Played: Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic

[Official site. Warning: plays music at you]


4000 years before the Galactic Empire, the forces of the Sith, led by Darth Malak, are locked in combat with the Republic, and winning. Cue much romping around the Old Republic waving blasters, bowcasters and/or lightsabers.

In so many ways, this is not my sort of game. It's a computer based "Role Playing" Game (not that I play the real thing nowadays). Large parts of the game are what I would call (in my LRP days) a mosh-fest. Hit the bad guys till they fall over, grab the treasure, exchange for money. Find the Plot Token, carry to significant location/NPC. Rinse, Repeat.

It's based on what I believe is now known as the D20 system, but which I always think of as the D&D system[1], and goes to considerable lengths to expose the underlying game mechanics to the player. Personally, this is a drawback, as I'm not remotely familiar with the system; as a consequence, most of the decisions I made when levelling up early in the game turned out to be pretty bad, as I had a lousy idea of what stats were relevant to what gameplay elements. As a result, by mid-game, at "normal" difficulty, combat was HARD, with mundane enemies pounding me at practically every turn.

Luckily, the game let me turn the difficulty down to easy (an option which is distressingly rare). At which point it got ludicrously easy, with my party swatting hordes aside with ease. Ho hum. [insert rant about having more difficulty levels than Comical-Normal-HardBastard]

BUT. Despite all that, I played it all the way through. Believe me, that's a big deal - if nothing else, this game has a fair quantity of content.

The plot is pretty good (even if I saw the much-vaunted twist from a mile away) and generally well told. The game practically oozes atmosphere.

A few minor nits: some of the branching conversations could do with some extra work. More than once, I selected an option, only to discover that the response I'd chosen was sarcastic rather than sincere, giving exactly the opposite effect to what I'd intended. It's a bit of a system hog for those on older machines - my Athlon 1900+ with cheap 64Mb GeForce 4 had to make do with low-to-middling graphics settings, and stuttered occasionally. For a supposedly non-reflex-oriented game, the combat interface demands an awful lot of rapid, precise, mouse-clicking.

After all that ranting, I'll simply say that, even though this isn't my sort of game, I'm seriously contemplating playing it again, just to explore some of the sub-quests I missed or messed up first time around. So they must be doing something right.

[1]Apologies to any professional RPG writers who may be reading this if I've bolloxed up the terminology.

Read: Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan

[amazon.co.uk]

In the 25th Century, death is rarely permanent. Thanks to advances in memory storage technology, people change bodies, or sleeves, with relative ease. Provided they can afford it, of course, and don't have any religious objections to being resurrected.

After being shot, an ex-UN envoy named Takeshi Kovacs finds himself resleeved in Bay City, on old Earth, and hired by a plutocrat who wants to know who blew his memory stack out, costing him several hours memory. Not to mention the inconvenience.

This is cyberpunk-noir, with a heavy crime influence. The plot zings about all over the place, generally though layer after layer of corruption, criminality and sleaze. Well written, hard-boiled prose, and a good story that kept me guessing. Cracking stuff.

Read: The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross

[Golden Gryphon, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]

Bob Howard works for The Laundry. They're just like any other bureaucratic government agency, except that you need to sign the third section of the Official Secrets Act (in blood) before you're even allowed to know it exists.

Magic is just a branch of mathematics, which has advanced a great deal since they invented the electric, and later laser, pentagram. The problem nowadays is that any over-enthusiastic computer geek exploring fractal mathematics with a powerful desktop computer can re-landscape a county, or unleash the Great Old Ones. Which is exactly the sort of thing The Laundry works to prevent.

This book actually consists of two tales: The Atrocity Archive, a short novel originally serialized in the magazine Spectrum SF; and The Concrete Jungle, a previously unpublished sequel.

In his dedication, the author salutes H.P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson. Those names alone ought to conjure up the sort of stuff we're talking about here. A spy thriller, where the worst case scenario is armageddon-by-cthuloid-horror, told with a droll, dry, prose style reminiscent of Snow Crash-era Stephenson.

Utterly bonkers, in the best possible way. It had me totally gripped, and I sniggered at several points, which is rare enough in itself. Huge fun.

Cassini-Huygens

For those who missed it, the Cassini-Huygens probe entered Saturn orbit this week. This is the last of the major space probes to the outer planets currently in space (until some sends another one, anyhow).

Most of the piccies sent back so far are only black-and-white, but they include some fabulously detailed close-ups of Saturn's ring system.

[Dial-up users: don't be phobic about the pictures - the larger of those two should take less than 12 seconds to download on a 33.6k modem]

Free Computer Game!

As a promotional tie-in with the release of Ground Control II, the original Ground Control has been made available for free download[1] - once you get through the soul-sucking FilePlanet registration, anyhow (which I suspect will end up with you being spammed).

It's a 3D RTS game (more Real-Time Tactics, actually, since there's no base-building angle at all) and I'll recommend it wholeheartedly, but with the warning: don't go in all guns blazing, 'cos you will get slaughtered. Careful reconnaissance and caution are the order of the day here.

And don't bother with the Dark Conspiracy mission pack, unless you like game scenarios constructed around the player being on the receiving end of repeated, unavoidable, ambushes by superior forces.

[1]Just bear in mind it's going to be a monster download - I can't find a solid number anywhere, but someone mentioned 400MB, which sounds plausible.