Where would action games be without health, eh? I have no idea. That was a stupid question to start an update with. Sorry. Maybe this stream of consciousness thing isn’t all going to work out after all.

It’s true though, that most action games have a representation of health for the player and the enemies they face. It’s a pretty bold game these days that will kill you in a single hit from the baddies.

But how to let the player know how much health everyone in the scene has? The current trend for players is the regenerating health, usually with some full screen effect tightening in their vision as they get closer to death.

For enemies, a lot of games still don’t show any indication of how much more you’ll have to beat on them before they give up the ghost. This is pretty annoying as a player, as you don’t know which guy to focus on (a big enemy may be just a couple of hits off dying, and worth concentrating your attacks on, rather than fending off the weak henchmen surrounding it). And if there’s an annoyed player, there’s usually some design thought to go on.

Back when I did my 24 hour gaming marathon (for charity, but I don’t like to talk about it) I played through Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (which is really good, by the way, you should pick it up if you liked Sands of Time). It has a really nice and simple way of showing enemy health.

All of the baddies in the game are sand, brought to life by whatever evil magic the main guy is using (I honestly can’t remember). The idea is that their appearance, weapons, armour, etc. are all just façades made of this animated sand.

The stroke of genius in the health, then, is that as they take damage the game shows more and more of the model using sandy textures – giving the impression that they’re gradually losing the magic – until eventually they die in an explosion of silica.

You can instantly tell how close to death an enemy is by how much of its body appears to be sand. It fits the game’s storyline, it works quickly and cleanly as a visual indication, and it doesn’t require any extra HUD.

More games should do that.

Eurogamer’s proper staff must have had a hard weekend, as they all slept in and left the news section up to the work experience kid.

Luckily said kid had picked up a copy of this month’s Edge magazine on the way in to work, and after reading the interview with Activision bigwig (and gamer fanboy hate figure) Bobby Kotick, decided to start reprinting it as separate news stories.

They rounded off the day by re-imagining themselves as a young Wetherspoons customer late on a Saturday night, full to the brim with WKD chasers, screaming at her neolithic lug of a man to hit random patrons for imagined transgressions.

Yes, I’m sure it will get your site hits but, like the herpes-filled cock of the lumbering and violent townie, is your prize really worth the cost to your soul?

It’s a shame there isn’t a site like Tabloid Watch and its ilk, but for games news sites. Yeah, I know there is Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits, but that guy jumped the shark months ago and just posting up any old random crap, without attempting to apply any journalistic integrity of his own.

As it is, no doubt traffic will remain king.

(No, not Milo – his actual kid.)

So Peter Molyneux (and if you read this, I’m just going to go ahead and assume you know who he is) recently uploaded a video showing his son begging Valve to get their arses in to gear with regards to finishing off Half-Life Episode 3.

This prompted a few comments on-line along the lines of:

Don’t you think it’s irresponsible for a leading figure in the games industry to admit his child plays a mature rated game?

To which my reply is: No, absolutely not at all.

I believe that parents who take an interest in the games their children are playing, and know their own children, will be a much better judge of what their child can play than some board imposing an arbitrary age limit.

I mean, it’s not like Half-Life is particularly mature – the zombies are probably the most scary bit, the enemies you’re shooting aren’t human, and there isn’t any swearing in it that I can remember.

I could easily believe a 9 (is he, or 10?) year old who had a fair amount of exposure to games and other media could play Half-Life or Portal without suffering any distress whatsoever. Equally I can believe that some children would be scared or upset by it.

We should be applauding parents who take a very active interest in the games their children are playing, not just dismissing them out of hand as being irresponsible.

This is going to be a fairly self-absorbed one, I’m afraid. If you come here looking for choice games industry gossip or incisive commentary (though if you do then God help you, you seem to be very lost), maybe skip this post.

I’m going to write a little bit about this blog, what I had intended for it, and that sort of thing.

A bit of history first. As you can see from the archives link on the right there, I started Mainly About Games on January the 16th, 2007. At the time we were in the early stages of a new project at work, and though there was a lot to do, I felt the need for an extra outlet – one that was exclusively mine. I guess I was also aware that I was writing a number of posts on various online forums, mainly on the subject of games, and they were quite scattered. It would be nice to collect them all in to one place.

The amount of writing I have managed has fluctuated since then, usually on a monthly basis. The first year I managed what I consider a fairly impressive ninety six posts, down to last year’s frankly rubbish twenty five last year.

You see, I have a serious problem with motivation when it comes to writing.

It certainly doesn’t help that distractions are around every corner when I’m online (as I am when I’m using WordPress) – as I write this I have TweetDeck in the background, and Facebook and Something Awful forums open on different tabs.

But even the computer isn’t everything. Between the last two paragraphs I played with our cat and her toy for a few minutes, then remembered that I needed to text my wife about something.

I don’t have particular trouble coming up with ideas for updates – right now I have sixteen draft articles sat in various states of half-written, the oldest of which is from February 2009 and is the basics of de-constructing my old Half-Life maps page. I will sometimes dictate whole updates in my head while I’m showering, or lying in bed.

It is really the act of sitting down and streaming some words that I am happy with onto a page that is the hard.

At the start of this year, when I moved Mainly About Games to its new domain, I set myself the goal of proving its continued worth by beating my previous yearly update total. And also, and this is the really self-indulgent part, getting my readership figures up.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that this blog is not high traffic. Google Analytics suggests I have had 350 visitors in the last month, and Webmaster tools says my feeds have 53 subscribers. I suspect there is a lot of overlap between those two figures.

There are cheap ways of increasing readership, of course. I could repost articles all over the place, seeding my links on gaming forums far and wide (this is known as the Bruce on Games technique, blogging fans) and hoping that enough interested parties stick around for my ongoing adventures.

I could write in detail about my work, or the company that I work for. Guaranteed to shoot readership through the roof. Also guaranteed to shoot my career (and this job that I like) right through the face. So that is definitely out.

(Whoops, there’s another quick check of Tweetdeck, and Flickr. Nothing interesting going on, though I did almost reply to someone. Stay on target, Gowland.)

No doubt giving away prizes or running some competitions would get readers (though maybe only in the short term). But as my friends would attest to, I am quite a vain and big-headed man – just raising readership is not enough. I want people to visit my site because they are interested in reading what I am writing. Otherwise what exactly is the point of a blog?

And so it comes back to the first goal – increasing the amount of updates (and in particular, quality updates).

Which comes down to having to make myself sit down and write something, at least once a week if I want to have any chance at all of meeting my target (though twice a week is more like it). As soon as the act of updating becomes this regimented requirement, it has sucked all of the fun out of it, and I feel like I have a hard time sitting and concentrating. As I wrote a few months ago, I already have a lot of “stuff” I feel is vying for my free time, I would prefer not to feel forced in to doing bits of it.

(Sorry, the Facebook tab is showing that there is (1) update waiting for me to look at. I am ignoring it, for now.)

I may have mentioned this before, but my blogging hero is the comedian Richard Herring, who has been writing an update once a day for almost eight years, on his Warming Up site. Even though he is a professional writer and comedian, I still don’t know how he manages to be so prolific.

In a recent update (sorry, I’m not going to hunt it out, though the distraction from writing this would be most welcome, even I’m not that flighty – though I have just googled “easily distracted” to see if there’s an actual term for it, because I’m sure there is and I just can’t bring it to mind right now) he mentioned that he tends to write updates as a stream of consciousness, with minimal editing.

I definitely feel this is one of my problems – I am critical of my writing, and I think it’s quite bad by a lot of standards, so I tend to hold on to articles in the thought that I will edit and re-edit them into shape. Except a month down the line either the news story they relate to is hilariously out of date, or I can barely remember the specific points I’m mentioning in a game I played.

(That Facebook update was not very interesting. Just confirming that a friend had been facejacked.)

So, what does this all come down to? I have a blog that I have trouble updating. I’ve taken up photography recently which gives me a much more instant feel of creative gratification, without the feel of being tied to something. I am writing a very dull sob-story piece about all of the above. I have another website that I have to try and keep up to date as well.

Well, I got thinking “how on earth did I write so many updates in that first year? I know that work was very busy, and I was doing a fair amount of overtime” and I went back and had a look.

It turns out I used to post a lot more short updates. A few lines commenting about some news, or a comment thread on Eurogamer that was a particularly hilarious stinker (the gift that keeps on giving). Positive and negative bullet points about something I was playing, rather than trying to edit together something I would be happy to call a review. Re-posting things I had written in other forums, if I thought they were at all interesting outside of the context of the thread.

And more than that, writing in what was basically a stream of consciousness.

So that is what I am going to attempt to re-capture in my writing. Though in the last year I have written some of what I think are the most interesting and useful articles on this blog, I do not think I can sustain shooting for that quality 100% of the time. Not every meal can be steak, right? Sometimes fast food will do (and yes, I do realise that at the point you’re comparing your own writing to Turkey Twizzlers you should probably just agree to stop writing, for the good of everybody.)

I am going to try and clear out my list of drafts. You may see some quite strangely disjointed updates coming. But after that will be clean and pure and fresh “what Tony is thinking these days”. God help us all.

I fully expect my readership to go down at this point. But now I am happy with that.

Today in my head, I set up my future games studio.

Called “Daylight Games”, it will run very similarly to many other studios. We’ll make games, for instance. And more likely than not, use computers to do it.

There will be meetings, and producers, and drinks vending machines, and fresh fruit delivered for free, and people will swear at their 3d art package crashing exactly fourteen minutes and fifty nine seconds since the last auto save. Eventually an email will be sent around to the whole company discussing the inappropriate lack of aim that an unknown someone has exhibited in the gent’s.

There will be two things that will set Daylight Games apart, and one will lead directly on from the other. Canny developers may have already guessed (the studio’s name is a bit of a clue).

First will be the interview question “Are you prepared to work in a well lit office?”

Obviously, that won’t be the only question we’ll ask, but it will be one of the most important. Like the much more common “are you going to defecate on my desk”, the wrong answer will ensure that no matter how talented the potential hire, and how low a wage they are prepared to work for, they won’t get in the door.

For Daylight Games will work in a studio where a) sunlight will be let in, and b) if there isn’t enough sunlight, the office lights will be turned on.

Turning them off or drawing blinds will be classed as gross misconduct, and will result in a stern disciplinary meeting, where we will play back to you the recording of your interview answer (yeah, we’ll record all interviews too).

The second thing that will set us apart will be that, as a result of the working conditions, all of our games will be fully playable at 3pm on a glorious Saturday afternoon. Without you having to shut yourself away like a vampire hobbit.

Think about it – artists won’t be able to make dank dark basement levels, because they wouldn’t be able to see their them in our lovely and well lit office. Which means that you can play the games without drawing the curtains.

Which means your significant other will likely be a lot more fond of them because the house won’t be pitch black. And because they’ll feature nice sunny scenes.

Mark my words, I have hit upon the next wave of “mass market” gaming. This shit is beyond asking friends for Facebook Cockerels, my friends. You are peeking through the looking glass (and having to squint because it is so nice and bright on the other side).

Well, we can all dream, right?

An unnecessarily provocative post title? Perhaps. But that’s how I felt last night, playing through the last two missions of Call of Duty: World at War.

I’ve played other Call of Duty games – in order I went through Call of Duty 2 (cool set pieces); Call of Duty 3 (prettier, but worse than 2 in almost every other way); Modern Warfare (which I seem to have never written about on here, but I really liked it. It felt fresh and had some incredible set pieces that have gone into gaming history); and then Modern Warfare 2 (“a huge let down”).

You might wonder, after reading that list, why I keep playing them. And I think it’s because I keep thinking that the moments of genius I’ve seen in CoD 2 and Modern Warfare could also exist in the next.

So it was with my on, off, on, off, hit record that I decided to play World at War. The pattern means it was bound to be a hit and I would love it.

The first level was pretty good, I enjoyed that, but it fairly rapidly went down hill. One thing in particular that I found baffling in Modern Warfare 2, and now also in WaW, is that they replay the successful set-piece levels from Modern Warfare. Whereas I could have enjoyed the stealthy sniper mission here, that ends in a mad rush from your target and a lot of shooting, I had already played it once before.

It’s also worth noting that, although the AI in CoD has never been great, in the past the designers have been able to skilfully disguise the fact for 99% of the time. Playing through World at War I lost count of the number of enemies I saw who were stood motionless, or who were having a Naked Gun-style shoot out with one of my AI allies who was stood right in front of them – neither able to kill the other.

It even ended in me getting killed a couple of times. When a guy is stood looking at you, with his gun lowered, you start to assume that he’s a friend (especially when everyone wears the same, no doubt historically accurate, brown uniforms). So you let him live, and wander off, only to hit the invisible “now start fighting” trigger and have him run up and bayonet you in the back.

The low point of the game came in the second to last level, though. My objective was to enter a large building that had a very grand set of steps leading up to it. On my radar, the building’s door had a marker. Enemy soldiers swarmed from the building continuously, jumping over the sandbags in front, and occasionally engaging in futile shoot outs with my team.

I killed the current wave of defenders and made a run for the door. I couldn’t jump over the sandbags that I had seen a dozen enemies jump over. The sandbags that looked exactly like the other sandbags in the same level, that I could jump over.

But my objective was over there. Maybe I’d missed a trigger, or an enemy I was meant to kill?

After 20 minutes of wandering back and forth with no success (and all the while my buddies kept shouting things like “Come with me!”, which was completely unhelpful) I consulted GameFaqs. Turns out I was meant to stand my ground and shoot the respawning enemies until the game decided that I had killed enough, and would trigger an even that would let me past.

I couldn’t believe that staggeringly bad level design like this could hit shelves in such a high profile title. I honestly believe that the people responsible never watched anybody play that mission. They just couldn’t have done.

So, after this crappy experience, will I be buying in to Call of Duty: Black Ops (by the makers of .. oh .. World at War)?

I think I will give it a miss for a while.

I like achievements in games. I like them a lot. While I’ve never played a game purely for the achievements (despite what some of the games on my profile would have you believe) they have kept me playing something I would have otherwise been finished with.

Of course, this just makes me sadder when I play a game that has some really badly design achievements in it.

Such as ones that make you play a long section of game in one sitting.

A particular offender in this case is Valve, and Left 4 Dead 2. Surprising, because as a company Valve seem to really “get” the idea of achievements, and pack their games with a mixture of fun and challenging goals.

But I think that expecting a player to go through all four levels of a campaign in one sitting, to get the achievements for surviving them, is a bad decision.

You’re expecting someone to sit for maybe a couple of hours (could be more, or less, depending on the difficulty level they’re playing on, and their skill). It’s just unreasonable, especially since the game is broken up into separately loaded levels. Why not remember which levels have been completed, and at which difficulty settings, like masses of other games do?

Imagine you’ve played for a an hour and a half, and through skill and a bit of luck you and your three teammates are moments away from completing Dark Carnival. And then your internet connection drops. How annoyed are you going to be?

Oh yeah, I decided to add my Flickr link over to the right there.

Along with my LinkedIn, but I don’t know that many people who actually seem to use that (or if they do, they don’t use it for offering me huge sums of money in exchange for work) so I thought I’d mentioned Flickr instead. Because people actually talk to each other on that. Or at least post entirely positive comments. So it does have things in common with LinkedIn after all.

(I did have the idea once of making a site called IWouldNeverWorkWithThemAgainEvenIfTheLivesOfMyLovedOnesDependedOnIt.com but in the end I gave up on the idea as I don’t fancy being sued almost constantly. I can’t be the only one that reads the recommendations on LinkedIn and wonders if I worked with entirely different people, though?)

Anyway, if you want to see what stuff I have been taking photos of, add me as a contact. I probably won’t post many of my own pictures on here again, if only to save on bandwidth. And I am getting better at it. Honest.

Or: How to ruin a promising series of games in just the second instalment.

I’m a massive fan of DJ Hero. Admittedly, I have almost no skill at it whatsoever (thought this is true of all music games – I am universally crap at them), but unlike Guitar Hero and its various spawn I have enough interest in turntablism that I played it anyway. My Xbox Avatar idles in front of DJ Hero decks, mixing his little heart out (again, he is probably better at it than I am).

Even as I was playing it I was interested to find out how the gameplay would be changed and improved for the inevitable sequel, and when a second controller and microphone were announced, I was keen to see it in action.

Then came the announcement of the licensed tracks. For those not in the know, each song you play in DJ Hero is a mix (or mashup, or bootleg, depending on your point of reference – and age) of two tracks. Each licensed tune is used in a couple of songs, so with a listing of say 10 tracks, there could potentially be … er … hang on my maths isn’t what it used to be … um … thousands of songs.

As with the first DJ Hero the tracklisting is announced without letting slip which are mixed together, and it was fairly promising. A fair amount of chart trash in there, but also some really good stuff. And since things like Tears for Fears’ “Shout” and Cameo’s “Word Up” featured on some of my favourite mixes from the first game, I knew FreeStyle Games’ in house artists (and the DJs they bring on board) could be trusted to put together the goods.

Or so I thought. And this is the crux of this whole rambling article (in case you were wondering when we were getting there).

Having listened to a bunch of the mixes from the sequel on the game’s website I can safely say the ball has been dropped. Good tracks mixed poorly with rubbish, or extremely lazy “take the acapella from one hip hop tune and place it over the beats from another” bootlegging that would get you mocked in that community.

I am very sad about this. All I wanted from a sequel was another great soundtrack (I prize my copy of the surprisingly hard to get DJ Hero soundtrack, and a few of the songs are on regular rotation on my iPod), but now it looks like I’ll be giving the follow-up a miss.

At the moment I’m playing through Lego Harry Potter (Years 1-4, because obviously they’re going to release a sequel that has 5-7 in it, and then probably a further one with the whole lot lumped together).

It’s a game that in theory I should love, as I’ve been a big fan of the previous Traveller’s Tales Lego games. This is mainly down to their gameplay revolving around blowing up stuff, and collecting billions of little tokens (see also: Ratchet & Clank, and to a lesser extent the SpongeBob SquarePants game I played recently).

It’s just not grabbing me that much though, and I’ve realsed that this is down to having a lack of reference knowledge in the series. Even though I’ve seen all of the films, I’ve only seen them once (or possibly twice but in pieces, for the ones that have been on TV), and I just don’t know enough about the world of Mr Potter to follow what’s going on.

As an example, in Lego Star Wars I know that I have to fight my way along the surface of the Death Star, then fire a torpedo at its core. In this when I am presented with a circle that only old characters can enter I’m not even sure if that isn’t something they just made up.

In Lego Indiana Jones when I unlocked the Mola Ram character I knew he would be able to perform dark magic and unlock more collectables. In Harry Potter when I unlock generic ginger haired schoolchild in costume variation #5, I do not know what that means.

That’s another problem I have with the game – the cast of characters seems relatively weak. Or rather, they are very similar looking to people who aren’t fans of the series (that’s not racist the ginger people, is it? No, gingers aren’t a race, not even the Scottish. (c) Frankie Boyle, I think).

Again, in Lego Batman unlocking Joker or Penguin or Killer Croc etc. is fun, they look different and have different abilities. In this everyone is a teacher or schoolchild, and most of them know the same set of spells.

It’s a shame really, as in many ways it is an improvement over previous Lego titles. Rather than the central hub world being purely a jumping off point to the story levels, here it is a large and interesting place that even contains story elements as you play through. Classes are held here, rather than in the six story levels per film/book.

There are problems introduced in that. Most noticeably that you are led by a ghost from one story encounter to the next to avoid instantly getting lost in the large Hogwarts playing area, but also that in order to hit each key encounter from the source material there is a huge amount of trekking back and forth from key location to key location.

It’s also possibly the first Lego game where I haven’t been able to follow the story. Even knowing Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the plots aren’t complicated at all, and require no deduction on the part of the protagonists. They are well suited to having key scenes played out by mute minifigs. Harry Potter does not seem so versatile, and often I was left with no idea why I was being dragged back across the length of the castle again.

A shame, since the last Lego game I played, Batman, had no problems here – its plot was concocted just for the game, so was able to be tweaked to provide the right setpieces etc. without having to shoehorn an existing narrative into game levels.

One for the die-hard fans, then (Lego Die Hard, now there’s something I’d buy. I would love to hunt out my favourite character – Foreign Goon #23, Bank Employee uniform).