Richard's Online Journal
Grace Under Pressure
It's time to return to Rapture and see more proof that Bioshock 2’s true genius lies... literally... under the surface.
RIP PC Zone
A dedicated PC gaming mag? It’ll never catch on.
As most of the UK games media is saying, it looks like the end for PC Zone. I say ‘looks like’ because technically, technically, it’s not closed yet. I don’t see that as being anything other than a formality though, so I’m going to say goodbye now and delete this if it gets some kind of reprieve. As far as the magazine goes, having never actually worked on it, I can’t speak about it in the same way as Will and Paul in their excellent tribute on Rock Paper Shotgun, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important magazine to me.
As a PC gamer in the 90s, it was part of the Holy Trinity of mags. PC Format filled your head with all the amazing things your machine could do, from 3D rendering to making music. PC Gamer was the voice of PC gaming: serious, funny, and dripping authority. As for PC Zone, that was the passion and joy of being a PC gamer back in the days when the wider world thought they were only good for spreadsheets and word processing. Obviously, all three danced in each others’ territory on a regular basis, but that was how I saw them.
Zone at its best was fast, funny, and yes, childish, but in the most infectious way. The articles everyone always talks about are the Frontier: First Encounters review headed by a giant poo wrapped in a bow, hiring a model to dress as a nun to rate joysticks on their phalluscity and all that other stuff, but really, the small bits were just as good. The Theme Park review responding to the game’s research team serving up the Teacups with “Yaargh! Wankers! They’ve gone and invented something shite!” The epic mini-poem Lord of the Chins about Ultima VII’s Guardian. Charlie Brooker’s rhyming review of Blown Away, which began with “Blown Away’s a brand new game, packed full of FMV. It runs under Windows and it comes on a CD” and ended “As an exercise in tedium, this game is unsurpassed. There’s far more fun in drinking sick, or chewing broken glass.” And of course, it was a magazine that dared to use the word ‘fuck’ back when it was both big and clever.
If you were a teenager reading a games mag, anyway.
My more-than-reader history with Zone is fairly minimal. As a long-time freelancer on PC Gamer (words that my younger self would never believe I’d one day be writing, but I remain incredibly grateful to), I wasn’t really able to write for it, although I did a couple of short reviews and similar over the years as bail-out jobs. At this point though, the Zone I knew and loved didn’t really exist any more, not because the magazine team had declined, but because publishing had changed and that anarchic freeform style wasn’t seen as the thing to do any more. That’s always saddened me, and I think the mag’s worst ever mistake was going for the Gamer market instead of pushing its own indie vibe, but I suppose it was inevitable. My PC Zone was a thing of its time. Times change, for good and bad.
Design on the other hand generally improves…
Obviously, old magazines closing has an extra edge to it for me. I’m a professional writer, which means I have no real skills. Every magazine closing is another pound-sign shaped star blinking out of the heavens. Still, it offers a few bonuses too, like having the chance to help switch the lights out on one of the mags that gave me years of fun, and played a huge part in shaping my desire to be involved in this crazy industry. Any time I write a concept review, I guarantee it’ll have at least a little bit of Zone in its DNA. Unless it’s crap, in which case blame PC Accelerator. Or 3D Action Games. But I digress.
For a dose of nostalgia, check out this scan of (most) of the first issue – sadly missing the debut of the great Mr. Cursor backpage column. If you love magazines or PC gaming, check out the final issue in a couple of months time. Until then, farewell, PC Zone. I officially forgive you for making me see Steve Hill in drag. And the Kingpin review.
They Did It First!
Join PC Gamer as we head back to the 80s and 90s in search of some of gaming's less celebrated pioneers
APB Review
Playing APB, it’s tough to remember that we’re in 2010. The basic concept is excellent – who doesn’t love a game of Cops and Robbers – but everything about the action feels incredibly dated. Jumping in as a hard-working cop trying to keep the streets clean, my first problem was that the city felt incredibly boring. There’s no sense of place to it, no personality, and no room to manoeuvre in its tight streets. It delights in penalising you for every slight slip-up, even something as trivial as hitting pedestrians with your car while chasing criminals. After GTA, it’s just brutally pedantic and unforgiving.
Oddly, APB is a very antisocial experience. You rarely deal with other players, and when you do, they’re only there to distract you from your own game. True APBs, sending you against worthy criminals in the name of Justice, are a rare treat, coming only after lots of repetitive smaller assignments. Your opponents are easily spotted by their ridiculous outfits and custom car designs, as if any crim worth their record would be seen dead cruising the streets in a bright pink van – even if they are called “Freddy Freak” and similar. Fights are quick and incredibly simplistic, requiring quick movements, but no real skill or strategy. APB has no localised damage, and everything uses the same hitbox.
You can buy upgrades that boost your abilities, but the nature of the power-up curve means that someone will always be ahead of you and waiting to kick your arse. Making it worse, the game will happily send you after crims you have no chance of defeating, and the basic mechanics offer little scope for evening the odds with clever play.
Some players argue that you need to spend at least 50 hours to get the measure of APB’s action, but really you’ll see it all after a couple. If you can get into the basic knockabout style, there’s fun to be had, but nothing that you’d want to pay a monthly subscription for or want to buy hours and hours of. Maybe you’d insert another coin though…
Honestly, it’s not even in 3D. Amateurs.
In conclusion, APB is a game that could have made a splash in simpler times, but in the cold light of now, it’s just too primitive to be truly satisfying. One for hardcore cops and robbers fans only, and even then, they might want to look for something a little closer to the technological standard we expect these days. Like Chase HQ.
Journey Into ImagiNation
It’s already better than Flamingo Land. Why? It’s not Flamingo Land.
As an old-school adventure fan, I’ve made a point of playing just about everything that Sierra and Lucasarts made back in the day, from big games like Day of the Tentacle and Gabriel Knight to more obscure stuff, like Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion and Black Cauldron. There’s one Sierra Online release I never thought I’d get to try though: The Sierra Network/ImagiNation – its online gaming service from 1991.
Back at the start of the 90s, the net was a very different place. The web existed, but it wasn’t particularly exciting. Instead, you’d generally join a closed off service like Compuserve and AOL, or in the UK, CIX, which would have its own file libraries, its own clubs and message boards, and its own community. You could access the web, or USENET, or whatever, but your real allegiance was to your specific service or boards. CIX for instance ran yearly barbeques for its members in the real-world, and felt like a big family where everyone knew each other. It was a different era, and I miss it immensely.
(The constant terror of waiting for both the phonebill and the internet bill to land is something I’m glad to have escaped though. At this point in the internet’s life, you were billed a small fortune by the minute for both the services and the phonecalls required to connect, and if you weren’t lucky enough to have a local access point, those bills landing on the mat was… unpleasant. Trust me on this. CIX’s actual internet service was dreadful as well. Downloads at 0.1kps are even less fun when you’re paying by the minute…)
Next to all this, The Sierra Network was an oddity. It was one of the most famous early online gaming networks, although not actually the first. It launched in 1989, but Lucasarts had long pipped it to the post with Habitat in 1986 – a proto MMORPG for the Commodore 64. That one was never talked about over here in the UK, but we were at least vaguely aware of the Sierra Network/ImagiNation from the copies of the official Sierra magazine, InterAction (“A Blatantly Biased Look At Games From The Sierra Family”, until Sierra lost its humanity) that occasionally got bundled with imported games mags.
I remember the articles/adverts well, though I can’t say I burned to play it at the time. I wasn’t online yet, we couldn’t have accessed it even if I had been, and it was clear that the cost of a phonecall long enough to play a game of something like Chess wasn’t in my future. Even when I did finally get a modem, the insane costs of using the internet made going online to find things more of a smash-and-grab affair, with one eye always on the constantly ticking clock. Had it been something closer to the adventure games I loved, rather than just more bulletin boards and board games, maybe it would have been a different story. I remember looking at the pictures, thinking that one day that might be quite cool, then never really thinking about it again until last weekend.
Why last weekend? That’s when I visited Abandonia, the net’s best abandonware site, and saw INN Revival, a fan project that’s bringing ImagiNation back. No geographical restrictions. No expensive phonecalls. No subscription costs. Just 1995, wrapped up in DOSBox, and ready for anyone looking to explore Sierra’s online empire.
Obviously, I had to check it out immediately…
Can someone lend me a pen? I need to add tonight’s episode of Doctor Who to my ‘Things That Are Awesome’ list. Can someone else lend me a pen? I need to underline it about a hundred million times. I was really worried about Moffat doing yet another OMG THE UNIVERSE IS DOOMED arc plot, but that one was just terrific. Lest we forget, the last time we were here, RTD was about to unleash an episode featuring a nuclear gunge tank. Not only can I not wait until next week’s episode, I’m already looking forward to Moffat’s Christmas episode and next year’s series.
(I totally called the Pandorica, incidentally.)
19/06/10 - Entertainment, Quickies - 11 comments