Session 1

So I shll take you through my first session playing Albion.

The game starts with a very odd (and, I'm sorry to have to say it) cheaply made CGI dream sequence. A yellow glowing figure flies through a sort of water green limbo. As it does, it goes past various coloured bubbles, containing (presumably) symbolic objects like apples, butterflies, tanks, spooky faces. That sort of thing.

As you fly onwards your yellow glowy chap explodes some of the bubbles and grows spikes all over him. The climax of the dream is the chap being sucked into an explosion.

here is a youtube link to a video of it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7qgie2lga4

From here we cut to Tom Driscoll (28-year-old, terran, Level 3 pilot)waking up and saying "Crumbs! Such a vivid dream! And I don't remember ever dreaming in colour before!" - odd. I don't think I'VE ever dreamed not-in-colour...

NOW I get to play the game.
I am driving Tom around his personal quaters on The Toronto - a super high-tech space ship. Turns out that Tom doesn't own very much that he can pick up - only a jar. Thankfully the jar will probably come in handy - the inventory screen tells me it can be used by a huge range of people! It lists all the character classes who can make use of any item you pick up. For the jar this includes : Pilots, scientists, warriors, Technicians, Druids, Enlightened ones, Oqulo Kamuloses and Dji-Kas Mages. Looking forward to findout who these guys are!

Saddly, Tom refuses to do anything with the jar. At least, I haven't worked out how to make him do anything with it yet. He won't look in it and I can't put things in it. But maybe this is just because I've not read the manual (which reminds me, there's a load of back story in there you might find interesting - I'll try and remember to give you the jist of it later on).

Anyway, after having a nose at my stats screen (which is lovely by the way - it's a bit like the Ultima 7 paper doll - only full-screen, not floating. You have a little picture of your guy with the various slots he can carry things in marked about his person.) I swan out into the corridor.

Here I'm accosted by my hidious girlfriend Christine. "I had that dream again" I tell her. "As if I care? Didn't you hear the explosion?"

"Explosion?" I respond - obviously it didn't wake me up, but it might explain the blowing-up butterfly bubble in my dream?

"Yes, your chum Snoopy Beagle - the aptly named government snoop who is only really referenced in passing, but who has the only comedy name out of any of us - blew himself up by using the COM unit (space phone) while we were using the over c-drive (warp speed). He should've known not to do that."

"Oh, that's a pain, now I'll have to take Dr Hofstedt down to the new planet today instead"

"Yeah - aparently Snoopy's body was burst ALL OVER THE PLACE."

"Never mind, Hofstedt doesn't seem like SUCH a douche. It'll all probably be fine."

"I wish I could see the gore. But they're guarding the COM room so no-one's allowed to"

"See you later, love".

[NOTE: I'm paraphrasing these conversations to give you the jist. I've not played the game before so I can't be POSITIVE I'm remembering to mention everything that will later turn out to be important. But I'll do my best]

After this conversation I wander around reading news feeds (entertainingly one of these claims that there is still no single-european-currency because Germany keeps refusing to play ball) and chat to a few characters to get the jist of what's going on.

The most chatty was Hofstedt who explained:

"This ship belongs to a space multi-national evil corporation. It is a mining ship that turns into a giant metal organism when it gets to the planet, builds invinsible robots to protect itself and then basically eats the entire world (firing the bits back to earth in capsules). Then when it's finished doing that, it melts itself and its robots down and fires as much of the resultant metal back to earth as it can before it dies"

"Interesting. Tell me about yourself though..."

"I am a government snoop, sent on this space mission to make sure that the evil corporation doesn't eff up any planets where there are living beings. Humanity already effed over the two intelligent specieses it has previously encountered by greedily smashing up their home worlds, so the ineffective earth government has sent me and Snoopy Beagle along to make sure you guys don't do anything like that again. THANKFULLY your boss says Albion is totally deserted, so it's unlikely to happen again when we turn The Toronto into a planet eating super robot."

"shame about snoopy isn't it"

"Yes. But this way it means I get to come along on the space ride instead of him. Sweet!! Also - I wish I could go look at where he was blown up. Aparently there was gore EVERYWHERE! Awesome!"

"anything else I should know"

"Humanity resurrected the tiger"

Other people I spoke to included NED the android (he's the avatar for the Toronto's on-board AI. He has quite a natty beard. Also Akira the chief engineer and Joe (my bezzy mate). The only obviously important stuff I learned from these guys is that they are all desperate to go have a look at the gore in the COM room and that Hofstedt is a peaceful environmentalist, but that there are EVIL environmentalists who filled a coral reef with bombs to prove a point.

Since everyone else wants to see the COM room gore, I got Joe to give me the pass-code for the door to the ladder to the secret passage that leads there. It seems there's this sort of "Below stairs" arangement where technicians and cleaning bots have a seperate set of corridors they go around in, and no-one's thought to lock or guard the below stairs door into the COM room.

Entertainingly the passcode is a 4-digit number, but instead of entering it on a key-pad I just select it using a slide-bar that scrolls between 1 and 9,999. Had games developers really not sussed the key-pad by 1995?

Anyway - down I go into the basement area - and here the camera changes to a first person view.

I don't know why they had 2 different engines for the game - but exploring dungeon areas via this first person mode is quite entertaining. It makes the environment seem much more enclosed than when you're wandering around vith the raised 3rd person sort-of isometric camera in the bulk of the game. Mind you, the basement environment itself was made up of enormous empty rooms, so it wasn't exactly a claustrophobic experience...

Anyway, after navigating a simple set of button-and-pressure-pad puzzles I find my way out into the COM room.

Unsurprisingly I guess (considering the family friendly rating of the game) there's no gore at all. There's a smashed up chair and that's about it.

HOWEVER - there's a gun someone's dropped! And you're not supposed to have guns on the ship!!!! I picked it up thinking it might come in handy... Then I thought "I can't be bothered to go round the dungeon bit again, I'll just walk out the door now..." Which was stupid because the guards got peed off and took the gun away from me. I guess I should've known better.

I did considering re-loading and taking the long way round so that I could keep the gun. But then felt that probably since I'd been dumb, I ought to live with the consequences.

At this point I felt ready to set off for my flight to albion with Dr Hofstedt..!