Musings and Happenings

While I escape the depressing clutches of uni work, both academic and tutoring relating, I find myself playing a vast variety of games lately. Some of these are new. Some of them are very, very old. It is interesting which of these games I have enjoyed more than others as it says something (at least to me) about the design of games today versus that of yesteryear.

As I expected, Shogun 2 was fantastic. It is probably going to be my favourite PC game of the year. It is polished and refined, something you would expect of Creative Assembly after returning to their roots having learnt everything from the previous iterations of the Total War series. For three days straight I put in roughly 28 hours and completed a domination campaign. I have not spent that much time on a game since I was 'addicted' to WoW in my second year of uni. To clarify what I mean by addiction in a gaming sense, I mean simply playing a game for an unhealthy amount of time, ignoring more important aspects of life. This includes people and housework. So, for three days I did just that, but at the end of it I didn't feel as 'bad' as I used to when I would do the same thing in WoW. Shogun 2 is ... almost a spiritual game, reinforced by the sometimes calming music and zen-like attitude the game forces you to have towards warfare. However, having said that, there is nothing more awe-inspiring than watching your armies march into battle in what is perhaps the best looking RTS game currently on the market. I swear I could listen to the sound of 3000 ashigaru trudging towards their doom forever.



But then there was Bulletstorm. I guess I should have expected the game to be what it is, but me being a fan of the old UT series and of Painkiller still had my hopes up nonetheless. This game makes me want to facepalm so hard that I swear my face would be nothing but a bloody skull by the end of the game. Kill with Skill? Really? Is this really the selling point of this game? There is nothing skillful about the killing in this. It is not hard, nor is constrained by time in any difficult sense of the word. A typical killing scenario involves popping your head over your chest-high wall, looking for a dude to leash, leashing him into the air towards you, looking around for 10 years to find something to kick him into (seriously, you have so much time to do this it isn't even funny) and finally giving him a blast of generic gun type B to assist him on his merry way. Congratulations, here is 500 points. I'm sorry, but this is not killing with skill. It's killing creatively, I will give you that, but when you do it over and over and over again it gets incredibly dull. It's not a bad game by any means. It's just not as good as it COULD have been. Then there are the quick time events, in particular the 'react quickly to this to get points' ones. I shit you not, something will occur and the speed that of which you press a button to automatically look at whatever it is the game wants you to look at will reward you some bonus points. The first time this happened I thought it was a joke, that was how stupid I found it. Then it kept happening. You also can't jump. Yeah. Yahtzee sums up the game pretty well in his Zero Punctuation review of it, mainly it being stuck between the (actually) skillful and fast paced days of old and the retardedly slow and console-like FPS games of today. If you want a clearer picture I recommend watching it.

... can you actually see what is going on here? Yeah, me neither.

Which brings me to my next chapter: games of old. I have been playing an uncanny amount of Doom lately for one simple reason: it is incredibly fun. The amount of media attention and articles revolving around oldskool FPS games of late (something I am quite happy to see) has inspired me to revisit some of these titles again. Doom was the first on the agenda which I actually found rather challenging. Putting it on Ultraviolence and wading straight in, I found myself on occasion being caught off guard by the odd imp or hellknight and almost (almost) jumping out of my seat. I will even admit I even died a few times. Now, to properly bring attention to the gravity of that statement I will inform you of two things. Firstly, I am using a mouselook mod called ZDoom which allows you to use a mouse and look somewhat along the wonky Z axis that Doom permits. Doom was not originally designed for mouselook, so being able to use a mouse gives me an enormous advantage. Secondly, if you have ever played Doom you will know that you can move at almost the speed of sound. So an experienced FPS player dying in Doom with these two aspects in their favour is, at least to me, telling me just how difficult this game really is. Certain sections I found myself just running through to get away from the hordes as I didn't have the ammo or the health to deal with them. Which, and this is important, was actually fun as well. Having to go from Rambo in one room to Houdini in the next reminds me of the importance of resource management (health, ammo, weapons, armor etc.) in these types of FPS games, something that is lacking in almost every new one being released today.

Never fight a drunken hobo weilding a boomstick

I have also recently jumped back into Half-life again after my last nostalgic audio post. While very different from Doom in terms of game play, the concept of resource management is still the same. If you simply want to get through the game you don't need to kill everything, but finding additional pickups may require you to do so anyway. As anyone who has played it will know, the game is constantly throwing new situations at you which are either combat or puzzle based. A good balance between the two (which the game pulls off) makes for very engaging game play that can keep you immersed for hours. Which is what the series is essentially renowned for. Also like Doom, it is not a piece of cake. Many a time I have found myself stumbling over a cliff face in a firefight frenzy or getting flanked by soldiers. Usually stupid things that I would usually check for but have forgotten that a game as old as Half-life has implemented. It is good to see I can still get just as much a kick out of these games as new ones being released today with all their fancy flair and poise. Perhaps even more so...

Blue is a terrible colour. Here, try some red on.

Sif not shoot everything with a shotgun.

Finally, on a much different note, I am slowly putting the pieces of a League of Legends frag video together. So far only two of us have actually submitted any replays (using LoLReplay, an excellent third party recording tool) but hopefully I will have roughly 2-300 clips of various LoL occurrences by the end. An awesome section, a humorous section and possibly a failboat section (which will be both awesome and humorous) will probably suffice in terms of video chapters. I will probably think about it more when the time comes to actually edit it. In the meantime I will entertain myself with smaller projects such as the following:

Time to choose ...

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. ~Doug Larson

It's late and I'm tired but I yet again find myself trolling through the many wonders of the internet, much like a drunken hobo alongside a busy highway. It's not often I stumble across something that will leave me sleeping content and happy, but this has truly left a smile on my face.


It's the ending/credits music. After bringing down that ugly mofo and fighting off hordes of xenos, getting to listen to this track after a very questionable and non-conclusive ending was, in my opinion, brilliant. The original Half-life is undeniably one of the best games ever made and at least in the top 5 FPS games ever developed. Although I didn't actually play the game when it was first released, when I did manage to get around to it a few years later I remember being awestruck by the ending. Little actually made sense in the game, but it wasn't one of those games that needed to explain itself. A similar ending also occurred in the excellent expansion Opposing Force. It is something I would have liked to seen debuted in the Half-life 2 engine/universe (playing as Corporal Shepherd). A strong war/combat based perspective on the whole ordeal would have worked marvelously.

Now I'm off to dream about shooting marines in the face with a shotgun and fighting off endless waves of aliens with Snarks and a Gauss cannon.

How to make a PC FPS - 10 simple rules

I never thought I would have to do this. Actually that's a lie. I probably always have secretly wanted to. After so many a lol-shoot-the-man-lol games of recent years, so many that just fail on the PC (yes, the whole console/PC FPS rant again), I'm kind of fed up. Two titles that I will leave unannounced are AGAIN ports of their console counterparts. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell you how to make a successful FPS on PC. I'm not going to talk about the theme of the game or the narrative structure or even the underlying game play mechanics. That's totally your job, and sif I'm going to do your job. What I will do is tell you what you need to have in your game. Or in some cases, what not to have.

1. Do not start your game with "Press the start button to begin".
Why do I need to press start ... to start? Why am I not looking at the main menu right now? What is the point of it to begin with? Why is it even here? In fact ... what start button? There is no start button on a keyboard. The only start button I know of exists on a ... oh. Now I get it. First sign of a bad console port? "Press the start button to begin".

2. Have a customizable graphics/game engine.
So you have either bought a game engine or made your own from scratch. Both are good options, nothing really wrong with either of them. This engine should (should) have a plethora of settings enabling certain input/output options and video parameters. This should range from everything, from anti-aliasing to texture settings. Allow your user to tweak them, and not through hidden config files in some roaming account attached file. A PC gamer wants to make the game look and feel just right. It is the very definition of why we own a PC and play games on them.


3. No mouse acceleration.
Seriously, fuck off. No one likes that shit. We are using a keyboard and motherfucking mouse for Christ's sakes. I don't need my mouse to speed up as I pan to the left because I am already looking at my target. Yes I just did a 180 degree spin instantly. It's what you can do with a mouse and it is not impressive. It is normal. On that note, no aim-assist. Or at least off by default. Using a mouse is precision aiming enough. If I want to shoot someone in the left earlobe than I will god damned shoot them in the left earlobe. I don't want some shit locking onto their head when I am checking out that palm tree behind them. Palm trees need loving too.

4. Have a 'console' with a decent array of commands (no, not the physical console you play on your TV)
From demo-recording to commands turning certain features on/off. Why? Because it will make your game that much more pleasant to play. And navigate. And benchmark. And mod. Do I need to explain why these are good things? Every good LAN game has had admin control commands to both set up games and prevent people from exploiting certain things. Commands allowing a fluent 'console' user to do things quickly on the fly is a good idea.

5. Dedicated server and LAN support
Holy hell. Which bogan from the dumpster thought the current (i.e. lack of) method of delivering modern multiplayer PC games was a good idea? If someone on your development team is suggesting this, shoot them. They are stupid. Yes, I can understand the want for online system security. Yes, I can understand the need for wanting control over all your servers (definetly not the right way to do it in any case). And YES, I can understand that this style of multiplayer gaming is quite popular ... on consoles! We are not playing on a console. We do not want to connect to the internet to play against our housemate who lives in the next room. Even consoles don't impose that insanity. PC gaming is about having options, not limiting them. Think about it. In 10 to 15 years from now, how in hell is someone going to even play your game in multiplayer? Which leads on to ...

6. Anti-consumer DRM
I could write an entire essay on why certain types of DRM are bad and how the whole piracy/punishing your customers model of things just doesn't work. I won't, at least not today. Simply put ... just don't. Games will always be cracked, workarounds devised and online authenticity checks disabled. Sure, you might stop 20% of otherwise illegitimate buyers. But needing to log on to three separate accounts alongside a profile and making an online tag which checks every nano-second to see if you are connected to the net is just awful design. There are many other and better ways of going about this. Take a look at League of Legend's business model. The game is free, and they still make heaps of dough!

7. UI Design, feedback and size matters. Or simply, lack thereof.
Crosshairs, weapons and indicators do not need to take up 1/3rd of the screen. I am not sitting 3 metres from my television. I am sitting a foot away from a monitor which takes up 60% of my view. I can see how much ammo I have very easily thank you, you don't need to flash it across my screen every time it is low. No, a red splash of paint across my view is not a good indication that I am taking damage and am nearly dead. Now I can't see anything you retard! UI elements and indicators do not need to disappear all the time. They should not be blocking my view as they should not be enormous. Where is this guy shooting me from? Is he behind this enormous mountain of a weapon you have me carrying? He was. Now I'm dead. Good.



8. Jumping.
Do you like jumping? I like jumping. Jumping is awesome. You can like ... totally get on top of things by jumping. Especially those chest high walls you see so much of today. Provide enough kinetic energy to yourself while jumping and you can totally jump OVER things. WHOA!!! Did you see that insane wall jump I just did? What about this rocket jump here? You didn't? Why the hell not? Because I can't actually jump you say? WTF? WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I JUMP!!??!!?
Why indeed. Besides games like DOOM, jumping has been in about ... 95% of games? At least games where you control a dude in some way. I don't know where it originated or even why it was introduced recently, but several FPS titles as of late have inhibited your ability to move positively along the Z axis for a brief period of time, at will, completely. Why? WHY!? Was the primary game designer drunk that day when you guys talked about jumping in the game? Is he fat and has something against people jumping? Could you not convince him that jumping is just one of those things a game should have ... like moving forward? I don't need to be able to bunny hop, rocket jump, wall jump or anything that crazy. But I do want to jump. Please let me jump?

9. Mouse support in menus.
Seriously. Wtf is wrong with some of you? You are using a mouse to aim in the game. Mouse support is obviously already in the engine ... in a 3D setting. Remove an axis and now you have 2D mouse support. Hooray!! Of course its never that simple is it. Your mouse support is actually just the code from the right analog stick adjusted to read from a different input peripheral. It was never supposed to exist in the menus, so it never will. Those PC Gamers can just suck it and wrap their cheated hands around yet another terrible console port.

10. Unsimplified controls.
What does any PC MMO, strategy game or flight sim game have in common? If you guessed ... a billion keys to press, then you would be correct. See, there is this device we use. It's called a keyboard. It has lots of buttons. Over quadruple the amount of buttons a controller has, in fact, and that's not including the buttons on another device we call the mouse. Those buttons (should) allow us to do many things. So when you have your insane grenade button that ... oh I don't know, throws a grenade when you tap it and changes grenades when you hold it down ... that is stupid. It takes too long, is inefficient and is stupid. Separate the functions onto different keys and then we can talk. How about that Zoom button you say? Only three levels of zoom after tapping the same button three times? Why not use the scroll-wheel? That gives you a massive number of zoom levels. It's used to change weapons you say? What, all two of them!!!??

Ugh

-_-

It's alive ... IT'S ALIVE!!!

It is that time of the year again. Well ... half decade, you could say. Roughly every 3 to 3.5 years I have been upgrading my home PC system. Mainly to play games, but also mainly to have a machine that isn't a sloth at certain tasks (e.g. video editing). The last time I did this it was in preparation for games like Crysis and UT3 which the system handled amiably at the time. However, while the system is still competent in many regards, it is starting to show its wrinkles here and there, as well as lacking many of the current gen shinies (e.g. DX11).

This time I decided to take a chance and buy components that I thought to be even more cost efficient and powerful than before. This required me to buy components from approximately five stores from around the country to get the stuff I wanted. Three were from Brisbane, one from Sydney and the other was from eBay, shipped from Melbourne. It sounds ridiculous but there is simply no one store in Australia that stocks only the best of the best.

The list of components were as follows:

- ASRock FATAL1TY P67 PROFESSIONAL
- G.SKILL Ripjaws-X 8GB (4GB x 2) PC3 17000 (DDR3-2133)
- Antec ATX TruePower 750W
- Intel Core i7 2600
- Gigabyte ATI 6970
- Kingston 128G SSD V-Series SATA2 G3
- Random assortment of other minor parts


I also bought an additional case for the retiring computer with the intention for it to be used as a media/guest/LAN computer should the situation arise.


So what did I learn from this experience? Simply put: never do it again. Ordering parts from around the country is fine, especially if you do your research and figure out the credibility of the sources. The problem is Brisbane's courier service. Would you believe that one package that I ordered from Brisbane (online store only) took 6 days longer to deliver than the package I ordered from Melbourne? I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for that level of service. It's just bad, and my faith in Brisbane's courier ability has dropped considerably.

Anyways, this computer (which will incidentally be 'Predator Mk V') should get me through Shogun 2, Crysis 2, FEAR 3 and Rage without so much as a hiccup and probably last me another 3.5 years at least. Lets hope the games during this time will actually have be worth upgrading for :)

Let the Doves Free!!!

When I was growing up, there was but one cartoon that my sister and I would actively try to watch. Before it was banned from commercial television in Australia, that is. It was Ren and Stimpy and it is probably the cause of my demented sense of humour nowadays.

Why am I bringing it up? Well, when you are a kid you sometimes notice the brilliance of things without even consciously being aware of it. Although your parents and surrounding environment have a tremendous affect on your upbringing, you begin to develop your own interests and hobbies that diverge from your parents and siblings perspectives. Playing computer games is but one of mine.

But before computer games there was cartoons, and although our parents didn't necessarily disapprove of them, they found some (such as Ren and Stimpy) to be a little extreme. With good reason too. Watching some of these episodes back now with a greater understanding of the world gives me an even greater appreciation for the material I grew up on. Ren and Stimpy was much more than the insane adventures of a chihuahua and a cornish rex. It was an introduction to some very adult themes which are hidden subliminally underneath the madness, and an appreciation for brilliant classical music, such as Habanera from Bizet's Carmen. Laugh as you may, but you cannot deny the genius gone into scenes such as the following:



Wilbur Cobb, the old senile gheezer in this scene, is probably my favourite character from the series and even now someone I see myself acting like from time to time. Particularly talking in malapropisms and general 'eggcorn' (eye sea, egg sell lent, hell oh etc). Hell, when I grow old I hope my body falls apart and uncontrollable disgusting things happen. Especially in the presence of my friends and family so I can lean over to them and say...

"You know what I just did? I just pissed myself. You deal with it." - Dylan Moran

Jumping Jack Rabbits!

As a follow up to my rant about missing arena shooters a few weeks ago, I thought I would make a short post about what exactly 'bunny hopping' is in first person shooters is. Or at least what it should be deemed as.

Many games, especially older ones, had some technique of moving faster than normally intended. Some of these were innocent exploits of in-game physics. Others were hard-coded in. Gaining control of these techniques and using them to your advantage was considered essential to becoming a better player and opened an entirely new avenue of possibilities in terms of player skill and creativity. Moving around a map with efficiency was just as important as shooting your enemy.

One such technique was called 'bunny hopping'. This existed in games such as the Quake and Half-life series which actually are all derivatives of the same engine. In Serious Sam, bunny hopping was coded in and made significantly easier for players to use. In the Unreal Tournament series it was non-existent, but replaced with 'dodge jumping' and other combinations of jumps. The truth is, while most games had some sort of movement enhancing options, they were not all performed the same way.

I will freely admit I am not an expert at bunny hopping in the Quake engine games. In fact I am sure I am pretty terrible at it. Nevertheless, these 'trick jumps' were the sort of thing you naturally picked up on after playing a few hundred games and it was not uncommon to see other players doing it as well online. After pressing jump so many times you begin to get a feel for the physics, and certain situations where you turn the mouse randomly to allow you to accelerate faster than you should. "Why..." you ask, "... should I simply not emulate this all the time?".

Sad as it may be, there seems to be some confusion amongst newer gamers as to what 'bunny hopping' is/was. "It's where you press jump repeatedly" they will say, "making you much harder to hit." Well, half of that is true. When you bunny hop, you do become a little harder to hit. But it is not as simple as pressing jump. As true 'bunny hopping' is remarkably different for every (oldskool) game, I think I will use a simple demonstration.

This is not bunny hopping:

That is called pressing forward and jump repeatedly.

This is bunny hopping:

... and I'm not going to tell you how to do it.

Mainly because you will need a keyboard and mouse to start with.

:)

How absurd!

Well I just couldn't not put this in.


I mean, who doesn't like a violently insane red-headed angry man shooting laser beams out of their arms and instagibbing people with the most powerful move in a fighting game ever?

No-one, that's who.

And if you're no-one, then you're stupid!

I like my weapons how I like my music ... heavy and metal!

If I had more free time on my hands and/or possibly wasn't doing some sort of research already, there is something I would probably look in to a bit more. This something is, quite simply, the appropriateness of certain types of music for gaming and how they can affect the player's performance. It is probably something that doesn't require much investigation as we already know that music does have an incredible affect on how people can behave. Athletes train to certain upbeat, fast paced music to keep their energy flowing and their frame of mind set in the right place. Relaxing cinematography is usually accompanied by likewise music, and not deathmetal. It's not exactly a science.

I'm certain many gamers, myself included, prefer to play their own type of music when playing games. Many a time in Warsong Gulch in WoW I would turn some distortion guitar based metal on, or sometimes the Hellmarch theme from the Command and Conquer series. Some games such as the Unreal Tournament series already nail a particular type on music to the board which depending on your taste can be suitable enough for you. Playing a particular style of music can make you both play a certain way and enhance the mood of the situation. It's almost like taking drugs...

So, during the recent flooding events taking place here, while I have still had electricity I thought I would make a short experimental LoL video. The footage is ... average paced . It's not surprising, it comes from an averagely paced game. Usually you don't feel overexcited or (too) bored when watching footage of someone else playing. But what if you were to over-dramatise the events that were happening? Make the relatively simple game play seem chaotic and incredible through music and simple editing alone?


Recommend changing to high (720p) resolution playback. Tis my first HD video ever uploaded! I don't know about you, but re-watching it back does leave a slightly more titanic edge to the whole thing. I would like to think it is successful, but I guess it depends on your taste in music, really.

Special regard given to hotpies, m1c_ch3ck and MorePieNow who participated in the filming and killing.

Also, a free chocolate given to the first person to tell me where the music in the video is from.

Zero Frags Left?

Hmmm. This post has been a long time coming. Indeed, while I have hinted at it and beat around the bush with semi-related discussion in the past, this post is something I actually am concerned about for the future of gaming and my general interest in it. I am also not incredibly tired or drunk (I think), so you can safely assume that what you read here is actually what I am thinking. So, equip your Hats of Ranting (+1 to rage generation) and prepare to listen to a grown man piss and moan about seemingly trivial stuff in as callous and pretentious a manner as possible. Well, sort of.

In gaming society today, there is (as I have mentioned many a time before) a slight disconnection between a large number of the major game developers and the PC as a gaming platform. Simply put, the PC is not considered to be the bread and butter, default, go-to platform for making a game anymore. Make a game on a computer you may, but for all intensive purposes it will probably end up being on console. Or on a hand-held. Or on a damn phone. The point is, unless you are an indie developer going through Steam or Blizzard Games, making big titles exclusively for PC (i.e. console ports later) is not considered profitable. A good part of the reasons for this is due to piracy. The general nature of the gaming PC is to provide an open and customisable platform, which inadvertently allows tech savvy people various options for playing a game illegitimately. Write an executable crack, tamper with some config files, adjust network protocols etc. You don’t and can’t do this on a less open, less sophisticated environment like a console. So it is unsurprising that even major players in the market, such as Microsoft, have such a strong foothold in terms of where and how they want to drive the consumer market. They have even publicly stated their stance on developing for the PC, releasing ‘facts’ that both bewilder and stun long time PC gaming fans such as myself. Gotta sell those Halo copies somehow I guess…

I’ve mentioned all this before, so I won’t bring it up in depth again. The main point of this article is quite simple. I miss arena shooters. Seriously. Inside my favorite genre of gaming it would easily be my favorite sub-genre of FPS. The last true arena shooter in my honest opinion was Unreal Tournament 2004. UT3, while good, was a step back from something that could and should have evolved into an epitome of gaming skill. Instead it was tacky, sluggish and tailored for … you guessed it … console players. It has now been 7 years since any form of successor has risen from the ashes of continuously slower, tackier, repetitive and outright boring FPS games. The problem? I don’t think it’s going to change. Games like Call of Duty and Halo are considered the norm nowadays, and why? Their game play is anything but intense. The decision making processes one makes in combat during these games are simplistic and primitive. These kind of games have come into fruition at a time when the console market exploded around them and so they have been branded as the benchmark. The true arena shooters of the past are either forgotten or simply unbeknown…


Now I’m talking about the multi-player, deathmatch/CTF game here, not the single player narrative bull crap everyone cares so much about (and plays once and forgets). The feature component of any FPS game should be that visceral, physical feel to the game play that the player is engrossed in. A good arena shooter (i.e. any shooter that has deathmatch/CTF/domination game modes) should push this experience to the limit. You should be able to literally ‘feel’ your actions and behaviors and intrinsically understand how they affect the current game state for you, without even thinking about it. Your gaming avatar and your control over it should be like a natural extension of your body. The funny thing is, even since the days of Doom and Quake this has been achieved. The level of control given to an adept player just feels … right. You get used to it and the sky literally becomes the limit. A true arena shooter doesn’t impose degenerative rules or chance based game play elements designed to add catch-up or random elements to the game. It should have strong, predefined rules with few restrictions and multiple features to accelerate game play, not hamper it. What the fuck am I talking about? Well let’s see...

It seems that today, most people are content with their control of their FPS character alone. Aim and move, shoot some dudes, jump here and there. Congratulations, you are a casual player. In a not-so-recent article by a dude called Shamus Young (yeah, he has a proper blog) I would personally rank you at about the Duke 3D or Quake level. Why? Well, because that’s where you are if you think your handle of FPS games is good if that’s what you can achieve. There is (or at least there used to be) so much MORE to FPS games than just that. The best way I can describe this is if I draw up some comparative scenarios, so let’s do that:

Scenario A: I’m playing Modern Warfare 2. I have spawned with the best weapons the game currently allows me to use. I just got hit a few times while running past an open doorway. I’m still alive, but I got hit up pretty bad, indicated by the amount of blood on my screen. I have nowhere to escape to, but if I wait a few seconds for my magical invisible health bar to refill, I can come back round the corner and spray the piece of tinfoil the enemy is hiding behind with ½ a clip of overpowered 1 shot headshot, 3 shot body kill machine-gun fire. I aim down the sites to perform this action, severely limiting my view and movement speed, but somehow making me fire 3x more accurately (because I am now aiming a gun). Said enemy dies quite epicly. He also respawns and comes looking for me as I attempt to camp in a similar position. After several engaging moments of looking down a corridor, the enemy appears once again and I again shoot him full of lead. I decide to stay at this vantage point and repeat this activity on several more opponents until I run out of ammo. I then use grenades, for even faster/louder results. When they run out, I then get up and attempt to knife someone with my 10 yard instagib melee button, successfully at first, but dying moments later.

Scenario B: I’m playing Unreal Tournament 2004. All I have is my starting weapon and a sniper rifle. I just got hit a few times while running past an open doorway. I’m still alive, but I got hit up pretty bad, indicated by the low valued numeric symbols on my HUD. I have nowhere to escape to and don’t have regenerating health, so I’m pretty fucked! However, I know my movement speed is my greatest tool. I attempt to double dodge-wall jump back across the open doorway, firing my sniper rifle at the first sight of enemy I see. I surprise my foe with my random aggressive choice of movement and remove his head in the process. I take a tiny bit more damage and am now nearly dead. I want to find health as I know the next engagement with an enemy will be my demise. I move quickly but carefully to the closest known location of a health pack. Unfortunately my previous opponent must have predicted this decision and although he has inferior weaponry, is now guarding the only access to the health pack. Desperate, I make for an alternative route, but as he has full health and I have almost none, I die in the process. AS I DAMN WELL SHOULD!!! I respawn, quickly, and decide my best course of action is to gain a firepower advantage. I head to the rocket launcher, keeping in mind where I think he is and where he could possibly be at this point in time.

I probably sound like a bit of an elitist here, but let’s briefly detail the differences in these two situations in these games:

• In MWF2 I spawn with all the equipment you need and have regenerating health, completely taking out the need to prioritize control of parts of the map for various pickups. You run around, shoot people and camp at good locations to kill them instantly with your instagib-machinegun. The ability to shoot through walls negates the need for me to orientate myself appropriately, turning fights into a spray fest. Enemies that die fast/instantly remove the need for me to carefully wear down the opposition to deliver precise killing blows where necessary. Camping in an advantageous, hard to reach location is beneficial for ambushing unsuspecting opponents, especially as I am aiming down the scope and have the RNG machine already in my favour. Although I move slowly, so does everyone else, making hitting people generally quite easy. Grenades and knife usage grant me incredibly easy kills, sometimes without even aiming. I am, overall, a terrible FPS player, but because the skill ceiling in this game is so incredibly low I am actually doing very well. Against people both worse and better than me.

• In UT2004, I spawn with the worst weapons in the game. They are situationally viable, but generally speaking, I will get outgunned if I don’t grab something better. Not having the best weapons or regenerating health makes me want to control parts of the map where they exist. This is not easy, especially when other players are doing it as well. People move quickly and have multiple movement options other than just walking/running. They are hard to hit, but so am I making fights more about skill in aiming and less about luck. Not having regenerating health makes the game balanced around how much damage is effectively done in an engagement. I can/will kill someone, even if it takes me a few tries. However it will not be easy. Besides moving quickly they could still have better pickups than I, so I need to take control of that aspect as well. Camping is illogical. I need to think ahead of my opponent and do what I think they would be doing in the same situation. Or sometimes … what they wouldn’t be doing. The skill ceiling in this game is so high, I am sometimes overwhelmed by both the number of things I can/should be doing and the fact that while I am an excellent player, there is still someone out there who is better than me.

… This is just deathmatch. I could bring up other game modes like CTF, but I don’t think it is necessary. I hope from these small descriptions you can begin to see the differences in game play these two games offer. You may argue that MWF2 is not an arena shooter, but what else is there to compare it to nowadays? The truth is MWF2 is simplistic and uncomplicated. UT2004 is not. In fact, in a game like UT2004, you begin to let your intrinsic nature take over when the game play starts moving and flowing like a battle where you have total control. You begin to pull off extraordinary feats of skill, such as stuff like this, which would be accusable for cheating! They probably would be nowadays, but 7 years ago it would have been normal. Maybe lucky, but definitely routine. UT wasn’t the only game though. Even Half-Life and TFC had the components for making extraordinary arena shooter moments, which I think brings to attention the most important aspect about these games in general. You may design a game, perhaps unintentionally, to have a conceived level of control that players will have. If you let this control run a little bit rampant, impose less rules and boundaries on what people can do, then you don’t force people to play in the same box as everyone else. If you let players own creativity and flair come into existence during play … then you can allow players to achieve incredible things such as the following, and be one step closer to making the perfect arena shooter.



The only question remaining is whether or not there will ever be another one?