As you all probably know by now, that project turned out to be Continue Magazine and it’s a project that I’ve been very excited about because it’s made specifically to fix What I Try To Fix. The preview edition of Issue 1 has launched today, meaning it’s a collection of hefty samples of some of the full articles that are going into the mag – including my huge feature on indie developers (but not my retrospective on Blood Money, which is something to look out for in the full thing).

The preview looks great, I’m very excited to be a part of this and you should totally CHECK IT OUT. No doubt I’ll put something up here too when the full issue is out

There is a clear disparity between what a player does or wants to do and what game environments or characters know how to handle. The above examples are extreme cases, of course, but it happens all the time – how often have you set off an explosion, killed a man, or even half flattened a city with barely any repercussion or consequence? How many times have you been forced to game a conversation tree to fit closest to what your character wants to happen; or been pushed down one path even though another makes much more sense?

But what are these mysterious “above examples”? What else do I have to offer in the 2200 words?

HAVE A LOOK

Hearing a man screaming for his mother as he bleeds out on the floor, his vision slowly fading to black and his crumpled body unable to move is, we don’t doubt, one of the true horrors of war. Nobody can do anything but watch him die and, as he struggles to take his last breath, nobody even has time to reassure him and lie that everything will be okay. It’s a humanising snap from firing bullets at an almost faceless enemy to a realisation of: ‘What the hell are we doing?’ It’s a feature in Red Orchestra 2.

The mag version is condensed because of word counts, and to deviate slightly, this is something which led to a talking point between me and Paul Millen. The online version of this review is not only better, but free to read, and I think this is largely the case throughout all of games writing. To my mind, this is further cementing (regrettably) the idea that print is indeed, dead or dying: it’s restrictive and costly, whereas the internet is neither. Sigh.

FOR THE MOTHERLAND

PUMP IT INTO YOUR EARS

Also, they’re doing a competition where you can win some things, so enter that as well if you like.

It’s not easy to find a decent pull quote to tease you with so here are some things you can expect to find out: how much a useless item costs compared to a useful item on average; the average price of a hat; how many real world monocles you can buy for the same price as a virtual one in EVE; and lastly, which popular franchise is named and shamed as “pay to win”.

YOU CAN READ IT FOR FREE HERE.

Basically, there’s nothing in the world that you haven’t seen or experienced before – it’s complete iteration and imitation without the merest tint of innovation or improvement. Whether you’re happy to put up with that or not is something that we can’t judge, but ‘Phoned in’ is a phrase that’s spun through our heads a lot as we played Dungeon Siege 3. More often than not it’s been accompanied by thoughts such as ‘this is quite boring’ too.

FULL THING.

Oof. Scorn! Note, though, that I didn’t write “we”. I hate “we” in reviews because no bugger else had played it apart from me and it’s my opinion. I get the whole argument of “our definitive opinion” like the pretend hive mind/personification of Edge, but I don’t buy into it as true because that’s not how it works. Anyway, the war between me and Joe will always continue where I write “I” and “My” in my reviews, and he silently does and find and replace to “fix it” to “We” and “Our”. Whatever Joe, whatever.

The most thing of note about this review though (personally) is that it’s up on Metacritic, on which I have awarded the lowest score which leads me to believe that:

1. Journalists, in fact, do not use the full range of 1-10

or

2. Journalists forget that games cost real money

or

3. Journalists are happy to say a game is mediocre and slap an 80% score on it

or

4. Bit-gamer is the only place where 50% means it’s an average game.

So that’s that.

Craig Lam fowarded me a link with a subject heading “Account of a haunted Morrowind mod”. Obviously, this isn’t a link I can refuse to click. It went to a creepy pasta that described a mod entitled “Jvk116z.esp” – a mod that turned Morrowind into a lovecraftian nightmare and went on to break a person. It’s a decent enough read, really, and I read it and carried on with my evening.

Then, I got hit with an article about Killswitch. A platformer released in 1989 that has never been properly completed, was only solvable with hints from a guy that posted on a messageboard then disappeared, and that deletes itself on completion (its playable as two characters with completely different stories – one is impossibly hard) while being impossible to copy. It’s super rare too with working copies selling for over half a million dollars.

And from these two links alone, I’m made to think the titular question : are games slowly getting mythologised? Books and video do this already. The book of the dead, the Necronomicon, the video from The Ring. Watch this and you’ll die! Read this and the world will end! This book was not meant for mere men! It’s legendary artefacts, Indiana Jones stuff. And now it’s about videogames. It’s probably a natural progression for any pop-culture, but now it’s happening here.

If anyone has any more examples of this sort of thing then I’d really appreciate you firing them my way – it’s something I want to look into and do something proper about.

Edit: another link from steve croop – http://inuscreepystuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/majora.html

A slightly more obvious tails doll story http://www.quackerandbowen.com/tailsdollstoriesvol1.html

Polybius – cabinet that sent kids insane http://www.joltcountry.com/polybius.html

I’m probably going to be using this as a notepad for a while to collate links until I blow my load on a full article.

I finally got the retrospective that I wanted to write for a long time commissioned. I think it was a case of wearing Joe down over several months. “Can I write about Morrowind yet? What about now? Now?” but it’s come to fruition over at bit-tech. I’m rather pleased with it, even if I do wish I could have doubled the word count.

These themes might seem common now after the mainstream success of Oblivion, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, but Morrowind explored these issues earlier and with unmatched subtlety. It doesn’t ram slavery or racism into your face. There isn’t an Alienage or a huge group of poverty stricken elves being spat on, or people constantly mentioning the ‘slave problem.’ These things just exist in commonplace, and it’s up to the player to pick up on them and deal with them as they like, if they like.

IT EXISTS HERE

Play4Free is a reheated version of Battlefield 2 that never gets more than lukewarm. It’s a free game that supports a micro-transaction model so cynical and omnipresent it’s like you looked a gift horse in the mouth and it bit your face off. It’s a game that’s less than the sum of its parts, despite all the parts being stolen from something great. It’s a game that’s simultaneously worse-looking and less fun than a game that’s six years old. It’s a pointless waste of time.

TASTE THE RAINBOW

Incidentally, I’ve got plans for other things to write on here other than just linking to things. Bear with me – I’ll sort it all out and give the links on the right side a bit of a pruning/update.

Shift 2 doesn’t care about how you feel. Spun out on the last corner? Not cornering quite right? Smashed into the car in front? You lose, friend. If you can’t keep up and adapt with the race then it will chew you up, spit you out, and laugh as you curl into the foetal position clutching a copy of Mario Kart, while sobbing quietly.

HERE YOU GO