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Okay, there's obviously a lot still being said about in the gaming space about Bioshock. Being a crazed obsessive, I'm still reading most of it. But, if you have to read one thing after completing Bioshock, this is the one. It's Chris Remo's extensive interview with Ken Levine, which goes through all the elements of the game and is pretty damn good. And let's have a non-spoilery aggressive quote, eh?

"Honestly, any writer could write a 20-minute cutscene. I hate those as a gamer. I skip them. Those games, I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm not going to sit through those. But in Half-Life, I know everything that's going on. That was a big inspiration. I know more about City 17 than I know about any Final Fantasy world.

Even a great game like Okami, it has 20 minutes of "blah blah blah" and I just want to kill myself. It's not fair to our medium, it's so self-indulgent. I think we have to work harder. Trust me, it's a lot harder to do what we did in BioShock than to do a 20-minute cutscene. I could write that stuff all day long.

I have to admit that the MMOs we can expect in the next year don't really excite me. The one that I hold a candle for is the mystic-barbarian romp Age Of Conan, which was beautiful-if-awkward when I played it earlier in the year. The developers at Funcom are keen to create a combat system which doesn't just have you press a button and wait for the turn-based hitting to occur. Their solution is the 'combat rose' which allows you to pick your melee swings for both attack and defence, via a small mouse and key graphical interface. It didn't really seem to work when I played it - one swing was much the same as another - and I understand that, after the closed beta, this was one of the systems that the team are reconsidering. The game has, it seems, been delayed until next year. Perhaps the beta did its job.

But there's more to this beast than a weird control system, as I'll report after the jump.

This is a piece that was previously published in The Escapist. It's a favourite of mine. Not only because I got to further seal my fate as gaming's crying fool, but also because it offered me an opportunity to interview the fantastic (Uncle) Charles Cecil about one of my favourite gaming moments.

Confessions of a Crybaby

I am a crybaby. And I don’t care what you think. Well, that’s simply not true, is it? If I didn’t care what you think, I wouldn’t be setting out to write a piece, on a widely read website, explaining why the crybaby gets the best deal. I deeply care what you think. In fact, if you don’t like me, I may… sniffle… come on, let’s get on with it.

I think anyone who might take the stance that games cannot make you cry is either a sociopath, has never played Angel of Darkness and tried to walk in a straight line, or simply a big, lying coward. Begone, cowards! Today is the day of the ludicrously emotional – we shall triumph and probably get all weepy as we accept our victory.

Let me put things in context. I can’t watch a Muppet movie without crying (please, no jokes about Muppet’s Treasure Island – I’ve deliberately never watched it). Not just in the amazingly sad bits where only evil monsters made of angry stone wouldn’t shed 14 buckets of salt water, but pretty much all the way through. There’s just something about them, something about the love behind them, the passion that fuelled (past tense, thanks to their vile murder via the Disney purchase – more crying here) their very existence. The purpose of this aside? To hyper-stress what a sap I am. The sappiest of the sappy. It’s established. We can progress.

After the hurdle: Interview with Charles Cecil.

This is probably the SHMUP! equivalent of Oasis and Blur releasing a single in the same week, but Hikware - of Warning Forever fame - have put out their latest enormo-blaster, Cyclops, while we were still recovering from ABA game's latest blast. And it looks like this...

Okay. I'm half-lying. They've been out for a few weeks now, but I wanted to wait until I had a chance to actually play Cyclops to actually put it into context. At least on my initial play, it's not in the same league as Warning Forever (Which is the Shadow of the Colossus of the SHMUP! except with none of the tedious fucking around with the horse, and about as good as a freeware shooter gets), but it's certainly its own creature. It's primary mechanic is that you're stationary, with enemies approaching from all side. Your weapon is an enormous beam-thing, which annihilates all and sundry. The "all and sundry" is the key bit - it also takes out incoming projects. Since after firing it needs to recharge and your turning speed is stictly limited, the game's based around you priotising incoming vectors and all that. It takes a little long to get going for my liking - I'm of the Robotron-school of Arcade games, where if I'm not mentally exausted by level 5, it's too weak for me - but I still think it's worthy of a little attention.

Cyclops can be downloaded from here and if you haven't actually played Warning Forever, for the sake of the eternal Arcade Fire, get it from here.

Continuing my abortive attempts to understand Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, the remake of the venerable MMORPG.

Today I killed a llama. No-one seemed to mind. I also killed a goat and a horse, but a frog beat the hell out of me. The fact it was called 'Bogling' rather than 'Frog' is, in retrospect, a reasonable clue. Later, when it got dark, I killed a cougar that I was convinced was trying to steal babies from cots or something. I've yet to see any other cougars, so now I'm a bit worried I've killed the only big cat in New Haven. I'm not supposed to be killing endangered species - I'm supposed to be a ninja, noblest of all the warriors. Except I'm a ninja that still can't hide.

Full-on ninja-versus-llama action: the stuff they couldn't show in cinemas!

After the jump: the murderous healer and the great shoe drought.

A fun piece of nonsense I wrote for PC Gamer in the current issue's Extra Life has gone online today. It's a guide to cosplaying Lara in Tomb Raider: Anniversary. In the game, I mean. I'll leave Kieron to write a guide to cosplaying as her in real life.

Anyway, it's deeply silly and surprisingly fun. And yes, one of them has her in the nude. But she's FAR cuter as a tiger.

I met Gabe Newell a while back when I was reviewing Half-Life 2 or something, but I completely failed to interview him. Well, he was distracting me - I had a game to play! And my dictaphone batteries were probably dead. Anyway, I shook his hand and said that I was just fine, thanks. Comrade Bramwell from Eurogamer.net is a little cannier than me, and when he met Mr Valve at the recent Leipzig computer games convention he sat down to ask him all kinds of searching questions.

Many of the answers to those questions are contained within this expansive interview. Bramwell and Newell discuss things such as the problems with DirectX 10, the fact that Portal and TF2 look awesome (more on that later in the week, Valve-fans), and the fact that Gabe didn't know how much his games cost to make. There's loads more too, so click up there to read it.

But not all facts were disclosed. No, because Newell also talked about unified gaming and the nature of the PC, and we have those quotes right after that click-hop.

DISCLAIMER: We're not affiliated with Eurogamer, right. We just know them, and sometimes work for them. Okay - so if they go and do something crazy and dangerous right now, it's nothing to do with us.

This may be the first in a short series, or it may be a one-off post of disheartened misery. Either way, you'll soon be able to make pretty exact estimates about how much willpower I have. As mentioned yesterday, I've had a strange, some might say futile and insane, desire to take a poke around the Ultima Online overhaul, Kingdom Reborn, for a while now. It's the father of the modern MMO, and, not being seriously internetted in its heyday, I'd never played it previously. So, I was curious to see how it compares to its many colourful children. It was released this week, and so I did.

After the jump: becoming 0.2% better at hiding, and accidentally turning into a rabbit.

When you're browsing news, trying to stay abreast of the developments in the world of PC Games, you're looking for something to stop you dead in your tracks. Something unexpected, that demands an immediate response. Escape From Paradise City managed to do so in a way which no game since Devastation has done so. I can only gawp and blink and run to Wordpress to blog a story.

Here's the "thing". It's one of its three playable characters.

It's Sean Connery! Sean Connery on Steroids, admittedly, but undeniably Scotland's most Sean-Connery son. And now I stop to look, those two lurking in the background look kinda familiar.

PC Gamer UK have posted up my review of Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms. I say things like this:

These four campaigns represent a gigantic amount of new material. It's all presented brilliantly - new animations and cinematics for each of them, and a unique front end and rack of options. This feels like four expansion packs rather than one muscular bundle. The smaller changes mean they all feel different to play, and the tiny tweaks and foibles mean it's not quite like Medieval II any more.

And we've linked this before, but it's worth reiterating that they got the inside scoop on Empire: Total War. Yes, it's got ships in.

Our absolutely favourite game trailers site, Game Trailers, have put up an interview with the 'military advisor' from Call Of Duty 4, Hank Keirsey. Watch him speak:

Thanks, Game Trailers.

GamesIndustry.biz have an interview up with NCSoft (Guild Wars, City of Heroes) boss Geoff Heath. In it Geoff explains that he believes PC users will end up buying a PS3:

I think there is a difference between PC and console players but there's overlap as well. Our view long term is that people who have traditionally only played on PC will actually now start transitioning to PS3. Once they figure out what PS3 does, I think that take-up will get greater and greater.

It's a fair bet - did anyone not own a PS2 at some point?

Simon the Sorceror is coming back!

And here was I thinking its only being released in Germany thus far was a lucky escape.

I'm fairly certain that this is the greatest game I've played since the infinite pleasures of DEATH WORM. Behold:

It's called HoneyBlaster, and in it you play a bumblebee with nothing to lose (except his hit-points) in a battle against a tyrannical swarm of insects (probably). A side-scrolling shooter of real pace, and splendid clunkiness, it has the best music I've ever heard. Seriously. It also has a (faked?) resolution of 160x100 pixels, which strikes me as just the thing for a Wednesday morning.

Get the three level demo here and pray to the God of black and white bee death-rays that the full game one day hatches.

Valve have announced that independent developers, ACE Team, have licensed the Source engine for a deeply peculiar-looking action/fantasy game, Zeno Clash.

Moving away from the more usual ranged combat of a Source game, we're excited to read that Zeno is focusing on melee combat. And more than that, it's focusing on being weird. The setting is described as a "punk fantasy world", with ACE explaining,

"The first chapter is set in a fantastic & chaotic world where the main character has been exiled from his clan and hunted down by his own brothers. A desperate journey past the forbidden desert will bring him to the end of the world."

Unfortunately, all the attention from the world's gamers appears to have been more than Chilean developer's server could handle, with the game's official website offline at the time of writing. (Perhaps Valve could step in and offer them some web support?). We get a good vibe from this one - the visual design suggests a depth of imagination from the developers, and promises of "brutal combat" are the simplest way to our heart. It's set to arrive at some point next year.

More art, links to the full versions, and gaming's saggiest breasts, after the leap.

Just spotted this on the ever-lovely Gamershell. Sim City Societies is a fascinating endeavour, as it's a Sim game without any Maxis/Will Wright involvement, and it's looking to make a clean break with the series' chequered but always entertaining past.

This trailer strongly demonstrates that the focus is very different this time around, leaning on the individual buildings and overall aesthetic of your city more than its zone layout and efficiency. I've certainly a tinge of regret that the Sim City 2000 lineage seems to been have brutally curtailed, but, if this is going for the sort of self-expression that the Sims allows, it's potentially very exciting.

I'm also amused that the first style nice-voiceover-lady suggests after saying "create the city that you want" isn't a cheerful Simstown or rural paradise, but "a city of grim authoritarian oppression" - which rather suggests EA understands gamers more than it sometimes lets on. They know exactly what I'd do, anyway.

Cheerful ska helps anything, and the more sax the better. Take this mod, Gateways, which seemed to be fairly unremarkable "let's just throw as many Combine in as possible!" Half-Life 2 fan-faffery. Until, that is, I was being chased around giant cubes of light suspended in the sky by all the antlions in the world, to the sound of very cheerful, very saxy ska-lite. It's basically Benny Hill with giant angry insects, and it's very funny, exactly the sort of "what happens if I do... this!" that modding is, at heart, about. There's some ridiculously over-the-top guitar noodling in another level, too.

The concept is you're a Combine prisoner (in a familiar orange suit, natch) who breaks out into a room full of portals. Each of these portals takes you to a psychotically designed mini-level that bombards you with waves of braindead foes in massive numbers until they're all dead. There's some button-pushing. And, well, that's it. While there's a certain admirable surreality in the odd-hued, physically impossible levels, at lot of the fun comes from HL2 bads being placed in situations they can't really deal with. An antlion placed in a giant chamber with a thin, spiral walkway reaching up to the ceiling will, for instance, attempt to land on it but repeatedly and comically fall off. A Combine soldier left on a 3-foot square floating platform just that little bit more than grendade distance from you will somehow manage to look hilariously frustrated despite there being no new animations. And, as has been proven many times but is always good to see again, something explosive thrown into a pack of a dozen zombies is always value for money.

It's not actually a good mod. Despite sounding fairly serious about it all, really this is just a bunch of guys dicking around in the way anyone would with plenty of time and a rough guide to building HL2 levels. But they've gone that extra mile into occasionally pushing the silliness just as far as it'll go, and that makes for a half-hour of play that's at least partly screamingly entertaining. I'm not entirely convinced its makers realise how funny Gateways can be - not that it matters.

Guess what this is? Click for a larger view, for extra help.

IT'S A VIDEOGAME!

Say what you like about Kenta "ABA Games" Cho, but you're never in doubt what any of his work is, even at a glance. Which means it's a cause for celebration that he's gone and released another one, Least Best Room.

If you're a watcher of anything indie or SHMUP!, you'll almost certainly be aware of Kenta. In fact, his reputation's risen to the level where he gets a degree of grief from people who consider him not all that. Which is unfair, and - putting aside the merit of much of his work - the secret of his success is plain.

Shock 2 veterans of the world unite! They can take our lean function! They can take our ability to walk! They can take our skill system which means that a highly trained solider can't work out how to pull a trigger on a grenade launcher for most of the game, guns which break down within seconds of acquiring them and a basically linear final third ending in a single risible cheap-gag cut-scene undercutting the whole thing!

But they can't take our Irrational Logo. ANYMORE.

Strangebedfellows.de have posted a tiny mod which replaces the logo at the start of Bioshock with Irrational's old one. As they put it...

A survey conducted by PopCap (those responsible for the excellent Bookworm Adventures and the AVERAGE Peggle) has learned that Casual Games will solve all the problems of the world, and cure all diseases.

Or indeed that they help families bond. Which is rather lovely, really.

The survey, conducted for PopCap by the Information Solutions Group, was the largest ever worldwide survey of casual computer game players, apparently. And it found that,

"70% of ‘family gamers’ believe casual games provide educational benefits to their children/grandchildren – with greatest benefits of gameplay identified as learning, stress relief and hand-eye coordination."

The report goes on,

"In stark contrast to traditional perceptions of computer gaming, parents/grandparents said casual games helped them bond with their children/grandchildren (92%) and mentioned the following casual game benefits for children/grandchildren:

· 68% cited Hand-eye coordination/Manual dexterity

· 60% cited Learning (pattern recognition, resource allocation, spelling, etc.)

· 51% cited Mental workouts/Cognitive exercise

· 48% cited Memory strengthening

· 44% cited Stress relief/Relaxation

· 37% cited Positive affirmation/Confidence building"

Bear in mind that this was a survey paid for by the most well known casual games publisher in the biz, so perhaps sprinkle salt. But otherwise: Games cure cancer!

The rest of the report is below the clickyjump.

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.