SUPERHOT

Boom! I shot a red dude.

SUPERHOT is one of weirder first person experiences I've ever played, for a whole bunch of reasons. The product of a game jam, I am given to understand, it's sort of like The Talos Principle, but bitter and nihilistic. First of all, it begins with a fictional set-up where you're breaking into a company server to play a supposedly boss computer game, which is actually just - in the game's own words - shooting red dudes. Secondly, the game is basically just shooting red dudes, and in a stark, white environment filled with black objects that can be picked up and shot, thrown or swung to kill red dudes.

Oh; and nothing moves unless you move.

That's the twist of the game, you see. Well, one of them. The other is the emergent plot, such as it is, of which more below.

This is looking bad.

But, yeah. You start a level and everything is still (almost, anyway; if you hang around too long, eventually something will kill you.) Things move slowly when you turn, and full speed when you move. This includes the red dudes, their bullets, and your bullets. The action of firing or throwing lets time run a little, but then you need to go somewhere for your bullet to actually reach its target. Interestingly, this means that targeting the time-frozen red dudes is actually harder than is usual with an FPS projectile weapon, because the bullets actually take time to travel.

Also, you can throw katanas at people.

Blam! His head exploded and... Wait; is this okay?

Anyway, then there's the plot, which emerges through play, and suggests that you are being sucked into some sort of virtual world to be a disembodied, electronic agent of change and sucker others into doing the same.

On the upside, you get access to the endless mode once you shoot yourself in the head.

I should probably add that it's more designed for VR, but it's still a decent, novel little shooter.

Wolfenstein: The New Order (and the Old Blood)

Perhaps the only thing missing from this game is the opportunity to personally
shoot Hitler in the face.

Wolfenstein is the grand-daddy of FPS, with Wolfenstein 3D one of the first serious exemplars of the genre, and a franchise which seems to renew itself once every decade or so. The latest revival began ahead of schedule with the largely ignored Wolfenstein in 2009, but this generation's serious entry is Wofenstein: The New Order, which brings the action of the series into an alternate 1960 in which the Nazis won the war and now rule the world.

Actually, we open with a chapter set in the last days of World War II, and the fact that this is in 1946 is a fucking sign. Long-time antagonist Wilhelm 'Deathshead' Strasse has pioneered a wave of advanced technologies which have brought the Nazis to the brink of total victory. Together with a company of infantry including Private Wyatt, and RAF pilot Fergus, series protagonist BJ Blazkowicz must infiltrate Deathshead's fortress and assassinate the general, but falls foul of what will come to be his most insurmountable foe of all, an unavoidable cutscene capture. Forced to chose which of his friends will be vivisected by Strasse, he escapes with the survivor, only to suffer a head wound which leaves him comatose.

Holy fucking shit I'M ON THE MOON!

Blazkowich spend fourteen years immobile in an asylum in Poland, until the Nazis come to close it down and take the inmates for experimentation. Driven by a desire to protect the nurse who has cared for him, Blazkowicz - displaying phenomenal muscle tone after fourteen years of immobility - starts murdering his way through the Nazis to save the girl. She takes him to her grandparents and they set off on a course that will lead them to the resistance, to a secret order of Jewish mystics, and even to the moon, before ultimately returning for a final confrontation with Deathshead.

Along the way, BJ has to fight robot dogs, cyborg dogs, supersoldiers, drones, and a whole lot of Nazis with a combination of light stealth and heavy firepower, including his new signature combination weapon and cutting tool, the LaserKraftwerk. There's a story, a romance, and you get to rock out with Jimi Hendrix in one of the timelines created by your choice at the start of the game. A lot of people get dead in the most horrible and visceral fashion that modern graphics technology can muster, and you spend what seems to be an awful lot of time looking down at a knife sticking out of BJ's chest, waiting for the QTE to strike back.

The Beatles may have gone German, but at least they got in trouble for not
thanking the Fuhrer before their concert.

The New Order is a very grim game, with lots of desperate gambits and bloody violence. At one point you fight your way through the burning Resistance HQ, past the bodies of your dead comrades, including a couple dead on a cot with a pistol by one of their hands. Then J plays the Star-Spangled Banner while he's gunned down by forces under the command of the crazed former head of the League of German Girls, whose face is all messed up from where it was squashed by a robot earlier in the game. Later on, her dodgy-moustached toyboy leers in your face after poisoning you, but you shrug off the drugs and brutally stab him to death. There's a lot of brutal to-death stabbing, with the takedown kills in particular leaving Dishonoured for dust and dual wielding - which you can do with everything from knives to assault shotguns - carrying a high chance of messy dismemberment.

Speaking of Dishonoured, my hours playing that game were a disservice here. Although there are stealth sections and it's always best to take out the commanders who can call in reinforcements before going loud, loud is pretty much where you always end up. This is not a stealth game and it isn't a game with multiple paths. It's a linear shooter, albeit a graphically impressive one. As a character, BJ Blazkowicz isn't actually that much more interesting for having a face, a voice and a love interest, and this does create a slight problem when he is surrounded by more interesting characters who keep getting killed.

Both of these two have more layers in their backstory than Blazkowicz, but by
the end of the game you will have shot one of them in the zombie face. I feel
it incumbent on me to save Annette because I don't want to let the only gay in
the franchise get eaten.

This goes double for the games stand-alone companion, The Old Blood, which is essentially the New Orderverse reboot of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, complete with the death of cool Brit Agent 1 (aka Wesley,) and a slight branching path where you can save either your resistance contact Kessler or his assistant Annette (because nuWolfenstein loves to make you choose who lives and who dies.) The one you don't get to in time becomes a zombie, as does Agent 2 (aka Pippa), another cool British character whose tragedy is all the greater, since it's her role to demand that you leave all your guns behind before going on a doomed undercover run, just to make sure that you have to watch her get clobbered by zombies because you can't shoot through a blocked gap to save her.

Don't get attached, folks.

So, yeah. It's more than thirty years since the first Castle Wolfenstein, and twenty since an identified BJ Blazkowicz first shot a Nazi in the face, and while The New Order and The Old Blood are decent fun and technically impressive, in terms of substance they aren't much beyond what Return was doing in 1992. The levels are open, but the plot still runs pretty much on rails. Also, you have to recollect your guns pretty much every level, even your spare knives and basic handgun don't seem to be basic mission equipment (although the laser cannon is thankfully essential,) which gets very, very old. As a die hard stealther, I also miss the Snooper rifle of Return, which leads to every level eventually becoming an arena.

On the upside, dieselpunk Nazi-punching, so it's swings and roundabouts.

Left 4 Dead 2

"Lookin' back on the track, for a little green bag..."*

"Son; we just crossed the street."

Last night I went back and played a bit of Left 4 Dead 2 with my quarter (that's my other half's other half.) It's been a while since I dipped into this particular zombie infected pool, and it's still a lot of fun.

For the uninitiated, Left 4 Dead (both the original and the sequel) are set in a world where the US at least is overrun with 'infected' in the wake of some sort of mutated flu epidemic. The 4 in the title refers to the four naturally immune survivors who make up your party and the 4-player co-op which this allows. The name of the game is escape, and not just once, as each main title is broken into several mini-campaigns, each describing the survivors' escape from one deadly situation, only to get landed in another at the start of the next installment.

The opening movie of the first game pretty much encapsulates the gameplay, as well as showcasing the 'special' infected (although the Boomer is only really there in gunk.)

I keep wanting to call it Dead Centre...

To set the mood just right, each campaign has a movie poster and tagline which shows in the loading screen, along with PSA posters warning you to wash your hands and notifying you that possession of firearms is now illegal as a matter of public safety. This is a game that knows what irony is and isn't ashamed of that fact.

The first game mostly plays out in Pennsylvania, and mostly in the midst of an urban sprawl. Left 4 Dead 2 brings the action south, kicking off in Savannah, Georgia and making its way through New Orleans. In addition to southern accents and an equal black/white balance (I think Zoe is probably meant to be Latina, so the representation isn't too terrible either way, although both have 3:1 male to female ratios and there aren't any Asian-Americans,) the game introduces new varieties of zombies - including the sad-making zombie clowns - and weapons, not just variant guns but the much requested melee arsenal, including axes, crowbars, electric guitars, katanas and the fuel-limited delight of the chainsaw.

Okay; mostly the name of the game is survival.

We played the opening chapter of Left 4 Dead 2, 'Dead Center', in which the four survivors - Coach, Ellis, Nick and Rochelle - are left behind by the last chopper out of town and have to make their way to a shopping mall to steal a stock car. One of the defining traits of the sequel was that it got much more inventive with its campaign finales. In Left 4 Dead mostly you were holding off the horde while waiting for rescue. Dead Centre borrows from the exception, Dead Air, in which the survivors have to refuel a plane as the horde attacks. In this case, you're gassing up a stock car in the middle of the mall and feeling more than a little bit Dawn of the Dead while you're doing it. It's not as good as later levels, like the one where you have to try to attract rescue by setting off a heavy metal band's stage fireworks, but it's pretty damn good.

The campaign manages some solid set pieces. A desperate rush through a burning building is impressively tense for all that the flames are mostly a route map, and the crying of the Witch and the Tank's distinctive brass theme are still enough to fill me with terror.

This image was clearly chosen to represent the gestures that I
wound up making as my buddies drove off into the sunset in an
APC without me. AGAIN.

I found that Andrew has a tendency to rush ahead, which I suspect would have stood us in poor stead on a higher difficulty, but I dialed it back since it's been a while. Notably, he got about twice as many kills as I did, but took roughly three times as much damage. He was also completely not there for me when I was pummeled half to death by a Charger, and don't think that that will be forgotten any time soon.

I'd forgotten how personal this game could feel, although in the final analysis we did all get away, whereas back in the day I got left behind a lot. The story of my early L4D experience is summed up by a picture of a dude standing on a jetty, clutching a pipe bomb as the boat pulls out and the horde charges in.

* Because I did the Monkees joke already.