Here’s an image I entered into a competition to win a free copy of Dragon Age which, sadly, did not win. But no matter! In honour of the imminent release of Dragon Age, about which I’m painfully excited, this image shall occupy the top of our blog feed for a bit. It’s name is Maliferous the Wrathful Wrecker of Worlds. It’s a she.

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo just clawed its way out of the cold earth to entertain the general public with its unique brand of frantic, zombie-slaying goodness. I went charging through the hordes, guitar in hand, and can report that there are quite a lot of zombies. And they bleed. A lot.

Structurally, L4D2 is identical to its predecessor. Four survivors make their way from safehouse to safehouse, navigating the hordes of Infected that line every street. Left 4 Dead 2 boasts spectacular new levels of gore, new survivors, new guns, melee weapons, more special boss infected and ‘gauntlet’ events. It’s the latter of all of these which proves to be the most exciting addition. Valve observed the playing habits of those playing the original game and noticed that habitually survivors would hide in a corner or a cupboard and stave off the hordes from a well defended position. The ‘gauntlet’ succeeds in remedying this.

Now sometimes when a panic event is activated in one location, it must be concluded in another. As you travel to the end of the gauntlet the all-knowing AI Director which controls the hordes will throw wave after wave of Infected your way. The only choice is to run, picking off charging Infected as you go, fending off the brain-hungry fiends attacking from all sides. It’s frantic and terrifying.

Fortunately when the monsters get too close and you’re becoming overwhelmed you have the welcome option of switching to a dedicated melee weapon. These are scattered throughout the levels and you’re just as likely to be liquidising zombie brains with a guitar as a machete. Getting up close and personal with your foes is where Left 4 Dead 2 gets messy. Hitting a zombie with a machete has serious consequences. Body parts fly off, blood spurts and bubbles from gaping wounds, entrails fly and generally a huge mess is made. It’s a fitting homage to the hyperviolence of the zombie movie influences that provide the basis for the Left 4 Dead experience.

While the melee weapons are visceral and perfectly satisfying, the new guns leave something to be desired. They’re hissy thin-sounding things which feel as though they’d struggle to bother a pane of glass. The silenced SMG in particular disappoints as it rattles off its shots to weedy bursts of static. The weapons you fire bear little reaction to the spectacular violence they inflict.

The new special boss Infected also fail to make an impression, though the brevity of the demo stops them from showing their full potential. Over the course of a full campaign, in different environments, they might really come into their own, but for now they are a minor nuisance at worst.

The demo’s too short to really get a sense of the new survivors.  The old team were much loved but Valve promise character devlopment over the course of the five campaigns that will be included in the full game, and this could lend them more depth than the old survivors ever had.

I loved the original Left 4 Dead. It was a superb game in its own right, but the pleasure really came from throwing LAN parties with friends and nailing each campaign on expert. Left 4 Dead 2 looks to have taken Left 4 Dead and made it bigger and better. The new deep south setting will hopefully add some much needed sense of place to the levels which, in the original game, were guilty of treading the cliched game locations such as sewers, offices and warehouse. The gauntlet events are set to be great and no doubt the finales will provide some memorable gaming moments. All in all, I have sky high hopes for the full product when it arrives on November 17th.

Ludo out.

The sun rises, and seems to set the world on fire.

I have no idea what to do. All I know is that there’s an indicator at the bottom of my view pointing me to the nearest base. Reaching this place shall, for now, be my mission.

The world is a smokey, smudged canvas of shifting pastel colours. The terrain explodes from the earth in fits and starts, half formed stairways arch their way accross the landscape, trying in vain to link the haphazard columns of rock. The world, for now, is completely silent. It’s like navigating a dream.

The landscape is oddly harsh and geometric. The world is full of pits and tunnels and half formed structures. Trying to escape from the gloomy depths I take a stairway up through the rock and emerge suddenly into a glade. A shadowy figure darts between the trees and starts throwing orbs of red fire at me. I fire back and the figure explodes into a cloud of lingering red smoke. The sun begins to set and rays of orange light come lancing through the canopy.

There’s no map. It’s impossible to know how far I’ll have to travel before I reach my destination. I press on regardless. As night falls I start making my way across an ice shelf, wary of wandering enemies. They’ll be harder to spot in the gloom. Ahead I see a mountainous structure and I abandon my quest for a few minutes to climb it. As I reach the top the sun rises again. The view is spectacular.

I leave the ice shelf and press on. I stay as high as I can to avoid getting lost in the unpredictable lowlands. Descending a little I find a a small bridge over a river. Two statues are perched upon it, posed as though frozen in the middle of a ballet. I wander through another forest, and climb twisting staircases and travel quite a distance before realising that I have at some point passed the settlement I have been searching for. I track back and keep looking.

The settlment is well hidden. The monolith that forms the centre of a settlement has been sunk into the earth and lies at the centre of a man made pit. Terrain near the monolith can be sculpted to the player’s will. Here the settlers have created a haphazard pit designed to be difficult for enemy forces to navigate. Carefully placed columns spaced apart provide a jumping puzzle exit from the base.

Players in love have tried many different strategies. Some have created mile high plateaus, others construct huge walls. The enemies in Love are ferocious, and they invade in numbers from their own settlements nearby. It’s these settlements that need to be raided to gain access to the all important Tokens which, when returned to base, provide more detailed means to interact with the world around you. Some allow you to swim, some will enable you to grow trees. Used in combination these Tokens allow players to set up detailed defense mechanisms to keep the shadowy enemies at bay.

None of this especially matters to me. I hop down into the settlement and activate the monolith. For now I’m just happy to have found a home in this wierd and beautiful world.

I’ve dived head first back into mapping for Left 4 Dead after becoming frustrated with the whole thing a few weeks ago. I came back and started the sewer sections, this time taking ages over each area. I’ve been looking over the Valve official maps, all of which have been generously made available in the game files to poke and fiddle around with. The first thing you notice opening a Valve map is how much damn detail there is in every single section.

Above: before and after a panic event is activated. A klaxon goes off, the large hexagonal doors slide slowly open and then … zombies! Except there are no zombies ’cause I haven’t hooked these areas up to the NAV yet. Another lesson from Valve maps: use fewer larger light sources. Some areas are let with two massive light_spot entities of subtly differing colours at opposing ends of a location. Also: use lots of low lights. The dev commentary that comes with L4D mentions how Valve used street cars for a lot of the lighting, giving them a good excuse to have low light sources which tend to cast more dramatic shadows. In outdoor locations it lets you leave the tops of buildings in shadow, used in combination with a sky that’s dark at the horizon and lighter overhead (as in the No Mercy campaign) you get good silhouettes which, if broken up well enough, give the impression of greater detail than is actually present.

So, back to the sewer, there are just three light sources in the above images, placed behind obstructions to generate streaks of shadow. On occasions in other maps I’ve carefully placed linvisible light occluder brushes to break up large pools of light. Textures can look dull and fake when evenly lit accross large surfaces, shadows help to break things up.

Finally a note on sewers. I often sigh when I come across yet another uninspired sewer section in a game. Along with warehouses and offices sewers are one of the most overused locations in gaming. Hammer is powerful but you’re more or less stuck with the assets you have (unless you want to spend months making a shedload of unique models), so I embraced the sewer section and tried to figure out what’s good about them. Darkness, claustrophobia, dirt rot, flickering half broken mechanics, an underworld of disrepair.  The thing is, actually claustrophobic areas aren’t great in Left 4 Dead. A narrow corridor is a turkey shoot for back to back survivors, so the challenge is to create areas that are large and interesting to navigate, but which feel tight and compressed. Hopefully I can pull this off and try and push towards something close to Valve’s efforts, a lofty goal, but it’s good to aim high.

Vin Diesel’s inimitable growl introduces you to Riddick.

“The dark,” he rasps, “is where I shine.”

It’s the voice of a man who’s about to kill his way out of the highest security prison in the Galaxy.

Butcher Bay is a concrete monster that descends kilometres below the planet’s surface, a high security centre built to hold the toughest convicts alive. Nobody has ever escaped before, but the folk who built the prison evidently didn’t anticipate containing the likes of their latest inmate.

Inside it’s a shiv or be shivved world full of angry men who would mostly rather kill you than have you mess with the carefully balanced hierarchy of prison life. You’ll spend some time rampaging through Buthcher bay with a shotgun and more time sneaking around killing guards with a screwdriver, but while both sections are perfectly good fun, neither are as compelling as the time you spend with the prisoners themselves.

The burly inmates of Butcher Bay have an uneasy relationship with each other and the brutal guards charged with maintaining control. Out of the necessities of cohabitation a kind of truce has emerged. Alpha male guards allow the prisoners certain liberties in exchange for favours, money and drugs. Those who fall out of line are beaten or killed.

It’s a dirty and brutal place. Huge, expressionless concrete slabs make up the walls and corridors, security camera turrets watch from rails above you, ready to open fire at any sign of defiance. The architecture is soulless and efficient as though the whole prison has been designed and built by a machine. It genuinely feels as though there is no escape.

Fortunately Riddick doesn’t share my pessimism. His obnoxious silence, growled quips and general antagonism proves wonderfully irritating to those who fancy themselves in charge. In fact, he’s oddly likeable in spite of his reticence. He’s a stone cold killer, but somehow the filth and corruption of Butcher Bay slides off him, leaving a very disturbed and almost alien individual who’se simply doing anything that’s necessary to gain his freedom. In fairness this includes killing, poisoning, maiming and generally brutish behaviour, all executed in spectacularly hyperviolent fashion.

Riddick’s first person brawling is splendid. It’s all rather simple, relying on direction presses for different attacks with a counter system thrown in for extra challenge. Chronicles’ engine handles the contextual damage, reeling animations and execution maneuvers with aplomb. Many times I found myself groaning at my latest foe’s spectacular demise. It’s desperate, bloody and visceral.

The ranged weapons are chunky and futuristic in a practical way, but the gunplay can’t really match the intensity of the melee combat. Your greatest ally will be the tranqualizer gun with its unlimited ammo and ability to extinguish lights silently. A tranqualized enemy can be executed at close quarters, a maneouvre that, by some glitch of the physics engine, often sends their corpse bouncing around the room in a comical fashion.

Oh yes, extinguishing lights, it’s useful and you’ll want to do it often. Crouching in the dark sees you enter stealth mode. A blue tint to your vision will signal whether or not you’re hidden from enemy view. From this position you can stalk your enemies at will, turning out lights to gain a greater advantage. An inspired addition, in some circumstances, allows you to whisper to your victim for no greater reason than to freak them out before you dispense with them. It’s mean, but helps magnify Riddick’s schtick as a creature of the dark. His eyeshine, an ability that you gain partway through the game with basically no explanation, allows you to see clearly in complete darkness, further lessening your enemy’s chances of stopping you.

As a package all of these elements come together brilliantly, making for one of the surprise hits of 2004. The remake does a good job of adding a graphical sheen to proceedings. Depth of field effects and high res textures make a good looking game even better. Chronicles still has some of the best use of lighting in any game to date, and I’ll mention it again, the fighting is brutal.

In some ways Chronicles has proved to be quite an important game. It seems to have had positive influences on the character interaction and meaty combat of Batman: Arkham Asylum, as well as opening the door to proper first person melee games like Zeno Clash. I still haven’t finished its sequel: Assault on Dark Athena, but so far it seems to be lacking the character interaction that made the original stand out. I really bought into that prison, and the thugs caged within it. The voice acting and the writing is good, and the facial animation was surprisingly advanced. Not quite Valve-level, but getting there. All in all it’s worth picking up for all of the above, especially if you’re in the US, where currently it’s going for about $5 on Direct 2 Drive, you lucky devils.

Ludo out.

American sports commentators have a wonderful expression that they use to describe a general sense of ‘where the team is at’. The team’s morale, how well they gel with their coach and their sense of team spirit are all referred to loosely as ‘the intangibles’. It’s a term reserved for those elements that can’t really be measured, but which undoubtedly have an impact on the team’s performance.

I’ve been thinking about the intangibles in games, those small elements that, while difficult to quantify, can help to elevate a title from being simply pretty good to something great.

There are plenty of aspects to a game that can be assessed objectively. You can take a game, see how many polygons it’s throwing onto the screen, observe the physics and the post processing effects and you can say it’s technically proficient. In other instances you can apply subjective assessments without worrying about being out of line with your readership. After all, terrible voice acting, such as the kind seen in Men of War, say, isn’t going to be convincing to anybody.

You can play an action game and say the controls feel fast and responsive, a seemingly subjective statement which is actually derived from a series of measurable factors, such as the time between button press and on-screen action, the length of wind-up animations etc. Anecdotally, you can observe occasions where you knew what you were supposed to do but found it difficult to complete the task because the controls were imprecise. In the hands of a reviewer who has played a lot of games in his/her life these statements are likely, overall, to be considered and fair.

But then there are the intangibles. Sometimes a game, in spite of its flaws, is charming or brilliant in a way that others just aren’t. It’s the difference between feeling as though I’m playing a game, and feeling as though I’m in a different world. It’s an unusual and brilliant experience, but a nightmare if you’re tring to stay objective about things.

Once upon a time, about five or six years ago, at school, I received an art project back from being marked (this is going somewhere I promise). I was pretty confident it was going to do well but probably not take a top grade. I was right, but the comment scrawled next to the mark, the reason for the reduced grade was, and I quote: “lacks fizz”. I found this comment so infuriatingly vague that I actually confronted my teacher and tried to pin down an exact definition of “fizz” in an artistic context. After about ten minutes this went nowhere, but I was forever left with a knowledge of the lingering irritation of vague and unhelpful criticism. This ‘fizz’ element, the ‘X Factor’ or whatever you want to call it, needs to be broken down and properly explained. Every impression you have comes from the game itself, there’s a factor, or a combination of factors that makes something special.

So let’s try and examine exactly why these moments connect in the way they do.

Firstly, examples: the flooded, half-ruined decadence of Bioshock’s Rapture. The monstrous concrete prisons and dog-eat-dog status quo of Butcher Bay in Chronicles of Riddick. Vast shadowy capital ships emerging from the nebulae of Freespace 2. The suave and macabre city of Vena Cava in Grim Fandango. It’s ridiculous to talk of these experiences in terms of polygons and shaders, it undermines the fact that by some feat of luck or incredible design, these games have created moments of pure inspiration.

It’s not about the graphics. A degree of technical expertise is needed to render a world or situation to the extent that the gamer isn’t torn out of the experience, but the bar for this is lower than we might expect. Grim Fandango’s low polygon models marched across relatively low res 2D backgrounds and the game dumped mouse support in favour of a clunky movement system, but that didn’t get in the way of the brilliant concept, writing, vocal delivery and visual design. Dungeon Keeper’s low res sprites and lack of modern graphical bells and whistles still can’t dampen the addictive dungeon building, inspired units and dark humour. If the idea is good enough, and the writing, visual and audio design are on the same wavelength then poor graphics are surpassed by the concept.

Gaming incorporates elements from almost every other existing medium. Art, music, architecture, writing, games use them all extensively. If every single one of these aspects are of high quality then it means you’ve probably spent a lot of money, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into the kind of inspired experience I’m talking about. The musicians, artists, designers all need to serve the concept. I like to think of a modern dev team as as a vast multimedia orchestra, working together to create an alternative reality.

So, forget the visuals for now, first it’s in The Idea. We’re talking about the central vision, the essence of the world you’re trying to create. Generic Tolkienesque fare probably isn’t going to cut it here, it needs to be bolder than that. This is where it helps to have, say, Tim Schafer on your side. Then there’s the chain of artists, designers and coders who have to try and deliver The Vision, and this is where it gets especially difficult. Modern triple A titles will have teams over a hundred strong working hard to deliver the product. How do you make sure everyone is going in the same direction? Good management, of course, but also a belief in the project, close collaboration between departments and a sense of passion and enthusiasm. The intangibles.

Passion for the subject matter has a habit of finding its way into the finished product. A telltale sign is in the extra stuff, the neat touches that don’t need to be in a game but are in there anyway. Locations such as Rapture feel as though they’re more than just levels in a game. Rapture feels like a place with a history. It’s all there explicitly in the audio logs and more subtly in the tipped over chairs, smashed bottles of bourbon and blood-stained party hats, it’s in the protest signs littering the floor when you first exit the bathysphere and in the bloody scrawls on bathroom walls. The war that broke Rapture wasn’t just physical, but a war of philosophies and ideas taken too far. The world of Bioshock is more than the corridors you walk, there’s a whole fiction that stretches beyond those walls, and even beyond the player’s story. Somehow it’s this sense of a greater world which draws me in and makes for a great gaming experience.

Similarly remarkable achievements have come out of the Indie scene. In smaller teams it’s easier to rally around an idea and coordinate your design, especially if your art, music and writing guy is one ridiculously talented person, as is the case with Kyle Gabler and the sublime World of Goo. For other examples of small teams producing unique visions look no further than Braid, or Introversion’s Darwinia. Even games like N show great cohesiveness in their design. with N, the mechanics are everything. The game is entirely about jumping, the sense of momentum and the level design, audiovisually N is as simple as that, no backstory or flourishes, stark and basic, it works perfectly. It’s a fitting homage to the sheer entertaining simplicity of the platforming genre as a whole. It’s that sense of the designers knowing exactly what they’re making, and showing that awareness in every aspect of their game.

Of course there’s bound to be a subjective aspect to all of this. Perhaps you didn’t really dig Bioshock, maybe Rapture’s inspired dripping Art Deco dystopia didn’t float your boat. Perhaps you weren’t charmed by World of Goo, finding it to be just another puzzler in a world of Bejewelled clones. In those instances I might gently imply that you’re a soulless husk of a human being, but that’d just be my opinion, y’know? I’d rather not be so cruel, so instead I’ll just pointedly refer to the success of these games, in sales and widespread critical acclaim, and take a moment to consider the odd combination of genius and luck it must take for a team of one hundred people to come together and make a truly great game.

Ludo out.

I’ve started this article three or four times before, and failed to follow through, Mount and Blade is one of the hardest games I’ve ever tried to explain the appeal of, it’s graphics are five years behind the times, it’s quests are repetitive, it’s dialogue unimaginative, it’s world derivative, but god help me, I love it. Why? The short answer is ‘the combat’ but the truth is far more complicated than that.

Journey beneath the cut to see me fail to explain why.

First, some background. Mount and Blade is an open world RPG/Medieval combat simulator. It takes place in the sprawling land of Caldaria, a fantasy land without Orcs, Elves or Magic. The land is perpetually fought over by five middle ages kingdoms, the Swadians (European Knights), the Vaegir (fur-clad Russians), the Nords (axe wielding Vikings), the Kergit (cavalry heavy Mongols) and the Rhodoks (well drilled, spear wielding Italians), I would eventually ally myself with the latter as they seemed the most modern, even being ruled by a proto-democracy. Players start as a wandering adventurer with a few basic items (generate depending on the origin story you chose) and a horse. The last bit is important, this game is called Mount and Blade for a reason, being mounted gives you a terrific advantage in combat.

Ah, the combat, the centerpeice of Mount and Blade. Those who have played Oblivion might feel at home, you click the left mouse to slash, hold it down for more power and hold the right mouse to block. Where Mount and Blade differs from Oblivion however is in two vital areas: The first is that blocking (unless one has a shield) is directional, you will automagically block in the direction the opponent is swinging, but you won’t adjust if they change direction, this means that blocking is down to timing, bringing your weapon up as the swing begins. The second is the more vital, the game’s physics engine adds damage to your swing based on the speed of your movement, this is where the horse really comes in handy.

But it’s the sense of time and place that makes the battles what they are, real effort has gone into creating the sensation of speed as you gallop along, and the sound of your sword connecting with an enemy is brutal and visceral, arrows embed themselves into shields, and flesh and even nearby trees with a satisfying thwack. It’s the use of physics in this fashion that really makes Mount and Blade’s combat what it is, arrows, spears and blades feel like real, physical objects, not merely moving textures with damage attached, nearly every aspect of damage is calculated using these physics systems, making for one of the most direct and realistic feeling combat system in any game I’ve ever played.

And Mount and Blade really needs this system, because it’s problems are far easier to explain. The first and most obvious is the graphics engine, which is not so much bad as from five or ten years ago, still fairly impressive for a game coded by a single Turkish couple, but poor when compared to most modern games. The second is the repetativeness, while Mount and Blade’s world is large, there are only really a handful of quests within it, and they very rapidly become rather dull. And there isn’t much character to the world either, as I explained earlier most of the factions are simple clones of historic armies, and their dialogue is rarely inspiring. Siege battles are another bugbear, turning the otherwise wonderful battles into dull slugfests.

And yet, the game remains compulsive, and not simply because of the combat, even if one ignores the quests there’s still a lot to do in Caldaria. The player doesn’t merely fight alone, but can recruit armies, training them from peasants into armoured knights. Companions, hero figures who earn experience in a similar fashion to the player, are scattered throughout the land, they can be recruited and outfitted, adding their skills to your own, but often fall out and disagree with one another. Allying oneself with a Kingdom allows one to take castles, towns and villages and be awarded them as a fief, to manage as one sees fit, there are goods to be traded and tournaments to take part in, each Kingdom even has a claimant, who accuses the current leader of usurping his throne, and whose cause you can back.

Eventually I’ll become tired of Mount and Blade, but even then there is a vibrant modding community that can provide additional entertainment. I think I’ll be going for a little while though, my Rhodok armies are besieging the town of Narra, we will drive the Kergits from Caldaria yet.

Sir Dante, sallying forth.

Guild Wars and all of it’s expansions can now be found for about £25. Dante and I have had a rocky relationship with MMO games, and while I’m still fairly convinced that the addictive properties of levelling and the social elements allow a lot of these games to get away with some pretty horrible quest design, I was tempted enough to pay up out of curiosity, as Guild Wars has always had a different take on the genre.

For a start, only hub locations such as towns and cities can be said to be Massively Online. As soon as you step beyond the town walls with your party you’re thrown into huge instanced areas where all of your questing takes place. If you decide that you really don’t want to interact with pesky real people you can hire henchmen to flesh out your party and go it alone in the wilderness. Some quests see you picking up extra warriors and followers to the point where, as well as our four-strong party, there were six swordsmen and a bloke with a giant pet scorpion following us around the world, helping us to beat the snot out of the indiginous wildlife. Most satisfying.

Another key difference: The level cap is set at 20. Compared to World of Warcraft’s 80-odd, this is a pretty major shift. Guild Wars encourages smaller arcs of play with lots of alt characters. Skills aren’t tied to your xp either, they can be bought or acquired at any time by completing the right quests. Levelling instead allows you to boost your proficiencies, making your existing skills more potent. It won’t take long for you to have more skills than you’re allowed to use at one time. The game almost bombards you with abilities, giving you a wide range of attacks, buffs, summons and curses to choose from. At any time you can retract attribute points you’ve spent from levelling up, and change your character’s proficiencies completely. The onus is on creating your own style of play and you’re never punished for tweaking.

Bearing all this in mind, levelling up isn’t the defining measure of your progress. It’s still useful, of course, but in a sense almost incidental. The focus is on picking the right quests, gaining new skills and pushing on with the story. And the story, as it happens, isn’t half bad.

It’s not as deep or rounded as your average single player experience but it made me pay attention, which is more than any other MMO has managed to do. After about 3 hours of play an invading army turns the world to dust. Familiar green meadows and forest lands disappear, replaced with red sands, fiery skies and huge crystalline structures beaming rays of cold light into the sky. The wolves and bears are replaced with twin-tailed scorpions, gargoyles and wondering squads of invading Charr warriors. Things have gone bad. Very bad. You’re assigned to the great North wall to help repel the advancing army.

It helps that combat is fast, exciting and, thanks to your numerous skills, a varied and interesting excercise in risk assessment. My Necromancer/Warrior is something of a glass cannon. Thankfully he specialises in thieving the life force of his enemies for his own benefit. It’s a risky business though. His regeneration skill deals significant damage before gradually giving back twice as much. A regen followed by a quick life steal nullifies the effects, and all the while he’s be building up adrenaline from the hits he’s taking, and that unlocks some of the nastier warrior skills. Best to finish off the foe I’ve weakened with my life steal and unleash my wounding ability on the chap with full life just behind him, that ought to allow the bleeding status I’m about to inflict to take full effect. Then, when everything’s dead, I’ll raise a few bone horrors from the corpses, natch.

Thankfully, as well as the general excitement of killing things, the main quest has already turned up some memorable moments as well. Example: You’re told to go behind enemy lines to gauge the size of the oncoming Charr invasion force. After a dangerous treck into the inhospitable Northern lands you turn a corner to see a plain stretching into the distance, littered with dozens of campfires and scores of enemy soldiers. You’re spotted and are forced to run, giggling, all the way back to the great wall, throwing nervous glances at the minimap and the sea of red dots hot on your tail. The great wall falls, and later you push the forces back almost singlehandedly, rescuing captured soldiers and unleashing fiery revenge in the form of a huge catapult.

The side quests are above average fair as well, though this is a bar set rather low by other MMO titles. It’s very rare that you’ll find a ‘Kill X number of X monster quest’. Instead you’ll be ferrying items across the world, completing escort missions and clearing hotspots of enemy forces. Along the way you’ll be navigating a fascinating world, which, like much of the game, is really rather pretty. The tech is undoubtedly getting on a bit, but the clean colours and strong design go a long way. When I see the sun glaring down through the windows of a shattered tower, or rivers of tar flowing through red valleys in the shadow of the great wall, I realise that at times Guild Wars is quite beautiful.

We’re still working our way through the original game, so I might add updated impressions as we progress through the expansions. For now it’s fair to say that Guild Wars is doing a good job of scratching our RPG itch. It’s faster and in some ways more streamlined that other MMO titles we’ve played, and future MMO games could do worse than steal a few ideas from Guild Wars.

Ludo out.

Herein lies the ghost of an adventure game that never was. Rather than let hard work stagnate alone in a folder on my PC I thought I’d give the assets some air and let them run free in the boundless back garden that is the Internet.

You play as ordinary dishevelled office chap Jack who wakes up in the City and has to find his way out. The City is a properly messed up place full of demons and monsters living out otherwise normal lives, running shops, hospitals, and their own twisted Parliament. Anyway, it subtly transpires that Jack is in his own bonkers subconscious. Spoiler alert.

A room escape puzzle breaks you out of imprisonment and you’re let loose into the city, greeted by the shot above. There was some difficulty establishing depth with the colours in each row of buildings becoming darker and then lighter again as the scene moves away. Paintshop’s blur tool helps a lot. There was a lot of trial and error involved in getting the colours right overall as well. Moving from the building on the left to the station, through the tunnel on the right, I tried to apply some of Valve’s colour theory, subconsciously demonstrating a sense of hostility and menace by leading the player into the coldest part of the image. Does it work? Hard to say, it’s a subliminal  cue which is impossible to test, but it’s worth throwing that stuff in there, just in case it does work.

Some characters. Mona on the left. She’s cool. How can you tell? Look, she has shades, a leather jacket AND a cigarette. A no-nonsense agent of a corrupt and incompetent government but with more sense than any of the morons who feed her orders. Sometimes a friend, sometimes working against you, it’s unclear whether she’s following orders or putting in place a complex plan to escape the city and go it alone.

On the right, our hero Jack with the small, green, sociopathic, psychopathic, cannibalistic mentalist companion known only as The Imp. He helps you out for food. Thing is, things go bad when you feed him. The plan was to have him growing larger and larger as the game progressed, his newfound size and strengh granting the player access to new areas to the point where he gets out of hand completely with pretty destructive consequences. Opposite is the birdman. All he wants, like any self respecting Demon, is the blood of an innocent. Extracting blood from a child or a virgin might be the obvious solution, but the answer lies in a cell, where the only man imprisoned in this crazy City is, in fact, innocent of his crime. Initially The Birdman had wings, but this meant sacrificing overall size and I wanted him to be big and threatening and just went with the vulture head, corpse like hue and snazzy pinstripe suit instead.

Animation. I had never done any animation before. It is really, really time consuming, but ultimately satisfying. Jack taught me that if you don’t fix your characters early, they will forever be lumbered with freakishly long arms. I wanted Jack to be nonchalant about his predicament, and he was supposed to wander the city with his hands in his pockets, revelling in the madness of his situation. Unfortunately Adventure Game Studio had other ideas. Getting his hands out of his pockets to do things required intermediate animations that aren’t really possible in the engine. Loss.

It’s not a sewer, I swear. It’s an underpass. It’s the tunnel to the station, cold dank and drippy. The best I could do for puddle reflections it seems is some pretty hopeful squiggles. With more time, it’s those little bits that’d get fixed up.

It was a good learning experience which taught me not to overstretch myself and be too overambitious. The one I’m working on now sees you playing as a hostage negotiator resolving a hostage situation. It can all take place in about 3 or 4 rooms, which gives more time for more detailed art and a lot more writing, which should hopefully create a short game with many possible outcomes. Hopefully that game will see a better fate than this one!

Ludo out.

I tried in vain to capture the sense of momentum, the speed, the exhileration of freerunning across the gorgeous cityscapes of Mirror’s Edge.  Ultimately, though, still images don’t really do the job. It’s something you’ll have to play the game to experience. Surprisingly, in a game where you’re encouraged to keep moving all the time, standing still and looking around the world is incredibly rewarding. Vistas like the one above are simply everywhere in Mirror’s Edge. Often they go almost unnoticed as you desperately try to gain enough speed to make the next death defying leap, but after a couple of playthroughs I began to savour the environments and came up with a few of my favourites.

This is a very small section towards the end of the game that I simply call ‘the gold room’. It’s a narrow and claustrophobic obstacle course of pipes and vents decked out in glorious reflective copper. It’s worth turning Runner Vision off to experience the monotone lushness of this area. Though narrow, there’s still some death defying gaps to overcome, and you’ll find yourself frequently swinging over certain death.

This is how you do a sewer section. You start at the other end of this vast hall in the shadow at the top left of the image. Five minutes later and you emerge into the light, and are rewarded with this view of the route you just took, complete with a squadron of hapless guards still searching for you hopelessly on the ground level. This image showcases a common theme in Mirror’s Edge’s environments, a garishly overpowering primary colour tempered by a sterile white. The tone of each area is completely distinct and utterly fearless in its choice of powerful colours.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone from Introversion once. Talking about Mirror’s Edge, he mentioned the fact that all of the trees and plants were white. I didn’t believe him until I looked for it, but he’s absolutely right. As nonsensical as this seems, it fits in so seamlessly with Mirror’s Edge’s aesthetic that you’ll barely even notice it. I liked the above area for a couple of reasons. Firstly, contrary to all press shots of Mirror’s Edge ever, it’s at night, and still looks fantastic. Secondly, this area epitomises the game’s fierce loyalty to the rules of complimentary colours. Mirror’s Edge is like freerunning through the colour wheel. Having endured game after game of grey dystopias jumping into Mirror’s Edge is to be utterly spoiled. Put simply, it pleases my brain in a very basic and satisfying way.

PHYSICS! Or, as I should sadly spell it, PhysX.  Small touches such as extra particle effects and realistic smoke and dust genuinely add a bit of extra drama, lifting the PC version above its console counterpart. The devs have cleverly worked in a few set peices to show off their fabric disintegration technology, but PhysX comes into its own in your first serious helicopter escape, which sees the gunship’s bullets showering you in cascading sparks, throwing up dust and sending steam billowing from ruptured pipes. It’s cool.

They say never look down, but I looked down every time I sailed across a big gap. The camera movement and body awareness combine to create moments of genuinely stomach churning vertigo. Sometimes jumps just look impossible, but somehow, with enough momentum, you’ll beat them anyway.

I don’t like to gush, and Mirror’s Edge has some problems, so here’s a guard looking stupid after I just stole his gun. I’m not giving it back to him until he agrees to take all his friends and get out of Mirror’s Edge, taking the awful fighting and gunplay with him. No, you’re not having it! Leave, get out! I command thee!

Ludo out.