What makes EDF:2017 so utterly wonderful is that it’s not really about the robots or the ants. It’s a game of scale. It’s the Spinal Tap of gaming. It’s dumb, it’s loud and it goes up to eleven.

Everything in EDF:2017 goes up to eleven. The guns go up to eleven. The ants go up to eleven. The spiders go up to eleven. The spaceships go up to eleven. The giant stomping robots go up to eleven. The explosions go up to eleven. The particles go up to eleven. The dialogue goes up to eleven. The pick ups go up to eleven. Everything sits on Eleven. It is all ONE LOUDER. That’s its beauty. SMELL THE GLOVE.

EDF 2017 is SPINAL TAP:THE VIDEOGAME. The core of EDF:2017 is that it doesn’t ever know when to stop or when too much is too much. It is ELEVEN.

EDF:Insect Armageddon is not these things.

It is a SIX. It goes up to SIX. That’s nowhere near ELEVEN. It’s not one louder, it’s four quieter. Insect Armageddon is FOUR QUIETER THAN EVERYONE ELSE, FIVE QUIETER THAN SPINAL TAP.

Insect Armageddon is TURN YOUR AMP DOWN, JOHNNY. YOU’LL WAKE THE NEIGHBOUR’S KID. IS THAT COLDPLAY YOU’RE PLAYING ANYWAY? YOU’RE NO CHILD OF MINE.

It is that pub you walk past that always has karaoke on and someone, somewhere is strangling something you dearly love. It is the sound of NEW YORK NEW YORK through a drunken bastard haze.

It is everything but ONE LOUDER. It is everything but SMELL THE GLOVE. It is LISTEN TO THE FLOWER PEOPLE when it should be THE MAJESTY OF ROCK.

Gimme the money.

I buy from Steam

I buy games from Steam. I’m aware it’s a DRM scheme la de da de blah, it’s also a fucking great storefront which whilst not perfect, certainly makes browsing comfortable, content discovery not that difficult and as an added bonus, has regular sales where I can get games for the cheaps.

Throw in my friends list, Steam Overlay which for someone who likes taking screenshots cuts out the need for a capture app running in the background, groups which make organising online stuff easy, the ability to download games only when I want to play them to save on HDD space and well, you get the idea. It may be a DRM subscription app where my entire account can have the rug pulled on it any second for a completely random reason but it’s got things I really like to use and use often also.

I open Steam when I start my computer, I only close it on reboots. It sits there and gets regular use.

I buy from Indie Royale and I buy from Hundle

I buy games in bundles. Invariably, I’ll have most of the games and end up buying the bundles for just one game and give the codes away for the rest or something but still, both Indie Royale and Hundle are places I pick up games from. If not for me, for someone else.

I buy direct from the developers

And I buy direct. I’m that weird kind of person who will buy direct from the developer to support them but also buy a back up copy from Steam that I can have tucked away for spares. I don’t mind paying more to buy direct either although even I have obvious mental limits on what I’m willing to spend (and to be frank, what I can afford to spend)

I like buying direct from devs. I dislike the fact that payment providers often sit there and ask for masses of information before I can even get to the “yeah, come on, just give me the fucking download”, I’m never keen that some developers take this as approval that I’m somehow signed up for their mailing list because I bought from them either but still. Given the choice, I will always buy direct first and Steam later if I really want your game.

If your game isn’t available at any of the above, I will not buy it.

And that’s pretty much it now because everywhere else falls into one of three categories.

1. The site is hideous and difficult to browse.

2. The site requires that I install a site specific client in order to download the games.

3. The site is hideous and difficult to browse and requires a site specific client.

GoG is the honourable exception here but I can’t buy new games on there, right?

I don’t want to go somewhere where it takes me an age to meander around the store, where my eyes can’t focus properly because the layout is like someone shitting in my eyehole or where the Special Offers link leads to 2 bundles and not to the actual special offers or where links in general don’t lead where they should or where I have to do 5 clicks to find what I’m looking for or any of that.

I don’t want another client. I’m happy with Steam. It does what I want and more. There is literally no benefit for me having another client, no matter how much you try and sell it so. I don’t want demos or recommendations or trade ins or another friends list to manage or any of that. I have Steam for all that. Anything else is clogging me up with shit. I don’t want clogging up with shit. Stop trying to clog me up with shit. I won’t thank you for it.

I don’t want to download download managers for my games. It’s not 1999 anymore, I’ve got WHOPPINGMEG broadband internet and a browser that manages these things for me. Offering me a download manager instead of a direct link is insulting. Offering me a download manager as well as a direct link is at least forgivable and quite possibly considerate.

And I definitely don’t want Games For Windows Live (a total aside, admittedly, but it never hurts to mention it as often as possible just in case)

I don’t want any of that. So I ignore it. All of it. And probably your game with it, right?

Right.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve bought stuff from other stores in the past but now, now I can’t be arsed. Not even if the game is less than a quid. If it requires me to download a client, it doesn’t exist for me anymore. If a site requires me to download a download manager, I won’t shop there again.

And as sites disappear into other sites or get taken over by others who can’t guarantee the same level of service, I’m especially wary of purchasing from “other” stores in bulk. I imagine post Stardock-is-Impulse and post Direct2Drive, there are a number of people also wary of the same.

Yup, there is a reason Steam has the stranglehold on the PC games sales market. Aside from being great and cheap, obviously. The reason is, everywhere else is shit.

The shit service that most other sites offer means that now I will only buy Steam codes from them if I do shop there thanks to unmissablycheapbargain7 or something.

Yet not everyone can get on Steam, I know this, it’s a curated store. There’s no guarantees that just because you’ve made a game you can or will get on Steam. And I understand the massive drop off between SALES ON STEAM and SALES NOT ON STEAM. See also bundles.

But if you can’t get on Steam (and hey, even if you *can* get on Steam), the best level of service you can provide for me will come from selling direct. The absolutely-tied-in-first-place best thing you can do is just let me get the game I want to download.

That way I don’t have to jump through store hoops, I don’t have to run 300 clients and try and remember what games I bought on what service and from where. I can get a clean and straightforward purchase and always know where I got it from.

Because I got it from you.

And as a bonus, you get to keep most of the money I throw your way too. So we both win, right?

Sell direct. Please. Even if it’s just a 99p-paypal-me-do link, I don’t care. Just let me buy your game from you so I don’t have to put up with any of the bullshit that other stores throw in my face.

Not just me, obviously, but clearly I’m the best at words.

“In summary: video games. That’s where we’re heading with indie in 2012. Into video games, lots of them. I’m sure there’ll be some other stuff but compared to the video games bit? No-one cares, right?”

I’m like the blind seer of the north or something. Covered in owl guts and intestines but just stating the bloody obvious and hoping no-one notices.

Trends Of 2012: Indie Games

I’ll freely admit, I’m surprised at some of the other answers and tilted my head in that sort of funny look kind of way you give things that seem to have little to no connection to any sort of reality. Mainly the stuff about segments of people hating people who make money or that this “sellout” thing has to stop. That’s a bit odd, y’know? Reads a bit weirdy persecution complex and stuff.

Still. Words. Go read them.

(also, my prediction for trend of 2012 that got cut was more physical games a la Johann Sebastian Joust, BUTTON and their ilk as well as multiplayer iPad/console/computer games that require folks to be sitting round the device in the same room and stuff. “Beating your friend beats beating the average” )

You start off in prison for shooting your dead psychic brother and you’re about to get beaten by some nasty guards but you’re then rescued by your dead psychic brother who you’re in prison for killing who assumes the body of one of the guards and kills the guard through the face and you run away and there’s some soldiers in offices and some monsters too and stuff and the prison is going to explode and the prison explodes I don’t know why I think they do that when you’re not looking because that’s a prison thing and I don’t know I’ve never been in a prison so it might happen and you escape through the sewers but the sewers fill up with water from the exploding prison and your dead psychic brother rescues you from there too and you end up in a village which looks a bit middle eastern and I don’t think your dead psychic brother is there but someone is speaking to me and I think it must be him unless there’s other dead psychic people talking to me and I keep absorbing corpses that glow too because points make prizes and there’s lots of army people who know you’ve escaped from the prison that exploded after your dead psychic brother rescued you and they’ve got giant mechs with machine guns that shoot you in the face and there’s a helicopter which drops teleporting people and one of them is all big and blue and fire lasers at you and everyone keeps shouting all the time non stop always shouting they keep shouting make them stop shouting and and and

…I need a lie down. I’m only an hour in and I feel like my brain has eaten all the smarties.

Most in game swears are boring. The moment early on LA Noire decided it was Full Metal Jacket was boring. The bit in that game with the thingy and the bloke that swore, that was boring too. Shit, fuck and bastard and the uses thereof in most videogame scripts are boring. They’re just there because no-one has anything creative to say. They’re just there because hey, we’re grown ups and we swear. We’re videogames, hear us roar swear.

Only Bulletstorm in recent times has come out of the swear test well, probably helped by the Cyril Sneer meets Gunnery Sergeant Hartman of the General. That’s funny enough all by itself. The fun with dicks is just the icing on the cake. The rest? Fucking boring.

Hey, videogame script writer – you are not John Cooper Clarke:

You are not Malcolm Tucker:

You’re not Bill Hicks:

You don’t have that class. You’re more like a 7 year old who’s just discovered a rude word and is going to use it anyway just for effect only using “poo” would have been far funnier and far more hard hitting than mindlessly blurting out “bastard” every 5 seconds.

The difference is, you’re old enough to know the difference.

So either learn to swear properly or fuck off. Thanks.

I didn’t have much in the way of hopes for Dead Island. Its drunk driving advert now game trailer with sad piano music was nothing but a little bit seat squirmingly embarrassing and well, tatty.

I realise it’s a little defeating the point to say “play it with the scenes in the right order, the theme from Hawaii-Five-O and at the right speed and then we’ll talk” but yeah, play it with the scenes in the right order, the theme from Hawaii-Five-O and at the right speed and then we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll just treat it as the full marketing that it is and spit on it from a distance.

Still, clearly it worked. Enthusiasm for the how-the-fuck-many-years in development Dead Island went from roughly none whatsoever to it somehow being heralded as the saviour of all things zombie game and the best thing since the last best thing (our survey says that this is probably X-Com because nothing was made that was any good since according to internet sources yesterday) all in the space of an afternoon. I still believe this probably says more about some sort of desire for games to be serious and taken seriously* that gets misplaced than just manipulative marketing (there has to be a desire for the marketing to feed on, after all) but for some reason, I never became convinced Dead Island would be the one.

Maybe it was the fact that aside from the trailer there were absolutely no signs whatsoever that Dead Island would be that game and had, repeatedly, just been pitched as a thing where you hit zombies with other things and they go crack. The earliest shots showed a fair bit of promise by looking like a low rent game version of a Fulci film. Yes, more low rent than Fulci. Perfect.

That’s a picture of a zombie being poked in the eye with a crowbar. I think we can all get behind that, right? It’s only a “STARRING IAN McCULLOCH” short of the full zombie.

So, if it’s not sad piano music OH MY POOR CHILD BACKWARDS, what is Dead Island?

Dead Island is a game where you fall backwards a lot. That’s what Dead Island is. It’s a falling backwards slowly simulator. Interspersed with moments of picking yourself up slowly after falling backwards just to break up the monotony.

It’s one of the biggest examples of videogame bullshit made game outside of LA Noire. (I was going to talk about LA Noire at some point but I realised that would mean having to play more of LA Noire and I don’t think my tiny mind can handle it. Just imagine if someone took one of the fairly ok Sherlock Holmes games and ran with their sketchy ideas to some sort of psychotic extreme where you have to have an action for everything and “spinning an object in your hand” is seen as some sort of reasonable thing to ask a player to do and you’re still not even close to how bizarre LA Noire is. How it’s avoided the same fate as Rise Of The Robots, I do not know.)

We’re all used to videogame bullshit by now and it’s not unusual to see everything from PRESS X TO BATMAN to PRESS LB AND RB TO CRAWL SLOWLY TO INTERACT WITH THIS CINEMATIC and to want to crawl up into a ball and have a little bit of a cry. What’s interesting about Dead Island is it’s videogame bullshit that’s been stolen from elsewhere and/or inserted with so little care as to make you wonder if anyone stopped and thought “y’know, should we do this?”.

And it being a falling backwards slowly simulator, obv.

What you’ll eventually come to realise is that it’s a game with so little self awareness it won’t actually realise when it’s passed the point of taking the piss and will happily chunter onwards for fucking hours if it feels the need to. DESIGN!

It’s a grand zombie epic where you spend hours in a resort doing fetch quests for lots of people in order to get to the next segment where you leave the resort to do fetch quests for people both in the resort and outside the resort. And then when you’ve done that, you’ll have some more fetch quests to run. When the designers run out of simple fetch quests for you to do for a character, they increase the difficulty of the fetch quests by having you need to do the same thing more times. Usually after you think you’ve just completed the fetch quest by fetching what you were asked to grab.

“Hey, thanks for this item. I need another one now. SORRY! OFF YOU GO”
“FUCK YOU, VIDEOGAME”

As Rocketcatgames pointed out last night on the Twitters, Dead Island is a game about scarcity in a zombie apocalypse, where you have to root for parts and craft weapons in order to survive that comes with Diablo-esque looting systems and more suitcases per square inch than the lost property section at your local railway station after a day when everyone left their suitcases in the station after a bout of amnesia caused by aliens, all of which contain goodies.

Fuck, it’s a game about surviving a zombie apocalypse that may as well have no death state in it at all. More on that in a tic…

The Zombies are your bogstandard Bethesda enemies (as in they use the should-be-patented technique of running at you a lot for a long time). Only they make far more sense when they actually really are zombies not just so utterly unconvincing as enemies or characters or even remotely plausibly animated. I think that’s a win for Dead Island but I’m not so sure. Ask me later.

They stagger along just following you after you’ve been within range of them, there’s some humans a bit later on who shoot you but yeah, you’ve seen all this in Oblivion, in Fallout 3 and probably, I’m sure, in Skyrim too. And that’s sorta fine, I suppose.

Kicking shit out of the zombies or cleaving off their faces is, undoubtedly, where most of the love in the game has been poured. It feels good. Landing a few hits to the face, lopping arms and legs off with an electrified meat cleaver and kicking zombies in the tits never gets old. When it all comes together in a ruckus with a few zombies, it’s intense, you feel both fragile and fearsomely powerful, it works. It almost works well enough to carry the entire game. It certainly worked well enough for me to rack up over 14 hours in the game mainly just hacking up zombie limbs and decapitating passers by.

But this is also the point where the videogame bullshit completely gets the better of the game.

Because videogame says you need a death state and because this is supposed to be a zombie apocalypse you need a death state but because the game is a sprawling series of fetch quests with zombie kicking inbetween (or some zombie kicking with some fetch quests inbetween, your call) that’s ill suited to you dying – the game throws videogame bullshit in your face.

You’re constantly gaining XP and levelling up (you can tell because it flashes up the XP count for every smack in the face you give) and so are the monsters. There’s a choice that they either level up with you or just the deeper you go the higher a level you encounter but both end up in the same result. Every two minutes the game will throw a couple of enemies at you that are of lower levels and you’ll smash them apart and it’ll feel great and you’ll like it and it will be good and yay games. Then, just as you’re starting to enjoy yourself it will throw in one or more enemies of higher level that will take you down. Mainly by spawning one just behind you. Or more just in front and to the side. Or something. And you will fall over. Slowly. In a little cinematic “ow”.

This will happen every 5 minutes. Every 5 minutes you will watch an animation of yourself falling over slowly.

You will look at your healthbar and see how many blocks it has and then you will ask yourself, why is it that no matter what I do, what level I am at, the result is the same? A few hits=that fucking animation. And it very rarely doesn’t feel rigged against you. Not in an overwhelming odds way, that can be fun (see Left4Dead as a good example) but in a “THAT FUCKING VIDEOGAME” way.

Now I understand what someone meant when they stated a few months back that the arcade legacy of videogames felt crippling to them when it comes to design, a legacy of making death pretty much a requirement in game. I understand that now. I don’t think it’s the reason Dead Island is in the mess its in but yeah, it can’t have helped.

And when you do go through this faux-death, you reappear about 5 paces from where you died ready to carry on as if nothing happened. Did no-one stop and think “haaaaang on…”

But then no-one stopped and said hang on to building an entire game around fetch quests that take an increasing amount of time to complete and with very little variation between them. No-one said hang on when they lifted systems from other games, no-one said hang on when they lifted the special infected from Left4Dead and gave them a new coat of paint (seriously, there’s a big zombie that charges at you, a fat zombie that vomits on you, it’s quite shameless), no-one said hang on having the car chassis fill 70% of the screen when you clamber into a vehicle and have to drive anywhere, no-one said hang on to any of the incongruities in the design whatsoever.

And that’s Dead Island’s biggest problem. No-one ever seems to have said “hang on”, it’s stuff for stuffs sake, systems for systems sake and stuff wot we seen in other games that’s going in ours right about now even if it doesn’t fit well. Which is a shame because if they’d built something less bullshit around the fabulous slashing up mechanics, it might just have been something a bit special. Instead, it’s just a fairly overlong romp through other games in one game with a zombie skin and the only truly memorable thing you’ll encounter is that falling over animation. Over and over and over again.

It does have plenty of sad piano music though, I’ll give it that.

*where serious is defined with very strict parameters that does not and cannot include wasteful stuff like, I dunno, writing art games and things. Know your serious place, serious games people.

The recent openly antagonistic piece on Edge Online detailing why corporations are perfectly ok to follow the ACS Law route of hit and run letters and all your concerns are worthless (Where is the empirical evidence that your opinion is worth anything, eh?) reminded me that I’ve never really mentioned why I don’t use any DRM on my games. Sort of. It actually made me cuss for a good few hours first because I’m never, ever good with anyone minimising people’s concerns in favour of what is best for a corporation. Never.

To be honest, the main reason is that it shouldn’t even be a discussion point as far as I’m concerned. DRM is, in pretty much 99% of cases, absolutely shit and shit useless at defending against piracy. But for me to follow that line, well, I’d need to actually be worried about piracy. I’m not. I don’t care if you pirate my stuff. Go right ahead. You don’t need to though, and I’ll tell you why in a bit.

I’m one person who makes games in his spare-ish time. I make the games I want to make and this is something that makes me happy and I want you to be happy too. INSTANT BOWIE! Sorry, lost myself there…

I grew up owning a ZX Spectrum, I still remember losing the Lode Runner code sheet and not being able to run the game. I remember squinting through a piece of warped plastic trying to work out exactly what the shit was on the screen and cursing the name of whoever invented such a shit system.

And I remember reading about a dongle system that would keep Amiga games secure, and I remember visiting the computer club I used to visit and seeing the game passed round with the protection stripped away way before it hit the shops. Dongle-no-more.

I grew up thinking “oh for fucks sake, I just want to load the game and play it. Will you please just let me do that?” because that’s why I buy games. I buy them to play them. And every step between me and the game, be it DRM, making me watch an advert on load, making me sign up for a bunch of services, update those services and I don’t know, asking me to shit an onion or whatever it is Ubisoft are up to these days can just go and fuck off because it annoys me.

I would sooner people pirate my game than that. Really. So there’s none of that. It’s rubbish. I don’t like it so I’m not going to inflict it on you.

I also understand that even with no DRM, putting something behind a paywall invites piracy also. So I understand that no matter what I do, someone will pirate it. And that’s fine too providing no-one is slipping any shit into it (which lets face it, despite hysterical claims isn’t something that happens in a good 99% of cases). If you want my games and you can’t afford it, you don’t want to pay what is a nominal amount (I’d prefer it if you didn’t pay $0.01 btw, just because it’s a bit of a pointless exchange on all sides – I don’t get offended or upset, I just kinda don’t see the point) or whatever reason is in your head, that’s ok. You can go right ahead.

Fill your boots and pirate away.

But you don’t have to. I don’t want you to pirate my games. I don’t mind if you pirate them, but I don’t want you to have to. Or feel the need to. WAIT WHAT etc…

Every few weeks, I get a mail along the lines of this:

“hey, I’ve lost the download link you sent me and stuff but I thought you ought to know that I managed to find it anyway without having to check any emails or contact you and just with a bit of internet cursory searching, you might want to fix that”

And I appreciate that people care enough to do that. I appreciate it that they’d take the time to try and find the games again because they want to play them. That makes me happy. And I appreciate that they’re concerned that I might lose out because whilst they’re honest enough, maybe other people aren’t – especially if it’s that easy. And I do, truly, appreciate these mails and I’m honestly thankful that people take the time to send them.

I try and reply wherever possible and tell them that it’s ok. That’s fine. Because I’d sooner people got them from me than from elsewhere because at least then, I know what they’re getting and I know it’s fine. I know that what they did is possible and I’m cool with that. I’m cool if they do it again. I’m cool if they want to tell their friends how to do it. I’m cool if they just pass a few zips around on a disk. I’m cool. That’s fine.

So you don’t have to pirate my games. There’s other ways. Obviously I’d be a lot happier if you chose the “recommended route”, I try and place as few barriers between you and my games as possible because I want to make this easy on everyone and for everyone but hey, whatever. I’m cool. We’re cool, right?

There are other ways also. I grant permission to OneSwitch and Special Effect to distribute any of my stuff with accessibility options in their library for free because that stuff is important. When accessible games are thin on the ground, when there’s already barriers of play in place I’m not putting a financial one there either.

There’s stuff lurking on MODDB if you know where to look also which I’ve never removed nor do I have any intention of doing so. Because you never know, someone might stumble upon it and enjoy it and that’s good, yeah? Besides, I like MODDB.

I also run giveaway periods where I throw everything out there for nothing anyway, no paywalls, no barriers, no DRM, no call home, nothing at all. So there’s never any real need to pirate my stuff anyway.

And why all of this?

Not once has someone pirating my games harmed me in any way whatsoever nor will it ever. There’s always that. But also…

I make games to be played and I want you to play my games and I hope you enjoy them. If you don’t, fair enough, we’re still good. I still like you. And if you throw some money my way, that’s great too because it means I can carry on making them with less worry in my life. I’m going to make them anyway because that’s the kinda guy I am but I can always make them bigger and better if I’m not doing it on 50p and a whippet and if something falls off my computer, I can do something about it.

And one thing life has taught me so far is that you know what, that’s a system that works for me because people do do that. And I love that, I love them for it because even if you send me 10p, I’m thankful for that because you didn’t have to do that. And that’s some way towards buying a cake*. Cake is nice. Being nice is nice. I’m not always nice but I like nice things and I like nice people and I like being nice when I’m not being a grumpy old git.

Yeah, so it won’t work for most people who aren’t me – 99.9% of people who make games couldn’t survive doing things the way I do them but they’re not me so that’s fine, they can sort themselves out and find their own things that they’re comfortable with and is bestiest of the best for them.

It’s not applicable across the board and there’ll be devs reading this pulling the most hilarious faces (oh, if they could see themselves in the mirror – the larks!), but I suspect one truth I’ve learnt is: trust is important. You have to trust me not to shit up your computer and I have to trust you to recompense me and hey, we might not always get it right, either of us but it’s a fucking better start than DRM or chasing people with threatening letters and scant actual proof and everyone going at each others throats or making fucking car analogies. Seriously, I fucking hate car analogies, let’s never go there again.

So yeah, if you want to pirate my games, go on. Do so now if you want. You don’t have to but you can with my blessing.

If you want to find another way to play them that isn’t pirating, well, I’m sure there’s some information out there somewhere that’ll help you do that.

And if you want to help support me in making more games, go right ahead too. You know where my site is.

Whichever you choose (none of the above is totally an option too!), I’m cool with. Let’s all be cool. Cool is cool.

*I’ve also been so skint that I know how “it’s only a couple of beverages/cigs/chocolate bars/party hats or whatever else people use to compare costs with” can be the most depressing thing ever when you can only dream of buying a couple of beverages/cigs/chocolate bars/party hats or whatever else people use to compare costs with.

That creeping realisation that when someone describes you as that person that plays all the games, they’re probably not that far off…

I also seem to acquire a fair few screenshots so let’s have a screeny dump. Click to embiggen the pretty pictures.

The Witcher 2

I’m not too far into The Witcher 2, really. I picked it up on a promise after Steve of NotSoftGames recommended I give it a try. I have this thing that I generally don’t appreciate or enjoy RPG games unless they’re incredibly light, fluffy and casual. Or at least, that’s what I thought I had.

It turns out I just think Bethesda games and Gearbox games are a bit shit and the rest of my RPG playing experience could be described as highly limited if we were being polite. Mainly because there’s a shortage of lasers, particles, particle lasers and more lasers.

The Witcher 2 is the first to win me round. Mainly because it’s fucking pretty and I’m a real sucker for pretty. This may be the first thing of its type I actually play through to completion, providing it doesn’t do anything really dickish.

Crysis 2

There’s a few things you need to know about Crysis 2.

One is that it’s the fucking hardest game to get a screenshot of because it’s slap-fucking-happy on the motion blur and smeary as bollocks. The other is that it’s essentially taking most of its cues from Roland Emmerich films.

As in, it doesn’t know when to fucking pack up and fuck off and will happily bore the shit out of you in the name of SPECTACLE but there’s only so much SPECTACLE one person can handle before it becomes OH FUCK OFF AND DIETICLE. Only unlike that time when I went to see Independence Day and the bloke sitting two chairs down shouted out “OH FOR FUCKS SAKE” at one point, I just had to hang my head in my hands at LOOK! CINEMA! moments on my lonesome.

The game bits are actually really fun. They’re just bookended constantly by walking slowly bits, pressing shoulder button or X to videogame bits that take up more time than the videogame bits.

Most of the problems it has come not from trying to put a Roland Emmerich film into a game but by attempting to put a game in a Roland Emmerich film.

Answers on a postcard as to why. Mark your postcards “modern videogames in the AAA space”, ta.

Aliens Vs Predator

See here.

Blur

It’s no Split/Second but also like Split/Second it didn’t deserve its fate or to be partly instrumental in its studio shuttering.

Desperately needs more fucking colours, though.

Portal 2

None of what happens in Portal 2 matters to anyone but you, GladOS and Wheatley yet it feels bigger and more important than every last one of the WE WILL INVADE EARTH AND KILL ALL THE PEOPLES plots all piled on top of each other and crushed into cubes of great importance.

That sort of personal and intimate drama is something normally associated with the indie space, seeing a mainstream dev pull it off successfully (and in what amounts to Videogame:The Sitcom) is a.good.sign™

Half Life 2 + Episodes

Replaying HL2 & Episodes for the first time since they were released it’s hard not to notice how little we’ve pushed forward since their release and how many games still owe a massive debt to the structures HL2 set down. Except so many games forget to learn why the bits in HL2 that work work and the bits that don’t work don’t.

Much like the rush to make the next Modern Warfare, I suppose. What you’re supposed to make is SUPER SOLDIER DUCK HUNT EXPLOSIONFEST 7 (with HYPERACTIVE MULTIPLAYER) and instead you get “Hey, wait there whilst I open this door. Jump now, follow me”. Woods. Trees.

As an aside, whilst I love the quick setup and run through to Ravenholme, the village itself is pretty hateful “guess the designers whim” stuff. Just needed to get that off my chest, there. Sometimes I wonder if Valve feel compelled to put these bits in just to make the rest really shine.

Minerva

Because you can’t replay HL2 without playing Minerva. A few slight missteps but still a sight to behold.

Mini Ninjas

Picked up on a whim with absolutely no idea what it was other than it looked faintly pretty. It is pretty. You can also control the little bunnies and foxes and stuff and awwwww.

I like it, shut up. No, really.

Cities XL 2011

I call this piece “Britain, 2011″.

If this is 2011, can you imagine what the rest look like? Probably the grimmest screenshot in my entire collection.

Call Of Pripyat

You can never have too many Call Of Pripyat screenshots. I’ve lost hours and days to the zone, prodding in its every corner, finding its anomalies, cowering in cellars as the sky bursts apart.

I’ve finished my business here, I just need to walk to the helicopter and leave. I’m not sure if I can do that. The zone has its hooks in me.

Fable III

I’ve never encountered a game that trusts the player less or treats the player with such a lack of respect as Fable III. If you even so much as pause to admire the scenery it starts prodding you to press buttons. It’s pretty shameful stuff, really, confusing accessibility with constantly patting you on the head and telling you what to do.

The PC version alleviates some of the worst but still, the message Fable III sends is “I DO NOT TRUST YOU TO PLAY ME” and that’s a shame because it’s quite cute when it lets up.

GTA IV

I didn’t get too far into GTA IV. I was really tired, I didn’t realise how tired.

I stole a car, fell asleep at the wheel and woke up 2 hours later down an alley crashed into some bins.

Insert your own punchlines.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a game where I can go for a quiet boat ride for an hour or so if I want to or I can go and blow up a power station for laughs.

Which all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Also, the signature guns are fucking cool.

EYE: Divine Cybermancy

One of these monsters is a drug. WHICH ONE?

I really like EYE. It’s got ambition, a madness and it over reaches in the most incredible way possible. It’s clearly a labour of love and like love, it certainly doesn’t come without hiccups en route.

And occasional bouts of incoherence. And falling over a bit. Yup. Just like love.

Bulletstorm

Reading comments sections in the run up to Bulletstorm’s release was an unintentional highlight of Bulletstorm’s existence. It was only an X-Com away from receiving all the scorn of the PC master race. The swears, the menly men, the CONSOLE FUCKING GAME of it all. When the Lords Of Superiority look down upon a game, they look down upon it hard. And lo, there is much hilarity.

In the safe hands of People Can Fly, I anticipated a faintly smart and fun shooter. What I got was an incredibly fucking smart shooter set in the best sci-fi world I’ve seen in a videogame for rather a long time. And the word “dick” repeated a fair bit.

I rarely replay games. I’ve played through Bulletstorm twice already and just mentioning it makes me want to go for Round 3. It’s wonderful and oh so fucking subversive.

Deus Ex:HR

Fucking inept, piss coloured relic from a time long past birthed unto the world in 2011. Great.

So depressing I just spent the entire time seeing how many bodies I could pile up and photograph to stave off the blues.

I piled up a lot of bodies.

Left4Dead 2

This is NotSoft Steve killing everything that moves and probably some things that don’t move as I sit cowering in the corner with little health.

You had to be there. He was amazing

Red Faction:Armageddon

Amazing toys, clearly not the game it was supposed to be. Quite the disappointment but the signs were on the wall the moment talk of transmedia, related TV features and aliens were brought up. Fuck that, I just want to hit things with a hammer.

And then not have to put them back together again so I can use the fucking stairs. Fucks sake.

Hard Reset

“Old school” is not an excuse for doing shit things. Especially when the only old school thing about the game is that it whiffs a bit like something you left at the back of the cupboard six years ago and you’ve only just found it, pulled it out and noticed a dead dormouse stuck to it.

Yet the old school/real gamer bollocks was rolled out to justify a lot of terrible things in Hard Reset. From not allowing quick saves to smearing shit over the screen every 5 seconds that makes the AAA obsession with mistaking your face for a speedway tyre every time you take damage seem understated, it was all justified with old school/real gamer bollocks.

Newsflash: no, it’s just shit. Stop it.

Rock Of Ages

It’s Terry Gilliam’s Stunt Car Racer. LOOK! A BABY EATER!

Costume Quest

If you want me to play a game with turn based battles in it, this is how you do it. Give me a giant robot that fires Bangai-O style missiles and I’m yours, baby.

And a ninja, obv.

Trine 2

Sad that they didn’t make more of the chance to go THE FULL FAIRYTALE but still, look at it. Just look at it. That’s just the title screen!

Trine 2 is amazingly beautiful and a constant joy. Yeah, it’s very Sunday Afternoon but so what? It can’t all be lasers to the cock.

Saints Row 3

I played most of the game as a zombified Papa Lazarou. Mainly because Saints Row 3 really doesn’t mind if I do that. However, the freedom to change your character around on the fly for a tiny fee meant I also played as a cowboy, a gimp, an ex games industry marketing man and anything else that sprang to mind.

I also drove pink cars. ‘Cos.

Cargo

Because you save the best picture to last, natch.

Proteus

Proteus is a sacred space, it is the English countryside, it is not the English countryside, it is nowhere, it is somewhere you’ve been before. It invites you to explore, eyes wide open as a stranger. It feels almost generous in allowing you to tread upon its lands, albeit within a dream. There is no jumble of videogame assets here, no back story, no audio diary, nothing, just an island, somewhere, with beautiful noise and curious life.

I miss Proteus when I’m not there. I’ve visited when cities blighted the landscape, I’ve walked upon its roads now gone, I’ve visited its castles and I’ve walked its well worn pathways but always, always, it comes back to the island and me. The hills, the trees, the wind, the rain and the sound of something otherworldly hanging in the air. The seasons may change but the island remains a most wonderful dream.

I trust wherever Proteus is to be a safe place. I can close my eyes and come back tomorrow and it will still be somewhere magical.

With an owl.

Vertex Dispenser

Up against GoatUp, Land A Panda and Greedy Bankers for the prize, Vertex Dispenser is rather obviously the only one of these that couldn’t possibly, not even in a million years, be construed as anything even remotely rude.

The lengths I’ll go to for a tremendously shit and unfunny joke should never be underestimated. Nor should the lengths I’ll go to to raise a shout out for a game I fear underappreciated either.

It seemed fitting that the award it would receive would be one for which Vertex Dispenser is ill fitting precisely because aside from “fucking great”, it’s a bastard hard game to pin down exactly where it belongs in this gaming universe. Vertex Dispenser is ill fitting for most categories so it was either this or “best game that is Vertex Dispenser” and where’s the fun in that?

It’s abstract, it’s abrasive, it’s uneasy, it’s an RTS, it’s a puzzle game, it’s an RTS puzzle game at exactly the same time. It’s an RTS puzzle game with fucking graph theory puzzles to solve on the fly. It’s the sort of game that looks like something you might have played before, kinda behaves mostly like something you’ve played before but isn’t afraid to spit in your eye and say FUCK YOU, I AM MY OWN MOTHERFUCKING GAME when it suits it.

It could only be made by an indie developer. You might get the push/pull landgrabbing RTS gameplay past the marketing drones but the graph theory puzzling? They’d shit a brick.

It all seems so simple but as with the best simple systems, it invites mastery. It knows it’s smart, it wants you to be smart too. But no-one likes a smart arse and so it’s remained overlooked far more than it should ever have been.

Now seems as good a time as any for you to remedy that and go and take a look at it.