This week's buncha free games take you to the world of dreams/the world of nightmares, depending on how much cheese you've just consumed. If you've devoured your weight in brie, prepare to meet a horrible figure on a bridge, to confront a sad memory, and to use a sleeping baby to fend off a shadowy cloud (I had no idea that's what they were for). For the lactose intolerant, I also have a game of myth and stepping sideways, and a world of messed-up glitches, which aren't quite as scary as the others I just mentioned. Night night!

Bad Dream: Bridge / Bad Dream: Memories by Desert Fox

Desert Fox's Bad Dream series is one of the most consistently great to feature in this column, each entry offering a precision-illustrated slice of streamlined point and click horror. While they work on their first paid game, Bad Dream: Coma (which is due to be quite a bit bigger than previous entries), Desert Fox have released a small chunk of it in the form of the excellent Bad Dream: Bridge. It's...well, it's set on a bridge, but it's not long before you're whisked off to somewhere else, somewhere a little more familiar. Bridge compliments the gruesome interaction of previous episodes with a full-fledged inventory system; the atmosphere, however, remains just as dark and funny and kinda scary and kinda sad.

Bad Dream: Memories, also available at the above link, dials down on the scary and increases the sad, focusing on a ruined family house and revealing how it ended up the way it did. If you've not played any of the Bad Dream games, I recommend going through the whole lot—they aren't all that long or difficult, and it's been great seeing Desert Fox's skills evolve throughout the series.

Lullaby by Daniel Arnold-Mist, Tobias Baumann, Samuel Green, Chris McMath

A room escape game of sorts, but with a twist: you're trying to flee with a baby in tow. The thing you're trying to flee from is a cloud of black smoke, which can only be repelled by holding said baby in front of its big cloudy face—put the child down for a moment and it will begin to creep, insidiously, back onto the landing and towards its crib. Doors, switches, items and so on are off limits while you're playing parent, so there's a note of earned tension as you search the environment, knowing that it's only a matter of time until the cloud claims the infant and ends the game. (There's also a note of frustration, which may be relieved if I tell you that the childproof stair-gate-thing is remotely operated via a switch.) 

Lullaby is a sinister game, and while I'm not sure the very end of it is set up properly, there is a good deal of originality and technical expertise on display here, particularly in the final scene.

Mudlarks by Cloak and Dagger Games

The art style might put a few people off (I kinda love it—it's made out of cut out photos, with only a few frames of animation), but the setting and plot of Mudlarks feels like unfamiliar territory for adventure games. It's a London-based game about a beachcombing treasure hunter who soon finds himself caught up in a strange, Herge-esque mystery involving a meteor shower, a breathtakingly cockney copper, and almost certainly lots of other stuff after I stopped playing. I like what I played quite a bit: the properly real world setting is fresh, and I'm interested to know where the story's heading.

Slumber Shrine by Zachary Johnson

Slumber Shrine feels a lot like a Jack King-Spooner game, but the interesting, glitch-warped world at its core does much to differentiate itself. Developer Zachary Johnson described it to me as a game "about humans fracturing and the seeping in of dreams from their liminal spaces", and I can't think of a better description so I'm pinching that. I can rarely follow what's going on in these sort of games, but I enjoy the sights, the sounds, the odd dialogue—this is a woozy, obviously dreamlike game, and a good place to lose yourself in for a while.

World's Dawn (Summer season) by David Grund

I covered the first part of David Grund's episodic Harvest Moon-like around six months ago, and it's twice the game now that the Summer season has been added on. If you're wondering what World's Dawn is in the first place, it's a bright, progressive life sim with a strong community focus, and all the jobs, chores, partner-finding and friend-making you might expect from such a title. With Autumn and Winter left to go, there's still a huge amount of game still on the table, but there should be more than enough to dig, rake and chop your way through here in the meantime.

Isles of Umbra by Twisted Pilot Studio

Last but certainly not least is the lovely Isles of Umbra, a 2D adventure game that makes full use of its paucity of dimensions. Though there are only a couple of scenes, you're able to scroll each one left and right with A and D, revealing actionable objects and more of each gorgeous tapestry. It's one of those jam games that's enormously slick and detailed, yet tremendously short (there's always, understandably, a trade-off). I wish there was more, and I have a feeling there will be, in time.

Remember Dragon Age: The Last Court, the free browser-based adventure/RPG thingy from the wonderful Failbetter Games? Your memory is terrible—I mean, I only wrote about it last week. Past Me said that it was going to be added to (exhaustive choice questionnaire tool) Dragon Age Keep in "just over a week", and here were are, just over a week later, and it has. It's lovely when things go to plan like that. The game isn't telegraphed especially well inside BioWare's browser app, but if you login to The Keep and click on the little menu icon in the top left, one of the options is to play The Last Court. With Inquisition not out until the 18th, it might be a good way to get your Dragon Age on while you wait.

Her name is Marta Louise Velasquez. She's the best of the best. Pray you never have her on your wing.

This week I thought we'd take a look back at one of the most interesting shareware games ever made - one that long, long, long term Crap Shoot readers will recognise, but which we never got to take a really good look at back in the day. Ah, those halcyon days when these columns were written to a word-count...

I've thought about Velasquez quite a few times since then though, especially in the wake of games like Tomb Raider on PC that have sparked discussions on what strong female characters are and should be. It's a subject couched in misunderstandings - just for starters, that 'strong' translates to either 'badass' or 'perfect', rather than 'well written' or 'interesting', and most problematically, that any negative traits tend to be seen as a slam on women in general rather than simply a character trait. As with so many things, it's less an issue of individual characters as trends. There's nothing inherently wrong for instance with a game having a level set in a strip-club, or a princess who needs rescuing. It's when that kind of thing becomes constant, the default state, that things start getting both problematic, and, frankly, boring.

Velasquez is a very, very different kind of heroine, one it's hard to imagine any publisher either then or now having the guts to unleash on the market. Hell, never mind the heroine bit. The closest in recent years was Walker from Spec Ops: The Line, and he had a complete mental breakdown to blame it on. Velasquez is pure poison from the start, both to herself and to her colleagues. Her very first line in the game, responding to a cheery "Routine assignment, Vel," is "The name's Velasquez. Say Vel to my face again and I'll rip yours off." After that, she only gets worse.

What's really interesting about our introduction though is how her character is set up to this point. As the credits roll, we see her father Ric returning home to what's obviously going to be a tragic death, and then surprising exactly nobody, being blown up by the evil invading Vultures right as he reaches safety - young Marta forced to watch from the hangar as her father burns to death. This unsurprisingly lights a fire in her soul that results in the Lt. Velasquez that we ultimately see - a woman who lives solely for revenge, and a hate that can never be fully satisfied. Hero fuel!

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Traffic Department of the title isn't in the business of giving speeding tickets any more. They're simply the last bastion of defence against the Vultures, acting as a resistance force using their former hoverskids. It's not quite as odd a choice of revenge as it might sound...)

The twist is that this isn't used to justify anything. Velasquez is poison, and the only reason that anybody puts up with her is that they have absolutely no choice in the matter - she's the best, they need her. A couple of characters are sympathetic to her, but even then it's more because they respected her father. The closest thing she really has to a friend at the start of the game is the slightly sleazy Dispatcher, and that's entirely one-sided - he teases her because he's behind a screen and out of punching range, and she tolerates it because she can't be bothered to go murder him.

Most of Traffic Department 2192... the bits not spent in honestly pretty crap combat against brainless AI... is an exploration of this - of what someone as truly damaged as Velasquez would actually be like. Early on, it's not too bad. She's a weapon that can be safely pointed at the enemy, and then wherever possible left the hell alone until the next time it has to be fired. Her commanding officer has enough of a grip to keep her relatively leashed, and when she does lash out, it's often played for laughs - trading insults, all of them weird bullshit future-insults, and suffering no fools.

You're probably wondering how long it takes her to encounter someone sexist, and will probably not be surprised to know it takes about four missions. His name is Aron Demeter, a representative of a group called E.G.G (don't ask), who introduces himself as "Why, your wet dream, sugar tits! How about getting me a hot cup of coffee?" Three hours later he regains consciousness to be told that's actually less than usual for Velasquez, and he wears the bloody nose and black eye for the rest of the game.

As the game goes on though, it begins to strip away this element character by character. The initially sympathetic commander is killed and replaced by someone with no love for Velasquez at all, and the episode ends with the wingman she's spent the entire game insulting, berating, sabotaging and showing up finally putting a bomb into the helicopter she's set to fly on a mission for no better reason than that he simply can't put up with her shit any longer. He's not a traitor or a sleeper agent or anything like that - he just reaches breaking point. Hard to blame him either.

And it's at this point that the shit really hits the fan. Because Velasquez doesn't survive the bomb. At least, not really. When she wakes up, it's with half her face replaced with cold steel and the rest of her a cocktail of functioning organs and cyborg parts - a killing machine who now literally looks the part, and in fact actually twists her wingwoman's head clean off during a fit of madness while being rebuilt.

The standard story at this point would be Velasquez struggling to retain her humanity in the face of all the electronic components, and there's some of that to be sure. The actual arc though is more about everyone above her in the chain of command being taken out, one by one, until there's nobody else to lead. This serves primarily to continue stripping back the heroic facade that Velasquez has as a soldier, and reveal her to be an out-and-out psychopath. The cyborg parts don't help, but they can't be blamed for it either. At the end of Episode 2, with the Vultures planning to glass the planet, she murders the man who reunited her with her son in order to steal his mining shuttle and escape, and when realising there isn't the space for all the vehicles she wants to take with her and all of her pilots and tech staff, opts to ditch the people and keep the hoverskids. Not long after that, more or less all her remaining allies abandon her and flee into space. It may mean getting blown up by a sadistic alien race, but hey, better that than Velasquez. And she openly tells them that she'd have killed them all herself, if she'd had the firepower to hand right then.

It's not even as if she expects to win at this point. All that matters is her son, to some degree, and taking out as many of the enemy as she possibly can. When called on this by their doctor, told that if she doesn't pull it together, there'll only be the two of them left, her response is just "I wouldn't count on survivors." Ouch.

She's right too. By the end of the game, pretty much every character is dead, and Velasquez herself is quite happy to add to the kill count. It takes until the middle of the third and final episode before she finally discovers a weapon that might win her war; a race of mostly peaceful shape-shifters who have infiltrated the Vultures and plan to replace them, who at least on the face of it seem friendly. Vel of course threatens to murder all of them at the first sign of trouble... and then starts doing so, never mind that their plan is literally, objectively, the only possible way she has left to salvage her continuing clusterfuck.

If you're wondering if it all works out... well, yes, it does to a point. The Vultures are dealt with, while Velasquez and her son don't so much escape as leave - her with malfunctioning robot parts that mean she's probably not going to last too much longer, wearing the colours of her enemy and flying one of their ships. For the most part though, the war ends because literally everyone else is dead - good guys, bad guys, and even the planets they fought over long-since reduced to glass and rubble.

...

To lighten the mood, here's a chipmunk eating peanuts.

Traffic Department 2192 certainly isn't the best written game around, with a tendency towards the hammy and trying a little too hard to stuff every possible SF trope into the mix. Nor is it that great as a game, with the action being entirely forgettable and more than a little irritating. Most missions consist of little but flying around in a loop shooting the AI, with occasional breaks for an awful escort mission.

It is however one of the most interesting stories told in an action game. Shareware games of course had less to worry about than commercial releases, but Velasquez was a brave, brave creation. Female protagonists were still a rarity... totally unlike today, cough cough... and those we got were typically the straight subversion of existing tropes - the damsel who saves the prince for instance, as in Jill of the Jungle and King's Quest IV. Traffic Department was one of the first games to not simply do that, but to try and create a complex character that we could follow on a psychological journey as well as a monster killing spree. It respected Velasquez enough to let her be flawed and awful, while being self-aware enough not to lose sight of that. Heroes often drift into villainy by accident, especially in adventure games - I can think of several puzzles on the lines of a supposedly well-meaning guy mixing up chlorine gas with cleaning supplies to steal a bottle of wine (Diamonds in the Rough), or poisoning a tramp to steal money to make a phonecall (Mystery of the Druids). At those points, you just have to ask "Do you realise what you just did?"

But Traffic Department 2192 did. It brought us a character who was at least initially disarmingly awful, then kept digging and exploring what that meant. Had it not slumbered in the relative obscurity of shareware in a pre-internet age, it's hard to imagine that Velasquez wouldn't regularly be mentioned along with the likes of Samus Aran and Lara Croft and Princess Rosella. She certainly deserves her place, even if nobody deserves to have to share it with her.

If you're interested in seeing the full story, the whole thing is in this Let's Play, and you're really not missing out on much by reading it like that. The whole game was however released as freeware a few years ago, and isn't difficult to find. (Unfortunately I can't link it because it's on abandonware sites.) Play it, enjoy it. Hope that at some point, someone will have the guts to do something similar. 

And, uh, hopefully with a better name than  "Traffic Department 2192".

During a press presentation for Overwatch at BlizzCon on Friday in Anaheim, California, Blizzard Senior Vice President Chris Metzen addressed whether the representation of women factored into Blizzard s thinking when it was designing Overwatch s characters, five of which are women (and one is a gorilla).

A press conference attendee asked: There s been a lot of conversation about female representation in gaming in the past couple years, I suppose. And I was wondering if that entered your thinking when you were designing [Overwatch] and the characters.

Totally, Metzen began. Absolutely. Our female and employees and… even my daughter calls me out… We were looking at old Warcraft stuff on YouTube, a cinematic the dragon aspects and my daughter s like, Why are they all in swimsuits? And I m like, Ugh, I don t know, honey.

But I think we re clear that we re in an age where gaming is for everybody, Metzen continued. We build games for everybody. We want everyone to come and play. And increasingly in the world like people want to feel represented. People from all walks of life, from everywhere in the world. Boys and girls, everybody. And you know, we feel indebted to do our best to honor that. There s a lot of room for growth, but specifically with Overwatch over the past year we ve been very cognizant of that, like, trying not to oversexualize the female characters. I don t know that we oversexualize the male characters. But it s something we re very sensitive to. We want that to be part of who we are, of what our brand looks like and appears to our community. I think Mike [Morhaime] talked in a roundabout way to that in his speech this morning. So it s something we re very cognizant of. We want girls to feel kick-butt and equally represented.

A few steps away from where Overwatch was announced at BlizzCon, 600 PCs sat waiting for attendees to play it. That in and of itself deserves a golf clap. We usually have to endure months of marketing teases before we get our hands on a big game. Blizzard is admirably aggressive about showing off its first built-from-scratch thing in 18 years: I got to play all 12 characters at BlizzCon.

The expectations set by Overwatch s trailer weren t that far off: this is an FPS built on Blizzard s unhidden affection for Team Fortress 2. There s a capture-point mode, and a Payload-style mode actually called Payload. There s a fast-moving, low-HP pipsqueak who fights at close range. The medic heals with a tether beam. There s an archer sniper, and a second sniper with a scoped rifle. There s a class that (as its ultimate ability) deploys a teleporter. There s a character that builds a sentry turret, then hits it with a wrench to upgrade.

It s easy to hold up these pieces of Overwatch, but in your hands, when all those pieces are in motion, Overwatch doesn t feel like a TF2 clone. It doesn t feel like it has Quake in its DNA in the way TF2 does. And where TF2 s nine classes operate as hard counters to one another in a kind of food chain (Pyro hunts Spy who stabs Medic who ubers Heavy or Demo in order to destroy an Engineer s sentry), Overwatch s heroes feel a little more like first-person packages of MOBA-like abilities who have looser relationships to one another.

There isn t one character who s in charge of turrets, for example. Actually, one of the characters is a turret: Bastion transforms into a static gun that can self-heal. He can also toss out a mobile mine a la COD: Black Ops RC car bomb. The best expression of Overwatch s mechanical looseness is the fact that every imaginable kind of character movement is represented: jetpacking, wall-climbing, grappling-hooking, gliding, ability- and equipment-driven teleportation, a superjump, a dashing charge that pins enemies (like L4D2 s Charger).

Too much of a good thing?

The best term I can pin on it is mechanical flamboyance. Overwatch s diversity is refreshing and fun, but the big question is whether that variety will actually help Overwatch be a great competitive game. The incongruous abilities and characters may simply make it a wild, loose, and playful FPS that happens to have a higher than average skill ceiling.

I loved playing as Tracer, for example. She drew on my spontaneity and reflexes in a way that an FPS hasn t since Tribes: Ascend. Tracer can teleport three successive times. In addition to that, her medium-length cooldown ability rewinds her position, health and ammo to what they were three seconds ago. At one point I phased through a Reinhardt s front-facing energy shield, appearing behind him to get in a few shots. Then, as he shifted his shield to face me, I rewound time, phasing back through him again to deal even more damage. Tracer s potential for nimble trickery and harassment is delightfully high.

But I have absolutely no clue if this artful dodging gels with a balanced game. The best competitive shooters are usually the most mechanically stripped-down (Quake, CS:GO), but then again, the best competitive MOBAs spread their complexity thick, across a hundred-some characters. Overwatch is taking a kitchen sink approach to multiplayer FPS, and it ll be interesting to see how much of its 12 characters and dozens of abilities survive beta testing. At the very least it seems like Overwatch is going to need some sort of character drafting and banning system in high-level competitive play.

For now, this is a colorful, creative FPS with a level of polish that we associate with Blizzard games. There are a ton of touches that convey how far along Overwatch seems to be. I liked that Bastion s basic movement animation, for example, jilted the first-person camera vertically as he walked, a reflection of his robotic movement.

I'll need to play it more before I can be sure whether Overwatch has a future as a competitive, skill-driven FPS, but for now Blizzard's twist on TF2 feels both reverential to that source material and original to me.

Read Tom's piece for more hard details on Overwatch.

The Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare campaign is a first-person shooting gallery smattered with nearly-on-rails vehicle segments, quicktime events, and slightly interactive storytelling. So, it s a lot like the last seven Call of Duty games. It sure is a lot better than Ghosts, though, and it introduces some neat near-future gadgets. The most interesting are the Exo suits, which imbue their wearers with double-jumps, strafe dashes, and other special abilities.

Guns are littered everywhere and they re fun to shoot: big, powerful, varied, some punching single shots through armor, others spraying corridors with death. The ballistics aren t very interesting (put mouse over head, tap left mouse button to make dead) but the animations and sounds and dramatic death animations are addictive feedback. There s even a beam weapon—it s like a Ghostbusters proton pack, only it extracts ghosts from the living—and heaving its energy stream between targets, watching them drop and die, is disgustingly satisfying.

I m a walking, running, jet-jumping massacre, but all that power is constricted by a greater power: the script. There are moments when Advanced Warfare snaps the rigidity typical of Call of Duty campaigns—a brief, unguided stealth section and a fantastic grappling hook which I was allowed to use freely a couple times—but outside of those bits I m rarely asked to solve any problem other than who to shoot first.

At one point, for instance, my squad and I were pinned down by a turret and I was told to flank it. I thought there might be a clever solution. Should I use my Exo suit's shield to approach it without taking damage? No, I'm out of battery because they told me to use it earlier. So, maybe I need to backtrack, and find a way around the turret? Nope. What I needed to do was run really fast past the turret and kill a few guys. Call of Duty says to me, Hey, don t think so hard! I didn t even need to aim frag grenades, which rocket toward threats all on their own. Because it s the future.

Pretty warfare

So I crouched behind cover, played with different weapons, aimed for heads or maybe crotches, depending on my mood. I couldn t stray too far ahead (though I was constantly told to move up) or I d die, but I could bash around just enough to feel like I had some freedom, jet hopping up to ledges and punching dudes into next week. That s fun. All my terribly critical bones want to shout at it for being so restrictive, but Advanced Warfare s eight hour campaign was actually really hard to put down.

With the help of Kevin Spacey in a lead role, it tells an enjoyably simple, predictable story of power and corruption. I didn t care a whole lot about the potboiler plot, but it was an effective way to push me into increasingly improbable scenarios: hopping between busses on a freeway, clinging to a jet with magnetic gloves as it flies over Antarctica, speeding away from assailants on a hover bike. It was impossible to be bored when I was doing something new every ten minutes, and always something spectacular and extravagant.

Despite a few ugly textures, this is by far the best looking Call of Duty. The Antarctica level in particular is gorgeous, with glowing ice caves and great windy plains of snow. And though my input felt predetermined—doing what the script says I do is mandatory—the scenarios it presents are some of the series most thrilling. Flying a drone around a compound sniping bad guys through the windows is just great, dumb fun. I find systems-driven moments much more rewarding, but I ve come to understand and enjoy Call of Duty campaigns for what they are: modern arcade run-and-guns. This is what Contra looks like in 2014, like it or not.

My biggest complaint is that Advanced Warfare slacks on some of the basics. I was always faster than the squadmates I was supposed to follow, for instance, constantly bumping into them as they slowed to deliver dialogue, and always reaching our destination first. They even gestured to me over their shoulders while I was standing in front of them, and then barked at me to open the door I d been standing next to the whole time. Other minor gripes: some objects have physics while others don t, I got stuck in the geometry once while under attack from a sniper, and the audio kept desynchronizing from the video in cutscenes, so Kevin Spacey s mouth moved a good second after he was done saying something Very Serious.

Worst of all, I had to restart the game twice to finish the final mission because a bug prevented me from sliding under a closing door. That s really frustrating, and I don t know what made it work in the end, but when it did, the conclusion didn t even feel worth it. I enjoyed Kevin Spacey s performance (like, who doesn t love Kevin Spacey?) and the between-mission cutscenes, which can look nearly photorealistic. But I didn t grow attached to any of the characters, or really give a damn about who lived and died. Advanced Warfare whimpered into the credits.

But hell, I did have fun, even if it was shallow. I do have one final complaint, though: Call of Duty has no place trying to express the terrifying realities of war like it does, showing rows of coffins as American soldiers return from battle, a mass grave in a concentration camp, and telling me to press F to pay my respects to a fallen friend. A game which judges me by my bodycount, on the number of men whose heads I shot—no, it s terribly heavy handed. I d rather CoD just embrace fantasy and leave tragedy for something more thoughtful.

The real reason people buy CoD

I think this is the fourth Call of Duty I ve reviewed, and we all know the drill here: this is the part where I leave the campaign behind (as I expect everyone will do after one playthrough) and move on to the multiplayer. It s good news: Advanced Warfare s multiplayer is much better than Ghosts . The weapons are more fun to handle, the maps are more colorful and interesting and better designed, and the progression system is far superior.

The campaign s Exo suits show up here, along with their jet-assisted double jump. They re useful in two scenarios: getting to the first or second tier of high ground to camp or move across the map faster, and praying that a high jump will take me out of fire long enough to survive for an extra few seconds. Bluntly, movement in Advanced Warfare is less fun than movement in Titanfall, which has more liberal jetpack jumps, bigger, taller maps, and wall-running chains. Even so, the Exo suits do make for occasionally fun cat-and-mouse chases as we hop around all over the place.

Exo suits also have special abilities; one or two depending on how you customize your loadout. The cloak ability is the one I most often see used, and it s like Titanfall s cloak ability, briefly turning you into a shimmering wraith. It s probably the most effective ability, but even so I forget to use it. Matches just move too fast to worry myself with extras, like holding out an energy shield or muting my footsteps. I do like the hover ability, though. When I remember to use it, it lets me hold position in the air for long enough to confuse the hell out of everyone below.

These abilities, as well as perks (move faster, be invisible to sensors, take less explosive damage, that kind of thing), special grenades, and weapon attachments, are unlocked as you earn experience and ranks, as usual. New equipment, however, is also unlocked in supply drops which are acquired during matches. Opening one is like opening a Team Fortress 2 crate, gifting me surprise new guns and gear.

First of all, I really like that I can customize the look of my soldier: male or female, with multiple faces to choose, and a ton of gear. I like looking cool. More importantly, though, there are now weapon variants to collect, so while there are only six assault rifles, for instance, there are multiple versions of each. I like it! I try out every new variant I get—do I like better handling or a higher rate of fire?—and a new shooting range lets me play with my toys between matches. It loads up really fast, and disappears just as quickly when it s time for the match to start. It s slick.

Though I ve criticized games like Borderlands for loading me up with guns that have negligible stat differences, CoD multiplayer is such a rigorous test of speed and accuracy that, yeah, I think one point to range does matter. It could be the difference between winning or losing a two second shootout, and in Advanced Warfare, that s about as long as any shootout takes. 

Quick eye

Extended stand-offs are rare, because even if the guy in front of you doesn t score the three-or-so chest shots needed to kill you, there is always someone behind you. They re there, waiting to slap the back of your neck with a combat knife, and they ll always be there. If you re behind someone, and you kill them, you d better turn around, because there s someone behind you, too. And there s someone behind them! And we all turn around and around and around.

I mostly play Team Deathmatch and Domination, and there are moments when I feel like two sides exist, especially on the Greenband skyscraper map, which reminds me of the Highrise map in Modern Warfare 2. Mostly, though, spawn points circle the map to keep you guessing. Stay still too long, and an enemy is likely to spawn ten feet behind you—I hate that. It s dizzying and stressful.

The guns are fun to use and there s a nice variety, though some feel superfluous. I find that the best players in any given round stick to the basics: assault rifles and submachine guns. I never see anyone from far enough away, for instance, for a sniper rifle to better than a long-range assault rifle, though I guess some players have success with them.

Among the especially superfluous guns are the beam weapons from the campaign. I ve heard players complain that they re overpowered, but I think it just seems that way because they re loud and bright and obnoxious. I ve found them plainly less effective than regular bullets. Some of the other guns feel like vestiges of long lost war metaphors from Call of Duty 3 and earlier. I had no luck with a clunky heavy machine gun, because what on earth is the point of a support class in a game with no suppression mechanism, no destruction, and not much distance? Call of Duty multiplayer isn t a representation of war at all—it s an abstract game with a war skin on it.

My go-to gun is the Bal-27, a no-frills automatic assault rifle good at medium range. The balanced, basic approach just seems best. I use the Tactical variant for slightly better range, a laser sight for better hip fire accuracy, and a nifty sight that zooms in a bit when I stand still. On some maps, I like to experiment with the ARX-160, which fires in three-round bursts at longer ranges; two bursts to the chest or one to the head for a kill. It makes me play very differently, and I like that. My biggest complaint about all these guns is that, while getting used to their stats and bullet spread is interesting, their animations are dull and simple, and there aren t many moving parts. They have distinct personalities, it s just hard to see it.

Dew the Duty

I have a few technical complaints, and they are serious. I ve crashed out of matches three times, and though I haven t had too many major performance problems, I m seeing a lot of ugly reports as I scan forums. I have experienced irritating framerate drops in many matches—and that means death—and sometimes it seems like I m being melee killed from ten feet away. Poof! He was over there, but now he s standing over my body. I expected dedicated servers at launch, and there are none. Apparently they re on the way. I d wait for that before buying.

I m used to these kinds of problems in Call of Duty, but that doesn t make them OK. And while Advanced Warfare is much better than Ghosts, that only affects its placement of the scale of Call of Dutys. I m afraid it still doesn t rank highly for me among other multiplayer shooters. Rising Storm goes for fidelity and long, multi-stage battles, and it generates some of the most exciting stories in a multiplayer shooter. Though I m not great at it, I love the tension and nuanced tactics of CS:GO. Titanfall is great, casual fun, with liberating movement. Team Fortress 2 has the best community.

Call of Duty remains a churning sea of adolescent sharks for whom new players are chum. The first several hours of learning are frustrating as hell, so thank goodness for the new Combat Readiness Program, which is a dumb but sweet way to play anonymously with beginners while you learn (if you can find a match, which I found difficult).

After eight hours I have some teeth of my own, but chomping down is really more instinct than fun. I ll play round after round after round, hoping for little moments of victorious slaughter and the next set of unlocks, but I m never really sure why I let the intermission timer tick down to the next round. The past week doesn t feel enriched by all the CoD I ve been playing. I don t have any exciting stories or fun anecdotes. I ran and shot and got shot. I could have spent the week getting smashed at a bar and I d feel pretty much the same about how I spent my time.

Call of Duty remains comparable to the carbonated corn syrup it partners with every year: it s the Mountain Dew of shooters. I start drinking it and I m not really sure I like it, but I just keep drinking and drinking until I m all jittery and agitated. Then I can t sleep, so screw it, I just drink some more and see if I won something under the cap.

In advance of the World of Warcraft movie s March 2016 release, director Duncan Jones took to the stage at BlizzCon today to update fans on progress. The Moon helmer revealed that a rough edit of the film now exists, which Blizzard s top brass has seen and appear to be delighted with. The majority of remaining work is on the special FX shots, which are being handled by ILM, needed to bring the world of Azeroth to life. It s Avatar and Lord of the Rings at the same time, said Jones. It s a big, big movie.

During the panel further details about the cast and setting were also revealed. The movie takes place in the Warcraft 1 era. The classic Horde versus Alliance origin story makes sense, given the richness of the Warcraft universe, and the fact Blizzard intends this to be the first iinstalmentin a series rather than a one-off. After searching for the right director for some time, Jones ultimately got the gig because he wanted to tell the Horde and Alliance side of the story equally, treating the orcs with real empathy.

Blizzard also revealed a number of the actors playing key roles for both factions:

Alliance

Lothar Travis FimmelMedivh Ben FosterKing Llane Dominic CooperKhadgar Ben Schnetzer

Horde

Durotan Toby KebbellGul dan Daniel WuOrgrim Rob KazinskyBlackhand Clancy Brown

They ll be joined by Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol s Paula Patton, who will play the less obviously aligned Garona. On stage, though, it was the arrival of Rob Kazinsky, wielding a giant Doomhammer prop, who stole the show. Kazinsky has been playing WoW since Burning Crusade, and has logged over 500 days in the game—a revelation which saw him jokingly accused of slapping his nerd dick on the table by the panel s host.

As Orgrim, all Kazinsky s work has involved mo-cap and green screen in order to bring the warchief to life. Judging by the slouched, menacing orc walk which he performed on stage, the Horde fans are in safe hands. Both Kazinsky and Jones also seemed understandably at pains to point out they don t plan on being the ones that ruined Warcraft . 

Speaking about the quality of the special effects work, Kazinsky said: You know the cutscenes that Blizzard do for, like, Draenor or the Arthas, My Son one? It s like that, but on crack. To prove the point both recommended that the audience headed upstairs to the Dolby Atmos theatre here at the Anaheim Convention Center, where an extended cut of the trailer which debuted at Comic-Con is playing. 

In terms of style, the impression I came away with from the footage is of a less booby, more overtly magical, Game Of Thrones. After the trailer, there was also a bonus lingering close-up of Orc leader Durotan watching over his pregnant wife, complete with some fairly subtle emoting. Promising stuff so far.

This afternoon s Fireside Chat panel hosted by the Hearthstone development team at BlizzCon had plenty of good news for fans of the RNG-embracing card battler. On stage game director Eric Dodds (above) confirmed that packs for the new Goblins vs Gnomes card expansion will cost exactly the same as existing Expert Packs, whether you choose to buy them with in-game gold or actual money. 

Better still, your existing gold and dust can be used to buy packs and craft cards from the new set. I m particularly pleased about that, because it means Team 5 is sticking to its abiding principle of keeping things simple by not creating two different types of dust. (And also because I m currently sitting on a dust mountain in anticipation of the new set s arrival in December.)

Dodds was followed by producer Yong Woo, who talked about how the game s much anticipated spectator mode will work. Although it wasn t clear when the functionality will roll out, it seems to tick all the necessary boxes in terms of what people have been asking for. 

Once in the client, you can browse your friends list to see who s in a match, and then one click will take you to their game. You ll be notified whenever a new person joins to watch you play, and can choose to make your matches invite-only or boot viewers if you re feeling shy. 

Woo also explained how you can spectate both players in a match simultaneously, provided they re on your friends list, which will make setting up tournament streams significantly easier for organisers.

After the panel senior designer Ben Brode confirmed that after the launch of Goblins vs Gnomes, Arena run reward packs will all be for the new set. We ll be speaking with the Hearthstone team tomorrow, so if you have any burning questions leave them in the comments below. I also played four games using the new cards earlier today, and you can see what I made of them so far here.

When a salty player complains about being beaten by a lucky top deck or a one-in-eight Ragnaros shot, the insult they tend to throw around is: Ugh, more like RNGstone . RNG meaning random number generation. The suggestion being that winning at Hearthstone is mostly do with luck, and little to do with skill. (Which doesn t explain why the best players are able to win much more consistently, of course.) So, given the seeming dislike of RNG, you might expect Blizzard to be steering clear of it with the first standalone card expansion.

Instead, they ve done the exact opposite, and doubled-down on randomness, chaos, and—at least so Blizzard hope—fun. I played four games here today at BlizzCon using new cards that will be included in the Goblins vs Gnomes expansion released this December. Of those, I lost three, only winning the one in which I was pitted against a girl who was so young that her dad had to help with key decisions. The salt is real. But I also had a lot of laughs as the new cards brought havoc to the board.

There are two decks available to select on the show floor, dubbed the Goblin Fury Mage and the Gnome Mayhem Priest. The matches were played on a new board, which is surrounded by gizmos and widgets. The interactive clickable bits aren t switched on yet, sadly, but in keeping with the theme should be suitably wacky.

I blame my poor performance on the fact I was desperately noting down the details of all the cards as I played, which ended up in multiple ropings. Below are the details of the cards that I and my opponents drew, with some initial thoughts on them. (You can see a gallery of all them revealed so far here.)

Piloted Sky Golem

Mana cost: 6 Attack: 6 Health: 4 Deathrattle: Summon a random 4-cost minion. One of seemingly several new cards which feature a random pilot who pops out when the card is destroyed. Pleasingly, the new minion actually parachutes onto the board.

Piloted Shredder

Mana cost: 4 Attack: 4 Health: 3 Deathrattle: Summon a random 2-cost minion. The little brother of the Sky Golem, essentially. Both are sticky minions, which echoes the Naxxramas theme of having more creatures out on the board battling for control.

Cogmaster

Mana cost: 1 Attack: 1 Health: 2 Has +2 attack while you have a mech. Mechs are the new minion type in Goblins vs Gnomes, and there are a number of cards designed to buff them or enable their use. Playing this is probably going to be the Mech equivalent of running Undertaker in a Deathrattle deck.

Madder Bomber

Mana cost: 5 Attack: 5 Health: 4 Battlecry: Deal 6 damage randomly split between all other characters. Troll decks are obviously going to be an even bigger thing post-Goblins vs Gnomes (which will please Randuin Wrynn-creator Noxious if no-one else), so it makes sense to raise the ante on mad bombing with this even riskier version that leaves a meatier body on the board.

Spider Tank

Mana cost: 3 Attack: 3 Health: 4 Dark Cultist, the Priest Card introduced by Naxx, was previously the only 3/4 in the game. The Spider Tank now also fills that stat profile, and although it doesn t have the benefit of the Deathrattle buff, its stats still pass the vanilla test of value. Plus as another mech, should prove a staple in themed decks.

Bomb Lobber

Mana cost: 5 Attack: 3 Health: 3 Battlecry: Deal 4 damage to a random enemy minion. Or in other words: a slightly more sane bomber. The 4 damage could prove handy against Gadgetzan Auctioneers, making this another piece of nice anti-Miracle tech.

Mechwarper

Mana cost: 2 Attack: 2 Health: 3 Your mechs cost (1) less. Another card designed to enable mech-themed decks. In practice the one mana cost saving actually proved substantial in terms of being able to flood the board.

Goblin Blastmage

Mana cost: 4 Attack: 5 Health: 4 Battlecry: If you control a mech, deal 4 damage randomly split among enemy characters. This is a Mage class card, and each hero type will have an injection of new cards that synergise with Goblins vs Gnomes set. The animation when the Blastmage s Battlecry goes off is a lot like Paladin s Avenging Wrath.

Unstable Portal

Mana cost: 2 Add a random minion to your hand. It costs (3) less. There are a number of cards, like this cheap new Mage spell, which draw or play completely random minions. Blizzard has clearly reacted to how much people ended up liking Webspinner, and gone a step further. When I played this, RNGesus served me up a Patient Assassin (one of the least-loved cards in the game), which I was able to play for free and created quite a problem for my 10 year-old opponent.

Next page: More cards and conclusions

Enhance-o mechano

Mana cost: 4 Attack: 3 Health: 2 Battlecry: Give your other minions Windfury, Taunt or Divine Shield. (At random) I love this card. Obviously you need at least a couple of creatures on the board to extract decent value, but if you ve got a full board (hello Zoo, Shaman and Token Druid) then the potential upside is huge. The Divine Shield enables really favourable trades, while Windfury can stack crucial bonus face damage. The only benefit that s questionable is Taunt, but even then it s unlikely to be bad. I expect this to get played a lot.

Upgraded Repair Bot

Mana cost: 5 Attack: 5 Health: 5 Battlecry: Give a friendly mech +4 health. This Priest-only minion s stat spread put him on par with Loatheb, Stranglethorn Tiger and, erm, Elite Tauren Chieftain. The useability is questionable, though, when you consider Temple Enforcer is a 6/6 for 6 which can boost any friendly minion s health by +3. And he doesn t get used much.

Shrinkmeister

Mana cost: 2 Attack: 3 Health: 2 Battlecry: give a minion -2 attack this turn. I messed up badly when I first played this, thinking the text said +2 rather than -2, and the card worked like a slightly fatter Abusive Sergeant. The point, when used properly, is to enable favorable trades, a bit like a watered down Aldor Peacekeeper.

Sneed's Old Shredder

Mana cost: 8 Attack: 5 Health: 7 Deathrattle: Summon a random legendary minion. This is the first of the new Legendary cards I encountered, and hoo boy even if you like RNG this is extreme. My first opponent who played it ended up getting Lorewalker Cho. Mistakes were made. The second one pulls a King Krush that immediately swings the game though. Obviously it s the very definition of high risk, and hardly cheap at 8 mana… But imagine the Baron Rivendare synergy!

Blingtron 3000

Mana cost: 5 Attack: 3 Health: 4  Battlecry: Equip a random weapon for each player. Okay, I like the idea of this card—which is another Legendary—because it enables hero classes which don t have weapons to equip them, but in practice I flat out hated using it. First time I dropped it, I got a Gladiator s Longbow and my opponent got Assassin s Blade. So I d say we netted out there. The second time I got Light s Justice and the other guy got Doomhammer, which he swiftly began wrecking my face with. At the Fireside Gathering Hearthstone panel Game Director Eric Dodds suggested combo-ing the Blingtron with an Acidic Swamp Ooze to destroy the enemy weapon. But that s so situational I wince even thinking about it. Still, both weapons being golden is a nice touch. Shiny, shiny!

Flamecannon

Mana cost: 2 Deal 4 damage to a random enemy. Yeah, seems like Blizzard really is over concealed Auctioneers being a thing. Now Mage s have a cheap answer with this toasty spell.

Micro Machine

Mana cost: 2 Attack: 1 Health: 2 At the start of each, turn add 1 attack. Note: this mini mech also gets the attack boost at the start of your opponent s turn, making it like a tiny Gruul, or a Mana Wrym on steroids. This is going to be one of those snowball cards your opponent has to kill with extreme prejudice.

Mekgineer Thermaplugg

Mana cost: 9 Attack: 9 Health: 7 Whenever an enemy minion dies, summon a Leper Gnome. This absolutely monstrous Legendary mech will help ensure Big Game Hunter remains a fixture in the meta. I actually never drew it, but when I saw it sitting in the guy sat next to me s hand I was agog. Free Leper Gnomes everytime an opponent minion dies sounds, well, sick. That said, Illidan s ability is easier to proc and most people hate him.

Dr. Boom

Mana cost: 7 Attack: 7 Health: 7 Battlecry: Summon two 1/1 Boom Bots. Another Legendary that the Big Game Hunter will have in his sights, but I like this card quite a bit. The Boom Bot s Deathrattle reads deal 1-4 damage to a random enemy . Note it doesn t say they can t attack, either. Should provide an interesting alternative to Baron Geddon, particularly for decks which can buff the bombs.

The fact the two decks are built almost entirely using Goblins vs Gnomes cards, combined with my unfamiliarity with them, meant the sense of mayhem was at the maximum throughout the matches I played, with board control swinging dramatically and suddenly. Under normal circumstances I tend to favour decks which have almost no RNG at all, but perhaps as with the Webspinner—which most people thought was trash before they tried it—the answer is to stop worrying and learn to love the RNG.

What I am absolutely certain about, though, is that this injection of new ideas is much needed. You only have to look at the largely predictable selection of decks which the pros have brought to the Hearthstone BlizzCon tournament to realise that this is a game which is going to require regular content drops—certainly more regular than Blizzard has been used to delivering in the past—in order to keep the fun flowing. Team 5 seem to understand that well though,

On stage at the Fireside Gather panel, Senior Designer Ben Brode made the point that Hearthstone is a game which blends luck and skill. The beauty of that, as he sees it, is that it encourages problem solving on the fly and generates amazing stories which players want to share. And I think he s right. One of my favourite Hearthstone moments was using Thoughtsteal against a Paladin and getting Equality and Wild Pyromancer. The sorry emote never felt more satisfying. The difference with pure skill games is that they favour players who can memorise exact openings and as a result games can play out similarly. Brode cited Chess to explain the point. Not because he wanted to suggest Hearthstone was better than Chess, of course, but more that the different games generate different types of pleasure. If the Enhance-o Mechano card can create more of those jaw-dropping WTF moments, then I can t wait. And, unusually for a Blizzard release, I won t have to for very long.