An interview by the universe

You’re late.

I know.

It’s been fucking five months.

Yeah, I noticed.

So – what the hell?

I was busy. Er. Playing Spelunky? You should play Spelunky.

Did you even get round to playing Warband?

Of course!

What prompted you to finish it now?

It’s on sale on Steam, and you should buy it. You still have time!

Oh. So now that you’ve had lots of time to think about it, maybe you can at least tell us what it is first?

It’s an RPG about horses and hats, largely. And swords and arrows and ladies and mercenaries and honey and villages and kingdoms. Or khanates, if you are so inclined. Despite what I said about hats last time, here they’re a reasonable addition to the game, as they’re mainly made out of metal.

Ladies? There weren’t any ladies in the original game besides the useless wives of the lords.

It’s not just the original game with added multiplayer. They’ve redone almost everything to some extent, not to mention all the additions. They’ve gone to lengths such as redefining how much happiness a jar of butter inspires in your soldiers. If you’re used to the vanilla M&B, the changes in the most minute details will strike you at times. It’s not often you see how difficult it is to balance a single-player game.

This might be a good time to remind you that there’s absolutely no point in buying the vanilla version of the game. There’s not one area where the original is better. Everything feels like a better thought-out game and they’re also heavily supporting the game. New, large patches are sent out every few weeks, even though the game is quite old. And unlike with The Creative Assembly, the patches don’t meant that the underlying product is broken.

I want ladies, not game balancing.

But yeah, ladies. It’s perhaps one of the most prominent, if also one of the least useful additions. Wives can serve as a secretary of state of sorts, but that appears to be it. Strictly no sex. Hilariously, when I married my in-game wife, her relationship to me got a severe hit and stayed at -14 until the end of the game. I’m actually rather happy that they didn’t give women a more strategic part in the game, as you generally don’t want those kinds of distractions in M&B.

Then again, you can now play the game as a female character, and it’s more than a cosmetic change. The game warns you that it’s actually a (mildly) sexist bastard and will treat you differently if you choose against beards.

Ladies are more boring than I hoped. Any war stories instead?

How convenient that you’d ask that. Let me walk you through a short period of one of my kingdoms.

Only three nations remain. The Khanate does not count as they hold no cities and most lords have been captured. The Rhodoks, despite their majestic spears (pervert), pose a minor threat with three cities close together and no easy access to my territory. The Sarranids are a different matter as i have never actually fought them for long. Can they keep up with our war machine? How will their mamlukes fare against our knights? Do they have any considerable super units that i don’t know about?

A far-away land until recently, both our and their conquests have now bound the borders of our nations. Minor skirmishes by bored lords over looted villages and attacked caravans have been raising the tension for a while. Open war is near. It’s just a matter of who mans up first.

The Sarranids invade. I lose three cities on the first day of the war. Fortunately I’m a sore loser and end the game, so I don’t get to see how I’m utterly murdered, probably to death.

Your kingdom?

Mine, yeah. Gone are the days of simple rebellions and the other kingdoms take upstarts relatively seriously now. It’s as you’d expect of course, with huge territories being increasingly difficult to maintain and control. In the end, I was losing as many castles to treason and my knights deserting me as to direct enemy action. Unfortunately, the mood of your knights and lords has more to do with your interpersonal relationships than the success of your kingdom. There’s also an annoying see-saw effect: if you get along well with one of your lords – say you give him a village – your relationship with the rest of your subjects will suffer.

So I found myself in an idiotic position where I didn’t want to designate rulers for my lands as my relationships would suffer too much. Besides pillaging, lands are the best source of income, so I was struggling to raise anything but very basic armies.

Fortunately that brings me back to the good parts of the game, as they’ve actually greatly streamlined the way you actually gather money from your lands. It was really satisfying to see that it’s now automatic, so you don’t have to travel from one side of the map to the other to get money from a few poor villagers. Mount & Blade: Warband officially features automatic horrors of feudalism!

Actual war stories, as opposed to this strategy nonsense? I want to kill men with sharp objects.

As I’m sure you will. While the battles have improved, they’re still somewhat basic and get repetitive after some time. But not more than other in most other action games! I really think they’re excellent, but could be much better. As of this iteration, they don’t make for wonderful war stories. You tend to try to single out enemies, kill them during short dogfights and then turn to the next. The fighting mechanics are still really fucking good and that’s what the game originally shot to fame with. It just puts any other medieval/fantasy game to shame. I’ve been playing Oblivion lately and it’s just completely pathetic in this regard.

Right. And that extends to Multiplayer?

Yes, it’s got multiplayer.

Yeah, but, you know, talk about it. This is supposed to be a comprehensive review.

Nay. I specifically decided not to talk about it at all besides saying that in my opinion, it’s different and excellent. If you want the details, go read other blogs or reviews. It’s all the web is talking about.
I’m a terrible salesperson. CAN YOU SEE? Telling people to go read other resources online. Sorry Chris.
I’m also out of ideas on how to end the revi

[Insert ordinary praise for the game and a slow introduction here]

Have you listened to the developer commentary of TF2? As you’d expect from Valve, they’re clever and give you a pretty thorough look behind the curtains of the game. Unfortunately, some of it is out of date by now, and only serves as a reminder of earlier times. Times without paraphernalia better suited for games like Men of War.

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Music makes the world go round, or so we’re told. It certainly seems to be an adage for many ‘casual’ games released on Steam lately, as we’ve seen with titles like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard using your music to create new gameplay experiences. Now Turba gets in on the act by combining music with the old mainstay of the puzzle genre – block matching. But how well do Turba’s blocks rock your beats?

In Turba the aim is to get a high a score as possible, by selecting groups of four or more connected blocks of the same colour, and then remove them by right clicking. You get bonus points for clearing on the beat of the music, if you can get a group of each colour at the same time and through multipliers which can be cleared with any colour block, while being wary of bomb blocks which must be cleared within the number of beats displayed, lest they turn themselves and surrounding blocks into unmatchable black blocks. Free Play presents you with a board full of random blocks that you must clear, with the bottom row being replaced on every fifth or so beat. Ascend, as the name suggests starts with an empty board, and new blocks being added from the bottom, while descend is as expected, similar but in reverse. However, while there is no punishment for the board filling up in descend, on higher difficulty levels, allowing the board to fill up in Ascend will incur a game over. In these modes, the blocks that appear are apparently decided by the song, and thus are – in theory – the same for every player.

Turba's visuals are very colourful, but can get confusing

The major problem with Turba is that it’s really hard to actually feel any connection between the music and the game. Most of the time it never really feels like your music is more than a backdrop to a very average puzzle or block matching game. Suposedly matching combos ‘on the beat’ heightens the score, but the difference between what your ears pick up as the beat and what the game decides can be vast. Admittedly, it was improved slightly in a recent patch, but when such an integral part of your game mechanic is resting on the technology, it’s a deep flaw that feels very hard to shake off.

There are, of course, special powers, of which Turba lets you pick one of five at the same time you pick your gamemode and one of these abilities is unique to each game mode. For example, Auto Combo helps you out by clearing some of the already made block formations for you, while Laser shoots a laser to clear blocks, breakout style from the board. However, the actual helpfulness of some of these powers can vary. Whereas some are activated automatically, many require you to actually stop concentrating on clearing blocks while you use the power, which can be almost impossible to do on the higher difficulty levels as frantic as they are already. It can sometimes be difficult remembering how to use certain special powers as well, especially as once you’ve picked them you’re not given any reminder in game which one you’re using for the most part. A major bone of contention on the higher difficulty levels is the need to select every block manually in a sequence to clear them – when the blocks themselves are moving and with the middle mouse button often moving columns or blocks to other locations, it can lead to some very frustrating situations.

Bombs create unclearable black blocks if allowed to detonate

One nice touch of the game is that the powerups and indeed yourself can be ‘upgraded’ by playing and using the abilities more, such as increasing the time your powers last, and slowing down the amount of time before a level is failed. This does encourage you to play more, although to say that the longevity of the game rests more on how long it takes you to max out these powers than your music collection does make these additions feel like they’re artificially extending the game’s lifespan. Achievements, leaderboards and last.fm support are also included, but again they feel like very token additions – they certainly don’t add very much to the experience.

Which is the main flaw with Turba. The experience is essentially, very shallow – and no amount of dressing, game modes or powerups can truly hide that. And unlike other rhythm action games, it feels oddly disjointed and disconnected from the music. There’s no real connection, and the basic game isn’t really much more than you’d expect from a free browser game. If anything, Turba feels like a bit a cash in on a fad. It’s not out and out awful, but you’ll soon find you’d rather go back to Bejewelled and stick on your own music in the background.

Not Turba-ble, but not great.

If you try to talk to someone about Apple and games you will likely get a lot of blurb about how the iPhone is the best thing since sliced bread and is the true new way of playing games. It is extremely unlikely that they will say anything at all about games on Mac OSX.

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I’ve decided against better judgment that I will make up a word in this review, keep an eye out for it. It’s very much needed as Singularity is quite a “mish-mash” game, but stick with me as it’s also quite wonderful. Raven have done most things right and only a couple of things wrong, keep a checklist handy as you may need it.

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Take a popular ‘realistic’ racing game. Add the over the top powerups from kart racing games. Throw in a tiny amount of Modern Warfare 2′s Multiplayer progression system. You’d be coming close to holding a copy of Blur in your hands. Unfortunately, the only ingredient you’d be missing is the bitter disappointment of the game’s technical PC shortcomings hampering what could have been a brilliant twist on the racer genre on the PC.

Let’s start with the positive. Bizarre Creations have done a good job on the stylistic aspects of the game. It’s become somewhat of a given that most racing games featuring powerups are commonly associated with games aimed at a younger audience. In some respects you would think we’d be sick of the whole nighttime/underground-esque racing scene. However when you see how well this ‘exaggerated neon realism’ style works immensely in it’s favour, and it’s hard to see how any other choice would have worked without veering into the very stylings they were clearly trying to avoid. With this style, Blur manages to appear as a slightly more ‘mature’ racer while allowing for the exaggeration from the power-up based gameplay pretty well.

Agressive drivers benefit from using the Battering Ram mod.

The powerups themselves are a nice rounded selection, despite appearing to be few in number. Bolt gives you three unguided, weak shots to fire straight ahead or behind you, Shunt fires a homing missle at your opponents, Shock lays down electricity based traps to the front of the pack, and Barge shoves anyone next to you out of the way while Mine, Shield and Repair do exactly what they say on the tin. They’re all powerful enough to really feel like they have an impact when you use them, while still weak enough that you think you can recover from them, at least in single player. However, at the same time Blur is the sort of racing game where you can race a perfect line all the way through, only to get shunted back to last place because of a last minute deployed powerup which can frustrate immensely if you’re the recipient.

Cars are numerous and varied. It’s certainly true that Blur caters for many driving styles from those who like to drift to those who like to muscle their way through the pack. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s great to see a game with licensed vehicles that actually lets you smash them up. In addition, the game also provides a ‘mod shop’ where you can add various perks to your car granting bonuses such as making your car able to take more hits or granting more fans when you hit others. This provides an interesting level of tangible customisation to your cars, possibly moreso than say visual customisation would provide in a driving game, when you’re spending most of the time concentrating on the road and the positions of the other drivers as opposed to if their paint job matches their rims.

Last minute boosts are a common sight online.

But of course, all these good points are negated by what has to be said, is a lacklustre port of the game to PC. First off, graphics options are limited to three choices and the level of anti-aliasing. That’s about as in depth as it gets – want to turn off the motion blur while leaving other effects untouched? Sorry. Would you like there to be slightly less particle effects when cars are hit while leaving other options intact? Not happening. Additionally, the game only supports one gamepad – the XBox 360 controller. If you haven’t got one of those, there’s no allowance of control reconfiguration, it just simply doesn’t detect the gamepad. Of course, third party software would allow you to use other controllers by convincing the game you’re using the keyboard but in this day and age this shouldn’t be so convoluted, especially for a driving game. Even if you do have a 360 controller plugged in, the game doesn’t even bother changing the tooltips to accommodate, so with prompts like “Insert” telling you to post your achievements to Facebook or Twitter, you’ll end up pressing every button until you work out exactly which one it means – or ironically enough revert back to the keyboard to navigate through the menus.

But the worst thing about the game may not even be the fault of the developers themselves. Blur prides itself on having a great multiplayer aspect of the game. You can race others and -borrowing a little of what keeps people playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer – you can earn ‘Fans’ and rank up, unlocking new cars, mods and different sorts of paintjobs by completing a number of different challenges with objectives such as Shunting 100 opponents. In addition to this the Singleplayer also has a neat ‘Rivals’ function, where you can pick a friend whose scores and times you will see during your singleplayer campaign, encouraging you to beat them, and offering an incentive when you do so. However, Blur’s biggest deficiency on the PC – aside from the poor porting issues – is the lack of people playing to take advantage of these features.

Blur is a visually striking game, when it works.

See, before the game was released there was allegedly a spat between Activison and Game in the UK, which also owns the Gamestation brand. As a result, the game was hard to find during it’s launch in the two biggest shops in the UK for any platform. The situation has reportedly improved now on console, but on PC finding a copy of Blur is a bit of a daunting task. The game was supposed to be on Steam, but there’s been no sign of it for weeks. During my play from the first two weeks since the game has been released the most players I saw in total across all the game modes was 100. The majority of those were in the first few gamemodes available from the start. Of course, reviews like this very one probably don’t help matters, but for me to recommend a multiplayer portion of a game that lives or dies on the number of people playing it in this state would be completely unprofessional of me.

It’s a terrible shame because the potential there is great. It’s just a shame that the execution of Blur on the PC is so flawed. Blur could have been one of this summer’s biggest racing games on the PC. As it stands, Blur feels like a massive missed opportunity, left spluttering at the starting line before the race has even begun.

Parked-life

His name’s Michael Thorton and he used to be a spy, until one mission in Saudi Arabia. When you’re burned you’ve got nothing; no cash, no credit, no job history. You’re stuck with whatever mission they left you with: revenge. You’ll do whatever work comes your way to pay the bills, rely on anyone who’s still talking to you: an Al-Samaad terrorist leader, a psychotic CIA agent, or maybe just a mole inside the organisation that burned you, if you can trust them. Read the full story

The new Formula 1 season has kicked off with a bang, four races in and we have seen all kinds of excitement. There will be more F1 excitement to come later in the year with the release of Codemasters’ new racing game, F1 2010. Here Senior Producer on the title, Paul Jeal talks about the impact of games like Grand Prix 3, the weather effects and much more. Also, new screenies, still with last years liveries mind.

The Reticule – It has been a while since the last official F1 title was released, and even longer since there has been one on the PC, how do you feel about bringing this game to the PC considering the F1 game heritage like Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix series and Grand Prix Legends?

Paul Jeal – As you say there is a strong F1 heritage on PC so we’re both delighted and hugely motivated to be bringing F1 back. My first job in the games industry was actually as a games tester on Grand Prix 3 and it remains one of my favourite games to this day. I think it’s fair to say there used to be a great level of anticipation as the latest F1 game arrived, they were thought of very highly, but they’ve lost their way over the years. There hasn’t really been any progression in terms of building on the existing feature set, or innovation in terms of thinking of what else could add to the overall experience. More than anything developers lost their way with the entry requirements for such games – the driving and racing elements have been poor for many years. Instead we’ve just had a series of updated assets using the same feature sets. Our philosophy from the very beginning has been to not only over-deliver on all the features you’d expect in a F1 game but also to add entirely original features to the mix so that F1 games can once again be talked about in a positive light and return to the head of the pack.

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