Whatever happened to "Essential PC Games" lists?

For about a decade I maintained a monthly subscription to a PC gaming magazine called PC Zone. Perhaps my favourite bit of the magazine was their list of essential PC games. This buyers guide changed format a few times over the years but the basic principle remained the same. It was a ranked list of essential PC games classified by genre. The genres included Shooters, RPGs, God Games, Space games (for a while) and a few others I can't remember. There were about ten games in each category.

For several years this list was a cornerstone of my PC gaming. I strove to acquire and play every game on the list in the categories I was interested in.  I even tried to get the top titles in those categories I wasn't so enthusiastic about.

I miss that list because gaming seemed much simpler then. I could play perhaps ten games and consider myself an expert on shooters or RPGs or whatever. Once a game got on the list it usually held its place for some time so this was an achievable goal. Some games (most famously Deus Ex) maintained  their place for years.

I don't know of any equivalent list today and I don't know if it would even be possible. There are many many more games around than there used to be and also there are fewer games that stand head and shoulders above the crowd. This is natural in a maturing industry where innovation has become incremental rather than radical. It is also natural that the difference in quality between best and worst has become smaller. This is actually a good thing. Games have gotten better and even mediocre titles from today are better in many respects than classics of the past although we older gamers tend to forget this when we don our rose tinted history goggles.

Another difficulty with recreating the list is that the gaming public has grown and has become more segmented. Gamers have their own individual tastes, which is a good thing but it means we no longer all speak the same language and we no longer agree on what are the essential games.  A quick Google search for "Essential PC Games" will confirm this. The various lists thrown up differ as much as they agree.

It is not all good news however. As AAA games have grown into mega brands reviewers and their scores seem to have lost much of their power. Nowadays it all seems to be about pre-order and first week sales which owe more to multi million marketing budgets than to the commendation of professional reviewers.

I still miss the list though. Nowadays my game purchasing algorithm is more haphazard, an ad hoc combination of "games in a genre I like" with "games I have heard good things about" with " games that have a reasonable meta critic score" and of course the all important "games that are on sale this week". 

Max Payne 3 finished

I enjoyed Max Payne 3 although I am not sure it is fair to call it a game. Interactive movie might be a more appropriate title given how little control you actually get over your characters actions and how much time you spend watching the game story unfold in cut scenes. You literally spend most of the game watching your character go through a series of long cut scenes interspersed with brief hectic firefights.

This actually sounds worse than it is because the story is actually very good, the characterisation is very good and the cinematography (if that is the correct term) is also very good. You could watch this as a movie in its own right. I have previously criticised shooters like the latest Medal of honour and Call of Duty games for restricting the players freedom too much. However Max Payne 3 does this far better than those games smiply because it is a better interactive movie. In terms of story telling it is up there with Bioshock infinite. A huge factor is that we finally seem to be breaking through the uncanny valley in terms of lifelike game characters. Max Payne goes for hyperrealism and still managed to produce characters with real empathy.

Surprisingly the worst part of the game is actually the "game bit" i.e. the fire-fights where the player is actually in control. You are forced to endure hundreds of mind numbingly repetitive encounters from beginning to end of the game. Every single time you go through a door the following happens:  

You go through a door. A cut scene triggers which advances the story a bit and then a gang of bad guys appear. The cut scene ends with you moving to some handy piece of cover nearby. Once you regain control you find yourself under a hail of fire from half a dozen or so enemies. You proceed to pick them off one by one using the powerful bullet time ability, all the while accumulating injuries from the onslaught. A couple of the enemies will try to flank around behind your cover. When you clear the first batch a second batch inevitably appears.  Hopefully your health packs (tablets) are sufficient to last you through the fight because when you finally kill the last guy (cue slow mo bullet cam) you have to go go througha newly unlocked gate to trigger a save checkpoint and more than likely to lead into another identical combat encounter.

These encounters are always hectic and fun enough at the beginning but by the hundredth time they become extremely tedious. What a shame.

Quick summary: Combat is poor because it is very repetitive but everything else is great. Recommended.

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD)

I stumbled across OpenTTD a couple of days back and the game is wonderful. This is an open source success story with a large active community of developers and players that have re-imagined and expanded upon Chris Sawyers 1995 classic game.

Coming straight from the flash and polish of Max Payne 3 (of which more in a later post)  it was quite  refreshing to see a game that solidly votes for substance over style. This world building game has huge complexity with many many layers that I haven't begun to understand yet. For example: I am trying to grow a town in the desert. Turns out I need water and food, which makes sense. Water comes from a nearby water plant so I build a road and send some trucks for it. Food comes from a food processing plant but that in turn needs maize and fruit. These are too far apart to reliably transport by road so I need to build a network of railways to ferry all this stuff about. To speed things up I want to run multiple trains on the tracks but that needs signalling to prevent crashes. All of this has to be paid for so I need to look for some lucrative transport route ...and so it continues.

Lest you be put off by my substance over style comment I should point out that the graphics, sound and music are  great and must have been produced by accomplished artists.Custom graphics  (including a recent 32 bit update) are also available thanks to the creative game community.

I have never played a Transport Tycoon game before so I am learning as I go along. I still haven't really figured out what the whole objective is. From what I have seen so far it could be one of a number of things:

1. To make profits from you transport company.  Although this seems like an obvious objective for a business game it also seems to be a boring objective. Even though I have barely scratched the surface I have already noticed that some things are a lot more profitable than others but if you only do the very profitable stuff your game will be very limited.

2. To survive till 2050. I read somewhere that you win the game if you keep playing to 2050. Are there disasters and challenges which make this difficult or it simply a question of patience? I don't know.

3. As a competitive game. There is a multi-player mode. I assume that players build competing transport companies. Perhaps there are bot competitors in single player mode. I haven't seen any yet but this would certainly increase the challenge of the game.

4. As a sandbox building game. Look at pictures of the game showing thriving cities and busy transport networks. I want to build a world like that.

5. All of the above or something else entirely. Possible I may still be missing the entire point of the game.

If you are interested you can get the game here: http://www.openttd.org/en/
I recommend the 32 bit graphics set zBase. You can now download this from the start menu of the game by pressing "Check On-line Content" and searching for zBase.

By the way when looking for info about OpenTTD I discovered yet another free transport simulation game called Simutrans which seems to have its own strong following.

Darksiders II: Tackling the Deposed King (Big Hint)

The optional Deposed King is one of the hardest bosses in Darksiders II. I stumbled across him first at level 13 and was soundly defeated and I didn't eventually overcome him until level 17.  He is not a very complex boss. Most of his attacks are slow and easily avoided but he hits very hard and one particular hammer attack leaves you frozen for about 10 seconds while your health drains away at an alarming rate. Even one of these can be enough to kill you so there is absolutely no room for error as you whittle away his large pool of health. This is the source of the difficulty and frustration with this encounter. You spend a long time getting his health down only to die because of one mistake. Anyway the simple hint I have is to stack resistance gear. Gear in Darksiders II has two mitigation factors:  defence, which protects against most normal attacks and resistance, which protects against elemental attacks. Defense is more generally useful so you have probably maximised that at the expense of resistance. Well the Deposed King's ice attack does surprise, surprise elemental damage. If you abandon your normal gear for high resistance stuff then you will take far less damage from the King's freezing attack making the whole fight much much easier.  You can choose your own method of hurting him. I took the cowardly approach of using the gun to build up wrath and then unleashing wrath powers. You can also get a few good hits in when his hammer is stuck in the ground.

Having finished the game I can confirm that I enjoyed it very much. The gameplay was more polished than the first Darksiders and it had none of the difficulty spikes of the first game. I preferred the settings of the first game though. I think they were more varied and more colourful.

EVE Frustration

I re-subbed to EVE yesterday and spent two hoour in game without getting even a single frigate out of the dock. The game has been in the news a bit lately with their annual fan fest in Reykjavik. I am also aware of forthcoming changes in skill trees that make it very beneficial to skill up destroyers and battle-cruisers before the next patch so I decided to buy a months sub to finish off the training needed. This is perhaps not the best motivation for returning to a complex mmorpg and indeed I am at a bit of a loss to decide what to do with my month of play time. Implementing my skill training plan took about an hour - downloading the latest version of EVEmon, setting up APIs and ensuring that I can get the skills required before the patch deadline. After that I decided to play around with some frigates partly because there has been some significant changes to frigates since I last played and partly because frigates are cheap to lose if I screw up. The once humble Slasher seems to be the new go to Minmatar frigate so I decided to try one out. That means downloading EFT, figuring out what will fit, realising I have none of the required parts, scouring the local market and so on. By the end of my second hour I was still sitting in a hangar staring at spreadsheets when real life intervened and I had to log out of the game.

I really don't think I am in the mood to return to an mmorpg.