Friend of The Reticule Craig Lager has been playing the Killing Floor mod Defence Alliance 2 and has written his thoughts on it, hit the jump to check them out! Read the full story

Friend of The Reticule, Thomas Senior is a big fan of Dragon Age, in this guest article he talks about Dwarven society in Dragon Age. Read the full story

Religion has provided the inspiration and subject matter for countless books, films and plays for many years, and continues to do so to this day. It makes fundamental claims about philosophy and ethics that have attracted fervent criticism and praise in almost every form and from almost every possible direction in recent years. So with all this in mind, why have we not seen more games that deal directly with the issues surrounding faith and religious belief? Well aside from the fact that, for reasons beyond my comprehension, it is somewhat of a taboo to openly criticise religion intellectually or artistically (an immunity that all other forms of discourse are completely free from), the last ten or so years have shown that mainstream developers will invariably get bombarded with complaints and criticism that is mostly generated by an extremely vocal and hostile minority claiming to represent the views of people of faith worldwide, should they attempt to do so. The ensuing controversy results in developers being forced to tip-toe their way around issues surrounding faith or even avoid engagement with them at all, out of a needless fear of causing ‘offence’.

The makers of Hitman 2, for instance, were forced to rerelease an altered version of the game after the original sparked controversy over a level in which Sikh guards were being killed within a depiction of the Harmandir Sahib, a Sikh holy site. More recently, Resistance: Fall of Man was protested by the Church of England for including a gun battle in Manchester Cathedral. Legal threats were levelled at Sony by the Church, who demanded a formal apology, a substantial donation and complete withdrawal of the game purely because they considered the depiction of the Cathedral to be ‘desecration’. Thankfully, Sony did not capitulate. The attitude of the media at the time, however, in paying too much in the way of lip service to the ludicrous accusations and demands of the Church has somewhat neutered the industry and helped to discourage many other developers from using explicit religious imagery in their titles. If major producers are getting their wrists slapped for merely depicting religious symbols or using ‘holy sites’ as the setting for certain scenes, then the industry has no hope of engaging with religious faith on a sophisticated level in the same way as cinema or literature.

Of course these kinds of themes and materials must be dealt with appropriately, and abominations like Ethnic Cleansing and Muslim Massacre only end up contributing to the stigma that games can’t deal with them seriously and objectively. Equally damaging, however, are the ‘religious-games developers’ who attempt to force gratuitous religious messages into their games and essentially proselytise their audience, which merely serves to attract ridicule and ultimately deter other developers from even trying to engage critically with faith. TwoGuysSoftware’s (now known as XcrucifiX) Eternal War: Shadows of Light, for example, is just a poorly disguised recruitment drive that has a deviously brainwashy feel to it. The attempt to involve religion more directly does deserve some credit, but when implemented with such an overtly Christian agenda it not only detracts from the level of enjoyment possible but serves to alienate the mass audience, who are largely unconcerned with the bogus moral values of religion being snuck into their gaming experience.

Where is the middle ground then? On the one hand you have some peripheral developers placing religion at the centre of the experience and essentially creating interactive propaganda, and on the other there are the mainstream developers who are terribly afraid of overtly trespassing on religious subject matter out of fear of incurring a lawsuit. Clearly there is not a market for the former, but there is a serious deficiency in the mainstream industry of genuinely creative, objective and dispassionate exploration of religious issues and the problems they have caused and still cause in today’s world.

Assassin’s Creed is a case in point. Although most would argue that the Crusades were considerably political or territorial in nature, I found it frustrating how the extraordinarily fundamental role of religion in the conflict and its pervasive presence in medieval society was forcibly pushed into the background as to be almost indiscernible. This was particularly damaging for a game which was specifically criticised for its lack of depth and the unconvincing nature of the world it created. Had the developers reflected in the game how religiously charged society was in the 12th century and not treated the issue so sensitively it would have gone some way to alleviating this and adding a certain level of believability to their depictions of Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, which were, at the time, religious centres of the world.

With the political, ethical and metaphysical issues surrounding religion becoming more salient since the 9/11 bombings and the rise of ‘New Atheism’, developers are going to find themselves increasingly constrained in the kinds of contemporary issues they are able to engage with creatively if such a hugely significant subject remains untouchable. We have come a long way from the early 90s, where a game with even the slightest religious reference was heavily censored, but until religion is placed back on the table of rational discourse and criticism, video games as a creative medium will continue to be taken less seriously than other forms of entertainment. Authors and filmmakers seem to have a lot more courage when it comes to critically and objectively examining religion and if games developers can follow the example set by people like Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders or Kevin Smith, it will just be a matter of time before the gaming medium will grow to a similar level of maturity and sophistication, which it undoubtedly has the potential for.

Half-Life Uplink is, for those of you who aren’t aware, the classic demo for the original Half-Life. It is also the first taste of Half-Life that I experienced some ten years ago or more when I came across the demo on an old demo CD that came with a long-gone PC magazine.

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After seemingly hours spent fighting my way through Combine Metro Cops and manhacks I was glad to see those cute little headcrabs launch themselves up towards my face. It was something of a relief to see these, the most basic of alien life form you find in the Half-Life universe. By the time they made their first appearance in Route Kanal I was tired of the usual Combine tricks of throwing exploding barrels at me and sending manhacks down tunnels to cut me up.

I was starting to feel that I was stuck in a world inhabited purely by Combine, humans and the occasional enslaved Vortigaunt. Of course the barnacles don’t really count, they are the most impassive of enemies you are likely to encounter in a game, by the time I came across my first headcrab, and almost immediately after my first zombie I was relieved. I knew that I was still in the Half-Life world and that I wouldn’t have to spend the remaining ten or so hours of the game fighting those bloody robotic Combine and their manhacks!

Going back in time to the original Half-Life I noticed things unravel in a similar way, just this time you go from fighting headcrabs and zombies to fighting the marines who are probably some of the best enemies in any FPS yet. You will always remember the first time you come accross the marines when you witness one gun down a helpless scientist. That is an awesome moment. Like with Half-Life 2 I always feel relieved that I am done fighting just one type of opponent.

In the similar vein to Half-Life 2 I always feel relieved and excited to find my first enemy which isn’t an alien or a Combine. However, rather than being relieved simply because of the change in who you are fighting, I think this feeling emerges for altogether different reasons. I would put it down to a sense of familiarity.

In the first game you start without knowing what these alien creatures are, once you are told by the scientists that help is on its way you start to expect help from the military, as we all know they don’t help you one bit. But they play an important role in your enjoyment of the game because you are able to identify with one of the enemies you face.

By the end of the original Half-Life you have come in some way to accept the role of the Xenian life, you are then thrown into the world of Half-Life 2 staring up at the face of Breen, observing Vortigaunt’s being used as slaves and the dreaded Combine Metro Cops. In Half-Life 2 it is the aliens which are the creatures you identify with first having battled them back in Black Mesa, you see the Combine, a faceless entity with which you cannot relate to.

Now though, I am heading back to Black Mesa so I can fight those marines one more time.

The Russian games development scene is home to some of the brightest minds in the industry creating games like The Void and Men of War, yet all is not rosy in the motherland, the economic crisis has hit hard and developers are having to adapt to a new world. Despite the financial pressures there are still many great, and other not so great, games coming from Russia. These are challenging times for an industry which is still young and has already had to deal with one economic crisis. In 1998 financial problems in Russia set back growth of the games industry, it is only now that it seems to be getting back on its feet.

Anatoly Subbotin of 1C Company, one of the largest publishers and developers of games in Russia, feels that it is only in the last four or five years that games development has moved from being a hobby and turning into a business that is comparable to what we see in the West and that it is this which allows titles like Kings Bounty and Stalin vs Martians to be developed. Despite the rapidly developing industry, Anatoly reveals “There are still some peculiarities. Many Russian developers still put a lot of effort in the creative side of their project, many teams still want to deliver something original. This is the reason why a big number of innovative products come from Russia.” These are ideas shared by Aleksey Luchin of Ice-Pick Lodge, a developer which has created a reputation for making experimental and innovative titles with Pathologic and The Void. Aleksey thinks that “The industry here is rather young compared to the ones in Europe and America, and …since the market is rapidly developing and due to the fact that doing business in Russian is different in its paradigm, the work patterns and traditions that the Western industry has accepted and follows, are still forming here. This fact lessens the control over the development process, and leads to developers being able to experiment with the game more.”

Unfortunately because of a lack of investment in some areas of the industry many games are released in extremely buggy condition. Aleksey says “the quality of games that come from Russian is in general worse than abroad – the games suffer from bugs, strange design decisions, often hard and requiring skill to beat the game and patience to look through the flaws to see a gem.”

It is not just a lack of investment that is causing problems, the economic crisis has hit the retail industry in Russia very hard. Alexander Scherbakov of Dreamlore (Stalin vs Martians) reveals some shocking statistics about the decline of the Russian retail market: “The traditional PC market we had is almost dead. By the New Year 2009 holidays local publishers were selling half from what they expected (compared to the same period of 2007). By the end of spring, they were selling 5 times less, than during the spring of 2008. Right now (compared to Fall 2007) the publishers are selling like 7 or 8 times less.” This is not just affecting the poor quality titles, Alexander thinks that all types of games are suffering: “Yes, you can’t sell unremarkable supercrap without any unique selling point as the publishers used to, since the retailers won’t order that. But everything else is just selling bad. Even AAA titles.”

There are various factors stemming from the economic crisis that has led to the dramatic collapse of the retail market, the inflation of the rouble and wage cuts mean that consumers buying power has decreased twice over. Alexander thinks that this is leading to a rise in piracy as people can’t justify spending money on games when it is needed elsewhere. In turn this leads to a downward spiral where retailers won’t stock a game because they don’t think it will sell which leads to publishers closing projects because they won’t get the guaranteed sales.

It may seem a grim picture for the games scene in Russia, but Alexander doesn’t think all hope is lost, he identifies three ways to survive as a developer in Russia and the ex-Soviet republics. “First option is going online or successfully going online. Second, is working directly with a Western (or Eastern!) publisher. Third option is outsourcing, but this one is pretty hard right now, not much orders nowadays.” Dreamlore is looking at moving into the online world for future projects and 1C has come together with another developer, Soft Club.

Anatoly feels that joining with Soft Club is the best way to tackle the economic crisis and drive business forward. “1C is the leading PC publisher in Russia and Soft Club is strong in console games sales. Together we plan to withstand the economic crisis more efficiently and moreover develop our business in the future more rapidly.” Creating a stronger console presence is important in Anatoly’s eyes, he sees changes coming in the traditionally PC focused market with console sales getting bigger each year.

The Russian games development scene is certainly unique, without it I am sure we would never see such artistic masterpieces as The Void or games like Cryostasis which use environmental effects like few others. As the industry continues to develop in Russia there is likely to become a clearly defined split between groups like 1C which make bigger titles and start to reach to the console audience, Dreamlore which will move into the online world and Ice-Pick Lodge which will continue with artistic and unusual games. Time will tell how the industry in Russia copes with the economic climate, some studios seem to have plans put in place while others may not be so lucky as to keep going past the development of their next game. It is a critical time for developers in Russia, hopefully we will see more gems like Kings Bounty and Men of War. Indeed, the next time you see a game coming from Russia, don’t rule it out as a buggy mess straight away, you may be surprised at what you find when you delve deeper into it.

“You can write about anything” he said. “Anything?” I said. “Anything” he said. “As long as it is PC related”. Well as much as this post might therefore seem like a defiant “fuck you!” to Chris’ only brief, I nevertheless want to share my recent experience of playing Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 with my fellow PC brethren. Why? Well aside from the fact that I had no internet for two weeks and was slowly becoming a desperate, games-deprived Neanderthal, everything I’d heard or read about Halo beforehand made it out to be the single greatest FPS of all time. Words like ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘flawless’ and ‘perfect’ seem to get thrown around willy-nilly when it comes to Bungie’s poster child and the few friends I have who play it with an almost religious devotion get quite defensive, angry almost, at the mere suggestion that it could possibly be anything other than those things.

Being the pretentious purist that I am, what I had seen so far really didn’t strike me as that impressive or original and so I spent most of my brief encounters with it turning my nose up and getting frustrated at my ineptitude with the primitive control system. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy a challenge, but after playing a lot of FPS with a mouse and a keyboard, trying to do it with a 360 controller is like trying to run an obstacle course drunk off your tits.

Annoyingly, my housemate is obscenely good, and could probably shoot my bollocks off with his eyes closed. But give me a few hours with a mouse and keyboard and he wouldn’t stand a chance, even with the hundreds upon hundreds of hours he has accumulated online. Aiming with the mouse is, quite simply, better, and being an uncompromising PC gamer means I’ll never be fully comfortable with a controller. Rest assured, I am aware of the fact that this is all relative; everyone playing online is using the same infuriatingly inefficient control method and so is facing the same challenge (I do, however, get a certain amount of amusement, as smug and pompous as this amusement might be, at the sort of things that are considered “awesome moves” in Halo; things that a monkey could probably perform with ease on a PC).

What can I actually criticise Halo for then?

Well there isn’t actually an awful lot wrong with the gameplay itself, and as the bleak, internetless days went by I found myself (with a certain reluctance I might add) slowly enjoying the multiplayer more and more. But to grant any game the extraordinarily special status that fans and critics have given Halo would demand equally extraordinary design and execution, which Halo simply doesn’t have. It’s a good game, but no better than any number of the great shooters on the PC.

The argument I find myself having with Halo fanboys is a continuous regurgitation of the same old nonsense, and the one thing I seem to hear time and time again goes something like: “But the engine is so robust bla bla bla”. True, the engine is good, great in fact, but a solid engine is no longer a mark of distinction. We are in a technological golden age (at least as far as video games are concerned) where having a decent game engine can no longer be flaunted as a remarkable feature. Call of Duty, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Battlefield, Quake, Crysis; all of these titles have solid engines that have withstood the test of time. Granted they’re not as good as Halo’s in some respects but they’re certainly good enough to facilitate a balanced multiplayer experience, which, when you think about it, is all you really need. A good engine is not what gamers actively look for in a game anymore; it’s something that should just be there as standard.

There is also an on-going debate about the problem of servers. The lack of third-party, dedicated servers means that players are forced to host every game on their own internet connection (the problems of which I won’t bother reiterating here). I don’t pretend to understand the technical or financial obstacles stopping Microsoft and Bungie from implementing the system used in multiplayer FPS on the PC (although as far as I’m aware there really aren’t any or, at least, many), but when comparisons are drawn by Halo’s own fanboys between it and, say, Call of Duty or Quake, then they immediately place it on the same table of discussion, including the efficiency of matchmaking/server browsing. And Halo’s is mind-bogglingly stupid.

Without any kind of server browser, players search for available games and are automatically grouped according to their current skill level, completely ignoring the highest skill level that certain players may have reached in the past. This results in the most ludicrous match-ups often pitting one side that may have played 5000 games between them against another that could have played as little as 100. The veterans barely even break a sweat, yawning as they effortlessly pummel the opposition, who spend the entire game headbutting their controllers screaming “OMG!!” and “WTF?!?!?” as they are sniped in the face or bludgeoned to death for the gazillionth time. No one finds this fun and it happens to me frustratingly often (because I’m usually on the latter team).

The lack of a server browser also means you get absolutely no choice over what map is to be played in the match. It is randomly generated and players get to veto just once, after which they have to settle for the alternative, which is also randomly generated. This results in players being forced to compete on some of the most unimaginative maps known to man, with their only options being to play through it regardless, or quit the game, suffer the XP penalty and leave the remaining players to fight it out with unbalanced teams.

It seems odd that a developer as well respected and acclaimed as Bungie have let such glaring errors remain in their principal title and it reflects poorly on the Halo community that the developers have been allowed to get away with some of the most heinous mistakes, mistakes that would have been instantly condemned had it been released on the PC.

I certainly enjoyed playing Halo, but in no way has it revolutionised the genre or competitive FPS in the way it has been lauded as doing- its huge success can be attributed simply to the fact that, with the exception of its flawed matchmaking system, it is the only console FPS that actually gets all the basics pretty much right, nothing more. It stands alone in this respect, and with no decent challenges to its crown, it has had a free ride with fans who are essentially none the wiser. Valve have raised the bar as far as feedback from their community is concerned and Bungie will have to match this if they are to see continued success with current and future titles.

We’d love to hear about your experiences of Halo 3, and what you think of it from a PC gamer’s perspective. Alternatively, if you would like to criticise my argument, complain about the fact I managed to use the words ‘fuck’, ‘tits’ and ‘bollocks’ in one article, or just tell me that I’m an obstinate little shite, then you can do that too.

Let the commentathon commence!

“No Gods or Kings, Only Man” Andrew Ryan’s sneering visage impresses upon you from his bronzed effigy. From the outset, Bioshock’s city of Rapture is one of affirmed ideology. Rapture isn’t just a city under the sea. It’s a vision. Read the full story