My favourite five games of 2012. Why five? Don't know. In order? Not really. More questions? Probably not.
1) Sleeping Dogs. If you've dabbled in the wonders of Hong Kong for any length of time (or China in general) you'll have had a whale of a time with Sleeping Dogs. The acting was top rate, and though they didn't push the policeman / triad schism far enough it still did enough to be one of my entries here. Shame the DLC looks to be the all too common "cheap pricepoint and little content" so beloved of most games around these days. Fighting tournaments and "spooky" Halloween events? Bleh. You have a rock solid storyline to flesh out, guys. Don't waste it.
After a wonderful experience on console, this game almost soured me completely due to the infamous hkshop.exe error on PC (go Google it, then weep). In fact, this sounds more like a rant about things I hate than "my top games" so I'll shut up now.
2) FTL. A powerhouse of decision making and random luck blessing the brave. Best thing to come out of Kickstarter? It might well be. Anybody with the mildest Star Trek hankering needs to have this on their PC. Also here's a few tips (I'll also add to those that Drones are essential).
3) Hotline Miami. If you ever wanted to pretend to be Professor Pyg while powerdrilling the heads of those who truly deserve it, then this is the game for you. I keep seeing "Drive: The Game", but "Professor Pyg: The Tribute Album" would be more appropriate. Not so much what your character does, as the overall feel of what takes place keeps reminding me of him for some reason.
4) Binary Domain. I'm truly glad to see it popping up on a number of "best of" lists. EVERYBODY should play this.
5) Spec Ops: The Line. This shunted a fair few titles out of this spot quite late on, as I only recently played it. The campaign is around six hours on normal difficulty and probably closer to ten on hard. It's powerful, it's bold, it's dramatic, it doesn't shy away from the horrors of war and almost everything it does is very, very smart. In fact, something it starts to do later on with a common videogame "thing" will slowly but surely start to freak you out a bit. And that's before you get to the plot, and the multiple interpretations it bears the weight of. A phenomenal title, and something that everybody should play.
It also doesn't contain a single QTE, and that's quite remarkable in this day and age.
The rest of the best of the bunch
I haven't done much with Torchlight 2, but it seems like a lot of fun. XCOM probably got doinked off the above list by Spec Ops, but is a really rather sensational game. Legend of Grimrock would have booted FTL or Hotline Miami out of the top spots, but again - not enough playtime. Borderlands 2 is phenomenal, but somehow it doesn't quite squeeze into the list. I guess I might just be a sucker for the first game.
And, me being me, I couldn't let this blog post finish without a closing complaint so I'll just come right out with it: my biggest gaming disappointment was Far Cry 3 which - I've come to realise - isn't as good as Far Cry 2. Blog post incoming, release the hounds and happy new year.
Here are my FTL protips (buyer beware, I've died horribly on the seventh wave every single time so maybe I'm not the right guy for the Protip job). Having said that:
1) Comb as much of the first map as possible, because you won't be able to hang about on later sections of the game. At this point, the enemy ships chasing you are fairly weak and you can afford to get caught by them once or twice as you forage near the exit.
2) For the first few levels, passing through a red area isn't quite as bad as it seems. It's worth passing through them if taking the "safer" route means you'll end up in a bunch of nebula sections which almost always mean instadeath later on in the game.
3) When upgrading the ship, a lot of players start powering down the medbay because other bits of the ship need to be up and running (you know, like oxygen and guns or whatever). Don't neglect the medbay! It'll stop you getting dead (important) and you can also use it to fend off ship invasions. How? PULL UP A CHAIR, but first: the doors.
4) Upgrade the doors as soon as possible. On later stages your ship will be on fire pretty much all the time, and if you wander into bug / mantis territory you'll be dealing with ship invasions every couple of hops. Patching up your doors will allow you to deploy some tactics. Position your least favourite redshirt in the vicinity of the invaders (next room over should do it) and shuffle one or two extra guys in the medbay.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
The redshirt will lure the invaders to the medbay where they'll be greeted by three or more shipmates who can lay out a smackdown while being constantly regenerated. There is a downside to this tactic, in the form of the next tip...
5) The moment the invaders look like they're going to die, start filtering your guys out of the medbay asap. The reason for this is the same reason you don't do what I did and get into the habit of healing everybody at once - I lost my entire crew bar one guy when an attacking ship teleported a big explodey thing into the medbay.
Unless you're in a gambling mood (or need to smack up some invaders) then only heal your crew two at a time, max.
6) Always target the enemy weapons, then go for the engines so they can't run away. After that, it's a case of juggling those two and hammering the bridge. I've never really seen any benefit to blasting away at their oxygen supplies.
7) Luck plays a part in this, but when you're on the run and desperately trying to get your hands on supplies, a defence drone will work wonders in fending off attackers long enough to be able to jump to safety. Hands up anybody who ever bothered to use a drone. I'll wait...
8) There is no 8. That's everything, it's all I have. I'll probably remember a few others and update the post but feel free to drop some more in if you have them.
Yep, the continuing adventures of "How many mods I can add to a game before it explodes and takes half the street with it". This time around, I've mostly focused on adding extra clothing, armour, quests, building interiors and a stack of extra people. There doesn't appear to be any real impact on the game as yet, and there are only two things I simply cannot get working (only head retextures so no big deal really).
In no particular order, here's a bunch more mods I'm running. I'll cover some of the others mentioned above (like additional people and buildings) next time, as I haven't actually come across all of the content I've added yet.
Not gonna lie - this might be my favourite armour in the entire game, modded or not. You do a little quest to grab it (there's two versions, actually - the other comes with a rebreather but it's surrounded by about a million high level enemies so I don't have that one yet). It's the kind of thing I expected to be in the game from the start, but the closest I could find was the hideous ghoul brotherhood robes.
And nobody is going to wear that.
Combine with some form of eyewear and the "face hidden" mode from pimp my scarf and you're going to look pretty badass.
2) Nevada RV house.
I really like this one, because it gives you a base of operations East of the Mojave Outpost, somewhat South of Nipton.
You get a shack with a ton of storage, an RV you can sleep in, a chemistry table to rid yourself of addictions and a dog.
Word of warning - you're not far from a place where Viper gang members spawn, and I was not entirely impressed when my dog exploded due to a sudden raid. Alas poor Yappy, I knew him not at all.
3) Portable Campsite. Another one for the "how was this not in the game" pile. You buy the bed and the campfire from random shops:
Then you throw them on the ground and activate both items. You can now sleep anywhere and cook some food whenever you feel like it.
Nice, simple and immersive mod. Sometimes the bed gets stuck in the ground or hovers ten feet in the air just like real life.
4) The Books for Bullets Program. Trading in books in Fallout 3 was great fun (no really, it was) and it blew my mind the first time I saw a ton of pre-war books in Vegas, thinking "I'm gonna make a fortune out of these" before realising they didn't carry the same worth that their DC cousins did. No matter, I'm sure you'll get to do something cool with all these books lying about the place. Right?
Wrong. You didn't do a damn thing with books, and I was somewhat let down by this. I also thought the whole crafting bullets skill was a nonsense due to never being able to find the parts I needed.
WOULDN'T IT BE AWESOME IF SOMEONE WHO CAN CODE THINGS HAD A SIMILAR IDEA AND FIXED MY PROBLEM.
Step right up, person who made this mod. It adds a "books for bullets" machine to a police station, and gives you the crafting components you need depending on what type of pre-war book you feed it (yes, the mod changes pre-war books into things like Fiction, Spiritual, History etc).
The machine:
The books:
My face: :D
Fantastic mod.
This is genius - a smart way to give your character a home (of sorts) in Goodsprings at the start of the game in a way that doesn't break the story with an unrealistic "Five minutes into the game and now you live in a mansion" mod. You know the alleyway at the side of the saloon and the store? Yep, you're going to set up there.
It's pretty simple, and you get some XP for each part of the alley that you sort out.
I was worried that me dicking around out in the open might attract a passing Deathclaw and cause a massacre but it hasn't gone horribly wrong so far.
6) Black Leather Armoured Duster.
No two ways about it: this coat looks badass.
Nice hat, too.
7) Oven cooking.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could cook with ovens? Well, now you can.
Depending on your Luck stat, you may find lots of working ovens or you might have to fix them before using. And then it might be out of fuel, so you finally have a use for flamer fuel (admit it, you never bothered to pick it up because you never bothered with flamethrowers). Great mod.
This one adds 21 bobbleheads to the wasteland, and you can configure the mod to give you skill bonuses or just money for every one you find.
9) Buildable Bots.
Science. Everybody loves science, especially when it involves insane death robots. And you'd love to build your very own insane death robot, wouldn't you?
Of course you would.
Well, GET READY FOR THE SHACK ATTACK, BY WHICH I MEAN THE WOODEN SHACK BELOW.
Inside, you'll find one of the most interesting and fun mods around. Behold the metal things!
Finally, there's a reason to collect all those bits of junk and scrap lying about the place. Fire up the machine at the end of the room and you can pick your weapon of choice:
This is what I ended up with:
They'll follow you around like a regular companion, and you can repair your robot if they get too messed up. My robot died horribly, so I ransacked him for parts. Easy come, easy go.
The ambient music in this mod could easily have wandered into town on the back of an official game soundtrack. It really is that good.
Bizarrely, the video only gives tiny snippets of music which seems a little pointless but don't let that put you off. Well worth the download.
I think that's everything for now. Next time I'll go over the rest of the 73 or so mods I've stuffed into my copy of New Vegas...
I've been meaning to write a thing about Skyrim for a while now - or, to be more accurate, a thing about Skyrim via the barren lands of New Vegas. This review of Skyrim prompted me to write the below ramble. I think I've covered most of the things I wanted to whine about, but I may throw in the odd update.
It seems to me there's a lot of things Bethesda simply ignored en route to Skyrim via the glorious path that was New Vegas. Of course, NV was put together by Obsidian and where Obsidian listened to the things players practically begged for, Bethesda seemed to throw up their hands, proclaim "didn't read lol" and just built Skyrim on the much older Fallout 3 model.
Why they did this, I have no idea. Things that Skyrim was crying out for yet are somehow strangely absent:
1) Hardcore mode. How the Hell this goes AWOL from New Vegas to Skyrim I have no idea, but given all the hunting, skinning and eating you can do it seems absolutely insane that Bethesda left this out. You can mod it into the game, but really - this was a hugely popular feature of NV (I wouldn't play without it), and should have been in the game. It's not like Skyrim would be negatively impacted in any way by its inclusion, so....where is it?
2) Actual impact stemming from faction choices. One of the greatest things about NV was all the faction interplay, sizing up the options, working out which side was the best shot at a future for Nevada and siding with one, becoming mortal enemies to the other, playing sides off against themselves or going rogue and doing your own thing. At one point I reached a tipping point and had so many options open to me, so many choices, so many possible directions the game could go in that I had to physically stop playing for a day or two while I weighed up the direction the wasteland would take. Games: serious business.
I loved that dressing as NCR and wandering near a slave camp was a guaranteed shootout. I couldn't get enough of mods that added in faction ID cards that you could forge to wander on into the enemy base. I tasted the sweet sweet bitter candy of pushing one side too far and having to steer clear of dangerous roads at night, instead hiding away in whatever friendly NPC location I could find. It made everything a little more tactical and, you know, interesting.
Here? I can side with the Imperial Legion, throw on some Imperial Legion Armour, walk right into Windhelm while rocking that armour to the max and jump up and down on the dining table of Ulfric Stormcloak. Nobody stops me, challenges me, queries why the legendary Dragonborn - who has decided the Empire is awesome, thanks - is no more than ten perilous feet away from the saviour of the Stormcloaks.
If this was New Vegas, within minutes of walking into the camp Cesar would be wearing me like a skinsuit and bits of my companions would be nailed to multiple crosses along the Nevada highways. Or I'd have those NCR goons warning me I had a few days to change my ways before dedicated murder teams would be shooting bullets into my skull. Or Mr House would not take kindly to me poking around the Lucky 38 and I'd be dealing with his stupid robots.
In Skyrim, I'm tap dancing my way through the homes of my enemies for the sake of being allowed to do every single mission that I can, and I feel like this is quite the step back from the advances made in New Vegas.
3) Companions. In Fallout 3, they were pretty uninspired for the most part, didn't have many interesting things to say and were quickly relegated to walking gun turrets / crap carriers. Don't even get me started on that game ending, but anyway...
New Vegas blew me away where companions were concerned. Every single one of them was a fleshed out character, they all had a great set of (involved and lengthy) personal quests that could directly impact perks that could bring you, future relations, the ending they received (yes, they all had multiple and varied endings depending on your actions and faction choice) and their general comments were endlessly entertaining. I mean, don't even get me started on Cass.
There's one mission in New Vegas later in the game involving Cass, except at the time I didn't make that connection and as a result I rather stupidly walked into a trap consisting of about 9 tooled up douchebags, whose sole purpose was turning her into liquified goop.
I was given the choice of simply handing her over for a reward, or signing my own death warrant as they went on and killed both our asses. By this point, I was so connected to the game world that for the first time ever in a game I was not only positively furious that they intended to splat a pretend persons brains across the floor, I was 100% balls out determined that this would not take place. What followed next can only be described as an orgy of death, explosions, shotgun shells and my character no doubt giggling to himself while smearing the blood of his vanquished foes on his face and chopping off their limbs with his fire axe.
Lydia is fun to launch off a cliff with Fus Ro Dah a couple of hundred times.
Like I said, the difference is mindblowing. Not only are the companion quests and character depth missing in action, the Skyrim characters also appear to be stupider than characters in a game released back in 2010.
In my humble opinion, the pathfinding in Skyrim isn't as good as NV. I can run all over the place in NV, turn around and be 99% sure Cass or whoever will be right behind me. In Skyrim, they'll often simply stop following me even when on a flat surface, or just....vanish. Somewhere. Or chase a wolf into a river then over the edge of a waterfall. In fact, I kind of suspect the reason you can kill your companion with weapons and magic but not by blasting them off a mountain with Fus Ro Dah (try it!) is because the only reason that shout exists is to overcome the issue of pathfinding and companions endlessly getting stuck in stupid places.
Seriously, why can't I kill Lydia by blasting her from the top of a mountain? Makes no sense otherwise.
Finally, the problem of doorways - specifically, companions becoming a lump of granite in a doorway and refusing to move. You'll notice in New Vegas that you can run into your companion and they'll just shift out of the way. In Skyrim, you're just running into a brick wall and hoping it eventually gets the message.
I haven't played Fallout 3 for a long time. Do companions do the "You shall not pass" thing there too? Either way, Skyrim companions were definitely brought into the world with a -INT score.
4) The interface. Oh God, the interface. Everything that needs to be said can be found here, but for my money the best vanilla UI in a Bethesda game is - you've guessed it - New Vegas. There are still problems, but most things are easily accessible, trading is straightforward (and you can see what ammo is needed for your weapons with no fuss) and the companion wheel....wait, let's back this up right now.
The companion wheel introduced by Obsidian remains the number one way to have your companion do stuff. It's fast, simple, reasonably sophisticated and lets you toggle tactics on the fly without too much dickery. Crucially, it also separates talking and doing. I don't need to have a chat with Veronica if I just want to take stuff or have her hang back while I shoot some dude in the face from afar. Similarly, should I want to listen to her various awesome hipsterisms, I can click the dialogue option and start waffling.
So of course we get to Skyrim and the companion wheel is replaced by slow moving text options. Whether I want Lydia to trade objects or alter her fighting technique, I have to wade through dialogue options, sometimes scrolling and often cursing. Look at this:
I cannot flip enough rageburgers at silly, silly decisions like that one. I loves me some Skyrim. I loves me some Lydia despite her vaguely Antichrist-like vibes. I especially loves me some blasting Lydia off the highest waterfall I can find.
But while charting the journey and development of these titles from Fallout 3 to Skyrim, I have to ask myself the question:
Did Bethesda even notice the improvements in New Vegas? And if so, why weren't they incorporated into Skyrim?
Playing NV on PC instead of the console is quite an eye opener - might as well be a different game, given how much extra content you can jam in there at no added cost. This is the best of what I'm rolling with so far, with no horrible crashes or explosions in sight. I'll be looking to throw in some gameworld expansions, but I at least want to play through the official DLC before I inevitably murder the coding with deathbricks.
1) Black Wolf Backpacks. How this game didn't come ready rolled with backpacks I'll never know, but this mod adds a collection of nifty carryspace onto your frame. You can double up the large backpacks with the small bumbag thing too. (Note: giving your companion a backpack increases their carry capacity forever, but this is hardly something you're going to complain about).
2) Another "what were they thinking" fixer, the Sunny Smiles companion mod does what you'd expect it to.
If you want to leave Sunny somewhere, you can tell her that location x is "your new home" and she'll wait there until you come back. You can also choose to leave the dog behind if annoying Fallout dogs aren't your thing (and nobody will ever replace Dogmeat anyway, not even his puppies).
3) New Vegas Bounties. This is a fun one, giving you twenty something "go forth and shoot that asshole" type missions to play around with. You go see some guy in a shack who tells you about the target and a general idea of where to go next, then off you go to slaughter what appears to be Robin Williams from his spot in Night at the Museum. The humanity.
4) Nordic Gear. I missed the old "find this awesome armour loot" missions from FO3 (did NV even have any of these? Can't remember) so this one fills the spot nicely. The loot is found in various locations across the map, with some of the best bits hidden in a certain location which I've yet to find.
I bought this for Cass.
5) FO3 has a better radio than NV. Mr New Vegas is nowhere near as interesting as Three Dog, and I now have a pathological aversion to Johnny motherfucking Guitar like you wouldn't believe. This mod here is a port from FO3, complete with scripted radio presenter and a whole bunch of public service announcement warnings from, uh, people.
6) 100 outfits. If you're bored with everybody dressing the same, then this is a good mod to have. It seems adding this causes characters to change their own clothing, but I haven't seen this happen yet. When installed, some of the shops will start trying to flog you different kinds of outfits, all of which come with modifiers to things like perception, agility etc. I kinda like this one:
Remember how much you liked the roving trader outfit but hated having to remove it due to it not having any damage resistance at all?
Yeah, this will fix that little problem.
7) Pimp my scarf. This one lets you pick up a snazzy face wrap / scarf and, uh, wrap your face with it. They come in "face hidden" and "face not hidden" varieties.
Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout New Vegas, Mount & Blade Warband and Fire & Sword, Shogun 2, Unreal And Quake packs, Hacker Evolution Duality, Defcon, Left 4 Dead 2 and the Hitman pack. I also got Swords and Soldiers as a freebie from the coal crafting thing.
Thank goodness it's over for another year...
I'm about seven hundred years late to the party but I've started playing Oblivion on the PC and am taking random screenshots of my journey through the place that isn't Skyrim.
Link here.
I'm sort of "meh" on hacker games really, as they all pretty much do the same thing: reduce it to "click a box, watch a meter count down and then you've hacked it". Uplink is entertaining for a while, but hack one machine and you've hacked them all. Thought I'd try Duality - after ten seconds, I have a crazy mouse pattern onscreen and I've completed a level.
I didn't do anything.
Maybe I beat the hidden "Draw a picture with my mouse" level or whatever.
I had a few whines about this game, and it seems a lot of other people have had the same problems.
Step forward, useful forum post.
15 hours in two weeks (less, actually) pretty much tells you all you need to know about Atom Zombie Smasher (£5.99 on Steam).
1) I like it.
2) It has zombies in it.
3) I get to kill millions of zombies.
Atom Zombie Smasher is a cheap and entertaining top down “make the little dots move around and kill other dots” strategy / resource management effort. The pink dots are the zombies. The yellow dots are the people. Save x amount of people before the time runs out with your helicopter or they all get eaten, or finish the level by wiping out the zombies before nightfall.
The campaign gives you a map filled with terrorities (they all look the same though, which is a bit of a wasted opportunity).
Each one has a number attached to it, the higher the number the more zombies you’ll find. As the game progresses, the game will change things up a bit with landscape hazards, tougher zombies, equipment malfunctions, shorter days and so on. You'll also gain XP for your units, unlock better skills and so on. You'll also see certain cities filled with valuable scientists, who will allow you - quite literally - drop some science on the zombie hordes.
Click to Enlarge
At the end of each level, you’re given a score and then all the territories owned by humans Vs zombies give points added to the Campaign total. First one past the post wins.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to win this game or even come close. No matter what you do, the zombie outbreak keeps spilling into new zones. The 1s become 2s, the 2s become 3s, and then you get a 4 and it’s basically game over at that point. A 4 is an outbreak that turns into 1s in adjacent zones at the start of the turn. After a couple of turns, an otherwise level pegging map with no claimed territories will quickly resemble six billion zombies hunting you down with chainsaws. There is NO WAY BACK from this, and the campaign score descends into farce as a quarter length Zombie bar screams towards the finish line leaving you wondering what the Hell just happened.
Another annoyance which doesn’t help: the squads / weapons you get is randomly allocated before you enter a map. You can guarantee that when you need your best assets the most, you’ll be left with 2 smoke bombs, a road barricade and some C4 to wipe out hundreds of zombies in a very tight time limit.
Click to Enlarge
Good luck with that.
In fact, many of the 15 hours of gamplay may well be me just sitting there wondering what to do once the Level 4 outbreaks start appearing. Besides swearing loudly, I mean. I think I may well just do that when a real zombie outbreak begins, because the tools you’re given here to do the job certainly don’t cut the mustard. Now the game does let you mod it, and I guess you can probably skew the odds in your favour but I tend to think something is going wrong when you have to resort to that.
I did also consider the possibility that I just might not be very good at this game, but everything was going fine until the Level 4 outbreaks hit. Then it became a random guessing game, the guessing part being how long it'd take to flash up the "Game Over" screen. If you think you can bluff your way through those odds from about halfway through your campaign, or you just want to mash some zombie skulls - and really, who doesn't - then you could do much worse than give it a go.
The music is great, too. But you're not here for that, you're here to mash some zombie skulls. Right?
