By Fraser McMillan

When does an air of confidence become outright arrogance?

Some would say it’s a fine line, others that no such divide exists. Either way, few would deny that Realtime Worlds’ Assistant Producer Ben Abbott has the utmost faith in his studio’s upcoming massively-multiplayer crime epic APB. In response my question about whether the depth of customisation demonstrated was one of the game’s key features, he exclaimed in an excited tone: “It’s not one of the key features, it’s one of the awesome features.”

At that moment it became apparent that overly formal rhetoric didn’t do justice to the visibly fierce passion Abbott displayed for his product. If his strong self-assurance happens to conflate into cockiness, then so be it, because what he told and showed to the packed screenings room at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival looked mightily impressive to say the least – and that was without any proper gameplay to pick apart.

//Getting into character
Chest-beating about the character, vehicle and logo creation for the best part of twenty minutes in a room so overcrowded by sweaty nerds it smelled more like a Rammstein mosh pit, the video he played was, all things considered, pretty astounding. Simple push and pull mouse gesturing allowed avatar features to be altered instantly by imperceptibly small degrees, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any system with such flexibility before. It looked implausibly cleanly laid out, while still presenting a depth that has to be seen to be believed. As Abbott himself continued, “you’re not going to find that level [of customisation] in any other online game.”

As if to prove his point about the system’s adaptable toolset, halfway through the demonstration a character model with its back to the screen appeared, a note on its back asking “Can we make him?” He turned around. We were greeted by the President’s signature grin and the familiar campaign slogan, “Yes We Can.” It was uncanny.

In a bid to avoid tempting players into robbing banks and gunning down civilians using the world’s political inner circle, Barack was hastily discarded to make room for aspiring mechanics. That’s the career mechanic, not the game element, though strangely enough the latter looks fit for the former’s purpose. Automobile creation was every bit as malleable as its sister system, with the size and shape of nearly every component able to shift and then some. An intelligent decals system, which recognises the location of windows and wraps neatly around curves, is present and correct – and, as Abbott pointed out, avoids being “just slapped-on textures.”

The creation of decals echoes the tattoo and clothing print system, which again wraps artwork naturally around muscle and fabric folds respectively. The former was particularly interesting, Abbott explaining that the team went to great pains to have inks stand out more prominently on darker skin, which has been a problem with games in the past. Making the logos themselves works like a drawing program, the layer-based system and thousands of shapes and colours handling anything one could throw at it. After talking through and showing the creation of a logo from scratch, Abbott informed the audience that “this is just the art department going crazy,” as dozens of professional looking emblems, made in their entirety using the game’s features, flashed up one by one.

[Continues...]

By Greg Giddens

World War 2 has spawned a ridiculous amount of FPS games, one of the most renowned and interesting being Battlefield 1942. Now, seven years later, a new year begins in the Battlefield calendar, leading to what is quite possibly among the best online shooters so far.

It’s certainly one of the most accessible games ever created. There’s no complex control system or rules; there are only four maps, two game modes and three classes. Battlefield 1943 is simple to play and impossible to put down. It takes everything that was loved about the previous Battlefield games and enhances them with a very clear goal to: create the perfect online shooter.

//In the beginning
Originally, only three maps and a single game mode were present, but the fourth map and second game mode were unlocked when the console community reached a set amount of kills – in this case 43 million. This incentive to play is truly original, and seems to have really engaged the community. Now, with the extra content unlocked, the Coral Sea map and the Dogfight game mode are large components of the experience, but the main game is still in the original content.

You play as either the US Marines or the Japanese Imperial Navy, across three maps based on real-world locations and battles.  As with the previous Battlefield games, your task is to take control of the flag points on the map to reduce the enemies’ counter to zero. But the presentation, health system and complexity have all been changed from before. Battlefield 1943 uses Battlefield: Bad Company’s Frostbite engine, and as a result looks beautiful. Colours are bright and welcoming, fire and explosions look menacing, and everything looks crisp and well detailed. Add to that the destructible scenery and buildings, and Battlefield 1943 offers a far more tangible world to immerse yourself in.

That’s not to say Battlefield 1943 is aiming for realism.  Instead, it celebrates the fact that it’s a game. There is no ultra-punishing damage system, and health is neither measured through a bar nor numerically. Instead, the game uses a red indicator to show which direction you’re taking damage from, and you need to avoid damage for a short amount of time to recover, Gears of War style. The complexity of Battlefield 1943 has been scaled back a fair bit as well, with each of the three classes being able to perform the roles of several from the previous games. It means it’s far more accessible to all players, and while each class has a specialised trait, they’re all still capable in all forms of combat, and nobody is penalised with a severe weakness.

//Universal
It’s not just the game mechanics whose complexity has been reduced. Battlefield 1943 offers a very simple menu system that allows players to easily invite friends to join a group and then a match, and once you’re playing the fun never ends.  Quite literally – you’re never kicked back to the menu screen. At the end of a round you’re automatically moved over to the next match, so theoretically, if you suffer no connection problems, you can join a game from the menu once and spend the rest of the day entirely in-game.

Battlefield 1943 is an austere concept. It concentrates on the one experience – online play – which it delivers brilliantly. But that’s all there is – there’s no single player mode other than a tutorial, and no simulated online play with bots. Online-only does potentially limit the audience, and the current selection of maps may not be enough to keep players amused for long. But each is well designed, offering a completely different experience through variation in the layout and terrain. There might come a time when it becomes boring, but it’s unlikely to be any time soon.

Indeed, it’s easy to forget that Battlefield 1943 is a XBLA title – despite the lack of content, it feels more like a full retail product. We played on the 360, where it costs a mere 1200 points (£10.20), and provides some of the best online shooter playability yet seen on the console. As far as bang for your buck goes, Battlefield 1943 is explosive.

8/10

What does this score mean?

I love my games big, bold and with as many bells and whistles as can reasonably be attached. I’m the quintessential PC enthusiast, choosing my graphics cards with care and bigging up the likes of Valve whenever I can. Casual gaming does not fit very easily into this mould. As such, the oeuvre of casual gaming kings PopCap, Bigfish and the like would not be something I dabble in very often (with Peggle being the one exception), so I wasn’t expecting anything from Egyptian city builder-lite Nile Online before I opened it in my browser. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised.

Immortal Cities: Nile Online (to give it its full, unwieldy title) is most definitely a casual game. Knocked out by developers Tilted Mill when they weren’t tinkering with the likes of Hinterland, all you need do to access the game is part with your email address. This modest little package is entirely browser-based, without the need to download anything, which is nice, though it is not entirely free (strictly speaking – I’ll get to that). No sound and minimal animation means it’ll run on just about anything with an internet connection, with the side effect that most of the time it looks and feels like you’re trying to manipulate a screenshot rather than guiding your fledgling settlement to greatness.

Credit to Tilted Mill, the only real barrier that’s between you and actually playing the game is the complete lack of a proper introduction. Even the laziest and most hackneyed products of the casual market take some steps to introduce new players to their superficial workings, but the welcoming party for Nile Online simply points you at the Wiki and buggers off, which can be a little offputting for someone who just wanted to spend their lunch break playing a game instead of reading a wall of text. Thankfully, the Wiki contains a handy step-by-step primer for the game, which I would encourage you to follow. For those of you who won’t, the gist of Nile Online is thus: it’s all about juggling numbers.

You have a few primary resources at your settlement and a set amount of labourers to gather those resources. You need wheat to bake bread to feed your workforce and trade for other resources, clay for bricks and pottery and so on. But you will never, at least in my experience, have enough labourers, so there’s a constant challenge to maximizing efficient production of all your materials. This requires you to reassign your workforce on a regular basis, depending on what it is you’re currently trying to achieve. Want to upgrade your Palace but need some extra pottery? Then you’ll need to pull some men off the fields and into the workshop while keeping an eye on how it affects your farm output. Even at its deepest, you’re just pushing numbers around on papyrus, but in small bites it’s a nice little management morsel.

Everything takes a lot of time in Nile Online too. It’s designed to be dipped into for a few minutes every so often during your day, and harvesting, building and upgrade rates are set accordingly. For instance, it took something like three hours to upgrade my Palace at one point, so all I could do was log in, start the process and log off to do something else. While this slow pace might infuriate someone used to playing a proper strategy or management game, it’s the perfect set up for a casual game that is in no position to put excess demands on your time or attention.

And once you’ve got your settlement sorted and those resources harvested you can trade them with your neighbours once you build a bit of a navy. Or at least, that’s what it says in the Wiki. In practice it’s a little more complicated than that. Each city in Nile Online is run by a different player and will have access to one special resource. In my case it was Oil, which can be used to make Perfume, but only in combination with another special resource called Kohl. If I wanted Cedar, for ships and weapons, or Bronze, for sculptures, I would have to find another player with these who was willing to trade. So to really develop your city past a certain level (every time you level up your Palace requires you to spend certain, increasing amounts of different resources) you absolutely have to interact with the wider community. You’ll have to send them scrolls directly asking for resources or trade on the open market for goods. Suddenly, out of not very much, Nile Online turns itself into a sedate and interesting little co-operative MMO.

There’s even a level above that involving sending armies off to fight bandits with other players for further rewards and access to monument building, but the game is a slow burner and I haven’t had the time to explore that in any depth. Also, while it’s initially free, after a certain level you will have to spend items called Scarabs to continue developing your society. The only way to get more Scarabs is to purchase them with real cash from Tilted Mill, but you’re certainly under no obligation to. The more frugal or less interested player can still enjoy most of the game for free without having to shell out for these microtransactions.

A very slow pace and being easy to dip into make Nile Online a nice little number to distract you every once in a while, on a coffee break or when you find you just can’t stare at that TPS report any more without cracking up. It’s also a great game to tinker with while you’re doing something else (I have it open now watching for a message from a prospective trading partner) and for the cost of absolutely zero earth monies, it’s hard to rubbish the game for its modest ambition and execution. I just wish it looked a little better.

6/10