Last weekend was the Penny Arcade Expo 2010, and 2K Games had a bit of a surprise for attendees. The 2K stand at the show was adorned with Duke Nukem Forever livery, and there were even a whole load of demo units for the game set up for the public. As news of the booth spread, 2K officially revealed that Gearbox Software (of Borderlands and Brothers in Arms fame) had taken over development of the title, and were now working to finish the game for a 2011 release. But that’s not even half the story. This is not a history of 3D Realms’ protracted development of DNF; there’s plenty of that elsewhere, try Wikipedia for a start. This is the story of what happened after they shut the project down, and how it ended up in the hands of Gearbox.

From the information available so far, it seems that when 3D Realms let the Duke Nukem Forever team go that May, the game was not finished, but there was “a surprising amount of content” completed. But over that decade of development, many who worked on the project had become quite attached to it. One of those was co-creator of the Duke himself, Allen Blum. He was one of a group of ex-3D Realm staff who took the game in its then state and worked on it themselves, in their houses, with no authorisation. Blum appealed to Scott Miller, who managed to work out an agreement that meant the garage team, which became Triptych Games, could continue development on the game. But with the ongoing dispute between 3D Realms and 2K Games, as well as disagreements over who owned the rights to the game and franchise, there was no way that the game could be released.

In the 90s, Randy Pitchford was just starting out in game development. Thanks to 3D Realms boss George Broussard, he got a job at the studio, working on Duke Nukem 3D, which turned the then 2D action series into a first-person shooter. Pitchford left the studio in 1997, as the team began work on Forever, and a few years later set up his own development studio with a number of other ex-3D Realms employees, Gearbox Software. Back to the late summer/early autumn of 2009, and Miller contacted Pitchford to see if he could offer any hope for the future of the game. By this time, Triptych weren’t far off finishing the PC version of the game.

Pitchford was in a lucky place. At that time, Gearbox was preparing to ship Borderlands (itself subject to delays and a complete graphical overhaul) for 2K. Pitchford knew Miller and Broussard, and had history with both 3D Realms and the Duke Nukem series. Not only that, but whilst Triptych were almost ready with a PC version of Forever, there was a need for console experience – 2K had no desire to publish the game as a PC exclusive – and that was something Pitchford and Gearbox could provide, with both Borderlands and Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway under their belts for PS3 and Xbox 360. They got the go ahead.

Gearbox began working with Triptych to finish off the game, and get it onto consoles. 2K Games parent company Take Two settled the dispute with 3D Realms. Gearbox even bought the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise. Duke Nukem Forever was re-announced at PAX 2010 for a 2011 release on PC, PS3 and PC. “We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill,” Pitchford admitted in the live announcement stream. “We need to get past the shock and awe, and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out a launch plan.” And in a far cry from the endless teasing, the companies brought screenshots, a new trailer, and a fifteen-minute gameplay demo to the show, to be publicly shown.

Whilst Pitchford is certain of a release next year, I won’t be betting on it just yet. Duke Nukem Forever has a certain history of disappointment associated with it, and Gearbox are no strangers to delays of their own. But it seems that, finally, the Duke’s brash sense of humour and ongoing battle to stop alien pigs stealing his chicks will show up on shop shelves again. And whilst 2K are proudly proclaiming the work of Gearbox at PAX, let’s not forget that Duke Nukem Forever might still just be a joke if it wasn’t for Miller, Blum, Pitchford, and everyone at Triptych Games.

Sources: Kotaku, Joystiq, 2K Games, Talkin’ Real at Ya, Wikipedia

Now I say good timing as I’ve only recently returned from holiday and had the internet reconnected. A little while ago, I had the seriously unfortunate event of lightning striking my house, rendering a variety of electricals useless/broken… Luckily my PS3 survived. It’s only when you have no access to the internet in any shape or form, you realise quite how gaming is dependant on it in this day and age. This lack of internet drove me off MW2 and the likes of ModNation Racers to FFXIII. Now… I’d tried playing this game before, but my PS3 exploded and I had no back up save data for it. However, now I had little choice in the games I wanted to play and saw this as an opportunity to get stuck into the game.

Now… The first 5 hours or so are pretty dull and in all honesty a bit of a tutorial for what’s to come. Eventually you reach a point where things hot up a little, the game widens a little and the story gets interesting, all the time while the screen is showcasing some fantastically designed areas. I’ll just finish on FFXIII by saying a little patience is rewarded and by the time you are over how good the game looks, the story has reached the point where you can’t let go. However, a trip away forced this upon me, so I switched to good old portable gaming. Out comes my DSi XL (I’ve still yet to see anybody else with one of these, so if you own an XL, please let me know i’m not the only one) and Pokémon SoulSilver… Yes Pokémon is for kids, i’ve heard it all before, but once you get over the childish front, the level grinding and RPG elements are superbly constructed allowing for such variation and depth. Anyway, more 12 year olds play MW2, so that’s obviously for children (Again I’m aware of the ironic statement, hush.)

Now, on to the main part of my post, which is going to be about, well, in honesty, a vaguely linked, poorly thought through ideas that have popped up over the last few weeks through sheer boredom and desperation to entertain myself without internet.

Call of Duty: Racing Warfare

More of a laugh thought up by the likes of me and a few others on a forum I frequent. The basic concept is that you can choose from a selection of cars and use a series of stupid perks to give you an advantage. For example, you could equip the car with Commando, which allows you a 700mph lunge across the line should you be not far behind the leader (I.E. half a track). This means you could steal the win and claim to be the best driver in the world. Of course, like the FPS, you can put attachments on your car, such as a pair of wheels (only 2, you need Bling to put 4 wheels on your car), or if you are feeling really underhanded, the engine attachment. Of course this would give you a significant advantage over some of the other players, who might claim you are using an overpowered piece of junk and frown upon you. I say, to hell with them. Why use skill when you’ve got an engine, no?

FFXIII – The Guide to Clichés and Life

Having got into this game during my lack of internet I’ve followed the game and the story very closely. I came to the conclusion that every other sentence is a sentence that could be used as a guide to life and sounds phenomenally clichéd. But seriously, If you have this game you’ll realise quite amazingly epic each sentence sounds without really having that much meaning. You could seriously take any number of quotes and use them as mantras or things to stick by.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

On to anticipation. If you are anything as much of a CoD fan as I am, you’d have seen the most recent trailers of Black Ops and pondered the game a lot. It certainly looks interesting, with the CoD money being a good idea, along with the wager matches. At last, something that will reward consistent skill and a fitting reward. I particularly like the look of the 1 pistol shot mode, which could lead to some very tense moments and I fear, corner camping until1 guy runs pass… However.. you still gotta make the shot, which is easier said than done. Accuracy, tension and skill all nicely brought together in one little package. I have high hopes for this game and I seriously hope it’s actually fun, rather than a rage filled game that is MW2. Yet I still play MW2… Go figure. However, I was disappointed to learn that Marathon/Lightweight returns in Black Ops, which could lead to more spawn system problems.. I also caught the look of a scope that looks similar to Thermal, another sad face for me… With any luck it’ll work, but little cracks of doubt are appearing.

New Pokémon games in just 10 days as I write this. Pokémon Black & White (Run out of colours, moving on to shades I see) come out on September 18th in Japan, bringing another bunch of creatures and a new story line. Well… A new story line for Pokémon… Not one person actually cares about the story anyway to be honest… However, from early screenshots, updated graphics and other little features are present, again more factors I’m not really interested in… I’m undecided on whether i’ll actually get one of these games, but it’s certainly something to look forward to…

Well that’s all folks. Tune in next week for a more structured post. Maybe.

It wasn’t through lack of choice; my PlayStation Plus subscription was providing me with a whole pile of gaming goodness, I had plenty still to even load up in my Steam games list, and I’d even managed to steal my PSPgo back from my sister (who has developed an unhealthy obsession with Pinball Heroes). But then I realised what it was that had triggered my current state. As great as God of War is, as great as Prototype, Bad Company 2 and Left 4 Dead are, they are not exactly the most optimistic and cheery games around. I’d gone down with Gloomy Game Depression, and I couldn’t see a way out. So I put away my DualShock, gave my PSP back to my sibling, and told Steam to stop pissing me off at startup. Time passed.

Last Monday, I went off to a boot fair with the aforementioned klepto sister, the other less-thievy-but-more-chavvy sister, and my dearest mother. After shifting a whole pile of old books I had, I wandered off around the site to see what hand-me-down Christmas sweaters and ancient giant music disks other people were attempting to sell, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a lone black box sitting on the end of someone’s makeshift stall. It wasn’t shiny black, mind, but matte, with a grubby white face on the front – a face with four eyes, two particularly elongated nostrils, and no mouth. I had a quick look, enquired about the price, then trudged back to my stall to burden more Tolkien on unsuspecting bystanders.

But then I remembered about the Blue Sky in Games campaign. I’d only seen the page once, linked to from some random blog or Twitterer I followed, but the sentiment had remained ingrained in my mind. “Games need blue skies! Games need bright yellow suns! Games need red and blue things in them! We want to play in a happy pretend land, not a shit version of an American slum full of mixed-race gangsters wearing licensed sportswear!” reads the site. So I reconsidered my world view, and returned to that lonely black box, and purchased it for the princely sum of seven Great British pounds.

I grew up on Sony. I loved Spyro and the associated greats on the PSone, but the styling of the PS2, then attitudes of game developers, and my attempting to actually socialise with other people meant that my time with the PS2 was largely spent running over prostitutes in Liberty City whilst listening to radio chatter about cocaine and mob corruption. Transitioning to the PS3 was largely similar, except that now it was an Eastern European I was instructing to take down the aforementioned ladies of the night. But I never owned a Nintendo console. I played them for sure, just when I happened to be in the presence of one. But now that changed. I had bought myself a second-hand GameCube, and it has saved my gaming life.

That afternoon I hit up the internet, searching for any way to hook up my old-new ‘Cube to my new-new monitor, before I accepted that I’d simply have to wait for the family to go to bed and then attack the relatively ancient living room telebox, like playing last-gen games was a secret sin. I set up an account on eBay and ordered through copies of Starfox Adventures and Sonic Heroes, and a second controller. I even went into an actual shop (albeit one half-full of weed and various sharp-edged implements) and headed for the “old game” section and picked up SSX Tricky and Nightfire – which, yes I know, does not strictly adhere to the Blue Sky motif, but is fucking awesome and represents some of my best last-gen gaming memories.

Almost every night since, I’ve been downstairs, plugging away at Sonic Heroes, switching between Sonic Team members like I’d never been away, and swapping out for quick Nightfire matches (gadgets on, natch) with the siblings, or to take a speed run down the snowy slopes of SSX. I realised that somewhere along the line, whether it was reading and writing so much about the hobby I loved so dearly, or through the sheer amount of high-definition grey and brown that would have been permanently etched onto my screen if I was daft enough to own a rear-projection set, I’d totally lost touch with what made me a gamer. And that’s the fun. So thank you, unnammed GameCube, for helping me realise that.

(Oh yeah, and welcome back to a new semester of Keybrood.)

Table top card gaming is finally gracing Keybrood in the form of…

Magic: The Gathering.

Some background on this mysterious game: it was originally created by a professor of mathematics (good start) and published by the generous LARPing overlords that are Wizards of the Coast (creators of Dungeons and Dragons). It was a massive hit back in 1993, back when dragons still roamed Middle Earth and necromancers danced their deadly mambos, but due to a powerful core experience and a wealth of fantasy lore to draw from, it still thrives today, with about six million players in over seventy countries still playing, making it the most popular trading card game both now, and ever. Bearing in mind it had to hold out against the swathes of fads through the years, like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and Pokémon cards, it’s done pretty well for itself.

But what about Magic: The Gathering makes it so timeless? Like WoW, Starcraft, and Linux, the answer is complexity. Like many games it has a smooth and understandable outer shell, in which beginners can safely reside and enjoy MTG, but underneath resides a molten core of rules and variations, a veritable cornucopia of strategies that flesh the game out to a level that’s on par with Warhammer, D&D and Rubik’s Cubes.

At a basic level, a player has a deck of cards. Within the deck are creatures, instant spells, sorceries, enchantments, equipments, and mana, which all play their part in the web of Magic: The Gathering. However, unlike Yu-Gi-Oh! where any card can appear in a deck and it won’t be noteworthy, Magic: The Gathering is split into 5 colours of mana: Red (Mountains), Blue (Islands), Green (Forests), White (Plains) and Black (Swamps). This means you have players who compile together decks of all 5 colours, keeping their deck varied and unpredictable, or others who stick to 1 or 2 colours in a single deck, in order to have some consistency, and some believe, stronger content. The limit applies when trying to lay a card of a specific colour. Ravenous Bolath, a Green beast, can only be summoned if you have enough Green mana in play (which would be the Forests), whereas Plains or Islands would be useless.

Sure this makes an interesting game to play, but when it comes to the lore, it keeps everything fresh. Each colour is renowned for certain types of units or playstyles.

The Reds are all about the goblins and orcs, mountain trolls and berserking humans, dragons and Golem Kings. They specialize in dealing direct damage to the player,  regardless of the creatures on the field.

The Blues are the thinkers; wizards, mermaids, winged beats, aquatic beasts, serpents and water elementals populate this deck. A lot of the cards are about controlling the game and breaking the rules, messing with the deck and throwing the other player off.

The Greens are about pure power. They’re the elves, the forest creatures, giant spides, snakes and wurms, bolaths and druids. Their main tactic is overwhelming numbers and powerful creatures, with the ability to regenerate at a cost.

The Whites are the ‘good guys’. Knights of all different races are found here, as are walls, templars, royalty and angels. They offer protection against specific colours and creatures, as well as healing the player back up to, and past, full health.

The Blacks are the bastards. These are the zombies, vampyres, rats, demons, gnolls, swamp manifestations, and other disgusting monstrosities. They will do anything to cause harm to the other player in any form, but in order to do that they will need sacrifice. Sacrifice X amount of life and deal X amount of damage is not an uncommon ability for a black card to have.

As well as all this, there’s a huge branching story to Magic: The Gathering. There’s legends and heroes, people die and are revived in subsequent card releases. It all makes the experience just that bit richer.

I guess the point of this post is just to point out that, yes, some of us at Keybrood do enjoy the nerdier things in life. And if any of you get a chance to play Magic: The Gathering, whether you buy an intro deck or find one in the street (?), it is such a blast to play.

Next week; DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS BITCHES.

Have you ever found yourself sitting alone at your computer, stripped to your boxers, browsing Wikipedia and thinking…is this it? A whole wealth of knowledge at my fingertips, an accumulation of generations of information, and yet all I receive are hollow, considered facts? Where’s the funny? Where’s the love?

Well, Josh and I have. In fact, we’ve thought this so much that, after removing Wikipedia, Google and Wikihow from our bookmarks and reconsidering several hours of our day, we decided to take the first step in adding a bit of nonsensical sparkle to the Internet. Okay, a bit more nonsensical sparkle.

Enter ‘Citation Badly Needed’, our answer to the blight of ‘freely distributed information’ on the Internet (a pox on thee). Why ask a question to the aggregation of the intelligence of millions of people all over the world, when you can simply direct your question to us, and get something at least slightly less accurate, but guaranteed to be a whole mess load funnier.

Okay, let me rephrase. We, for the benefit of all humanity, and you specifically, will be answering questions, given to us by anyone ever, in the most unresearched and unplanned way possible, in order to entertain and inform you in the most unneeded way possible. Sound good? Yes? Wunderbar!

Here’s how you can transport your old useless questions to us, so we can at last begin our patented fact falsification and humour generation machine. Just send us questions to any of the following…

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Formspring
• Facebook
• Email

…and we’ll answer them all. The best, however, will be hoarded in our question vault and answered on video (much like the one above), on the spot and without any references whatsoever. The primary aim, mind you, is not to teach, but to entertain. Don’t be surprised if, upon asking us “What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything”, we descend into a logic spiral towards nazi hamsters, heliotropes and ornithopter management. It’s just how we work.

Any questions about Citation Badly Needed, as opposed to for Citation Badly Needed, can be sent to any of the previous five links, but in doing so you risk having the question answered on video and subsequently mocked or torn to pieces, regardless of it’s original sincerity.

And that is it. Get sending in your questions, and within a week we will have a brand new video, chock full of fresh funny and slightly minted humour cake. (I don’t know what I’m saying)

First off, lets talk about the characters:

Lightning (Claire Ferron): One of the first characters introduced, she initially appears cold and detached from her emotions. However as the story progresses, she shows a compassionate side and becomes tolerate of the other characters. One of the better characters in the game, not just for battles but because she doesn’t annoy me in cutscenes.

Fang (Oerba Yun Fang): Introduced later than the other characters, you are lead to believe she is against you, but that is not that case. She is focused towards a single goal and very protective of Vanille. It was her and Vanilles’s original ‘Focus’ to transform into Ragnarok, 500 years prior to the events of FFXII. Again a strong character and also does not annoy me in the cutscenes.

Snow (Snow Villers): Introduced slightly after Lightning and Sazh, he is shown as the leader of a rebellious gang called NORA. Snow is annoyingly optimistic and appears to not be the smartest character in the game by a long shot. He is engaged to Lightning’s sister. Overall slightly infuriating, but FFXIII makes up for it by getting Lightning to hit him.

Hope (Hope Estheim): Introduced around the same time as Snow, he is shown as a shy boy who struggles to voice his thoughts, blaming Snow for the death of this mother, though he learns to forgive him later on. As the story progresses, Hope becomes a stronger-willed character, learning from Lightning and ultimately being attacked by Alexander when he begins to doubt himself. One of my least favourite characters, to me he will always been known as “whiney little cunt”.

Vanille (Oerba Dia Vanille): Introduced at the same time as Hope, she motivates Hope to find Snow, however she is quite deceptive and it isn’t until later in the story that the characters know the truth about her and Fang’s actions 500 years ago. Extremely optimistic, always looking on the bright side meant that the other characters had no idea about the burden she has had to bear. An okay character but all her moans and grunts make it sound like I am watching some dodgey Japanese porno.

Sazh (Sazh Katzroy): Introduced with Lightning, he is a pilot and single father and to begin with his only motivation is to save his son. He is a middle-aged character making him the oldest of the group and often this leads to jokes about his age. Looks after a small chocobo chick, that he brought for his son, which uses his hair as a nest. Provides a small amount of comic relief to the story along with his unnamed chocobo chick.

Starting the game I was confused and slightly annoyed that I didn’t start with magic, couldn’t name characters and didn’t obtain Gil after battles. But as I played through the game, these annoyances left my mind. A few hours in I was granted the use of magic, which made me a happy moogle. The fact I was earning stuff to sell at high prices after battles meant I did not need Gil after every battle (but it still would have been nice) and naming characters isn’t that big of deal anyway.

After the tutorial segment of the game finished, the battle system opened out. This was the first time I had used a role-based battle system in which you only have control over one character while AI controls the other two making them do various spells and attacks depending what class that character is in. There are 6 classes:

Commando: Used for inflicting damage.

Ravenger: Used for raising ‘stagger’ bar.

Sentinel: Used for focusing enemies attacks on that character.

Saboteur: Used for inflicting negative status effects on enemies.

Synergist: Used for inflicting positive status effects on allies.

Medic: Used for healing and removing negative status effects on allies.

Also in this system there is no MP, each spell takes a certain amount of ATB to use. So Fire takes 1 ATB and Fira takes 2 ATB. 2 Fires do more damage than 1 Fira (when the enemy is not staggered) so against one enemy using Fire is better than Fira. However since Fira has AOE against multiple enemies that are standing close together Fira is more effective in terms of damage to all enemies/ATB used.

Onto Eidolons (summons) now; each Character has access to one Eidolon each and since MP is not in this game TP is used instead. TP (Technical Points) are given to you after winning a battle  and through various accessories. You can hold a max of 5 TP and summoning requires 3 TP. TP is also used for other actions but summoning is the only cool (or useful) one. To obtain an Eidolon, you must defeat it in combat (progressing through the story leads you to all of these battles). When summoned, the Eidolon will proceed to attack automatically, which fills it’s Gestalt Gauge, though each Eidolon will have other ways of increasing it’s Gestalt Gauge When finally the Gestalt Gauge is full, or in fact when the summoner wants, pressing X(360) or Square(PS3) will make the Eidolon enter Gestalt Mode. When an Eidolon enters Gestalt Mode, it transforms, allowing the summoner to ride it, during which you are given time counters and each action you can perform uses a certain amount of these counters; costs and actions vary from Eidolon to Eidolon. However all have a finisher move that uses all time counters (best to use last as it’s strength is determined by how much of the Gestalt Gauge was full entering Gestalt Mode not amount of counters used).

Lightning – Odin (Lightning Elemental)

Finisher = Zantetsuken

Fang – Bahamut (Non-Elemental Magic)

Finisher = Megaflare

Snow – Shiva Sisters (Ice Elemental)

Finisher = Diamond Dust

Hope – Alexander (Non-Elemental Physical)

Finisher = Divine Judgment

Vanille – Hecatoncheir (Earth Elemental)

Finisher = Gaian Salvo

Sazh – Brynhildr (Fire Elemental*)

Finisher = Múspell Flame

*Default Element, by using the Synergist role you can give it Water/Lightning/Ice elemental attacks instead by using the following spells on it En-Water/En-Thunder/En-Frost.

The XP (well CP, actually, Crystarium Points) are earnt for winning battles against enemies (there are some that don’t give it; yer I am looking at you Orphan) and you use CP in the Crystarium to improve Strength, Magic, Max HP or to learn a new ability. The Crystarium is a more linear version of the sphere grid system from FFX offering dead-end branches so you can never stray away from the main path.

Speaking of linear, most of FFXIII is a staight line, with chapter 11 being the only ‘open’ chapter; this means that the game does not require as much time as the previous games in the series and due to the unlocks of more powerful monsters (earning much more CP) you should not (and will not need to) grind all that much, with chapter 11 being the only suitable and available place to do so.

The only real side-missions are Ceith stones which require you to kill a monster in return for a reward. The reward makes the walking around worth it though, as these stones offer the only means to various items important to killing the ‘super bosses’, for example the Genji Gloves accessory allows you break the damage cap of 99,999, but can only be obtained as a reward for 3 separate missions.

Because it is a Final Fantasy, there are many reoccuring themes, for example some enemies will be similar or identical to old ones and there are plenty of references to old weapons in the series. The infamous Tonberry makes a return, as does the ever annoying/cute Cactuar (depending on your cactus persuasion) and various forms of Behemoths appear.

One of the remarkable things about this game is that graphics are so amazing during gameplay, and even more so during cut scenes. Each cut-scene is extremely well done, my favourite being the bridge between Chapter 11 and Chapter 12.

This game has earnt it’s way into my heart, with pure hard work, like some of the classic Final Fantasy games did in the past, a return to form in my opinion. Plus I am loving doing all the little side quests.

The Story takes place in a world where human are dependent on their Fal’Cie for food, energy and various other things. Fal’Cie and Humans are created by the maker. Each Fal’Cie were given a focus (task) and can not stray from it, for example the Fal’Cie Carbuncle can only produce food for the city of Palumpolum, limited free will. However, Human do have free will but can be turned into a L’Cie by a Fal’Cie and given a focus. The L’Cie maintains freewill but if they fail their focus in time they turn into Cie’th. Cie’th are mindless monster filled with eternal despair and sorrow becoming mindless puppets to the Fal’Cie who transformed them.

L’Cie are granted the power of magic to aid them to complete their focus, it is implied that the Fal’Cie do not give them the power but simply unlock the power of the Human.

The characters become L’Cie fairly early on in the game, this drive the plot along as well as each characters individual reasons at the beginning stage however towards the end the L’Cie are only driven by revenge and salvation.

Overall, it seems like the developers put alot of time into making the game look great, play great and they haven’t cut any corners. If you can get over the linear aspect to this game you will love this game.

Official Keybrood Rating

92/100

Confirmed for the event are your Keybrood team – my good self (Josh Hood), Zack Goodrich, Etienne Lughthart, Alex Bullock, Tom Russell, George Brierley and Dan Collins – as well as Keybrood TV favourites Henry Poulton and Nick Thomas. The star attraction will, naturally, be the brand-spanking-new and brand-spanking-awesome StarCraft 2, whilst second place goes to a surprise visit from an Xbox 360, which has seen fit to risk its life and enter our lair, but I’m sure we’ll have some fun. Of course, there will be all the team favourites like LittleBigPlanet, Red Alert 2, Brawl, Guitar Hero and Red Bull, and we’ll more than likely be mixing in some new games too.

The liveblog will be kicking off about 9am GMT, and I’m going to try and get as many people as possible to join in with that, so join us then!

Anyway, what you need to know is that Keybrood is embarking on its greatest potential achievement yet, rendering our previous 24-hour gameathon worthless in the process, as we try for 48 hours. We have in no way consulted medical professionals, but I can tell you that this is wholly unhealthy, and we could all suffer long-term side effects. But goddammit, we will do it. We’re still finalising some details and the list of attendees, but come back tomorrow morning at 9am when we will be starting off the liveblog. Naturally, we will be filming the whole thing, and taking a crapton of pictures, so a media overload will likely result from the event.

See you tomorrow!

Now, old horror games – indeed old horror films – are very difficult to fairly rate, simply because of the gulf in technology which grants the modern viewer unparalleled realism. I’ll be honest with you – System Shock 2 is no longer a particularly scary game, certainly not of the level I experienced as a small-ish child. What it does remain, as Bioshock’s oft-lauded ‘spiritual predecessor’, is a tremendously interesting FPS in the Half Life mould; it is overly complicated at times, ridiculously difficult at others, but there is enough depth and creepiness left in this pre-millennial shell to provide a great gaming experience.

In System Shock 2, you fill the boots of a specialist soldier in a cyberpunk world, trapped by unfortunate work placement on a ship devastated by viral outbreak. You go exploring the vast, mostly empty corridors with little in the way of radio contact and nothing in the way of human contact, stemming the tide of infection and hitting lots of things with a wrench.

This game is built from some serious stock. Developed by the infamous Looking Glass Studios using their Thief: The Dark Project engine, SS2 was a one-time collaboration with Irrational Games, and one never planned as a direct sequel; Looking Glass made their approach out of a love for the first game, but only wanted to combine elements of it with their own ideas. What they ultimately ended up with was the same setting, the same aspect and many the same mechanics, but with the advanced engine, environments and RPG elements which had made LG’s Ultima series so successful.

This RPG system is one of the defining features of a game way beyond its time. You begin by choosing one of three classes: Marine (weapons), Navy (hacking) or OSA (psionic powers), but you can then upgrade their various facets with hard-to-find ‘cyber-modules’. These focuses completely dictate the way you play the game; with poor hacking skills you will have difficulty with alarms and doors, without weapons skills you’ll have trouble dispatching enemies, and without psionics you’ll be in constant need of ammo. No game at that point, and no other for years afterwards, offered such a level of customisability that you could immediately play through again and have a completely different experience. Consider that Bioshock took many of the elements – strong story focus, character customisation in an FPS, the constant scavenging, a prominent hacking mechanic, the ‘bio-reconstruction chambers’, the horror + isolation focus – and created a game praised for its innovation amongst the general quality of production, and you get an idea of how brilliantly deep and entirely new most of this game was to the world.

Depth and creativity are great, but a great game they do not necessarily make. Luckily System Shock 2 is good fun to play and works well, but is is also equally annoying. As much as I like the inventory system, the weapon customisation and the different ammo types (although the latter is vaguely frustrating), weapon maintenance is one step too far; your guns ‘degrade’ as you use them, and you then have to use fairly rare tools and skills you don’t necessarily start  with fairly regularly to repair them. The only thing that doesn’t degrade is the wrench, and you will definitely find yourself using that more often than anything else; I’m told it’s more than possible to use it alone through the entire game. The character customisation is also massively unbalanced, allowing you to only learn skills from the other archetypes if you wish, though I wonder if being unable to learn any psionics or hacking as a soldier (for example) wouldn’t be pushing the difficulty a little too far. And it is difficult. The world you inhabit is persistent; that is to say, it acts and changes without direct interaction, and while there are events which take place when you enter areas, NPCs are almost entirely free-roaming – they will follow you where humanly possible, and they will open many a door to do so. There is nothing quite like accidentally setting off an alarm and immediately running into a room and shutting the door, only to be swarmed for two minutes by enemies moving from all corners of the level to come and find you.

I said System isn’t all altogether scary any more, and altogether is the word – while the graphics and the slightly rubbish voice acting don’t do it many favours, the lighting, isolation and relative inability to kill things, heal yourself or find anything with any great ease work brilliantly where they might cripple any other FPS. It never makes you jump, but there are a lot of ‘SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT’ kind of moments where you switch to invent, get a gun, start firing, realise that it literally isn’t working and then run away, all the while frantically mashing buttons to get out your wrench. It’s atmospheric, it’s clever, and above all else, it is a difficult, adventurous and SINGLE PLAYER shooter. You don’t see many of those nowadays, eh.

Official Keybrood Rating:

87/100

I should apologise first for the lack of a day four; if you’ve been keeping up with my Twitter (hoho) then you’ll have noticed that I sort of gave up on Driver until I have some more time to revisit it; it’s pretty challenging and I’ve discovered that I’m no longer much of a fan, not that it’s a bad game, so I feel like I need more time to get a fair picture. Also, if anyone would like to take over for a day with their own retro review (perhaps of a particular favourite), do get in touch.

Now, it was the third game in the series which undoubtedly catapulted Rockstar into gaming stardom, but what of the PC and PS1 originals? Let’s be honest, they get a lot of stick – unsophisticated, top down, mapless. Maybe that’s retro syndrome, or maybe it’s just because the newer renditions are so brilliant, but I think a lot of this sentiment is unfairly shovelled upon a game most haven’t properly played. Ok, it’s fairly simple stuff, and it has glaring flaws, but that is much of the charm. What you see here are the foundations of a pop-culture franchise which would rock the world.

Grand Theft Auto is set in all three of the cities which would later be built upon in glorious 3D – Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas – and has you take one of eight characters through one of several ‘levels’ on a crime rampage. You run and drive around the cities, gaining points for death and destruction, and multipliers for completing missions (losing them with failures). Completing missions unlocks harder and more rewarding ones, failing them can seal off opportunities, and points build to a tally which unlocks more levels and more missions in other cities. You can still travel around a city doing what you will in a completed level, however – gathering secrets, completing outstanding missions – and freedom is generally abundant; you choose your paths, you choose what to do. GTA was the first in a long line of true sandbox games, and quite incredibly ran in its entirety on the Game Boy Color. The magnitude of this game as a piece of engineering and a gaming accomplishment, in spite of its modest success, is not to be underestimated.

Now, first thing’s first – the PS1 version pales in comparison to the PC one, but it is unfortunately the version I’ve been playing (I know you can get the PC one for free, but…meh). You might say that differences such as four characters (all male) instead of eight, and one radio station per car are cosmetic, but this wealth of detail speaks volumes of a game ahead of its time – what other game had such a rich, real-world soundtrack, bar maybe Pro Skater (if that was even out)? GTA 2 would spawn many of the defining features of the series – multiple gangs, the army, hidden packages, a wide variety of weapons, complex NPC behaviours – but the ambition of this game with the map size it included, and the wealth of pedestrians and vehicles across it, are not just to be admired but to revel in; it truly is a joy to steal a car, speed through the streets and alleyways, and just go and blow something up. This is a game like no other of its generation, and it should, if only for that, be lauded.

An intrinsic part of its richness and sheer fun to play is the irreverent humour. The dialogue, subtitles set to jabbering, is crude but nonetheless witty. There is a dedicated fart button. People offer their ‘hot sister’ to you for completing a mission for them, and what voicing there is to be found in certain bonuses (see excerpt) is brilliantly OTT. The visuals, while veeeeeery simple, are likewise colourful with blood splatters, explosions and fire, trees, ocean, the blue and orange roads and grey buildings and the myriad of coloured cars and shirts. This is the city you speed around, setting people on fire or running them over to the sound of country and western, all the while racking up those points and being urged on by that booming bonus voice. It is puerile, it is simple, but it is surely unadulterated fun in its purest form.

There are flaws, certainly. This first version – although perhaps this is a problem with the PS1 port – doesn’t have a mini-map, or indeed a map of any kind that I could locate; this was definitely rectified with the London expansion packs, but is a MASSIVE problem in a big city like this. Sure, you have the directional arrows for missions and to locate the mission telephones, but in a sandbox world that just doesn’t slide. Second of all, the weapons are very limited – you get a pistol, a rocket launcher, a machine gun and a flamethrower, and that’s with cheats. It doesn’t quite feel like a GTA game either, and that’s more to do with the structure and lack of NPC interaction with the environment; it’s very much ‘complete these generic missions (albeit with cool dialogue) to gain multipliers to boost your way to the next level’, and it would be the next rendition which would add stuff like moving trains, and pedestrians using taxis and buses. When I say that is is fun at its most simple, I mean that wholeheartedly – the concept is brilliant, and it works on one level, but there is very little of the depth which defines the rest of the series.

I’m cutting things a little shorter today because I’ve realised that this PBP malarkey really eats up my day, and as a result, I’m going to shorten the reviews a little and add a score to fill in the gap instead. My conclusion is thus: technically, this game is brilliant. For a bit of pick-up-and-play, it still stands up as a wacky, arcadey, kill-things kind of romp. As a spectacle, it has aged horribly, and it wasn’t all that creative and mystifying to begin with…but I still really like it. The score on today’s doors:

Official Keybrood Rating:

76/100