Well then, here it finally is. After much drama, many a frag and certainly a lot of team-killing (that’d be Lyle, by the way), we’ve managed to brew our potions, let the mana flow and summon a lesser demon to forge this magazine.

If Issue 4 seems a little smaller than you remember your last Another Castle, it is. We’re sadly not immune to this contagion called the ‘economic downturn’ and one of the measures we had to take was to min(imise) our max(imum), as it were. Okay, I’ll stop these horrible puns now.

Regardless, we certainly hope you enjoy this long overdue issue and take care to keep an eye out for the competition page – there are some rather nice goodies to be won. Well, what’re you waiting for? Go grab yourselves a copy!

For those who can’t teleport into campus to pick up the physical copy, we’ve used a laser beam to magically digitise the magazine.

We met up today to discuss where we think Another Castle is going in the next academic year, and also to plan the next issue. And after copious amounts of screaming, shouting, swearing and pizza, we actually got started. We’re really looking forward to playing this year’s crop of Christmas blockbusters, and even more excited about shredding the suckers and dedicating a shrine to Modern Warfare 2 (OK, I might be biased). We’re also looking forward to Freshers’ Week – we’re not sure how it’s working yet, but our new Editor-in-Chief (my, doesn’t that sound fancy), Azfarul Islam, or Az to his mates, would definitely like to try and get some newbies on board so the whole ship doesn’t fall apart when we disappear off the face of our Imperial-centric Earth.

If you are interested in writing, designing or something-ing for Another Castle… well, there’s a great big “Contact Us” link up at the top. Why don’t you click it? I’m sure you can figure the rest out.

See you all the new year guys.

Sometimes, in the absence of anything better to do, my mum and I sit down with a cup of tea and play Oblivion. (Obviously, that’s a cup of tea each, otherwise things would rapidly become unpleasant.) We alternate who gets the controller. Two pairs of eyes often work better than one, if you can stand the backseat driving – the person who isn’t currently being flayed alive by imps often notices things the other would have missed. Mum is a pretty nifty console hack’n’slash fighter, which I hate, and I have good directional memory, which stops her running around the same room eight times looking for the way out. Plus, wisecracks are always a lot more fun when there’s someone other than your character there to hear them. It’s actually a pretty fun way to play the game.

Thank God, because otherwise I really hate Oblivion.

Honestly, I don’t really know why I don’t like it. It’s a fantasy universe. There’s a linear overall plot supported by optional side quests, a rambling world for you to explore, moral dilemmas and so on. It could justifiably have the label “RPG” applied to it. It is, in essence, identical to most of the games on my top favourites of all time list. For some reason, The Elder Scrolls series and I have just never clicked.

Oblivion – like Fallout, BioShock and dating back to some of the older pseudo-RPG look-alikes on the market – plays like a shooter. Or rather, it plays like a shooter on ketamine. Combat is first person, hack’n’slash or sniping, and consists of a large quantity of strafing, and if you’re me, not being able to turn around fast enough and wondering why the monster is behind you. And whilst I’m not claiming to be the worlds greatest console gamer, I managed Mirror’s Edge and Portal just fine, so I’m forced to conclude it may actually be a clumsy system, not just me. The stealth system is pretty neat, and some of the dungeon design is sheer genius, but bottom line, as a shooter, it’s no Half-Life.

On the flip side, it also seems to want to be an RPG. Your character is an original creation, unlike the games mentioned above, but the creation process is an ordeal. In all honesty, it seems like the personalisation of the character has been taken to ridiculous proportions as a cynical ploy to boost marketing potential – when there are hair-trigger sensitive sliders for the width, depth and length of the character’s nose, chin and eye setting on the character creation screen, things Have Gone Too Far. Hypothetically, you could have your character look however you liked. Practically, the combination of too much control and badly rendered graphics meant it took me a few days to realise my Argonian had no chin.

The other major issue for me on the RPG side is the conversation. The NPCs are wooden puppets. They talk to each other , but it’s a string of pre-generated responses which often makes no actual sense. I’ll give you an example of a conversation which has occurred as I was writing this:

“Ah, it’s you. Hello.”
<pause>
“Please, go on.”
<pause>
“They say that someone somewhere has been attacked by goblins.”
<pause>
“Hmmm. The country has seen so much political unrest since the Emperor died.”
<pause>
“Goodbye.”
<pause>
“Farewell.”

To be honest, I’d have found the world more immersive if they’d just shut up. It’s not as if I make a habit of listening into the conversations of other people as I stroll through life anyway. I was wounded and going to sell loot. I doubt their loud conversation would really have been on my character’s mind. Likewise, the responses in PC/NPC interactions are wooden and repetitive. I’m not averse to dialogue screens which make it possible to go around and repeat what you missed, but the one-word topic prompters given for your character remove the opportunity for them to develop any kind of discernable personality. The persuasion system for making merchants like you plays as a mini game featuring four styles of conversation and four “quantity” segments, where the player has to match up the biggest segment to the conversational styles the NPC likes best. Again, it’s a nice idea but in practical reality it just results in NPCs smiling at coercion and implying any joke your character tells is crude. Goodbye characterisation, hello dumb-but-muscular hero of the realms. Mum gets around this by playing a slightly dim but likeable Argonian named Horace, but then, she spends most of her time picking flowers in the wilderness and murdering goblins, so maybe social interaction just isn’t high up on Horace’s list.

I suppose, at the end of the day, that’s my problem with Oblivion. The world is beautiful, and a lot of thought has gone into the design (the alchemy system, in particular, is excellent). It’s a good game – but that’s it. It’s noticeably a game. The RPG attributes don’t make me care enough or connect enough with the character to feel immersed, and the shooter elements are rarely tense. Monsters walk back and forth along a single line, posing at the end of each wander in order to give you a better shot. The connection just isn’t there. In all honesty, that’s probably why it’s a good one to tag-team. Wisecracks and backseat driving can’t break an immersion which never existed.

Well, it’s up, finally. Issue 3 of Another Castle is now available for you to down and peruse at your pleasure. You can acquire it from the magazine page – just click the picture.

Oh, by the way, Jen is annoyed she doesn’t have a Sim on the inside cover like everyone else. If anyone wants to mock up a green-haired, evil psychopath for next time, I’m sure she’ll be ecstatic.

The Sims 3 really missed a trick. Sure, people are a little more lifelike, but only when they’re doing normal things, with normal people controlling them. Trouble is, I’m not normal.

Tell me, why don’t my Sims act like they should when I wall them up, or take the damn ladder out of the swimming pool (can you still do this? I haven’t actually tested it). Why is it that when I’ve taken away the walls and replaced them with plaster, they don’t start pounding on where the door used to be? Why, eight hours in, are they not clutching their knees and rocking? And why isn’t there a Lord of the Flies moment when they’re trapped with another incomprehensible and infuriating Sim?

Get to work, Maxis.

I’ve been programming ever since I was 12, when I cracked open a copy of C for Dummies and tried to figure out what all the weird curly braces meant. I loved the style of that book: the first thing it told you to write was a program that spat out “Goodbye, cruel world!” in an attempt to cast off the shackles of convention, and then it told you to ignore half of what you’d written and that it’d explain it later. Perfect for a 12-year old with the attention span of a hyperactive butterfly.

When I tell people this, they always react with derision, shock, snarkiness or, if they’re about to ask me a computer-related question, elation. What they never ask, with a couple of notable exceptions, is “why?” You see, the reason I picked up C programming is because I read, most likely in a copy of PC Gamer, that Quake III Arena was written in C. At the time, I was a huge fan of Quake III (the demo – I didn’t have the patience to save up for the real thing, nor would the wonderful people at Gamestop have looked down at my pre-pubescent features and willingly handed over a copy of the 15-rated Nirvana-inducer), and I wanted to know how to make games just like it.

What’s that? I should get to the point before you finish making up your mind to stab me in my sleep? Fine, here we go. Today, I came across an article from 2005 detailing the square root algorithm used by Quake III, most likely originally coded by the geniuses that worked at 3dfx (and not the fools who ran it). Now, I understand that out of the four of you that read this, three of you will not care how a computer finds the square root of a number, but that’s not really what I want to talk about. Suffice it to say that computers usually have an operation built into the hardware for finding the square root of a number, and that id’s software implementation was faster than the instruction that was built into the chip. Someone out there found that if you were willing to accept a higher margin of error, you could get away with combining very few simple instructions into a passable function which was much faster than the standard way of doing things. This, to me, encompasses what Quake was all about: pushing the boundaries to make a fantastic game. The tools the guys at id were given weren’t good enough, so they made their own, they made them better, and they made damn sure they kicked ass from day one.

That “day one” concept is important. Time and time again, we’re seeing developers release patches in the first few days after release. You often hear people comment on negative reviews with “Don’t worry, I hear the developers are going to patch that soon.” The attitude of “ship first, fix later” is one born largely of laziness and a lack of enthusiasm for the very project the developers are working on. It smacks of an Electronic Arts-like culture, where a game’s release date is based more on public holidays and trade shows than its quality and progress. To make a game great, you don’t just need a solid pitch – everybody working on it has to have the same enthusiasm they had when they first uttered the magic words to the lead designer: “Wow, that sounds awesome!” Have you ever wondered why the indie gaming scene is killing it right now? If you’re an indie developer, you’re the boss. If the enthusiasm stops, you don’t release the game. I have no doubt that the number of indie games out there is far greater than the number of professional games: it’s just that the bad ones, the unfinished ones and the flawed ones don’t often see the light of day. I’m sure I have eight or ten sitting on a hard drive somewhere which I wouldn’t even show my mates.

Of course, there’s a downside to putting your all into a game, and polishing the hell out of it until it’s perfect. It’s the same with any medium, any project, any piece of art. It’s never perfect. There’s always something more to be done. I think this is what happened with Duke Nukem Forever: the team was never truly happy with their project, and management was too sentimental to stop them, so they kept plugging away, completely writing and rewriting everything from the ground up until the whole company ground to a halt. It’s a damn shame, because you never really know when to stop – it’s just an arbitrary line in the sand. “We’re not done yet” plagues some developers more than others – Valve are renowned for it, but I don’t see it being a huge problem in the long term: if your game is exciting enough, journalists will write previews, people will find out about it and they will force you to get it out the damn door. Just please take a lesson from the current innovators of the industry – the indie devs out there – and make sure it’s the game you said you were going to make; the game you’re proud of; the game you want nothing more than to sit down and play.

One of the things I highly revere in a game is when the developers go out of their way to craft a unique universe that’s believable in its own quaint ways. EA’s Dead Space is one that attempts to do so; it’s not brilliantly conceived but it still has a sense of identity. In order to better flesh out this IP, EA also decided to supplement it with a fully voice-acted webcomic series as well as an animated direct-to-DVD feature, both media serving as a precursor to the events in the game. Now that we got our hands on a copy of Dead Space, I thought it would be interesting to check out what the film version had to offer.

As expected, the plot is pretty trite and at worst, a little confusing. As head of the security detail for the “planet-cracker”-class USS Ishimura, tough-as-nails Alissa Vincent needs to keep her wits about and her team-mates alive as she deals with multi-limbed mutates monstrosities hellbent on mauling anything with a pulse. As far as survival horror plots go, everything falls neatly into place so all you have to do, really, is shut off your brain and take in the action. Interestingly, skirting around the edge of the actual fighting is what makes Downfall less slasher and more macabre. There’s an air of mystery surrounding the strange obelisk known as the “Artifact” as well as a psuedo-religious conspiracy regarding the “Unitologists”; it’s not brilliant but hey, a decent attempt was made to prevent this from turning into a Jason X.

I also have to say the artwork’s not half bad, being not completely dissimilar to the stylings of Titan A.E. Voice-acting is solid across the board and there’s an eerie rendition of “Twinkle, twinkle little star” that makes up in spades for the lacklustre soundtrack.

While the 74 minutes I spent watching Downfall was largely forgettable, in the end, it achieved its supreme goal: it whetted my appetite for warming up a game of Dead Space. Kudos to EA for trying something different and more or less succeeding with it.

A gaming hobby is generally a steady one; there are hardly very many surprises that can make us truly genuflect with awe. Innovations come and go and we, as gamers, move on like the animals of the Serengeti, from one water hole to the next, unfazed and unperturbed. Every once in a while though, comes something that stirs up the horde. Like a group of hungry lionesses, they stalk from behind, sizing up our numbers, willing one or a few to break away.

OnLive wants to be those lionesses and it wants us to be the unwary gazelles and the odd zebra or two who decide that there’s nothing wrong with trotting over to relax under the shade of yonder tree. Okay, enough with the metaphors already. What is OnLive, you ask?

As it stands, OnLive is mostly a concept, a remarkably ambitious one at that. When suggestions are made that console-makers won’t be able to compete until 2022 (“We have at least 11 years to establish our business before there is a clone”—Steve Perlman, Founder of OnLive), you know that someone wants to make his point and resolve quite clear; OnLive is apparently the next step forward in bringing gaming to masses. Imagine this scenario: you’ve not tinkered with your PC hardware for while and it’s fallen behind enough such that the new-fangled Mirror’s Edge game everyone’s raving about will chug on your system. So instead of going through the pain of upgrading all the while trying to create a semblance of future-proofing (a plan fraught with fail, usually), you decide to just pay for the game and run it as is. Is that possible? Doesn’t that sound like a console? Well, ‘I’m not sure’ and ‘yes’ are the answers.

See, what one is doing is actually subscribing to a service from whence you purchase your full games. The quirk here is that you’re not actually going to play them on your godforsaken machine: that, you’re not. Rather, somewhere in some distant land lies a cloud computing server with more powerful hardware than you’ll ever see in your lifetime (for the average gamer, that is) and that is what actually runs the game. All you have to do, in Matrix terms, is “jack in” and let the system deal with the grunt work. *cue a very Neo “Woah!”* According to Steve Perlman, “It took many years of development, testing, and refinement to get it to work through the vast range of Internet hookups in the home” (OnLive Interview, MTV Multiplayer). He also added: “To make OnLive work involved fundamental work in psychophysical science; custom chip, hardware and wireless engineering; complex real-time software — from the lowest- to highest-level, and real-time network engineering down to the sub-packet level.” Now, this sounds too good to be true and you’re probably wondering how the magic happens.

Firstly, claims have made from OnLive’s parents that it actually uses a video compression algorithm that can “encode and decode video into data in about one millisecond” (1/1000ths of second). Yes, that’s what you’re actually going to be playing: literally a “video”-game. And I hate the fact that I made that stupid pun but for once, it makes sense. That’s why, all you—the gamer—will need is a PC capable of receiving said data and then decoding it while you do what you have to with your preferred control system (keyboard, mouse or OnLive’s proprietary wireless controller) and then the end-user data is sent back to the server. Alternatively, you can use OnLive’s own “micro” console which is a USB-powered dongle of sorts that houses an HDMI port (for output to an HDTV) and an Ethernet port, among other things. This micro console is being pitched as a “competitively priced” video decoder that is specifically designed to carry out the OnLive dream as efficiently as possible. It also boasts Bluetooth connectivity and optical output for audio.

Something as revolutionary like this will surely ignite the masses and it has clearly done so, with polite yet flaming words being hurled already. Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbutter wants this “to be brilliant so much that it’s almost painful” but offers warnings to the ambitious developers on a technical level. He speaks of the hardware issues particularly in terms of numbers when it comes to servicing the clientele as well as flaws he sees with the video encoding technology. These are important particularly given that OnLive will apparently be able to output 720p video at 60FPS whilst taking into account the constant end-user to server data streams with regards to input signals and its corresponding response. No mention has been made of the resolutions that will be achievable when playing on a standard PC monitor. Similarly, the very first warning bell in gamers’ minds would be that of latency. Having run his own Counterstrike server for a while, Another Castle writer Derek Chow commented, “Running something as old as CS1.6 still gave us hell with regards to latency and [expletive indicating faeces]“. Since instead of optimised game data streams, encoded video streams are being passed, one also wonders about the bandwidth requirements. Those, too, are high: “standard def” will require a minimum of 1.5Mbps whereas “720p60″ hungers for a meatier 5Mbps.

In response to Mr Leadbutter, visionary Steve Perlman defended his product with some interesting numbers: 9 content partners (including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and THQ), a round trip latency from “pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen” of less than 80ms and that the custom chip running these complex algorithms costs “under $20 to make”.

Now, all this is very exciting and I personally can’t wait to see how the drama unfolds. Until then, I have a simple question for Mr Perlman: What the hell is psychophysics and what does it have to do with OnLive?

If I were ever a Pokémon I think I’d be a Psychic type. My primary attacks would be Verbosity and Hyphen Bullet. Yeah, thought I’d share that.

Except now. Now it’s a game.

Another Castle resumes normal service next week. Hang on in there!