Indeed, very little has changed from the formula outlined in my previous post, so it’s worth only noting the few changes:

• Corresponding to the reduced length of the game, there are only two environments to explore, one of which is largely filled with factual trinkets from the Doctor’s past. At least both environments are pretty well realised.
• There’s a new minigame! But it’s a quiz, which sucks. Particularly when you have to restart the whole thing after failing the final question. The stupid and finicky maze minigame also makes an unwelcome return.
• It would be impossible to describe the puzzles as challenging.
• I think they only use a single piece of background music and loop it for the duration of the game.
• It’s not all bad: the quality of the writing is, on the whole, significantly improved over previous episodes; as is the voice acting, which is generally of a decent quality. The few slip-ups seem to be the result of shoddy Direction.

Edit: I almost forgot: no stealth sections! Best. Doctor Who game. Ever.

So it was with considerable excitement I discovered that the BBC was planning to release a series of downloadable Doctor Who games funded by the License Fee and with the involvement of Charles Cecil, the man originally responsible for Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword games. With the involvement of Stephen Moffat, could these TV tie-ins perhaps, just maybe, be a work of genius?

Of the four-strong series, two of the Doctor Who Adventure Games have thusfar been released: City of the Daleks and Blood of the Cybermen. At their heart, they’re point-and-click adventure games with reworked control schemes ala. recent Telltale offerings. Note to game developers: holding a mouse button down to move is infinitely shitter than clicking. It might work for lazy controller support, but when most of your action animations do an exceptionally extravagant move from where I am to the exact correct spot for that action, couldn’t I have just gotten there by clicking in the first place?

However the developers have thrown a number of other gameplay devices into the mix; the most persistently awful of which being some exceptionally long stealth sections which have you creeping through generic corridor X around Daleks with vision cones so short they make Foxhound guards look like fighter pilot candidates. There are also a number of mini-games thrown in as the final step of many a “add this to this” puzzle, presumably to justify the sonic screwdriver no longer being the deus ex machina it is in the series. Some of these are trivial whilst others, such as where you have to guide objects through a maze without touching the walls, are nothing short of malicious.

The graphics? Well, they’re… ok. The textures are there, but the lighting is shoddy and the models just aren’t all that detailed They’re more than fit for purpose, however. Most importantly, Amy isn’t quite so hot. The sound quality is more notably rubbish: whilst the Doctor and Amy have both been at least partially voiced, it sounds as if they’re both speaking through some ancient tannoy system. Also Karen Gillan’s performance is, at best, uninspiring (Matt Smith is thankfully somewhat more enthusiastic in reprising the Doctor).

Being funded by the license fee, it seems that the BBC has insisted that if it is to fund this “game”, they need to justify it to the Trust under the banner of education. A fair number of the clickables in the game bring up a screen telling you some real-world fact, perhaps about “nanotechnology” or “World War 2″. There’s also a trans-episode card collecting mini-game which provides the only element of replayability in these episodes, with cards being scattered in various out-of-the-way places, all relating to some aspect of the Who canon.

Amy, I love you!

Ultimately, the Adventure Games’ biggest flaw has nothing to do with the shoddy acting, dodgy stealth sections and questionable graphics. It lacks Karen Gillan naked. The true thrill of Doctor Who has always been watching the Doctor zip around from problem to problem, talking his way through anything thrown at him with a astounding mix of humour and ludicrous tecno-babble. The bits in between: the bits that this game allows you to control, when you’re pointing screwdrivers at things, grabbing an eye stalk from here and mixing it with a thingie over here before doing a mini-game? Sure, perhaps these are all things that the Doctor does, but that’s not the Doctor I want to see in these games. Unfortunately, the joy of Doctor Who isn’t something best portrayed by the video-gaming medium: noone yet has really found a good mechanic for the telling of a non-action driven story within a game, and maybe we should just accept this as a fundamental limitation of gaming that it just can’t tell stories like this as well as a book or TV program. Is this, fundamentally, the reason for most film/tv/book game tie-ins being crap?

It’s worth noting that of the two episodes released thusfar, the second is superior to the first in almost every way. The story is tighter and crafted with greater cohesive, the puzzles more intuitive, and mini-games less frustrating. Best of all, Karen Gillan’s VO work is much improved. I do have hopes for the remaining two episodes.

This is a game squarely designed for an eight year old Doctor Who fan to play with their parents after school. For an older gamer, the difficulty is almost insultingly easy, the stories rather dull and graphics uninspiring. As a fan of Doctor Who, it’s easy to look beyond many of these faults: some of the cutscene scripting is laugh out loud funny, and the main title sequence genuinely got my heart racing. As such, it’s almost impossible to recommend to anyone other than a Who-fan, all of whom I would encourage to give to give these games a chance (each episode isn’t long, nary one or two hours) on a quiet Sunday afternoon. It’s worth it. But if you’re just looking for a good game? Don’t bother.

In case you somehow missed it, this week saw the release of Modern Warfare 2, a game that has comprehensively smashed every existing release day sales record, and looks set to become one of the best selling titles of all time.

Leaving aside certain issues that came to light in the days and weeks preceding the game’s release, the game’s PC release was marked by a frustrating and peculiar disparity between the release date of the retail and digitally distributed editions of the game. For its retail release, MW2 has been fully integrated with Steamworks, meaning that in order to install and play the game, it is first necessary to install Steam and associate your copy of MW2 with your Steam account, something that worked well on the game’s release date of Nov. 10.

However, copies of MW2 which were purchased directly through Steam (i.e. weren’t ordered from a retail store either in the highstreet or online) failed to unlock on this date, and indeed did not do so until very late on the night of the 11th. The reason for this remains somewhat unclear, but is suspected to be a concession to a retail channel which is greatly afeared that digital distribution will steal all their business.

This hugely frustrated many who ordered the game through Steam unaware of this delay, but it does allow an interesting insight into the strength of digital distribution on PC today.

Steam, as well as every digital retailer known to man, has always been exceptionally reticent to release sales figures for any of the titles sold through their service. However, the Steam website has a stats page which lists the number of people currently playing a particular game, as well as the peak number for the course of the day. The staggered release of the retail and digital editions of MW2, combined with the game’s dependency on Steam, meant that for the first two days this figure represented only the total number of players of the retail edition of the game, whilst today these have also been added to the number of people who purchased the title through Steam.

Whilst I’m afraid I failed to obtain a screenshot at the time, the peak number of players over the course of the day, as observed towards the end of the evening of the 11th, but before the release of the Steam edition was about 33,000. As evidenced in the screenshot above, the corresponding maximum a day later was 68,000; implying that perhaps as many as 50% of all MW2 sales were digital.

Is this figure at all scientific or conclusive? Of course not. But at the same time, it does at least provide a ballpark figure – one which for me at least, proved shockingly high, and perhaps indicative of the rate at which digital distribution is increasing in importance to PC gamers.

It’s interesting to compare this figure to the number of simultaneous players on the XBox 360 edition of the game, which is considerably higher.

Ars Technica have the only well written review that I’ve seen from a PC gamer. I’d recommend reading it.

This review is a reposting of the review that I wrote for the Warwick Boar – complete with intended italics.

Only a month ago, the landscape of PC adventure gaming seemed a desolate and barren place,  Telltale’s episodic offerings being the only visible remains of one of the bastions of traditional PC gaming. Since then Lucasarts had confirmed that they were returning to work on Monkey Island, one of the most infamous of adventure gaming franchises. Indeed, it was soon confirmed that not only were they working in collaboration with ex-Lucasarts staffers on development of a quintet of new Monkey Island episodes, titled the Tales of Monkey Island, but also on a special edition rerelease of the first Monkey Island title, the Secret of Monkey Island, resplendent with both a graphical overhaul and new voice acting. Only hours before this writer put fingers to keyboard, Lucasarts further announced that they would start releasing their back catalogue of titles on the digital delivery system Steam, starting on Wednesday with a selection of ten titles ranging from LOOM to Battlefront II.  Perhaps adventure gaming could be stirring from its long forgotten ashes?

The first of these Monkey themed releases is the Tales of Monkey Island, whose five monthly episodes begins today with The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, which I’ll be looking at here.

Fans of the series need not worry: this is very much Monkey Island. Crucially, the humour is spot on throughout; in fact, the jokes seem to continually improve as you progress through the game. I found Launch much funnier than any of Telltale’s previous episodic titles, which suddenly seem rather dry by comparison. The developers have also drafted the considerable talents of Dominic Armato who, along with other actors who lent their voices to characters in Curse of Monkey Island, thankfully reprise his role. Dominic as Guybrush is a delight to listen to.

The puzzles in the game are similarly up to task. Whilst they’re generally noticeably easier than the calibre of puzzles generally found when Monkey Island was first released, there are still a number of real brain burners strewn liberally throughout the episode. The puzzles thankfully have little reliance on “rule of three” tasks and hold a good variety of problems and tasks whose solutions remain, with only rare exceptions, generally logical and relevant.

Launch begins where few gamers dare tread: at the end of a game, with the mighty Pirate, Guybrush Threepwood finally dealing with his arch-nemesis LeChuck once and for all, attempting to enchant a Voodoo sword, rescue his wife and save a number of rather bemused looking monkeys in the process. Somewhat inevitably, all does not go to plan and Guybrush is soon stranded on an unusual island. In some ways, Monkey Island titles have always been somewhat suited to being episodic content as their story has always been divided into somewhat discrete chapters and similarly each of the Tales can be approached in the same way: as a different chapter of a single game. Whilst Launch undisputedly is only the first part of a much larger, overarching plot, the episode’s story is still distinct to itself, with a definite objective and endpoint. In true episodic fashion, concluding with a cliff-hanger (of sorts) really whets the mouth with anticipation for the second episode.

The game does draw heavily from previous Telltale titles, using the same engine that has been employed in every episode since Sam and Max; and the control scheme is a modified version of Wallace and Gromit’s somewhat controversial choice of using WASG to move the primary character around. Here, this has been altered so that it is also possible to click and drag with the mouse in the direction that you’d like to move, allowing the game to now be controlled entirely with the mouse. That Telltale seems to have entirely done away with point-and-click movement is likely a nod to console gamers, but this is unfortunate given the somewhat cumbersome implementation of the click and drag mechanic. Additionally, some of the previous limitations of the engine used in Wallace and Gromit are still apparent; in particular the camera’s positioning is occasionally questionable.

In many respects Launch is vastly improved over its stablemates with the action taking place over a much broader variety of locations than Sam and Max or Wallace and Gromit, and I’m hopeful that there will be only a minimal recycling of environments over future episodes. Previous Telltale episodes have really suffered from reusing near identical environments time and time again, and I really hope that this doesn’t blight future episodes.  The environments themselves are lushly depicted and probably the main strength of the game’s artistry. Unlike some previous games in the series, they’re almost all brightly coloured and cheery. Unfortunately some of the characters seemed under-developed and bland, with two pirates in particular appearing almost precisely identical.  This and occasional shockingly low texture quality are unsightly blemishes on otherwise perfectly acceptable presentation which if you’ve ever played a previous Telltale game, will be of exactly the standard that you expect. This is not a graphical tour-de-force, but it should also just about run on your netbook.

It’s worth noting that in the build of the game that I played, there were two puzzles which would have been virtually impossible for a deaf or hearing impaired person. I hope that Telltale have fixed this issue for their final release.

Launch of the Screaming Narwhal was a game that I immensely enjoyed playing from the moment that I first loaded it. It has decent humour in spades; puzzles which are challenging, accessible and satisfying; a promising storyline and some memorable characters all at a very appetising price for a single episode. As a Telltale game, it is their best release yet. As a Monkey Island game, Launch is very much a product of 2009 with all of the hallmarks of a Monkey Island game carefully included. The lack of point-and-click might upset the purists, but Tales has reworked the franchise for a new audience whilst still doing well to appease those that have been enjoying it for nearly 20 years. The future of adventure gaming is once again Monkey shaped.

Answers on a postcard… or in the comments section.

It’s taken years to get Chrome to start compiling, not least because of the dependency tree that needed sorting. A more trying problem was that Chrome uses SCONS via gyp to set up the development environment. Cruelly, scons uses its own $PATH variable which it determines of its own accord. This meant that all of the dependencies that I’d built into /local/usr weren’t being referenced in the SCONS path. Additionally, editing the scons files themselves with the PATH setting didn’t work because they were regenerated by gyp at each reinitialising of the environment. Eventually after much trial and error I found a workaround in editing the src/build/common.gypi file to include the line:
'ENV': {'PATH': '/custom/path/variable/here'},
Within the scons_variable_settings block for linux.

1. Enabling the “Developer” tab in the ribbon – Open Word Options from the menu which is opened by clicking on the circular thing in the top left. Under “Popular” options should be “Show developer tab on the ribbon”. Enable it.
2. Open the Document Tempalates dialogue – it’s under the developer tab.
3. Disable the addins – On the templates tab, uncheck both the “MathType Commands 6 for Word” and “MathPage” Global Templates and Add-ins.

And you should be done! Yay!

President:

1. Andrew Bradley
2. Mitchell Fung
3. Andy Glyde
4. Sam Shirley
5. Asen Geshakov

Education Officer:

1. Sumaiya Khaku
2. RON

Communications Officer:

1. Isaac Acquah
2. Andrew Horder
3. Tommy Precious

Welfare Officer:

1. Sami Wannell
2. Fran Piddlesden
3. Kirstie Osborne
4. Joanne Royle

Societies Officer:

1. James Hall
2. OJ Hemmings
3. Esther Jardim
4. Andy Rossall

Governance and Finance Officer:

1. 1st: Andy Perkins
2. James Hilsdon
3. Rich Belfitt
4. RON
5. Michael Jones

Sports Officer:

1. Alex Twiss
2. Leo Matlock
3. Laura Holden
4. Nicola Mulvoy
5. Sebastian Reid

Executive Committee Chair: Chris Rossdale

Academic Forum Coordinator: Nidhi Badaya

Campaigns Forum Coordinator: Alex Fowles

Democracy Committee Chair: Gareth Williams

Societies Committee Chair: Hazel Lim

Student Sport Committee Chair: Sonny Kombo

Anti-Racism Campaigns Officer: Sam Glace

Ethics and Social Justics Campaigns Officer: Lorna Russell

LGBTUA+ Campaigns Officer: Lev Taylor

Students with Disabilites Campaigns Officer: RON

UG Arts Representative: Rory Kinane

UG Social Studies Representative: James Roberts

Second Senate Representative: Sumaiya Khaku

Second Council Representative: Andy Perkins

International Forum Coordinator: Rahil Jain

International Forum Members:

Akshay Bhatia
Hazel Lim
Ishita Dalmia
Snagda Talera
Sumedha Tibrewal

With a 25% or so turnout, which actually sounds quite good.

These are the games currently sitting on my shelf

Without counting the games purchased on Steam, of these, I have completed only… erm… COD2, COD4, COD5, Half Life 2 and… uhhh.. that’s it.

Christmas is a good excuse to play more, right?