Killed in a Smiling Accident.

Alpha Protocol looked like an intriguing prospect in development, a contemporary espionage action RPG allowing players to travel the globe as a secret agent. It received rather mixed reviews on release, tending to “meh”, but when it showed up for less than £2 in a Steam sale a couple of months back it was hard to say no. Playing Alpha Protocol after Fallout: New Vegas and Deus Ex: Human Revolution was rather interesting, in a “compare and contrast” sort of way. You know what they say: first/third person Action RPGs are like buses, you wait all year for one that allows a variety of approaches to meet objectives, and then three come along at a suitable price in Steam at the same time. Give or take a few months. And they all feature a hacking minigame. And two of them are made by Obsidian.

I do like a spy novel, so the setting of Alpha Protocol is a big plus for me; there aren’t many games in the espionage genre, especially RPGs where you have a bit of freedom moving through the story. The key elements should be familiar enough to genre fans: rogue agents, private military contractors, assassination attempts, arms smuggling, double crossing, triple crossing, mysterious beautiful women, that sort of business. You play Mike Thorton, an agent desperately trying to recover the ‘N’ that somebody stole from his surname (and maybe some missiles or something). One of the key features touted beforehand was the conversation system, where you can generally take one of three approaches: Aggressive, Suave or Professional, which the developers broadly equate to Jack Bauer, James Bond or Jason Bourne. There’s obviously something about the initials “JB” and secret agents, lending additional credence to the theory that Justin Bieber is a psychological warfare project. This tends to work quite well, though the exact dialogue that results may not be quite what you expect; the “Suave” node in particular sometimes feels like it should actually be labelled “The ‘What Not To Do’ Example From A Corporate Briefing Video On Sexual Harassment In The Workplace”. Different approaches can lead to being Liked or Disliked by key NPCs, sometimes you can uncover in-game dossier information that may suggest the best approach to take, or you can always use your super-spy abilities to look up a walkthrough on GameFAQs. I’ve been on a bit of a John le Carré kick recently after seeing the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and was slightly disappointed there’s no George Smiley-inspired approach (apart from the fact that he’d have to be renamed Jeorge Bsmiley to have to right initials), but I suppose it would be quite tricky to create compelling gameplay from listening attentively, carefully writing things down and polishing your spectacles on your tie.

Once you get on a mission, mechanically Alpha Protocol is incredibly similar to DXHR in many ways. Sneak around, crouching to make less noise, avoiding security cameras with sweeping green cones of vision (if you get spotted an alarm sounds, find the alarm panel and you can disable it via a minigame); creep up unnoticed behind a guard and you can tap one button to knock him unconscious or a different one to kill him. Computers holding vital intelligence can be hacked via another minigame. You have a choice of weapons from pistol, shotgun, submachine gun or assault rifle (though you can only carry two), getting into a stand-up firefight is usually a bad idea, but you can take cover behind scenery and jump and roll between bits of cover. Oh, and every now and again you’ll get into a really stupid boss fight.

Just as in DXHR you can specialise in Alpha Protocol as a stealthy master of hacking, able to slip undetected past human guards and cameras alike, delivering precise knock-out blows or tranquilliser rounds where force is unavoidable, and just as in DXHR the game thinks it’s hilarious to stick a superpowered boss at the end of certain levels who has to be shot. A lot. And you haven’t even got the option of a Typhoon explosive augmentation as a handy “I win” shortcut. It’s especially jarring, as at least in DXHR you were facing cybernetic super-soldiers who you could believe were nigh-invulnerable; unless I missed a vital bit of dossier info that revealed a key Alpha Protocol villain had an adamantium skeleton, there was no explanation as to how a middle-aged man could withstand three magazines of assault rifle ammunition emptied into his head at point blank range. One particular fight descends into absolute surrealism as a psychotic Russian mobster snorts coke to become a knife-wielding instant killing machine, leading to a Benny Hill chase around a disco as ultra-cheesy 80s rock blares out until he gets knackered, at which point you shoot him for a while, then repeat. It’s like a reel from Austin Powers got spliced into the middle of The Bourne Identity.

Though the games share several mechanics, freedom is a key difference. At the start of Alpha Protocol you run through a weapons training course with sandbag corridors and pop-up targets, and the rest of the game never quite shakes off that feeling. For one thing Elite Agent Thorton can’t jump, his rigorous training unfortunately not covering “stepping over knee-high obstructions”, and though the level design usually doesn’t emphasise this too much there are occasions when your progress is stymied by an ankle-high sandbag wall. Sometimes you find a sniper rifle, but rather than, say, picking it up and carrying it around, you press Space to start using it, and when finished you put it back down in the same place, like it’s a rifle range and the gun is chained down. There are no boxes to be piled up to reach vents or windows, you can’t punch through walls, and the buildings you’re sent to infiltrate are strangely lacking in conveniently human-sized air ducts that let you into critical areas completely bypassing all security. The levels feel a bit like movie sets, sometimes with two or three paths through them, but with decorative doors and painted backdrops to appear more open.

On the plus side, they’re movie sets in a variety of exotic locations. Where DXHR featured an awful lot of corridors, Alpha Protocol moves from desert compounds to embassies to train stations to museums to parks across the world. I felt a lot more involved in the story as well; though things are headed for an obvious showdown (there’s a slightly clunky flashback structure that I felt broke up the flow slightly without adding much) you seem to have quite a few important decisions on the way.

Overall, then, Deus Ex: Human Revolution had great mechanics but got bogged down a bit in repetitiveness towards the end without an especially compelling plot to drive it on, whereas Alpha Protocol wasn’t so strong in general gameplay, but had a more interesting story and kept the pace up throughout. Worth a try, especially if it’s on sale for less than £2 again sometime.

Back in ye olde days, I spent a lot of time creating characters for pencil and paper RPGs. For most games that was quite a lengthy process; read and thoroughly digest the rulebook, assess the possible races, classes, skills, spells, feats and the like, roll up stats (oh look, the 3d6 came up as 18. Again. Honest.) Best of all was outfitting; I do love a good equipment list. There’s something about a lengthy table of items with their cost and weight, the RPG equivalent of an Argos catalogue, that laminated book of dreams. Weapons and armour first, of course, with many bonus points if the system could spend three pages on polearms alone (I seem to recall Tunnels and Trolls was another one with about seventeen different types of dagger), but you couldn’t neglect the other items that might prove useful. My dungeoneers would be kitted out with rope, grappling hooks, hammers, pitons, torches, lanterns, flasks of oil, flint and steel, parchment and quills for in-game map making, needle, thread, a saw, belts, sacks, pouches, cutlery, kindling, obligatory ten foot pole, canvas, paint, carrier pigeons, scaffolding, oars, a tricorder, first aid kit, fire extinguisher, laser pistol, rations, flour, flasks of water, travel oven, breathing apparatus, space suit and portable folding kitchen sink. They were ready for absolutely anything, apart from moving under the weight of all that junk.

Being something of a rulebook magpie I had a shelf full of different RPG systems, all with at least one character ready to go, usually more. The logistics of getting (real) people together meant actual opportunities to play were far more limited, though, so the vast majority of characters were purely theoretical. OK, so all characters in roleplaying games (LARP aside) are imaginary, but these ones didn’t even go on real imaginary adventures. Though some of them went on extensive theoretical imaginary adventures in order to get hold of the cool stuff from the magical items lists, or to set themselves up in strongholds or castles. Theoretical adventures generally worked out for the best, as they avoided all those awkward issues of where to leave the mule train, wagon and camels (you never know when you might need to cross a desert) while investigating a dungeon, and just how someone could move without slicing their own foot off when they had nine throwing daggers tucked into each boot (just in case). It also avoided the dread spectre of the non-optimal character, that most heinous of MMOG crimes, for every character was perfectly suited to whatever situations I thought they’d probably encounter. Horatio the Multilingual, with no combat skills or spells but phenomenal memory, fluent in 17 different languages (including Dragon, Lizard and French), might not have been much use against wave after wave of kobolds or zombies, but he was the ideal choice to engage in diplomacy and intrigue in a bustling trading port (not that he ever experienced either, but had he hypothetically done so it would certainly have been the latter, resulting in a grateful Duke awarding him command of his own barquentine, outfitted as per table 7, page 364).

Getting into computer RPGs slightly shifted the focus, as they had this peculiar idea that just creating a character wasn’t the main point of the game, that you should take that character (or party) off on an adventure. The adventures had to work within the limitations of the computer, and were therefore mostly combat-oriented, but what they lacked in endless possibilities they made up for in not requiring other humans who, even once you had herded them to the right place, at the right time, with the right number of polyhedral dice for a game, wouldn’t always be on quite the same page…

(You create a brilliant scenario involving the Comte de Drakenfall, a nobleman who goes to war, but on his way home receives word that his younger brother, steward of the estate in his absence, has fallen under the sway of a necromancer, is experimenting with vile magicks, and plotting to kill the Comte before he can reclaim his lands. The Comte disguises himself to evade assassins, and seeks the aid of the players in an inn…)

“A man approaches you; he is wearing the plain clothes of a travelling merchant [rolls dice] but you notice several expensive rings on his hand, one of them with a crest [rolls dice] that you do not recognise. ‘You seem able to handle yourselves’ he says, ‘perhaps…’”
“Hang on, expensive rings?”
“Yes”
“Brilliant. I stab him and nick the rings.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he’s not expecting it right, so it’s definitely a surprise attack. [rolls dice] That’s a hit, right? [rolls dice] 17 points of damage.”
“But… he… but…”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes”
“Ace. I take his rings and sell them. Now, any dungeons near here where we can kill some goblins and nick their stuff?”

Anyway, even without the option to purchase improbable quantities of camping equipment, I still rather enjoy whipping up new characters in CRPGs and MMOGs, picking races, classes, powers, abilities etc. One area where they tend to shade the old pencil and paper systems is in character appearance; of course they’re limited to what the computer can render as opposed to the unconstrained range of human imagination, but my imagination isn’t terribly visual and is no match for a team of skilled artists and 3D modellers when it comes to potential shoulder pad options.

All of which waffling is really just preamble to saying: I downloaded DC Universe Online the other day. I hadn’t been planning to; after bouncing off Champions Online (again) earlier this year I’ve been having a splendid old time in City of Heroes since it went “freemium”, so it’s not as if there’s been a lack of superheroic-type online fun. It wasn’t the prospect of interacting with DC’s iconic heroes that did it, or a more action oriented style of play, or even the fact that DCUO went free to play (though that was a contributory factor), it was a screenshot from the character creator that made me want to whip up a DC hero, so I kicked off the download overnight.

15Gb and a quick blast through the tutorial later, if I had to pick one word for DCUO I think I’d go with “adequate”. For character creation the interface is pretty big and clunky, presumably to support a controller as well as the mouse, but it does the job. The option to create a character “inspired by” a signature DC hero or villain is quite novel if you want to get into the game with minimum fuss, I went down the custom route with dual pistols as a weapon and fire as the power. The range of costume parts you select from isn’t terribly large, but is… adequate. Launching into the game itself you get a quick cutscene outlining the plot with Brainiac and a time-travelling Lex Luthor involved somehow, but though I enjoy some of the individual titles I’m not much of a fan of the DC Universe as a whole, so it didn’t do much for me.

The tutorial involves escaping from one of Brainiac’s ships, and introduces the usual MMOG moving, attacking, and killing of random integer quantities of things. Combat does feel quite dynamic for a MMOG, on a par with something like Age of Conan, pistols having a melee attack on the left mouse button and a ranged attack on the right, all quite… adequate.

Finishing the story you chat to a few people around a police station then wander out to fight crime in the city, during which time I levelled up to get the “Meteor Strike” fire power. That was quite interesting, as rather than just a bunch of particle effects a tangible meteor rockets down to smite your foe, then rolls around a bit in the landscape (apparently it can even be picked up and chucked). That’s quite novel, though I was a touch disappointed that raining down a giant meteor from the very heavens themselves upon the head of an opponent didn’t squash him flat, but knocked about half his health bar down. Tough cookie.

All in all it’s fine, but just doesn’t really shine. If you really like the DC Universe that might be the clincher, if not it’s hard to recommend DCUO over Champions Online or City of Heroes, I can’t see myself leaving CoH for it in the near future.

“Skyrim director Todd Howard told Wired.com in a phone interview Monday that the game will feature a never-ending stream of procedurally generated content, giving players an infinite number of things to do.

“The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” Howard said”

Unfortunately for players, it turns out that never-ending ‘procedurally generated content’ translates to Kill Infinity Rats.

Unfortunately for Bethesda, it turns out that those beta participants recruited from the MMO playing set completed the Kill Infinity Rats content in only four days, and were outraged that another infinity and half quests were not going to be available until the next expansion.

Host: This week, teams, news that 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 have been stolen in an armed raid. In a scene that could almost have been part of the game itself, “the robbery allegedly involved a fake car accident, tear gas and knives as the crooks walked away with games worth an estimated €400,000″.

Melmoth: The robbers were almost captured when they wasted precious minutes spray painting low resolution pornography tags onto a nearby wall. The criminals eventually made good their escape through ‘blatant hacks’, a police spokesmen said. The mayor of Paris called for an immediate investigation into whether the local police force were, in fact, lamers.

Zoso: Activision immediately took swift action, and released a patch to MW3 heavily nerfing both knives and tear gas.

Melmoth: Reports that the robbers escaped on a one hundred and fifty ton Brigantine flying the Jolly Roger, which they sailed around the Boulevard Périphérique to escape, are rumoured to have been entirely fabricated by the RIAA and MPAA.

Zoso: Blizzard are reported to be stepping up security around panda enclosures for the release of Mists of Pandaria in case of copycat (or copypanda) incidents; Bioware are less troubled and merely sending leaflets to drivers of Star Wars: The Old Republic deliveries telling them not to worry about plastic lightsabres (even if they have got powerful LEDs) and to ignore anyone in a dressing gown waving at them and saying “You don’t need to see my identification; this is not your delivery truck; move along”

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution feels properly “Deus Ex-y”, but that’s a double edged sword as startling innovation from ten years ago can be old hat now. Back then, for example, the idea that you might not actually be a noble anti-terrorist agent but a pawn for shadowy conspiratorial organisations was pretty novel, whereas in DXHR the presence of the Illuminati is marginally less shocking than the tutorial informing you that the WASD keys move you around. Adam Jensen, the central character of DXHR, has mirrorshades and a gravelly rasp heavily reminiscent of JC Denton, but though JC sometimes had a bit of trouble expressing emotional intensity (“A bomb!”), Jensen is a full-on charisma-vacuum who drones through every conversation in a monotone with an emotional range spanning the full gamut from “mildly disinterested” to “slightly miffed”. Perhaps memory (via rose tinted mirrored glasses) is being kind to the original game, or the writing was better, or the novelty of a voiced protagonist made up for clunky delivery, but it seems a much more glaring flaw in DXHR; as Charlie Brooker tweeted “If any film starred a character as rubbish & po-faced as this Deus Ex prick, audiences would hurl shoes at it.”

What saves DXHR is the gameplay, equally solid whether sneaking, hacking or shooting your way around. Again demonstrating its heritage, you tend to come off second-best in a straight up firefight, especially towards the beginning of the game when lacking an arsenal of upgraded weapons and sub-dermal armour. I remember having terrible trouble at the start of Deus Ex, coming to it from more straightforward shooters, blithely running around the starting level trying to shoot guards while sprinting, running out of ammunition without managing to kill anything and getting pummelled. DXHR therefore offers a similar plethora of routes and options through its levels. Some require augmentations to take advantage of, such as the hacking skill to open a door (via a mini-game) or enhanced arms to be able to pick up heavy objects blocking routes or even punch through walls. The tech tree of the augmentation system works nicely to let you specialise in a particular approach, from improved hacking skills to quieter movement or even a (brief) cloaking device.

If you choose to fight it out there’s a wide array of weapons from non-lethal shock guns and tranquilliser rifles to the staples of pistols, shotguns and assault rifles, with more exotic laser and plasma rifles later in the game, and a few varieties of grenade if you prefer chucking stuff. Avoiding confrontation involves a lot of crouching; I’m not generally a fan of stealth gameplay, especially if it involves ten minutes of analysing camera movement patterns and guard patrols and automatically failing the level if you get spotted, but it’s most enjoyable to sneak up behind a guard in DXHR and hit ‘Q’ for a satisfyingly crunchy takedown (lethal or non-lethal, depending how kind you’re feeling), and if you do get rumbled then you’ve still got options to run, hide, or pull out a plasma rifle and melt anyone who comes to investigate.

Even Jensen’s growl works; in lengthy dialogue sequences he might sound like he’s trying to bore the other party into unconsciousness (maybe his augmentations have made him too perfect as an infiltration agent and conversations are just a different sort of non-lethal takedown), but when out running missions he has a more of the Man With No Name about him, delivering the odd laconic aside but otherwise letting his actions do the talking.

Of course there is a bionically-enhanced fly in the choose-your-approach ointment: the boss fights that even Eidos admit were a mistake, when sneaking goes out of the window (or, more to the point, sneaking is unable to go out of the window, because there are no windows, air ducts, hackable doors or other alternatives). Forewarned is forearmed, though, so after seeing numerous tweets and comments I’d equipped myself with the Typhoon Explosive System augmentation (description: “Deals enough damage to kill all living targets”), which made the unavoidable fights as tricky as running up to someone and pressing “F2″ (and sometimes pressing F2 again, if they were inconsiderate enough not to die the first time). Tiny spoiler: there is a later boss who you have to fight without the benefits of augmentations, which turned out to be just the sort of special occasion I’d been saving up a grenade launcher for.

I enjoyed DXHR enough to explore every level methodically, usually punching, stunning or shooting (depending how kind I was feeling) all the guards, hacking anything hackable, then working backwards through any air ducts or lift shafts (the exits are usually more obvious than the concealed entrances), but that did mean it got rather samey as it went on. It probably wouldn’t have been quite so obvious if I’d varied the approach a bit as I’d gone through, but despite the globe-spanning plot you wind up going through lot of strangely similar corridors with strangely similar grilles over conveniently human-sized ducting, evading (or shooting) strangely similar guards and hacking in to strangely similar computers (with the computers, keypads and alarms sharing the same mini-game that’s diverting enough to start with, but not deep enough to sustain that much interest). Maybe it’s a comment about increasingly homogenized globalisation (aaaaah!) The two city hubs are the highlights, with more scope for exploration and side missions, but if you thoroughly explore everything in one playthrough there’s very little replayability. The story is on rails; the first game was as well to an extent, forcing your hand at certain key moments, but it felt like you had more decisions to make on the way, whereas the extent of the choice in DXHR seems to be whether a couple of characters live or die, without a major effect on anything else. It’s fine to keep the action moving but never particularly engaging, not least due to Jensen’s dullness.

Overall a good game, not groundbreaking like the original, but solid enough fun. Deus Ex: Human Revolution gets the coveted KiaSA “Probably Worth Buying in a Steam Sale” award.

July 14th 2008, Melmoth asks “Where is my BattleTech MMO?”

Looks like we finally have the answer, and it sounds rather promising. “Online”, “free to play” and “proper MechWarrior game in the tradition of MechWarrior 2 through 4″ are phrases that earn the KiaSA Stamp of Approval (just as soon as I’ve finished carving it from this potato here).

Not a vast amount on the official site yet but you can reserve your pilot name, so if you want any variant of “Steiner”, “Davion” or “Kurita”… bad luck, by the time you read this “D4v10nnNnSst31nn33rKur1t44442351097230″ will already have gone. Anyone else might want to pop over and sign up, though.

Tipa’s exclusive reveal of Winds of Pandaria sounds awesome with a capital ‘Z’ (followed by capital ‘O’, ‘M’ and ‘G’, lower case ‘l’, ‘o’ and ‘l’, then ‘wtfbbq’ in either WingDings or Cyrillic, depending on available fonts). The undoubted highlight for me is:

The Pandarens live in peace and harmony, and that means NO MONEY. Yup. Gold GOES AWAY ENTIRELY. The Auction House now deals in barter and karma. Do a nice thing for someone, you get a little karma you can spend. You can even help out animals and monsters for more karma. Blizzard just killed the whole gold farming industry. Now you’re going to see bunches of level 90 rogues jumping around trying to do nice things for you.

I’m not sure what I’m looking forward to most, Gevlon’s head exploding or the term ‘gold farmer’ becoming obsolete and replaced entirely with ‘karma farmer’. Probably the latter in a future expansion when new camelid races are added, as the question would arise of why Blizzard would release a statement about a contentious incident involving one of those played by someone from northern Italy named after the US President acquiring protective yellow fruit nightwear? If you’re playing along at home, that’s ten points if you said “to calm a Parma llama Obama karma farmer banana pyjama armour drama”.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

News today that Microsoft is intending to patent a celebrity shaping system for their search engine Bing.

“A search for an evening dress using the persona of Jessica Lange, explains Microsoft, would return dresses that reflect the actress’s ‘style and/or fashion preferences,’ including ‘color, fit, designer, cut, etc.’”

Which quickly leads us to wonder which MMOs would be turned up when the term was searched for under certain celebrity personas. So we programmed a quick rough’n'ready plug-in for the KiaSA Captcha AI and tried out a few random personas.

Searching for ‘MMO’ when using the Naomi Campbell persona turned up EVE Online, possibly based on the fact that they’re both overly interested in their own appearance, while regularly turning around and biting the hand that feeds them.

World of Warcraft was, predictably, returned in many results. The persona of famed temper-tantrum prone singer Björk being a fine fit for a large section of the game’s populace, and the ‘once young, fun and whacky, but now old, tired and should probably just retire gracefully’ Robin Williams persona also provided a solid hit for the game.

We had to tweak the plug-in slightly when Patrick Stewart’s persona returned Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Mark Hamill’s returned Star Trek Online. Now Stewart returns DC Universe Online, while Hamill’s persona gives Marvel Super Hero Squad Online.

BBC presenter Clare Balding‘s persona returned LotRO as the top result for MMO searches, which we assume was due to her being charming, homely, and fanatically interested in horses to the point of distraction.

A search using the Lady Gaga persona returns City of Heroes as a top hit, probably due to the fact that everyone likes the game, but few people seem to openly admit it. Plus Lady Gaga could probably learn a thing or two from the crazy-mad outfits that can regularly be seen on display in Atlas Park.

The Richard Nixon persona always returned a nostalgia tinted version of EQ that never really existed, no matter how much we tried to refine our search terms.

The George Lucas persona returned the original version of Star Wars Galaxies as expected, but then consistently overwrote its results, first with the SWG Combat Upgrade, then the New Game Experience to cries of “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

A Sasha Grey persona? My word, how did that get in there? Regardless, although it’s probably not one that would be used from work, for an MMO search it returns Rift. Associations seem to revolve around a burst of popularity, a sudden realisation that you’re the best (in a sea of mediocrity) at something which is of only passing interest to the fans of your genre, followed by a gentle descent into obscurity.

And the persona for renowned flip-out maniac Christian Bale returned Hello Kitty Online. Hmm, well we’re still ironing out some bugs in the KiaSA Captcha AI Search system, but as a first attempt, we’d say it was an unqualified success.

Bioware’s Ray Muzyka says “One of the most common things we’re already hearing is that people seem to find it hard to go back to other MMOs once they play The Old Republic”. Impressive, but why? Did he continue “… because our beta client uninstalls any other MMO on their hard drive, muahahahaha!”? Or “… because they can’t remember the 34 character passwords for the other games they’ve had to change for the third time in the last two weeks thanks to new security concerns.”? Some terrible cynic (not us, obviously) might think “… because they’re almost completely burned out on the genre and the last gentle glowing ember that briefly flickered into life, kindled by SWTOR, guttered out after the third ‘kill ten womp rats’ quest.”

The juicy soundbite is extracted from a wider interview and sounds a bit arrogant on its own, especially as he says earlier “One of our core values, as an organisation, is humility”. In context he’s talking about that fourth pillar, the story in The Old Republic, and how it adds a greater sense of depth and purpose; the quote continues “… there’s a real sense of purpose to everything”. I’d agree that MMOGs can imbue numbers with more significance than single player games, though I’m still a little sceptical as to how a truly massive game can maintain the focus on one player; it’ll be interesting to find out how SWTOR does it.

I was outraged while playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution to be subjected to a terrible bug. During a shoot-out I was pinned down by automatic fire emerging from a blank wall. Obviously there was an enemy soldier behind the wall shooting straight through it; were it was another player I would’ve assumed malicious use of a cheat, but as it was just the AI I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I was all set to make a post starting “Dear Sir, why oh why oh why oh why etc.”, but couldn’t let go of the right mouse button or I would’ve stopped hunkering down in cover and been shot.

On the off chance, I loosed off a few bursts of my own towards where the bullets were coming from, and was slightly surprised to see blood splatters, then the body of a solder materialise from thin air as his cloaking device failed. It wasn’t a bug at all, it was an invisibility suit; I wish the game had warned me, though that might’ve slightly reduced its effectiveness.

I should probably be thankful that the tactical decision of the stealthy enemy was to stand completely still in one place shooting at the boxes I was hiding behind (and equally thankful that those boxes, like all boxes in cover-based shooters, were conveniently packed with concrete, iron plates, kevlar and other composite armours capable of withstanding any projectiles short of an artillery barrage), as if he’d tried something as crazy as “walking around the boxes (while completely undetectable)” I would’ve been in trouble.