Sunday 28 February 2010

Session 5

So at this point I'm guessing that there was a third human on me and Hofstedt's space ship. Probably some kind of spy for the mining corporation. Perhaps the spear was meant for one of us two instead of this Akiir guy?

Janiis seems pretty bummed out by this all and just sends everyone away. Her poor grandson must be peeved since he now, presumably, doesn't get to be an adult. Or, at the very least, his big day is ruined.

"I'm going to have to get Drirr onto this at once" she says

"Who's that then? The head of the police?"

"No, he's the minister for Human Affairs"

"Seriously? That was quick!! We've only been here a few weeks and we've not even met this Drirr - what does he know about humans?"

"Err - seriously? What're you on about?"

"Well, I'm just amazed that you have a minister for human affairs when there's only 2 of us (and potentially some more with an invincible robot army somewhere else on the planet)"

"Only 2 of you? Are you for real?"

"You mean there's more of us?"

"Err - blates! Humans have lived on Albion for forever!"

"WHAAAAAA????"

"Er - yeah. Hold on, no-one told you? About all the humans who live here?"

"What the eff?!?!?!?"

"Ok. Well you can talk more about this with Sebai-Giz Frill in a bit. But first there's some bad news for you."

"How bad?"

"I can't let you leave here"

"That's pretty bad"

"UNTIL..."

"ooh, getting better..."

"...you solve this murder!"

"Easy! That guy with the mask on did it!"

"Ha ha, not so simple as that. That masked human was a hired assassin. One of the clans on humans on this planet is the best assassin society ever. They never kill people for themselves because there's no need - people give them what they want because they're hardcore ninja killers. But people pay to have them kill other people for them all the time. You need to find out who did THIS murder..."

"but why me? I'm possibly the LEAST equipped person here to do this! I mean, I don't know the victim, I don't understand the local politics, I'm not trusted by the locals..."

"Ah, well, there's a convenient law about this sort of thing that means you have to do it. You see, when someone round here goes mental and does a killing, it's the murderer's family's responsibility to work out who the killer was..."

"hold on - the family of the killer have to solve the crime? How does that work? If you didn't know who the killer was, what family does the crime solving?"

"That's never come up somehow. And probably the police would solve the crime in those circumstances. Anyway, since a human did the killing and you're the closest thing to being in his family that we have round here, YOU have to solve the crime."

"Seriously? I mean, I'm a pilot and this guys an earth-government snoop"

"hello"

"It's not like we're a big family like one of the local sets with plenty of people to throw at the problem..."

"Shut up now. Here comes [a female Isaki police officer whose name I forgot to write down in my notes] to help you. Now get on with solving this crime or else you're not allowed to leave this continent and find out what happened to the planet eating space-ship you arrived on that is somehow a lower priority than this."

Ok, so this is quite exciting! A murder to solve! Up until this point I'd been happily just wondering at the beautifully presented alien culture - but now I've got something to be doing that brings a little bit of pace into the whole experience.

First things first, we go to see Sebai-Giz Frill.

Sebai-Giz means he's stolen a baby's body 20 times over! This, Tom calculates, means he's over 600 years old!

"Hello Sabai-Giz - we're on the hunt for a human killer!"

"Ah, well now, I can tell you everything I know about humans on Albion"

"Cool"

"So humans have been around here longer than I have (so AT LEAST 600 years) and there's three clans of them as far as we know. There's the humans who live at Beloveno, the humans at Umajo and the ones just near by who are the Knget Kamulos - which means 'people from Kamulos'"

"Well tell me about the Kamulos folk first please."

"Ok. Well they're humans who aparently live in the style of their forefathers and are killers for hire. They're the best killers on the planet, despite my species having claws and fangs to do killings with."

"Cool - so who would hire them to kill Akiir?"

"Well it'd have to be an Isaki, since Akiir had nothing to do with humans so I don't think any humans would have a motive to hire a killer to kill him."

"hmm... that's not very helpful... everyone round here's an Isaki..."

"Shall I tell you about the other clans?"

"Well ok..."

"It's not DIRECTLY relevant. But the Umajo are awesome miners who dig up precious metals and earn a packet as the only people trading in the stuff"

"How come they're the only people who trade in precious metals? Our scans of your planet suggest that it's totally PACKED with useful materials. EVERYONE should be digging the stuff up..."

"Ah well, only the Umajo can because they're the ones with the powerful magic that tames the goddess"

"eh what?"

"well you see, the goddess REALLY doesn't like people mining on this planet."

"Oh, so, it's like... Some kind of superstition?"

"ha ha ha, no. Seriously, the goddess bads up anyone who mines on this planet except the Umajo"

"For real?"

"yeah. I've seen it with my own eyes. People try and dig up the precious metals and BAM - earthquakes, cataclysms and the summoning of Horrible Beings. Honestly, anyone who doesn't know what they're doing DEFINITELY shouldn't do any mining on this planet or else they'll be killed up HARD by the goddess..."

"But that's what the crew of our whole space-ship was coming here to do! My Girlfriend's on that space ship!! ARG! What if they go here and were immediatly eaten by a Horrible Being???!!! WE HAVE TO SOLVE THIS MURDER AND FIND THEM!!! NOW!!!!!"...

Session 4

Ok. So re-load. Let's not bother with the basement right now. I've trawled the house for better weapons but can only find kitchen knives. Stupid guards on the stupid Toronto pinching my gun. Mind you, knowing my luck it'd have had no bloomin' ammo with it.

Anyway, I explored the house a little more and found there was a SECOND basement! This one wasn't a first-person basement and was "A little cooler" than the ground floor (this was something Tom spontaneously announced when we got down there. I didn't think it was significant myself, but since the game made a point of mentioning it, I wonder if maybe it will be...)

The second basement if full of people who've been injured in the hunt. They're all wandering around saying things like "I could do with a sleep - I hope I don't get infected". Only one of them would have a conversation with me:

"Dsarii-Ma" (this is alien for "hello")

"Hi, can you tell me about your job?"

"I am a hunter, but I got effed up by a Krondir and now I have to recouperate in this basement. Giria's looking after me" (Giria is Mandy's real name).

"Giria's nice isn't she..."

"Yeah - she looks after us all really well. But she's quite sensitive so be careful what you say to her..."

"What can you tell me about the hunt?"

"I can't say anything about that."

"Really? But you're a hunter. And it's not a secret hunt because everyone else is allowed to talk about it... Are you sure there's no tips you can give me about dealing with Krondirs? I mean, you never know when I might come across some in a basement at the other end of the house..."

"Goodbye human"

"err - ok... Mental"

Nothing much else to see down here (apart from an open cesspool, which doesn't seem to ME like the kind of thing you should put in the same space as all the sick people - no wonder they're worried about infections!) so I set off out for the big city.

Before I leave, I stopped by Giria's room so that she can join my party if she's going to. This being an RPG I guessed that she might be a healer character class who would be handy to have with me.

"Ah! Tom Driscoll! I'm glad you're actually ok and not horribly dead from getting up before I told you it was safe to. Repairing a human was a fun change from repairing half-dead isaki who've been badded up on the hunt"

At this point the game offers me two dialogue options that went along the lines of:

1) "Thankyou for looking after us Giria - without you we would've died!"

or

2) "Geeze Louise! I got better quickly so I didn't have to look at YOUR hideous face and listen to your shrewish winging!"

Normally I wouldn't be sure which was the right option, but thankfully that mental huntsman told me that Giria was sensative - so I probably SHOULDN'T call her a horrific shrew.

My instincts prove right! I talk sweetly to her and she gives me some lovely healing potions, but so far she's not offered to come along.

I ditch the shrew and head out of the front door...

Now I have to make a small confession. When I said I'd never played this game before that was only MOSTLY true. Back when it came out I played the demo of it - which I think must've been on a cover-disk of PC Gamer. That was definitely the magazine I read the review of it in. I only very hazily remember that demo so all of the stuff I've seen so far has been ALMOST as fresh to me as if I was seeing it for the first time - but I'd like to announce that from this point on everything that happens is 100% new to me.

And here's a surprise! The town is in 3D! Stepping out of the front door I find myself in first-person mode looking across the crazy, mossy, canal addled streets of whatever-this-place's name is (I've never quite got round to noting down the name of this town I don't think... Unless it's "Jirinaar"... I know the continent is "Nakiridaani"... I'll make a note to clear this up next time I switch the game on...)

My glimps of the street is only brief as an Isaki soldier strolls up and announces

"Ah! I'm glad I arrived when I did! Janiis the Sebainah wants to see you RIGHT NOW!"

and off I'm whisked to the council house in the centre of town!

The council house is back in isometric view and it looks pretty much exactly like the house I woke up in, only laid out differently. Janiis's office has it's own little in-door moat which is cool - although it does mean that when you go to talk to her you have to listen to the running-water sound effect for the whole conversation. At this point I just took my headphones off. The music's not interesting enough to be worth being made to need a wee.

"Hello humans - I'm interested to have a look at you. We have powerful magic here, but your ship is something else! It nearly killed a bunch of people when it arrived - but I'm sure you didn't mean for it to..."

"Yeah. Sorry about that. And if you thought our rubbish pod was good, wait 'til you see the massive space station that turns into a planet eating robot with invulnerable robot minions that help tare up the whole world".

"woah!"

"Sweet eh? Yeah, it should've arrived by now though. You've not heard anything about it have you?"

"Um no, nothing so far..."

"Oh, don't worry though - even though everyone else on board is a corporate puppet out to make money with no regard to the well-being of the locals, they DEFINATLY won't destroy the world once they see you guys!"

"Phew! Well in that case, why don't you come to my great great grandnephew's coming of age ceremony in 2 day's time? After that I'll arranged transport for you to other continents where they might've heard about a giant killer mining robot touching down..."

I'll be honest I was a little suspicious about this. She basically told me to hang around for a couple of days "Getting to know about Isaki culture" until this celebration occurs. But why would they need ME there for that? I mean, you don't see the Prime Minister saying to aliens on first contact "Yeah, you can go off and find out if any of the rest of your species are here... BUT FIRST, you absolutely MUST come to my son's christening!"

Anyway, I decide to make the most of it and go for a first-person stroll around the town.

Technical limitatins aside, the town IS pretty impressive. When I step outside it's night time, but it's ok because I can "Wait" wherever I like until it's daylight. Irritatingly, a slip of the tracker-ball (I'm actually using a rolee polee: http://roleepolee.com/ ) means I wait 21 hours and it's dark again already so it's done me no good at all. But still the town looks good at night too. The large buildings all have huge glowing domes and there're huge areas of flowing water breaking up the streets. It's not got any rows of buildings as such, instead it's broken down into large clustry buildings like the one I started in. Lots of people all live in one huge house rather than each family having an individual property. Having this section in first person mode really does bring home the sense of wandering around a strange city gorping like a tourist at the sights! It's a shame there aren't tourist attraction style things to go look at, but then the developers had probably put all their resources into building what's already there before they start thinking about complimentary nicities...

I wander around until I accidentally wander right out of the city altogether and suddenly we're in another view-point again!

Outside the city walls the game is isometric again, but this time greatly zoomed out so that you get a great view of the amazing countryside with it's green and orange trees.

The city is surrounded with a high mossy wall that's been grown out the ground and just outside is an itinerant farmer with his herd of "minins"

I can't accurately describe what a minin looks like alas because from this distance they're about 5 pixels wiggling around like digital worms. But their owner tells me their meat is nicer than the stuff the hunters bring in and cheaper and easier to get.

"EVERYONE IS TIRED NOW!" cry my characters when I've finished chatting with the farmer, so I have a rest out in the open.

When I awake, it turns out that it's time for adulthood celebration and I have to go directly back to Janiis in the council house.

So here we are, standing around in the main hall and Janiis introduces everyone:

"Everyone, this is Tom Driscoll. Tom this is Akiir - he's the head of the "formers" (the Dji-Fadh, y'know, the ones who use magic to grow all our buildings)"

Akiir steps forwards and says hello.

"And this is everyone else" (Janiis can't be bothered to name everyone. They're probably not important.)

JUST THEN! A masked figure turns up! Tom is startled to see that it's another human!

Another human?!?!

But before anyone has a chance to say anything, the human lobs a spear at Akiir and scarpers! "STOP THAT MAN!" shouts Janiis... But it's too late. He's vanished, and Akiir... IS DEAD!!!!

Sunday 21 February 2010

Session 3

I'm free to wander around the house for a while before I go to see this big-chief, so I took a stroll and found the kitchens. This was where Krina the former huntress and her bezzy mate Gridri (the master cook) hang out.

It turns out that these space cat people eat exceedingly spicy food (Tom makes an allusion to having a "bucket" with him all the time during his time in bed after the crash as a result of the spiciness. But I wasn't sure what that was meant to imply...) ALSO - I'm pretty sure the aliens are called the Isaki

I had a word with Krina about her job:

"Well, I was this awesome hunting type of lady. But then I got pregged up and now I have to stay home with the kids. So I thought I'd help Gridri out in the kitchens."

"Tell me about your kids?"

"How about instead of that I tell you about how Isaki ladies are only fertile for 3 months in a year. We call these three months Fadhim and have a big festival of procreation when it happens. During the festival it's taboo to sleep with your partner's siblings."

"Um..."

"oh yeah, it's totally fine on this planet to sleep with your husband or wife's brothers and sisters. EXCEPT when it's Fadhim."

"So... um... errr... I've got to go..."

Gridri the cook had nothing useful to say for himself - although he did give me some food supplies - so I headed off to look around some more. I found the loos (which look sort of like a large raised platform with a few holes in it for pooping into) and a faintly phallic fountain that was described as squirting out water with a "strong, pulsating motion".

The fountain is the only thing I've found so far that looks like the sprite is made up of baked out images of a 3D model. As such, it's pretty rubbish looking compared to everything else.

Actually, before we carry on, one of the things I love about this game is that you have make sure you've got food for your team. I love RPG's with micro-management elements. So things like your team getting hungry, or complaining that they're tired, is great as far as I'm concerned. One day I'd love to make an RPG where you have to constantly balance and micro manage your characters - they'd probably not get much done (you couldn't concentrate on keeping their shoes properly maintained AND deal with a complicated intrigue) but it'd be quite fun.

Anyway, so there's this pulsating fountain and in the next room I meet Sebai-li Wrinn! The ancient leader of the clan!

Only get this, looks like Mandy was lying - this guy's clearly a child

"Er - I thought you were well old?" I say

"Well I am. Despite appearances, I am 57 years old - IMPOSSIBLY old for someone of our species. Only, see, the thing is - we have this awesome trick there if you put your trii on a baby's trii you can take over its body and have another life"

"Hold on. What's a trii?"

"Well it's this special organ that we all have on our faces. It allows you to steal the body of a child. But really, despite the fact that anyone can do it, you're only supposed to if the council gives you the ok."

"What happens to the baby?"

"What do you mean?"

"well... like... does the baby live on as part of you?"

"No. Babies don't have souls until they've had a few months out of the womb..."

"errrr"

At this point Sebai-Li Wrinn (which translates this: "Sebai" = person who has been through the body-snatching process, "Li" once, "Wrinn" that's just a proper noun.) explained that mostly they only saved our lives because the space-ship we landed in is made of precious precious metal. And since other people would want to claim the metal, they needed us alive so that we could sign it over to them. He also mentioned that the Jirinaaris (which is the government of all Nakiridaani) wanted to see us and that our belongings were in the basement.

Nakiridaani is the country I have landed in.

Before setting off, I have another explore and bum into Krinn, the Stri (leader) of the hunt.

"Hello, tell me about your job" ("tell me about your job" is one of 4 basic conversation options you get with all characters. The others are "What can you tell me about [SUBJECT OFF A LIST OF TOPICS THEY'VE ALREADY MENTIONED]" "What do you think of [THIS ITEM]" and "bye").

"I am the leader of the hunt. Only I'm 32 now so I'm too old to go out on the hunt. The council offered to let me steal a baby's body but I didn't do it because I'm a maniac who thinks babies have souls of their own."

"Phew! Someone sensible at last!"

"Would you like me to tell you about the sorts of things we hunt here?"

"Go on then..."

"Krondirs have two-legged predators who are totally inedible. HOWEVER we like to hunt them because they have things on their horns that are basically the same as our Triis - the organs that allow us to steal bodies. People like to have these Krondir semi-triis as ornaments! Additionally we hunt things called Warniaks - they're flying monsters that have poisonous attacks. BUT they contain a supply of spherical minerals"

"Spherical minerals?"

"Oh yes. And people pay good money for Warniak spheres."

"Fair enough..."

Other things I learned from various people include:

SIBLING LAWS - apparently, if you've got younger siblings who aren't old enough to be adults yet, you're considered to be more responsible for them than their parents are.

MAGIC USER GUILDS - there's two groups of magic users: Dji-Kas - who are sort of magic scientists, and Dji Fadh - who are basically builders who use magic.

Apparently the builders on this planet use their minds to grow regular plants into awesome buildings. This is a system that works fine until you get someone going off the rails - like Agrim.

Agrim was the leader of the Dji Fadh who, 150 years ago, was so peeved that he wasn't given permission to body-snatch a baby that he went bonkers and set the Dji Fadh HQ to grow like mad - which it has continued to do ever since.

I'm sure that much of this information will never be of any use to me at all. But since it's all mentioned I feel I ought to record it in case any of it comes in handy. It's very hard to know what things will or won't be referred to again - so sibling laws might just be a nice bit of scene setting OR it might be a crucial plot point down the line.

I was in a book shop in Warwick yesterday and found a strategy guide for "Stonekeep" the ill-fated dungeon crawl game released in the same year as Albion. The makers of that had apparently put together a huge almanac of back story about the Stonekeep world to help them build up a consistent feeling context for the game.

I never played Stonekeep, but own a copy somewhere and would love to go through it - since it's obviously heavily inspired by one of my favourite ever games: "Dungeon Master". And I'd DEFINATLY love to get hold of their almanac to see what it was like. But more importantly, I'd love to get hold of the equivalent document for Albion.

The kind of nonsense points of interest (like the season of Fadhim and the fact that some people think babies have souls after all) is something I find fascinating - especially since I now work as a games developer. I know how behind the scenes games are churned out and built in a very un-romantic way - but the way that things a developer has made up while sweating over a slice of pizza in an office translate into fascinating and absorbing details about a fictional world when they get to the player at home is almost magical!

It was about this point where I'd got up to go get my lunch. But when I came back to the game there was a message on screen telling me EVERYONE in my party was tired and I should rest.

Entertainingly, when you rest the game shows Tom and two human female strangers sat round a camp fire - Hofstedt is no-where to be seen!

When we were all rested I went to look for the basement. It's easy enough to find - you head through a door to a signpost that reads

"SUPPLY CHAMBERS. CHILDREN: THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES!"

Crickey! Consequences? What consequences...? Well I was about to find out!

Yomping down the steps the game goes first-person again. The basements are exceedingly dark, and the game now introduces another micro-management element that I love - torches! I have to light a torch and dedicate one of my characters to carrying it around. I know it's inconvenient, but I love it when a detailed game world is supported by detailed interactions with it.

I wander around a pokey but extensive cellar filled with scraps from my own space ship and jars of dried meat. There's nothing obviously very useful down here, but just as I'm starting to think I can't be bothered with the clunky first-person interface any more the roof collapses behind me and monsters appear!!!

Monsters? In the storage chambers!!!??? No wonder the children have to consider the consequences!

Combat starts immediately and I am presented with a little grid. Hofstedt and Tom are stood on squares close to the bottom, and three monsters (that I assume are Krondirs) are stood looking at me.

I'm basically unarmed at this point - Hofstedt has got a kitchen knife that he can stab with, but Tom is just holding a torch and can't fight.

This combat system is a bit strange and I can see it'll take some getting used to. Characters can move and attack, and presumably some other actions (although none were available to me).

It seems, however, that your team can't move forwards past the first 2 rows of the grid. This means that if, like Hofstedt, you only have a kitchen knife that doesn't have enough reach to get a baddy at any distance at all, you just have to skip your go and hope you survive long enough to have a stab at the enemy when they've walked up to you.

The fight was a brutal one - Tom ran around on the back row hoping to escape the claws of the monsters while old-man Hofstedt sliced ineffectually at the first monster.

If only I'd managed to keep hold of that gun!

Alas - the onslaught was too much! Tom and Hofstedt, having survived a space crash, spent a couple of months learning an alien language and signing over the debris of their space ship, were slain by (basically) rats in a basement!

GAME OVER!

Saturday 20 February 2010

Session 2

So I turn up ready for my flight down to the boring desert planet of albion. I'm not sure why I'm even going to be honest - if anyone mentioned it, I must've forgotten. I'm going to guess that, since I'm taking Hofstedt with me I'm going to make sure there's no tiny sand mites that need protecting as a species that'll hold up the mining.

We meet up in the hanger of the Toronto, everyone says they're ready, Captain Brandt wishes us luck and away we go!

Now I'm thinking that Snoopy was probably murdered. He was a government snoop who died making a phone call - everyone THINKS it was the phone exploding because if you use phones while traveling above the speed of light they're likely to do that. BUT this gun I found suggests otherwise. But why would someone do that? And if they'd offed one snoop, are they going to try and off the other while they're at it? And if they are going to try it, wouldn't the best oppertunity be when Hofstedt is off in a tiny space pod with only one other pilot with him? Am I really sure that this whole space trip is a good idea?

Well, there were no conversation options to this effect, so looks like I'm going through with the trip anyway.

The space journey is actually pretty cool. It's not done as a cut-scene, instead you've got an in-engine sequence where you're looking at your two guys sat in the podule chatting about how the planet's a funny colour. I really like this stuff - much more interesting than a FMV would've been!

Suddenly the radio breaks up, the control panels go haywire and the ship crashes. oh bum.

I'm not dead though! I have the freaky dream from the start of the game again and wake up to a full-screen image of a weird looking room.

"Where the eff am I?!?!?" I exclaim.

Only then this cat woman (don't know her name yet, but for now we'll call her Mandy Bapsout) with her boobs complety on show springs up from the bottom of the screen!

"CAT BOOBS!" - then I slump back into a coma.

Later I wake up and Mandy's there again saying

"[arbitrary alien sounding words]"

And Hofstedt's there too saying

"[further arbitrary alien stuff]"

"What's going on Hofstedt?" I ask.

"Well we crashed. And dispite the computers on the Toronto telling us that this was going to be a desert planet, it's actually incredibly lushly vegitated with an intelligent native species who live in houses that seem to grow out of the ground!"

"How come you can speak alien then?"

"Well, conveniently, you've been in a coma for just long enough for me to pick it up. I'll teach it you too while you're getting your strength up!"

"Ace"

"Brilliantly, when the Torono gets here we'll be able to make it into a study base instead of a mining base now that we've found awesome aliens!"

"That sounds like a sensible idea"

several weeks later I'm up on my feet and exploring my new bedroom.

Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if the alien words are as arbitrary as I assumed. Someone somewhere obviously had a really strong idea of what the universe of this game was like. The characters on the Toronto had loads of irrelevant back story speech about the world, and the look and reasoning behind the alien culture all seems to have been quite thought through. It's not impossible that someone had decided to come up with enough of an alien language to cope with the small amount it would be used in the game until you learned how to hear it in English. And let's keep in mind how much the Ultima games seem to have been an inspiration - and THEY had the whole runic alphabet thing in them where you had to work out how to read the language yourself (your character didn't just do it for you).

Mind you, the game was originally all in German. So maybe it's easy to imagine that the alien language in the native versions of the game wasn't totally arbitrary - but I can imagine that if I was a localiser I'd just have made up gobble-de-gook for these lines rather than do anything clever.

Anyway - The graphics for the alien house are awesome. Everything looks like it's made of moss and there are water ducts all over the place irrigating the whole building. The floor is green a squashy looking and there are huge flowers growing all over the place. It's all totally beautiful - and from the high-point of sprite-based art. These aren't baked out renders of 3D models, they're all hand-drawn images that've had a LOT of effort put into them! Even if the characters are hidious (and I suppose you could excuse that as being the style, if you were feeling charitable) the environments are just cracking.

If you were wondering about why Mandy had her baps out by the way - Hofstedt explains that it's because the planet is hot and ALL the cat people go around naked ALL the time. He's a member of my party now and I load him up with all the alien jars and cups I can snaffle. He's a level 3 scientist so should be able to use all the jars just as well as Tom.

As I leave my bedroom Mandy runs up and says

"Oi! You shouldn't be out of bed"

"Seriosly, I'm so bored of being in bed! I'm on an alien planet for crying out loud! I want to explore!"

"ok. Have it your way, but I'm telling [incomprehensible name that I forgot to write down] about this. He's the family elder!"

So she storms off across a dainty little bridge over a stream leaving me and Hofstedt thinking

"She never mentioned a family elder before... Uh oh!"

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..!

Monday 15 February 2010

Introduction

I'm going to introduce this blog now.

I intend to play through the video game Albion. It's a PC RPG from Blue Byte released in 1995 (according to wikipedia).

I read a review of it when it came out in the UK and immediatly wanted to play it. However, I never quite got round to it. Then, in 2008, I found a boxed copy of it in a charity shop in Newcastle (this is the UK by the way - and I mean THE Newcastle. Newcastle upon Tyne). Now, another 2 years on, I've decided it's finally the time to play through it.

I was inspired to blog my way through the game by the phenomenol Blogging Ultima (http://bloggingultima.blogspot.com/). I loved being able to read someone else's journey and observations in that sequence of games! And thought that it might entertain someone else to read about Albion as much as it did me to read about Ultima.

I should introduce myself too - My name is Peter Theophilus and I'm a designer working at Blitz games (a UK indipendant video games development studio). I find games fascinating, not just as an awesome and absorbing form of entertainment but also in a professional sense. I like to think "wow, I wonder why they did such-and-such like THAT" or "Man, I wish I'd thought to do blah-de-blah like THIS" etc.

I'm hoping to go through Albion and keep a regular diary of what I did in each session, record my way through the story and note down my thoughts on what the game's like. I hope that it's interesting and if it doesn't sound like it will be, stop reading now!

Sunday 14 February 2010

The start

It is just gone 11 on Valentine's day night. My fiance is in the front room. He is playing team-deathmatch Bioshock 2 on my XBox 360 gold account with our friend down the road who is using her boyfriend's gold account.

I have just managed to get Albion running on my Asus Eee PC and am setting this blog up before I go and try to drag him away from virtually slaying anonymous over-seas splicers in my name.

But I thought that I'd mention that the interesting contrast right at the start of this blog. Chris is just starting to play a brand new FPS in a very modern way on-line on a cutting edge games console while I take the first step towards playing through a dodgy old single player RPG that (if the internet is to be believed) might even be "longer than Ultima VII"...