No jokes about how much it sucks, I promise...
I'll break the ice with some facts about myself, for those of us who haven't met:
Fact one: I don't leave my bedroom whilst the sun is still in the sky.
Fact two: My skin is pale and clammy; my eyes sunken, yellow, and frightening to children.
Fact three: in lieu of food, I drink large quantities of human blood for sustenance.
Simple logic dictates that I am, quite irrefutably, a vampire. If only. No, the truth of the matter is that the first point can be explained away by my being a misanthropic wanker, the second point accounted for by negligent personal hygiene and a poor diet, and the third ...well, I just like the saltiness.
Whilst very firmly and regrettably a day-walking mortal in real-life, then, I am quite an expert in vampire fiction, particularly that of the White Wolf series. Well I say expert, I mean I've read nearly half the Wikipedia pages on it and talked to a bloke in a queue in a shop about it once, although my mind was really on custard creams. It was perhaps with these things in mind I bought Bloodlines some...two years ago, perhaps, and have only in the last fortnight completed the knobbing thing.
Bloodlines is a lengthy game, offering many hours of good, honest, neck-chewing fun, but it is not two years long. It offers more replay value than most games, because each clan you choose affects how you will solve the problems you face, running the gamut from hand-to-hand combat to tedious stealth to insane gibbering. But seven-hundred days of replay value? Two whole Far-Side calendars? No, rather it was simply not fun to play for a long time after it was released. On the day I bought it I eagerly slotted the disc into Margaret (my computer... not a hooker I have tied up in my closet into whom I periodically insert discs), sat through one of those ruddy multi-CD installation processes which always wait until you've just left the room, then ask for the next disc (how do they know?), started it up, played for...let's say seventeen minutes, exited the game, ejected the disc and threw it sulkily into the corner. Those were seventeen minutes of baffling character creation ('how should I know whether or not I want a high Carpentry skill?'), recurring crashes and clunky combat that ended up with my vampire dead (all over again) and me very frustrated and angry. So angry that I had to go beat up Martha (the hooker I keep tied up in my closet).
It's no exaggeration to say that, in the first two years of my owning the game, I never completed the first mission. Whatever character with whichever permutation of skills and abilities I chose I failed each time. Being as the first mission seemed to consist nigh-on exclusively of 'go to this beach-house and duff up some hippies with your immense vampire strength' I usually felt pretty confident, but somewhere between the clumsy mechanics and my youthful ineptitude the hippies always had the last laugh, normally a laugh drowned out by the sound of shotgun blasts riddling my quivering corpse. If I went back in time and told myself that this was one of those few games worth persevering with, even if it does really piss you off, I wouldn't have believed myself (actually I'd mostly just be annoyed that I'd had the opportunity to travel through time and had wasted it talking about a computer game, without the foresight** to bring some winning lottery numbers).
But time, contrary to popular opinion, can be a kind mistress when she wants to. The version of Bloodlines that I played and actually completed recently was vigorously patched every which way from Sunday. Perhaps there are some purists out there who will snort and say this is not the true experience, that I had an easy ride, that I'm a whiny little Liberal pansy who should bend over and gratefully receive the merciless learning curve of the original version: maybe, but I'll tell them this- I enjoyed the game, and was surprised at how well it all hanged together.
Oh, and fuck off. I'd want to tell them that too.
First impressions can be bad though. Although a decent looking title at the time (it was the second game based on the Source engine, the first being an obscure shooting game of little historical importance) the cold and inevitable passage of time shows it to be rather fuglier now. 'Functional', I believe, is the polite euphemism that we all tacitly agreed to use at that secret mountain summit which we all swore never to mention. It's still got that nice Source water and whatnot, and the framerate and loading times go like the clappers on a modern rig, but the textures are all too often lacking, leading to things looking a bit sparse. In fact as far as graphics go time nearly always has her 'cruel mistress' leather brassiere on, riding whip grasped enthusiastically in hand. It does urban squalor quite nicely, but this is more through sheer force of dialogue and setting: the streets themselves are thinly populated; the rooms often painfully empty and dull. Not a looker, then...but does she have a nice personality?
Bloodlines charms not with its looks, but with its brains. Wait, actually not it's brains: more it's filthy, dirty mouth. Where S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (how I hate typing that) created a visually and aurally striking world locked in a spiral of decay, populated solely by idiots talking a load of shit and gibberish about nonsense, Bloodlines has a world of rather crude visuals but brains where it counts. When people talk about sex in Bloodlines they don't do it in the tittering, inane, secondary school way so beloved of most games that deal with the subject. When characters swear they do so because it makes sense for them to swear, not because they want to impress the sweaty, prepubescent tykes whom that sort of thing impresses. I really can't stress enough how nice it is when a game treats you like a grown-up. As loath as I am to illustrate this with a spoiler (but I will): there's a character who you find out has a multiple-personality disorder, formed in her youth when she was sexually abused by her father. Yeah, so you've seen it on Heroes, but Bloodlines did it first. With vampires, which is always a checkmate in my book.
The thing about looks is that some mistakes are hard to forgive. Bad animation is a perpetual thorn lodged in my eye because it's always there, gyrating in your face every bit as unconvincingly as a Morrowind lap-dancer. Finding yourself visually accosted by ugly textures? Hey, just squint, everything's a blur anyway: worst case scenario, slap a couple of eye patches on and use your imagination. Maybe buy a new graphics card? That might help. But bad animations? They're so hard to escape, cackhandedly lolloping around in your peripheral vision all the time, waving their arms and generally making a fool of themselves. There's one chunky monster in particular that you'll spend a good chunk of the game shooting into chunks, a kind of angry, biting head that runs around on two arms and hugs people to death. It is, in one handy acronym, SPA: Spectacularly Poorly Animated. How, exactly, did this happen?
Late stages of development of Vampire: the Masquerade- Bloodlines
Andy, the project manager, sits at his desk. David, a programmer, approaches...
DAVID: Hey Andy, I was just looking at the latest build and...um... who did the animation on these monsters?
ANDY: Oh, you noticed! That was my son. Yeah, it was his work experience. Talented young chap, isn't he?
DAVID: ...Yeah, sure! Yeah. Uh...but maybe...we could just get one of our guys to...ya know, have a quick look at it, check it over?
ANDY: Why? You don't think there's anything wrong with it, and by extension anything wrong with my offspring, do you? Is that what you think David? Do you denigrate my progeny, David?
DAVID: No...no, of course not. I was just being...doesn't matter. I should...um...go.
David makes his excuses and shuffles off. Andy looks at him as he leaves then picks up the phone.
ANDY: Julian? Yeah, it's Andy here. I was just talking to David... I don't think he's a team player, ya know? Bad egg... I think we should lose him. What is it he does exactly?...Bug checking you say?
What, you got a better explanation? And I'll bet they hired a load of blind playtesters too- all rookie errors. There's simply no way that you can't notice how comically poorly these beasties move, especially since you slaughter about 400 of them throughout the game. And the player character's no better, shuffling about like a pony on rollerskates with a rugby ball shoved up its arse. 'What a bloody shambles this game is!' you will hopefully be spluttering, purple with indignation and ready to write to your MP. But, again, we need to keep in mind that the animation is ultimately a means to an end, and can be forgiven. So the animation's stodgier than day old porridge, but who cares when you're ambushed by shotgun toting witch-hunters, slipping into bullet time, weaving between their fire (admiring the lovely trails left in the air- kudos to whoever's responsible for that one), smashing one of them into a wall with your fists, then darting behind another to chomp on his neck and use him as a bullet shield whilst you whip out your Desert Eagle and send the final one off to a rag-doll grave?
It's atmosphere. Atmosphere's difficult to put a price on. The prettiest bump-mapped parallax-shaded vistas in the world can't convince you that they're worth spending time in if populated exclusively by drooling cretins spouting the same three lines of dialogue and handing out tedious 'go fetch my lost puppy kind sir' quests to all comers. Slow-burning quests go a long way toward helping atmosphere- don't be afraid to give it some build-up, guys. Not all quests need to be completed in twenty minutes; make them link with each other; gradually develop them into a coherent fictional world. Bloodlines grasps this principle and throttles it thoroughly, fleshing out it's world with newspaper clippings, e-mails, snippets of overheard conversation...all a bit System Shock, certainly, but Bloodlines crafts it's own universe quite artfully. Arguably this is because Troika had such a wealth of background material to work with when they made the game, but I also think there's a strong element of the designers just taking ideas and really running with them. Coming across vampires who wish they'd never been sired, despairing because they'll never see the sun rise again is genuinely affecting, and compels the player to ponder the perpetual night in which their own story takes place.
Someone mention System Shock? Scary stuff. So it is we send the game off with an honourable mention to the Ocean House Hotel, a quest that crops up fairly early in the game but stays lodged in your mind for the duration.
Of.
Your.
Life.
You're just getting the hang of this vampire business. Bullets? Hah! Bullets schmullets. You can punch bullets out of the air mid-flight; you can summon animals to do your bidding out of the aether; you can fix someone with your gaze and make their very blood boil. Your employer directs you towards a hotel on the outskirts of town: apparently it's 'haunted'. 'Big whoop' you think, cockily cocking your shotgun. So it's a bit Shining-esque, but if you've not played it, you should. Often muttered in the same breath as 'Shalebridge Cradle', it made me whimper like a puppy trapped in a shoebox. It does an excellent of job of giving you a real fear of ghosts, making you yearn to be out of the place and facing up against some good old fashioned ghouls or vampires: anything that feels a fucking bullet. It's a strange feeling to assume the role of a supernatural being and still be scared of things that go bump (and scream) in the night, and is in no way the only interesting or absorbing quest. Objectively speaking (about something inherently subjective...) I would say I've seen scarier things in games than the Ocean House Hotel, but it's impact, putting you firmly back in your place just when you were starting to get a wee bit too over-confident with yo' vampire self, cannot be easily overstated.
Pathologically reluctant as I am to end anything on too high a note, though, we should remember that Troika, at times, seemed to spend rather too many of their own character development experience points on their 'Haunted Hotel Level Design' skill, whilst clumsily neglecting their 'Not Making Interminably Endlessly Bastard Long and Cripplingly Boring Sewer Levels' skill. I always think that a good way to assess the quality of...well, anything, is to take a long look at it and say 'would anyone really give a fuck if we got rid of this?' I'd encourage Troika to consider this for their future games. Well, I would if they hadn't split up. That's called karma, for making me play through those sewers!
If you're still not convinced, consider that the game only cost me £9.99 two years ago, so can almost certainly be picked up for about 27p these days- call me stingy but I've always found a quality game even better if you can get it for less than the price of a packet of crisps.
**or should that be hindsight?
I'll break the ice with some facts about myself, for those of us who haven't met:
Fact one: I don't leave my bedroom whilst the sun is still in the sky.
Fact two: My skin is pale and clammy; my eyes sunken, yellow, and frightening to children.
Fact three: in lieu of food, I drink large quantities of human blood for sustenance.
Simple logic dictates that I am, quite irrefutably, a vampire. If only. No, the truth of the matter is that the first point can be explained away by my being a misanthropic wanker, the second point accounted for by negligent personal hygiene and a poor diet, and the third ...well, I just like the saltiness.
Whilst very firmly and regrettably a day-walking mortal in real-life, then, I am quite an expert in vampire fiction, particularly that of the White Wolf series. Well I say expert, I mean I've read nearly half the Wikipedia pages on it and talked to a bloke in a queue in a shop about it once, although my mind was really on custard creams. It was perhaps with these things in mind I bought Bloodlines some...two years ago, perhaps, and have only in the last fortnight completed the knobbing thing.
Bloodlines is a lengthy game, offering many hours of good, honest, neck-chewing fun, but it is not two years long. It offers more replay value than most games, because each clan you choose affects how you will solve the problems you face, running the gamut from hand-to-hand combat to tedious stealth to insane gibbering. But seven-hundred days of replay value? Two whole Far-Side calendars? No, rather it was simply not fun to play for a long time after it was released. On the day I bought it I eagerly slotted the disc into Margaret (my computer... not a hooker I have tied up in my closet into whom I periodically insert discs), sat through one of those ruddy multi-CD installation processes which always wait until you've just left the room, then ask for the next disc (how do they know?), started it up, played for...let's say seventeen minutes, exited the game, ejected the disc and threw it sulkily into the corner. Those were seventeen minutes of baffling character creation ('how should I know whether or not I want a high Carpentry skill?'), recurring crashes and clunky combat that ended up with my vampire dead (all over again) and me very frustrated and angry. So angry that I had to go beat up Martha (the hooker I keep tied up in my closet).
It's no exaggeration to say that, in the first two years of my owning the game, I never completed the first mission. Whatever character with whichever permutation of skills and abilities I chose I failed each time. Being as the first mission seemed to consist nigh-on exclusively of 'go to this beach-house and duff up some hippies with your immense vampire strength' I usually felt pretty confident, but somewhere between the clumsy mechanics and my youthful ineptitude the hippies always had the last laugh, normally a laugh drowned out by the sound of shotgun blasts riddling my quivering corpse. If I went back in time and told myself that this was one of those few games worth persevering with, even if it does really piss you off, I wouldn't have believed myself (actually I'd mostly just be annoyed that I'd had the opportunity to travel through time and had wasted it talking about a computer game, without the foresight** to bring some winning lottery numbers).
But time, contrary to popular opinion, can be a kind mistress when she wants to. The version of Bloodlines that I played and actually completed recently was vigorously patched every which way from Sunday. Perhaps there are some purists out there who will snort and say this is not the true experience, that I had an easy ride, that I'm a whiny little Liberal pansy who should bend over and gratefully receive the merciless learning curve of the original version: maybe, but I'll tell them this- I enjoyed the game, and was surprised at how well it all hanged together.
Oh, and fuck off. I'd want to tell them that too.
First impressions can be bad though. Although a decent looking title at the time (it was the second game based on the Source engine, the first being an obscure shooting game of little historical importance) the cold and inevitable passage of time shows it to be rather fuglier now. 'Functional', I believe, is the polite euphemism that we all tacitly agreed to use at that secret mountain summit which we all swore never to mention. It's still got that nice Source water and whatnot, and the framerate and loading times go like the clappers on a modern rig, but the textures are all too often lacking, leading to things looking a bit sparse. In fact as far as graphics go time nearly always has her 'cruel mistress' leather brassiere on, riding whip grasped enthusiastically in hand. It does urban squalor quite nicely, but this is more through sheer force of dialogue and setting: the streets themselves are thinly populated; the rooms often painfully empty and dull. Not a looker, then...but does she have a nice personality?
Bloodlines charms not with its looks, but with its brains. Wait, actually not it's brains: more it's filthy, dirty mouth. Where S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (how I hate typing that) created a visually and aurally striking world locked in a spiral of decay, populated solely by idiots talking a load of shit and gibberish about nonsense, Bloodlines has a world of rather crude visuals but brains where it counts. When people talk about sex in Bloodlines they don't do it in the tittering, inane, secondary school way so beloved of most games that deal with the subject. When characters swear they do so because it makes sense for them to swear, not because they want to impress the sweaty, prepubescent tykes whom that sort of thing impresses. I really can't stress enough how nice it is when a game treats you like a grown-up. As loath as I am to illustrate this with a spoiler (but I will): there's a character who you find out has a multiple-personality disorder, formed in her youth when she was sexually abused by her father. Yeah, so you've seen it on Heroes, but Bloodlines did it first. With vampires, which is always a checkmate in my book.
The thing about looks is that some mistakes are hard to forgive. Bad animation is a perpetual thorn lodged in my eye because it's always there, gyrating in your face every bit as unconvincingly as a Morrowind lap-dancer. Finding yourself visually accosted by ugly textures? Hey, just squint, everything's a blur anyway: worst case scenario, slap a couple of eye patches on and use your imagination. Maybe buy a new graphics card? That might help. But bad animations? They're so hard to escape, cackhandedly lolloping around in your peripheral vision all the time, waving their arms and generally making a fool of themselves. There's one chunky monster in particular that you'll spend a good chunk of the game shooting into chunks, a kind of angry, biting head that runs around on two arms and hugs people to death. It is, in one handy acronym, SPA: Spectacularly Poorly Animated. How, exactly, did this happen?
Late stages of development of Vampire: the Masquerade- Bloodlines
Andy, the project manager, sits at his desk. David, a programmer, approaches...
DAVID: Hey Andy, I was just looking at the latest build and...um... who did the animation on these monsters?
ANDY: Oh, you noticed! That was my son. Yeah, it was his work experience. Talented young chap, isn't he?
DAVID: ...Yeah, sure! Yeah. Uh...but maybe...we could just get one of our guys to...ya know, have a quick look at it, check it over?
ANDY: Why? You don't think there's anything wrong with it, and by extension anything wrong with my offspring, do you? Is that what you think David? Do you denigrate my progeny, David?
DAVID: No...no, of course not. I was just being...doesn't matter. I should...um...go.
David makes his excuses and shuffles off. Andy looks at him as he leaves then picks up the phone.
ANDY: Julian? Yeah, it's Andy here. I was just talking to David... I don't think he's a team player, ya know? Bad egg... I think we should lose him. What is it he does exactly?...Bug checking you say?
What, you got a better explanation? And I'll bet they hired a load of blind playtesters too- all rookie errors. There's simply no way that you can't notice how comically poorly these beasties move, especially since you slaughter about 400 of them throughout the game. And the player character's no better, shuffling about like a pony on rollerskates with a rugby ball shoved up its arse. 'What a bloody shambles this game is!' you will hopefully be spluttering, purple with indignation and ready to write to your MP. But, again, we need to keep in mind that the animation is ultimately a means to an end, and can be forgiven. So the animation's stodgier than day old porridge, but who cares when you're ambushed by shotgun toting witch-hunters, slipping into bullet time, weaving between their fire (admiring the lovely trails left in the air- kudos to whoever's responsible for that one), smashing one of them into a wall with your fists, then darting behind another to chomp on his neck and use him as a bullet shield whilst you whip out your Desert Eagle and send the final one off to a rag-doll grave?
It's atmosphere. Atmosphere's difficult to put a price on. The prettiest bump-mapped parallax-shaded vistas in the world can't convince you that they're worth spending time in if populated exclusively by drooling cretins spouting the same three lines of dialogue and handing out tedious 'go fetch my lost puppy kind sir' quests to all comers. Slow-burning quests go a long way toward helping atmosphere- don't be afraid to give it some build-up, guys. Not all quests need to be completed in twenty minutes; make them link with each other; gradually develop them into a coherent fictional world. Bloodlines grasps this principle and throttles it thoroughly, fleshing out it's world with newspaper clippings, e-mails, snippets of overheard conversation...all a bit System Shock, certainly, but Bloodlines crafts it's own universe quite artfully. Arguably this is because Troika had such a wealth of background material to work with when they made the game, but I also think there's a strong element of the designers just taking ideas and really running with them. Coming across vampires who wish they'd never been sired, despairing because they'll never see the sun rise again is genuinely affecting, and compels the player to ponder the perpetual night in which their own story takes place.
Someone mention System Shock? Scary stuff. So it is we send the game off with an honourable mention to the Ocean House Hotel, a quest that crops up fairly early in the game but stays lodged in your mind for the duration.
Of.
Your.
Life.
You're just getting the hang of this vampire business. Bullets? Hah! Bullets schmullets. You can punch bullets out of the air mid-flight; you can summon animals to do your bidding out of the aether; you can fix someone with your gaze and make their very blood boil. Your employer directs you towards a hotel on the outskirts of town: apparently it's 'haunted'. 'Big whoop' you think, cockily cocking your shotgun. So it's a bit Shining-esque, but if you've not played it, you should. Often muttered in the same breath as 'Shalebridge Cradle', it made me whimper like a puppy trapped in a shoebox. It does an excellent of job of giving you a real fear of ghosts, making you yearn to be out of the place and facing up against some good old fashioned ghouls or vampires: anything that feels a fucking bullet. It's a strange feeling to assume the role of a supernatural being and still be scared of things that go bump (and scream) in the night, and is in no way the only interesting or absorbing quest. Objectively speaking (about something inherently subjective...) I would say I've seen scarier things in games than the Ocean House Hotel, but it's impact, putting you firmly back in your place just when you were starting to get a wee bit too over-confident with yo' vampire self, cannot be easily overstated.
Pathologically reluctant as I am to end anything on too high a note, though, we should remember that Troika, at times, seemed to spend rather too many of their own character development experience points on their 'Haunted Hotel Level Design' skill, whilst clumsily neglecting their 'Not Making Interminably Endlessly Bastard Long and Cripplingly Boring Sewer Levels' skill. I always think that a good way to assess the quality of...well, anything, is to take a long look at it and say 'would anyone really give a fuck if we got rid of this?' I'd encourage Troika to consider this for their future games. Well, I would if they hadn't split up. That's called karma, for making me play through those sewers!
If you're still not convinced, consider that the game only cost me £9.99 two years ago, so can almost certainly be picked up for about 27p these days- call me stingy but I've always found a quality game even better if you can get it for less than the price of a packet of crisps.
**or should that be hindsight?
