A few Games I've played recently: Pc Edition

After the unprecedented success of my last post (a comment!) I feel I should continue the list with the Pc games I've recently played and enjoyed. This week I'll talk about the large, studio-made games I've been playing.

In a world containing GT5's 1000 unique cars, a game that only has a single type of car shouldn't really be anything to get excited about. If however that car is an F1 car, and the game lets you race it through a complete season including testing, quali and racedays, and the opposition on track are actually named after the real life drivers, then I get very excited. honestly one of the best bits of the game is the fact that it's all fully licensed. Outbreaking Fernando Alonso is much more fun that outbraking "Player 2", especially as I'm a McLaren fan.
The racing itself is brilliant as well, the tracks are beautifully realised and the difference between driving on slicks and wets in the rain is monumental. Thankfully codemasters included their brilliant 'replay' system, that lets you rewind a few seconds if you make a mistake, something that is invaluable when you put it in a wall after 15 laps of Monaco (I'm not sure if I've ever concentrated as hard as I did during that race). It's a game that I'll keep coming back to, just for a race now and then, and certainly more once the new F1 season starts. I now have an intimate knowledge of all the tracks on the calendar, and it makes watching races on TV much more fun when you know exactly where the braking points and racing line are on a corner.

Just Cause 2 is just plain fun. It has lots of problems, but if all you want to do is run around a HUGE island paradise, blowing stuff up, this is perfect.
The storyline is a bit sketchy, but it really takes a backseat to just creating chaos on the island. Creating chaos is actually the aim of the game, you gain chaos points by blowing things up and disrupting the government, and racking up enough of them unlocks the next storyline quest allowing you to progress in the game, but creating the chaos points is reward enough in itself.
At one point while I was playing, I attacked a military base on a motorbike. I drove the bike as fast as I could towards the gates and at the last second jumped off and opened my parachute, floating gently over the walls while the bike rammed into a petrol tanker and exploded, killing 3 guards. I landed on a roof, threw a few grenades before grapple-hooking'ing my way up a tower, and then hijacked the helicopter the government had sent to kill me in mid air. I then used the helicopter to destroy the remains of that base, and another, before I was badly damaged by another enemy helicopter, so I jumped out of mine, grappled onto the new one, hijacked it and flew off, while the burning remains of my original aircraft fell to the ground and exploded, destroying a jeep full of soldiers.
Just seeing and experiencing the island is a good enough reason to play the game. It is the most massive open world I've ever seen and takes probably 20-minutes to fly across in a helicopter (to run it would genuinely take a day). It varies from thick jungle to snowy-mountain-tops and there's an enormous city, complete with skyscrapers you can climb and base-jump off. There are also 3 airports (that I found), oil-rigs, harbours, nuclear bunkers, factories, and literally hundreds of villages and towns dotted around the landscape.


Dragon Age is another huge game, but in a different way. I have currently played about 32hours, and I'm at 27% completion. It's good, clean, RPG fun, and I've really enjoyed fighting my way up towers and down dungeons. The storyline is good so far, nothing spectacular, but it's keeping me playing which is no mean feat considering how much time it can take up. The combat system is solid: you can either play real time, or pause the game during the combat and issue commands before restarting it again. So on easy battles you can let your party get on with it themselves (you assign tactics to each of them, so they know what to do in any situation) and in harder battles you can stop/start second by second, micromanaging every spell and ability. This variation means you can relax and concentrate on exploring a lot of the time, but when you need to win a tough battle, there is enough depth for you to dive in and make sure the right enemies go down early, and everyone gets healed.


Another game that deserves a mention is Mafia 2. This storyline driven third person shooter is really good, and very well made. The game creates a fantastic 1950's feel, with the costumes, cars and music absolutely spot on, and the casual conversations you hear the public having help to immerse you even further.
The storyline itself is fantastic, I was genuinely excited by the twists and turns that it takes you on, and at times it felt more like a movie than a game, with great voice acting and a terrific script. The shooting is fun and satisfying, and the fist-fights are well designed.
It markets itself as an open world game, but I really didn't find myself exploring that much apart from when I had to go somewhere to complete a quest. I suppose it is a credit to the writing that I felt the need to progress the story all the time I was playing, rather than venturing out to steal cars and cause havok.


Next week I'll write about the indie games I've been enjoying lately. Steam had a sale last week, and I stacked up on loads, some better than others.

A few games I've played lately

I'm very aware that no-one reads this blog, but decided that in the interests of my future self I should make an effort to record some of the things that go through my head while I'm playing certain games. Actually these are more like the thoughts that go through my head shortly after I've finished playing games, seeing as I'm writing them now and not while I have a joypad in my hands...

I recently bought a Wii, and along with it a raft of new games to play. Also, having just finished university, I figured now was a good time to buy a new PC in order to do more "work", and of course by work I mean play new games at their most beautiful.

On the Wii side of things I have really enjoyed Mario Galaxy 2, Zack and Wiki, and Red Steel 2.


I'm not going to say anything that hasn't already been said 100 times about Galaxy 2.

• It's probably the best platformer I've ever played
• The variety of the levels is outstanding, and even if something is repeated later in the game, it still feels fresh
• The worlds you get to explore are amazing, and the way gravity is used is inspirational.

Zack and Wiki is a great puzzle adventure to play though. It has elements of the old Lucas-Arts games, with the point/click and the humour, but at the same time feels brand new and original. It's quite unlike anything else on the Wii, and while the later puzzles are fiendishly difficult, at no point did I feel like giving up as solving them was too much fun. It may look like it's for kids, but the puzzles are certainly geared more towards teenagers and up.

It's a while since I played a puzzle game that really made solving it so enjoyable. If you can avoid looking at walkthroughs and persist in solving the puzzles yourself, it's one of the most satisfying games you'll play in a long time.

I probably enjoyed this game as much as I did because it was so different to the two above. After spending hours bopping Goombas and solving puzzles, running around with a Katana and a pistol, killing ninjas, was a nice change. The story was fairly poor, but as a means to an end it worked fine, and was more than made up for by the motion controlled sword fighting. While the sword fighting is a long way from 1:1 action, and rather substitutes gestures for buttons, it's still a great way to play, and you do get out of breath after a long battle. I enjoyed the exploration aspect, and while the upgrade system is fairly basic, learning new moves and techniques certainly kept the game feeling fresh even after hours of combat. 

Handpainted Mill

I decided that I needed to improve my texturing, without using photographs as a base like I usually do.

Having recently played through Torchlight I had a good idea of what I wanted to make, a building in the same style as you see in that game.

After a bit of googling I thought it would be fun to make a small fantasy mill with a water-wheel on the side, so I did.

I did all the textures in Photoshop using my tablet and the model is about 600 polygons. I'm pleased with it, and have certainly improved by doing it.

Masters Passed!

Today I received the great news that I have passed my Masters with merit, which is a bit confusing; I didn't even know there was a 'merit' grade...

I've now updated my CV, webpage, LinkedIn etc.but am still only vaguely aware of the fact I never have to go to uni again. I was probably ready to finish uni and start a job about 6 months ago, 5 years is a long time to study the same subject, and I can't wait to get to use everything I've learned (although hopefully not too much of the programming).
Highlights of the last few years include my time in Germany, the games design modules, and Dare to be Digital. It's interesting that these are where I had the most fun, but are also where I learned the most...

Masters Completed

A couple of weeks ago I submitted my last piece of Masters coursework, namely my dissertation. While not as massive as my undergrad diss. this one was still a lot of work, and was done in about a third of the time due to spending the summer in Dundee.
I had some great news in that we were allowed to submit 'Grrr!' as our group project, so hopefully our marks should get a boost from this. Uni were very accommodating when it came to Dare, shifting modules around and allowing us to use our game as a submission, as well as helping us during the application process, so I thank them for that.
Marks are still a while away I expect, but in all honestly I'm in no rush to get them, am just happy to have finished the course and am looking forward to getting a job. A task that hopefully shouldn't take too long, but could end up being a real slog.

New Grrr! Trailer

I cut together a new Grrr! trailer, and uploaded it to Youtube for the whole world to see:

Award winner at Dare to be Digital

Well I'm back from Scotland and had a fantastic and very fruitful time.
In the end the game we made came out brilliant, and got great feedback at Protoplay (the exhibition) from the audience and also the judges.

As a result we were awarded the [Adult Swim] award for creativity and unique gameplay!
A superb prize for the team, but also the best outside the top 3 for artists. This made us one of the 5 teams to come away with a prize from DTBD 2010, something we're all very proud of.

Other news about the competition is that our team was one chosen to be featured on a Channel 4 documentary about Dare to be Digital. So over the last 10 weeks we got followed around, interviewed and got to play our game on a cinema screen while they filmed us. It'll be 3x30minute shows being broadcast in spring 2011, and should be brilliant to watch, as by then I'll have forgotten all the stupid stuff I said on camera and can get embarrassed all over again.

All in all it was an amazing experience, met so many great people (competitors, mentors and staff) and got the chance to make a game I can be really proud of.

Dundee 2010

So I got the incredible news yesterday that my team and I; 'Bears with Jetpacks',  have been selected to goto Dundee for the 'D2BD' competition!

It's so relieving after all the work we put in to get to this stage. This summer now holds an amazing opportunity to create something that we can be really proud of and also to meet and learn from so many other talented people.

The competition starts on the 7th June, so we really don't have that long to prepare but I'm sure we'll be fine. We are already well set up with our concepts and gameplay demo running, so we can get started on the prototype as soon as we arrive in Scotland.

Some very exciting times ahead, hopefully I'll come out the other end of this summer with a huge amount of experience and possibly some life changing contacts. Whatever happens it's sure to be amazing.

Dare to be Digital

People in the games industry reading this will probably know about the 'Dare to be Digital' competition, anyone else will most likely never have heard of it, but rest assured, it's a big deal for people in my position.
They can explain it better than I can:

"Dare to be Digital is a video games development competition for extremely talented students at Universities and Colleges of Art. Teams of 5 students, usually a mix of artists, programmers and audio, assemble in a development hothouse for 10 weeks to develop a prototype video game, receiving daily support and weekly training sessions from industry specialists."

The reason I bring this up, is that I am entering along with 4 other guys from uni. Our group/studio is now collectively known as 'Bears with Jetpacks' and we're currently working on our application. Happily my group is made up of people I've worked with on a game over the last few months (Stefan, Amila), one guy I've worked with for the last 5 years (Tom) and someone who worked on a game with him for the last few months (Mark). So we're a pretty tight-knit bunch, and have a very real chance of getting to Dundee with our collective skills and areas of expertise.
For sake of security I won't outline our game idea yet (applications are in on Friday) but will put up our pitch and concept art as soon as we know no-one will steal the idea (and they would, you just wait till you see it.)

Spacific Video

Over the autumn semester at university I was working on a game prototype with 2 other guys, Stefan and Amila. Together we created a mystery/puzzle game in the Unreal 3 engine, starting from scratch and coming out with what I think is a pretty awesome artistic and tech demo. You'll recognise some of the stuff in the video that I've posted before:

Amila and Stefan worked as the programmers on the game, while I was the artist, everything you see in the video was created by me. It's easily the biggest group project I've worked on as the sole artist, and it was really refreshing to be able to pick the style and make everything as I wanted it, rather than trying to co-ordinate with another artist as I'm used to.

The video above is the game from start to finish as it stands. The sound was done by Stefan, he's a sound design graduate, thank god, I have no idea with that stuff, give me eyes over ears any day. The intro video was produced by me to go with the monologue, but was only a placeholder for what we really wanted to make, maybe one day I'll go back and put something better together for my portfolio.

The script writing was a group effort, but I can lay claim to the line 'my mouth tasted like a dogs arse'. I definitely remember thinking of that.

Oh, and the name Spacific was a bad attempt at word play by myself. The game is set on an island in the Pacific ocean, and the puzzles each have a 'Specific' answer. Pretty awful...

New Website

I've just uploaded my new webpage, it's actually been ready for a while, but I've been distracted lately with skiing and new uni semester. It's still very much a work in progress, I plan to have the gallery pictures opening new pages with details and more related thumbnails rather than just maximising the image that's clicked. That can wait until I've smoothed out any problems with the current version and finished uploading necessary files, like my CV, which is still in German oddly.

If you do come across any problems on the site, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to fix it, unless it's something like "I know a problem, your site is crap" in which case I'll do my best to hunt down something YOU love and insult it. Unless the only thing you love is your mother, because insulting mums just isn't kosher (and to be honest, if the only thing you love is your mother, you're either 2 months old, or need to get out more).