I recently had a week off work, which was marvelous. I thought I would download a game to keep me occupied, so I got me Return to Castle Wolfenstein. But that’s soooo old, I hear you cry. It is old. The age of a game isn’t important. Half Life remains the best single player experience I have ever had, which is closely followed by Quake 1. Engines have improved over time, but it takes a lot more than purdy lighting to impress this old man.

So, as you have probably already guessed, RTCW failed to impress, or I wouldn’t have bothered writing this.

I hate it.

RTCW plays like old people fuck. Slow, steady and in the missionary position. It should be in every highschool as a tool for teachers to explain intercourse to a bunch of thick teenagers. It seems to be doing its best to be as white bread as possible. It doesn’t push the extremes of any particular direction. It feels like a demonstration of a perfectly standard FPS suitable for a public school textbook. In all fairness, I haven’t played the MP, and I won’t have the opportunity because my weird ass net connection is quite selective as to who it copulates with. I knew the MP wouldn’t work before all this, so I was looking for a single player experience, and RTCW was what I chose..

First of all, I was a big Wolfenstein 3D fan back in the day. It was the first FPS I played and it started a love affair that lasts to this day. I had high expectations attached to playing it’s sequel. Perhaps a little too high. If you are going to attach the Wolfenstein name to a new game you had better be sure it is a damn good game. I don’t mean revolutionary. Revolutionary usually means they took an FPS and stuck in some gameplay elements from another genre, for example Dues Ex with its crazy character point system. Those kinds of revolutions I can do without. I am an FPS purist, don’t fuck with something that isn’t broken. But I do like innovation. Innovation is Tribes 1. That game added a whole new concept of gameplay. The jetpacks were a simple addition, but it would take years to really master the possibilities they presented. I don’t mean to suggest I want flying Wolfenstein. The way I see it there are two paths for an FPS to pursue. One is the skills path. This was quake 3 all over. No silly little story (well there was a little story, but one gets the feeling is written just to beef up some press releases), it was all about developing the skills, reflexes, prediction skills etc. needed to play it well. The opposite was Half Life, which needed very little skill to play. This was a story / puzzle game. The story was very smart and so were the puzzles. Everyone remembers the big tapping monster that reacted to sound. That was very cool. How many of you drained a load into it before realising you just had to lob a grenade to wherever you didn’t want to be at the time?

RTCW is not a difficult game to play. No quirks in the physics to master. No lightening guns to baffle you. The best I can peel off the bottom of the barrel is that you needed circle strafe on one occasion, but the years when that was considered a ’skill’ all started with a 9. In fact, if you can’t circle strafe you are a degenerate human being and you can get off my site right now. The enemies get progressively bigger, badder and less intelligent as the game plods through. You don’t need to outwit or outmanoeuvre anything. You just have to pound away at it with your big guns and step to the side or run away when it throws something at you. A case in point is the final boss. He sometimes throws some little flying skulls at you, but otherwise he sticks to melee. You simply run circles around him sticking panzerfausts into him and prickling him with a gatling gun until eventually he dies of boredom (unless you die of boredom first). As the final boss he leaves a lot to be desired. There is no sense of elation at kicking the poor old resurrected king down. You can only take solice in the knowledge it was for his own good. Imagine if the poor old guy got sent to the eastern front? Those starving Russian conscripts would have eaten him alive.

So you don’t have to be a master of the WASD to get through, nor do you have to strain the brain. I had one small “oh” moment when fighting some undead knights (yes, plenty of undead around these parts… more on that later). Your bullets ricochet off their shields and hit you, I’ll leave that to you to figure out. There is no real interaction with the environment, you simply run through linear levels blasting at things until you get the end. I suppose when it comes to stomping a bunch of Nazis at the same time you could try to take advantage of quirks in the AI, but most of the grunts in the game are so easy to kill you won’t be bothered. Head shots are the name of the game, so if you have ever played CS this will be a cakewalk. In addition to this, the hit zones are just enormous. To snipe you aim in the general direction and let off a round, and something will die, guaranteed.

There was one sequence I enjoyed. A stealth mission where you had to get from A to B without the Nazis seeing or hearing you. Lots of angles to be considered and patience while guards walked their rounds. Not a new idea by any means, but well done and enjoyable.

Back to the bitching. RTCW does the secret thing. I don’t suppose it would be Wolfenstein without secrets. Secrets either get you some supplies or some treasure that achieves absolutely nothing. It does increase re-play value of the game, but there is little motivation for finding them other than the ego stroking. If you actually NEED the secrets for ammo and health, I have some better advice;

learn to aim and stop getting shot.

Secrets increase the sense that you are just playing a game. This can be quite cool. Quake 1 was so fantastic and ridiculous that the secrets sat very well with the overall vibe. Most importantly, Quake 1 was consciously a game. You were immersed in what was a conspicuously man-made world. You could sense the fun the designers were having when putting the whole deal together. There was also more motivation as the secrets sometimes lead to new levels or easter eggs. Half-Life had plenty of secrets (though never named). Secrets lead to the usual ammo and health, but also shortcuts and the like which were significant for the progression of the game. You were more interested in where the new way might lead, not the act of just finding it so you could tell your friends. RTCW secrets feel like there were stuck in with the usual odd-coloured wall clues as a generic necessity. Like the cumshot, you have to see it to complete the experience, but you have seen so many they leave you cold.

And then there is the zombies, resurrected kings, mummies and tooth fairies. RTCW runs the gauntlet of popular victims. There are the standard Nazi grunts that only a little less fun to kill than American grunts. In addition to the supernatural and the grunt-ish we also get the sci-fi with some frankenstein like “super-soldiers” and others like that. I guess in a way it all fits in a primitive way with our stereotypes of Nazi mysticism and science (which are melded seeeeeeeamlessly in the game).

The absence of the dogs is conspicuous. The farcical protest against killing dogs in Wolfenstein 3D would have been laughable if hadn’t been real people expressing it. But it was real people. They exist all around you. They are you nieghbours. They could be in the apartment next door. Feeling paranoid yet?

http://news.bmezine.com/2008/07/26/seeding-the-sow-with-love/

look at the tattoo then read comment 7.

What the fuck is wrong with the world? I’m glad somebody slapped him / her down, though I don’t think a comment that retarded really deserves a serious reply. German Shepherds are one of the few breeds of dog I actually like. I had them as child so I have a serious soft spot for them. Now I live in Bangkok I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands of stray, starving, limb-missing, fur-missing soi dogs. Be damned if I can think of a humane solution, but I really don’t like seeing any living being in that condition. For you see, I am a reasonable human being.

A reasonable human being would also expect that in the new Wolfenstein game he would be doing some serious dog fragging against some seriously vicious dogs, and fuck “Moonchild” for getting in the way of it.

It’s like the Linux penguin turning up as a Q3A skin. Who doesn’t want to put a rail between it’s cute little eyes. This is how Kong expresses his love, with rails. And if the Penguin Liberation Front has something to say about it, I will rail their teary little penguin loving eyes as well.

So I don’t like pixies and elves and never played Diablo. I could have coped with it, though. It’s NOT like you ARE a bondaged clad sorceress with +3 magic and CBT power and 30 litres of manor juice up your airport saddlebag. You are an all-American bag of steroidsand go pills doing the business (or all-English, it is diplomatically vague, it would be very unfair to credit just America or England individually for a victory that was made a little further east…).

I’m not a tall man, and this is loaded with many an unspeakable insecurity. One of them is an inherent dislike of steroid using jocks like the protagonist of RTCW. Gordon Freeman, he was a skinny hero with PhD. and a quickly developing taste for morphine. There is someone we can all relate to. There is only one thing more popular than sweaty football captains, and that is nerdy opiate addicts. Best of all, Freeman isn’t fighting to save the world anymore than he saving himself. The grunts trying to kill him aren’t bad people, if anything they are also trying to save the world from hordes of alien misunderstandings and Freeman is making that job a little more difficult. The ambiguous ending will most likely leave you working for the g-man, and something tells me he is far from wholesome.

I have just got into the downhill slope of the latter half of the twenties and feel as if I might be getting just a bit too old for the goodies and baddies thing. Gamers are getting older. I’m not done with heroes, nobody will ever be done with heroes. But I can’t get off on being a jock fighting all the evils of the world with one hand. I’m sick of killing Nazis, Russians, Arabs, Persians and whoever else is deemed bullet worthy. Part of me would like to be tearing through corporate office buildings using those headshot skills to take care of ivy leaguers who have lives I will never know, all on the way to putting a crowbar in the back of a CEO’s skull. I perish to think of beatnik who would write a game based on those objectives, though. Tearing through the office converting people with vegan love and the breaking down of emotional barriers.

I want an anti-hero.

The reality of vulneralbility, of not always wanting good things and the lack of happy endings does appeal to me. To be the hideous Marv smashing your way through cops to avenge the death of your one-night freebie prostitute’s honour, killing the corrupt priest behind the party only to be executed for murdering the whore in question. This is the anti-hero. A man so ugly he could have never gotten p4p, drinks day and night in strip clubs and is probably schizophrenic. That’s pure gold. Gaming is fantasy world. The reduction of the world into black and white, goodies and baddies isn’t the fantasy for me. It is not even a fantasy appropriate for children. Presenting the world as black and white to a child is probably the greatest crime imaginable. It’s the stuff of propaganda. I don’t think anyone here is fooled by the presentation of terrorism as a goodies vs. baddies thing. Yet, when it comes to consumer entertainment, that’s exactly what we want.

Some of you will tell me it’s already here. Pull out Vice City or Manhunt as recent titles. No, these aren’t good enough. These are horribly one-dimensional characters for rebellious white teenagers in the suburbs. These games are as black and white as taking on the Wehrmacht and SS single handedly. These games dumb us down. They don’t offer something more, it’s something less. Don’t get me wrong. I want a bloodbath and If I’m in the mood some Q3A will do nicely. When it comes to a good single-player, though, I find the world sorely lacking. We have had the technology for years, games like Half Life (as I keep on saying) really had something going. FPSs have the potential to be more. If am to look at my screen through into the eyes of someone else, put me somewhere half way interesting.

I suppose this is always the problem when you have a bunch of binary tech heads writing your storyline. The skills school of FPS has seems to have reached new heights with things like the DeFRag community. I think it’s great, but I don’t have the time these days now that I’m a working man. Age seems to have mellowed my competitive streak as well. So I want things pushed into the other extreme. More of the thinking man’s FPS. It’s a spectrum of the genre that the deathmatch thing and multiplayer technology sort of killed. I like deathmatching as much as the next man, but would like to see the humble single player element have a bit more effort put in.

I also wouldn’t want it to go the other way either. I don’t want a storyline by some coke frazzled tinseltown types. All this talk of hero’s it is inevitable that this whole new Batman film will come up. I don’t want that kind of meaning in an FPS. The kind of meaning where every beatnik walks out of the theatre feeling high and mighty because they “got it” more than the next man, itching in the pants to get drunk or sped up and have long cliched conversations with their similarly high and mighty chums. I want it to BE something of meaning, not to be told it is something of meaning with clever dialogue delivering it like a subtle jackhammer through the skull (God forbid anyone would walk out of the theatre without having “got it” repeatedly - incidentally I haven’t seen the new Batman film, I’m basing this on the ad nauseum conversations around the office from people who ‘got it’). A world where FPS turned into the abstract mess that’s called art these days would be bad enough. A world where FPS becomes hollywood trying to imitate an abstract mess but in such a way that every chump will understand, that would be much worse.

Straylight and I played WoW for a few months when we first moved to London.  The problem was that it was horrendously addictive, but it was also a bit dull for me.  Combined with this, the PvP aspect was completely, unforgivably biased against anyone on their first characters.  Seriously, if you didn’t have a Twink, you were in for an entirely frustrating time.  The only alternative being to spend actual Great British Pounds on virual Gold to buy special equipment for your character, which is fine for some and all due respect to them, but that didn’t fit into the scope of what I wanted from a video game. 
The final straw was that in April of this year we had a string of gigs including a Plague Sequence gig in London, 2 Crystalline Effect gigs in Holland and 1 in Budapest, which required alot of rehearsal and preperation.  So we stopped playing in order to prepare.  After the tour was over, we realised that a month or two had gone by and we hadn’t even logged into WoW.  It was out of our system, and we took the opportunity to cancel our subscriptions and uninstall the game. 

Anyway back to Eve.  I recently succumbed and followed the links from The Escapist.  After an easy sign-up process the exe started downloading.  It was a total of 600ish-mb and was coming down at a steady 240k/s (I love English broadband), so was down in about 40 mins.  After a quick install, and my free 14-day trial account being successfully set up automatically, I was in. 
I’m mentioning how easy it was because I was merely curious about the game and if it required any more serious effort I may not have bothered. 

Unfortunately I had a bad feeling straight away.  Character creation felt incredibly long-winded, with the only thing to guide me being thumbnails and long text descriptions.  The character attibutes were mostly arcane and there was no real sense of what set my choices apart and what impact they would have in the game.  The long, un-animated, slideshow-style intro had my hand hovering over the escape button with tedium, but I stuck with it, and was eventually launched into the game. 

I was looking at a ship hovering in space.  This was me.  You’d think space would allow a sense of freedom but the movement system is based on a series of tedious menus.  After a lengthy tutorial I learned that I can’t just move around, I have to find an object and double-click on it to approach it.  I can’t circle-strafe a target, but must right-click and click on the “orbit” sub-menu and then select in feet the distance from which to orbit my target.  To then stop my ship I must right-click on the ship and select “stop” from a menu.  WASD is clearly for the unevolved, i.e. me. 

At this stage I was hoping to see other players zipping by, to give me a sense of community, as this was an MMO after all.  Not once did I see another player.  I was just stranded in space, struggling with a clumsy ship, with only the promises of long-winded transits, extended mining sessions, and dull battles ahead. 

The game looks reasonably stunning, and given the cool, futuristic setting I can understand why it’s the 2nd biggest MMO after WoW.  But I found it so difficult to get into and felt so unwelcome in the Eve Online universe, that I get the impression that after the amount of hours I’d have to put in to make the game start to feel rewarding, I’d want to move onto something more familiar and accessible like WHOnline, which comes out in a couple of months. 

I also saw some good reviews about Monster Hunter Freedom 2, which professed to be as much like an MMO as possible, which apealled to me.  I could seriously imagine sinking hundreds of hours into this game, which is grind-tastic.  However, it feels clunky to play and the graphics are a bit artifacty.  Combat, which comprises most of the grinding I assume, feels horrible.  I guess I shouldn’t compare it to the fluidity and responsiveness of God of War but given that I just played it I couldn’t help it.  Moving around is frustraring too - the stick is used to move but the d-pad is used to move the camera, making it impossible to manipulate both at once.  It’s like going from eating steak to eating cereal, in terms of gameplay and graphics.  I don’t think this game is going to get me hooked at all. 

The last game to mention is Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core.  After seeing ads on the London Tube for this game, I knew it had to have a huge production budget.  This game also gets reviewed as favourably as God of War.  I’ve only had an initial look so far but it looks incredible.  The cinematics are the best I’ve ever seen on a hand-held, and definitely better than anything from a PS2.  Gameplay initially feels as nice as God of War, but with alot of extra depth and possibilities.  Camera control is done via the L&R bumpers, which feels great.  The levelling system is taken care of via a “lottery” system, which seems a bit in poor taste to give young kids a taste of gambling, but apparantly there is an experience system behind it, so it’s not really random.  Visuals are the best I’ve seen, and the hairstyles, outfits, cityscape settings and trademark giant swords seal the deal.  It really makes me want to start a Japanese Visual Kei band!  I can tell I’m going to play the sh1t out of this game.