1745: Dreams of Ice

Page_1 Andie and I journeyed all the way back from Aberdeen to Southampton today — a trip that took somewhere in the region of 11 hours altogether. I offered to drive some of the way, but Andie decided that she would be just as comfortable driving as she would be in the passenger seat, so I was relegated to the position of passenger and entertainment-chooser. (We have plumbed the very depths of everything the BBC Radio iPlayer catalogue has to offer.)

We were both quite keen to get back today due to the release of Final Fantasy XIV's fourth major patch, dubbed Dreams of Ice. This is the penultimate big patch in the series before the full-scale expansion drops next year, and as such the main storyline is starting to build to a climax. Alongside that, one of the principal "side stories" — that of the super-difficult endgame dungeons The Binding Coil of Bahamut — finally comes to an end in this patch, so the most dedicated of raiders can take on what is effectively the game's "true final boss" with their friends. Meanwhile, there is plenty of other stuff to keep slightly less hardcore players occupied.

I haven't done everything yet, not by a long shot, and I wasn't expecting to in the space of a few hours this evening. I have, however, had the opportunity to check out two of the new dungeons — Snowcloak and The Sunken Temple of Qarn (Hard) — and play through roughly half of the new episode of the main storyline. I haven't yet taken on this patch's "big fight" against ice queen Shiva, but that's coming up, and since my friends and I are yet to clear the Second Coil of Bahamut, the Final Coil of Bahamut is probably some weeks or even months away yet.

There's plenty of new stuff to get stuck into, though, and once the initial excitement of brand-new content has worn off in a few days, there's a lot of gear to set my sights on. The addition of a new endgame currency (and the retirement of one) has led to a new "tier" of equipment being added to the game, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact that has on the already spectacular amount of damage that my Black Mage puts out without breaking a sweat. I'm also intending on gearing up my Paladin a decent amount, too, because 1) it's already catching up with Black Mage and 2) I'm really enjoying the tanking I've been doing. With our regular group seemingly putting me in one of the tank roles for the Second Coil of Bahamut, it will probably pay to have some better gear, too, anyway.

But now it is 2:45am and I am very tired. Both Andie and I rallied a bit once we got home and started playing, but now I am abundantly ready to go to sleep and hopefully wake up rather late and reasonably refreshed tomorrow. I have the rest of the week off, so I intend to enjoy it fully by bumming around not doing very much at all except playing Final Fantasy XIV. No change there then, huh?

1742: Reaping Rafflesia

Page_1 You may recall a short while ago I talked a little about Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut in Final Fantasy XIV, notorious as being one of the most difficult battles in the game and essentially, if you want to look at it that way, the "true final boss" of the game as it existed at launch.

Since clearing that a few times, we've managed to get a regular group together to take on the Second Coil of Bahamut, a four-part dungeon that follows on from the original Binding Coil — and which is soon to be superceded by The Final Coil of Bahamut, bringing this particular side story to a close in suitably climactic fashion with patch 2.4.

We're by no means ready for the Final Coil of Bahamut yet — mainly because you have to clear Second Coil in order to even enter Final Coil — but we've been discovering the joy of having a regular, committed and enthusiastic group together to take on challenging fights.

The first Turn of the Second Coil of Bahamut (known in FFXIV vernacular as "Turn 6" or "T6", since it's the sixth overall part of the Coil storyline) is deceptively simple, much like the other Coil confrontations. You begin by making your way across some perilous terrain and fending off the unwanted advances of golems that spawn from chunks of dark matter and corrupted crystals. Having fought your way past these — destroying the crystals on the way — you find yourself in front of a fragment of Dalamud, the moon that fell from the sky at the end of Final Fantasy XIV's version 1.0 incarnation (and, by extension, the beginning of A Realm Reborn) and burst open to reveal the elder primal Bahamut. Over the course of the first Binding Coil of Bahamut, you come to discover some interesting bits and pieces about what Dalamud really was, why Bahamut was inside it and, indeed, what happened to it following the apocalyptic "end of the world" that appeared to happen at the conclusion of 1.0. Second Coil is elsewhere in the lands of Eorzea, and promises to offer further insights into the truth — but, of course, it's not that easy.

Your main obstacle towards even getting inside the damn place is an unpleasant little thing called Rafflesia, a plant from the Gridanian Twelveswood that has been corrupted by dark matter and which now appears to be a tad on the pissed off side. You ain't getting inside the Dalamud fragment without getting past Rafflesia, and thus begins another extremely challenging battle that our group is yet to clear — but which we've made significant progress on in our two attempts to date.

Like the previous encounters in the various Turns of the Coil, the battle against Rafflesia initially appears to be extremely complex and insurmountably difficult, but in reality it's all about being organised, communicating effectively and knowing how to deal with the various situations in which you find yourself.

Shortly after the fight begins, Rafflesia whips two party members with thorny vines, which attaches them together and continues to do damage as long as they remain joined. The only escape from this spiky fate is to run in opposite directions until the vine is snapped.

The plant monster then goes on to spawn dark matter bulbs, deadly seedlings that sprout into spiky briar patches that slow the movement of anyone unfortunate enough to step into them. A key part of this battle comes in the management of these briar patches; our attempts involved keeping Rafflesia as central as possible and only worrying about bulbs if they appeared where Rafflesia was. This occasionally demands that you dance around a little to make sure you're not standing in thorns, but it does allow you to concentrate on what you're really there for — punching/stabbing/burning/chopping a plant monster to death.

Rafflesia is a hungry beast, though, and every so often a party member will find themselves the target of the monster's appetite. She'll suck in everything in front of her, then devour it before spitting it out again; ideally, by the time she's doing the first thing, you're well out of the way, ensuring that the second and third things don't happen to you.

Rafflesia, being a plant, also has numerous unpleasant spores and gases designed for the obliteration of unsuspecting adventuring parties. Most deadly among these is her Blighted Bouquet, a devastating move which causes immediate death to anyone unfortunate enough to have been doing anything — moving, attacking, using an ability — when it goes off. She's also fond of glazing a party member in honey, which causes dark matter-corrupted hornets to come in and give the unfortunate adventurer some unwanted attention — and eventual death, if they're not defeated, too.

So far, we're yet to defeat Rafflesia; her Blighted Bouquet and dark matter hornets have proven particularly troublesome to deal with, but we've made honest-to-goodness progress in the two sessions of about 2.5-3 hours each that we've had to take on the fight to date. Along the way, we've come to work well together as a party, too, and the desire is there from all of us to continue the fight against Rafflesia, onwards into the fragment of Dalamud and, eventually, into the Final Coil of Bahamut to discover the truth behind the Calamity. (And, of course, to get some sweet loot in the process, too.)

I've been really enjoying our sessions so far; as I've noted before, Final Fantasy XIV is the first MMO that not only maintained my attention from beginning to level cap, but which has kept me interested with its endgame, too. Second Coil is, as of now, the most challenging dungeon in the game — though this will change on Tuesday when Final Coil arrives — and it's a pleasure to be able to take on these tough encounters with a group of people who are becoming not just online comrades, but friends, too.

1741: Shareware

Page_1 I was interested and excited earlier to hear that 3D Realms had come out of sort-of-retirement to unleash a pretty spectacular package onto the world: an anthology containing a fantastic selection of its games from over the years, going right back to its early days as Apogee — a time when men were men, women were women and PC games ran in four-colour CGA.

I probably don't have to tell you that I didn't hesitate to hand over the $20 for the complete collection of 32 games — many of these games were fixtures on my home PC while I was growing up, and even more of them were titles that I never got around to playing at the time for whatever reason. A surprising number of them hold up pretty well today, more to the point, and with the Anthology package updating them to run just peachy on modern Windows systems as well as providing rudimentary controller support, it's a great time to rediscover these great games.

Of the 32 games, I had heard of most of them — though a couple, like Arctic Adventure and Pharaoh's Tomb, were new ones on me. I'd played a decent number of them, too; particular favourites from the past included the Commander Keen games, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Shadow Warrior and, of course, Duke Nukem 3D. I'm pleased that the collection offers the opportunity to rediscover somewhat lesser-known titles like Bio Menace and Terminal Velocity, too; both of these were games that I only ever played the limited shareware versions of "back in the day" and was always curious to see how they developed in their full, registered versions. This being the mostly pre-Internet days, however, it wasn't as simple as just clicking "buy" on a game and having it on your computer moments later.

I really liked the shareware model, and I'm actually surprised it's not used as much these days, since the Internet would seem to provide an ideal delivery medium for this sort of thing. For those unfamiliar, a shareware game could be distributed for free, and generally provided a full and satisfying game experience in its own right. It would usually only form the first "episode" of a fuller experience, however, and to see how the story concluded — or simply have the opportunity to acquire new weapons and fight new enemies — you'd have to pony up the cash for the full, or "registered" version. In some cases, you had the option to purchase some of the game instead of all of it — Wolfenstein 3D, for example, featured six episodes, the first of which was free, the second and third could be purchased as a bundle, and the fourth, fifth and sixth episodes could be purchased as a separate bundle. Or, of course, you could buy the whole lot in one go.

The closest equivalent we have these days is, I think, the "episodic" games that companies like Telltale put out, but they're not quite the same; although there are sometimes special offers or even giveaways of the first episode, the game isn't built around the assumption that the first episode is not only free, but also freely distributable. That "share" part was important — you were actively encouraged to share the free episode with family and friends, and in that way these games built up a very early means of viral popularity, without the Internet to support it. Kids were already illegally copying games and sharing them with one another in the playground, after all; all shareware was doing was legitimising this to a certain extent — though I don't doubt that a few dodgy copies of registered versions probably did the rounds, too.

Sony sounds like it's trying some interesting "sharing" functionality with the PlayStation 4, but it's still not quite the same. Perhaps I'm just being nostalgic and looking back on it with rose-tinted glasses, but I do know one thing for sure: I have very fond memories of a lot of these games, and a surprising number of them still hold up very well today.

If you'd like to try them out for yourself, you can grab a copy of the complete Anthology here, or download and purchase some of the games individually if you prefer.

1727: Warwolf One

I beat Ace Combat: Assault Horizon this evening. (Looking at the clock, it's nearly 2am… I guess I was enjoying myself, huh.)

I've already said a lot of the things I want to say about this game in yesterday's post, but having played the whole thing through from start to finish now, I feel I can talk about it with a bit more confidence.

The thing I most want to talk about, I think, is what it was clearly going for and whether or not it was successful.

What it was clearly attempting to go for was a dramatic military-style story with a personal angle. And, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it failed. Not miserably, but it still fell very short of what I can only assume were the team's ambitions.

To put this in context for those of you unfamiliar with the game, let me explain a little. The majority of Assault Horizon casts you in the role of Colonel Bishop, an ace fighter pilot who is wracked with recurring nightmares about facing off against a "shark-faced" rival ace. (Indeed, the first level is a dream sequence that — spoiler — you re-enact for real later in the game, only things turn out a little differently.) Bishop becomes embroiled in a war between the free world (the real world, unlike many other Ace Combat titles) and an army of Russian rebels. (This latter aspect allows the game to follow the Unwritten Law of Jet Fighter Games, which is that you must spend the majority of your time shooting down MiG-29s and SU-27s.) Said Russian rebels have access to a weapon called "Trinity" — an incredibly powerful nuclear device that you see the devastating effects of firsthand in several of the early levels. Naturally, it's up to Bishop to put a stop to all this nonsense by flying shiny planes very fast and blowing lots of things up.

Except it's not just up to Bishop; there are also a couple of other characters who provide a vehicle (no pun intended) for the other types of mission you'll be flying aside from air-to-air combat and air-to-ground assaults. One guy flies helicopters, so you get to play as him during the helicopter missions; the token ladypilot flies bombers, so you get to play as her during the few bombing missions — including a pretty cool "stealth" one where you have to avoid enemy radar cones.

The setup is fairly interesting, then; Bishop has the potential to be an intriguing character, confronting his own personal demons over the course of the story and developing into someone "human" as it progresses. Unfortunately, this potential is left largely unrealised; a short monologue at the end of the game suggests that he has learned something from his experiences, but the rest of the game's narrative really didn't make that particularly clear.

Things are worse with the other characters, who pretty much only appear to be there for the sake of it. Ladypilot is shoehorned into a rather hasty apparent romance plot in the final scenes of the game, having spent the rest of the game showing no form of interest in Bishop whatsoever, and Helicopter Man is… well, he flies helicopters.

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity is the "villain", who is teased a little early in the game — the "shark-faced" pilot from Bishop's dreams — and then introduced rather hastily towards the end. He's given little in the way of explanation, and his own personal motivations are pretty much used to bludgeon the player over the head with to say "This! Is! Why! He's! Evil!" at one point. He's a pain in the arse to shoot down in the final mission, so there's a certain degree of personal satisfaction in blowing him up, but this finale could have been so much more interesting if there were a lot more interaction between him and Bishop throughout the game. It is a poor antagonist who only reveals himself in the final chapters of a story, and it leaves Markov feeling like a rather weak adversary for Bishop.

Despite all that I've said above, however, Assault Horizon was an enjoyable experience in the way that a good action movie (with equally ill-defined characters) is. The missions were varied and fun — though a couple dragged on a little too long — and the presentation throughout was immaculate; the PC version looks lovely, and the action is accompanied by some wonderful music and excellent voice acting just to add to the whole "movie-like" feel.

It's just a pity so many opportunities for interesting narrative development were squandered, leaving the whole experience feeling a bit hollow afterwards. I'm not sorry I played it, as on the whole I did enjoy it immensely, but now my appetite has been well and truly whet for the earlier — apparently much better — installments in the Ace Combat series, which hopefully I will be getting my hands on very soon.

1726: Assault Horizon

Following on from yesterday's post, today I decided to give Ace Combat: Assault Horizon a try, partly because I was impatient to get started on my journey through the Ace Combat series, and partly because I was conscious of the fact it had been in my Steam library since one sale or another and I had never even installed it, let alone tried it.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is pretty much the black sheep of the Ace Combat franchise, so I figured it probably wouldn't be a terrible idea to try it first. That way I can see what the series is like now, and then compare it to what it was in the PS2 era. Ace Combat fans do not have the luxury of doing it this way around, so they inevitably see it as a series in decline — particularly now it's made the jump to free-to-play on PlayStation 3.

Now, as noted, I have no frame of reference for the rest of the series as yet, but if the other games are even half as enjoyable as Assault Horizon appears to be — and I'm led to believe that they're considerably better — then I'm very much in for a treat. But more on that when my copies arrive.

For now, let's talk a little about Assault Horizon. It was referred to by some on its original launch as being Call of Duty in the sky, and this isn't an altogether inaccurate comparison. There are lots of characters who have little in the way of… you know, character development, but who provide the framework for the different types of mission (one dude is a fighter pilot, another dude is a helicopter pilot, the token ladypilot flies bombers and transports); the missions and story are very much pre-scripted to fit the overall narrative; the narrative itself makes little in the way of sense but is enjoyable from the perspective of it simply being spectacular to watch.

And, for all the shit Call of Duty gets, this isn't a bad thing for this sort of game. Air combat should be spectacular and exciting — at least, if you're taking the "action movie" approach to it, as this game is — and when you approach it with that attitude, it doesn't matter so much that the game just flat-out defies the laws of physics on numerous occasions with regard to how the various vehicles handle. (The way the helicopter dodges missiles with a ridiculous barrel roll is a particular highlight.)

So far the combat itself has been enjoyable and satisfying, too. Early in the game, you can pretty much get someone in your sights and fire off a missile at them, but as you progress you start having to pull off more and more fancy manoeuvres to get into a position to get a kill. And it's here that the game's most controversial addition to Ace Combat veterans shows its head: Dogfight Mode.

Dogfight Mode is… well, I'm not really sure how it works, but I do know it's ridiculous. Rather than having to worry too much about pointing your plane in the right direction, Dogfight Mode consists of a sort of autopilot as you tail an enemy, though you still have to roll and pitch in order to keep them centred in a large circle on the screen in order to lock on with missiles. It's usually the most reliable means of ensuring you down an enemy — particularly the stronger "leader" enemies — but it's also used for some very silly white-knuckle setpieces throughout, as your quarry leads you on a merry chase between skyscrapers (with things like cranes collapsing around you, naturally) or perilously close to the ground. (And yes; turn the assist options off and the flight controls to the "proper" ones and you can indeed slam into the ground and immediately bring your mission to a premature end, like any good air combat game worth its salt.)

I fired Assault Horizon up out of curiosity earlier and have found myself playing it pretty much all evening. While I'm conscious of numerous things it could do a bit better, I've enjoyed my time with it so far, and I'm feeling like it was a good choice to give this one a try first, because from what I understand, things only get better from here. My mild curiosity has been upgraded to "can't wait" status.

Fox two, fox two.

1722: Shared Hardship on the Shores of La Noscea

I had an enjoyably bizarre experience in Final Fantasy XIV earlier on — and it's the sort of thing that couldn't possibly have been planned; the kind of emergent weirdness that only comes about when you put the unpredictability of humans into the mix with a set of systems that always play by set rules, regardless of context.

In order to explain the situation for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV, indulge me a moment, veterans, while I define a few things.

One of the main systems in Final Fantasy XIV is known as the Full Active Time Event (or FATE) system. These are essentially "public quests" that spawn at predictable points on the map, but on an unpredictable schedule. Some spawn more frequently than others; some are required to progress in certain quests; some are more "popular" than others owing to their convenient location or rewards on offer.

There are three important things to note about FATEs: firstly, they're time limited, usually providing you 15 minutes to complete the main objective, which is generally plenty of time; secondly, if you are standing inside the blue circle that represents the FATE area on the map and hit just one enemy once — even if it's just a glancing, accidental blow from a weapon better suited for channeling powerful magics than melee combat — you are considered to have "participated" in that FATE; thirdly, the number of people who participated in a FATE the previous time it spawned determines how difficult it is the next time around: in other words, at peak periods, FATEs are designed to be challenging for larger groups of people, whereas if the last time a FATE spawned no-one took part in it at all, the next time it appears it will probably be completable by a (well-geared) solo adventurer, perhaps with a chocobo companion in tow.

Completely separate from FATEs is a newer system called The Hunt, in which each area in the game has three Elite Marks that players can hunt down for substantial rewards: a B-rank mark, which you can fight solo, and which only offers rewards if you have a specific Mark Bill inviting you to hunt it down; an A-rank mark, which requires about 4-8 people minimum to take down, but which offers rewards according to how much you (and, in most cases, your party) contributed to the kill; and an S-rank mark, which is much more powerful but works along the same lines as the A-rank marks in terms of rewards. We're mostly concerned with A-rank marks here, since S-rank marks have special conditions that need to be fulfilled before they'll show up in most cases, whereas A-rank marks will just show up regardless.

A-rank marks spawn on predictable schedules — you can see the timers ticking away for the server I play on right here, for example — and appear roughly once every four hours. What normally happens is that hunting parties will gather when the first marks on the list are approaching the "four hours since last killed" mark, then spread out and start looking for the beasts to respawn. There then follows a phenomenon that has become known as the "A-Train", where hunting parties move from zone to zone and pick off all the A-rank marks on the list one at a time until they're all dead, at which point the parties will all disband — unless there's the possibility of an S-rank showing up — and reconvene again when the first timer on the list hits four hours. It's like clockwork; it's perhaps not how the designers intended the system to work when it was first designed — and indeed, it's been tweaked and reorganised several times since it launched — but if you can get involved (which is usually as simple as throwing up a Party Finder ad with the word "Hunt" in it) it can be both fun and rewarding, if not particularly challenging in most cases.

Anyway, the point here is that when an A-rank mark shows up, a horde of players normally follows — and I do mean a horde. We're talking maybe 30 or so people minimum, and usually much more than that.

When I was sauntering around the lands of Western La Noscea earlier today, hacking and slashing my way through some FATEs in an attempt to collect the very last Atma crystal I needed to upgrade my Paladin's relic weapon into its Atma form, I happened to stumble across one of these gatherings, who had showed up to fight the giant crab Nahn. Nahn, as it turned out, had spawned right in the middle of the FATE I had actually run to this area to complete, and as such there was something in the region of 50 people standing around, killing Sahagin indiscriminately to clear the area ready for the big group push towards Nahn. The important thing to note here is that the Sahagin they were hacking, slashing, punching and setting fire to (depending on class) were parts of the FATE I had shown up to complete, so as far as the game was concerned, when that FATE's boss fell, over 50 people had participated in it.

I'm sure you can imagine what happened a little later, after Nahn was defeated and after I returned to the area to complete the same FATE again as it happened to appear while I was passing through.

Yes, believing that 50 players being in the area, battering Sahagin left, right and centre, was a representative example of the zone's population at that particular hour, the game adjusted the difficulty of the FATE to cater not to little old me and the two other people who happened to wander into the FATE at the same time as me — oh no — but instead to the 50+ people who were no longer present, now doubtless considerably further down the tracks of this particular run of the A-Train.

I didn't notice this initially. I thought that the "trash" enemies that you have to defeat before the main boss monster showed up were a little stronger than I remembered, but I thought nothing of it. My companions and I slaughtered our way through them until the boss showed up, at which point I, as the Paladin — a protector "tank" type — got its attention by smacking it firmly upside the chops with my shield, and then began inserting my sword into various parts of its anatomy while my companions got busy with magic spells and poking it with a spear respectively.

I figured something was amiss when the health bar of the boss was moving very slowly despite us all unleashing our most powerful attacks. To put it in context, the boss' health was declining at roughly the same speed as a well-geared party taking on Ramuh Extreme, currently one of the most challenging fights in the game. Fortunately, the boss didn't receive a damage buff at the same time as his vastly increased hit points, otherwise we would have been in real trouble.

We persisted, though, shaving away a tiny sliver of health with each hit. Andie happened to be passing by at one point, and joined the fray to contribute a bit of extra damage from her Bard class. We were making progress, a tiny bit at a time, though the longer the fight was going on the more exhausted my Paladin was getting, my ever-declining TP (Tactical Points, used for triggering physical attacks) getting perilously close to the zero mark. I had the boss' attention pretty firmly, though, so I eased off the powerful attacks and let my (TP-free) automatic basic attack do its work for a little while.

The timer ticked down. We were into single digits of minutes remaining, despite the fact that we'd all entered the fray with the full 15 minutes on the clock. The boss was barely at 50% of his HP, and I was starting to doubt whether or not we'd be able to beat it. Still we persisted.

"DIE DAMMIT!" I typed in frustration, on the /say channel so that my companions (whom, aside from Andie, I didn't know) could "hear" me.

"for real!!!" came back the response from one of them. We'd shared a moment. It was nice. Still we fought on.

My TP had recovered a bit by now, so I triggered my Fight or Flight ability — which temporarily increases my Paladin's damage output — and started hacking away with a bit more gusto once again. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, but the boss' health bar seemed to be going down noticeably faster. It looked as if we might just make it.

In fact, it was beginning to look like we'd make it just as the timer hit zero. Would we pull it off?

Sadly not. At less that 1% HP remaining, the timer expired and we failed the FATE. Our characters all fell to our knees and wept for the 15 minutes of effort we'd just put in — and, of course, to add insult to injury, I didn't get an Atma crystal from that FATE either.

I don't regret the experience, though. As I say, I shared a moment with those other people who were there at the same time as me, all doubtless thinking the same things, willing their characters to do just that little bit more damage. When I happened to run into them again doing another FATE in the area about half an hour later, we exchanged pleasantries and had a laugh about how the new FATE was quite a bit easier than our earlier tragedy. Then we went our separate ways. It was a real "ships in the night" moment, but it made what would have otherwise been a frustrating experience into something highly memorable — and, indeed, something I ended up wanting to write about at length.

I've got one more Atma crystal to go before my Paladin's weapon and shield can be upgraded, hot on the heels of my Black Mage's weapon reaching the powerful Novus (second-to-top) upgrade phase recently. If I can have more experiences like the one I just described, though, I really don't mind it taking a little longer; shared hardships like that — while fairly trivial in this instance — can bring people closer together, even if it's just for a moment or two.

1721: Run the Gauntlet

I tend to be rather wary of reboots that are simply named after the thing they're rebooting, because in my experience of them they often end up either being 1) not very good or 2) not particularly true to the original. (Or, in some cases, 3) both.)

As such, I was a bit skeptical about the prospect of a new Gauntlet game, particularly as the screenshots for it on Steam made it look like the worst kind of drab, brown, "gritty" modern-day reboot that we've seen all too frequently recently.

However, my friend Tim dropped by for a visit today, and we decided to give it a shot. £15 is a price at which I'm more than happy to take a punt on something I don't know a lot about, and so I downloaded and installed it, and we jumped into the action.

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover a very solid game indeed — and one that clearly shines the way Gauntlet was always intended to be played: in local cooperative play, with up to four players crowded around playing together.

In other words, Gauntlet, as the new game is simply called, deftly addresses my two main concerns above by being 1) good and 2) true to the original. Let's look at both elements in turn.

It's good

Gauntlet's mechanics are pretty solid. It's not trying to be Diablo or anything more complicated than the original game was: it's a straightforward hack-and-slash arcade game in which 1-4 players take on a variety of dungeons while attempting to gather as much treasure as possible.

Each of the four characters is made unique through the use of their own individual attack skills, including a super-skill that works on a cooldown. The Warrior and Valkyrie both specialise in close-combat, with their main distinction being that the Valkyrie can attack more quickly and block things with her shield, while the Warrior focuses on smashing his way through enemies. The Elf is a ranged attacker, in possession of a rapid-fire shot that works like a twin-stick shooter, a slower, more powerful sniper shot that is the only means of damaging some more powerful enemies, and a bomb, which can blow up groups of enemies. The Wizard, meanwhile, makes use of Magicka-style button combinations to cast spells — discovering which combinations do what is, seemingly, part of the fun.

These mechanics are supported by some arcade-style shenanigans where if you kill enough enemies at once (usually using a special skill) and then keep killing enemies repeatedly after that, you'll build up a chain with a score multiplier for as long as you can keep the carnage going. It's immensely satisfying to keep pressing your luck and keep the enemies coming as your score shoots through the roof — and if the Steam leaderboards are anything to go by (and if they aren't filled with cheaters, which I sadly suspect right now) it's possible to get some astronomical scores through careful combo-management. Far better than simple fire-and-forget.

When playing in co-op mode there's an element of competition, too; at the end of each level, you'll be shown how you stacked up compared to your companions in terms of points you earned by killing things and points you earned through snagging treasure. There's also a bonus for anyone who managed to keep hold of a shiny gold crown until the end of the level, making for some enjoyable scuffles as enemies knock it from your head and everyone scurries to be the first to reclaim it.

There's some interesting "progression" mechanics, too; as you play the game and achieve various milestones, you'll unlock various small bonuses to each of the four characters. None of them are game-breakingly powerful, but on occasion they can provide access to new abilities or allow you to approach things in a slightly different way. In other words, they keep things on a level playing field for those who have been playing for different amounts of time while simultaneously letting people feel like they're making "progress".

It's true to the original

While a lot is different, the core is the same: you make your way through fairly linear but maze-like levels, defeating enemies — which keep coming from enemy-spawning structures until you destroy these — and grabbing treasure. Every so often, you'll be faced with the powerful (and, in this incarnation, seemingly undefeatable) Death and have to run for your life, and, of course, there's always the risk of shooting the food, making healing somewhat more difficult. (Thankfully, the one aspect of the original which isn't maintained is the ever-ticking health bar, declining over time as a means of getting you to feed more money into the arcade machine; now, you simply have a stock of lives shared between all players which you can recharge pretty easily.)

The four-character dynamic is very true to the original, and they even keep their original colours — though they've had a bit of a makeover in some cases. The Valkyrie is no longer a sexy, skinny, bikini-clad supermodel, for example — instead she looks like a rather more formidable woman of war, as any good Valkyrie should. (Whether or not you still find that "sexy" is up to your own tastes, of course.) The characters all have voices and personalities, too, and while it's initially a little odd to hear a regional accent coming from the mouth of Questor the elf, the voices and personalities are well-chosen and give some much-needed flavour and humour to the game as a whole.

These may all sound like differences from the original rather than being true, but in reality they support the core gameplay and the core appeal element of Gauntlet, both back in the day and in this new incarnation: simple, straightforward, no-commitment dungeon-crawling with friends. It's a huge amount of fun even with just two people — I perhaps question its value as a single-player title but am willing to give it a shot — and I can imagine with four, each taking on the role of a different character, it will be an absolute blast.

And if you want even more trueness to the original? You'll be pleased to know that the sounds for picking up keys and potions are intact from the original game, the main theme plays on the title screen, and there's even a "Classic Mode" filter for the graphics, though I'm yet to try that for myself.

A pleasant surprise, then, and one I hope I'll have the opportunity to play with people again sometime soon.

1715: Twintania Downed, Again (and Again)

This evening it was my great pleasure to be a part of the inaugural Giant Bomb/Loose Cannons (aka GBomb/LoCo) raid party in Final Fantasy XIV — what I hope will be the first of many joint adventures that take place on a UK timezone-friendly schedule.

Since a couple of members of LoCo hadn't yet cleared The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 5 — something of a "benchmark" for how well groups work together — we had decided that, come hell or high water, we were going to get a group of some description together and attempt it.

We'd tried this once before, filling out the extra spots in the party using Final Fantasy XIV's matchmaking Duty Finder system, but the downside of this is that you never know who you're going to get — even in challenging content like Turn 5, there's always a possibility you'll get someone who is just looking for a quick and easy clear with no fuss, and who might not have patience to deal with people who are hoping to learn the fight and practice it. Indeed, this happened to us; the first time we got to

[Editor's note: At this point, Pete was called away for another hasty attempt at Turn 5, this time with Andie in tow. It was a successful attempt, as was, I'm sure you've already guessed, the one about to be discussed.]

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway. As I was saying, the first time we got to try it together, we were lumbered with one of these people, who got all huffy when someone got hit by Twintania's notorious "divebomb" mechanic — one of the more difficult attacks in the game to dodge and otherwise deal with. Eventually, when Huffy McHuffypants left in a huff, we had to abandon our attempt as, since Turn 5 is fairly old content now, it can sometimes be difficult to get people in there unless you pre-form a group before you start.

But anyway. Tonight we assembled a crack team of GBomb and LoCo types, including a couple who had never cleared it before and a few — including me — who had. Then we jumped in.

Our first attempt went reasonably well. Twintania's companions, the three Scourges of Meracydia, all fell to our onslaught pretty quickly, and we handled Twintania's barrage of fireballs and conflagrations without breaking a sweat, since we were all, by now, pretty familiar with how this part of the fight worked. When Twintania swept off into the inky blackness high above the right hand of Bahamut, we dove into the nearby ditch between the fallen god's fingertips and waited for the angry dragon to show her face again.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the first set of Divebombs passed without incident, and Twintania's snake-like guardians Hygieia and Asclepius showed up. We dealt some damage to the two Hygieia and then focused our attention on Asclepius again; then it was time for another set of Divebombs.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the second set passed without worry, and one of our two paladins dragged the annoyed Asclepius and Hygieia across the right hand of Bahamut to join their two companions that had just showed up.

I used the party's collected energy to unleash my Limit Break, calling down a shower of meteors onto the heads of the snakes, killing two of them outright and seriously wounding the rest of them. As the Hygieia died, they increased Asclepius' vulnerability bit by bit, until we were all eventually dealing about twice the normal damage we usually did. It wasn't long before Asclepius fell to that onslaught, at which point we dove into one of Twintania's dropped Neurolinks, the collars that the ancient Allagans had used to control her, and which had gradually been falling from her neck one by one as the fight progressed.

At this point, things fell apart somewhat. Twintania summoned her deadly Dreadknights, and it wasn't long before they ripped through several of our number; the rest fell to her powerful Twisters attack. But not to be deterred, we picked ourselves up and tried again.

Once again, the Scourges fell, and we set to work on Twintania. The fireballs and conflagrations proved little challenge for us, and we deftly avoided the first set of Divebombs. We got a little too enthusiastic on the Hygieia this time around, however; one died before we got out of the ditch and the other was nearly shuffling off the mortal coil as we pulled them together for another Starstorm summoned by my command over black magic.

This time, the furious Twintania didn't faze us. While our lead paladin kept the attention of the giant dragon, the other made sure the Dreadknights didn't reach their destination, battering them repeatedly with their shield while I pelted them with freezing ice, which slowed their movements when they weren't stunned. A Dreadknight would fall, then we would move as one to sidestep Twintania's next Twisters; then another Dreadknight would fall, and we'd once again hop neatly out of the way of Twisters.

Finally, the weakening Twintania resorted to the same attacks her Scourges had used on us at the start of the fight; spitting huge gobs of flaming matter all over the battlefield, creating a Liquid Hell. We'd run to avoid these, but by this point our victory was all but assured; sure enough, not long after that, the beast fell to our relentless assault, and we were triumphant.

I love this fight. It's no longer the most difficult thing in the game, but it's a demanding battle that ensures everyone involved is on their toes and sets expectations appropriately high for the Second Coil of Bahamut (and the Third Coil of Bahamut, which is coming soon). It also bodes well for the group of us who are planning to tackle some of this content on a regular basis; clearing Turn 5 on a second attempt is good going by anyone's standards, and we repeated the situation almost exactly when a few hours later Andie wanted to give it a go with us, too. We seemingly work well as a team — even without using voice chat to coordinate what we were doing — and our own individual skill levels were apparently well up to the challenge Twintania offered.

So what's next? That remains to be seen; all being well, we'll be giving the first Turn of Second Coil a go this week. I've tried this battle once before and it appears to be somewhat demanding in the same way as Turn 5 is; you need to pay close attention to what is going on, and react quickly and calmly to the things that are happening around you. One mistake can leave you lying dead on the floor at a moment's notice — and potentially kill off the entire party. I have faith that we can rise to this challenge, though, and I'm looking forward to giving it a shot.

1713: Yep, You Should Play Ethan Carter

I must confess I hadn't been paying all that much attention to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I knew several people whose opinions I trusted were excited about it, however, so I was always intending to give it a try. And with it releasing this week and Andie out of town for the weekend, I figured tonight would be the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

I completed it, as it happens — it's not a terribly long game, but it is a very worthwhile experience that I recommend you indulge in, preferably in a single sitting if you have three or four hours to spare.

But what is it? I hear you ask. Well, it's… Hmm. Sort of hard to describe, in one sense, but pretty simple in another.

Its developers describe it as a non-violent investigation game in which you attempt to track down clues as to the whereabouts of the titular character, a young boy who wrote a letter to the protagonist — the rather wonderfully named Paul Prospero — prior to the eventd of the game beginning.

Now, the description of "non-violent" usually points to an example of those games that are often derided (or sometimes celebrated) as "walking simulators" — games that are, in effect, little more than theme park attractions in which you wander around and have a story delivered to you through various means. Notable recent examples include Dear Esther — which kind of invented the "genre", if you can call it that; Gone Home, which famously got branded "Not a Game" upon the introduction of Steam's tagging system; and The Stanley Parable, which no-one seemed to mind too much because it was amusing.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not quite in the same wheelhouse as these games. Rather than funnelling you down a specific path, Ethan Carter offers a certain degree of freedom — though there's still a natural order you'll come across the game's main… bits.

It's these "bits" that distinguish Ethan Carter from your common-or-garden walking simulator, however, because each involves a degree of puzzle-solving, deduction and thorough investigation of the environment to succeed. And in order to see the game's story through to its conclusion, you'll need to succeed in all of these little mini-adventures scattered across the map.

The exact form of these mini-episodes varies with each one: some require you to simply find a bunch of objects in the nearby vicinity; some require you to figure out what happened where in a particular situation, and then correctly identify the order the events you uncovered occurred in; some are more traditional "puzzles" requiring a bit of lateral thinking and investigation to beat. The nice thing about the game's relatively brief length is that it never feels like it's repeating itself too much: the most-repeated game mechanic is the chronology-identifying system, and that usually comes at the conclusion of some other investigative work.

The most pleasing thing about Ethan Carter, though, is that it warns you when you start that it's not going to hold your hand at all, and then it's true to its word. No navigation arrows. No journal. No flashing objectives. Just you and your brain looking out onto the lovingly detailed (albeit fairly small) open world that forms the setting for Prospero's investigations.

And what a world. It may be small, but it's beautifully crafted; this is by far one of the best-looking games I've seen for a long time. Outdoors, grass, bushes and trees blow in the wind as the sunlight streaks down through gaps in the leaves. Indoors, light streaming in through windows shows dust floating in the breeze. Textures are beautifully detailed, meaning you can easily read things like book titles and small incidental signs without having to get right up close to them, and the overall atmospheric effects are marvellously convincing: there's a lovely gentle haze in the background, and although the explorable area of the map is fairly small, the background is rendered in a convincing enough manner to suggest that the area you're tooling around in is very much part of a much larger world. It's gorgeous — and it provided the workout I've been craving for my brand new nVidia GTX 970 graphics card, which handled it perfectly on max settings without breaking a sweat. Lovely.

I shan't get into the story of Ethan Carter now, since with it being so short, it's something you really should experience yourself. I will say, however, that I enjoyed it a great deal, and can recommend it highly — even if you're not normally a fan of non-violent "walking simulators". The puzzle-solving and investigative elements elevate this far above titles like Dear Esther and Gone Home in gameplay terms, and, although short, it's a satisfying game to work through and complete.

So go on. Set aside a few hours this weekend and go find out just where Ethan Carter has got to. You won't regret it.

1674: Raiding the Stars

I think I've found a suitable successor to classic Atari space sim Star Raiders. And that successor is Artemis, the starship bridge simulator. It was the second time I've played it tonight, and it confirmed what I had suspected on reflection since the last time I played: that Artemis is a spiritual successor to Star Raiders.

There's a chance that if you're reading this, you don't know what either Star Raiders or Artemis are, so a brief lesson: Star Raiders was the original space sim, featuring a surprisingly detailed simulation of what it might be like to fly around the galaxy defeating enemies and protecting starbases from being overrun. Artemis, meanwhile, is a space sim exploring what it might be like to fly around the galaxy defeating enemies and protecting starbases from being overrun. You can probably see why I'm drawing comparisons here.

There's a twist, though. While Star Raiders was a single-player affair, Artemis is a multiplayer experience that requires a rather elaborate setup. Specifically, you need a computer to act as the simulation's server and the ship's main viewscreen, then several other devices — one per player — act as the bridge's various consoles. From here, the players have to work together — and communicate — to fly the ship as one and defeat the enemies in the area.

It's a highly flexible system, too; the default game mode is pure Star Raiders as you do your best to protect the sector's starbases from attack, but support for hand-crafted missions and even RPG-style affairs with a human "game master" overseeing proceedings and triggering events and attacks as they see fit give the game a considerable amount of longevity.

The only issue is that which I've already mentioned: the fact you need multiple computers, phones and/or tablets to play together. This has become less of an issue since the affordable mobile version, but you'll still need to actually get four or five people together to play the damn thing, unless you're very good at multitasking!

It's an effort worth making though; it's a co-op experience altogether unlike anything else, and if you have the slightest interest in space sims — including Star Raiders — then you won't be disappointed.