We've got 12,000 Star Wars: The Old Republic beta keys to give away. Yes, you read that right, twelve thousand keys to the beta of Bioware's huge upcoming MMO. These will get you into the big stress test weekend that Bioware are holding. Sadly they haven't confirmed when that weekend will be, but we'll bring you that news as soon as we can.

Update - If you've already received an email telling you you'll be invited to a test weekend 'very soon' you won't need one of these keys, you'll get your invitation in good time.

To enter, simply go to competition page and fill in your details, you'll receive a code as soon as the giveaway ends. Pop that code into the Old Republic website before before Friday November 18 (when it expires) and wait. You'll get an an invitation for the beta weekend as soon as it kicks off.

If you get into the beta, why not join the PC Gamer guild? Which class will you be? So far I'm liking the Imperial Agent and the Smuggler.

As reported on IGN, Studio head of Sledgehammer Games, Glen Schofield isn't happy with the way Modern Warfare 3 is getting treated on Metacritic.

It's currently got a metacritic of 82. That's a reasonable average, sitting just above our Modern Warfare 3 review score.

Glen was more upset by the user rating (formed by the public, not critics). At the time it was sitting at 1.7. Metacritic's users were making a statement. Not necessarily a truthful statement, but a statement nonetheless.

Schofield wasn't happy about this, so he hit his twitter feed and posted: "I don't usually do this but, if u like MW3 go 2 Metacritic.com & help our user score. It's suspiciously low. Be honest but help if u agree."

He's since deleted the tweet. Probably because it got him into trouble. Later on, after some negative feedback and accusations unfair boosting, he attempted to justify his original comments by posting that he "know it's better than a 1.7."

It seems the users agree; Modern Warfare 3's user rating currently stands at 1.8.

If you ask any Battlefield 3 player what the most annoying thing in the game is, they'd say tactical lights, but after that they'd probably say 'bloody mortar spam'. Thankfully MP1st have noted that DICE are looking into a fix. The problem is that mortars can be safely spammed from extremely long distances, with users safe from any reprisal. How could that be dealt with? Designer, Alan Kertz, has been tweeting that they might be using the Recon's flying drone as a counter:

"Seriously considering MAVs as a counter to Mortars. ECM jammers could destroy the Mortar with a few hits. Looking for feedback."

Other issues that DICE are looking into involve players spawning without weapons and the ability to use the IRNV scope while driving vehicles. There's also good news for colour blind gamers, as DICE say they'll be looking into a colour blind mode in future updates.

Red Orchestra 2 is the best murder simulator I’ve ever played. It’s not the best first-person shooter or multiplayer game, or even the best team-based multiplayer game. It’s certainly not the best World War II game, and its singleplayer is the worst I’ve played in years. But in the killing, and in the being killed, Red Orchestra 2 is a terrifying and satisfying experience.

Let’s talk about you for a minute. You’re a soldier in either Hitler or Stalin’s army, and you’re shit-scared. You’ve got your back against the wall in a room with one door, two windows and three walls, and you’re peeking around a corner into the exposed core of a half-destroyed building. Every room could conceal an enemy soldier, and you’ve died a hundred times already, always from that one angle you didn’t check.

Looking down through the rubble, you see an enemy soldier break from behind a wall. You aim and fire in a single motion. You’ve shot him and now he’s dead. It’s exactly like a million other games, but it feels nothing like any other game. It’s the little things that make the difference, such as the sound of your own breathing when you lifted the rifle to your face, and the way it bobbed slightly in your hands. It’s in the mark on your enemy’s chest where the bullet hit, and the way his blood spritzed from his back, marking that bullet’s exit. It’s in the way he fell, forced by some terrible weight. Sometimes, but not this time, it would be the way he clutches his stomach, yelling in Russian, or the way he fires his machinegun madly during his last few seconds of life.



At some point, the developers of Red Orchestra 2 realised that if the primary interaction in your game is killing, then you should probably make the killing feel incredible. It’s this attention to detail that turns an otherwise ordinary game, a slightly more realistic Battlefield, into something great, with Soviets fighting Nazis across mother Russia.

Take the game modes, for example. The most popular is Territory, in which one team starts in control of a map’s capturable points and the enemy must take them. In this mode, reinforcements spawn every 20 seconds or so, and on maps designed to support 64 players it does a fine job of focusing attention on the shifting frontline. But it did the same in Battlefield 2, where it was called Conquest mode. Countdown mode has similar attack/defend objectives, but players get just one life per round, and the teams swap sides midway. No one is currently playing it. The third mode is Firefight, a team deathmatch variant which is popular, but feels as if it’s missing the point of Red Orchestra.

While the weapons feel remarkable, the classes that carry them are familiar. There’s the Assault class, with a sub-machinegun; the Marksman, with a sniper rifle; the Rifleman and Elite Rifleman; and a few others. The few inventive classes, such as Squad Leaders and Commanders, do little to change the flow of battle. Both roles have valuable abilities, but nobody follows orders on public servers.



Even tanks don’t add much to the experience. They require a whole different set of skills to use well, and have lovingly detailed interiors, but they are an easily ignored nuisance on the few maps that actually include them. On any server I’ve ever joined, the one tank-only map is the moment in the war when everyone disappears to write letters home to their mothers.

Let’s be clear: none of these things are bad, they’re just not why Red Orchestra is great. Ignore how dull the idea of another World War 2 shooter sounds, and look to the experiences RO2 provides. Again, it’s the little things that have made me play it for 25 hours in a week.

It’s creeping through the ruined buildings of Pavlov’s House, one of the best maps, and jumping every time you see a piece of paper float through the air. It’s listening to the footsteps echoing through the building, and freezing as you hear creaking on the stairs. It’s the time I rounded a corner to come face to face with a Nazi holding a grenade above his head, bayoneted him in the stomach, and then dived down some stairs to escape the blast. It’s the thrill of sprinting across an open field, enemy machinegun fire whizzing all around you.



Death in RO2 is so sudden and violent that you’re constantly on edge, an experience that’s exacerbated by all the little pieces of information the game is keeping from you.

Firstly, at a distance there’s no easy, instant way to tell if a soldier is on your side. The uniforms are distinct, but not the fluorescent green cycling jackets you need on a smoky battlefield. If you’re close to someone, looking at them, and they’re on your side, their name will appear, but often you don’t have that kind of time.

Secondly, there’s no instant kill confirmation. You’ll be fighting across the ruined tenements on the wonderful Pavlov’s House map, and you’ll spot a head in a window across the street. From the shape of the helmet, you’ll infer that it’s an enemy and fire. The head will disappear from view. Are they dead? Did you miss? Are they wounded and bandaging themselves? Is it safe to move on? You can only hope. Wherever it can, RO2 makes murky what other games want to be clear. There’s no ammo display on the HUD; you have to check the barrel for a rough estimate, or count your own shots. Realism mode, which is activated on roughly half of the servers currently running, removes certainty altogether by taking out friendly names, kill confirmations and the radar. It doesn’t make a huge difference, but I had more fun in non-realism mode.



Lastly, the heart-munching adrenaline you feel in front of your PC is mirrored in the soldier you’re controlling. When you’re stood at a window and bullets start to chip against the frame, all the colour drains from the screen, the world blurs, and your aim becomes worse than a drunk teenager in a nightclub bathroom. You need to get out of there to catch your breath, like the person who enters the bathroom after the teenager. It’s a smart way to stop camping.

All this attention to detail hasn’t prevented the game from being miserably broken. Connecting to a server frequently plops me on to a team selection screen where the buttons don’t work. The server browser refreshes only once, meaning I have to restart the game to try again. If I do successfully connect to a server, the bugs don’t stop. Sometimes when I die, I’m unable to re-spawn until I re-select my class. The XP system, which is supposed to reward you with new weapons, is completely broken, and the Steam achievements system will often reward you for things you haven’t done. At least once every two hours, on two different PCs, the game crashed entirely.

It’s like buying a beautiful dining table from eBay, having your editor help you carry it up two flights of stairs, and then discovering it has Death Watch Beetles pupating inside it. Tripwire say they are aware of the issues, and I’m confident they’ll fix them, but right now it makes playing a chore.



Less likely to be fixed any time soon are the German and Soviet singleplayer ‘campaigns’, which amount to nothing more than multiplayer matches with bots, connected by brief, animated history lessons. They would be fine, but the bot AI is more stupid than the larvae tunnelling under my dinner plates.

Let’s make a list, then. The AI soldiers are blind, and will run directly past soldiers on the enemy team without firing. They’re cripplingly indecisive, and will leap in and out of the same window over and over. If an enemy is close enough, he’ll try to melee you, but if you run backwards, he’ll chase you interminably and never fire.

I’ve seen machinegunners set up with their backs to the enemy. I’ve seen machinegunners set up on top of kitchen cabinets, facing a wall. I’ve seen soldiers run in infinite circles, unable to navigate a corner. I’ve seen enemy tanks drive forever into walls, and crash into the front of me, but never fire.

The singleplayer option appears at the top of the main menu, and to newcomers who aren’t familiar with Red Orchestra it provides a terrible introduction. It should not have been released. Ignore it.

But don’t ignore the game. By perfecting a lot of tiny, gruesome details, its developers have created an experience where killing a man is as satisfying as getting a tetris, and when I close my eyes I’m still firing rifles in my head.

It is a puzzling day when such an impressive, interesting, expansive and customisable game is released free of charge. That's why everybody needs to play Metal Gear / Super Meat Boy hybrid-em-up Stealth Bastard immediately. And in a week of lovely free games, there's also a vampire-centric adventure, a pole-vaulting multiplayer game, and a puzzler in which one of your characters appears to be a staff member on PC Gamer UK. Put Skyrim down for a minute and read on for this week's picks...


Stealth Bastard

Curve Studios. Download it from the official website.



Unrelentingly stylish, mischevious and brutally challenging, Stealth Bastard is one of those games that's difficult to put down. It's also one of those games where, after playing it for just a few minutes, you scratch your head and wonder why on Earth it's free.

The elevator pitch is sort of 'Metal Gear Solid reimagined as Super Meat Boy'. You'll navigate a series of areas you must infiltrate, avoiding being spotted by security cameras and robots. You'll also have to deal with the countless insta-death traps that litter the game world. There's a leaderboard for high scores, some of which are just astonishing. Already, it's clear that a lot of people have spent a long time playing Stealth Bastard.

Making this delightful game even more impressive is the in-depth level creation suite that accompanies it. It's overwhelming to begin with, but once you figure out how it works you can develop your own maps and share them with others online. Already there's a decent community blossoming.

And it's just so professionally presented. Which shouldn't come as a surprise, given that this arrives from a studio responsible for several commercial games, including five Buzz! titles for Sony's PSP. That Curve Studios aren't charging for this splendidly drawn, epically soundtracked and impressively huge package is perplexing, but it's something of which we should be grateful.

Byte of the Draculator II

The Swarm. Download it from Big Blue Cup.



What do you get if you take the contributions of a huge range of Adventure Game Studio developers, then lump them all together in a single game. Something along the lines of Byte of the Draculator II, it would seem. In this short point-and-clicker you play as a half-vampire, half-robot hybrid, which should be all you need to know to understand that this is a very silly game.

With full voice acting (or variable quality) and a fairly rich stream of dialogue (of varying funniness), it's quite an impressive achievement, even though it's not the longest adventure game you'll ever play. The puzzles are generally smart, too, in the way that makes you groan as if you've just heard a terrible pun.

The Draculator himself begins to grate after you've heard him repeat the same line a hundred times in his ridiculous voice, but if you can stomach that, it's well worth a go.

The Convergence

Currant Cat. Play it on the website.



The Convergence is a love story. It follows a bespectacled young lady and a gentleman who looks a little bit too much like Rich McCormick as they defy gravity in a way that only lovers can. In this puzzle-platformer, which takes more than a little bit of inspiration from VVVVVV, the aim is to get the boy and the girl onto two opposing platforms so that their desire for one another may blossom.

This is an early build. There's no sound yet, and there are extra levels to be added, so says the developer. Ordinarily I'd leave something like this until nearer the finished version before writing about it, but already I've found myself hopelessly addicted. It's not hugely challenging, but the process of bringing these two young whippersnappers together is a rewarding one. It's also a pleasantly drawn game, blocky and colourful, and a great afternoon distraction.

Pole Riders

Bennett Foddy. Play it on Foddy's website.



If you know of Nidhogg, an absolutely delightful two-player game, then Pole Riders will seem quite familiar in its back-and-forth goal-chasing with a competitive multiplayer edge. Where that was about fencing, though, the idea here is that both of you play as a pole vaulter, aiming to vault upwards and kick a ball towards your opponent's castle. Obviously, your opponent will be trying to do the same back.

Pole Riders, though, comes with a floppy twist. Those who've played Foddy's previous games QWOP and GIRP will know that he enjoys playing around with fiddly, loose controls, incorporating them into his games as a mechanic in their own right. And with a pole vaulting game, these mechanics absolutely come into their own. This is a splendidly fun little game, made all the better by the gleeful, pizzicato strings sound effects that accompany the silliness.

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Payday is that bit in every heist movie since time began where the poo hits the fan. At some point, our gang of four criminals in clown masks were hunched over a table in a smoky room, working out their every move with mathematical precision. Now they’re trapped in a crumbling building with the loot, every policeman in the world is kicking in the front door, and their only hope is to survive long enough to make a miracle. And then do it again on a harder difficulty setting, because Normal mode is for wimps.

The most surprising thing about Payday is that, while it obviously owes Left 4 Dead the kind of debt that gets people’s legs broken by angry Russians with tyre irons, it only takes a couple of heists to start appreciating it as a very different experience. Unlike zombies, cops attack using helicopters, smoke grenades and automatic weapons, making the always-ranged battles fast and brutal. Each of the six heists also offers very different experiences, from Heat Street treating you to a familiar leg-it-through-town map, to Panic Room giving you a building to defend while you try to retrieve the stolen loot. Finally, where Left 4 Dead occasionally blesses you with a moment of relaxation, Payday’s 20 to 30-minute maps love to keep piling on the pressure.



Getting to the good stuff can be frustrating though. You can technically play Payday on your own, using AI partners to fill the slots, but only in the sense that you can technically drink your own urine. Finding a game can be harder than some of the levels: there’s no matchmaking, only a server list, and Payday is yet another of those games that uses RPG-style levelling to render a rookie player practically worthless. You get no weapon choices, no handy items to help the team, nothing. Try to join internet games, and get used to seeing the message: “You have been kicked from the server.”

The idea is that by levelling up, you’ll unlock the kit and competence to keep these levels feeling fresh. In theory, perhaps. However, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to run through them too many times, even on higher difficulty levels. There’s no scope for playing especially smart or coming up with your own criminal plans, with the action firmly about hitting up the preset objectives and gunning down cops until the smell of fresh bacon starts wafting out of your DVD drive.



The shooting itself does play out differently each time – especially on higher difficulty levels – though the more grounded subject matter doesn’t allow for anything like Left 4 Dead’s AI-directed shifts of fortune. There, you get the sick realisation that a Witch is hiding round the corner. Here, maybe you end up retrieving a bag from the roof instead of a balcony, or a bank key that worked last round no longer does, forcing you to take hostages and shoot more police for longer, but you rarely have time to notice such details, never mind care. You will notice other things, like the AI’s habit of glitching out, but even then you’ve usually got enough on your mind to let it pass.

Payday obviously suffers next to Left 4 Dead’s amazing polish, but that doesn’t stop it being a surprisingly compelling alternative – especially at this price. While flawed in many ways, it easily has enough spirit to be worth checking out next time you’re getting friends together for a LAN party. Stuck on your own though – or if you’re primarily going to be reliant on internet games with strangers – it’s a crime that’s unlikely to pay off.

Bezoar isn’t a city. It’s an explosion with streets. Every plaza is piled high with toxic barrels, every kiosk and ATM wired so that a single overly-enthusiastic sneeze can spray arcs of lightning at anyone in sight.

Why? Because Hard Reset isn’t just a reference to what you’re expected to do to the army of killer robots infesting the city: it’s what the game tries to do to shooter design itself. It’s a back-to-basics FPS in a shiny modern engine, not so much throwing out such things as moral choices and fancy physics puzzles as declaring them officially irrelevant. It’s you versus roughly seventy squillion enemies, hoping to save at least slightly more of your futuristic home than you blow up.



There’s a bit more plot than that, but it’s not worth worrying about. Hard Reset’s story bits, which mostly serve to give you something to look at while the next level loads, are a confusing, barely coherent mass of graphic-novel type scenes that fail miserably at introducing any of its characters, or even explaining why an army of machines is attacking a city named after a lump of hair dug out of the digestive system. Beyond ‘shooting stuff’, I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was doing for most of it, right up to the point where Hard Reset just decides it’s had enough and ends with nothing actually resolved.

Luckily, it’s a much better shooter than storyteller. Members of the team worked on both Bulletstorm and Painkiller, and it shows. Weapons and environmental explosions have terrific weight to them, and enemies attack in hordes of whirling-blade death machines instead of just a couple of tough guys at a time. You spend most of your time circle-strafing and running backwards: cover mostly exists to be blown away by a charging tank and scenery is every bit as deadly to you as the enemies. Ammo is plentiful (and recharges on its own if you run out), as is health. That doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing your own splattery death a lot, however, especially in multi-wave arena fights where you have to ration your pick-ups carefully to survive.



As good as all this feels, it doesn’t take long to get repetitive. There are very few enemy types, and none of them require any more advanced tactics than dodging a charge or switching to a rocket launcher to hit a boss’s brightly glowing weakpoints. Bar a spectacularly hateful final boss, you feel like you’ve seen it all very early on... and actually will have before very long. On Normal difficulty, I polished off the campaign in a casual afternoon’s play and was left with no incentive to replay it. There aren’t any multiplayer modes, and you’ll have all the weapons you actually want long before the end.

As a one-of-a-kind game, perhaps the nostalgia factor would be enough to compensate. Unfortunately for Hard Reset, it has company from both the original Painkiller and the balls-out cheer of Bulletstorm, with Serious Sam 3 close on its tail. In comparison to any of them, its back-to- basics charm feels firmly in tech-demo territory – albeit really good tech, and with great combat for the short while it actually lasts.

I remember storming the beaches of Normandy five years ago in one of CoD 2’s most tense and memorable levels. Yesterday in Black Ops I shot a zombie on the moon with a gun that made it vomit blood then explode. What the hell has happened to Call of Duty?

Whatever our memories of the shooter series, the zombie survival mode introduced by Treyarch in World at War has frequently been the best part of the regular Call of Duty: Black Ops packs. It follows, then, that a DLC pack made up of five zombie levels should be the best. It is, but not by much.



Moon is the centrepiece. You and three friends start out in a facility in Area 51, with zombies rising from the mud around you. Every few minutes a horn will sound and the zombies become faster and more powerful. Anyone frustrated by the boredom of the first few waves of a zombie map will greatly prefer this frantic opening. Within two minutes, the swarms will force you to take the cackling teleporter to the lunar surface.

You’ll find yourself in low gravity, gasping for air. Snatching an HEV mask will give you oxygen and eerily mute the sound of gunfire and incoming zombies. Like all of Black Ops’ zombie maps, you must use the points you’ve gained popping zombies to open doors to new parts of the level. Your first task is to turn on the power generator to restore gravity and oxygen to the warren of creepy moon-base corridors. If you fight deep enough into the facility you’ll get the wave gun that cooks zombies inside out. Restoring power also enables you to tear off your HEV mask so you can hear where the zombies are coming from, but it can be more fun to stay outside where a shotgun blast can send a nearby zombie flying into space. Low gravity is brilliant.



The other four maps aren’t so inventive. They’re almost identical versions of the four World at War zombie maps that Black Ops limited edition owners have been playing for months, with some upgraded lighting and slightly reshuffled weapons. The basic ruined house of Nacht der Untoten and the gloomy swamps of Shi No Numa represent the Zombies mode in its most skeletal and boring form. The huge Tesla coils of the experimental Nazi facility in Der Reise are more fun, but the real star of the resurrected maps is Verrückt . This splits your squad of four into two teams who must fight through a building to reunite, shooting zombies off each other’s backs across a large central square.

It’s telling that of all the Black Ops DLC packs the most worthwhile is 80% recycled material. Rezurrection is the best of a miserable bunch. Moon is good, but not £11.50 good, and it all seems moot when you can shell out an extra £2.50 and get Left 4 Dead 2 or Killing Floor for some more substantial, meatier zombie slaying.

Deep in a coma dream, Tanner floors his imaginary gas pedal and begins the chase. The suspect in the red SUV desperately weaves in and out of traffic, but if he’s hoping the risk of civilian casualties will keep him safe, he’s in the wrong car chase.

Tanner may not yet realise he’s lying in a hospital bed, but that doesn’t stop reality being his subconscious’s bitch. As the suspect hits the freeway, Tanner becomes a floating, ethereal spirit, possesses a truck driver coming the other way, and turns his truck into a high-speed battering ram.

And later, things get a bit odd.



Driver: San Francisco is one of the weirdest driving games ever, in the best possible way. It’s Life on Mars turned into a wheelman’s wet dream. Tanner’s ability to shift between cars at will takes what was previously a straightlaced series and makes it constantly fun, funny and chaotic. In the main story missions, it’s treated as a superpower that only Tanner and his partner are initially aware of. In side-missions, it’s cheerfully abused to hand out such objectives as coming first and second in the same race, helping a femme-fatale evade the cops and turning dangerous driving into a televised artform.

Tanner’s enthusiasm for all of these is infectious, and the fact that he’s temporarily possessing drivers instead of simply their cars makes for great in-game chatter from other terrified passengers. For instance, to convince his partner, Tanner torments a boy-racer by leaping into him and forcing him to smash into cops and leap off moving car transporters. Another couple of missions are about scaring people to the point of heart-attack through high-speed insanity. If all this wasn’t openly presented as a dream, Tanner would be the biggest dick this side of Saints Row 2. Instead, you can enjoy the ride, guilt-free.



It can be a bumpy one though, especially on PC. This isn’t a great port, starting with the fact that it quite obviously is one. Graphically, it’s unimpressive, and with no real options beyond switching antialiasing on or off. The biggest annoyance, however, is that the controls are designed for a controller with analogue sticks, and trying to play with keyboard and mouse is a recipe for insanity. You’re also stuck with Ubisoft’s DRM, which demands an online check when you fire the game up, though at least it lets you play offline after that.

Even with a controller, the actual driving is usually mediocre, with poor handling in most vehicles, and very rubber-banded races. Rarely do you come across a particularly difficult mission. This keeps the story humming along, but makes the occasional spikes all the more noticeable when they do show up.

Without its shifting element, Driver: San Francisco would be enjoyable enough mediocrity, but nothing special next to other driving games. With shifting, it’s one of the most enjoyable racing games in a very long time. Gimmicky or not, there’s a gleeful purity to Driver’s action, from its lack of gun battles and on-foot action, to the way it soon convinces you that magically weaponising oncoming traffic can be as natural as a handbrake turn. That especially is a hell of a trick.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, he's busy cursing empty, yet surprisingly detailed threats at Bethesda for thinking a tutorial was a good place for giant spiders. GRR! But also...

Skyrim! It's here, it's awesome, and you're probably playing it right now, aren't you? But here's something interesting you may or may not know - while it's officially The Elder Scrolls V, it's actually the seventh game set in its universe - not including expansion packs like Shivering Isles and Bloodmoon, or a set of mobile games for N-Gage and cellphones. Somewhere in the middle, two went missing - and their names are Battlespire and Redguard. What happened to these lost adventures?





While The Elder Scrolls is currently the biggest single-player RPG universe out there, the surprising thing is that it was never originally intended to be one. The first game, Arena, started out as a gladiatorial combat hack-and-slash about a team of mercenary types fighting their way through fantasy tournament bouts with the aim of ultimately taking down an evil wizard. During development, what had been intended as side-quests ended up becoming the game's core; a game that featured no magic items called The Elder Scrolls, nor any fighting in an arena. The first bit was added to the title more or less for the hell of it, the second handwaved by the idea that the land of Tamriel was so dangerous, so chaotic, simply living in it was like living in... uh... an arena, that "Arena" had been adopted as its nickname.

If that sounds tenuous to the point that it could be represented by a piece of Juicy Fruit gum stretched from the North Pole to Saturn... you're right! Allegedly, the only reason was that the adverts and boxes had already been printed... though all the boxes I've ever seen have had the Elder Scrolls tag on them, so that bit may be one of those apocryphal tales that'd taste better with pinch of salt.

Neither of the first two games are particularly obscure, though with the first coming out in 1994 and its sequel, Daggerfall, landing in 1996, but let's take a quick look at them just to set the scene. They're pretty weird games, starting by dropping the player in some of the biggest gameworlds ever and ending with conclusive proof that bigger isn't necessarily better - especially in a primitive 3D engine. Daggerfall remains one of the standard worlds that gets trotted out as a comparison whenever someone claims their world has 15 square km or space or whatever, boasting as it does no less than 487,000 of the randomly generated buggers. That's twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns, cities, and villages. Or so it says on Wikipedia. If you'd like to go count them for yourself, feel free to correct it.



Don't let the graphics fool you. For the time, this was impressive 3D, and a reasonably deep RPG. It wasn't the narrative based joy of something like Ultima, but if you just wanted a sandpit, the only thing in your way was one of the most brutal welcoming committes ever. Arena especially came out swinging. You know how Oblivion and Skyrim start with tutorial dungeons? This game starts with a fuck you dungeon. It's big, sprawling, and will kick your ass, but that's only the start of the pain. Dare to sleep in the wrong place, and it actually spawns extra-tough monsters to punish you for it. How bad are we talking? The lead designer - repeat - the lead designer of Morrowind/Oblivion claims to have fired it up around 20 times since it came out, and only finished it once. Not the game. The first dungeon.

And once you're out of it? It gets worse. You emerge battered and bruised in the middle of an entire continent, with about six million square kilometres of terrain to explore. How many hand-crafted dungeons are there in that, holding plot relevant things? Seventeen. One plus seven. Not eight. Yow. You may as well try to find a needle in a haystack, blindfolded and using your teeth. Only without the needle. And with a bucket full of scorpions instead of a haystack. Upside down. On the moon. Reached by a rocket. That you built yourself with Kraft cheese slices. Paid for by a part-time snipe-hunting job.

Or you could just cheat your arse off, like 99.9% of the people who ever finished it did.



Looking back, it's a miracle the series ever got off the ground... and it almost didn't. It was a buggy mess, with little 'real' content, and a spectacularly bad art swords-and-sleazery cover of the kind that only contemptuous marketing people still persist in thinking gamers will be drawn to like Pee-Wee Herman to a porno theatre. All of that, plus the fact that distributors had been expecting some kind of rock-em-sock-em action game, only to get a hardcore RPG instead meant that Bethesda initially shipped fewer copies of Arena than of The Terminator 2029: Operation Scour - an expansion pack to a completely forgotten licensed game. (That we may do one week.) Hard to imagine now, isn't it?

For their sins though, the Elder Scrolls did some awesome and quirky things - a demo and word-of-mouth attracting the hardcore RPG demographic and and ultimately turning it into a slow burning success. And not without cause. Being able to make your own spells quickly became a series trademark, though unfortunately not one that continues into Skyrim. Similarly, elements like its melee combat, while rudimentary now, were surprisingly fun for the time. After Arena, Bethesda realised the importance of actual content, and served up a far more complicated world with guilds and missions and a much stronger story... that was also impossible to complete at launch, but never mind... and a ton of options that would still be noteworthy in modern RPGs, like becoming a vampire or a werewolf.

Oh, and one more, that no commercial RPG is ever likely to do again...



Yep. Daggerfall especially was pretty filthy by modern standards, not only leaving your character naked if they took off all their clothes instead of welding tacky underwear to their naughty bits, but sprinkling its world with naked priestesses, horny succubi and more, regardless of whether you switched on the special child-safety mode. And there were plans for other things too, which never made it into the game, like a joinable guild of prostitutes and a cut-scene to play for when sexy time happened.



After making a name for the series with Arena and Daggerfall, Bethesda opted... to release something completely different. Meet Battlespire - easily the oddest, and by far the worst of the Elder Scrolls series. It was originally intended to be a Daggerfall expansion, being promoted to a full game during development, which landed right at the end of the DOS era. Where previous games had been taken on huge worlds, this took an Ultima Underworld approach and was (almost) entirely set in one mage academy taken over by everyone's favourite baddie called Mehrunes Dagon, Mehrunes Dagon.

(Incidentally, doesn't "Mehrunes" sound like a particularly apathetic mage? Just saying.)

Battlespire was the first and only game in a spin-off series, Elder Scroll Legends, and the first in the Elder Scolls series as a whole where everything was designed in an editor instead of by throwing a bag of random seeds at a map and seeing what happened. It's also the only multiplayer game in the series, though one of the many reasons for its failure was that getting it running was a real pain in the arse. This wasn't really its fault - server browsers as we know them today were still in their infancy and most people were still on awful modems - but for good and bad, it was a bit ahead of its time.

Never having played it with anyone because other people smell and try take your sweeties, I have no idea how it worked in either co-op, or what's probably best described as the This Game Has Deathmatch? modes. Flying solo though, it's another brutal, brutal game. You're not allowed to rest to regain health, the monsters are hard as nails right from the start, and the design goes out of its way to give you rubbish, fragile equipment. All the niceties of a full RPG are gone, from towns to the wimpy idea of a difficulty curve, replaced by a relentless trudge around every level. Cool things are few and far between, unless you count being able to talk to a few of the monsters if you can persuade them to stop impaling you on their claws for a few seconds, and absolutely awful writing.

Here's a handy Let's Play courtesy of YouTube.

Won't lie, I don't have much to say about this game for one reason: I've never gotten more than a couple of levels through it. There are harder RPGs, but the relentless trudge of its hack-and-slash action makes even that much a real grind, and it offers next to no good reason to endure it. At the time, simply getting it running required a hefty PC (mostly because it was built for then-high resolution graphics without having any support for the 3DFX card), with fans more likely to praise it for its very in-depth character creation system than anything in the actual game. Ultima Underworld 2 it was not. And that game got away with saying "Okay, you're in a flying castle... with no windows. Just trust us, 'kay?"



Despite shoving the Elder Scrolls Legends series firmly to the bottom of the drawer, Bethesda decided to try something else. Games like Tomb Raider and Space Bunnies Must Die... more the first than the second... had exploded onto the market, CD was now standard, and 3D acceleration was rapidly spreading. Cue a brand new series that would bring a whole new audience to the world of Nirn/get unceremoniously canned after just one game... The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard.

Redguard was a decent enough action adventure for its time, if one that deviate even further from the series than Battlespire. It's the only game in the series where you don't get to make your own character and story, casting you as a pirate type called Cyrus on a hunt for his sister on the island Stros M'kai.

It's also the retrogaming equivalent of being broken on the rack.

For some insane reason, Bethesda built the game around two of the Holy Trifecta of pain: Windows, 3DFX and Quicktime. It's a DOS game, but with a Windows installer that basically doesn't work on any recent version. Painfully extracting the files by hand and throwing it into DOSBox, you then discover that while it does have a software rendering mode, you're not going to get more than a few frames a second out of it. People tell me it's possible to get it running, but I tried for hours without success - and even then, it apparently breaks midway through. The only way I got anything out of it was with Glidos-



No, Glidos, which seems to work, but adds its own spinning logo to the 3D world unless you cough up $10 for an unlock key to play this, Tomb Raider, and not a vast amount else, really. Still, $10 isn't much. Obviously, only a spectacular skinflint would begrudge the hard-working programmer that.



Even after all this work, nothing's guaranteed. My i7 PC which handles Skyrim on Ultra chugs away like nobody's business, keypresses are laggy, and the sound doesn't work. Also, it's surprisingly hard to fight and keep track of what's going on with the word GLIDOS spinning in front of your face on a constant loop. So, while I originally planned to play through a decent chunk of it and see how it lived up, instead I'm going to have to rely on my memories from playing it way back in 1998. Unfortunately, since my PC at the time was a pile of crap, mostly what I remember is it chugging away like nobody's business, with lots of lag. There was probably music, but I don't recall. Hmm. This is going well...

As attempts to turn a franchise into a 3D adventure go though, it was definitely more successful than most of the time, from King's Quest: Mask of Eternity to Ultima IX. It may not have sold brilliantly, but it wasn't a spin-off that had fans vomiting out their skulls or cursing its name until the nth generation - if only because Morrowind was on its way, and the use of the 'Adventure' tag made it clear that this was a spin-off series. Its hardcore roots would never be left behind! Not even in Oblivion! Cough.

The choice of subject matter definitely didn't hurt it either. Pirates have always been such an undertapped niche that Sid Meier's Pirates! and Monkey Island are the only ones that have ever particularly stood out, and Redguard's take on them was at least reasonable. It used a proper dueling system for instance, more like Prince of Persia than simply hammering the button... but as ever with the Elder Scrolls series pre-Oblivion, leaned firmly towards the 'murder the player' school of game balance. As for the adventure side of 'action-adventure', it didn't cheap out by turning all the characters you might have talked to into kumquats or similar to avoid having to have a conversation system... a rarity at the time... and told a reasonable story on a much smaller scale than the RPGs.

Mind you, it was equally impossible to finish, not because of bugs, but because of unfinished French homework. I think the final boss was the pluperfect tense. But again, I might be mis-remembering.

Maybe this Let's Play will help...



As for the portable games? Being neither a millionaire nor a moron, I've never owned an N-Gage, so I have no idea about that one. Nor have I ever felt the urge to play an RPG on anything less powerful than the iPhone. The only things I know about them is that they were called The Elder Scrolls Travels, and one of them, Dawnstar, is a city that also appears in Skyrim. I'm guessing it looks prettier now than crushed onto a tiny LCD, but you never know. Maybe Bethesda buried it for shame that even with its great technology, it could never hope to create anything so beautiful, so realistic, so transcendent. In a thousand years, maybe archeologists will uncover it and be instantly blinded by the sight of their very God, the revered game that has sparked churches and crusades, and a new Golden Age based on the hope that one day humanity may again touch such perfection, pair it with one of those plastic wristwatches that played Altered Beast, and take off into the celestial heavens cosmos on a mission of love that will spread light to the darkest corners like a beacon. A beacon called Dawnstar...

...

Anyway, if you only play one Elder Scrolls game this weekend... make it Skyrim. Obviously. But if you're interested in taking a trip back to see how things first started, both Arena and Daggerfall have been released free, and don't take much dicking around with DOSBox to get up and running. The original versions aren't the best ones, so I'd recommend going through The Elder Scrolls Pages for links to fan-patches, extra content, and the information you'll need to even stand a chance without a copy of the manuals to hand. They're not easy games, and if you're not willing to basically make your own fun, you're probably best off steering clear. As a way of really appreciating how awesome Skyrim is though, you won't find may better ways short of... well... actually playing Skyrim. Like you already are.

And on that note, if you'll excuse me, I have a Dark Brotherhood to murder my way into.