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999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

How do you write a review of the best game you’ve ever played?

Excuse me, that was a little melodramatic — but how do you write a review of one of the best games you’ve ever played?

How do you even begin to describe the combination of an incredible storyline, fantastic pacing, and solid gameplay, all mixed into what is easily one of my favourite games of all time?

999 is one of those things I wish I could forget. Not because it’s bad, no, exactly the opposite: it’s so good that I want to be able to experience it all over again. I want to play it again, but it just won’t have the same impact as it did the first time around.

But where are my manners? I haven’t even told you about the game, and here I am, already singing its praises like it’s the best game I’ve ever played.

So we’ll start at the start.

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel. It’s similar to games like Ghost Trick and more recently The Walking Dead in that the entire thing is completely story-driven. There’s parts where you actually play the game and make decisions that have some kind of impact on what happens, to be sure, but for the most part, you’re just along for the ride, wondering where it will take you.

999 doesn’t have any kind of spoken dialogue. It means the game comes of as rather text heavy, but that’s par for the course with these kinds of visual novels/interactive stories. The Walking Dead has endless cutscenes, and 999 has text. Lots and lots of text, seeing as that’s kind of the only way it can tell you what’s going on and how the story is progressing. It comes of as text-heavy at the best of times, but it works well — the text isn’t something that ever becomes overburdening at any point, is what I’m saying. The delivery of text is near-perfect, and you never feel like you’re being swamped with information.

When you’re not progressing the story through these semi-cutscenes (which can include the odd decision here or there), you’re playing the other part of the game. You see, gameplay in 999 can be broken into two parts: there’s the story-based cutscenes, if we can call them that, and then there’s the escape sequences. During these escape sequences you’re tasked with escaping from whatever room you’ve found yourself trapped in, and the sequences themselves play out a little like some kind of point-and-click adventure game. In most cases, you find objects, combine them with other objects, and then use them to escape the room — somehow. Sometimes your companions will give you hints on how to use the items you’ve collected, or hints on what you’re supposed to be doing to escape the room, but for the most part, you’re just left to explore rooms on your own.

Yes, you’re not the only one in this story. As the title might suggest, along for the ride are eight other individuals. There’s a few other characters that play minor roles, but for the most part, the eight characters and you are the only ones that really matter — when you meet the other characters for the first time, you’re not really sure who they are, what backgrounds they have, or why they’re with you. All you know is, something out of the ordinary is going on, and it’s up to you to find out what and why.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: the Nonary Game and associated rules are revealed pretty early into the piece by one of the so-called “bad guys”, and it soon becomes clear you’re just a pawn involved in some kind of game. A game where you have to find answers to questions such as: why were you chosen for the game? Why were the others chosen for the game? And perhaps the question with the most elusive answer of all: what is the purpose of the game?

The puzzles you’ll encounter as you play the game are fairly simplistic, for the most part. Usually you’ll be able to solve puzzles by combining objects, using objects with the environment and using some lateral thinking to work out how to escape out of the current room. No puzzle is impossible, although you might find yourself scratching your head on occasion when you just can’t figure out the answer. Random guessing will ocassionally reveal the answer, but some answers simply can’t be obtained by guessing every combination, and indeed, there are cases where doing so would take quite a lengthy time indeed.

Quite a few puzzles involve numbers and the concept of a “digital root”, as that’s one of the key concepts the Nonary Game is itself based around. The digital root is just the digits of any number added until only a single digit remains: for example, the digital root of 5, 7, and 3 would be: 5 + 7 + 3 = 15 = 1 + 5 = 6. Over the course of the game you’ll be using these digital roots to solve puzzles and progress though the Nonary Game; just try not to think about how the numbers do or don’t add up at any given time — there’s enough on your plate as it is without adding that kind of stress.

Solve the puzzles, make the right decisions, and maybe you’ll get to the end of the game.

But that’s just where it all begins.

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Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Alternate title: all these o’s directly followed by r’s with no u in-between getting all up in my grill, yo

Hooah.

I ended up pre-ordering Medal of Honor: Warfighter after enjoying the previous game so much, and, as it so happened, ended up playing this year’s Medal of Honor title during this year’s Uni study period (the second one). Warfighter isn’t the first game in recent times that’s been almost universally panned (see also: Resident Evil 6), and at first, I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, Warfighter is as much a game as any of these other titles; it has a plot, which is played out via interactive gameplay and the occasional cut-scene. Isn’t that what a game is? And yet, Warfighter was receiving scores which suggested it was nothing more than exceptionally mediocre — nothing spectacular in terms of breakthrough gameplay, storyline or pacing, but just… average.

But… why?

Warfighter is the story of Preacher, a Tier One operator who’s been through hell and back. He’s been through the thick of it in the past, but in Warfighter, Preacher starts out as someone who’s just on the sidelines. You learn that Tom — Preacher — has taken a leave of absence from his usual duties in order to fix his marriage, and meanwhile, something big is happening elsewhere in the world. By playing over some of Preacher’s previous missions, you learn that some of these things might be connected. Then, suddenly, boom — a train blows up in Madrid, the very train and platform where you’re supposed to be meeting your wife and kid. You wake up in hospital, where your former CO tells you your wife and kid are safe, that they missed their train. But that’s not all: things are going down, and others you used to know are there trying to clean up the mess, find the culprits, and get to the source.

What follows is your story of how you’re assigned to an entirely new Task Force, Task Force Blackbird, in order to find out who the source of these attacks is. First you’re looking for P.E.T.N., the explosive compound that you encountered during your very first mission in Warfighter, then you’re looking for where it came from, tracing the source all back to a certain Sheik, and then even further still, to a mysterious Cleric.

Along the way, you’ll eliminate enemies from a helo in the sky, breach through numerous doors in a variety of different ways, participate in a co-ordinated sniper strike on targets in a hostage scenario, and, perhaps my favourite of all, drive like a madman through the streets of Dubai, either in pursuit of a target, or in an attempt to evade pursuing forces.

Don’t get me wrong, Warfighter is just about as linear as they come. You play through the missions in the order as dictated by the developers. There’s no decisions to be made here, only enemies begging for a bullet in their skull. At the heart of it, maybe that’s the issue here: Warfighter is a game with a single-player campaign that doesn’t let you make decisions, that doesn’t put you in control. You don’t get to decide whether people live or die, you don’t get to call the shots.

“If I die, give this to my wife. She’s already got everything else.”

But, I mean, isn’t that kind of the point? If you’re expecting to make decisions in a game that’s all about what the developers want to show you, aren’t you expecting too much? Single player campaigns in first person shooters are all about telling a story, and if you’re not coming along for the ride — beautiful scenery, on-rails shooting galleries, and all — then you’re playing the wrong game. Because if the developers of the game wanted you to make decisions, if they wanted  you to be in control, wouldn’t they have put those kinds of elements into the game to begin with?

Honestly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of game. Warfighter features un-skippable cut-scenes, and you know what other game does? The Walking Dead. Like Warfighter, The Walking Dead features un-skippable cut-scenes, of which there are many. And even though The Walking Dead is perhaps a game where you’ll make some seriously hard decisions, it’s also a game that features the illusion of choice. But again, why is any of this surprising, when it should be the complete opposite? Games that tell narratives (however poor said narrative might be) via their single-player campaigns aren’t exactly new, just ask any of the Call of Duty series, the Battlefields, or the somewhat newcomers, the Medal of Honor games (2010 game onwards, that is).

If it’s different you want, then it’s different you’ll get: Spec Ops: The Line is another game that I’ve written about recently, and that shares a lot in common with Warfighter. Spec Ops and Warfighter are both games that, on the surface, look extremely similar. They both set the scene for war, explaining to those who haven’t been in the mix what war is like. They’re both games that feature linear gameplay, fighting enemy after enemy, corridor after corridor. But where Spec Ops takes things to their extreme by evolving the protagonists into something resembling nothing like themselves, Warfighter takes the well-worn path. Warfighter forces you to take the shot, Spec Ops laughs at you for not doing so. By comparison with Warfighter, it’s easy to see why Spec Ops has been so widely praised.

After my first play through of Warfighter, I wasn’t sure if I liked it as much as the previous game. I wasn’t even sure what the plot was even about, or why some of the cut-scenes weren’t rendered in the game engine, but rather, as some kind of quasi-movie scenes with actors that looked like characters out of a video game. But then, around halfway though my second play-through, I realised it was more than that, that the non-rendered cut-scenes served to separate the story from the gameplay. It was then it started to click: the story wasn’t all over the place any more and actually made sense, and I felt that I had a real sense of purpose during the game, that I was doing something that had a real impact on things.

I don’t necessarily agree that Warfighter deserves the scores that it gets, but I can see where the critics are coming from. Warfighter isn’t a mind-blowing game in any respect, but it does tell a story, and it does feature some nice — if extremely linear — gameplay. There are the odd enjoyable parts, such as the epic car chase scenes, but it does lack what I consider essential to any first-person shooter: a black-in, black-out sniper mission. Just thinking about that snow level (“Evasion”, if you’re playing Spec Ops) in the second Modern Warfare is enough to send me to my happy place.

Have you seen the movie Act of Valor? Warfighter is a lot like that. So like that, in fact, it’s almost as if Danger Close took Act of Valor and made a game out of it. Both Act of Valor and Warfighter had real-life SEALs onboard as consultants, and it shows — the game and movie are uncannily similar.

At the end of the day, if Warfighter set out to tell us about the heroes that go into battle against enemies, get shot at, beaten up, and then get back up and ask for more, than it succeeded. If Warfighter set out to tell us about the sacrifices these people make every day, then it succeeded in every possible way. It’s people like Preacher, Voodoo, Mother, and Rabbit that make gamers like us realise that all of what we’re seeing on screen is inescapably real for a select few.

And for that, I thank them.

Why Guild Wars 2 is perhaps the first MMORPG that agrees with me

Alternative title: a somewhat pensive review of Guild Wars 2 from the perspective of someone who has not completely immersed themselves into the stream of MMORPG culture, but has simply splashed around in the bathing pool, presented as a series of sections separated by descriptive titles

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 ever since Day Z kind of fell out of fashion, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best MMORPGs I’ve ever played. Mind you, that isn’t a huge list: I dabbled in WoW at one stage, got to level 60 within a respectable time frame, and I played the heck out of Star Wars: The Old Republic during its beta period. I enjoyed both of those games, to be sure, but there was always something that wasn’t quite right about each: WoW felt way too inundated with lore and background storylines, like it was some kind of Lord-of-the-Rings-style plot but for every single character. There were stories behind everything, but I just couldn’t care less about them. They were uninteresting, boring, whatever you want to call it.

The Old Republic was fine in that regard, as the Star Wars universe is a little more forgiving — there’s still a copious amount of backstory, but because it’s Star Wars, it’s forgiven, and at times, welcomed — people just can’t enough of those Jedi, I tell you. But the one thing that grated about The Old Republic was that it kind of felt tacky, like it was trying too hard to monetise something that should have come naturally. Suddenly  the Star Wars universe wasn’t just about the big bad Sith and killing Stormtroopers, it was also about repairing droids, repairing things that went wrong, negotiating between various underworld characters. It  felt like you were playing out the entire lives between what you see in the movies, which might have appealed to some, but felt overdone to others. Now that I think about it The Old Republic tried too hard in a lot of areas. That was probably the main reason why I didn’t bother renewing my subscription after the first month.

Guild Wars 2 is much, much different to the two aforementioned games. It’s still a fantasy RPG in that the environment isn’t, strictly-speaking, “real”, and at first I thought this would be a big downside — “ugh, not another fantasy RPG!” — but I now realise it wouldn’t have worked any other way.

I didn’t even think I would be buying it, at first. I’m not entirely sure what convinced me to, in the end, but I’m extremely glad I did, because Guild Wars 2 is a great game. Not so stooped in lore as to be overburdened, not trying too hard for the sake of a few pennies, but just right. The right mix of a compelling personal storyline, even if some of the initial choices were a little ridiculous (my biggest regret was not joining the circus? Really?), combined with good quest and event mechanics, and of course, the right amount of replayability. And perhaps one of the biggest pluses: no subscription fees.

It’s about exploration

One of my biggest features about Guild Wars 2 is the fact that it’s not all “go here, kill/collect/escort this person/thing, come back” — at least, it doesn’t have to be. There are quests like that, of course, but what’s really great is that once you’re in a new location, you can leave the questing until later and just explore. Guild Wars 2 has a big focus on exploration, and you can visit Vistas which count towards your overall region and map completion. Some of these Vistas are easy to get to, others require lots of jumping and falling, but all have a great view of some feature or structure in the game world.

And that’s not all — through trial and error, players have discovered jumping puzzles in almost every region. They’re not marked on your map, and the only real way people would have discovered them is via exploration. They’re fiendishly hard, and sometimes what you think is a jumping puzzle is actually just you jumping up and down mushrooms.

Like I said, Guild Wars 2 isn’t just a linear quest grind. It’s about exploration, and it’s a better game for it.

It’s about aesthetics

Guild Wars 2 is the same as other MMORPGs in that you’re always on the lookout for better-specced gear than the stuff you currently have, but different to other MMORPGs in that there’s an aesthetics element to it, as well. Sometimes you can’t bear to swap out your current Greatsword for one that has +999 Critical Hit Damage because it just looks crap on your character. I came across a dude that had fish heads for pistols one day, and that was awesome. Thankfully, if you do come across your next big Longbow that has vastly better stats but looks much worse than the Longbow you currently own, you can simply transmute (read: combine) the item so it’ll have the better stats of the Longbow you just found, but look just as awesome as the Longbow that you’ve been using.

Choosing armour is perhaps even more stressing for the player that cares about aesthetics, because even though there’s bonuses for having armour with the same rune/sigil/accessory, sometimes having the set doesn’t look as cool as these other great pants you crafted yourself. Or maybe you’re looking for a different outfit entirely — the best thing is you can preview how a certain piece of armour looks on your character before you spend the clams.

I mean, if you needed any more proof Guild Wars 2 is all about the aesthetics: there are random dye drops that let you change the colour of your armour, for crying out loud. People seem to gravitate towards black and white colours, but there’s plenty that can be done with an interesting colour palette. Changing the colour scheme could be all you need to give you character a new lease on life, aesthetics-wise.

It’s probably a little girly, but the aesthetics portion of Guild Wars 2 is fantastic. It probably makes up for not having as many character/face customisations as, say, the Mass Effect series.

You don’t have to play with others (but it’s a little better if you do)

Another thing I like about Guild Wars 2 is that you don’t have to play with friends — at least, not all the time. Because it’s all PvE, everyone in the region has common goals if you’re all doing quests or random events — if you’re doing a quest or an event, everyone gains with your participation, so it’s like everyone is always in a big group together, doing the same quests for the common good. I played solo all the way up to level 80 (the current level cap), and it wasn’t until I hit later stages of my personal story and later regions that I really found running around with someone else to be useful.

Speaking of which, your personal story is perhaps one of the only times (at least right from the outset) that you might want someone else along for the ride. You make all the decisions, of course, but sometimes it’s handy having someone else in your own personal story instances to help out with the combat, purely because the NPCs can be a little useless at times.

Just about the only time you’re forced to group with other players is when doing dungeons, and that’s to be expected.

Overall, Guild Wars 2 is pretty great. It’s the first MMORPG that I’ve really enjoyed, and for all the reasons above; exploration, aesthetics, and the not-pared down solo play. I’ve only scratched the surface of the game, becuase there’s so many aspects to it: there’s World vs World vs World, which is kinda puts different “worlds” against each other (think massive battlefields, contention for castles etc, but with everyone on your server playing for the same team), and then there’s also player-vs-player, which is kinda like WvWvW except on a smaller scale.

There’s dynamic events which everyone can do at any time, and oh — perhaps one of the best features of any MMORPG, ever — instanced loot, which means your loot is totally separate to others. No more “rolling” for the best loot when you kill a boss, bceause you everyone gets their own loot according to how much they participated in any given event (or their own standard quest rewards). It means you’re guaranteed an equal shot at that rare pirate coat you’ve been hanging out for as everyone else, all the way down to gather-able items in the game world (trees, ores, berries, and so on).

I get that MMORPGs aren’t for everyone. Doing quests and crafting can seem a little grind-y at the best of times (not to mention be a huge time suck), but while Guild Wars 2 shares many similarities to traditional MMORPGs, it’s different enough to separate it from the pack.

And that just makes it all the more enjoyable.

You Should Be Playing The Walking Dead

Spectacular cell-shaded scenery, when you’re not being mobbed by the undead.

Look, I’m not kidding around here. If you’re at all serious about games, or watch and enjoy the TV series by the same name, you should play The Walking Dead on whatever platform you feel most comfortable with.

The Walking Dead isn’t my first interactive adventure from Telltale Games. That honour has been bestowed to a smaller game called Puzzle Agent, which is kinda similar in a lot of ways — there isn’t such a focus on puzzle mechanics like there is in Puzzle Agent, but you do get the same explorative, story-driven gameplay, accompanied by a healthy dose of dialog trees.

Telltale Games are quickly becoming the masters of the interactive adventure genre on multiple platforms, and for good reason: most of the story-based games they make are of a very high standard.

For those that aren’t in the loop about The Walking Dead the game, but are a little familiar with the TV series (and possibly even the comic), you’ll be pleased to know The Walking Dead follows the same storyline as the TV series.

The Walking Dead‘s lead character is Lee Everett, a guy who’s on his way to prison when the cop car that’s he’s getting a ride in hits a zombie, and from there, all hell breaks loose. At first he’s confused about what just happened, and why he’s just had to shoot the cop that was taking a ride with, and then he starts to understand that there’s something very, very wrong about the world he’s woken up in.

Which is actually one of the best things about The Walking Dead; there’s real, believable characters. Just like the TV series, you soon meet up with a group of fellow survivors who seem alright, and you quickly form relationships with them. There’s hard-ass Kenny who’s just looking out for his son and wife, there’s can’t-work-out-batteries Carley, the reporter who’s actually a dead-eye with a pistol, and there’s even a few military types who take charge of the group and make the decisions (but ultimately, you make the call).

But the game wouldn’t be complete without some kind of purpose outside of simply surviving the zombie apocalypse, and in The Walking Dead, your purpose is Clementine. She’s one of the first characters you meet in the series, and by that time, she’s already been surviving on her own for a few days. You decide to take her under your wing, and that’s that: the status of her parents is a little murky, and essentially, she’s the little impressionable girl that looks up to you — even though you’re not her real dad, you’re just a guy/some neighbour/silence.

That’s pretty much how the first episode starts. The Walking Dead is released as episodic content: as of writing, three out of five planned episodes are currently out on PC and Mac. They’re released about a month apart, and each episode is around two to three hours long.

Clementine is all you have.

Which brings me to another thing that’s great about The Walking Dead: whilst it’s a game that’s meant to played episode by episode (sometimes, as in the case of episode one and two, with months and months of in-game time in-between), it’s s tailored experience all the way. Make no mistake: the decisions you make in The Walking Dead could have implications two seconds later, thirty seconds later, a few minutes later, even an hour later, and in some cases, even a few episodes later. In The Walking Dead, the choices you make count for something, even if it’s not immediately clear what that something may be. Perhaps that lie you’re about to tell will destroy an already-fragile relationship with another character, perhaps it won’t. The fact is, you won’t know until you make that call.

And boy, do you call all the difficult shots. One of the best reasons you should be playing The Walking Dead is because of the decisions you’ll make along the way; The Walking Dead is all about morals and tough choices, with a little accountability and perhaps even regret thrown in on the side. One of the best things about Telltale’s interpretation of the story genre is the little details, such as when you’ve been particularly hard on a fellow survivor, and it says something like “Kenny won’t forget your words”. It’s a unnerving feeling to know everything you say and do is being judged by other characters. Maybe you choose to tell the others what you were doing when the world ended, or maybe you make something up. Either way, whatever you say will have a profound impact on how the characters see you. Again — maybe that will matter down the track, maybe it won’t.

One thing I love about the dialog in The Walking Dead is how silence is also a valid response. If someone asks you a question you don’t like, or can’t choose from the various options in time, then you simply stay silent. If it’s a particularly polarising decision, silence then represents the fence-sitting option; other times, another character might be asking you about your past: if you say nothing, then that might be seen as guilt or something else. It’s a great game mechanic that works really, really well.

Let’s get one thing straight, though: The Walking Dead isn’t a twitchy first-person shooter like seemingly every other zombie apocalypse game out there. No, it’s a point-and-click, interactive adventure game, and that means you’ll be doing a little puzzle-solving here and there, (how to distract those zombies whilst I run over here and grab these keys?), interacting and exploring your current environment, and talking to other characters via dialog trees. About as twitchy as it gets is the quick time events (of which there are a few, but they’re do what they’re designed to do, i.e. get you through a panicky moment without some uber-complex keystrokes), which don’t really count. There’s one scene where you’re shooting zombies with a rifle, and it’s laughably easy to get kills: you pretty much just point the rifle in the direction of the zombie (you have a scope to make this easier, for some reason), and you click the mouse, and boom, headshot.

Lee Everett — Tough Decisions

I’ve been putting a few hours into DayZ recently, and it’s interesting drawing parallels between that game and The Walking Dead. They’re both about zombie apocalypses, and as much as they’re both totally different games in some respects, it’s strange how some things are similar. In one episode a fellow survivor is about to shoot a bird, but you tell him not to because the noise will draw the walkers — things like “noise attracts zombies”, things like that that you learn in DayZ, and can now be applied to The Walking Dead. In some ways, playing DayZ prepares you for a lot of what was going to happen in The Walking Dead: you’ve been there, done that, so some things are easier. But then some things, like making those black-and-white decisions you have to, just aren’t easier no matter which games you’ve played before this.

Spec Ops: The Line is another recent game that I enjoyed quite a bit, and in many respects, it’s actually more similar to The Walking Dead than DayZ. But where Spec Ops has an entire game which meanders through various twists and turns leading up to one of the best finales of any game I’ve played,  and where Spec Ops builds up the entire game to finish in a spectacular fashion, The Walking Dead is a lot more episodic. You take things as they come, knowing that things might change for the better (or for the worse) in later episodes. The episodic delivery suits it well, I think.

As much as I enjoy pretty much every gameplay and story aspect of The Walking Dead, there are a few things that mar an otherwise brilliant experience.

Let’s start with the black and white decisions you’re forced into. At certain stages, you’re forced to make a critical decision between two absolutes. That whole “infinite shades of grey” thing you hear about? There is a little of that in a few of the longer-term dialog options you get presented with, but the critical events, those are entirely black and white. I don’t want to spoil things too much, but you’ll be choosing the lesser of two evils a little more frequently that I’m comfortable with. I don’t really have a problem with that, but the fact that you’re forced into them is somewhat harsh.

And while we’re on the topic, for a game that’s all about the freedom of choice, sometimes, you don’t get any. That is, you can make decisions along the way, but being a game that has finite possibilities and doesn’t account for every possible outcome from the hundreds of dialog options and choices you can make, there’s only so many possibilities that can actually happen. Maybe you want to run off with a mildly attractive, slightly-insane, military woman, but that’s not how it’s meant to play out. It’s the illusion of choice, and once you realise it’s very real, it kind-of spoils the game. A little.

Lee: “It’s over!” Well, for whoever he’s talking to, it is.

But those are just two tiny flaws on the face of what is, let’s face it, one of the best games of this year. In the grand scheme of things, The Walking Dead isn’t just any point-and-click interactive adventure story, it’s the point-and-click adventure game of the year. Games such as DayZ and the recently-released Guild Wars 2 require you to pour a significant number of hours into the game before you start getting anywhere, whereas The Walking Dead is eminently casual. There’s arguably as many cut-scenes as there is actual gameplay, so if you’re not into the whole story aspect, then this might not be a great fit.

At the end of the day, there is no higher recommendation I can make for you to play The Walking Dead by Telltale Games. It features compelling gameplay with real, believable characters and some of the worst decisions you’ll ever have to make in a video game, but it’s also one of the best zombie apocalypse experiences you’ll ever have (as far as “good” zombie apocalypses go, but you know what I mean). It’s available on pretty much every major gaming platform, and you would be doing yourself a disservice by not playing it. Telltale Games have released one of their best titles yet, and with only three of five episodes released thus far, there’s still plenty of the game left to come.

I can’t wait.

Chinese gamer returns spacebars stolen from internet cafe | The Verge

a man recently turned up at an internet cafe in the country with a pile of stolen spacebars. Irritated by the noise made by players of the rhythmic game Audition Online, which involves repeated tapping of the keyboard, the disgruntled gamer had surreptitiously removed the offending keys from the establishment two years previously. But he decided to make amends in order to enjoy a fresh start following his upcoming wedding, returning the spacebars in bulk earlier this month.

via Chinese gamer returns spacebars stolen from internet cafe | The Verge.

What.

More Fun in DayZ: Lingor Island

Just when you though Chernarus was getting stale, getting a little boring (as you might do, if you’ve put over 300 hours into it so far), along comes Lingor Island, a different map for the DayZ mod that I’ve sung praises about before.

One of the things I never liked about DayZ when playing the Chernarus map was that more than half of the buildings weren’t enterable. Only a select few kinds of buildings were enterable and contained loot, and once you identified those buildings (barns, factories, shopping centers and so on), that was half the battle. No more sneaking around small towns in order to find a can of beans, no more scoping out a town before approaching. Knowing the map and being familiar with the buildings and the loot contained within is a huge advantage, especially in DayZ — and Chernarus didn’t have enough of that.

Enter Lingor Island. Pretty much every building is enterable and spawns loot, and there’s many more building types. It’s exactly the same game, built on exactly the same ARMA 2 engine. It’s a mod of a mod, if you will — simply a different environment in which to fight zombies, gear up, and survive encounters with other players. And I’ve had the most enjoyable DayZ experiences thus far in it — not in Chernarus, the original and only “sanctioned” map — but in Lingor Island, the unofficial Russian map.

Lingor Island is laid out in roughly the same way as Chernarus, only a little smaller. There are three main cities — Maruko in the north east, San Arulco in the middle, and Calamar in the south — and many, many smaller towns dotted all around the map. Instead of the dense forests and wide open plains of Chernarus, Lingor Island features dense, thick jungle areas that separate the various military bases, the multiple airports (three or four, at least), and even the various islands.

Of course, being an island, Lingor also has much more water than Chernarus. Hope you packed your swimming trunks, because depending on where you want to go and sometimes even where you spawn, you might have to swim a little to get to land. It’s not uncommon to swim across a rive to get to the other side, because the only road across isn’t for a few kilometers in either direction.

But the best part about Lingor Island isn’t the multitude of enterable buildings, more vehicles, or even the lush jungle environment. Unlike Chernarus, Lingor Island isn’t about the survival aspects of DayZ. No, no — in my mind, Lingor is all about the player vs player mechanics. Ask anyone that’s played DayZ for any period of time about what their most intense, most adrenaline-fuelled experiences in Chernarus will be, and most of the time, their answer will be the times they came across other players. Forget asking if people are friendly, because in Lingor, the goal isn’t to survive, the goal is to gear up and hunt down other players with extreme prejudice.

Lingor Island is DayZ, deathmatch-style. You see people, and you make it your mission to hunt them down. It’s crazy good fun, super intense, and means you’ll die, a lot.

Because the towns in Lingor are all pretty closely spaced, right from the get go you’re thrown into the most brutal PvP arena. Going solo probably isn’t recommended, but you might be able to get the jump on people easier. If you’re in a group, you can hunt people down via comms — the only downside being you might have to share the loot afterwards.

Sometimes you’ll spend a few hours gearing up, maybe kill a few people, and be feeling pretty good about yourself, when suddenly, without warning, you’re dead. No shot that you heard, no idea where the shot came from, and now faced with the dreaded words: YOU ARE DEAD.

Forget setting up a camp and hoarding gear — the map isn’t big enough to hide things that well, and vehicles make it even smaller. Besides, there are enough military-grade loot spawns for that to not be necessary anyway — if you can’t find a good primary weapon and sidearm and enough food/water to last you for a few days within an hour or so, you don’t know the map well enough.

So if you’re getting bored of Chernarus, there’s good news on two fronts. For one, you can play Lingor Island as a sort of holiday; I haven’t played vanilla DayZ in weeks because Lingor Island is simply too much fun in terms of player-vs-player combat. And two, Rocket has said the current Chernarus map won’t be the one included as part of the standalone game released later this year — it will be kind of the same, but modified with a few other features and more buildings. Chernarus 2.0, if you will.

But until then, there’s Lingor Island, players to kill, and that sort of thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me…