Who are you? What gender are you? What ethnicity are you? Are you comfortable financially? What did your parents teach you, and did you even listen to them? Have you ever had a crime committed against you?Are you a parent?

Many games are now drowning in options of ‘choice’. Mass Effect, Fable, Heavy Rain, Dragon Age, Fallout, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto or inFamous all offer ‘choice’. What choice is, of course, ranges from game to game and can mean vastly different things with different consequences depending on what game you play. Choice seems to be a buzzword, with very little meaning when plastered across press junkets. Choice in games is not a monolith. They are binary constructs where you are forced between a ‘good option’ and a ‘bad option’. As games branch out and try new things, there are more complicated choices: do you choose yourself and your own health over that of an innocent? Which teammates will survive under your command and which ones will die? What sort of person is your character, and what values do they hold?

The protagonist in games can change the way we look at games. During Grand Theft Auto IV, I found myself unable to ‘connect’ to Niko Bellic. He’s an aging war survivor, an immigrant, and a criminal. I’m a young female student and the worst I’ve ever done is stay at a Tim Hortons past the recommended 30 minutes without buying something. Niko was driven by desire to help his family and a need to correct a devastating betrayal. I can’t relate to that, and so Grand Theft Auto IV never pulled me in. Alas.

We project who we are onto characters, choices, and games. We associate more strongly with characters who mirror us, or go with gut decisions based on our own life experience. Stephen Tolito wrote in a piece for Kotaku how being a married, older man changed the way he played games, noting Heavy Rain especially, where you play a devoted father protecting an endangered son. He writes:

“I’ve learned that fatherhood is mostly about caring for someone who is fairly helpless. In that way, dadness in video games appears to be a good motivator for searching for something that can’t just save itself. You’ll be more motivated to find your lost daughter than a bunch of dead crows or even a heart container, perhaps? It’s also a good shorthand for making the player be a capable protector. As a Big Daddy, I was more motivated to protect my daughterly Little Sisters in Bioshock 2 than I was to protect the annoyingly incapable President’s daughter in Resident Evil 4.”

It’s only when a protagonist is a blank slate, and I can decide my motivation, my values, and my morals that I get sucked into a game. I often make pale brunettes named Cassandra and agonize over whether I should have hit that Renegade interrupt or whether I can truly devote myself to Alistair or maybe whether I can afford to give that old man my purified, radiation free water. I am part of the game world, and I am fully immersed in the story and world. I don’t need to try to relate to the struggle of a war veteran trying to make it in corrupt Liberty City, or a father trying to protect his innocent dependants.

Of course, there are difficulties to this. This Dark Legacy Comics strip illustrates one challenge of creating a character in your own image. (www.darklegacycomics.com)

http://www.darklegacycomics.com/190.html

Even if you make a character to your perfect specifications, you may still have your immersion broken quite suddenly. The perfect example is in Dragon Age: Origins. The races are elf, human and dwarf. You can make yourself a human of any color. In the Mage Origin, this works perfectly fine. Your character is in the Mage Tower, about to begin their Harrowing. Their family is long out of the picture and will never be seen, as mages are taken to the Tower from their families, and the chance of reconciliation is very close to zero. The issue arises in the Noble Origin – no matter what, your entire family is white. Your black character suddenly looks very suspicious, like Lady Cousland was a bit of a harlot while married to your dad.

Compare this to Fallout 3, which handled this issue expertly. You never see your mother’s face, and your father’s appearance is directly based on yours. In your travels out of the Vault and into the Wastes, you meet a wide assortment of people. You may feel like an outsider because of your Vault Dweller suit or your refusal to help slavers or because you slaughtered some merchants, but you will always ‘fit’ naturally into that world.

The difference between a straight narrative and a game where the character has an impact on the world through their decisions can be a small one. No matter what, Commander Shepard will save the galaxy from the Reapers. No matter what, Niko Bellic will navigate the criminal world of Liberty City, face his demons, and defeat his antagonists. For some players, choice-based games has a greater emotional investment. We do what we feel is right (or sometimes we choose on what will just be satisfying). And we see the differences in who we are as people from the different results we choose. We choose to spare as many lives as possible, or we decide that the people in danger probably deserve it. We make sacrifices to achieve our goals. We hold onto our goods out of selfishness or merit or need to survive, or we help out every homeless bum we see. And of course, we are often forced to choose neither perfectly good or perfectly bad option, but from a gradient in-between.

As the writing and depth of this medium evolve, no doubt these choices will become more complex and involved. Heavy Rain is a step in this direction, and hopefully it proves to be a trailblazer. The more variety and conflict there are with choice in gaming, the more we’ll have a chance to see ourselves in games, and find our own path, despite who we are or how we identify.

STALKER was all about creating your own story within the harsh radioactive environment of the Chernobyl Dead Zone. It was a dirty, rough gem that appealed to many despite its bugs and glaring issues. It almost never came to pass, but alot of people are glad it did. Now, several years on from the original, Call of Pripyat has been released and attempts to iron out the problems the original had and create a game to the expectations of what STALKER was meant to be.

Things though don’t exactly start off well however. The intro is a neat enough explanation as to the true story of Chernobyl, and the parts the game has invented for it in the future. The problem is that when the Russian English voiceover gets the dates wrong compared to the subtitles, alarm bells start to ring in your head. The intro stops and suddenly you’re thrown into the middle of the zone without much prior explanation of how you got there. Not the best of starts for STALKER, but then again veterans of this game will be used to it.

Alright alright, now smile for the camera!

It’s not long before you’re picking up your first missions and getting to know the place a bit better. Call of Pripyat is set on the other side of Chernobyl compared to to the original. You won’t visit the NPP in this game and will only really get to see it in the distance. Instead this game is all about you, a secret agent soldier, trying to make your way through the zone to recover lost pilots from a military project that went up in smoke. You discover others along the way, learn all about the artifacts and treasures of the Zone, and perform missions in the service of other stalkers.

Artifacts have greatly changed in Call of Pripyat. You’re no longer just going to stumble across them lying on the ground. Instead artifacts can be found in anomalies that have been scarred into the wasteland. These anomalies take the form of different guises: fiery craters, chemical swamps, huge cracks in the earth. It will be up to your keen senses to gather the precious artifacts that exist in these anomalies. To help you’re given detectors, however you’ll start off with a pretty clumsy one and will need to build up on missions and money to get better ones.

Your fundemental source of income in STALKER are the finding and selling of these radioactive goods. Call of Pripyat extends this by making most artifacts now give you a huge return in credits if you sell them. It’s important to note though that some artifacts can improve status effects on your character for a little bit  of radiation damage. It therefore becomes a choice of equipping the right artifacts and selling the rest. You can also sell weapons and gear but this won’t gain nearly the same amount of money.

Call of Pripyat is therefore one part exploration, one part missions and one part hunting. The zone you visit in CoP feels larger than the original game, and there’s far more content and things to do in the three areas you visit. Interestingly the starter area can be just as hard as the later sections of the game, and when you begin STALKER it’s important to keep in mind your limitations. Getting a good rifle is step one. Loading up on food, medical supplies and vodka is step 2.

These guys aren't very friendly.

How you react to other stalkers and dwellers of the Zone is up to you as well. Unlike the original game, bandits will not shoot on sight, and in fact everyone is willing to bargain or answer questions for you, apart from the religious nuts Monolith, who WILL shoot you. Of course you can take the attitude of shooting another dweller in the face if you so please. Just be prepared for the consequences of people being mildly disturbed and shooting back. Call of Pripyat’s human inhabitants of the Zone are tamer than Shadow of Chernobyl’s.

Then you meet the dogs, mutants and other entities of the Zone that go bump in the night. Having good weapons is handy. Jamming in weaponry can be the difference between life and death. Call of Pripyat can be quite frantic at times against any enemy. Shooting and taking cover are primary aspects, otherwise you’ll end up dead quite quickly. Looting corpses if you’ve got into a fight with bandits should be about gathering resources such as medical kits. You’ll not be able to strip the guy naked and wear his clothes, but you can rob weaponry if you wish. Just remember you’ll eventually become encumbered if you overload your inventory. Sacrificing objects in the name of being able to run in STALKER is rather important; you don’t want to be stuck out there.

I do have some complaints though; Call of Pripyat doesn’t feel nearly as scary as the original, nor as memorable. The secret chambers and areas of Shadow of Chernobyl were frightening. I hated going into the secret labatories of Chernobyl. Squeky noises, strange anomalies and horrifying enemies. All of this eventually leading to the large sarcophagus of Chernobyl NPP itself: beautifully, terrifyingly, accurately rendered.

Call of Pripyat seems to lose that. The secret labs you visit don’t feel nearly as scary, and the end result of your hard work in the zone isn’t nearly as good. It’s something worth keeping in mind, and I wonder how many players of STALKER would agree with me that CoP just doesn’t quite match the frightening realism of the original.

Another gripe is the audio translation, oh the horrible audio translation. I’ve played The Tomorrow War you know, therefore i’ve heard poorly thought out dubbing. But this is worse. Nearly everyone you meet in this game seems to have taken there Russian voices from American comedy inspiration. They don’t sound Russian, they sound goddamn retarded (excuse my french). It’s an offense to anyone who is Russian. Characters in this game mix between saying things that belong from South Park, or sounding like the Heavy from Team Fortress 2. Some of the lines they come up with are poorly thought out. “Real mean go in from behind,” is one genuine example (and not for a situation you’d think it belongs to). Dear. God!!

Here doggy, fetch! No, not my leg! GET OFF!

Graphically Call of Pripyat has shrugged off the bugs of its predecessors but is starting to wane in the quality department. CoP will win no prizes for best graphics, although I always felt that the STALKER games attempted to maintain a sense of realism rather than attempt to go for flashy effects. Buildings and metal can look fairly realistic in the right lighting. Pripyat is realistic and feels eery.

Upon glancing over my review I get the feeling i’m being somewhat judgemental and harsh on Call of Pripyat which is a bit unfair. CoP does alot of good things to the STALKER license; it successfuly tidies up the game without the need for mods. It keeps in mind the community wants and attempts to create them. You’ll for instance have to deal with emissions, and original idea from the early plans of STALKER that were reformed by the community. These strong radiological waves that can kill you damn near instantly if you don’t get into shelter and result in the world lighting up in radioactive glow. You’re vision becomes fuzzy like the cameras that took pictures of Chernobyl when the disaster occured, and before you know it you can end up dead from radiotion poisoning.

These are good aspects and they’re what makes CoP exciting. The game is less linear exploration to an inevitable end and more open ended. You can choose how you play and interact with the world, and similarly the world will choose how to interact with you. If you’re new to the STALKER franchise this is where to start your story before trying the older game. If you’re a returning veteran you’ll enjoy this just as much as STALKER, and even more so than the lack lustre Clear Sky.

Call of Pripyat is definitely worth the visit. The harsh environment of the Zone is a unique first person shooter experience that shouldn’t be missed. Grab your vodka, get your gun and join me in the zone stalker, and watch out for the dogs.

7/10

There seems to be alot of concern going around the net at the moment that the Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII might be a tad poorly produced compared to its rival PS3 version. Rumours of not true 720p gameplay, and somewhat spiky washed out screenshots haven’t helped in the slightest.

A hunt through the Net though and MSXboxWorld.com has some Xbox 360 gameplay footage! Probably the first i’ve seen yet. The footage looks pretty good and much better graphically compared to the screenshots. So perhaps our fretting over graphics is a bit premature?

The links can be found here:

http://www.msxbox-world.com/xbox360/videos/view/644/Final-Fantasy-XIII.html

Final Fantasy XIII is released on the 9th March. We’ll have a review for you by then.

Tits. The only real reason for the classic RPG nowadays.

You may have noticed your RPG has changed. Gone are the confusing stats, the rolling dice, the numerous equipment and armour values. No longer do you need to worry about equipping for damage or defence; these things are almost a thing of the past. Nowadays the RPG means decision rather than choice. Mass Effect 2 is a prime example of this. Streamlined and smooth, it plays now like a shooter with roll playing elements attached. It’s not the only one: Fallout 3, Final Fantasy XIII. These games take the attitude of less complicated customisation, more action packed fun.

There’s a name for it; action RPG. I sometimes wonder if the traditional RPG player – the Dungeons & Dragons fan – shudders at such a term. Truth is though, the average gamer just isn’t interested in making statistical decisions. This isn’t helped by the fact that these decisions were always complicated in the first place. It took me two attempts to realise that if I ever wanted to be a good mage in Baldur’s Gate 2 i’d need to put lots of points into intelligence and forfeit other areas. My usual response to stats was to place them equally in each area, effectively making me a jack of all trades and a master of dying alot…

Unforgiving games like Baldur’s Gate are becoming a thing of the past. The action RPG is king now. All you need to worry about is choosing the conversation arc you like and installing the equipment you enjoy the most! Sit back and let us worry about the complicated stuff for you! Need to choose a stat? Don’t worry, it’s really really simple. The exception to the argument is Dragon Age: Origins, but even Dragon Age attempts to streamline certain areas. If you, for instance, compare Dragon Age to older tactical RPG’s like Neverwinter Nights or Baldur’s Gate, alot of stats, options and classes have been removed. The most notable aspect of DA:O is that there’s only 3 classes available in the game.

But William, you cry, Dragon Age Origins is using Bioware’s own ruleset!

My answer to that is that Bioware is using its own ruleset for the very reasons I’m pointing out. Bioware knows the days of using Dungeon’s & Dragons are gone. It has to cater to a larger world; one that has absolutely no idea the difference between a Mage and Warlock (magic basically). By overdoing the amount of stats, choices and complex classes in the RPG, the player gets confused and runs off to an easier game, like Modern Warfare 2. Am I saying that gamers have low attention spans? You bet I am!

Gaming nowadays is 10% decision and 90% action. Would you rather set up a complicated array of skills and stats to get that extra edge in a fight, or would you just prefer to pick up a rocket launcher of extra rocket launching +18, and blast the opposition away in a blaze of glory? The gamer on the sofa – the gamer that currently dominates the market – would choose the latter. Until that gamer wishes for a bit more exploration into customising there character, that’s how it will remain.

Your tactical RPG’er has been relegated to the online communities such as World of Warcraft. Thankfully however they’re enjoying it there, and why not? Constant updates, customisations, helpful guilds. It’s all fun and games. Sadly though if RPG’er were to look for a single player tactical RPG, they’d find at the moment things are a bit empty. Could Diablo III fill that void? Who knows.

The truth is the trusty dice roll is the thing of the past for the single player RPG. Without community, or indeed to be more blunt, without the ability to shout on chat “How can I opens locked chest?” the tactical RPG will die. There’s just no place for it nowadays. Towns are boring, who needs them? Side quests? Pffft; never do them. I prefer to hack and slash my way to the end, and maybe do one of the hot girls while doing so!

Here’s a final thought; Square Enix recently said that they tried to make Final Fantasy XIII based on the action packed aspect of Modern Warfare. They stripped the towns and freedom away because they felt that the player preferred linearity and action. The gamer prefers to be told what to do instead of having freedom of choice. Take that as you will, but I sense that this is the true death knell of stat-dice-customisation-tactical-RPG.

Don’t expect Baldur’s Gate 3 anytime soon.

Of course, being new to the whole Hammer shenanigans, it turns out that if you don’t start your map with a good idea of how you’re going to optimise it already formed then things can get quite tricky when you actually start throwing down the func_areaportals. In this instance I decided that the map needed to be split down the centre with an open area portal since the general design means that without one you can pretty much see the entire second half of the map further down the road from the start zone, coincidentally the same place where you’ll feel the huge framerate hit. Easier said than done. I may have known from the start how I was going to lay the level out but I certainly wasn’t clear on the area portal requirements until recently when I looked them up. As such a considerably amount of fiddling with base blocks and boxing in of underground displacements which were opened up to the free sky has been going on and even now the portals are being antsy as to whether they want to work or not. The one success I had was quickly followed by failure as I thought “Well I’ll tweak them a bit so that they don’t merge”, followed by inability to return the map to it’s previous state which was followed by an instant engine error when I compiled.

It really isn’t nice, I’ve certainly learnt my lesson and will be taking better care with future maps. As soon as these irritating errors are fixed I’ll be setting up the nav zones for the level and then closed beta testing will be taking place with a few previews and, camera skills withstanding, a trailer being released. When everything’s hunky dory with those work on the second map, which has already been planned out in its entirity and is currently undergoing closer scrutiny so that I don’t fall into the same despairing pits as this one, will begin whilst McDonald’s Plight is released.

I picked the first Dead Space up out of a bargain bin at the local video game store. It was only $15, and I had heard good things about it on the Internet – hell, why not? It was a couple of days before Halloween, so I invited the boyfriend over, picked up some chex mix and cupcakes, and we sat down to play it together.

Dead Space transfixed both of us from the start. The opening sequence where you flee, unarmed, through a tight corridor from one of those aliens as pipes burst around you was astounding. The enemies are the perfect blend of familiar human traits and horrifying mutations from the Necromorph disease. Even the protagonist, Isaac Clarke, straddles the line between humanity and the unknown. An engineer thrust into madness on what seems to be a routine mission, he wears the heavy suit of Planet Cracker engineers in the future, and wields weapons mainly meant to aid crew members in everyday tasks. He lumbers slowly, making moments when you need to run more terrifying. When he is injured, his breathing rasps loudly inside his suit. Your human contact is severely limited, and it seems at times like you can barely trust your own mind. Combined with the monsters at every turn, the unfamiliar writing scrawled, and the twists and turns the plot takes at the end, we were simply awestruck.

Take that evil!

Not only were the pacing and gameplay tight and professional, but the writing was well done. The game had an internal logic – there were no Fridge Logic moments where you complete a plot point and then go “Wait – that didn’t make sense…” there were no questions left unanswered at the end by sloppy writing, no tense plot points spoiled by stupid dialogue. The characters all spoke like real human beings, there were no Jill Sandwiches (Jill what now? – Ed), it was the perfect horror game. Sometimes, the boyfriend and I would even get too scared and we would revoke our lights-out policy to exchange hugs for a little while we gibbered about how baby Necromorphs are just unfair.

So now that I’m done slavering over the brilliant game that Dead Space was, let’s talk about Dead Space as a franchise. The Dead Space game was accompanied along with a ARG online game, a comic series, an animated movie, and a Wii prequel. Of course, all of these side projects were written by different teams with different visions of the franchise. These projects were no doubt meant to satisfy fans and increase excitement for a new IP with a bold new vision, but all they seemed to do from my perspective was muddle the universe that had been expertly established by the game itself.
I remember joking after watching the boyfriend finish Dead Space that an upside of being so late to the party is that we wouldn’t have to wait so long for the sequel. Now that I’m looking at more information leak out about the sequel, my excitement is diminishing. There’s yet another team behind Dead Space 2. They talk about making Isaac talk to his companions, who will likely be characters from Extraction. There’s talk of lessening the scares, adding action, surfing out of danger on metal rails…

To understand my fears, let’s look at another legendary horror series: Resident Evil.

I was late to the Resident Evil party too. I didn’t get into the series until the Gamecube remake of the first game was released in 2002. I worked through that on a Jill playthrough and even though it terrified me near to death, I became a fan of the series. I dug out my older systems and worked my way through the other games, enjoying the adventures of Claire, Leon and Jill. The older games were graphically a step down, but they had a certain je ne sais quoi that kept them fresh and interesting even as I had to hunt down that last goddamned emerald for that stupid statue to gain access to the police station where I would promptly die to Nemesis because I hate tank controls and they’re awful.

Ahem where were we?

At a certain point in its lifespan though, Resident Evil got stupid. There were books and movies and comics and 3D arcade movie/games (Japan only) and subplots and prequels with monkey zombies… Code Veronica pushed me over the edge. It was a game that starts with Claire fleeing as a helicopter pilot fires through windows at her while explosions boom and ends with an incestuous child genius awakening from a coma and turning into an ant queen zombie with fire powers who was aiming to take over the world. A lot of fans of the series love Code Veronica, for me it was when I decided I was done with the series.

Resident Evil 4 won my heart back. It recognized that the Resident Evil series had been heading towards mindless action and stupid dialogue since its origin and full out embraced it. The gameplay is refreshingly fun, the enemies do have a certain creepiness (anyone who says the sound of a Regenerator breathing doesn’t creep them out a little is a filthy liar), and most importantly – it stripped free 90% of the stupid backstory except for references here and there. (It’s also the only enjoyable escort quest ever.)

Then Resident Evil 5 took everything amazing that 4 brought to the table, added back all the stupid backstory to tie up some loose ends, and started taking itself seriously again. I couldn’t even laugh when Chris Redfield punched a boulder apart with his enormous, melon-sized biceps.

Biceps of STEEL!!

So how are Dead Space and Resident Evil related? They’re both horror franchises are their roots – they’re both taking an action-y turn for their sequels, and they both have increasing convoluted backstories being built up through strengthening the IP.

Now, action and horror sometimes goes hand in hand – and there’s only so many times Isaac Clarke can be surprised by Necromorphs. The new, agile, streamlined suit and new weapons make sense to a degree. Dead Space 1 cannot be repeated over and over, lest it gain the stagnancy and staleness of Raccoon City. I’m willing to give the action-oriented sequel a shot.

But the reason Resident Evil 4 worked so well was that it stripped down all the tradition and pretense of a series that had been gaining clutter for years at the same time that its controls became even more dated and frustrating. Dead Space is a new, fresh, franchise. It shouldn’t be gaining all the sideplots and betrayals and mysterious returns that Resident Evil did – and yet, with all of the questionably canon side stories being released…

Too many cooks spoil the broth. As different teams build up different aspects of the universe, and as prequels are tied into sequels and comic books are released that ask new questions and movies contradict the games… I have to admit, I get a little scared. I don’t want Isaac to find Kendra Daniels on his new adventures, except now she’s a Necromorph and I don’t want the USG Ishimura to become the new Raccoon City.

Here’s my fondest dream for the Dead Space IP: that they keep the integrity of the first game. I hope that they keep the game to the basics, remember the things that impressed me (and so many other people) about Dead Space 1, and if they go action: do it like Resident Evil 4, not 5. You might be feeling like I’m exaggerating a little – how bad could this get? All I hope is that one day we don’t see Isaac Clarke on top of a volcano punching a boulder to death.

What I’m aiming to do is create a fully fledged 5 map Left 4 Dead 2 campaign by the time summer rolls in. The problems I encountered along the way (see the old site) have all but been completely fixed and I’ve been motoring away for the last couple of weeks with the first map (currently dubbed McDonald’s Plight but all the names are still up in the air) to the extent where it’s almost ready to enter a closed beta testing period. As soon as myself and the little team of volunteers have identified big issues and I’ve amended them the first map will be formally christened and released to the public to tide them over and raise anticipation for Map 2. Until then, please do enjoy keeping track of this little feature blog either through the Wordpress site I’ve set up for it or the Left Mouse Button features page.

http://back4more.wordpress.com/

http://www.leftmousebutton.net/features/back-4-more

Hello Commander. The Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Beta has been activated and your assignment is to see how the final instalment to the Tiberium Universe is shaping up.

We may only have access to competitive match making with this build of the game but there’s more than enough on show to see that C&C4 is radically different from past iterations.

For those not following development progress; Tiberian Twilight takes a hybrid strategy/role playing approach to gameplay. The basic profile stats system that tallied wins and losses from previous titles has been expanded to give your commander profile a whole online persona. Play well and win to receive experience which goes towards unlocking different branches of the tech tree for use ingame. Units, upgrades and abilities span three stratagems, offense, defence and support, which you select at the beginning of each map for the duration of the game. In many ways this resembles the old generals power/command points system from previous games albeit now in a persistent form and lacking a lot of the interesting abilities. Functionally the system works fine, but it does run the risk of oversimplifying the gameplay. Tactical flexibilities aren’t modifiable on the fly when you’re tied to a specific set of units that only serve singular purposes as soon as you begin the map. And each new unit ultimately does nothing aside from being a more powerful replacement of an existing one and with a different skin.

Persistent levelling isn’t the only thing that’s new to Tiberian Twilight’s online battles. In fact there’s very little that you would actually recognise when you load up your first game. Command Centers are walking AT-ATs, tiberium harvesting is replaced with a capture-the-crystal-for-bonuses side quest, annihilation is gone in favour of a Company of Heroes style victory point/king of the hill mechanic and all of the units look like they belong in some Japanese robo anime. I’ve put a few levels into the offensive GDI tree and have yet to see a recognisable unit or one that doesn’t have annoying and soullessly spoken lines.

Perhaps that is the biggest sin Tiberian Twilight commits, it’s Command and Conquer in name only. We may not yet have glimpsed the single player campaign, but the online aspect of the game fails to provide the personality that drew many of us in to the older titles. Sure, the old green hue of tiberium tints the map and the tail of that tank shaped like a scorpion does look like a classic Nod prism tower (another monument to the stupid unit design), but this still feels nothing like Command and Conquer.

Don’t think that this beta doesn’t deserve some praise though. Functionally this is the best beta build of a title that I’ve ever played; it doesn’t crash or bug out, it loads quickly, it isn’t unstable and laggy, the menus are intuitive and easy to navigate and the matchmaking will always find you a game within 3 minutes. It really is quite easy to hop in for a quick death match. Surely these things are a very good sign for the quality of the final release. Unfortunately, the problems I’ve found are ones less likely to change in time for going gold, unlike the bugs and errors that the developers will iron out. The problem lies in the bland, repetitive and dull gameplay that has no personality to draw you back in, with the only aim of the game being control point capture, a single structure to create units from and no resource system aside from ‘build stuff until your population cap hits’  the rounds almost always play out the same way. You spam a mixture of your rock, paper and scissors. Your foe spams their mixture of rock, paper and scissors. You duke it out for an hour whilst trying to get one up on each other with control point domination. It’s all so lack lustre that I’d be suprised if many people don’t give up on it after only a couple of matches. As such it also fits the criteria for most disappointing beta I’ve ever played too. It’s nothing more than a poor attempt at a hybrid RTS. And it’s certainly not Command and Conquer.

It’s been a long day at work and you’re itching for a release. You kick off your shoes, shrug off your coat, and maybe get a hot cup of tea going. You flop down on the couch or pull your chair up to your computer and log into a game, ready to forget the stresses of the day. Of course, it’s not quite that easy…

Online gaming played on the PC or consoles is on the rise. As less and less people crowd into their friends’ mom’s basement to share a couch and shit-talk as they play, more people are flocking to online services to play with other people. While there have always been services like Blizzard’s battle.net, it seems online play has grown in sophistication, depth, and size. More people play for more hours a week, and people connect. They join Steam Groups, guilds, and clans. You learn about people you’ll never meet, their fears, their kids and their jobs. There’s definitely a gaming culture, and it’s at its most vibrant and alive in online communities.

As with all cultures, there must be regulations and rankings. There must be a way to judge people and choose who to spend your time with. Gaming culture likes to pretend that it maintains an objective meritocracy, where skill rules all. “Move out of the fire, this isn’t rocket science!” Of course, there is no culture large or small which is able to hold a purely unbiased view of the people who participate in it. Gamer culture is no exception. Personal characteristics that count against you in the real world and its dominant, mainstream culture carry over into the virtual world. Gender is one of the largest biases which skew the meritocracy most gamers try to abide by, leading to a culture where hard work and practice pay off – but they pay off much less for some people.

World of Warcraft handily provides a perfect example of this. During the Burning Crusade expansion, Nightmares Asylum on Smolderthorn-US Horde made a public announcement that they were recruiting new players to help take down top content. Of course, there was a catch. Only male applicants would be considered. Female players were accused of causing too much drama, distracting male players, and not bringing enough skill to the table to make up for these shortcomings. There was some outrage from players, but the vocal minority of people who felt that this was absolutely not right were mainly ignored. After all, most players weren’t female and so wouldn’t be affected by such a policy. Not to mention the fact that Nightmares Asylum was demolishing difficult content, allowing access to the most treasured of epic loot.

While this policy brought some anger or disdain from players, it is not an unpopular decision from guild leaders and officers. Jake*, 17, is an officer in a ‘hardcore-casual’ World of Warcraft guild, and a former ‘full-time’ FPS tournament player. His methods of weeding out poor players from good players are blunt, but he claims they hold a certain effectiveness.

“In a raid, everyone has a job to do. If you set up a twenty-five man progression raid and one person is failing, they are being selfish. They’re wasting time and energy of twenty-four other people. Sometimes you just need someone with a pulse at the computer and you can piggy-back them through content, but our guild likes to weed out the bads before they have a chance to poison our success.”

“We don’t kick you if you miss a raid or you have kids or you have a date or whatever, but if you come for a raid then you stay for the entire raid and you bring your best.” According to Jake, the players who are most likely to bring their best and justify their slot in the raid are men. Jake is firm with the policy of preserving the time and energy of the other players in the raid. “Girls just aren’t on the same level. Sometimes they’re okay as healers or whatever, and I’d rather have a girl than an empty raid slot, but they lack that primal aggression that a man needs. They don’t need the kill as bad.”

The examples of Jake and Nightmares Asylum show how many modern stereotypes of women filter in and affect the gaming experience. Even dueling stereotypes that would seem to cancel each other out coexist happily. Women are seen as more maternal and caring, and less aggressive – as such, it is seen as ‘girls can’t pvp’. Yet women online are often characterized in a sort of aggressive, loud, ‘Girls Gone Wild’ way. Not only do players have to deal with the forces of the Horde and the minions of the Lich King, but they seemingly must contend with waves of attention whores, drama queens, and loot-sluts.

This reality often begs the question: why reveal your gender at all? This question is asked of many marginalized groups, but women must deal with it most of all. Why use voice chat if you will be harassed? Why bring up the fact that you have a boyfriend? Why mention anything feminine? Be safe, stay anonymous. Of course, in this case, anonymous means male. This well meaning advice not only solidifies the image of male as the default gender in video games, but more than that it is utterly impractical and useless on two fronts.

First of all, online gaming demands voice chat. As soon as you speak into your headset, it’s over: you’re revealed. The advice not to speak will only hurt your team. Look at the game Left 4 Dead: even at lower levels of difficulty, Left 4 Dead is a complicated, competitive shooter based heavily on teamwork and overcoming hectic challenges. Good luck surviving if you can’t call out when you’ve been snared by a hunter or grabbed by a Smoker!

Secondly, this advice ignores the fact that online gaming has become more of a community. As mentioned before, people join up into clans and guilds and groups. People talk about their lives and kids. The way that gaming ties people together, unites us from around the globe, through different cultures and backgrounds and gives us a common goal (shoot the other guy!) is one of its greatest strengths. To deny this experience to women seems silly.

Furthermore, the fact that this advice is seen as the great antidote to online sexism might explain why the numbers in online gaming are so skewed. When the onus to stop harassment is put on the victim instead of the harasser, its unlikely the victim will keep hanging around.

Let’s face it: there’s a reason why the typical picture of a gamer is a gangly teenage male. Looking at the numbers provides a much different picture. 2 out of 5 gamers are female. Casual games like Peggle are played in disproportionate numbers by women. The Wii is played by a vast majority of women. The numbers are clear: women are open to gaming. Marketing towards women, like the Wii Want To Play campaign works.

What can men do to coax women onto Xbox Live, Steam or Battle.net? The answer is more simple than it seems: When women talk about their experiences with online harassment, don’t roll your eyes. When other men whoop and throw slurs at a woman trying to suggest a good strategy for Lord Marrowgar, throw them a STFU. Definitely don’t be the guy joining in with the peanut gallery. Most importantly of all: just shut up and play with us. You may be surprised at the results.

*names used in this article have been changed

The USS Damocles in Stardock.

I’ve been spending time trying to figure out how to start this review. I suppose I could be all cliche and do a “Captain’s Log” monologue. Or perhaps even a “Space, the final frontier!” Perhaps i’ll go for “Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow, klingons on the starboard bow, wipe them out Jim! Star Trekking across the Universe, we keep going forwards we cannae find reverse!”

Star Trek is a part of all our lives. It gives us a dream of a future where we’re part of a big galaxy full of aliens, where money and corruption have been replaced by utopia and where our dreams can come true in the stars. You’d have to be living in the deepest darkest cave to not have heard of the USS Enterprise, or Kirk, or Picard (Kirk beats Picard) or any number of Star Trek stories. These are the voyages, and we are the viewers. There is no other sci-fi out there that has really ever been able to take our hearts as much as Star Trek.

Star Trek Online attempts to capture this magic by allowing the viewer to become the captain of his voyage. You begin your story with Leonard Nimoy telling you what’s been happening in the Universe (the primary Universe. Universe A. Whatever.) he left behind. Doom and destruction basically: the Klingons are at war with you again, the Romulans are rather miffed their homeworld has been destroyed, and the Federation is under attack on all sides. You start as a hapless Ensign on board a starship currently in the midst of a battle with the infamous Borg. The tutorial briefly gives you explanation as to how to move, jump and interact in your environment. It seems the Captain of your ship needs you to beam to another ship and save the crew from a borg attack. It’s all rather frantic and gives you a start to how the ground combat of Star Trek Online functions. Before you know it you become the captain of your own ship (the original captain seems to magically dissapear, and the chain of command seems to be totally wiped out leaving you in charge…oddly) and you’re racing across the stars to fight off the borg attack, where once again the tutorial gives you a brief introduction in how to fire phasers and move about in three dimensional space. Finish the mission then warp out!

Ground combat can be very pretty at times

Did that sound a bit to frantic to you? Well the problem is that it is. The tutorial is a heavy weakness on Star Trek Online. It’s overall designed to be exciting and to get you into Star Trek Online as fast as possible, but as tutorials go it falls flat on its face when it comes to providing information. You don’t find out for instance that you can control the amount of allocation you can give to particular parts of you ship, like shields or phasers. You don’t find out for instance that your ship has a particular firing arc, and how to use your ship most effectively when it comes to offense and defense. You don’t really find out alot of stuff that quickly becomes important and beneficial to know later on.

Despite this, STO can be a very fun game. Allowing you to both command your own vessel in space as well as beam down onto planets or spaceships is a great idea by Cryptic, and keeps the entertainment of Star Trek Online mixed. Funnily enough it only just works thanks to the transporter technology of the Star Trek world. Although there’s alot of loading, you don’t feel it so bad because your beaming down and up as you go. Quests in STO are performed in what is known as “Episodes.” These episodes mix and match the ground or space combat and the scenarios that take place; whether it’s dogfighting, beaming down to save hostages or planting a bomb on a research facility. Its entertaining enough that you won’t get bored while playing the episodes.

Space combat is where the real meat of the game comes from though. Movement is more like Freelancer than Eve Online, and the larger your ship is the more sluggish it becomes when it turning or in general movement. Rather than flooding you with numerous skills, upgrades and items for your ship, STO supplies you with only the choice of phasers, disruptors or torpedos, and your ships will have a specific limit to how many weapons you can equip. Your starter ship for instance has a forward and rear phaser array, and a forward torpedo, but your next ship may have a forward and rear torpedo.

This doesn't end well for me.

The choice of how you load out your ship is up to you, and allows for variation in tactics. Different phasers have different firing arcs; your laser based weapons that you commonly see in the series or movies have a wide phaser arc, but the damage is not as effective as a phaser cannon that has a narrow firing arc. This can lead to numerous weapon variations later on depending on what sort of fighting style you wish to have. Photon and quantum torpedoes make an appearance and are extremely deadly damage dealing missiles that pack a punch. The disasdvantage with them however is that in order to make a huge amount of damage you need to bring down the enemies shields.

You can see the tactics already. Sweep in with a wide firing arc to bring down one side of the enemies shields, turn in and fire a torpedo salvo, then sweep out and fire with rear phasers to make sure the torpedo hits home. Rinse, repeat. Despite this the action never gets boring and actually becomes fairly intense. Enemies can stack on top of you and shoot you from all angles, so it’s important to turn your ship as appopriate to make sure they hit shields rather than hull. If you’re not careful a torpedo volley can absolutely rip through your hull and in the worst case, destroy you.

As well as typical weapon arrays, you also have your own skills to choose from depending on what you choose as a class. Comparisons between STO’s classes and other MMO’s are actually quite difficult as by all intents whatever class you choose you’ll be able to tank in whatever ship you wish. Nevertheless the classes give specific skills that you can deploy in space and on the ground. Tactical officers for instance can fire multiple torpedoes or perform a fire at will attack on multiple targets. Engineers can deploy shield improvements or disrupt enemy sensors. Scientists can deploy tractor beams or even black holes to suck enemies into firing range while causing damage.

Space is big and beautiful.

Things then start to get a bit more complicated in the form of Bridge Officers. These NPC’s are alot like Guild War’s “Heroes” in that they fight for you and offer there own special set of skills. Your ship can use up to four bridge officers to offer different skills in offense and defense, while in ground combat your BO’s can fight and use skills quite actively, such as dropping shield generators or healing devices. Be warned though that when it comes to training up skills your bridge officers are limited to what they can use on the ship, another useful tidbit that’s omitted from the tutorial.

Where space combat is the meat, ground combat is a veg. At times it’s the yucky vegetable as well and you’re forced to eat it. Ground combat doesn’t feel nearly as sleek or as fun as space combat, but is still a worthwhile addition to the game. The problem I think with ground combat is that it almost throws you into an entirely different game with different rules. Here STO starts to mimic the more traditional MMO’s, with the unusual addition that instead of party members of your friends you have your bridge officers instead to fight along with you. At times it can be rather fun, particularly if you manage to set up your bridge officers really well, but other times it feels sluggish, slow and irritating.

Levelling and customisation is another aspect of Star Trek Online that’s not explained to well. Levelling works in a sort of pyramid system, in that you allocate skill points to particular skill areas that you are interested in – for instance points into improving warp core speed – with you gradually being more specific the further you level. Levels are dealt in 10 level spaces before your next ship, going up from Ensign, to Lieutenant, to Lieutenant Commander and so on. Once you get into the habit of it, it becomes easy enough to understand, but I can’t help but feel better explanation would solve its somewhat complex process to new comers.

I love my Constitution class. Best ship ever.

You can customise everything as you please; from your uniform, looks, bridge office uniforms, BO looks, ship colours, shape and design. This has led to rather wacky outcomes and some grumbling from fanatics of Star Trek who believe that colour schemes and customisation should be restricted to standard Yellow, Red and Blue. Despite this Cryptic have left the customisation reasonably open to the designs of what the user wants and are thankfully ignoring the rather extremist trekkie views, for now.

You can see throughout the review what the main complaint is lack of information. A lack of time has been spent trying to make sure that there’s enough information being conveyed to the new player of how to play the game. The tutorial is useless and somewhat ironic; it pits you against the might of the borg but the borg cube you fight at the end of the mission is extremely weak. These are supposed to be the end game bad guys, yet you’re destroying them easily enough at the very beginning, when you still have a wet nose and you’re just learning how to use the replicator. Cryptic try to excuse this by explaining within the story that the Borg you fight are “disconnected” from the rest of the Hive, but it feels less like a tutorial and more like an excuse to get the excitement rushing in immediately. A trip through starfleet academy, going through the ranks, would be a far better tutorial system.

Other complaints are that the game can be rather dull at times. Remove the episodes and there is very little to play with. Patrol missions are interesting enough, and sometimes become quite spectacular with friends and randoms helping in the same instance, but overall they can become rather tedious. PVP currently feels rather lacking in content, and there isn’t enough of a reward to play it constantly. Perhaps the best missions outside of the episodes are the group campaigns that occur in large instances. These involve such things as defending a station, or destroying an attack fleet, and can feature up to 200 players within the instance at a time. A full instance like this can be a sight to behold, and even if it doesn’t match the 600 man campaigns of Eve Online, it certainly matches it in excitement and beauty.

To boldly go where no man/woman/tribble has gone before!

Graphically Star Trek Online is beautiful, both in space and on the ground. I was extremely surprised and impressed by the knowledge that you could orbit the planets that exist in the system you’ve visited, and that planetary bodies feel well sized and aren’t the pea size shape of Freelancer, or the dust balls in the distance shapes of Eve Online. You can’t help but zoom into your ship, enjoying the fact it’s all yours and customized and named as you like (even if you like calling your ships USS Penisland).

In the end, Cryptic have alot running on this game. Not only is it the first online game for the Star Trek Universe, it’s also the first competitor against Eve Online. Those who are feeling jaded or confused by Eve’s extremely difficult learning curve may find themselves enjoying Star Trek Online alot. It presents a refreshing but somewhat rough new universe to play in. There is definitely room for expansion and improvement, and I would imagine Cryptic will be hot on their heels to iron out any shortcomings and make this an excellent addition to the MMO scene. Had it been released a bit more polished I would have awarded it a 9. I’m looking forward though to seeing what Cryptic does with the franchise, as it looks very promising. Overall if your looking for a refreshing different MMO to others, Star Trek Online is definitely worth a try.

Warp 8, Mr Sulu!

8/10