I needed money, that’s all. I had blown my entire fortune on the construction of a new mill in my fief, to increase the prosperity of the village and (as a nice bonus) its profitability to me in the form of taxes. Suddenly I found myself in the city of Werchek with a meagre 170 denars to my name and a force of 50 men to pay 350 denars at the end of the week. I had to get money, and I had to get it fast.

So I went to the nearest enemy village and started pillaging. Werchek is right near the border to the Vaegir lands, so it wasn’t far. The last time I did this, I gained 3000 denars in a couple of days of looting, and I met no resistance. But this time, a band of sea raiders showed up and rallied the villagers against me. I found myself in command of 50 well armed men faced with 65 very angry villagers and 23 sea raiders.

I placed my men on the highest point in the village and charged into the enemy ranks on my heavy warhorse. It was a massacre. In the end, even the women of the village attacked and fell at the end of my lance. I had slaughtered an entire village, but… it wasn’t my fault. It was those damn sea raiders.

I marched back to Werchek to sell all the loot my force could carry for an impressive 4000 denars. On the way, one of my lieutenants, Ysmira, stopped me to confront me with her dissatisfaction with the recent blood bath. I told her I had noted her objection, now fall back in line. I am not a good person.

Mount & Blade succeeded in making me feel like a right bastard, which is quite a feat for a game with basically no story. There is nothing in there resembling a plot. There is a narrative, sure, but it’s all up to you. What Mount & Blade does well is supply a wide range of features with which to form your own narrative: Warring nations ruled by rivalling lords, an economy that can be exploited to profitable ends, dynamically constructed tasks to gain or lose favour with villages or lords, exiled contenders for the thrones currently possessed by others, wronged ladies whose cause you may champion by duelling offending lords, villages you may gain lordship over, heroes you may recruit to your party, and armies you can raise and train from useless recruits to powerful veterans.

There’s almost enough of this to make for a compelling narrative. Unfortunately moments such as my brief confrontation with Ysmira are too rare and too brief. There was no long and detailed argument with her about the necessity or unavoidability of killing innocents in times of war, she simply informed me that she did not approve. The next time I raided a village, she had finally had enough and told me she could no longer face the harsh realities of war; then she left.

I want more of this. I want more frequent and more detailed reactions to my decisions. I want my heroes to develop an actual relationship to me, I want them to have opinions of me and I want to be able to influence those opinions. If only TaleWorlds had gone into as much detail with their emergently narrative elements as they did with the management and battle parts of the game, this would have been game of the year material.

Because the game is very detailed, but in other ways. Obsessive detail has been put into the management and battle systems of the game. Your actions, your abilities, and your force composition influence the morale of your army which gives you an advantage or detriment in battle. Troops may be wounded in battle rather than killed and will take some time to recover. Shields will deteriorate each time they are destroyed in a fight until they become entirely useless. Horses come in many varieties and may have special qualities such as “heavy” or “spirited” which make them better than their normal counterparts, but if incapacitated in a fight, they may become lame. Lame horses are slow and difficult to control, but can in time be trained back to their normal state, though special horses will become regular.

Mount & Blade is a big and epic game. It’s also extremely open. It’s not trying to be a great adventure like Lord of the Rings, instead it strives to be a simulation of being an adventurer, a rebel, or a lord in a land much like northern Europe ca. 1100-1300. Its greatest asset is its titular mounted combat, at which it excels like no other game I’ve ever played – though admittedly I believe the only other game I’ve played featuring mounted combat was Two Worlds, which was quite abysmal in most ways. Ramming your armoured warhorse through an enemy formation and spearing a knight on your lance is really quite a lot of fun, and though it’s a detailed and nuanced system, you quickly get the hang of it.

The game looks reasonably good too, though it’s obviously not Oblivion or anything like that. In DirectX 9 mode with everything set to max, it runs like a peach on my (less than cutting edge) machine and looks quite nice with dynamic lighting, ragdoll physics, and pretty solid character animations. Its world design is good too, with villages looking often quite picturesque and landscapes appearing detailed and natural. The environments in the game are also somewhat varied, from lush forests to frozen mountains, though the frequent reuse of battlefields can get pretty repetitive.

Finally, the game gets extra plus points from me for featuring a viking-like faction called The Nords. What they lack in cavalry, they make up for in infantry, and I have dedicated my first campaign to helping them conquer the Russian-styled lands of the Vaegir – and hopefully getting lordship of a castle or two in the process.

We’re playing on Expert, and we’re at the cliff house in Blood Harvest – the one with the lawn mower, you know. All four of us are still alive, but we’re all doing quite poorly and we’re all out of ammo, relying on our pistols now. The safe house is close, in the train cart just across the bridge. Tor and I went ahead, desperate for the respite of the safe house – desperate enough to leave Mads and Magnus behind if we had to.

Back in the house, Mads and Magnus are in a spot of trouble. Mads was recently liberated from a closet, and now he’s stuck on a door, under attack from an unexpected zombie horde. We hear him shouting for help, but he’s down and losing health. He dies ungloriously, messily, buried in a snarling, frothing group of infected. Magnus is moving from room to room, fighting off the horde and looking for the exit. He knocks out a window and jumps out desperate for excape.

We stare incredulously as he falls directly into the abyss to his death 50 or so feet below us. Desperate can mean Dead in the zombie apocalypse.

“Just the two of us left now.” Tor’s character says, automatically. Tor and I are both wounded, and we’re moving slowly, but Tor reaches the train car far ahead of me. I can see zombies moving around in the mist behind us, and I’m fairly certain they’ll come this way. I’m not gonna make it to the train cart. I have to make it to the train cart. I prepare a molotov – it’s a tough call: It would be really useful in the final stretch of the campaign, but I have to survive this or it’s gone anyway.

Yes, those zombies are definitely coming this way. I toss the molotov, painting a broad wall of fire across the bridge – the common infected perish, but I hear a hunter. I’m not sure if it can make it through the fire, so I reload my pistols and shoot at anything that moves within the flames as I continue crawling backwards towards the cart.

Just as I see the hunter emerging from the flames, Tor starts screaming over the voice chat. I turn around to find him caught by a smoker, dangling from the train cart by its slimy tongue. I empty my guns at the smoker, killing it, and Tor falls to the ground incapacitated. I turn around to face the fire, and the flaming hunter emerges on all fours, crawling towards me with a purpose unwavering even in the face of the searing fire. I shoot. Crawling backwards, low to the ground, smoldering cigarette between my clenched teeth, I shoot until my clip is empty and the hunter falls dead a few feet from me – easily within pouncing distance.

I turn around and help Tor get back on his feet. We limp into the train cart and close the door. Now for the really hard part…

I got most of that from Mads after the game. I was too busy struggling to keep a level head despite the steadily escalating peril. I have it on his authority that the sequence I described above looked amazing. Of course it doesn’t reflect the final outcome of the game – that Mads and I perished in the final onslaught, each a victim of one of the two tanks attacking the farm during the wait for extraction by the military. It took us 4 attempts to complete the final level – a number the others assured me is quite modest compared to how many times they had to play No Mercy to survive on Expert.

Left 4 Dead is a great game. I guess that summarizes it.

It’s a game that manages an extraordinary amount of largely unscripted emergent Cool Events. Playing on Expert is frustrating, but also fantastic, and my Danish group know what they’re doing – we’re careful, tactical, and sensible. We manage some really sound strategies on occasion, and it speaks to the longevity and intelligence of this game that such simple gameplay can foster such inventive strategies. It must be the only game where carrying a gas can through an entire level is a sound tactical decision.

I stroll down the hill towards the road and pick a bush next to the well worn tyre tracks. Making sure my by now somewhat old and patched-up camouflage suit covers everything it needs to, I crouch in the tall savannah grass behind the shrub and wait in the choking African noon heat for the convoy to turn the corner.

I’ve done this before and I know what to expect from these arms convoys: Two armed pick-up trucks on either side of a larger cargo truck with the goods. I need to blow the cargo to complete the contract, but I’ll need to dispatch the armed escort to stay alive. One driver and one gunner in each. I’m looking forward to trying out my new M79.

The first armed truck drives around the corner in the distance. I calmly wipe the dusty sweat from my brow and take aim down the barrel. If I do this right, three grenades will be enough. Otherwise my M249 SAW machine gun is ready to mop up the left-overs.

There’s the cargo truck and the second escort. Just need them a little closer.

Aaaaalmost there.

With a dull whump, I loose the first grenade, and the impact tears apart the leading truck, throwing its burning wreckage several feet into the air before it comes to rest a mere couple of yards from where I hit it. The driver in the cargo truck desperately slams the breaks, barely avoiding the wreck, and prepares to back up and drive around, but with the routined movements that come from years of practice, I eject the spent shell casing and insert a fresh grenade in seconds, lining up a new shot before the driver has a chance to evade.

The second explosion rolls off the surrounding hills, a blazing hellfire completely consuming the truck. My sardonic, satisfied smirk turns to horror as the munitions on the back of the vehicle are set off and launch the several tonnes of smoldering metal directly towards me. Seconds expand into minutes as I stare, frozen, mouth ajar at my unbelievable misfortune. It seems my mind has no reaction prepared for getting crushed by a burning truck, but at the last moment, I throw myself to the ground as heat and darkness engulfs me.

All this war, all these skirmishes – all the people I’ve killed and everything I’ve destroyed, and in the end I’m done in by physics…

Distant gunfire. Panicked shouts. A curse in a language I don’t understand. Somebody is tugging painfully at my arm. I open my eyes as much as I can, and I see Nasreen through the blood. She came to save me. How did she get the truck off me? My legs hurt, they must be broken. The gunfire has stopped, she’s killed the two soldiers in the last escort, but the grass is on fire all around us and I can barely stand, even leaning on her.

“Get up!” she grunts, supporting me only with one arm, unwilling to let go of her rifle. “Watch out, the fire is getting close.”

We limp away from the wreck, blood oozing from my forehead and swimming across my vision. Her jeep is parked just down the road, it’ll take us to the nearest safe house. One day my luck will run out – it seems I cheat death more and more narrowly each time. And this was supposed to be an easy mission.

I had a somewhat stirring yet peculiar experience yesterday. After wrapping up our business in the Ghostlands at level 18, Nick and I bid the native lands of the Blood Elves farewell and travelled via Undercity to Orgrimmar, with the intention of going through the Barrens to the Stonetalon Mountains where our adventures would continue.

Passing through the ruins of Lordaeron over Undercity again after a 2 year absense, I was struck by a sense of familiarity that made me note the circumstances of my return to WoW until that point: Though I was back, I had chosen to return to Azeroth in a zone that I had not previously visited (since the Blood Elves’ homelands were introduced in the Burning Crusade, and I stopped playing before it was released). Though it was the game I played 2 years ago, it wasn’t a familiar environment.

The zeppelin soared lazily in to dock at Orgrimmar, and the striking Monument Valley-like environment of Durotar filled me with nostalgia. I tried to describe the feeling to Nick, but it came out sounding stupid and phoney – I couldn’t think of any other way to say it than that it felt like coming home.

Of the cities I’ve visited in World of Warcraft, Orgrimmar is my favourite. Its size is perfect, large enough to accomodate many players without spreading them too thin. It’s layout has decent verticality without being as confusingly complicated as Undercity or as awkwardly fragmented as Thunder Bluff. Aesthetically, it’s much farther from traditional fantasy than Stormwind or Silvermoon, while still being low key and familiar enough to feel at home in, and the warm colour palette feels quite welcoming and pleasant.

It’s a nice city full of people, but considering how much anguish WoW caused me the last time I played it, I’m quite surprised that I was so happy to return to my old starting area. I stand by it though: Durotar and the Barrens are interesting fantasy settings, quite unlike Ye Olde European-ish meadows, forests, and mountains.

And now Nick and I will journey through this middle American inspired landscape in search of adventure. All we need is a pair of motorcycles, and we have ourselves a good oldfashioned road movie.

We’re in a corner of Las Vegas abandoned by civilization. A group of houses still under construction when the economy crashed and the construction was abandoned. It’s tight quarters, and the terrorists are aggressive, but we’re patient players. We keep at it, refining our strategy with each death and each subsequent resurrection.

This time, it’s looking good. There are 3 of them left, and we’re moving cautiously through the ground floor rooms. We stack up on the next door and Nick opens. Three Tangos inside. Nick throws a flashbang and we avert our eyes as it goes off, blinding and deafening our enemies. Nick moves in first, killing one of them with a perfect shot to the face, but somehow one of the terrorists has remained unaffected by the flashbang. He kills Nick with a burst of auto-fire, and I quickly take him out before he turns his gun on me. The third terrorist elects to escape through the door.

I quickly weight my options. There’s only one terrorist left, but in this game, and against me, he might as well be 10 – even if I’m careful. I crouch in a corner and wait for Nick to respawn. “8 seconds”, he helpfully informs me on the voice chat. I don’t know where the last enemy went, and I’m afraid to go see. I want to finally beat this mission. We’re so close, it would be stupid to waste that now. When Nick is back, that last frightened guy won’t have a chance. “I’m just waiting for you to respawn before we go look for that last guy.” I say. “4 seconds. 3… 2…” Nick interrupts his own countdown with a chuckle, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if you died right no–”

He’s cut off. The sound of a shotgun blast tears across the sound of Nick’s voice from beyond the grave. It’s a helpful noise: It’s there to let me know I’m joining Nick in the after-life. The words “Mission Failed” burst uncompromisingly unto the screen accompanied by the groan of my avatar as he expires messily. Nick is laughing hysterically, incredulously on TeamSpeak. I’m laughing with him. We were so close this time.

We respawn and try again.

I break out my binoculars and do a quick zoomed out scan of the treeline. The hardware picks up a few soldiers patrolling the road between the camp and the bridge. Quickly locking them into my radar, I zoom in closer on the nearest watch tower where a sniper has let down his guard. For a few seconds I watch him completely fail to pay any attention to his surroundings, then lock him in as well before continuing along the road. Looks like the main entrance is pretty well guarded. Another soldier has manned a mounted machine gun and appears to be watching his patrolling friends – almost like he has a sense of what’s about to happen.

I won’t be going in the front entrance. My tactical satellite map shows a route up the side of the mountain which is unlikely to be well patrolled, the best way in is probably to take a jump into the water below and swim around to the side. Shouldn’t be too hard to slip in right under their noses. But first, I’m going to even the odds a little. With a reassuring click, the safety on my precision rifle is off. Thanks to the 10x zoom on the scope I picked up in a guard shed a few hours ago, I would have to mess up really bad not to hit what I intend, even at this distance.

As I pull the scope up to my eye, making sure I’m nice and comfortable, I switch my suit to Strength mode, steadying my aim and bracing for the recoil. I gently squeeze the trigger and paint the floor of the tower with the unattentive sniper’s final thoughts. I quickly find the two patrolling guards in my view and track them as they dive for cover, but they’re moving too erratically to hit – it would be a waste of ammunition, and I only have 7 rounds left. My sight follows the road up to the sandbags with the machine gunner, who has sensibly chosen to duck behind cover. Unfortunately for him, I’m high enough that I can still get a good shot at his head. I squeeze off another round but curse my aim when it bounces off his helmet, throwing it off his head. He stumbles out from cover, bewildered, just long enough for me to get off a second shot that buries itself in his chest. He drops like a rag doll.

Well, that got their attention. My radar shows a few of the soldiers I passed earlier converging on my position. Strapping the rifle back over my shoulders and picking up my silenced FY71 assault rifle, I set the nanosuit to Armor mode and jump off the cliff. The suit absorbs the impact with the water and the built-in oxygen tank turns itself on right away. When I reach the shore, I’ll cloak and disappear into the undergrowth before anybody figures out which way I left. And now to find that path up the mountain…

Crysis is the best sniper game I’ve ever played. Several factors contribute to a superbly authentic experience: The enormous world with a frankly absurd draw distance, the canny AI that’ll send enemies hunting for you if you discharge the particularly noisy sniper rifle so you have to relocate between every couple of shots, the fact that you can prepare the shot by finding a good place to lie down and activate your Strength mode, and the way there are gameplay benefits of using your binoculars to lock enemies into your radar before you attack. Obviously I don’t know what it’s really like to be a sniper, and I’m quite happy not knowing, but Crysis fits pretty well into my impressions from films and what I’ve read. Above all, it takes patience and preparation to snipe well, and I really enjoy that.

My name is Geralt of Rivia. I am a Witcher – I kill monsters for a living. You may think of me as a more macho Van Helsing, but without the steampunk and I live in a traditional fantasy world. I’ve just left the graveyard in the city of Vizima, having cut swathes through ghouls and vampires – I’m sorry, “fledder” – and now I’m on my way, my sack tightly packed with trophies, to collect my rewards for the three contracts I’ve fulfilled in there. My first stop is the local dentist who took over the shop of the private eye I worked with briefly. He said he’d pay me for the teeth I pulled out of the festering mouths of the ghouls I killed in the graveyard, and he better make good on that deal or he can add his own teeth to his collection.

The door is open so I walk right in. Place is pretty empty. I notice he’s rearranged the furniture since he took over the place, but clearly he’s not home right now, so I leave the way I came. Well, Kalkstein’s lab isn’t far from here, I should turn this stinking bone marrow I collected from the alghouls over to him and get my money. I can’t be bothered knocking as I enter – he should be used to it by now. The messy apartment is devoid of the half-kooky alchemist, so I check the lab in the basement, but he’s gone. Gods know where he is. I poke around a bit, help myself to some useful ingredients from his cabinets, and then go through his portal, heading for Triss’ place. She was just there a few hours ago, so hopefully she’ll still be around to pay me for the magical sensors I placed around the city for her.

I emerge from the cold, blinding light of magic to a warmly lit empty bedroom. My eyes immediately snap to the stool in front of the mirror, but the sorceress is not there. I check downstairs, but no dice. She must’ve gone to do… whatever it is she does when she’s not staring at her reflection in the mirror or sleeping. I sigh and leave through the front door, heading for the nearest inn where I can hopefully get a room and kill time until somebody gets home to give me my damn money. Adventuring was never this dull in the bards’ tales.

(No more spoilers beyond this point)

And that’s the problem. Because The Witcher is a computer game, and adventuring shouldn’t be this dull. This is coming from a guy who loves downtime in games, often more than he loves the combat. My favourite part of Mass Effect is the Citadel where I enjoy walking around, exploring the areas, talking to people, running errands, and solving problems through charm or threats of violence. The Witcher has plenty of that, but it also has the boring sort of downtime – the downtime you spend running all over the city to look for somebody who’ll reward you for killing the latest monster, only to find he or she is out doing God knows what so you have to wait until evening when that person returns.

In theory, giving the NPCs in a nonlinear game a daily schedule is a great idea. Having your characters move around and appear to be doing things makes them seem a lot more real, like they have a purpose in the world, and because a given area will contain different characters depending on the time of day, your world will appear full of life. But it’s not enough. You need to help me out a bit because I don’t want to rest for 2 hours, then return to see if Triss is home yet, then go back and rest for two more hours, rinse and repeat. I want to know exactly how much time I have to wait until I can find her, or even better: I want to know where she actually is right now so I can go visit her and get on with my next quest. I spend way too much time in this game moving back and forth between fireplaces where I can rest and the homes of important characters who owe me money. I feel less like a monster slayer and more like a debt-collector. It’s frickin’ tedious, is what it is!

So please, augmenting your AI with daily schedules is a great idea, just find a way to let me know where people are. Put them on the map. Leave a note in their home saying they’re at work in the hospital from 9-5, or pin it on the door that they’ve gone fishing at the lake and will be back at noon. Hell, gimme a seperate journal entry with everybody’s schedules printed in it if necessary, or just put it in the entry you’re adding about every major NPC anyway, that’d be fine. Just don’t make me guess, because this is becoming less of a game and more of a chore.