Typical. You wait months for even a sliver of Wasteland 2 footage, and then seventeen-odd minutes of it turns up at once. The following video appears in the game's latest Kickstarter update, 'Without Further Ado'; the accompanying text going on to describe it in detail, making sure we're aware that there are a lot of missing or unfinished elements in place. Even so, this early build of Wasteland 2 (minus sound effects) is looking remarkably robust, containing an environment rife with atmosphere, sweary conversation and typically grisly narration - oh and the occasional giant mutated bug.

The action proper kicks off after a few static radio transmissions, so you may want to knock the video along a couple of minutes. You'll be rewarded by a tour of the Agricultural Center by Development Director Chris Keenan, showing off the game's tactical combat and dialogue, and with a demonstration of the lockpicking and brute force skills. Wasteland 2's currently on track for an October release.

Thanks to Blue'sNews.

This all started in Chiu Dai park, Hong Kong, twelve years ago. The first mission of the first Hitman game. You’re given a target, a pistol and a disassembled sniper rifle in a briefcase. And something is odd.

You’re just a guy, in a street. No one’s shooting at you. No one’s hunting for you. The challenge isn’t to survive, or to get to the exit, or to solve a puzzle. You can just explore, observe, and understand this space, then decide how to make one man dead.

For the rest of that game, and for two others, the Hitman series kept giving us glimpses of that perfect assassination sim. And it kept screwing it up. The first game had you sprinting through a jungle warzone to steal a sacred tribal statue. Silent Assassin made you trek across fields of snow in Japan. Contracts hounded you with SWAT teams. And last year’s Absolution missed the point more completely than ever: it’s a story driven sneak-’em-up primarily about reaching the door to the next cut scene.

But one time, in 2006, IO Interactive did make a near-perfect assassination sim. And it wasn’t just the best Hitman game, it’s one of the richest, most open-ended and enduringly satisfying games ever. Hitman: Blood Money is the darker twin of Deus Ex.



There’s a short, restrictive tutorial that isn’t very good. And there’s an ending so odd that many players don’t even realise it’s playable, and simply quit. But that’s it: every single one of the 12 main missions is a proper assassination in a space you can explore, with dozens of possible approaches.

A Hitman mission – a good one – is a clockwork dollhouse of interacting elements. Guards walk their patrols on one timer, a short one, and it’s easy to learn and predict them. Workers have more elaborate routines: the dustman comes to collect the trash, the courier delivers the diamonds, the janitor uses the bathroom. And the centrepieces, the targets, all move differently. One performs a whole opera rehearsal before retiring to his dressing room. One takes a long soak in a glass bottomed jacuzzi. One performs a pyrotechnics show.

You can weave between these moving parts to put the tiniest spanner in the works, and watch it all fall apart. Replace a prop pistol with a real one. Crack the glass jacuzzi with a silent shot. Rig a flamethrower to catch the performer mid-act. Each orchestrated accident is the solution to an elaborate puzzle, whose clues are everywhere if you look hard enough.

But minimal intervention is just one extremity of a huge possibility space, one that includes a world of other stylistic philosophies to kill by.



I’ve tried killing everyone with a kitchen knife. I’ve tried never changing out of my suit. I’ve tried using only an unconcealable shotgun. And I've tried the Silent Assassin code: no witnesses, no evidence, and no kills except your target.

My current favourite is similar, but stricter still: every target has to be shot with my custom sniper rifle. It’s a long range and silent weapon, but because it’s so big I have to unpack it from a briefcase and assemble it before each shot. On missions with three targets, that means unpacking and repacking the weapon three times, in line of sight of each target, without being spotted. It’s hard, which is why I’m doing it. But it’s possible, which is crazy.

Every time I think it can't be done, Blood Money’s mission design surprises me again. There’s no way to get an angle on Manuel Delgado while he’s out in the open, but it turns out there’s a row of barrels in his wine cellar that can hide my set-up and pack-away rituals. There’s no way to assemble my gun in a gang boss’s office before he turns around, but it turns out there’s a drainpipe across the street I can climb for a perfect angle on his balcony. And there’s no way to take my briefcase with me into a rehab clinic, but I can toss it over the wall, wait for the guards to confiscate it, then steal it back from their security office once I’m inside.

In fact, if you’ve ever wondered what’s so special about Blood Money’s level of simulation, throw a briefcase into it and watch what happens. You’ll find them on most missions – full of money, diamonds, DNA samples, or just hotel guests’ luggage – and they open up an extraordinary set of deceptive schemes.



Luggage is not suspicious when you’re carrying it, which means you can sneak bombs or guns into it to get past a full body search. But unattended luggage is odd, and will be picked up by the nearest guard. If there’s a bomb in it, you’ve just given yourself a way to remotely and instantly kill everyone in the security office at any time. If there’s a gun in it, as in my sniper rifle example, you can steal it back once you’re past security yourself.

But Blood Money lets you be trickier still. What if there’s nothing in the briefcase? It’s still an odd thing to find lying around, and a guard will still pick it up and take it away. But now the endgame is not what you’re interested in – it doesn't matter where the briefcase ends up, but it matters that one of the guards has to take it there. Particularly when there are only two patrolling the objective.

As one walks off with the briefcase, his partner can be silently strangled, his uniform taken, and his body hidden before anyone else even knows you’re there. And when the other guard gets to the security office, he sets down the empty case and turns to see a colleague he doesn’t recognise. The colleague’s gun has a silencer on it. And that’s the last line of code that passes through his digital brain.

Hitman is a murder simulator, and that might be a terrible thing. I don’t know. But if you’re going to make one, make it as beautiful as Blood Money. Make it a dark and complex work of interactive art, a working model of the mathematics of lies. Six years later, people like me will still be too enthralled with playing it to care.

This article originally appeared in issue 249 of PC Gamer UK.

Having retired from world-saving heroics, Christopher Livingston is living the simple life in video games by playing a series of down-to-earth simulations, though this week is less down-to-earth and more up-to-space as he attempts to create his own space program and learns that what goes up, might not come down. Ever.


I've just scored a major success in Kerbal Space Program, a simulation that lets you build rockets, launch astronauts into space, and explore the solar system. After many, many attempts, I have finally put an astronaut into a stable orbit around my home planet of Kerbin. There is a caveat: as he orbits the planet, my astronaut bears upon his face a constant look of sheer, unmitigated terror. This fixed expression of horror may be because he is well aware of a second caveat: he's used up all his fuel getting into orbit, so there is no way to get him back out of orbit. Essentially, he is stuck in space, possibly forever. Oops!



The word "oops" is going to come up a lot today, and that has to do with my scientific process and how it's not so much a process as a bunch of things I try. I am not practicing science as much as I am inflicting it upon thousands of pounds of rocket fuel and my inexhaustible supply of hapless astronauts. Luckily, oopsies in Kerbal Space Program are both fun and educational, and internally I've come to think of my oopsies as opportunities. In fact, let's call them oopsortunities!

You can click the image to see just how big an oopsortunity this was.

In KSP, my oopsortunities begin in the vehicle assembly building, where it's a snap to build a rocket ship. Literally.The parts snap together like LEGO blocks, and it's easy to assemble a massive, multi-stage rocket within a few minutes. Whether or not the rocket will work properly is a different matter entirely. What looks nifty in the assembly building may just sit there, too heavy to take off, or perhaps turn a bit explodey if it's not structurally sound. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong, like messing up the sequences of your rocket stages, using the wrong types of engines on the fuel tanks, or, say, hitting the building that sits next to the launch pad.

A successful launch, provided we were trying to be the first man on the roof.

When things go awry, it's not a big deal. Just head back to the assembly room, make some tweaks, get some new astronauts, and try again. Even the worst oopsortunities teach me something, and just because my decouplers weren't strong enough to hold onto my solid boosters long enough to get into space, that doesn't mean my astronauts can't still have a successful landing.

The astronauts have returned safely! Also, ignore those broken rocket parts whizzing around back there!

Actual successes can be a bit surprising after a long string of oopsortunities. Sometimes, the tensest moments in KSP come not while watching a launch fail but actually succeed. I had gotten so used to my rockets failing to escape Kerbin's gravity that when one finally did, I had no idea what to do. I hadn't learned yet how to put my craft in orbit, so I essentially just flew my astronaut away from Kerbin and deep into space. He's still up there, not orbiting Kerbin or the moon, but the Sun itself, and of course he's out of fuel, meaning he will be circling the solar system forever, or until his orbit decays, or until I've advanced my space program enough to go rescue him. I wouldn't hold my breath for that last option, though my astronaut might have to.

Another safe landing! On Kerbin. We just missed the moon by... a bit.

That is, however, one of the great things about KSP: provided you don't cancel the mission, your space capsules, astronauts, debris, and whatever else you've thrown off your planet will remain persistent in the game. At any point during my career, I'll be able to check on my marooned astronauts or look at how much junk I've spewed into orbit. My few successes and all my little oopsortunities, all perpetually floating around being tracked.

Eventually I'll have enough junk floating out there I can just walk to the moon.

While I feel a bit guilty that I can't bring my two orbiting astronauts home, it's still a huge success for my space program. As miserable as those spacemen may be, at least they're orbiting something. I have another one simply headed straight out of the solar system, so powerful were the rockets that launched him and so poor was my ability to correct his trajectory.

See, I aimed directly at the moon after escaping Kerbin's gravity, though I didn't really take into account that the moon wouldn't actually be there when my rocket reached it, due to, y'know, the moon moving along on its own orbit. I just wound up shooting straight past it, which I'm counting as a successful oopsortunity, since if it had been there, I had literally no way to stop anyway, and would have crashed. So, that astronaut is headed straight out into the abyss forever, but at least he seems to be enjoying his spacewalks.

Provided you do not have any follow-up questions: Yes. We are bringing you home soon.

Someday, I hope to safely reach the moon, land there, have an astronaut pop the hatch and walk around, and then strand him there forever. I know, my goal should involve a return trip to Kerbin, but I'm not sure how many oopsortunities that would take. Thousands, probably. Land 'em and strand 'em. That's my motto.

Conclusion: This simulation is tons of fun to just play around with for those not gifted in science and math and learning things (me), and I suspect it's even better for those genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about physics and spaceflight. The free demo (scroll down a bit) gives you a decent selection of rocket parts to practice with and the moon to aim for, but the full alpha build version, at $23, gives you tons more, as well as an entire solar system of planets to (try to) visit. Absolutely worth the price.

This preview originally appeared in issue 248 of PC Gamer UK shortly before THQ's implosion. 4A Games has since been acquired by Koch Media, and though the game's release is still anticipated, no definitive release date has been announced since.

In the tunnels beneath post-nuclear Moscow, there is a town called Theater. Like much of what passes for civilisation in Russian sci-fi author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s apocalypse, it’s built into the old subway – the metro system for which 4A Games’ shooter series is named.

Theater’s curving tilework makes it look like it might have had a bit of class, back in the day. The walls could be marble, and although they’re streaked with grime they’re dazzlingly white by the standards of this rust-and-blood dystopia.

I’m watching one of Metro: Last Light’s non-combat sections. The campaign will lead protagonist Artyom through four waystations of this kind, places where the player can trade top-grade ammo for weapons and upgrades, scout out additional plot information, and otherwise absorb 4A’s meticulous rendering of the world in the year 2034.

Artyom passes through Theater’s kitchens, where a panhandling drama critic bemoans the irrelevance of his profession. Not without reason: this is a world where life is measured in bullets and gasmask filters rather than glasses of Prosecco and those little tubs of ice cream with a wooden spoon in the lid.



High art might have been a casualty of nuclear war, but culture survives. Outside the market, there’s an area where an older man performs shadow puppets for an assembled crowd of children. He makes a bird and an elephant, and his audience interprets these as a demon and a nosalis – two of the mutated creatures that prowl Moscow’s unsettled tunnels and blasted surface. The sequence is a touching little meditation on what it’s like to be born after the end of the world. It also illustrates what 4A’s proprietary engine is capable of. Dynamic lighting, audio and physics support everything that 4A are trying to achieve, from wandering around a town packed with refugees to stalking human enemies through the shadows, or engaging in a running battle with a pack of monsters.

A short time later Artyom reaches the theatre itself, where he is joined by Pavel – a returning character from the first game. As they make their way through the crowded auditorium during a burlesque performance, Pavel turns to the player and quips: “well, Stanislavski, you can watch the show if you like.”

A 20th century Russian dramatist is an odd point of reference for a character who makes his living blasting mutated rats the size of ponies, but it’s a neat touchstone for Metro: Last Light itself. 4A Games are based in Ukraine. They’re part of the Eastern European development ecosystem, and share a measure of its enthusiasm for simulation. Metro isn’t concerned with realism in the same way as Arma – once again, rats the size of ponies – but it boasts a naturalistic attention to detail and a vigilant support for the fourth wall. If Call of Duty is a broadway musical, a wide-barrelled cannon loaded with glitter and aimed squarely at the audience’s face, then Metro: Last Light is trying to be something smarter, tougher, and more rewarding – Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, perhaps.



“It’s this obsessive attention to every minute detail, on each individual thing in the world – the culmination is something that is greater than the sum of its parts,” THQ creative strategist Huw Beynon tells me. “We really want to impress on people playing the game that this isn’t a level. It’s an environment. A place.”

It’s something most apparent when Artyom is facing human opponents. During one mission to escape from an engineering yard patrolled by Reich fascists, idle guards can be seen working out, tending fires, sleeping, singing and talking shop.

Metro: Last Light’s stealth system is deep rather than broad, and grounded in realism. Like its predecessor, the game has a very minimal UI, with no crosshair and no artificial assists such as a mini-map or sight cones for patrolling enemies. Instead, you’ll rely on the equipment in Artyom’s possession: a torch, a lighter, a photosensitive gadget on his watch that glows when he’s standing in light to let you know he’s in danger of being spotted. Noise is important, too: even the game’s hand-pumped pneumatic guns aren’t perfectly silent, and will get you detected if you use them in close proximity to an enemy. The more power you pump into them, the louder they hiss – and this isn’t just a signal to the player that they can stop cranking the handle. It’s a sound, in the world, that a curious guard may respond to.



Throwing knives offer a guaranteed silent kill, as do lethal and non-lethal melee takedowns: but all of these require that you catch your opponent off-guard, and that means traversing the level carefully. Most light sources can be shot out, and electric lamps can be brought down at junction boxes scattered throughout each stage. Doing so will raise suspicion, however. Not only that, but the kind of light matters. Shoot out a lightbulb and you’ll plunge an area into darkness with a tinkling of broken glass. Shoot out an oil lamp and you risk starting a fire that will propagate freely on wood and cardboard, not only illuminating the area more but drawing every guard in the vicinity. These, you need to blow out the old fashioned way – unless a distracting blaze is exactly what you’re looking for.

Sudden darkness will cause guards to activate headlamps and torches, and these can also be shot out by a sufficiently skilled marksman. Kill a guard wearing a miner’s helmet and his light will continue to shine until you disable it, adding an element of risk to each kill and illustrating what a dynamic lighting system can bring to stealthy play.

The AI seems improved from the days of Metro 2033 – I saw guards switch lights back on and respond believably to unusual sounds and the sudden disappearance of colleagues. In open combat, they fell back into a fairly familiar cover-and-flank routine. Without hands-on experimentation I’m unwilling to say outright that Metro 2033’s AI problems are a thing of the past, but in two hours of live demonstration I didn’t see anyone stare blankly as a colleague received a harpoon to the chest or start running laps around sandbags in the middle of a gunfight, so there’s that.





Last Light isn’t a dedicated stealth game, and therefore doesn’t feature the full mechanical complexity of Hitman or Dishonored – you won’t be hiding bodies or hacking turrets or approaching levels from a dozen possible angles. But its focus on simple details – the fact that it lacks typical stealth game accoutrements like maps and a HUD – give it a naturalism that’s appealing in its own right. Last Light is more about lots of small, interesting interactions with the world, rather than making and executing grand plans.

Those small interactions are the key to the game’s loftier ambitions. Metro 2033’s morality system will return with alterations that THQ and 4A aren’t yet willing to disclose – indeed, Beynon asks that the press give away as little as possible about the specific ways in which the game will track and respond to the choices that the player makes in the game. Metro 2033 undersold its morality system to the extent that many players had no idea it was there, but Beynon argues that ‘gamifying’ ethics with clear-cut ‘choose your alignment’ moments undermine the whole concept.

This also applies to anyone who played through the first game with a guide in order to ‘beat’ the morality system. “They’ve missed the point entirely,” Beynon says. “It’s almost a hilarious joke. It’s like following a recipe without understanding what it is that you’re making.”



“The things that take place in the environment should be consistent and believable,” Beynon continues. “As you introduce that, people will think about the way they perceive the game-world that they’ve been asked to play in. I think we do a really good job of humanising all of the people that you fight against.”

The hope is that by convincing the player of the verisimilitude of the world, the decisions they make will be more genuine – and more meaningful – than those offered by a traditional RPG.

The idea of providing room for more satisfying choices has also informed Metro’s weapon system, although in a different way. Where in Metro 2033 the player was limited to three weapons within different categories – sidearms, primary weapons, and secondary special weapons – in Last Light you will be free to mix and match any trio of guns you like. Extensive customisation also frees you to swap out scopes, extended clips, silencers and so on, at the cost of valuable pre-war ammunition that doubles as currency. If you want to tool Artyom out for sniping and stealth, that’s up to you: alternatively, you might place your hopes in automatic shotguns and assault rifles.

“You make your choice and you deal with the consequences,” Beynon says. “If you want to, you can play it very safe throughout the game – that’s fine, that might be the optimal way to play it. But you might not get to experiment with things that are really fun.”



An extraordinary amount of effort has gone into modelling the weapons themselves. Spent casings clink together dynamically as they tumble from a revolver during a reload, a detail demonstrated to me by slowing game-time down to a fraction of its regular speed. Viewing the game this way, it’s also possible to pick out the way a spring pushes each new ball-bearing into the chamber of Artyom’s pneumatic rifle between shots, and admire the lever mechanism that pulls the next shell into position on a jury-rigged automatic shotgun. Last Light’s makeshift weapons are the brainchild of 4A creative director Andrew ‘Prof’ Prokhorov, whose background in aeronautical simulation gives him the technical expertise to design new firearms that would actually work.

“There’s no gamification of the devices that you have,” Beynon says. “That’s a contributing factor – if you want to see how much battery you have in your torch, you have to bring up the charger – a physical thing that sits in your hands. The cumulative effect of that detail builds the sense of the world.”

It’s also what makes Last Light a contender as a horror game. During another sequence, Artyom drives a tram – made up like a dragster, and covered in lights – through an abandoned area of the subway. The lights keep photosensitive spider monsters at bay (sorry about those, arachnophobes), but if you choose you can stop the car at any point to get out and explore side passages for supplies and secrets. Dynamic lightning in this context means something very different.

Finding a junction box and switching on all the lights in a section is now a huge source of relief, tempered by the sound of a hive full of spider monsters screeching and thrashing in response. It feels like a totally different game to the one where a man darted between campfires, unscrewing bulbs and slitting throats – but it’s based on the same mechanics, and it’s part of a contiguous experience.



It’s easier than ever to think of ‘first-person shooter’ as an outdated term. The temptation is to break it down into parts – to map out a landscape with your deathmatch blasters over here and your thinking man’s sneak-’em-ups over there, your Portal-style spatial puzzlers nestling a healthy distance from DayZ’s wide-open survival horror. The problem with this approach is that it downplays the unifying effect that the first-person perspective has: the way that lots of divergent experiences can be made to feel like part of a continuous whole. Game mechanics don’t get much simpler or more relatable than ‘looking and doing’.

Metro: Last Light is setting out to be many things: realistic shooter, stealth sim, cinematic narrative experience, atmospheric exploration game. Having been shown an extended chunk, though, I don’t feel it’s quite right to describe it as a hybrid. Instead, the impression I get is of a first-person shooter of an older sort – a linear game with the mechanical variety to support many different approaches and experiences, and the design sense and eye for detail to sustain dramatic shifts in tone, from frantic monster horror to blistering military shooter. It’s an old model, in some ways, but a proven one – just ask Half-Life 2.

Whether or not the game can perform to those high standards remains to be seen: but it has something of that old-school sensibility. It’s a show that is very much worth stopping to watch.

Well this is awful. You might recall that, around eight months ago, Epic Games snapped up many of the developers left jobless after the collapse of Kingdom of Amalur's 38 Studios and Big Huge Games. This new company, Impossible Studios, seemed like the light at the end of a particularly dark tunnel - but it's just a few months later and the developers have been fired all over again. Epic founder Tim Sweeney made the announcement on their community site, stating that "ultimately it wasn't working out for Epic."

Here's the statement in full:

"We're closing Impossible Studios.

When former members of Big Huge Games approached Epic last year, we saw the opportunity to help a great group of people while putting them to work on a project that needed a team. It was a bold initiative and the Impossible folks made a gallant effort, but ultimately it wasn't working out for Epic.

In addition to providing Impossible Studios employees with 3 months of severance pay, we'll be giving the team the opportunity to form a new company with the Impossible Studios name and the awesome Impossibear logo.

This means that Infinity Blade: Dungeons is now on hold as we figure out the future of the project."

Still, at least they get to keep that logo. Eurogamer are reporting that Ken Levine has since expressed an interest in Irrational Games acquiring some of the laid off staff, noting in a Facebook status update that he's a "huge fan of everything Big Huge ever did" - a comment accompanied by a link to Irrational's hiring page. Hopefully those affected will land on their feet, whether they decide to reform the studio or not.

We'll keep you updated as soon we know more.

In the grand tradition of releasing a new thing for a game just as we're beginning to forget all about it, iD software have bolted the official toolkit for Rage onto Steam. You can finally build your own environments, guns, mutants, cars or whatever else. Perhaps you could swap John Goodman's character Dan Hagar for one that looks more like John Goodman, or create a mod that changes the colour palette from 'very brown' to 'less very brown' - whatever your heart desires. However, there are a couple of things to bear in mind with the download, not least the fact that it's a whopping 35+ GB in size.

There's a welcome document accompanying the toolkit, which makes clear that the kit is "provided on an 'as is' basis only for the technically sophisticated and adventurous." iD's John Carmack tweets that "The toolkit release is not something that we consider consumer friendly, but it does let you get a look inside the construction process."

To download the toolkit, head to Tools section on Steam (it's helpfully listed as Rage Tool Kit).

Thanks, Eurogamer.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Ace of Spades’ indie-developed alpha version was broken in many small ways, but the sandbox shooter’s foundations were remarkably solid. It was Minecraft spliced with Team Fortress 2, a shooter that let players slowly build and destroy a blocky environment. Runescape publisher Jagex took the game and some of its developers in-house, and promptly broke it.

Ace of Spades lets players modify their environment. Interaction is similar to that of Minecraft: spades, picks, and other tools dig out blocks, a disembodied hand places them. Players are encouraged to build structures: each of the four classes – commando, rocketeer, sniper and miner – gets pre-made fortifications that they can plonk around the cuboid maps. Game modes encourage blowing things up as much as people; Destruction is the best of these, asking a team to wreck an enemy’s house before their own home is demolished.

But the speed of the game means that time spent building or planning is time wasted. Ace of Spades is a twitch shooter, and the malleable environment is entirely pointless. Games only last around 15 minutes at most, meaning grand building projects are off the table. Players can jump and sprint around the maps at a lightning pace, mounting carefully placed defences in a single leap. The Rocketeer’s inclusion is particularly galling: the bastard can just hop over any geometrically intricate structures that are in his way.



The act of destruction is more enjoyable. The miner gets access toa spinning drill bit that can take out a giant wodge of blocks in a few seconds, and I had most fun alone in a corner of a map carving massive holes into rock faces. Blocks make satisfying sounds when they pop, and severing a structure from its foundations has tactical benefits: gravity kicks in and levels it.

I could forgive Ace of Spades’ pointless environmental interactivity if the shooting was top-notch. It’s not. The speed of opposition players meant I found myself reduced to guessing where I’d be attacked from. There are no battle lines in a game where people can attack from above or below. The latter approach offers something tactically intriguing – burrowing under an enemy’s base and killing them from behind – but it’s minutes of digging for a slim chance of reward. Just as likely, the opposition team will spot you and plug you for a one-shot sniper kill. Instead, most battles take place in the air or at extreme range, with the tiny time-to-kill and respawn counter making death an inconvenience rather than a strategic consideration.

In trying to be two excellent things at the same time, Ace of Spades unfortunately approximates neither. Ace of Spades as a class-based shooter is too open and aimless to thrill; Ace of Spades as a Minecraft-esque builder’s paradise is too fast-paced and destructive to satisfy.



◆ Expect to pay: $11 / £7
◆ Release: Out now
◆ Developer: Jagex
◆ Publisher: In-house
◆ Multiplayer: Up to 32
◆ Link: www.aceofspades.com

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, it's that time of the year again - time to celebrate love, life, overpriced chocolate and all that other happy shit. Bah, teddy-bear-with-heart-on.

Ah, Aching Solitude Awareness Day once again - our yearly dive into the romantic side of PC gaming. We've had one for the guys and one for the girls. This year, it's time for one where everybody can supposedly find love and companionship - as long as they're straight, not too choosy, and prepared for the worst at every turn. This is a game with a section for "PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES" in its credits. The only question is whether they were hired for the designer himself, or his game...



You've got to give Romantic Encounters points for moxie, at least. It's a text-based game, mostly parser driven, which claims "I am flexible enough to respond to anything." Technically, this is true. As long as you include responses like "Huh?" and "I don't understand..." It also really wants to be seen as deep, with instructions like "Your life inside the Dome will be controlled by random factors of TIME, FATE, your INPUT and TEMPERAMENT," it also adds, before puncturing all of that by adding "To avoid FATE and TIME and assume really false GOD-LIKE powers over your destiny, select G."

Personally, I'm a big fan of having god-like powers over destiny. It's the kind of thing I crave, while working out how I'd defeat Superman and catch the Road Runner. Still, to begin with it seems a little unnecessary. After all, my terrible romantic track record is obviously just a series of flukes. I can quote Monkey Island. Chicks dig that, even if the chicks who claim chicks dig that are usually laughing when they say so, before walking off with a cry of "And stop calling us chicks, bitch!"



Before setting foot in the Dome, you have to tell it who you are - Male, Female, Guest or Other. The first two are obvious. Saying Guest produces easily the slickest explanation of the game one of these things has ever had, explaining that this isn't simply about sex, but "a chance to experiment with different relationships, to take dramatic risks in matters of the heart, to TRY-ON LOVE in a variety of situations and settings. It is sincerely hoped, by management, that your experiences at the DOME carry over into your daily life, broaden it, and make it a richer place for you to be."

This is a game with some serious aspirations, and a hilarious sense of class... especially if you know what's coming up. To navigate for instance, it insists you type things like 'approach bar'. If you try to treat it like a standard text adventure - "go north" for instance - you get this...



And also, you're probably not even wearing a tie, you philistine.

It's often sarcastic like that. Go into the elevator and fail to find the right command to bring up the control panel, and a couple of turns later "an elderly couple" wanders in and does it for you. Or if you just stand around not accomplishing anything, a guard will decide you're being suspicious and kick you out of the club. Better to avoid the word 'fuck' entirely too. It's a sensitive game. And also odd.



But anyway, enough standing outside the bar, waiting until exactly the turn of the hour to step inside, then pretending to read a text message that hasn't actually arrived and deciding to hang on until quarter-past for good measure - it's time to jump into the dating pool and 'rock' this 'joint'.



The evening's seduction starts in the Reception, with promises of ENCOUNTERS - honestly, it's like having Beneath A Steel Sky as a wingman - at the Mezzanine Bar, on Floor 3, the Penthouse, and... the parking garage? That does sound like a sexy, happening kind of place. Or indeed, not.



Since this is supposedly a fantasy, the squalid Mezzanine Bar can screw itself. I head to the Penthouse, and am immediately faced with a key dilemma - approach the bar and try to get lucky, or go to the bathroom and pee. I immediately start feeling a little curious about the writer's priorities.



That's probably the longest description of a toilet I've ever seen. In contrast, leaving it sums up a nearby event as simply "On the distant dance floor a frantic young danger loses her halter, exposing her huge breasts. This causes a near riot of pleasurable excitement for everyone." Groovy. But how about that Armitage Shanks porcelain, eh? Freshly fitted, I hear. They even made three animes about it!

A man in a tux approaches and offers the help of a nice lady, Maxime, willing to make introductions with available damsels. I accept, and am immediately less than impressed by her idea of a hook-up.



"If it looks like a girl digs you, she's literally ill." Thanks, Maxime.

Of the set, only one hangs around afterwards - the Dome's secretary, Cathy. She asks to talk, and that seems fine, so we head outside to a balcony to enjoy the scenery. Which she almost falls off, necessitating what would be a fast catch if not for the game doing it automatically. Afterwards, she asks if it was scary. I reply not, because she doesn't actually exist and thus caring would have been silly.



Well, that's not potentially worrying at all. To celebrate, Cathy steals a bottle of champagne from her employers and invites me to her room. It's essentially empty, and she's silent until she offers a toast "To us." Huh. Then she comes in for a big squeezy hug to show her attraction to this apparently handsome stranger, and the game sternly warns "There is nothing particularly sexy about this."

"Yeah, well you'd know about things not being sexy," I reply.



Who the hell talks or thinks like this? And it gets worse if you actually take her up on her offer of sex. Never has a game about going to a bar and having a one-night stand been so... whatever this is:



"Necessary lubrication." Eeew. When Ikea Erotica is just a little too hot. Anyway, it's clear the game really disapproves of this, and that Cathy is a crazy person who's already decided we're soul-mates destined to be together forever. I take the hint, and politely excuse myself from her presence. It seems like the gentlemanly thing to do, and she takes it pretty well. The night ending in a bust, but not the good kind, I head down to the garage, collect my car, and head back home, content that-



Goddamn. This is why I don't date. Also, the lack of charisma, social confidence and good looks, and refusing to bathe on the grounds that the government controls our brains via the rust in the pipes.

Well, let's try again! Once more into a breach, or at least, to attempt to...



This is Jeri, and once again, I query whether the narrator of this game is supposed to be a human male or some kind of broken sociology robot from the future. This is a first impression here:



...

O-kay. Talking to her, the game asks for an opening line.

There's clearly only one possibility.



She looks up from this introduction with a half-smile and sounds bored, which is easily the most realistic part of the game so far. Monkey Island hadn't been released by this point after all, so how would she get my reference? I approve of this attention to detail. Not something you often saw in the 80s.

Less realistic is that talking to her more results in her eyes opening and an invitation to the nearest lounge. She orders a Tom Collins. Given a free choice, I order Klingon Coffee. The waiter doesn't even bat an eyelid, and a still-attentive Jeri is clearly primed for more of my suave techniques.



Eh, could have been worse. Could have been the old "Day Of The Tentacle" gambit. Though that one's a bad idea now that everyone knows about those dodgy anime movies and stuff. One reload later, we get on better, talk about TV for a while, and she squeezes my arm, and end up in her suite. A kiss later...



Darn, so close. But if Leisure Suit Larry told us anything, it's that having sex without protection will lead to your cock exploding, and also you should never flush toilets. Hypothetically though, if you go through with it, Jeri starts to cry, then kicks you out of the apartment on the grounds that she was feeling a little off-balance throughout it all, that it's her, not you, and so on and so forth and never call, thanks.

Hurm.

You know, I'm starting to get a little suspicious of this game. When one date ends in suicide or having to submit to an emotional remora, and the other's sex ending is a hollow experience that finishes with tears, it's time to start asking some serious questions. Or better still, use God Mode to cheat.



This menu lets you skip to any part of the game, simultaneously showing off how little of it there actually is, and how much bullshit all of its claims of being more than a Choose Your Own Adventure that doesn't tell you the options actually are. You type the right thing to progress the story within at most three vague prompts, or get it forcibly severed like John Bobbit's manhood.

There are eight women to have an encounter with - Bobi, Jeri, Tanya, Kitty, Cathy, Julie, Priscilla and Roxy. Roxy is a hooker, which is something everyone except the hero knows - failing to recognise her eyes, her hair, her teeth, her boobs, or her nose. Unsurprisingly, no good comes of that relationship, with her two endings being kicking you out in a rage, and successfully doing the deed but without using protection - leading to this rather unusual bit of introspection on the drive home.



On the plus side, maybe he'll become a vigilante and fight crime. Swings and roundabouts.

Bobi is a manager at the club, who takes the initiative herself - kissing you, dragging you around her office by the penis, making with the sex and then distractedly saying "Oh, you're still here." Possible attempted social commentary there, though I think we can probably assume anyone who bought this game probably isn't the Barney Stinson type. You get laid, but it's hardly a romantic encounter - especially when the narrator follows this up with.... just read it. These are words someone wrote.



Jesus. And this is what he's like after getting laid.

Tanya turns out to be the ex-girlfriend of the club manager, who bursts in on the two of you with a gun. You have two choices - be a man and get shot, or wuss out and have it all turn out to be a practical joke that kills any chance of you ever knowing dignity again. Not the greatest choices.



There's a problem with that somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it.

Kitty has a happy ending, apparently, though I'm not sure what you have to type to get it. By default though, it's as creepy as the rest. She takes you to her room for some sex and drugs and probably no interest in catching an episode of Adventure Time first, promptly gets naked and:



Oh, the raw passion of young love. Not that you have to let this stop you, of course.



Well, still healthier than 50 Shades Of Grey. Moving on. Julie's lover also has a gun, and shoots you dead. As for Priscilla... well, Priscilla just wants to jump your bones to get back at her ex-boyfriend, leading to a seriously sociopathic bit of internal monologuing from our supposed hero.



Goddamn, game, quit with the 'lubricating' talk already. And the rest. This is supposedly about fantasies, and my only one right now is that this guy gets his cock caught in a wood chipper.

The other ending is that you get caught having sex in the closet by some onlookers, leading to the options 'run', 'hide' or - no kidding - 'die'. Despite this supposedly being a game about living vicariously through this strange little man, there are no 'get high-fives' or 'say excuse me, can we help you?' type options. But if you decide that you'd be mortified... the game takes you literally.



So, what have we learned? Basically, once again, even in a virtual universe where anything can happen, you're screwed... but probably won't be. Anything that suggests romantic success will be a trap, possibly a lethal one, or end up in pain, recrimination, humiliation and shuffling home in shame.

Semi-related, I'm selling these fine Aching Solitude Awareness Day survival packs. £25.



Just out of interest, I also ran the female side of the game to see if it was any different. The answer - nope, not really. The men have different names to the women, obviously, and there are a few differences in the text, but most stories and basic resolutions are the same. One exception is that where the man could see a prostitute, the woman can be tricked into filling in for one. So, yeah.



Another involves falling for a charmer who takes you out, then knocks you out and steals your purse. You can also get kicked out for getting into a fight, resulting in this strange 'take that' to gamers.



Weird. Me thinks the designer doth protest too much.

Overall though, the message of the game is pretty clear - according to Psychology, nobody out there is actually getting any worth having, and any evidence to the contrary is just a lie from the greetings card industry to sell more heart shaped chocolates. Ignore that this year. Buy the regular kind, which are cheaper, easily bought in bulk, and can be shoved into your face-hole until your snot comes out as little brown bubbles and your blood tastes of frosting. It's the true meaning of the season. Right?

Right. Well, close enough, anyway.

This week's "Why" video acknowledges that not everyone was playing RTS games in 1996, and that even those who were may not realize how much fun they'd be having if they took a quick time-trip back to Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The game isn't just a highlight of the series (and no one's discounting the original or the Tiberium series), it's a highlight of the RTS genre, and it holds up so well 17 years later that it's just as fun as modern RTSes. That's my argument—see and hear it in the video above.

Yesterday, we mentioned a certain area of Dead Space 3 where players can generate an endless bounty of crafting supplies and health kits for constructing the best weapons. Although calling it an "exploit" is more fun, EA contacted PC Gamer to explain that it's all by design.

"The resource-earning mechanic in Dead Space 3 is not a glitch," EA PR rep Jino Talens told PC Gamer. "We have no plans to issue a patch to change this aspect of the game. We encourage players to explore the game and discover the areas where resources respawn for free. We’ve deliberately designed Dead Space 3 to allow players to harvest resources by playing through the game. For those that wish to accumulate upgrades instantly, we have enabled an optional system for them to buy the resources at a minimal cost."

In other words, if you want the most impressive arsenal sooner rather than later, it's grind or pay the fine.