“Flashpoint arrived just as shooters were entering their first phase of faux-realism, with titles like Delta Force and Soldier of Fortune making the most cursory of nods to something beyond the arcade action of Quake and Unreal. But for gamers who thought these offered an authenticity that had previously been lacking, Flashpoint must have knocked them sideways. It must have given them concussion.”

I don’t know why I didn’t write about this sooner. Flashpoint is one of my favourite games. Ever. It’s also a defining gaming experience for me. It’s also old, so I get to continue to be the old man of PC gaming.

Most of all, though, it’s amazing and I’m very happy to be able to write about it again for the first time in… twelve years? Possibly. I’m really pleased with the response to this one, too.

“It’s not that Jeremy Soule has a BAFTA. It’s not that many of the games he has composed for are million sellers. It’s that the internet loves him.”

This is something that I’m pretty much ecstatic to have been able to do. Actually, this was pretty much a dream come true. I interviewed and profiled the composer Jeremy Soule for Eurogamer.

I’ve been a fan of his music for about a decade and I might have first thought of interviewing him around nine or ten years ago. I remember jealously reading other interviews at least as far back as 2006 and maybe even earlier still. I used to idly think about doing it while walking around and listening to his music, either out with the dog or simply off on some directionless wander somewhere. Very often I found I didn’t really have the confidence to try it, nor a decent excuse.

Read More

“It’s not easy to predict which games will age well, though many wear their years with a certain dignity. Some classics find new life and new audiences as mobile or tablet games, while the past few years have seen an embracing of all that is retro, all the way back to the oldest of the old school, something that has been seized upon by a burgeoning indie scene. Sometimes we like what’s old. Or at least, what seems to be old.”

Don’t buy it. Certainly not at this price and for these changes.

“When I talk to Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke about his influences, it’s like I’m being thrown back to my childhood. He’s just shown me both Dragon Commander, the developer’s forthcoming strategy/RTS/RPG hybrid, and Divinity: Original Sin, an open-world RPG. As we talk about the inspiration behind these games, the titles they draw upon, the same phrase comes up over and over again: old school.”

As well as interviewing this gentleman about the paths not taken, I also had a look at Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin. Both are very interesting.

“It’s not the kind of game plot we usually find ourselves talking about, but Daedalic’s largely independent status means they have the freedom to craft stories like these, without worrying whether a publisher will sanction, for example, a female lead.”

This began as a conversation about Daedelic’s forthcoming adventure game, but turned into a discussion on the role of plot in games and the freedom that independent developers have to tell the stories that they want to. It’s not often that I have the time or the freedom to touch on so many different topics and I’m glad that I could.

“The rage players have expressed over the always-online requirement, important as it is, fogs the far more serious fact that many of the systems that underlie the game are broken and it exhibits a host of bizarre behaviours. Weird things happen out on the streets of SimCity, all day and every day. As a blaze takes hold in a downtown restaurant I watch as a fire truck is dispatched. It begins driving off in the wrong direction before performing a few loops up and down the same street, circling as if warming itself up.”

Initially, it’s engrossing.

“The game’s levels are procedurally generated. Brevik very much enjoys the surprise and the possibility that this brings and it was a major part of the first two Diablo games, though he adds that it’s much less common for games to feature it nowadays, making it something of a design challenge.”

I’m not a particularly big fan of superheroes, but I had a great time talking to David Brevik, one of the minds behind the original Diablo, not least because I got to get nerdy about procedural generation and about board games. I should probably add that my excited tangents aren’t in the piece. I’m not that indulgent.

“The music ends. The demo map appears. Then the game’s lead designer takes hold of a bus depot and slams it down on top of somebody’s house, dragging a road out of its mouth and trailing it through the suburbs. Screw you, house. You were in the way. In the way of progress.”

This went up a few days back and, funnily enough, is getting lots of interest because it turns out that SimCity is really rather broken.

“The Europa Universalis series represents the grandest of grand strategy, and while I’m sure there are strategy titles out there that are even more complex, I can’t say that I’d ever want to try them. EU’s real-time strategy was quite enough for me, frequently stretching me to my very limits, and the same was true for its peers, that stable of strategy that Paradox Development Studios has been rearing and carefully crossbreeding for over a decade now. Games like Victoria, Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings had me so lost in their menus that my friends had to send out search parties.”

I wouldn’t expect to like this, but it turns out I just might. Maybe.