DavidGoodman.Net

I’ve just seen a preview ad for the new game Far Cry 2, coming out in October, which has me simultaneously excited and slightly apprehensive. For a while, we’ve been approaching a tipping point where the idea of games with genuine, tough-to-make moral choices becomes an accepted reality rather than a ‘games are art’ pipe dream. Bioshock is the most obvious example, and the original Fallout games gave you incredible moral freedom a decade ago. While Bioshock is slightly black and white in its kill/save the ickle girls choice, it has something in common with the Fallout games - there’s little real emotional consequence of going down either route. In both cases, being ‘evil’ gets you advantages (more guns and so on) and disadvantages (characters treat you differently). But Far Cry 2 might be something a little different - a genuine moral grey area. Check out this quote from Clint Hocking, producer of the game:

“What happens is dependent on how each player approaches it, but somewhere in the second act you become so notorious and feared that the underground [of medics and priests] says that you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and stops giving you medicine,” says Hocking. The result is a twist on, or reversal of, Far Cry Instincts’ feral abilities. “As medicine is cut off you become sickly and grotesque, but still more notorious,” Hocking continues. “You transform from being this healthy guy that might occasionally shoot someone in the knee to somebody that’s literally dependent on being cruel and vicious, twisted and deformed and vomiting all the time. You invert your relationship with your own power – from being powerful because you’re healthy to powerful because you’re crueler than the enemy.”

Powerful and compelling stuff, especially in the completely open, non-linear world promised by Ubisoft. It really comes sharply into focus though, when you see a gameplay video that showcases an actual (and brutal) tactic of war as a gameplay mechanic - namely, shooting to wound, in order to draw out your enemy’s fellow soldiers. Grim stuff:

There’s a whole run of open-world FPS/RPG hybrids coming down the pipeline, from this to Fallout 3 and STALKER: Clear Sky. It seems the one thing they have in common right now is the chance to be a complete bastard, or try and survive in brutal fictional worlds through wit and charm and last-resort self defence. How do you play open-world games?

In common with a lot of folks my age, my first experience of multiplayer gaming was the ground-breaking console game ‘GoldenEye’. From the ostracism for the new boy who unknowingly picked OddJob to the wince at hearing seeing a curtain of red drop across my vision for the eighteenth time in a single game, it was a formative, incredibly fun ritual. We’d play for hours, usually with a beer or two, and between rounds and afterwards we’d chuckle together over that ridiculous snipe or rocket launcher death.

For the first time, shortly after GoldenEye came out, I had the slightly unnerving experience of feeling a very strong instinct to hug the wall and check corners for other players. At school. I kept expecting the tinkle of a grenade landing at my feet or the paff paff paff of a pistol being unloaded into my back. This is the point at which the anti-gaming lobby would throw up their hands in horror and claim my mind was irretrievably damaged, that blocky, pixellated headshots and a game that was way better than the film it took inspiration from, had turned me from mild-mannered kid into ticking time bomb. Sure, maybe if I was already halfway nuts then all-night sessions of GoldenEye may not have helped, but as a pretty well-adjusted kid with a great group of friends, I was exhibiting something much more harmless, and actually kind of cool - I had become immersed in the game.

At heart, we’re all pack animals, reacting to stimuli in the world around us, flocking in groups, constantly assessing and shifting in our relationships and hierarchies. The human brain has survived and prospered for so long precisely because it has an ability and aptitude for picking up new skills and patterns of behaviour. My mind was adapting to a new situation, learning new skills to help me ’survive’. You see it on sports pitches and in boardrooms every day - people learning the behaviours that get them through the day or game unscathed - why should gaming be any different? Especially when it’s the basis of comedy gold.

The learning and instinctive grasping of game mechanics continued, and not just in first person shooters or multiplayer blast-fests. I found myself automatically judging the speed and vector of approaching cars, ready to jack them, after months of Grand Theft Auto III. I wanted a flashlight and something hefty in my hand to enter dark spaces after Half Life 2. I learned the finer points of multi-tasking and developed a twitchy relationship with dealing with multiple inputs on a computer from micro-managing stockades across the New World in Sid Meier’s Colonization. All of these games succeeded in different ways, but they all shared a common factor - they were so good I played them at great length, and they were so immersive that they bled out into daydreams and odd moments during the day.

It’s continued of course. These days most of the games I play don’t even require a willing suspension of disbelief. With good headphones and the lights down low, the world of Rapture in Bioshock or a dust-blown street in Call of Duty 4 become incredibly real. Sound design, sharp graphics and realistic physics combine to create stunning virtual environments. It’s the reason I can’t bear to play the Condemned series - they set off genuine fight or flight reactions in me, and I can barely play for five minutes. I started to realise the power of this when sniping on Creek, one of the new maps released on multiplayer for COD4. I served in University reserve forces a few years ago, in an infantry unit. Years ago, I had actually lain on a hilltop with a rifle, scanning for enemy movement in the middle of a training exercise. In COD4, I did the same thing, waiting for the biological miracles that are my eyes to detect movement in the valley below, before snapping the rifle scope to my eye and blowing away another player. Two worlds merged - skills from life used in a game.

With Grand Theft Auto IV breaking new ground in immersive environments that invite exploration and experimentation, I’ll again be fighting the urge to jack the nearest car to get where I need to go or toss a grenade through a doorway before I enter, and every time I do, I’ll smile. Gaming is at its best when the borders blur, when strategies and memories and new ideas bubble up during our daily round. And its even better when we can stand up, turn off the gunfire and explosions and get a nice cup of tea.

Well, when I say here, I mean at home. Amazon has come up trumps and delivered my game on release day - unfortunately it arrived after I left for work, so I’ve yet to give it a go. Just a tiiiiny bit excited about this one.

I’m a big GTA fan. The series was one of the first that non-gaming friends of mine quite enjoyed watching me play, and I spent hours enjoying the at-the-time unheard of freedom that GTA III gave you. The reviews are glowing, and the gameplay videos are looking amazing. The GameTrailers.com review seems to be the best summary I’ve seen so far.

A first impressions post will be up later today, if I can tear myself away.

It’s been a few weeks since the new ‘Variety Pack’ maps were released for Call of Duty 4 on the 360, so the time is ripe to take a quick look at these maps, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, how they play. First up is Creek, a brand-new map set in the Former Soviet Republic of the Week that the SAS campaign from the single-player campaign has as its playground.

What that means is lots of burnt out Soviet APCs, ruined farmhouses and foliage, as well as the ever-present rasp of either a grizzled SAS chappy or Boris, your friendly Spetsnatz announcer. Nothing quite like losing to be told you ‘just got your arse kicked’. Fantastic, especially when it drowns out the 12 year old Ritalin addicts who just slaughtered you.

Like Killhouse, this map is not based on any particular location from the single-player campaign (by contrast, Chinatown is a re-skinned Carentan multiplayer map from COD2, and Broadcast is lifted pretty much straight out of the main game). While this makes for a tougher learning curve, it also makes it a uniquely balanced and fun map to play.

With a large, dominating ridge in the centre, a gentle slope up to a small village at one end and a cluster of farm buildings at the other, you would think that this game would turn into a sniper camp-fest, with the spawn-die-spawn-die gameplay that makes so many user-created maps unplayable. In reality, the map only becomes sniper-driven with very small teams, four or less on each side, when the sheer size of this enormous map gives snipers time to get a good position and rain lead death on anyone stupid enough to poke their head above the ridge line. Even then, it’s tough to find a really good sniping position - experienced players will nip quickly through the connecting cave system or lob a smoke grenade to cover movement, and you’ll quickly find a knife in your ribs or a Desert Eagle round between the eyes.

With larger teams, the map quickly becomes brutal, but definitely not sniper driven. A really good sniper who changes positions frequently might be able to rack up quite a few kills, especially if there’s a high number of newbies who don’t know all the nooks and crannies, but heavy machine guns win out for sheer weight of fire in the open places, and shotguns, grenades and assault rifles will carry the day in the claustrophobic caves, roof spaces and ravines. The claymore is your friend, and ‘Noob Tubers’ will find that the old M203 will work nicely when someone skylines themself on the ridge.

All in all, a very fun map that lends itself to strategic games, especially Sabotage and Search/Destroy. Do a few objective games to learn it, then throw yourself into some big Team Deathmatch games.

I’ll start right out by saying that I’m a big military shooter fan. I’ve played a heck of a lot of them over the years, starting right back at Operation Wolf on the Atari ST. I love the settings, the story, the action, all of it. In fact, I’ll be doing a series shortly - Shooters I have known.

The Call of Duty series has nearly always been a safe bet from the first installment, although it has flipped between developers Infinity Ward and a number of others including Treyarch and Grey Matter. Call of Duty 1 and 2 were Infinity Ward Games, and received markedly better reviews and player plaudits, so it was a smart move on the publisher Activision’s part to give the tricky fourth game to a safe pair of hands. Infinity Ward have, in short, utterly excelled themselves.

CoD 4 has been out for quite a while now, and has become game du jour on xBox Live, overtaking even Halo 3 in the passions of teabagging multiplayers everywhere. It’s the multiplayer game that I’ve played the most of, and I’ll be doing some map reviews of the new downloadable content over the next couple of weeks, but today I’m going to take a look at the single-player campaign.

At first glance, the decision to abandon the WWII setting that made the CoD series what it was in the first place appears to be pretty much a gamble, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. What would have been a gamble is to assume that fans of the series would happily shell out a couple more twenties for anything that wasn’t some kind of departure from the mileau of bombed-out Europe, the thunk of bolt-action rifles and screams of ‘Achtung, Amerikaner!’. In truth, the land campaigns of WWII have been heavily played out in FPS-land, and the genre was crying out for something new.

It’s tough to set a good ol’ dust-up in a modern setting without being crass (like recent whoop-fest Army of Two), unlikely (looking at you Splinter Cell series) or just dull (*cough*Full Spectrum Warrior*cough*). But these guys have done it, and big-time. From the ‘pre-credits’ attack on a cargo ship to the incredibly atmospheric interactive cutscene that opens the game, this feels like the start of a bloody good military film, and not any old Steven Seagal nonsense either. Think Bravo Two Zero crossed with Jarhead, but more the action bits rather than the sitting around.

From the start you’re thrown into a series of missions with a fairly forgiving learning curve, teaching you the basics as you knife, grenade and snipe your way to more and more complex tasks. There’s no hand-holding or stop-the-action puzzle-solving like you might find in the Half Life series - generally someone barks an order at you and you’ve got a few seconds to shift your arse and get it done. Huge visual setpieces abound, like the sprint across a bridge past burned-out tanks, rescuing downed helicopter pilots, or the vaguely unsettling experience of flying in an AC-130 gunship, firing a weapon through a TV monitor - playing a game about a war where the war itself is like a game. Head spinning stuff. And all accompanied by splendidly mustachioed SAS chaps with dry-as-a-bone humour and shouty US Marines with a whole lot of hoo-rah.

Gameplay is fast, fluid and fun, although many people have come across the infamous TARDIS houses that will spit out as many screaming fanatics or Russki baddies as you can shoot until you twig that they won’t stop until you take them. In some cases this makes the game an exciting series of dashes and frenetic grenade and knife room clearances, but in others it can result in a string of frustrating deaths, especially at the higher difficulty levels.

All in all, it’s the most polished FPS I’ve ever seen, and has been my game of choice since I bought it. It gets whacked in the disc tray any time I get bored in Mass Effect or come across another physics puzzle in Half Life 2, and it never fails to disappoint. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at some of the new multiplayer maps in detail, but til then, keep blasting, and add me on Live if you fancy a match.