of the music as opposed to the pin-point reflection of the guitar lines that Guitar Hero offers, and that took me a little while to fully appreciate.

What you gain over something like Guitar Hero, of course, is the infinite variety of your own MP3 collection, especially if your musical preferences generally don’t tend towards index-and-little-finger extending RAWK! Classical, baroque, jazz, trip-hop, game soundtracks, Dylan bootlegs, Interröbang Cartel, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson’s classic “Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine”, if you’ve got it as an mp3, wma, ogg, flac or iTunes file, you can pipe it into Audiosurf and see what crazy tracks result.

Once Audiosurf clicked for me I really got into it, and could quite happily lose a couple of ours with “just one more song…” Something I particularly like is its straightforward high score table; in this internet connected age, most high score tables are frankly depressing as you find yourself in competition with thousands, if not millions, of other players, and after a triumphant, almost-perfect run of something you shout “yes!”, punch the air, and then find, after an awful lot of scrolling, you’re at position 10,472 on the table. Audiosurf lets you choose your battles; if you really want to test yourself you can play one of the included songs (particularly Still Alive), or something terribly popular with the playerbase at large (Through The Fire And The Flames). In the darker recesses of your MP3 collection, though, you’re bound to be able to find something with rather fewer players that you can boldly proclaim yourself Pro Champion of.

Something else I’ve come to appreciate in the past year is just how difficult it is to make a decent game based around any MP3 you can throw at it. I’ve tried a couple of others since, Raycatcher (a bargain from a Steam sale, natch) which was distinctly “meh”, and Jam Legend, that promised to turn your music into Guitar Hero-style tracks, but really didn’t for the couple of examples I tried.

Hardware-wise the laptop coped fine, after cranking the resolution down a bit, but as I’ve played it plenty before I only ran through a few songs on holiday. Overall, two bouncing-to-the-crazy-beat thumbs up, and well worth the full £5.99 individual purchase price.

I remembered the laptop charger so, as planned, I spent the odd evening and mercifully rare rainy day of last week’s holiday with “The absolute, autonomous, freewheeling, grassroots, nonaligned, nonpartisan, sovereign, unconstrained, uncontrolled, unregimented games pack” from Steam, ten popular and acclaimed indie titles.

The laptop I was using wasn’t really an ideal gaming platform, 1.8Ghz Celeron processor, 1Gb RAM and shared graphics adapter using up to 128Mb of system memory, but it coped fairly well with most of the pack.

On with the games…

I really ought to be packing a suitcase at the moment as I’m about to head off for a (hopefully) nice relaxing week on holiday, but a last minute browse through the feedreader found news of Steam’s indie games sale on Tales of the Rampant Coyote.

Away for a week, with a laptop that can’t handle big, graphically intensive stuff, and a collection of indie games for less than £2.50 each? At least one of them is a copper-bottomed actinium-edged classic, and several others have sounded interesting but not necessarily the sort of thing I’d want to shell out £10 for, so the pack is merrily downloading away.

If I get a few quiet evenings (or a couple of days of the traditional British summer and resultant torrential rain) I’ll try and write up a few thoughts on each of them, although bearing in mind that the best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong, and frankly these are, at most, third- or fourth- best laid plans, I probably won’t even get a chance to play them, let alone write. Like if I don’t get a shift on, I’ll forget to pack the laptop charger, but I thought I’d just point out the sale while it’s still on in case anyone fancies playing along at home.

I’ve been cruising towards an MMOG break for a while now. Although the server move in Warhammer Online seems to have perked things up greatly on the RvR front I’ve scarcely logged in the last few weeks, and the prospect of the Land of the Dead doesn’t excite me greatly, though I should probably give it a try before dismissing it entirely. It’s been a good run, though. After getting a bit sick of it all almost exactly a year ago I wasn’t sure if I’d stick with another MMOG for more than a month, but I’ve been fairly active in WAR for six months or so, popped in and out for another three, and managed my first level capped character since hitting level 70 in The Burning Crusade. Time for a bit of a break, then, to recharge the massively multiplayer online batteries for Champions Online, or APB, or The Agency, or whatever next catches the eye.

Away from MMOGs, Grand Theft Auto IV is still fun to pop into now and again for a few missions, or a race, or just to cruise around the city looking for shiny cars to purloin. Empire: Total War is also excellent, I’ve been paying more attention to the naval battles which are quite manageable with a fleet of up to four ships (more than that and I find it tricky to micromanage them for optimal broadside-delivery). I’ve got half the setlist to go in Guitar Hero: Metallica, getting the hang of heavy strumming (Shortest Straw and Disposable Heroes passed), but the longer solos still need work. I’ve finally got around to playing Left 4 Dead’s Survival Mode with a few friends, and would like to try some more. For quick pick-up-and-play fun there’s Plants vs Zombies (I say “quick”, inevitably a five minute game somehow stretches out to a couple of hours…) Summer is traditionally a quiet time for game releases, which is good, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with. I really don’t need any new games.

Naturally, then, I’ve been buying stuff from Steam. First, it popped up the news that the two Freedom Force games were available for a fiver, just as I’d been reminiscing a bit during a podcast invasion, so I stuck the double pack in the shopping cart (after all, if you get one you might as well get the other… even though the boxed game of Freedom Force vs the Third Reich was sitting on a shelf not four feet away). And seeing as I was in the Steam store, sorting the options in ascending price order to see what else could be had for under a fiver… While doing my series of articles looking back at old PC magazines and thinking back to early gaming I’d remembered how much I’d enjoyed the original Civilisation but totally neglected the rest of the series, and the complete Civ III was on Steam for about £3.99. Two Freedom Force games and a boatload of Civilisation for less than a tenner, lovely! About the same price as a cinema ticket, and many more hours of fun.

To digress for a moment, when did a cinema ticket become the benchmark for hobby cost/time ratio, why not something else? Say, books? A shiny new hardback can run to somewhere around £20, you might finish it in three or four hours if you’re a fast reader… comparable to the cinema ticket, I guess, maybe slightly better value. You’d probably get it at a discount from Amazon or somewhere, though, or maybe in a three for the price of two deal, and you could always sell the book after you finish it, or keep it to re-read, and who only gets brand new hardbacks anyway? Poke around the charity shops and jumble sales, you can pick up plenty of stuff for 50p or less, radically reducing the cost per hour. Why spend money at all, in fact, a bracing walk around our delightful countryside is entirely free (as in beer, not necessarily as in speech, depending on the right to roam etc.) Let’s not get the ramblers involved, though, and lack of cost plays havoc with divide by zero errors in the spreadsheet. Tell you what, Sherbet Dip Dabs. 39p (in the shop at the end of the road, at least), and, providing you don’t go crazy and start chewing the lolly straight away, you can get ten minutes out of a packet, giving £2.34 as an hourly cost benchmark. That’ll do.

So, two Freedom Force games and a boatload of Civilisation for the price of three and a half hours of Sherbet Dip Dabs, and they won’t make you sick if you play the whole lot at once. The money isn’t really an issue, though, that entire previous paragraph was just an excuse to crowbar Sherbet Dip Dabs into the post in a desperate attempt to secure some kind of sherbet-based sponsorship for the blog (not Sherbet Fountains, though; liquorice, eugh!). I’m hardly lighting cigars with twenty pound notes, but then I’m not so boracic^[1] that buying a few games here and there means I need to forego other luxuries like food or rent in a month.

Except money *is* the issue, if the Steam update had popped up and said “Buy either Freedom Force game for £19.99, or £34.95 for the two!” I’m reasonably sure I wouldn’t have bothered. Civilisation IV was available, presumably a better game than III, but for the massive sum of about £12.99 instead of less than a fiver. To the immortal question of Mrs Non-Gorilla, “What d’you buy that for?”, I can but plead “Oooh! It was a bargain”, and I’m hardly alone. As the figures put out by Steam show, major price drops result in kersquillions percent sales increases, particularly when they’re for a limited time.

Anyway. The result of all that was more games than I could possibly play plus three extra, but that was it. Whatever the siren call of the Steam bargain of the week, I’d plug my ears with cheese and lash myself to the mast, even if it’s Cheap MMOG Weekend. What’s that you say, Narrative Inevitability? It’s Cheap MMOG Weekend on Steam? Well, it’s a good job I’m taking an MMOG break not about to go and buy something just ‘cos it’s cheap.

So. Yeah. I’ve got a level seven Inquisitor in EverQuest 2. Oh come on, it was a bargain!

[1] Fun fact, etymology fans: I’d assumed the word was ‘brassic’, and somehow related to cabbages, perhaps being so poor they were all you could afford to eat; it actually seems to be rhyming slang, ‘boracic lint’ for ‘skint’.