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This editorial over on the PC hardware site PC Perspective considers the age-old issue of why PC gamers stick with their format, rather than opting for the ease of consoles. It covers many tired old routines, such as the flexibility of the PC's options and scaled resources, as well as the complexity of mouse/keyboard controls systems. One thing it comes up with that I've not heard before is this:

While Bethesda was having problems with certain Non-Player Character interactions, one can't help but wonder if the AI was lobotomized to make it play well on the Xbox 360. If you never saw Bethesda's pre-release demo videos they displayed at the 2005 E3, you can find them on YouTube. I would suggest the 5th video on which details the complexity of the Radiant AI specifically, as it shows the breadth the original version of the AI would display. If you never played the game, you can see the final implementation in many of the other videos on YouTube, from bizarre domestic violence to the death penalty for stealing bread. One of the most rabid fan bases for a PC game are having a collective convulsions in dread of what Bethesda will do to their favourite franchise. Fallout 3 is going to be released on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as well as the PC, and will use the Radiant AI system.

Those are their own links in there, and the first link explains what he's talking about. Anyway, I can't help thinking that any reduction in AI sophistication must have been about making the game work on more lower-end PCs too, since anything that didn't work on the 360 wouldn't work on a whole load of lesser PCs, right? It's interesting that there is, potentially, a more sophisticated Oblivion AI out there though, and you wonder if an AI mod might serve/break the game in interesting ways.

As received by GameSetWatch maestro Simon Carless: the special edition EA Monopoly set.

Although actually this is something-like-irony, because Activision finally made more money than EA this year.

You may be pleased to know that it hasn't been all intricately documented whining about really brilliant videogames this August Bank-holiday weekend at Rock Paper Shotgun Towers. As I said a couple of posts back, I've been playing Guild Wars: Eye of the North on its preview weekend. And I've had a lot of fun. Let's see a picture of my character, having a lot of fun.

Yay! It's like Rainbow Islands, except with less Rainbows or Islands or Rainbow Islands.

So obviously spoilers. All the spoilers ever, completely ruining every aspect of the game. There's not a sentence of this you should read before finishing what is a very good game. Spoilers. Spoilers. Have I mentioned, stuff here will spoil surprises? And ruin the game.

This isn't a list of reasons why BioShock is a bad game. It isn't. It's an excellent game. This is a list of reasons why I think it doesn't merit the highest score possible.

Reader David links us to Point Defense Systems, a particularly hardcore-looking overhaul of Homeworld 2. "The gist of the mod is that it turns HW2 into something much more akin to a space-navy simulation, rather than the arcadey feel of the original," quoth he.

Not sure I'd ever refer to Homeworld games as arcadey, but by the sound of things, this really puts the 'ship' in 'spaceship'. If phrases like 'naval simulation' don't encourage you to try it, perhaps hearing that it's got a ton of custom-made spacecraft models in it will. Homeworld (we at RPS tend to lean more towards the first than the second) remains god-king of space-based strategy, so it's fantastic to see it still kept alive. With Relic so bound up in Company of Heroes and Dawn of War these days, will we ever see a part three? I'm off to visit them in a couple of weeks as it happens, so I'll attempt to find out.

Anyway, we'll dig up a copy of Homeworld 2 from our quivering plastic monolith of dusty CDs soon and take a look at PDS ourselves - meantime, check it out here.

The awesome TIGSource link to this beautiful trailer for Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet - a shooter by comic artist Michel Gagne.

Sorry about the crappy image, the trailer is tough to grab. Take a look at the thing in motion to get a better grasp of what it's all about. And, hmm, there's something weird going on with his site architecture... anyway, more detail about the project, including loads of shadow-puppet animations, can be found here. Sadly the game itself is not out until next year.

EDIT:

Empire: Total War enthusiasm is totally understandable, but also horribly plebeian. If you really want to stand out during a forum discussion/pub chat/job interview/speed-dating event, try enthusing about one of the other Napoleonic strategy games currently in production...

If lone French developer Jean-Michel Mathé ever gets around to finishing this groundbreaking tactical wargame then it should make ETW look Fisher Price in several areas. HistWar armies utilize five different levels of intertwined AI (commander, corps, division, brigade and regiment) and can't be retasked at the drop of a bicorn hat. Credible command-chain modelling means lots of authentic inertia plus the potential for lost and ignored orders. Those that have played Mad Minute’s splendid Take Command series will know just how engrossing this sort of naturalism can be.

Another Gallic offering from a small studio, NC will likely give the ETW strat layer a serious run for its money, especially if the AI turns out to be as sabre-sharp as it was in Birth of America and American Civil War (the last two titles from AGEOD). Though there won’t be any fancy 3D maps or animated army figures, the lovely 2D art of Robin Pirez and Sandra Rieunier-Duval should be ample compensation.

[Edit - please don't request a download of these songs in the Comments below. We'll get into lots of trouble for it. Most of these songs are available on iTunes, though.]

So, I was angrier than a wasp in a box about the Moby debacle with the Bioshock limited edition. One of 2K's multiple attempts yesterday to avoid the flaming pitchfork treatment from furious fans was to release the game's impressive score for free. Still not what I wanted - there's a bunch of frankly awesome, vintage 1950s songs in the game, including Beyond The Sea, Papa Loves Mambo and, uh, How much Is That Doggy In The Window. The stuff that should have been on the much-loathed soundtrack CD, in other words.

I've been trying to work out myself where in Bioshock's install directory these fine vintage ditties lurked, and how to extract the songs in question so I can listen to 'em without the distraction of screaming Splicers in the background. I'd just about given up when I read this post on the official forums. A summary of how to get the songs playing whenever you want 'em to follows after the jump.

Been playing through the preview weekend of Guild Wars: Eye of the North. More eventually, but something amused me and I wanted to share. What some would consider spoilers under the cut, but since it's one which was included in Arenanet's trailer for the expansion pack, it really doesn't matter.

The demo for World In Conflict has arrived, and it includes single player, skirmish, and multiplayer elements. You can download it here, at a beastly 1.2gb.

World In Conflict is the direct descendant of my favourite RTS, also by Massive Entertainment, Ground Control. You can download that ancient sci-fi strategy from here, and if you do you'll see that it still stands up today. The way that it stripped away the traditional use of resources (eg Tiberium and base-building in C&C) left a kind of raw tactical challenge - just what can you do with a handful of units, and nothing else?

This acute challenge has mostly been lost from World In Conflict, which means that the single player will be a little disappointing for Ground Control veterans, and a lightweight but fun action sequence for anyone else. The fact that you can call in endless air-drops (as in Ground Control 2) basically takes away the tension. They try to add it with time-limits and so on, but it doesn't always work. Massive have chosen a good single player map for this demo, however, and there are a number of such highlights throughout the game.

2K are scrabbling around, trying to make up for the bit of a whoopsie that represented BioShock's PC launch. While a 360 player can indulge in such crazed madness as lending the game to their friends - gasp in horror and disgust - PC players were limited to two activations of their code, and three re-installs (meaning anyone with a typical crappy PC would be screwed in moments), as well as being scuppered by scrappy driver issues. To run the game with any success, you need beta drivers, and the game failed to come with the latest version of Direct X. Not pretty.

So in an effort to apologise, it seems that 2K are listening and responding to the moans. As of now, the activations have been raised to five, and the number of re-installs on the same machine is up to five. (Although why this should be limited at all is bewildering). They continue,

"As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base."

I'm reviewing Medal of Honor: Airborne (it's for someone else, so thoughts on it another time - briefly though, it's pretty good, pleasingly non-linear but fairly silly).

I just stumbled across this.

It's a Nazi Super-Soldier. In Medal of Honor. Gas mask, experimental chaingun and everything. He took about six grenades to kill. I can't stop laughing.

[Another postmortem from the vaults. I've actually got a lot of these - about twenty. For a couple of years on PC Format, I did one a month for them. The idea was simply to chat to a developer about one of their previous games for a couple of pages, in kind of a more casual, laid back version of the sort of thing Gamasutra do so well. I'll be sticking them up here, one every Friday, until I run out. With the announcement of Empire: Total War, I thought it a good idea to start with Mike Simpson of Creative Assembly looking back at Shogun. This was a fun one - Simpson was completely self deprecating at all times, even in the face of the most ludicrous flattery.]

Shogun was an epic game that changed everything, rejuvenating the real-time strategy game at a time when it seemed that it was just going to be a tank rushing eternally down a game-design cul-de-sac. With its unique, atmospheric setting and its groundbreaking marriage of mass-scale battle scenes and high-level Risk-style strategic management, you presume that it was always destined for greatness. After all, this sort of thing couldn’t just happen without a plan. And you’d be wrong.

“It actually started when I joined the company,” reveals Creative Assembly’s Creative Director Mike Simpson, “Then there were five people, doing a sports game. A rugby game. We were looking at setting up a second team, and wanted to find something which was relatively safe and not very challenging, unsurprisingly. At that point, Command and Conquer clones had come out. Things like Kill Krush and Destroy. We looked at them and thought “These are easy to do!”. It’s fairly formulaic and you can’t really go wrong. And they’re selling bucketloads.”

Quite literally yesterday's news for anyone paying attention, but seeing as the franchise has a bit of a bad rep these days and everyone's currently playing that game, thought I'd point out that a Settlers 6 demo has been released.

Yes, Settlers. No, honestly, it's alright.

Developer Bluebyte showed me Rise of an Empire (for that is its wholly unnecessary subtitle) a couple of months ago, and I was pretty impressed. Few I told believed me, as it's been a series in constant decline since around the third game, a lineage with fine origins that most games hacks now sneer at. Having played some preview code recently I'm not totally sure the game's going to be quite as delightful as I thought from the hands-off look, but there is some really cute stuff in there. Most of all, it seems to have nailed to some extent that traditional Settlers joy of sitting back and watching your custom community go about its business. It aslo has ferrets in it.

THE ULTIMATE PC BATTLE

The demo of Two Worlds, a fantasy adventure with pretensions towards being the next Oblivion, can be downloaded from here.

This is my hero. That's the default hat. He started the game with it.

But it's not just about hats. There's moonwalking too.

[This is a particularly long piece on The Sims which was written for a project that was canceled at the last minute a couple of years back. Which is a shame, but at least I got paid for it, eh? It's sat around ever since, but since it really is particularly long, it's hard to work out a home. And I'm a little bit precious over it. So rather than cut it to something smaller, I'd rather present it here. Hope you enjoy it.]

It was the phone calls that made me certain. The Sims was going to cross over, one way or another.

I worked in a cramped games magazine office for just shy of five years. There were only three times that we really knew the eye of a media mini-storm was circling somewhere above us. We knew we were being watched at those moments, because every time we answered the phone the same questions came from different missionaries from the Real World Media. The first and biggest spike in calls was part of the fallout of 9/11 when every journalist in the world needed to ask us whether Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear or Microsoft Flight Simulator could be used to train terrorists to take over commercial airliners. Majestic, prompting the second and smallest peak, was publisher Electronic Arts’ great failure – a reality-blurring attempt to commercialise the alternate-reality game before anyone really knew what an alternate-reality game was, which bombed in the States and was never released in Europe. The third was sparked by The Sims, Electronic Arts’ great success and one of the most popular and groundbreaking games of recent times.

As much as an article has an origin, it is in one of those calls. It was from a freelancer from help-the-homeless-help-themselves magazine The Big Issue, which wanted to run a feature on The Sims’ runaway success. He was, essentially, looking for a quote saying that it was played by those with no social life to indulge in a surrogate fictional one. He wasn’t interested in the truth – he admitted he’d been provided an angle by his Editor and was working to fulfil it. So I just informed him that, actually, The Sims was actually already receiving a snobbish backlash from actual hardcore gamers, and its fans were in fact non-typical players. Normal people were digging it, not just crazed obsessives. All the while, of course, I was thinking that I should point out that phoning me and asking for that sort of quote was a little like me phoning him and asking him to say that all the homeless are work-shy layabouts who stink of piss.

He’d got it entirely wrong. His wasn’t the answer. But what was? It got my thoughts rolling, and eventually those thoughts coalesced to a single point.

It’s sex.

Steam are still claiming that pre-purchasing BioShock via their system will allow you to

"play the moment it's released."

Which is not true. What they mean is,

This is an interesting piece of futurologist chin-strokery. Yes, it's fairly redundant posturing about the horrendously over-exposed but under-subscribed Second Life (an abberation of a marketing tool on which there's something of a moratorium on RPS) beyond the introductory paragraph, but that first statement - soon there will be more avatars than real people - is a fascinating concept.

" Gartner research indicates that in four years' time 80% of internet users will have avatars - virtual replicas of themselves - working or playing online. Given the pace of internet adoption, and the fact that people often have more than one avatar, there will soon be more avatars than humans, at least in the industrialised world." - Victor Keegan, The Guardian

It's people creating fake shells for themselves, idealised versions to be discarded once they're bored, or once something with superior technology comes along. Of course it happens - there's any number of MMOs I've abandoned - but the fact that it's happening with so many people now... It's means there's all these digital spectres, partial identities existing only as numbers on a server. They can't be killed, not yet, because there's a principle - what if someday I want to go back? I can't help but imagine a ghost world of floating orcs and wizards and space marines and large-breasted strippers and spaceships - personalities cast adrift, but left in limbo forever.

SpinTop Games (who are yet another of these companies that seem to mystifyingly sell PopCap games without mentioning PopCap at any point) have released their own puzzly obscurity, madly called Mystery P.I. - Find The Missing The Lottery Ticket.

It is, in fact, a puzzle game in which you are given a list of about ten objects to find in a screen crammed with hundreds of the things. Click on them to find them, collect enough to unlock the end-of-level picture pairs challenge, and gain another piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

Click on the pic to play along at home, kids!

You can download it from here, at the princely size of 1.3gb. Word on the street (well, in the pub at least) is that this is a pretty good iteration of the soldier series, at least offering some competition for the mighty Call of Duty games. Airborne contains lots of hot parachuting action, violence against Nazis, and broad levels to allow you some shooting freedom in an otherwise linear action game. Huff huff, or whatever it is American soldiers say.

Jumping out of a plane: Manly.

Woo - my big box o'Bioshock just arrived. Circumstances have conspired to ensure I won't actually get to play the game until the weekend (I was going to take a quick look-see this morning anyway, but the activation servers are down, infuriatingly. It's HL2 release day all over again) but what I can do is review the various junk in the Collector's Edition. When I say 'review' I do, of course, mean 'complain.'

Firstly, the soundtrack. I was quite excited about this, given the atmospheric gramophone music heard throughout the demo. Turns out it's just three tracks, all of which are by Moby. Moby. So instead of Bobby Darin's stately take on Beyond the Sea, we get a hideous mobile phone advert-style plinky-plonky boom-boom-boom remix. Franky, if you told any DJ to remix Beyond the Sea but they only had 20 minutes to do it in, it would sound just like this. The other two tracks sound like lazy Orbital b-sides, and contain what I'm guessing is voice samples from the game. [Edit - I'm snidely informed that the second track, God Bless The Child, is quite well known, making it one of my many cultural blindspots. If I'd managed to listen to all of it without clicking next in disgust, it's possible I'd have recognised the original song Moby's slaughtered]. This EP (only referred to as such once you get to the disc itself - the packaging refers to it throughout as 'soundtrack CD') is a real missed opportunity. Ken Levine's list of Irrational's creative inspirations for Bioshock states under music simply "1950s-era jazz." That would have pleased me enormously. That would have made me think 'Bioshock.' The three awful pieces of irrelevant lift music I've actually got make me eye the nice metal box the game comes in with distaste.

Flicking quickly through the 40-minute Making Of DVD (which I don't want to watch properly until I've finished the game), it seems rather more interesting, though seems to predominantly consist of sniggering, poorly-shaven men badly superimposed onto Rapture backgrounds. It's all talking heads stuff - there's no look into earlier art or the tools used to build the game. It does expand on Ken Levine's claims that the Little Sisters were initially insectoid - apparently they were formerly slugs that you could stomp on. There was also talk of including a 'squirrel-man', a dog in a wheelchair and monkeys at some point. Personally, I'd have gone for a squirrel-man in wheelchair being pushed around by a monkey. The video certainly isn't anything that requires a seperate DVD, as opposed to a 100Mb DIVX file on the game disc, anyway. Pah.

It's almost as if we planned it. In the week where we look back at Yves Grolet's previous work on Outcast (Which remains perhaps the finest game ever starring a man in an orange sweater), his new game gets announced from 10tacle. It's called Totem and it's a third-person superhero platform game with fisticuffs. Yes.

Meet a chap its filename calls "Monkey Avatar". Say Hello, Monkey Avatar.

Superhero platform game. Not a bad idea at all. Totem is riffing off Le Parkour, which remains one of my favourite things in the world, and as anyone who's ever played City of Heroes knows, how superheroes move is one of the best things about them. While CoH-veterans tend to obsess over the joys of the high level travel powers - leaping from tall building to tall building, soaring between skyscrapers, whining that they bought the teleport power - at low level, patrolling around the city, just clearing a fence and moving onwards ever onwards is a fluid tribute to the modern world. The Press release is low on detail but includes a fine piece of tech-gibberish in describing its self-proclaimed innovative "Semantic Environment Sensing System (SESS)" which allows you to use the environment in a fancy way. This may be posh for "you can climb and jump and swing and shit".

More cinematic winks to camera from Valve's trailer department:

Well, there's got to be someone out there who isn't planning on going through Bioshock this weekend. I'm among you, actually. I'm instead going to be spending my time playing Guild Wars, as they're having a preview weekend for their forthcoming Eye of The North Expansion.

While the game proper goes live on August 31st, they're giving people who've pre-ordered the game 72 hours of running around and generally trying to power their way through as much content as possible from the 24th to the 26th. And, most importantly, all progress and achievements will be absolutely valid when the game goes properly on, so you're not wasting your time. Clearly, this is an attempt to get as many pre-orders as possible, but that's just a fine mutually reciprocal relationship. Arenanet get lovely, lovely money. You get to wander around the newbie zones on August 31st and wave your magical equipment at them braggingly.

That said, for Eye of the North, it's worth nothing that the newbies won't be newbies. This is the first of the Guild Wars games that is a genuine expansion - in that you need a level 20 character to access it. If you don't... well, you should. Guild Wars is excellent, and if you haven't already, I'd recommend you start at Nightfall. But if you don't, there's always that Defcon weekend. Or some other game.

I love things like this. I've got into some of my favourite things via creators of things I've loved recommending them - following the trails to interesting places. Because if they've inspired something you've loved, they've got to be pretty good, yeah? That thought process has lead me to everything from Vonnegut to the Buzzcocks to Nethack.

Anyway, Gametap asked Ken Levine for his list of works which kept the Irrational team's creative engines fully stoked up. For example...

Animal Farm: (Book, 1945) "You really only need to read this one book to understand power and what it does to people; it's the ultimate story of what happens when ideals slam into less than ideal people."

Edutainment seems to have reached a new plateau of electronical achievement when Minnesota Zoo announce they are releasing an online wolf simulator. Wolfquest allows y'all to pretend to be wolves, either online or offline, learning realistic wolf behaviour like catching sick elk and howling.

Is this really what we want from our videogames? The slightly scary child featured in the video has clearly reverted to a feral state, like a keyboard-bound Mowgli... I jest of course: there aren't enough wild-animal simulators, and I look forward to the day we can all play a bumblebee MMO.

This depicts the wolf urination menu.

While the UK impatiently awaits Bioshock (just got a message saying my ultra-geek edition has now been dispatched, so I'm praying for my Big Daddy figurine to turn up tomorrow), the US have got their internationally-favoured hands on it already.

And, um, it's not going as well as could be hoped. More than the average number of whingers have reported crashes, lockups and loading problems. My own PC froze during the demo, requiring a hard reboot, but my RPS fellows sniffily informed me it was fine for them, so I shrugged it off as Microsoftian chance.

"I lucked out. I was able to play for about 2 hrs with intermittent crashes (yeah, I call that "lucking out" at this point). A lot of people can't even load it. Now I can't progress any further because of the reboot crash." - John C. DisappointedBioshockPurchaser

Surprise! Well, not really - though Medieval II: Total War was yer bona fide critical and commercial smash hit, most of the flak it did take was for being too similar to its forerunners and being a bit crap at boats. The smart money, then, was on the next Total War including fully-realised naval combat and gunpowder. And it does - Empire: Total War is its name, and magazines across the globe will currently be trying to think up gags abut Napoleon for their preview features on it. Us? Not tonight.

Click above for stupidly large, ISP-upsetting full version.

We've actually known about this for a little while, but we're supposed to be a fun blog, not one that mercilessly stabs our friends in the back, as we would have been had we chosen to scoop PC Gamer's exclusive feature on it. Perhaps in time we'll grow that cold, but for now RPS is everyone's chum. Yes, even you, you rude man.

Codies have announced Operation Flashpoint 2's full name: Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.

This is the official sequel developed internally by Codemasters, rather than the unofficial sequel, Armed Assault, from original developers Bohemia. (This is only made furtherly confusing by there having been a Bohemia developed Op Flash 2 for Codies in 2003, set in the 1970s, that never was).

There's a new site, and promises of a teaser trailer video for all to enjoy. Except of course the moment you try to download it, you're asked to enter your "Code M" details, or register to their special club.