I love Battlefield 2, I think it is one of the best games out there. I have always wanted to write about it here on The Reticule, I have probably had two or three different drafts of articles about the game hidden away here. This time is different.

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Last year Quinns took a shot at analyzing Pathologic on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Just over a year later Lewis Denby has retrospectively looked at the game on Eurogamer.

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First things first. This is not a review/verdict or anything similar. I set out with the intention of giving Drakensang a fair, long and ultimately helpful review, but I can’t. I just can’t get far enough into the game to give it a proper review, so this is an impressions piece.

That said, what this piece will also attempt to illustrate is the need for the first chapter of a game to be engaging and, above all, entertaining.

It’s not that Drakensang is a bad game, but it certainly doesn’t have the most exciting opening scene. RPGs often fall into this trap, especially fantasy ones. The game begins with you being sent to a town for some reason that wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember, when, surprise surprise, there’s a quarantine on. Stuck outside the city, a guard helpfully informs you that he might let you in if you get some references from citizens who happen to be outside the city. Off you toddle to go and grab them.

Almost every fantasy RPG I’ve played has something like this in, and it is always annoying. I’m going to use the Witcher for this example, entirely because Chris is playing it while I write this. The exact same situation happens in the Witcher, but is mitigated by not being the very first thing that happens. The Witcher introduces you to its world by having you fight a giant insect beast in a decrepit castle before bonking a witch, then sends you off to Quarantine City, Fantasyland. You get a taste of what the rest of the game will be in that first half hour, manic combat against big opponents, boobs, and the occasional smarmy dialogue line.

You don’t get that impression with Drakensang’s opening. It may be somewhat childish of me, but in RPGs I tend to start judging the quality of something by ranking the awesomeness of the basic spells. When given a choice, I am always some form of wizard; I blame this on the romantic notion of strolling around hurling fireballs at people I don’t like. When playing a magical class, that’s what I want – fiery death. What I don’t want, as became quite quickly apparent in Neverwinter Nights 2 for instance, are spells that look pathetic. I don’t want to bring Warcraft into this, but I feel that I must. The spells in Warcraft look powerful. Yes, they do start to get repetitive, and a great deal of it is just levelling up the same spell to make it’s animation bigger, but they are still impressive. Not so in Drakensang.

I understand that starting spells are supposed to be a bit crap, being, as they are, training spells and all, but they can still look impressive. The fantasy equivalent of a card trick, they should have an effect. My experience of the early spells in Drakensang was very much one of disappointment, my bland looking spell glancing off a generic wolf with nary a scratch. It made me sad.

Also, I hate the camera. Seriously, I really hate it. There’s a strange voyeurism about it that makes the game a little disjointed. It’s not tied to the movements of your character in the same way as other RPGs, instead it clumsily follows you as you run away, like an overweight documentary crew, consistently requiring you pause the game and forcibly move them into a better position just so you can see what you are doing. It’s annoying and was possibly the main reason I lost interest in the game.

It is important that you understand, however, that I’m not saying Drakensang is a bad game. I am in no way entitled to make such a judgement with what I’ve played. You’ll notice I’ve not touched on the plot, or characterisation or any of that business, and that’s because I couldn’t get far enough to get my teeth in.

People will probably say “give it a chance, it gets better once you sink a few hours in” and that may be true. I myself have said that about a number of games in the past. But Drakensang has caused me to rethink this position somewhat. When considering the whole nature of the medium, the vast catalogue of video games currently and soon-to-be available, it is important a game grab you from the outset. Games are all about living a dream of some description, and you need to be sure that the dream the game is going to provide is the one you want. Good games use the first level as a sort of taster of the sort of thing you will reach at the end; they’ll show you a powerful wizard decimating foes, give you a brief play as an ultimate bad ass character, boobs, whatever, then stick you back in noobsville with the knowledge that you will, eventually, become that good again. Sticking you in tedium and saying “the game will get better eventually” without any proof doesn’t provide the necessary hook to draw you in.

Sometimes, I’m glad I don’t get paid for reviewing games. If I was being paid I would have had to have played through Drakensang in its entirety, and I really don’t want to. I have other, more exciting games to play with my time. But still, this is an important point that I think all developers need to understand, from consumer to developer, the first scene of you game must categorically be engaging and interesting, otherwise how do you expect people to stay around until the end?

It is safe to say that we are entering a new Steam Age, rather than a time when steam is a new power source this Steam Age is where Valve’s program is at the heart of the modern PC gamer.

Steam is home to over 20 million users and plays host to over 500 different applications. In recent years it has become much more than simply a digital distribution platform. Read the full story

[A brief public service announcement first.  For some reason (we honestly don't quite understand why) Mercurio has gone and signed up for twitter.  If you want to see more of his vitriolic hatred of various things to do with the internet, you can find him at MSilverESQ.]

Morons of the internet, gather round! I made certain to book an extra large room today, I know how many of you cretins litter the various tubes of our electronic kingdom, but if it’s a tight fit I apologise.

Apologise.

That word is very distasteful to me. I don’t use it often being, as I am, always right by point of fact. I use it today to make a point, to direct this little lecture for you. Today’s lecture will be entitled (for those of you that need a brief vox-pop for any semblance of concentration): Dear Internet, shut the hell up.

It seems that the laypeople of the internet, the cyber-cattle, have started gathering in unwashed, spotty hordes and attempting to quantify the purpose of a games review. I’ve been noticing this for a while in various places, commonly called “forums”, and today realised that these people need setting straight.

If there were to be a manifesto of how to review something it would, by the nature of its existence, be written by the reviewer or the reviewee. However, a review is ultimately a written piece and, as such, is entitled to the freedom of any written work. I will concede that, in some professions, ethics (irrelevant as they are) and other factors may come into play. Doctors and the police, they’re the people who need ethics. Not games reviewers.

I can hear your tinny mooing rising to a crescendo: What of the audience of the reviews? They want a scientific breakdown of the merit of the product! They don’t want a corporate shill vomiting press-packaged reviews in order to sell games! They want the truth! You must give that to them!

Let me tell you now that you’re wrong.

I understand that such a brusque statement may have confused you, you are simple after all, so I will endeavour to explain it for you.

What is it that you expect of a review? You want honest and unbiased and objective journalism, someone to deconstruct the game in question and tell you which springs work, which sprockets gleam with polish, and which nails hang loose and bent from the woodwork. You want a check list of the merits. What you want is a robot to review your games.

Up until recently, I always assumed that the world was aware of the humanity of reviewers, God knows they don’t try to hide it. Reviews are almost always written in the first person, or contain first person passages, detailing their experience with the game. I thought the world at large understood that.

I’ll sum that up in a sentence for you before I continue: Reviewers are people.

What does this mean? It means that they are reviewing things in a medium they enjoy, and as such their scores will be based upon how that particular product impacts upon their enjoyment of the medium. A very simple scoring method would be either: A) It makes me feel good about my medium, or B) It makes me feel bad about my medium. That, of course, isn’t enough for the nebulous audience, they demand quantification of merit. Three Sartres of profundity out of five, sir.

The scoring system offends me in general, so don’t think I’m merely focused on the laypeople today, oh no. The scoring system will no doubt get its own rant before too long, probably after I’ve finished deciding whether the one employed here is any better or not.

Back to today’s topic, however. If we accept that reviewers use grades of merit for products, we then move onto the prime point of contention: content of a review. Everyone seems to start their little list of what they want a review to say with the words “I want…”. This is as pure an indicator as any that everyone who isn’t me had bad parents.

When I was a young boy, a sprightly lad, my parents would often inform me that “I want” never gets. Did no-one inform you? You’re not in a position to demand, you’re detached from the production of said work. You are allowed a modicum of input with the comment boxes, but never be deluded into thinking that anyone reads them. Reviewers can’t provide objectivity no matter how many times you bitch and moan, the human condition prevents it. They could provide you with a check-list review, a systematic breakdown of everything that, well, broke down, but that would read like a patch log. Reviews are meant to be interesting, surely?

I’ll leave you to ponder on this, if your brains can actually ponder without starting to steam. You’ll probably disagree with me of course, and that is your right. If you want to be wrong then I can’t stop you from disagreeing with me, but there is one thing you must consider:

Reviews are meant as guidance, if you follow them to the letter without thought then you are an idiot.

Good day, morons of the internet.

Spurred by Liegh Alexander’s recent post on SexyVideoGameLand, and a few choice words from our interview with Edmund McMillen a while ago, I’ve started to think about just what Indie means now. I don’t think it’s nearly as clear cut as it has been in the past, and the rate at which it is growing and diversifying is only making it more difficult to classify. Of course, there’s always the fear that by lumping something into a genre you diminish its own voice, but that’s an discussion for another day. Instead, I’m interested in exploring the attitudes and perceptions of what constitutes exactly what makes a developer or game ‘indie’ and what makes it just ‘independent’.

There’s a few different approaches to this discussion, and they’re all valid. ‘Indie’ could just mean a small team, a few people with little money but lots of vision and talent, making something brilliant, original and creative that lights the communities on fire, like 2DBoy (love you!). It could mean something made by a developer without a publisher, funded by them so they reap all the profits, like Introversion. It could mean something thrown up on some sort of distribution service like Steam or Xbox Live, so it’s given the audience it wouldn’t normally have, but at the same time sacrifices a portion of the profits, like The Maw or Pixeljunk Eden. The point is there are many different ways you can get your game out there, and there are many different types of developer who have all been called ‘indie’ at some point or another. The things they have in common is that they are largely independent, and their games are all creative and different from the AAA titles.

I think there is a separation between how developers see ‘indie’ and how consumers see it. Talking to McMillen, he claimed that ‘Working with a publisher I’ve learned a lot about what really goes on behind the scenes. Even if you’re indie, you’re really not indie; you’re Independent. No longer indie. Super Meat Boy Wii isn’t indie… it’s Independent.’ The difference between ‘indie’ and ‘independent’ is one of money; if you can afford to pay all the fees associated with a big release, then your game slips away from ‘indie’ and into ‘independent’. From the other side, we don’t, for the most part, know how these games are made. We just know about who makes them, and perhaps in a few cases, get to play the game during its development to help out with beta testing. Thus to the community the games are characterised by how they play, and how they look. You expect the games to be a little buggy, or if not merely quite limited in how long they take to play and how they look. Something like Spelunky only retains your attention because of its procedural nature coupled with its addictive and sadistic death mechanics. If it had been 3d and covered with bloom, no matter how much fun and clever it was, it would no doubt lose its ‘indie’ tag.

So it would seem it’s a case of ‘lo-fi’, as Liegh Alexander puts it. Low production costs and small teams mean the game is simple yet enjoyable, and often revolves around a core mechanic but not much else. While this would seem true of the majority of games recognised as ‘indie’, there are exceptions, such as Flashbang Studio’s 8 week games. They have a reasonable sized team and the games they produce are often wonderfully original and fun to play, but have often a surprising amount of polish and graphical charm, yet retain the feel of an ‘indie’ title. A game about an Aptosaurus dreaming of a Brontosaurus with a jetpack could only be made as an indie game, because no one would want to make it for anything but pure enjoyment. So perhaps instead the ‘indie’ name applies to the concept of a game rather than the production values.

You don’t see many FPS or Strategy games coming out of the indie scene. The few that I can think of off the top of my head (Gravity Bone, Zeno Clash, Stalin Vs the Martians) depart heavily from the conventions of the genre, be it aesthetically, mechanically or satirically. They take the norm and play with it, coming up with something entirely different from what was there before. The rest tend to head towards platform and puzzle territory, sticking with clever physics mechanics, things which will work on a 2d plane. I keep coming back to the word ‘simple’, and, fundamentally, that is the common characteristic of an ‘indie’ game. There are, of course, exceptions, but for the most part an indie game is about a simple mechanic executed in interesting ways. World of Goo, the recent poster-child for the indie scene, is the perfect example of this.

You build things out of goo balls. That is, in essence, the entirety of the game. The fact that 2D Boy did such a brilliant job of playing with that concept to keep it fresh and exciting all the way through it’s many chapters is a testament to their accomplishment as developers. There isn’t really a whole lot going on in the game, and you’re often only focused on a few key points on your structures, but the simple nature of the game keeps you entertained in a far more relaxing way than the vast struggles of an RTS like Empire: Total War or the adrenaline fueled rushes of an FPS like Far Cry 2.

This isn’t an easy discussion to close. The perceptions of the indie scene are changing constantly, and depend almost entirely on where in the situation you stand, whether developer or consumer, it would seem it doesn’t boil down to any one thing. Money is a factor, mechanics are another. How many people make the game has a greater effect than it would appear at first. You can’t even say that when you put all these things together you have a sure-fire formula for what constitutes ‘indie’. Sometimes certain things matter, other times they don’t at all. In the end, it’s one of those situational things that moral philosophers always bang on about. Those liberal bastards.

I’ve been reading a lot of press releases lately. It’s not been by choice, various members of staff at The Reticule have started sending them to me as a practical joke and, not to be undone by their childish antics, I’ve read every single one. It’s like when you catch a child smoking, you make them smoke every single cigarette in the house inside of one hour with an end to teaching them a lesson. That lesson being how much fun a cigarette can be.

I think I lost my point there. The important thing is, the Reticuleers are sending me press releases to shut me up, to keep me bogged down in tweaking my spam filter to get rid of their emails. I’m not going to play their little game.

What I am going to do, however, is explain to you all why press releases are pointless exercises. I dare say this will be less controversial than my previous posts, but I don’t care. Sometimes (now pay attention kids, this is important) it’s alright to agree with the majority.

Now then, press releases.

I would imagine none of you read print media (pornography, The Sun, and games magazines don’t count) so you may not be fully aware of how strange the composition of a press release is. Your frame of reference comes from things like 4chan and other internet forums, places where the English language is ripped apart piece by piece, puréed, then squirted onto a stale cracker in lieu of dialogue. With that in mind, allow me to make this easier for you.

I’m going to present you with a standard press release, one I have plucked from the slush file upon my 1984 Amstrad Super-Deluxe Computational Electroterminal’s desktop. I will then present you with the same press release a second time, however I will have reconstituted it into a more polite format, one which will make sense. Understand?

First up, the press release:

TAURINE GAMES ANNOUNCES NEW GAME: DARK LIGHT

March 1^st 2009, Bolton, England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Europe – Taurine games have today announced their new IP, Dark Light, in production for the PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS and some mobile phones.

Dark Light, created by acclaimed director Erasmus Tokei Hume, will be the start of a trilogy of Survival Horror/Action/Strategy games from Taurine games. The game will feature both graphics and animation, a story, and will involve Nolan Price’s search for his daughter in a haunted mansion in rural Kentucky during a full moon on Halloween night.

“Dark Light may well be the biggest leap forward in visual entertainment since the invention of the remote control,” said Quentin Paulson, VP of Endworld Inc’s Digital Distribution service, ByteMole. “It’s a game that has won unprecedented critical acclaim before it has even been released and, let’s face it, the Survival Horror/Action/Strategy marketplace is pretty barren right now!”

Dark Light will be available in May/June/July or August 2009 for $14.99 (40.00 Pounds Sterling, 60 EUR)

Read that? Good, now for the more pleasant version:

Dear Potential Consumer,

We at Taurine games would like to announce to you the creation of our upcoming game. It is entitled Dark Light, and will be available on pretty much every console that you are likely to have.

This game is being crafted by a man with plenty of experience in this field, so you can be sure you will receive value for money. He has created a great tale of loss, family and love, and woven it into a game with significant replayability and innovative controls.

The story concerns a man named Nolan Price, an architect from Cincinnati who is forced to return to his one failure, a mansion in Kentucky. His daughter (who, you will be pleased to know, will be voiced by Dakota Fanning) has gone missing, leaving a note that reveals the mansion as her destination.

I would like to go into greater detail, but unfortunately my superiors have told me that I must not. It is rather unfortunate really, I have some game play videos that I would love to show you, but apparently I can only show them to the press. I’m sorry. But, you know, if you said you were a journalist I don’t think anyone would check your credentials.

Anyway, I do hope this announcement has peaked your interest. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about Dark Light in the coming weeks. It’s due out around the middle of the year and will be a pretty reasonable price I understand, unless you live in the United Kingdom or Europe. The publishers don’t seem to understand regional pricing, but we’re working on it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope we can count on you to pre-order our game.

Regards,

Ken Michaels

Press Department, Taurine Games.

Now then, which one do you think is better? Yes, it is clearly the second one. A little bit of effort and you get something that people will enjoy reading.

Why can’t they just do things my way?

Yes. Nukum. Have a problem? Take it up with the man directly, in his lair. If you wish to venture to the surroundings of this lair (with the possible goal of understanding what the hell it is I’m talking about), don’t hesitate to visit http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.php. Read the full story