So. You’ve completed Doom 3 on Nightmare. Dead Space on Impossible. STALKER on whatever-the-hard-difficulty-is-called. What next for a hardcore gamer like you? What else is there to spend your money on when you’ve already bought a mouse with more buttons than your keyboard, a screen made of platinum and lasers and various other gismos so bedecked with blue LEDs that their purpose is totally disguised?

I have the answer. Railworks.

Hated by Californian lawyers & Alan Tichmarsh while loved by the most dedicated gamers it is easy to dismiss Railworks as too hardcore. As that guy who puts his name on soundcards & headsets said “Railworks… man… I can play CSS and that but Railworks… Railworks scares me.”

The latest in a string of hyperviolent action games Railworks raises the FPS bar to levels that would have John Romero hastily retracting that advertising statement. Set over a terrifying array of “routes” including the depths of the creepy English countryside and the terrifying Canadian Wilderness Railworks is a game that you’ll be playing for the rest of your life… if you can make it that far.

The tasks in Railworks sound deceptively simple. Perhaps you’ll be asked to run a mainline commuter service. Maybe you’ll need to engage in some sorting of freight cars. Whatever the mission brief you’ll head into your first scenario full of confidence.

Confidence that’ll soon vanish.

Each route in Railworks is infested with the most dangerous and terrifying creatures you could ever have the misfortune to lay your eyes upon. Warped… things follow your every move. With only a nose mounted artillery cannon and several light machine guns affixed to your train every mission ends in a frantic fight for survival.

These terrifying ordeals are bad enough alone but jump into one of Railworks’ many multiplayer modes and you will experience the true meaning of terror – when those… things… might just be your best friend.

Would I recommend Railworks? I think I probably would but only with the most heartfelt warning that this isn’t for the faint hearted. If you were remotely worried by Doom 3 or the labs in Stalker than Railworks, frankly, isn’t for you. For those hardened souls who’ve fought through it all and still come out on top – Railworks is the challenge you’ve been waiting for. Just don’t expect to succeed.

So Valve are making a DoTA maybe. There’s been a dispute on the internet about this, but I feel that them trademarking the DoTA name, and then hiring the main man on the Warcraft 3 mod is sort of conclusive,  unless they hired him so that they can dress him up in hats and shoot nerf guns at him or something. But will they fix the problems that surround DoTA, or will they actually screw up for once?

People utterly hate DoTA. If you’ve been under a rock for the past decade, then DoTA is a fairly new genre, where teams of heroes compete against each other to destroy the opposing base, through levelling up by killing AI controlled “Creeps” and other players. They then use the gold and experience to buy items and level skills and stats. The concept itself is quite solid, and it’s interesting game. Fast paced and satisfying. There’s nothing wrong with the actual game, but the reason people hate it is because the community is utter shite. There is not a community in any game that is worse than in the DoTA clones. You think Counterstrike’s is bad? Play for a day amongst the Heroes of Newerth community and you will earn a sense of loathing you probably thought was unachievable. Why is this so? I’ve drawn a diagram, which is in the title preview thing.

There. I did science. The nature of the game, how close the teams have to be to ensure victory and what is at stake (HoN and LoL both have some form of persistant ranking, this means that internet fame is on the line, and everyone knows that is oh so important). For HoN, it’s PSR. Player Skill Rating. A coveted resource that decides how good you are. The higher the PSR, the ‘better’ you are at the game. (You start at 1500 PSR and the amount you lose is decided by the PSR’s of your team and of theirs, if they are decided higher than you, you gain more for the victory and lose more in defeat) You immediatly know what sort of game you’re playing when you have guides on the internet telling you how to get a better PSR, how to survive starting and how to get that digital ranking higher.

I’m not really experienced enough in LoL to tell you the intricacies of higher-end play, having only played a few games, but in HoN there are cocks all the way up. The issue is, as with the ‘formula’ above, people are so dependent on the team for victory, have something riding on them winning and have invested a lot of time in the game, that they turn into absolute cocks when it comes to the other team winning. The blame game starts, fingers are pointed and it’s absolutely pathetic. So, how are Valve going to solve this? With Starcraft 2′s multiplayer leagues, something similar could be implemented. Before you start in the “Pro” leagues or higher toss, you’re thrown into a beginners league where you can learn the game with people of similar standings. This could perhaps solve people getting thrown in beyond their depth. The issue is that people who have prior experience of DoTA will end up playing it, and when they enter the practice league may introduce loathing and hatred once more. How can we possibly solve this? Active moderation, a report button. Friendly banter such as “Good luck, you’ll need it” etc being fine, “You’re a fuck who should uninstall the game and go play in traffic” being right out.

So providing they get the ground work done on the actual game, with perhaps some twists and turns in items, maybe some original heroes, a new mechanic here and there and Valve have the opportunity to make a good game. It’s just that they’re going to be at ends with the incredibly elitist, generally obnoxious dregs of the DoTA community.

Solve this and they’re golden.

I can smell meat.

I leap down from my perch onto a catwalk, bound ten feet along it and soar up again, disappearing into the shadow of the rafters from which I came.

I can see the first of the meat now.

I move past it and three others; one piece has decided to break from the group. Perfect. I move quickly, low to the ground. Following. Hunting. I hunger for the kill and feel my pulse quickening.

Focus. Stay calm.

A mere two seconds later I’m fifteen feet above it and forty feet ahead of it, hanging bat-like above the door it’s about to walk through. Three seconds more and claret sprays into the air, coats my knife and spills on the ground. It whips round and fires a shotgun at where I was. Fortunately I’m already at its back again, plunging my knife in a second time and a third. The meat falls at my feet, comically limp. I can still taste the iron-sweet blood as I move silently through the door and back inside the dock.

Four to go.

I rapidly climb back to my perch in the rafters, from there I can better assess the situation an pick a target. Minutes pass before all four walk onto a right angled staircase in single file. I light a home made pipe bomb and aim it at the flat corner landing as the first two have advanced past it. The smell of smoke and injuries reaches me a second later than the deafening explosion.

The meat is weak now.

I can smell their blood and fear, my ears pulse and my breathing becomes audible. I have to hold back. Much as I want to give in to the blood lust I must pick my moments and focus on my attacks if I want to survive.

Minutes pass before one becomes isolated by it’s allies. Moving faster than it they have entered a corridor to a computer room. Leaving one in the open. My leg muscles explode and I surge toward it. I hit it with all my weight and strength, crimson spray spouting into the air for an instant, splashing onto the ground seconds before the lifeless cadaver. I’m forced to cling high on the wall by gunfire. I hate guns.

Three left.

I hear the one closest to me reloading and launch myself through the door, down the corridor and into the retreating flesh. He falls to my blade only moments before the second. The room is empty five seconds after I entered it. The last one is close. I can smell his fear, stronger even than the fluid that is starting to spread from the necks of the two on the ground.

I lick the blood from my knife. One left. I’ll make it quick.

I know which direction it went and I know it can only lead to one place. I take an alternate route, through a narrow corridor, right, along the second corridor and out onto a catwalk. I vault the railing, spinning as I fall and hit the ground in motion. Swiftly pouncing towards the only door it could use. I’m mid flight when it emerges and still airborne as my knife glides through the of my final victim.

I hunch over the corpse and place my testicles in it’s mouth.

You can find Part 1 of the diary at Creed’s blog, and follow your way back to here. The saga continues below…

We got hit. And we got hit hard.

Osiron, at the behest of their alien masters no doubt, launched a raid on our base with over a dozen men. Half of them were packing Marsec rocket launchers. The ensuing fight was… well, it was a bloodbath.

Four Agents dead, four more hit so bad they nearly died from their wounds before the battle was finished. The gangers just rushed in with no regard for their own safety, firing high explosive rockets everywhere. It was horrible, but my foresight to build security stations all around the access lift saved the day I think. The automated guns took their fair share of kills and kept the scattered enemy troops from forming up and pushing deep into our base. By the end of the fight, I had one squad whose members were relatively uninjured and I just dug them in around a security station to wait for the stragglers to be picked off.

x25killa was the first to die in the engagement, splattered by one rocket. Asmodeus and his squad suffered through half a dozen rocket hits as they tried to put some fire on the access lift before he succumbed to his wounds. Grey Painter and Paddy were knocked unconscious by a stun grenade and then killed when a followup rocket detonated the ammunition on Paddy’s body. I thought Admiral was going to die defending the science team when they ran straight into two gangers as they were falling back into the base. He took several point blank hits from one of those alien blasters before he killed both of them with his machine gun set to full auto. He totally earned his new Sergeant stripes.

As you might have guessed from the last post, Osiron were packing some serious heat, technology both human and alien. While I sold off most of what they left behind (If I never see another Marsec launcher again it’ll be too soon…) I did spot this little curiosity in among the pile. It’s another alien weapon that, dare I say it, vaguely evokes a swastika. An exploding swastika, judging by the description. If there’s one thing worse than murderous aliens from another dimension, it’s murderous Nazi aliens from another dimension. I’ll have my scientists check into it as soon as they’re done researching the ray gun.

I’ve also had to do some emergency recruitment to replace slain agents and to help cover for those injured agents currently healing up in my medical bay. Dr. Dick, Da’Jobat and Bad Pixel are among the new hires. If they last longer than a week I’ll be very surprised. Ground missions are only going to get tougher now, and with the majority of my troops injured to some degree I’m going to have to be all the more careful when it comes to combat.

Speaking of combat, the aliens strike soon after the Osiron raid. These are brand new types of UFO, bigger and undoubtedly tougher than the ones we’ve seen before. I dread to think what new horrors they may be carrying. Strictly speaking, I don’t think we’ve got any air power that can really take them on, but I deploy my fleet of hoverbikes anyway. They entirely fail to reach their targets before their deployment mission is complete. Sigh. They also entirely failed to shoot down any of these new craft. Double sigh.

By now, I’m pretty pissed off. Osiron waltzed into my base and shot up some of my best agents (and x25killa) and they’re going to get away with it because I’ve nothing to commit to a retaliatory raid, and now the aliens have flown by in shiny new ships and dumped a truckload more extraterrestrial scum on my city while I’m still trying to recover. Bastards. I’m not going to stand for this. I’m not going to just sit and wait for another alert. I saw the building the aliens were dropped into, so I load up the J-Mobile with every able bodied agent and send them over there as soon as the sky is clear. I’m not going to give them a chance to get settled.

In Apocalypse you can send agents to investigate any building you please. If you don’t find any aliens, you’ll piss off the organisation that controls the building, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem here.

They’re here all right. My agents deploy onto the factory floor, all wide open space punctuated by the odd gantry or engine assembly. It takes us all of half a second to spot our first targets.

Why they all decided to hide up there, I’ll never know. It’s a tower with only one exit at the bottom, with minimal cover and of fragile construction. I actually grinned when I saw this. The aliens are already boxed in nice and neatly for us. If we can avoid the return fire we should be able to complete this mission relatively quickly.

The aliens pop smoke and try to do a runner from the bottom of the tower, but five angry X-Com agents with weapons set to full auto make very, very short work of the breakout attempt. Five aliens dead in as many seconds and they don’t even get a single shot off. It’s glorious. I think there might still be a few left in the tower, so I move the second squad of four agents around the other side to cover the exit while the first squad covers them. It’s then that someone spots this little fellow:

It’s small, blue and ugly as all hell. And it comes barreling towards my agents…

…while trailing smoke. This can’t be good, and I order my agents to open fire on the little blue monster. It keeps coming, dodging fire like some kind of ninja, until…

…Sweet. Zombie. Jesus.

What was the premise of this game I’ve never heard of I hear the voices in my head ask? Well dear schizophrenic tendencies, this game involved a civil war in China, in which the international community have of course stuck their noses in to help keep the peace. You get to play as Nathan Frost, some grunt or somesuch, who, while rather foolishly running to save a man down, gets blown to pieces, meaning he gets to be bionically enhanced. If I sound cutting about the back story, then it’s probably because I am.

The back story isn’t why I suggest you go find this game, just like you don’t play Crysis for its story. You should play Snowblind because it was the first shooter that got augmentations right*. You are actually meant to be a supersoldier, as opposed to one that somehow survives magnum clips being unloaded in the face because they get behind cover.

It wasn’t that they were new ideas. None of them were. Yet they work perfectly in this world. The reflex boost that essentially slows everyone else down, perfect for when you need to rush through the horde with your shotgun, is bullet time without the jump. The ballistic shield, great for when you can’t get out of a corner, is a well known idea. The vision augmentation for when you get scared of the dark, and need to see cloaked people or through walls is just night vision goggles crossed with a wall hack. Cloaking is obvious, and the electrical storm you can send at them feels eerily like force lightning.

A very shouty soldier, who happens to also be a biomod - One of the 2 others you meet

On their own, they sound pathetic, but the old adage better than the sum of all its parts has never been truer. The advantage these brought were you could decide how you would take on the enemy on your terms, and this is without speaking about the weapons you also get, each of which has a secondary fire. Once you get into the last 2 hours or so of the game, you’ll have a rail gun, a gun which can fire drones to kill the enemy while you sit there giggling like a maniac, a sniper rifle which can either kill or convert them, and all manners of secondary ordinance. If you even decide that you just want to sneak around them and hack the security, that option was available on more than one occasion.

Even better, they took time to add the little touches that make gamers want to find the writers and hug them close. The wonderful Ed from Gaming Daily spoke about how background chatter in games makes him happy here, and Snowblind fills that criteria. When you send those little drones to go kill them, the enemies fire at them, barking questions and wondering what to do. When you bring yourself back from the brink of death with a nanoboost, they shout “He’s not dead, he’s not dead!” All of which makes me cackle while I blast them to kingdom come.

Put down that Mass Effect 2 box that arrived while you were reading this and go find Project: Snowblind. I can find it for £3.45, which is easily affordable. You don’t have to worry about compatibility either; it’s sufficiently young enough for Windows not to throw a hissy fit. A quick warning though, I occasionally had it crash on 64bit Vista. Whether it didn’t like 64 bit or Vista remains to be seen, but the save points it throws at you every 3 seconds are very helpful with that.

*Yes, Deus Ex used augmentations and got them right. But calling it a shooter is plain folly in my eyes. Return to reading

So, the Mount and Blade Warband Multiplayer beta is out, and it’s pretty…pretty…well there’s no words to really describe it. It’s a middle part between “It’s quite good” and “It’s needs some work”. So is it Mount and Blade WARRGGGHband, or is it Mount and Blade Poorband? Apologies for the pun, hit me later.

See this as a very very close version of the original Mount and Blade, but from looking at it so far, some of the best improvements have been in the graphics department. Metal armour has a nice shine to it, blood on weaponry looks like actual blood rather than someone attacking a ketchup sachet, and the weather is suitable, although I’ve yet to see a night map in the beta, at least one that any servers are playing. To use a worthless tagline for the game, it’s like if the multiplayer for Dark Messiah wasn’t terrible, and didn’t have morons who simply spam spells while standing at the back being thick. The Battlefield 2 of medieval fighting games. It’s got all the staple gamemodes, point control with tickets (ala BF2), Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch, but with one interesting addition. Siege. The idea being that one side has a castle and the other…doesn’t. It’s got ladders, siege towers, and those pretty awesome slit castle things that you can shoot the face off the nearest Saranid from.

So, having used the tagline that its Dark Messiah-ish, which many consider to have the best sword fighting in any first person game ever, how does it shape up? Well. Feh. Sometimes it feels natural and brilliant, with sword swings either clanging against an opponent’s parry, or slashing against armour or flesh, and the other times it feels really pathetic. The clunk of hitting a shield sounds so uninspiring, and it feels annoyingly static and clunky.

Parrying being rather the art form of lucky, with the idea behind it despite being sound, in practice ends up useless, as you die when your shield breaks. Of course there is the ever-present element of spam, and it’s here in force. People running forward slashing away with their two-handed glaive or sledgehammer will often reap kills with zero effort, mainly down to the attack speed being outrageously fast, and the time between blocking a blow and attacking being too slow. Kicking an enemy feels totally uninspiring as well, being very hit and miss in nature and often not actually staggering them enough to get a hit in, before they block.

Interesting enough, it also has a form of gold system. You see, you purchase all of your armour, weapons, arrows and other curios upon spawning with a set amount of starting gold. From then on it seems to go into wizardry, with amounts awarded from killing enemies being unexplainable, and the gold you are left with after death varying from colossal mounds to pennies. It also has an interesting, yet fiddly Character creator, meaning that you aren’t entirely faceless, until you put on any form of armour and then all personality is lost. It also suffers from a massive case of Oblivion face, in that every woman is absolutely hideous, and some faces defy logic. The lack of documentation hurts it badly, though being a beta, it’s expected. So is it worth it? The original is currently on Impulse at around £5.00 (at time of article), and the singleplayer variant is fun on its own. See this as an unfinished, but highly interesting, Battlefield: Medieval.

What happens when you mix a company well known for 3D benchmarking software, and a potentially groundbreaking idea? A simple but hardware taxing shooter. If I am honest this game has some problems. The graphics engine is demanding, with little reason. This is a picture in the game on low and here is one on high. Much difference? Not for me at least. Quite the controversy has sprouted over the games requirements. DX10 and Vista are needed. To a lot of people this hasn’t gone down well but I am personally amazed that there are so many people on XP still (over 40% on the steam survey for Jan 2010). I mean with the whole second coming that was 7 I thought this wouldn’t be too much to ask.

The game is a simple set of team games. CTF, Point control, team death match, and so on. We have all been here before. The new thing here is that it’s done in a zero-g environment. You’re essentially a man in a spacesuit, with a jet pack, and a gun. Rather spartan in nature, but it does work in the games favour. You get none of the COD “He had a better weapon than me” issues.

But having said that, this game is rather barren on the equipment. One gun, three grenades and that’s it. This however works out in the games favour. The simple equipment and interface make things surprisingly compelling. The grenades are a nice touch. EMP can scramble your suit so you are unable to move with much rapidity. ICE are your smoke bombs and MPR are high explosive that don’t do much damage but send people pinwheeling all over.  The addition of the ‘magnetic boots’ (which can stick to rock), allowing you to attach to any surface for greater accuracy and stability. This game is all about vantage points. Find a good view of the battle, lock to a surface and let loose.

Whilst the game is fun the stuff under bonnet however detracts from the experience. The net code caused serious issues with ping, lag and rubber banding. You can get randomly kicked from games that have a upper ping limit without warning. Also the server browser throws up a common player count error. Often you will see 24/20 listed. Also as I stated at the start of this review the graphics engine is demanding for no apparent reason. Since I turned the game to low settings I haven’t looked back. However I have never come across a game with such great Alt+Tab support. Almost instantaneous.

Overall this game has serious potential and is held back by things that could be fixed without much effort. Throw in a decent server browser, rag-doll physics, a better graphics engine, a single player practice mode,  and I will love this game.

Death. On the short list of inevitable things, right above taxes. And it’s a real nuisance, too. So why do so many games feature death heavily as a failure condition, even a punishment?

As pictured above, I’ve recently been playing Spelunky, a game where my playtime is better described as how many times I’ve died (340!), rather than how many times I’ve completed the game (0). This is because Spelunky, like a classic roguelike, takes death to its (gaming) extreme. Once you run out of health points (or discover one of numerous ways to be impaled or crushed), you die, and you stay dead. No additional heroes behind the curtain able to continue your quest where you fell, like Mario’s considerable supply of identical twins. No power to rewind time itself and try for a more favourable outcome, as saved games allow even the least princely of heroes. The game is over.

Dying is an obvious method of terminating a game based on failure, since the player can see that his means of interacting with the game world – his avatar, whether it be an intrepid explorer or a military commander in a giant mech – is no longer operable. Being told that your input is no longer valued because you failed to fetch a toothpick for the quest-lady within the allotted time really stings. Reputation damaged as it may be, a future still exists for your character, so ending the game there is separating you from your game incarnation, and ultimately the game itself. (Unless failing a fetch quest is punishable by death, of course.)

In addition, death is something humans are programmed to fear. It’s easier to get players to see death as an unfavourable outcome than it is to explain that failing to reunite the Holy Roman Empire in 20 turns is an unfavourable outcome. (It helps that life is almost always a simple, binary state, free of ambiguity.) Plus, having the death of the protagonist as a condition for failure makes the death of the antagonists (and survival of the protagonist) an obvious condition for success, which appeals to many gamers’ inner combatant (or, failing that, desire for contests of power with binary results).

So death is a great solution for games in need of a game over mechanic, adding a clear defeat condition – required for building tension and maintaining player immersion, and helpful for establishing a victory condition too. So why do so many games dilute death by letting you ignore and reverse it?

The ‘save game’ has become a common trope of most games in many genres. One benefit is obvious, and almost without exception a good thing – you can stop playing, quit the game, and resume play later. The more dubious benefit is that it serves as a backup that shields you from even your most fundamental mistakes.

You have fought your way through a skyscraper full of hired goons, with your varied arsenal of weapons and time-slowing powers, and reach the roof in time to see your nemesis escaping via a helicopter, with bulletproof glass making direct fire ineffective. You only have time for a few tactical shots; you need to think fast. The -whole game- has escalated to this point. The tension should be palpable.

You don’t see the trick and they get away, leaving you presumably for dead, more goons inevitably to end you. But after reloading your save game from when you had just reached the roof, you get it on your second try, destroying the helicopter with conveniently collapsable building supports. No missed opportunity, no lost hope. Little tension. Less feeling of achievement.

The moment we use save games in this way, death is reduced to nothing more than a speedbump. There is no cost to causing your own demise other than the time taken to restore your saved game, and the jarring transition into a past incarnation. Even worse, it can function as a punishment for players who have failed to see beyond the game – who do not tap their immersion away with judicious use of the ‘quick save’ key, bound to their keyboard by developers who understand that anything less would be harsh, even unfair.

I think developers should do better. Death is a powerful mechanic that can give players something to really value, but should be used carefully, even sparingly. If sending players back to the start of the game is unacceptable, then perhaps death is not the right defeat condition to use, since you reap few of its benefits whilst wasting players’ time. If the nature of the game makes death the only likely demise for the player’s avatar, the story for one character ending due to death doesn’t have to result in the loss of all progress; having new protagonists who are not what their deceased predecessors are and do not inherit all their defining features can make losses genuine but not game-breaking. If having players lose progress is such a bad thing since they would have to repeat a part of the game that was not fun to play, perhaps you can find a less repetitive way for players to get back what they have lost – or perhaps you should be concerned that parts of your game aren’t fun to play!

I’ve been enjoying Spelunky despite a lack of a save game facility. Admittedly the game does not require long to complete, so the desire to leave the game half-completed and resume later is reduced. But saving between levels is something the game could incorporate relatively easily. The lack of save games, though, is a blessing; the game would be easy to complete and discard if death was no obstacle, but that it is, and it is one that will defeat you regularly and for a time consistently, keeps each attempt at completion tense, each minor success more potent, and each crashing failure just leaving you begging for more. The game is confident enough that it’s fun to play again and again, and impressively, it really is.

Those 340 dead Spelunkers each mattered. I cared about (some of) them. They are gone, and nothing directly succeeds them, but that’s okay. We can have our fun without having pressed a key and saved it.

Minecraft is something of a quiet obsession of mine. I’ve spent entire days building everything, from dinosaurs to clock towers to Edoras. It’s such a simple game, but at the same time throroughly absorbing. For anyone who has bought the game, /indev/ is the place to play. It’s a work in progress of the next major build. For now, it remains limited to single player, but multiplayer survival antics are not far off. And even now, in its half finished state, it’s proof that Minecraft is a very interesting game. It isn’t just about satisfying our urge to play with LEGO anymore. It’s also about exploring, crafting, hunting, and surviving.

So what does this entail? What exactly can you look forward to, should you part with the £9 it currently costs to buy Minecraft? This, more or less, is the answer. One man (specifically, this man) and one goal. To not die horribly.

First up, Minecraft needs to generate a random level. I’ve gone with a fairly standard setup here, but should you wish there’s options for floating islands or endless forests, or even hell itself. Ingame there’s also a difficulty option in the menu. For amusement purposes I’ve set it to hard, which basically means more enemies, with more health, doing more damage.

Anyway, I hit create and the game is up and running. The first thing you’ll see on spawning is the inside of a very basic wooden house, which will serve as a decent enough base for now.

I head outside for a look around, and it seems I’ve got lucky with the spawn location. It’s next to the water, which offers a bit of defence and will be perfect for irrigating some farmland. Facing inland, it seems I’m at the bottom of a small cliff, which means I’ve got a supply of stone right on my doorstep. There’s also a cave entrance, so I make a mental note to explore that later.

It’s already midday, though, and I have other priorities right now. To do anything useful in /indev/ you need tools. I can make some, but I need to find a good supply of wood first. I head up to the top of the hill next to the house, and start punching down some trees.

A short time later and I’ve got myself a nice supply of wood. As a bonus, some saplings drop from the leaves. I can plant these near my abode and they’ll grow into trees after a while. A constant supply of wood on my doorstep should prove useful.

By now it’s late afternoon, so I make a dash back to the house. The key rule of /indev/ is not to get caught outside at night. It’s when the beasties spawn. So having blocked up the front door, I quickly put in a staircase and fortify the roof of the house. This gives me a good vantage point where I can survey the area in relative safety. Last thing I want is to open the door in the morning and get eaten by a spider.

I also move one of the torches from downstairs up onto the roof. Enemies spawn in dark places, so this should stop them popping in above, at least. I finish the rooftop renovations just as the sun sets on the horizon.

Still, it’s not like I’m afraid of the dark. How bad can it be, right?

As far as cliffhanger endings go it’s a little dull, I grant you. But next time I’ll be making stuff and breaking rocks. Swords are also used. Don’t forget that Minecraft is also worth buying soon if it interests you, being 50% cheaper while still in the alpha stages of development.

What do we want? NO DRM!
when do we want it? NOW
Are we likely to get it? ….no

So you may have seen that Ubisoft went seriously too far with it’s DRM. If you haven’t here’s a brief run down: when playing assassins creed 2 you MUST have a constant net connection. Failure to do this you get booted from the game and lose any unsaved data and access to your saves until you reconnect.

Madness, I know. Now if I am honest I doubt we will see this actually happen. My guess is that they have something up their sleeves that’s only mildly evil and they will bring it out when the net rage reaches a high point.

However we as gamers have a more serious issue on our hands.

DRM is here, and it’s not going away. We are going to have to deal with this as a group. The arguments made against DRM are moot point. Companies are wanting to protect their investment from theft and make as much money as possible. People will still pirate their games even if it’s easy to get ahold of or if a demo is out. We are going to have to live with it but that doesn’t mean accepting ideas like those from ubi! We need to get behind ideas that we as a group are comfortable with.

This is very much an argument of choosing the lesser of two evils. There is going to be some experimenting from the games companies. We also have to accept the fact that no service is going to be perfect. Steam is lauded as one of the best DRM solutions but it still has issues. Think of many big names that have been released on their service only for the authentication servers to die from so many people trying to access them en mass. We are going to have to accept a few drawbacks to get something that we can live with.

A more chilling thought is that we may have to live with GFWL. The reason? Many developers are seeing Down Loadable Content (DLC) as a new means to make money and improve on their games. They are going to need to have some kind of infrastructure to distribute it. GFWL offers the best system and I have not seen anyone else with one thats works for any game (as in a add on that is not a publishers own brand system).

We need to find a system thats half way decent and support it. That way we can encourage change.

Also I would like to see publications to take a more serious stand on this issue. I am hoping that when AC2 comes to review and that this DRM is still present that they get slammed for it. However I somehow doubt it.