Ludo – New Prince of Persia

The new Prince of Persia game has been announced and early screens released showing off the Prince’s new look, which has an amazing painted-to-life vibe. Note the icy baditude and facial scars that indicate he was assaulted with a cookie cutter at an early age. We can’t imagine this prince cracking wise as he defies ancient deathtraps. Is the Prince once more afflicted with generic rage? It remains to be seen.

Early indications are that the sands of time are no longer present, instead of the dagger of time the Prince has gained a giant metal claw, less useful, less subtle, but ultimately giant and claw-like.

There are early hints that there will be some sort of light world/dark world mechanic at play (not exactly original but hey), expect spectacular acrobatics, one on one combat and a GIANT METAL CLAW later this year.

UPDATE:

The first trailer has somersaulted onto the interweb and is here. Go forth and view.

Ludo – Games Made Me Bad

In a more sensitive age the Victorian novel shocked its readers with vague allusions to sexual encounters, frigid conversational faux pas, marital gaffes and tales of social rejects daring to reach beyond the mandate of their class. A misplaced glance or an uppity remark were enough to see a stiff eyebrow raised in disapproval. Since then our taboos and limits have shifted. The invention of film brought us closer to the knuckle, its immediacy gave it mass appeal, bringing the human body, violence and sex to the masses.

Prose has always possessed an ability to portray something whilst simultaneously keeping the reader distant, and this has allowed it to breach issues so troubled that they remain taboo even today. Nabokov’s examination of pedophile Humbert Humbert in Lolita is one such example. The novel is carefully structured to veil the difficulty of the subject matter, employing several techniques that distance the reader from the reality of the subject. The main text is bookended, so to speak, by police accounts framing the narrative as a cautionary tale, a record of the sick exploits of a desperately ill man. Humbert’s narration is intelligent, humorous, technicolour prose, reveling in the flamboyant ego of its protagonist; its unreliability all the while cautiously masking the dark subject matter at its heart. Lolita was no stranger to controversy, and despite these distancing measures there was no denying the corrupt eroticism at the novel’s heart, the book found itself banned for the first years of its life. In time, however, it has not only been allowed to enter the public consciousness, but it has thrived, and is regarded today as a literary classic.

Cinema, meanwhile, has failed to convert the story of Lolita well, finding itself unable to adapt these literary techniques into its own armoury of tricks and tropes. Kubrick’s attempt places Humbert’s humour at the beating heart of the film and the resulting farce undermines the pathos of the tale. Lyne’s adaptation took the cautionary approach to arguably poorer effect. Both struggled with their inability to convey the nature of Humbert’s dangerous fixation visually, they lacked a language that society would accept. In a new age we have another medium to consider, and this one has the potential to bring us closer to the subject than ever before. In games, the player has the power to experience content as closely as they want, and the question is: does interactivity make things too close for comfort?

It seems clear that games have the power to move beyond the simple voyeurism of cinema. As well portrayed and detailed a world as it was, I could never actually walk the streets of Scorsese’s construction of New York in Taxi Driver. Until the game I could never tread the murky, drowned streets of Bladerunner. The planned Bioshock film will no doubt copy the astounding decimated 40’s underwater noir aesthetic, but I suspect I will never know it the same way I came to by exploring Rapture myself. The ability to roleplay, and to properly occupy a world is powerful and unique to the medium. Greater interactivity coupled with ever evolving technology, improved graphics, more expansive sound and ever more detailed game worlds means a greater sense of immersion for the player. But will it ever be considered acceptable to roleplay Lolita’s corrupt protaganist?

This question lays bare many of the assumptions we carry about videogames and their purpose. Roleplay Humbert Humbert? Why would I want to? People read the book and watch films in order to be challenged, to see what the fuss is all about, and to investigate a piece of work that touches upon a dark and rarely explored phenomenon. This is an experience that nobody would expect to receive from a videogame because, well, they’re just mindless escapism aren’t they? Games aren’t meant to be difficult, that’s not what they’re for.

From the very beginning people would visit cinemas and pay to see a news report, since then millions have sat through Schindler’s List, and they didn’t do it for a bit of mindless escapism. They paid money to watch three hours of despair, to see the worst human nature has to offer come bleeding through the projectors, to walk out shocked and dejected, and to see the world in a slightly new light. The videogame genesis took the form of Tennis For Two, which was just a very clever toy, a side project to amuse the scientists while they went about the more serious business of building big machines. Games have continued in a similar vein ever since.

Behind the pretence that videogames are just toys there is a more substantial fear which motivates much of the hysteria surrounding videogame content, the fear that interacting with a virtual world leaves one more susceptible to any disturbing influences it might carry. The mainstream view of videogame violence, punctuated by almost weekly bashings in the conservative press, constantly reinforces this notion, often with emotive stories linking games to real life murders, with claims that these real acts were copied from, or somehow directly influenced by in-game actions. The assumption that someone involved in an interactive experience loses sense of what is real is the most ludicrous assertion to come out of the arguments and hyperbole surrounding videogame content. Graphically games are advanced, but not photo realistic, and the suite of actions available to players is so contrived that, without suffering from a mental illness (or having this happen), it is impossible to confuse videogame actions with real ones.

This accusation is often ignorantly thrown out as a knee jerk reaction to offensive content, and often masks the real concerns that people have about videogames. The most disturbing element seems to lie more in the symbolism of committing a virtual act of violence, with the assumption that the virtual act is a form of wish fulfillment. The fact that game violence is a strong selling point shows that there is a profitable desire to dish out spectacular death among the population, violent games sell directly to the primordial parts of us that revel in destruction, the part of us that society tries to keep contained as much as possible.

This becomes especially problematic in games offering purely linear experiences that revel in violence and little else. In this environment the player walks the path carefully laid out for them by the developers, an obstacle course of various horrific acts, a bloody fairground ride that challenges the player to match its preordained levels of violence and horror. Manhunt, and its sequel, are naked examples of the disturbing appeal that some games possess, but the real controversy stems from its honesty, its refusal to disguise its core selling point. Manhunt simply lacks the tokenistic pavlovian punishment/reward system commonly used as a veil to lessen the impact of in game brutality, and to sustain an illusion that the game is reinforcing society’s moral code.

It’s this moral code that prevents games from dishing out points or providing immediate gratification for the unprovoked killing of innocents – a phenomenon that caused mainstream controversy when observed some years ago in games such as Carmageddon and the first Grand Theft Auto, and which can only be found today very occasionally in the likes of God of War, which, in one or two sequences, allows the protagonist to dismember fleeing civilians for a quick health boost. The fact that games are seen to need to reinforce ‘good behaviour’ are a hangover of the perception of games as children’s toys, whose purpose should be to entertain, perhaps to educate, but never to glamourise or encourage antisocial habits. Today this developer imposed morality acts as a form of distancing, the gaming equivalent of Lolita’s police accounts, providing window dressing in the form shallow B-movie storylines, pitting the player against suspiciously humanoid alien foes who, when cut, still bleed like us, or, most depressingly, casting Nazis as the villains, whose death and dismemberment is considered innately acceptable.

The side-effects of this prove damaging. Games often still treat us like children, protecting our fragile minds from the grey ambiguity of real human choice by providing us with colourful cardboard cut-out visions of good and evil. In Fable we’re given two-tone quests and the ability to evolve into a saint or satan himself, in Bioshock the much hyped moral decisions surrounding the Little Sisters were neutered to the point that it had little impact on the storyline, the consequences of the player’s actions instead took the form of two possible endings which squatted so far apart on the good/evil scale that it was almost laughable.

This problem has been circumvented in recent years with the prevelance of open world games which, thanks to improving technology, are now larger and more involving than ever before. Good open world or sandbox games empower the player by providing them with more tools, more ways to interact with the virtual world. By granting a degree of creative freedom these games give the player a say in the content of the game, allowing him to mediate the levels of violence within it to his own standards. Take Hitman: Blood Money for example. Following an FBI bodyguard into a dark corridor and plunging a kitchen knife into his neck to steal his clothing is an option, but it’s just as easy to slip some sedative into his tea. After a night of drinking in GTAIV you don’t have to get into your car and drive, you can hail a cab. In a sandbox environment the player is required to take more responsibility for his actions. Just because the game gives you the tools to commit heinous acts doesn’t mean you have to utilise them. The responsibility for violence in games shifts from the developers to the player.

This movement of responsibility has the potential to take censorship out of the hands of the conflicted ratings authorities and into the hand of the individual adult, where spurious media assertions can only have so much impact on the well-informed mind. More importantly, offering the player control of their play leads to more mature game experiences, free of the cartoon black and white good an evil concepts of something like Fable, more mired in the ambiguity of human experience.

This is perhaps most spectacularly evidenced by the tumultuous happenings in the vast space MMO Eve Online. Eve Online’s omnipotent overseers are morally indifferent entities, ruling as the philosopher’s god, sustaining the technical integrity of their world with little desire to mediate what happens within it. Eve’s ’shit-happens’ approach has birthed some spectacular stories, grown entirely out of the friction between its vast and complex groupings of human participants. These tragedies and space operas are all the better for the fact that they have been allowed to evolve unchecked from the syrupy nastiness of human nature. Betrayal, theft, assassination, murder – the stuff of great drama is on show for anyone to be a part of.

There is a fear of games that can be applied to any artistic medium, a fear that they will act as a crucible for our darker desires, allowing for a space where graphic violence is sanctioned and can occur without consequence, with unprovoked abandon, a place for our alluring dark sides to fester. Upon asking friends and family of their experiences with violent videogames I discovered that one member had a particular habit. She had found a convenient rooftop in San Andreas that the police could not reach. Tooling herself up with weapons cheats she would proceed to snipe passers-by (“only in the head”), until her wanted level peaked. “Then the helicopters come, but I just shoot them with the rocket launcher”. When asked why she would do such heinous and terrible things she replied “I was bored”, when quizzed on the appeal of mass destruction the reply was concise: “because it’s really funny!”

It goes without saying of course that this particular person has never been arrested, and has never displayed any violent or criminal behaviour in real life, but her gaming habits did find her indulging a darker side. When finally asked why she didn’t feel bad about her carefully planned killing sprees she dropped a rather potent observation, a pearly brick of pure uncut wisdom which, for the sake of any concerned and overzealous mainstream journo I would have printed in big friendly letters on the front of every retail edition of Manhunt and all its ilk.

“It’s not real.”

Ultimately, developers creating adult games, as forms of art or entertainment, shouldn’t be required to relentlessly reinforce society’s moral line, but should instead be allowed to produce stories and situations that challenge us. Games, like other more accepted media formats, can, will and already have visited those dark, violent, id-ridden spaces that entertain us, and they shall continue to do so whether the ratings organisations or the conservative press like it or not. What will remain true is that much of the thrill of an adult virtual environment lies in its subversiveness, its power to allow you to roleplay actions that you could never perform in real life. In a young medium which has yet to find its limits, and that has yet to learn subtlety or restraint, with evolving gaming technology and open worlds, the question is increasingly being asked of the player, in a bloody virtual future – how far will you go?

Ludo out.

Dante – GTA IV

It’s hard to get perspective on some games, sometimes the hype machine has gone into such overload that by the time the damn thing is released it’s already a guaranteed hit, regardless of actual quality. I would have bet my house on GTA getting ten out of ten scores from the vast majority of reviewers before it even came out, and I would have won too, which is handy, because if I’d lost there’d be awkward questions to answer, like “How can you bet your house when you don’t own one?”.

GTA IV is, first and foremost, a GTA game, and this means that while all that is good about it’s predecessors still applies, all that is bad applies also. It’s still very hard to drive in a sensible fashion for instance, you’ll often find yourself bowling over pedestrians and trashing nearby vehicles quite by accident, which is problematic if your mission is say. ‘go bowling’. And that’s not a joke, sometimes that really is the mission, especially with the ‘freinds’ system, where you can take various characters out on activities, getting their approval of you up to a point where they’ll offer handy services after a phone call. At first this seems like plenty of fun, but it rapidly becomes a case of grinding out various trips to bars and the like until they give you what you want, then trying to avoid them as much as possible when they inevitably call you when you’re busy with missions.

Ah the missions, long GTA’s achilles heel, they inevitably start with a series of tutorials that take significantly longer to complete than some entire games, followed by a parade of classic GTA staples such as ‘go here, kill him’, ‘go here, steal this’ and ‘go here, give chase’. Once in a while they’ll throw in a genuinely interesting mission, like the bank robbery for the Irish fellows, but half the time it’s only a humourous cutscene at either end that masks a rather simplistic affair. The enjoyability has been upped slightly by the nifty new (I say new, I mean copied from every other game of recent years) cover and mechanism, which makes shootouts much more fun. This is however tempered by the abundance of ‘give chase’ missions, which are about as fun as pulling teeth, requiring as they do, you to keep up with a fleeing adversary, who is inevitbaly a much better driver than you, and will set off staged events like a lorry losing it’s load to slow you down.

Andreas now eating simply restores your health regardless of where you do it, and with But enough of complaining about the same old problems, it’s not like Rockstar care about fixing them at all, not when every reviewer in the land is lying prostrate at their altar. What’s new? Well a big deal has been made fo the mobile phone, allowing you to call to report a completed mission or activate one, call your freinds for help or to arrange activities. and a whole host of other things, including the ever amusing prank 911 calls. It’s all about ease of use, so Rockstar say, which is also the reason for taxis, the other new innovation, which you can hail and have you take you somewhere for a negligable fee, avoiding the complication of accidentally running over a policeman on your way, you can also use it to instantly transport between locations (at an extra fee, which raises questions, implying as it does that the cabbie is aware of his magical matter transportation ability), there’s also a subway for fast transit between islands, but I rarely used it, as cabs were always much easier to use. All these combine to take much of the irritation out of day to day operations in the GTA world, although one has to wonder if this is just an end around that distracts from the real job of making it actually less irritating, like making it easier to turn a corner than it is to hit a wall. On improvement however is the ditching of the rubbish eating/working out system from hotdog stands dotted around it’s easy enough stay alive.

All of which summarises the gameplay pretty simply, new features improve things, but many of the old annoyances remain, but those who love GTA don’t do so for the gameplay, they do it to explore the world within, so how is that world? First off it’s a lot smaller than San Andreas, and continues down that route towards a more realistic depiction, away from Vice City’s cartoonishness. The new graphics are admittedly very impressive, and the city now emulates the real New York in a wonderful fashion, complete with brooklyn bridge, times square and statue of liberty. Once you unlock Manhatten (yes, they’re still making you work like a dog to unlock the map) you get a real sense of wonder, with the bright lights, skyscrapers and neon wonderland of the place looking truly spectacular, flying over it in the helicopter is even more beautiful. There does, however, seem to be a significant lack of things to do in the world, maybe I’m just not a GTA veteran like the others, but after a bit of nosing around and gazing at the spectacle I seemed to run out of things to gawk at and wander back to the missions, but then with such a large world to explore, it’s always possible I’ll find more things in time.

GTA IV, much like it’s predessors seems to follow a bell curve, at first it’s frustrating that they aren’t letting you out in the world, then they do and suddenly it’s wonderful fun and you’re enjoying yourself immensely, then it drops off as you you get back to the missions and the grind all over again. This is pronounced most obviously in GTA IV with the appearence of the third island, which is criminally poor, yes I know it’s based on New Jersey and thus isn’t going to be like the bright lights of Manhattan, but it could at least have some stuff in it, there isn’t even a clothes shop for crying out loud! In the end if you like GTA you’ll probably like GTA IV, but for me it’s just another big open world that inspires for a while, but ends up feeling empty and meaningless, I’m still having fun right now, but I can see it joining oblivion on the shelf in future.

Ludo – Infinite Undiscovery

New clip hit Gametrailers here, treating us to some wooden facial animations and wonderfully obscure exposition:

“Man enjoyed great prosperity by harnessing the power of the moon.

Until the Order appeared, and ensnared the moon with chains.

The land began to bleed.”

Finally, a plotline from Square that I can really empathise with. It’s time we remembered how important the moon is in all our lives.

The trailer sees a welcome return to characters shouting what they’re doing as they do it, which, coupled with some typically awful voice acting means laughs for all. Props especially to the bad guy, who comes complete with ludicrous moon-related motivations.

The few moments of actual gameplay footage that are in the trailer look a lot more interesting than the story twaddle, and there’s evidence of the high production values typical of Square Enix titles, with a lovely score already evident. It’s slated for release on Xbox 360 this September across the whole damn world.

Check it out if you want, but whatever you do, don’t try to unpack the actual meaning of the title, your sanity is worth more than the answers it would bring.

“Blog post … END!“

Ludo – Concept Art

The Internet is a Strange and Wonderful Place

Remarkable.

Ludo – Lego Indiana Jones

“A shiny new demo of the upcoming Lego Indiana Jones game landed earlier today!”

“What is this ‘Lego’ you speak of?”

“It’s these plastic blocks used to build little people and sometimes objects. In this case it’s a Lego recreation of quite-popular-but-not-as-good-as-Star-Wars film franchise Indiana Jones.”

“Interesting, so does that mean that the game is essentially not quite as good as it’s amazingly popular Star Wars predecessors?”

“It seems the answer is unfortunately yes, it’s exactly the same sidescrolling platforming simplicity we’ve seen before from Lego Star Wars with a less popular franchise, but the sense of humour and general silliness is still here in abundance, so it’s still worth checking out for the laughs.”

“Laughs, you say. Tell me more…”

“Well, the keyboard controls are just awful so you’ll want to change them in settings or otherwise just hook up a game pad. You’ll get bloom lighting and depth of field effects if your PC is down with that sort of thing, the game couldn’t look much better. Also, remarkably, in spite of the sidescrolling screen to screen action there’s a fair amount of exploring to be done, with the option of free play with extra characters once you complete the mission. You’ll come back again to unlock those new areas, and there’s a few to be found in the demo alone. If you like your co-op then you’re in for a giggle as well as the format is perfectly suited for two players.”

“I’m still not quite convinced that this is worth my time, sirrah.”

“Then I shall use the following four words to sway you: Giant. Rolling. Lego, and boulder.”

“Sold. Bernard, fetch my gaming pipe and some pants – to the Personal Computing Machine!”

Ludo – Iron Man Review

I’ll be honest, expectations were low.

In footballing terms, Iron Man is the superhero equivalent of an amateur Division Four team made up mostly of plumbers and brickies, whose occasional bouts of violence prove entertaining but whose skill with the actual game leaves a lot to be desired. I remember the cartoon. It was rubbish. But still, I bit the bullet and took my seat, partly because it was free, mostly because it’s the first superhero movie of the summer, and I need something to tide me over till The Dark Knight arrives.

The action kicks off with a torn-from-the-headlines pastiche of the middle eastern conflict, a pleasantly shallow but explosive opening. Then the escalating conflicts (spoilers!) – First up: Iron Man versus terrorism! I don’t want to spoil anything here but Iron man doesn’t not win. Then it’s Iron Man versus American Fighter Jets in the standout action sequence of the film. Third up it’s Iron Man’s greatest weakness: Slightly Larger Iron Man! Who will win? I don’t really need to say do I, but suffice to say that the CG is well executed and the explosions are big and flowery. What more do you want? An engaging plot full of thrills and spills, twists and turns, you say? Hmmm, You may be a little let down in that department…

More spoilers coming up, except they’re not spoilers at all because anybody with half a mind will see the twist coming from a mile off. Let’s just say, some friends become enemies, and here’s a clue – it’s the one that looks really evil. It’s the peadophile beard that gives it away, as well as the obvious evilness that oozes from his fat grinning face in every scene. I mean look, he’s SMOKING A CIGAR, people, and he’s even CACKLING.

I always expected the story to be thin, but my main worry was the central character behind the iron mask. Tony Stark by all rights deserves to be hated, he begs to be hated, your hatred sustains him. He’s incredibly rich, he’s a smartarse and he sleeps with more women than you. His partner for the early sections of the film declares “You are a man who has everything, but at the same time nothing,” which turns out to be exactly half true, as evidenced by Stark’s gigantic state of the art mountain top villa from the future with a basement full of robots that perform his every bidding, not to mention his beautiful assistant (Miss Pepper Potts – the full extent of that joke remains unclear to me, some sort of euphemism perhaps?) and his garage full of sports cars, legions of adoring fans etc etc. The remarkable thing is that you don’t hate him, because Robert Downey Junior defies the odds and turns everything around by sheer weight of charisma. He’s funny and likeable even before he has his moral epiphany. The man carries the film on his shoulders and drags it from being completely forgettable to being a pretty damn entertaining piece of cinema.

So it gets the thumbs up for being the first superhero movie of the summer, and not being half bad. See it for Robert Downey Junior, failing that, see it because RDJ alledgedly reprises his role in the upcoming Increcible Hulk movie. Iron Man versus Ed Norton, who won’t not win this time? I await the answer with baited breath.

Ludo out.

Ludo – Trackmania

I hate driving games.

A typical Gran Turismo experience – I cast an appreciative eye over my car, perfectly modeled according to the manufacturer’s specifications. I stare in appreciation at the track, an inch for inch recreation of a real rally course. I’m at the start line, ready to slam my machine round this course in a glorious whirlwind of mud and iron. I rev my engine and burst off the line, tyres squealing. I enthusiastically approach the first corner at max speed and turn – the car ignores me completely and flies nose first into the wall with an anticlimactic ‘whump’.

Turns out I was supposed to drop two gears, slow down to a slug-like 20 mph* two minutes ago and sail along an invisible and indiscernable ideal racing line to victory.

Rally drivers spend years perfecting their reflexes and memorizing course layouts, they are masters of their machines, knowing every intricacy of their vehicle. They are true experts, and I have no urge to recreate their expertise in a virtual environment where the core pleasure of the whole experience – the feeling of going really really fast – is lost.

The driving sim game is a cold and calculated game of numbers. Brake now. Change gear now. Accelerate. You have shaved one hundredth of a second off your previous time. Congratulations.

Enter Trackmania, a game that is to simulation as Ghandi is to Manhunt.

Trackmania is honest, open-faced simplicity incarnated in videogame form. There are five buttons that matter. One makes you go faster, one brakes, two turn and one lets you respawn at the start of the race if your lap isn’t going too well. The simplicity of the system means that the strategy becomes all about picking the best line and going fast along it, and the action has a kind of admirable purity to it that anyone can enjoy. Add to that the fact that the tracks are insane cocktails of loop-the-loops and vertical banks and you have … well I believe the scientific phrase is ‘a whole lot of steaming awesome’.

When you create your profile you tell the game where you live and enters you into the leaderboard for that area. Every time you complete a race you gain medals and points which advance your progress on the board, in my case putting me in competition with the whole of Great Britain. There is something unbelievable satisfying about setting a good lap time and being informed that you have just left 16,000 fools choking in your virtual dust. The game even breaks down your country into areas, so there’s finally proof of what I always knew, the West Midlands IS better than London. True Fact. Trackmania says so.

You have immediate access to a full tool suite that will allow you to create tracks from scratch and modify existing ones. A stupid-proof interface lets you customise your racer by painting directly onto your car. I was able to create the Flame Bastard in about 25 minutes, and from there I could immediately take it online for anybody to see.

The online game is where Trackmania really comes into its own. Everybody on the server has three or four minutes to set the best lap time, you can respawn as much as you like. From the moment the game starts all concept of a linear race is lost as a hundred cars take to the track simultaneously, crashing, flipping, respawning as though some great god-sized baby has flung a handful of micro-machines at a ramp to gorge itself on the sweet, sweet chaos. The spectacle alone is worth it, and because you are never in direct competition with anyone else (you cannot crash into other cars), it becomes a group of strangers banding together to collectively flip one enormous fat finger at all familiar concepts of gravity and common sense.

The real success of Trackmania is that even in single player it feels like a social experience. It surrounds you with its community and encourages you to contribute. Every time you finish a race it will remind you of your ranking, in the West Midlands, in the UK, in the world. As if that wasn’t enough, the game is completely free to download from Steam.

That’s right, it’s free. Why are you still reading? Why am I still writing?

The Flame Bastard and I will see you online.

Ludo out.

*20 mph slugs – that would be seriously messed up.

Ludo – Team Fortress 2 Update!

As if the Orange Box wasn’t already a good enough deal, Valve dropped a whole new content via Steam yesterday. The long awaited much anticipated Team Fortress 2 update landed bringing unlockable medic weapons, new achievements and a whole new Payload game mode and the Goldrush map to test it with.

Within hours the community had discovered that the Medic achievements and special items could be unlocked with a simple console commands and public servers were awash with frenzied tooled up Medics, giggling and Kritzing each other with interminable enthusiasm. The resulting carnage was sublimely ridiculous but a competitive game was nowhere to be found.

Fortunately there were alternatives. Hopping onto PC Gamer’s server saw Editor Ross ‘BBC’ Atherton and the writing staff assembled to take on all comers on the PCG server. An hour of frenzied action followed as the writers and steam community members blew each other to smithereens and tried to figure out the intricacies of the new map. The Blu team came incredibly close several times, but victory remained elusive. There was plenty of friendly chatter and general goodwill so even a relatively inexperienced TF2 player like me could get involved and have fun.

The new game mode is so simple that it is summarised in a single sentence on the introduction screen. The task is to push a cart loaded with a bomb to the end of the rails. The cart moves forwards if a Blu team member is near it, it doesn’t if a Red team member is near it. The action shifts dynamically as the cart moves through different environments, encouraging you to change your class and strategy based on its position. Because every player is focussed on the progress of the bomb, the fighting is localised, constant and intense, making Goldrush one of the most explosive and action packed maps in the set.

For the moment it seems to be a very difficult map to win. The final stretch is a large open space which can be accessed via corridors and tunnels from all sides. For the final twenty feet the cart is the only cover and the surrounding area is a complete killing field. A coordinated ubered assault seems to be the only way to push the cart to the end, but this may change in time as players figure out new methods of attack.

If you’re still not convinced that TF2 is for you then Valve are providing a free weekend from May 2nd – 4th, so download it via Steam and hop in – If you have had bad experiences with other games like Counterstrike then this is a chance to be reassured, TF2 isn’t your typical online shooter.

One final note – It’s hard to stress enough how cool it is that Valve continue to release so much new content for nothing, especially when it is as fresh and well made as Goldrush. Ungrateful forumites will always moan and bitch about change and balance ‘ruining the game’, but as long as Valve stick to their guns the game will get bigger and better. Huzzah for that.

Ludo out.