So I was a little surprised by his piece in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

Jason Hill, corporate shill

I guess “Corporate shill” is one of the more unpleasant names I’ve been called over the years.

Oh, Jason. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings so badly! I feel really guilty now. I didn’t intend you to spend years running that beautifully rhyming insult over and over in your head.

Look, I still don’t agree with the line he’s still running on the subject of modchips, of course: he still argues that if “the majority” of their use is piracy, it’s irrelevant what lawful purposes they have, and they should be banned – logic which would’ve banned the cassette tape, the VCR, the home PC, the internet and so on.

And as to the present issue – Jason is revisiting the subject today because of the PS3 modchip that Sony is trying to get banned in the Federal Court. I hope they fail, not because I wish to pirate games, but because I’d like to see some decent media player software developed on the HD consoles to replace the brilliant open source Xbox Media Centre from the last generation, which has never been bettered by the commercial products. The idea that increasing the functionality of a piece of hardware I’ve bought should be a crime is absurd, and offensive, and I hope those defending this action are able to win through despite the vast reserves of money that will be thrown at defeating them.

But I suspect Mr Hill’s approach to the issue is more to do with the relentlessly one-sided propaganda to which he’d be subjected as he liaises with the games industry – I doubt very much he chats often to the EFA or other public domain lobbyists, for example – rather than anything dishonest or cynical. So, with the benefit of hindsight, and the cooling passions of fading youth, I regret using the term “shill”.

Even though it did rhyme.

Those gamers who’ve never tried “jailbreaking” their hardware to increase its functionality – an AR-Max to enable backing up saves from the 8MB PS2 memory cards, an Xbox modchip to run XBMC, homebrew on the DS – does having that option available to you appeal? Or do you not mind if the people who made your console can artificially limit your use of it – and send you to jail for dare trying for more?

UPDATE 4/9: The Federal Court has apparently banned the chips permanently. A sad day for Australian consumers. Meanwhile, the necessary code has hit the internet, potentially rendering Sony’s victory somewhat pyrrhic.

Being a huge fan of the era (and the genre) I was, naturally, pretty quick to pre-order the uber-awesome feature-packed special edition, complete with A2 posters of ’50s pin-up girls and even some bonus DLC.

Flash forward to the 26th of August, and I’m at home and slowly, methodically punching in the DLC codes into my xbox before booting up the game for the first time.

Now, you need to understand something about me. My fixation with the ’30s through to the ’50s is pretty full-on. I’m one of those people who’s read most James Ellroy novels more than once, and who even tolerated ‘Mobsters’ and ‘Mulholland Falls’ despite them having almost no redeeming features as films.

This being the case, when I boot up a game like Mafia, I try to get as involved as humanly possible in the story. I don’t run around like an unruly hoodlum – I try to behave in-character as much as I can. This means a that, in a story like Mafia, I try to consider the situation the main character is in and let it guide my decisions.

Vito, the protagonist of Mafia II, quickly finds himself sleeping on his friend Joe’s couch, doing wet-work for the mob while wearing a grotty leather jacket and driving a stolen car whose plates have been changed. This seems to sum up the tone of the early game pretty well – a game that spans a decade. As the game progresses from the part of the story in the ’40s to the ’50s component, the world changes appropriately. The music, cars and the look and feel of the city shifts.

But at the beginning, you’re stuck with whatever clothes you can buy in the city of Empire Bay during the final months of World War 2 – an era defined by shortage, food & fuel rationing, et cetera.

So when I realised what the DLC had done, I was quite perplexed. Let me explain – by unlocking these pre-order DLCs, I had brought four new ’50s sports cars and some mob/vegas style outfits into the game. Cool, no?

Definitely cool. Some additional kit to make Vito look like a really successful mafioso, and some swanky new sports cars to make getting away from the cops just that much easier. The only problem is that, being bonus DLC, the content is promptly made available to you from the beginning of the game.

While the game’s story is guiding you through stealing your first car and shopping for ’40s-style clothing throughout the shops of Empire Bay, sitting in the players’ garage are four anachronistic sports cars and in his wardrobe, four outfits that there’s no way a man who’s having trouble coming up with the cash to rent his own place would be able to afford.

I dread to think how much easier the early car chases of the game would be if you drove these ’50s-styled beasts around instead of the ’30s and ’40s clunkers that dominate the roads in this chapter of the game.

Now, I’m fully aware that this is really quite a silly thing to nitpick about – but in a game where immersion in the game world is key to keeping your audience, and where such attention to detail has been paid in every aspect of the game’s visual development, it seems a bit unfortunate to throw in bonus stuff that breaks this.

Me, personally? I’d have been happy if I at least had to spend in-game cash to get the content I’ve unlocked… though I realise that I’m probably alone in this regard, and it would most likely have been a rather bad business decision had they done this.

What do you think? Have you ever obtained DLC of any kind (not third-party mods, but first-party content) that has changed the game for the worse for you? What about the actual gameplay? I suspect these fast cars will give players with this DLC an advantage in the early-game, although it’s just a theory so far. Have you ever obtained DLC that altered the difficulty of the game itself?

• New strategy game RUSE is free to try this weekend on Steam, as a method of building interest in the title. Unfortunately, the full game remains Ubi-crippled with Ubisoft’s gamer-hating “log you off if the connection is lost in the middle of a single-player game” DRM (even if you’re running it through Steam) so, I have absolutely no idea whether the full game is any good or not because I’m not going to bother downloading even a trial of it. (And I’m not alone.)

• I was going to give new comedy RPG DeathSpank a go, and went to download it on 360 before realising that there’s no way it’ll fit on my crowded 20GB hard drive. Naturally, I have thus far resisted paying Microsoft’s frankly obscene prices for a drive upgrade, and will thus be downloading the demo and possibly buying the game on PS3, where Sony will get the sweet sweet cash and not Microsoft.
• Would’ve bought the PC version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the recent Steam sale, if Australians weren’t being forced to pay 40% more than every other country. Well done, EA and local distributors – you’ve done yourselves out of another sale. Likewise 2K with its even more obscene 270% markup on the PC version of Borderlands.

I’m just one man, slowly making up for his weakness in buying the MW2 map packs.

I was lucky for this reason – I’d somehow failed to learn that NASA was putting money into developing a series of free, educational space games until the release of the first game was upon us. Moonbase: Alpha is a rather strange game. Based on the unreal engine, it’s a first/third person action/strategy game where you and up to 5 other players work to repair the life support systems of a semi-permanent base on the moon, based on the original plans to do so by NASA under George W Bush.

Things have been shaken up a bit now – Obama’s government has increased NASA’s budget and changed their goals, meaning the NASA games will likely remain the only glimpse at this particular moon base. But still, this game remains as a fun, interesting, semi-hard-scifi game which shows what that base might have been like, at least from the outside.

The actual game itself involves you and your fellow astronauts, fresh from some kind of long-distance EVA, desperately attempting to repair or replace enough of the life support systems to bring the O2 tanks back up to safe levels before your 25 minutes of remaining air are all used up.

This is accomplished by walking, jumping, driving rovers and piloting remote-controlled robots around the various damaged areas to repair and replace these parts. If you want a rough idea of the gameplay, imagine a large puzzle game much like the engineering mini-game in the Lightspeed/Hyperspeed series, but where you have to move from place to place in order to make changes to the system itself.

The gameplay is actually, if we’re being totally honest, a shade simple and even quite repetitive at times. After a meteor strike, various components of the complex life-support has been damaged. Just which parts vary from instance to instance, but generally you’ll have to fix or replace one or two solar dishes, re-attach at least one broken power cable and fix up the circuits, filters and generators on the life support system itself. With dangerous coolant leaking from the latter stuff, you’re not going to be able to just walk up there with a welding torch to fix it, either – you’ll be remotely piloting robots of two different kinds to get the job done in time.

Once you decide whether to repair or replace each unit, you’ll either be dragging a replacement part out from the engineering module across the other side of the base, or playing a ‘soldering’ mini-game not too different from the kind you’d expect in System Shock or Bioshock to get the component back up and running again.

In short, it’s a sort of strategy/puzzle affair which probably wouldn’t keep your interest for more than a half hour, except for one small detail: nothing about the gameplay changes the fact it’s hard-enough sci-fi to give you a feeling that no other game I’ve ever seen has truly managed: you get to be on the frickin’ moon.

Unlike other games, this one shows quite a realistic depiction of a low-gravity, no-atmosphere environment. Hell, you can’t even see the obligatory “Hollywood Star Field” above you by default, nor hear sounds. (Because, you see, sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum)

Actually finishing each “level” (there are three, and they simply scale up the difficulty and size of the base to better work with larger or more experienced players) is quite easy. After one or two failures (almost guaranteed) you’ll get the hang, and find that the real trick is getting faster at the game. The developers certainly know this, and they’ve made a big show of the end-of-mission leaderboards. How did your best scores compare with others around the world?

Teamplay is important. Just wandering around fixing things on your own, and things are bound to go awry. Really, in order to get the most out of this game you need to be working with a team with a designated (and experienced) leader, who can keep an eye on every team-member either through voice coms or through the commander’s station.

If you have a team like this – a few friends who get excited every time the space shuttle or a soyuz capsule take off – then this maybe the game for you. But hell – it’s worth a try, right? After all, it’s free.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, like I mentioned earlier, this is the first game from the NASA ‘Learning Technologies’ project. The main title is going to be an MMO which, presumably will includes gameplay elements like this.

I only wish I could have played this when I was a kid – maybe I’d have stayed at school and kept studying astrophysics, after all!

Moonbase Alpha can be found and downloaded for free on Steam.

So I did, and then my morning vanished. While I had originally wanted to avoid writing ‘reviews’ here on RRQ, so many good indie games that have cropped up recently that I am unable to review for other sites have made me decide to start doing some individual game coverage here at RRQ – but only for off-beat, unique games that you might otherwise miss if you stick to mainstream sites for your gaming news & reviews.

(Note: There are no spoilers in this review)

Digital: A Love Story has a concept that, in some ways, might seem familiar if you’ve played games like Uplink or the forgettable Hacker games by Activision, at least on the surface. But there’s a major difference – while Digital may involve hacking, that’s just a pretense to tell quite an immersive, fascinating story about… well, a relationship, I suppose. Where Uplink is really just a strategy game, Digital is a story that happens to be in game form – and it’s infinitely more immersive and engrossing in this medium than it would be as a novel or a film.

The game is a sort of sci-fi / hacking story set ‘five minutes in the future’ of 1988. You load the game and promptly find yourself confronted with “Amie Workbench”, which looks suspiciously like the old Amiga Workbench – complete with many of the same quirks. Having been given this shiny, brand-new computer, you are encouraged by the good Mr Wong to dial this fascinating new service called a Bulletin Board System.

The mechanics of the gameplay are simple enough. (And I do mean simple – there are no fancy features like directories for this BBS software, and especially early on you’ll find yourself scrawling phone numbers and passwords on a piece of paper like it really is the late ’80s) But it’s not the gameplay that drives you to keep playing. It’s there to immerse you in the forgotten world of 2400 baud modems, phone numbers and the beautiful (or garish – your mileage may vary) singing of a modems connecting.

Within minutes you’ll be engaged in a number of discussions on this local bulletin board, including the most important one  - a strange, text-only relationship with a girl who calls herself Emilia and seems quite lonely.

As this relationship develops, the story kicks into high gear and you’ll find yourself dealing with dictionary-based password brute-forcing, system exploits, C-compilers and angry sysads who don’t like you turning up on their BBS uninvited. As you get better at hacking and find yourself breaking through US Sprint’s calling card services to hack across state lines and even making it out onto an early version of ARPANET, you’ll find yourself in a unique position to help the enigmatic Emilia with one of the most difficult problems she’s ever faced.

The method of communication with other people in the game is unique – you hit ‘reply’ to a message and, rather than typing something or selecting from some sort of discussion tree, your ‘character’ then fires off an email which you never get to read. This is a fascinating thing, because it means you’re generally reading just one side of a conversation, and through the subject-lines and the different characters’ responses, you’re left filling in the blanks to figure out just what your character said to illicit such a reply.

It’s hard to go into detail about much else without spoilers, but suffice to say that Digital is the most unique piece of interactive fiction (yes, I’m going to call it that despite its graphical nature) I’ve played since I first enjoyed Adam Cadre‘s Inform pieces.

There are some anachronisms in the game if you’re an anal ’80s/BBS/old computer snob but they almost seem deliberate – smirking comments, jabs and pop-culture references rather than oversights or mistakes.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough.

If you’ve played the game (it’s free! and available on all three major computing platforms!) and want to read some more eloquent people than I discuss the many merits of the game, here are a few pieces that (unlike mine) do go into spoiler territory: The Missing Protagonist by Emily Short or a review by Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper Shotgun.

For example, and for no particularly good reason (“achievements” are not a good reason), I’m on probably my half-dozenth playthrough of Half Life 2, having completed it on PC, then original Xbox, then along with Episode One, then as part of the orange box on 360, then on PC again on Steam. City 17 both horrifies and fascinates me, and there’s something powerful about that abandoned landscape (particularly Highway 17 and the road to White Forrest) that really strikes a chord with me. You wander through humanity’s twilight, where we’re on the way out but individuals are still hanging on, waiting their turn to disappear, without hope. It’s civilization as it becomes a ruin. It’s haunting and beautiful, and it still evokes strong feelings even though I am now completely aware of what’s coming next and know the levels well enough to see behind the curtain. It’s got a certain magic to it anyway.

And, even if Half Life 2 isn’t your thing, I doubt I’m alone in the condition I’m describing.

What are your addictive favourites?

Take Sunday’s sale of Dragon Age: Origins. The 40% off “discount” price in Australia is 40% off the frankly absurd 70 USD so it’s 46.89 USD. Hardly a bargain. The standard, non-sale US price is 39.99 USD, so our “40% off” price is still significantly more than the US standard price – let alone the UK sale price of 13.39 pounds, which works out at 19.82 USD, somewhat less than HALF the Australian “discount” price.

For a digital download that is in all respects identical.

I get that publishers have to add GST to games sold in Australia, but the 10% GST is 10% – considerably less than 110%, being ten percent and not one hundred and ten percent. It’s not much of an excuse for the markups they’re imposing, is my point.

And that’s not even the worst example – according to the steamprices.com top ripoffs page, Steam charges USD 20 for Red Faction Guerilla in the US, but to those stuck behind an Australian IP it charges USD… prepare yourself… are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I will continue… USD 70. (That probably needs to be in a bigger font.) Yup, a markup of 350%. I mean, you’ve almost got to admire the sheer gall of THQ, don’t you? That kind of ripoff is a thing of such spectacular shamelessness that it’s almost thrilling. I’m not going to buy their game, but I might come back and admire its monstrous pricing structure next time I need an emotional shock.

Also, unbelievable regional pricing aside, there’s the issue of the ever more stupid delays in game releases here, highlighted by – who else – Nintendo Australia’s treatment of its flagship titles. Like Super Mario Galaxy 2, which won’t be out here till July. Despite having been released overseas a month ago.

My question is: what the hell is the point of Australian distributors, and why wouldn’t we all be better off if they just disappeared and the big retailers imported directly from overseas?

Feel free to share the examples of us being ripped off and screwed over that have really gotten your metaphorical goat.

Obviously, when you have access to all these devices, you aren’t going to spend equal time on each. It becomes a “right tool for the job” situation. So, after now having most of these (except the iPad, which I will discuss separately) for numerous months, just which devices have proven to be the most frequently used ones?

I’ll list them in rough order of use (most used to least) and give some reasons for this.

Xbox 360

There are a number of reasons the 360 is my most used gaming platform. These are:

• The majority of new games tend to either be cross-platform, 360-centric, or 360 exclusives.
• Over-all quality of release titles. The number of times I’ve read about (or seen, if I purchased a copy) PS3 versions of titles that have speed issues, pop-up errors or (amazingly, given the speed of the PS3) a lower resolution than the 360 counterpart makes me far less likely to buy a game on PS3.
• More friends who own them. If a game is multiplayer, I’ll doubtlessly want it on 360. Sure, you have to pay for Xbox Live (and I’m increasingly convinced that this is a rip-off) but I have only a small handful of friends who play multiplayer games on PS3, where-as almost every gamer I know plays 360.
• The controller. I love it. The right weight, the right size for my hands, and the triggers feel good and natural when using iron-sights/triggers in first-person shooters.

Windows

Put simply, not every genre of game is good on console. Strategy games, simulations and even some RPGs (especially those who are almost made by the third-party addon community) are usually better with a mouse, a keyboard and a screen where more information can be displayed without using fluffy graphs and symbols.

So, why Windows? Well, it’s because that’s where most of the games are. Steam may have just come to Mac, and many other titles by the big publishers (Call of Duty, The Sims series, Blizzard’s games, etc) may all have had Mac-native ports for years, but the simple fact is that it’s often the smaller-budget titles that I want to play, and in my experience either big AAA titles or tiny, tiny made-in-a-garage titles are the ones that become Windows/Mac/Linux cross-platform.

The unique games like ARMA 2 or Napoleon: Total War do not. They’re Windows through and through.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I use the Windows machine for anything else, however. I have real computers to produce content, browse the net and do actual work. Can’t rely on Windows for that. That’d be silly. (Steve Jobs told me so)

iPhone/iPad

I won’t go into any detail here about the iPad – I’m going to write a separate article about gaming on the iPad, but suffice to say that there are many times when I’m not at home and want to play something. Sometimes it’s a short train trip, and I’ll play solitaire. Other times it’s a long train trip, and I’ll play Civilization. Other times it’ll be with friends, and we’ll play a pass-around game of some sort – usually a digital version of a board game.

So, why the iDevices?

• Number of available titles. This I cannot stress enough. There are any number of reasons to go for an Android phone over an Apple one. Plenty of arguments for lugging around a netbook over an iPad, too, really. But what gives these things the edge, and the reason I still use them, is the massive, overwhelming quantity of titles – many of which work nicely on both platforms. Also, in most cases, buy once – own on both.
• A well-made, intuitive touch screen interface. I’ve used a lot of touch screen devices, and most frustrate me. I’m not saying the iDevices are perfect (I could write a laundry list of complaints)… just that they piss me off less than every other one I’ve tried. For certain types of games – board game ports, strategy games, etc – this interface is absolutely perfect. Try dragging units around in a turn-based strategy game. Perfect. Sure, it’s not ideal for platformers or shooters, but creative use of the interface can fix that – and game developers are finally doing so. (Oh, and despite saying that, try out Wolf3D or Doom – both of those work wonderfully well on the iPhone)
• The price is right. Not of the devices themselves – that’s debatable. Of the games. You could allocate yourself just $5 a week and you’d likely find 2 or 3 new games (ignoring free ones) every week that would keep you entertained – some for much, much longer than the week itself. And the best part? No long treks out to the shops to buy them – and you have them all on you, all the time. Now that’s convenient.

Mac

I have a Mac Pro. That’s the beastiest, most beef-cake of all the Macs. In fact, it’s about 2-3 times faster (at least) than my Windows machine. But I don’t play many games on it. Despite popular perception, there are actually lots of games on Mac – like I discussed above in the Windows section.

For me, the Mac is doing the ‘real work’ (a edit my film projects on it) and often, while rendering, I’ll switch over to the PC or play 360 on the couch. But it’s grunty enough that often, if I’m monitoring what I’m doing, I will game on it.

More often than not, though, I tend to use it to play old DOS games, or something else on an emulator. In one screen I’ll have whatever I’m uploading to youtube, on another, whatever I’m exporting, and without skipping a CPU cycle I’ll have dosbox there, playing some old classic I never quite finished.

I often wonder, if I was forced to keep just one desktop machine, whether I’d play more games on Mac. And I suspect I would – especially now that we have steam and an ever-widening selection of great titles available.

Increasingly, for me, Windows’ days in my house are numbered.

Wii

I don’t like the Wii. I really don’t. There’s no precision, and almost no reason to ever want to game on it. If you’re playing one of their ‘Wiiware’ arcade or whatever the snot they call it titles that do not use the motion sensors, you’re either stuck using those horrible Wiimotes sideways in order to game (that’s frustrating) or sitting it beside you while using the plug-in ‘Classic’ controllers. Also frustrating.

Then there’s the actual motion-based games. During a party, they often get broken out. Tennis, Archery, Golf, Bowling… that can be fun. When you’re drunk. But honestly, almost no modern titles have made me care about them on Wii. In fact, the only title I didn’t return after buying that isn’t part of the Wii Sports (or Wii Plus Sports) titles was Mad World. And I’m still not entirely sure why.

In short, the Wii is a gimmick that in my experience, people buy, play once or twice, and then forget about. (Unless they’re between the ages of five to eight, or drunk at a party)

Playstation 3

Boy, what a nice bu-ray player! Low load-times, boots fast… that’s about it. This year, I’ve played Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2 (gag) and the Pixeljunk titles on it. Because they’re exclusives. So, why don’t I like the PS3? Well, I’ve largely covered this in reverse in the 360 section, but to add a few points that should already be fairly obvious…

• A piss-weak controller. It’s too light. It’s too small. And using the ‘bumper’ / ’2′ buttons to fire by default? Yuck. Also, there’s the way my fingers seem to slip off the analogue sticks (thank-you, whoever made 360 sticks convex and with bumps around the edges to catch your thumbs on)
• Installing and updating games. Half the reason I switched to consoles for many genres in the first place is because I could slam in a game and play it very quickly. This isn’t the case with the PS3. You get home, excitedly unwrap your brand new game with your grubby little mitts, and put the disc in. Then you get the install. That takes a while. Then the patches. They take forever. In contrast, I’ve never seen a patch for a 360 game that didn’t download and apply in a heartbeat.

So, would I change to PS3 over 360? Sure. These are nitpicks. But as long as most gamers I know use 360, and as long as the non-exclusive titles are weaker on PS3… it’s highly unlikely.

PSP

You’re joking, right? It’s heavy, the load times are slow, the analogue sticks are near-useless, and there’s also a practical consideration. See, it’s just a shade too large to fit in my pockets. So I need to take a bag. But if I take a bag, I have room for my iPad – also a wonderful device to check my email, read RSS feeds and browse the web on. And if I don’t, then I’ll invariably have my iPhone on me.

So why on earth would I want to carry this waste of space around? In fact, I haven’t turned the thing on in 2 years now, really. Wouldn’t shock me if the thing has been broken.

The PSP is a near-complete failure as a gaming device. Not so much when it first came out – it didn’t originally have to compete with the iPhone and various other things-that-do-what-the-ngauge-could-not – but it’s an extraneous device.

Add to this that most games you want to play when on-the-go are either turn-based or very short, and it’s not hard to see why people prefer the DS or their phones.

What about you?

Most of my reasons for going with one console over another are personal preference. The shape of the controller in my hand isn’t exactly hard science. There are often other concerns for people that are just as personal – and sometimes much more practical (or economic).

• What platforms do you use, and why?
• Which the most, and which the least?
• Have you ever sold off a console while it’s still current-generation?
• Do ergonomics often drive you from or to a given platform, like myself?

Only I’m in Australia, which means Steam insists on making me pay a penalty for many titles. Take Civilization 5, now taking preorders – they want $US80-90 from us (in US currency, bizarrely), where if they don’t manage to automatically detect your location and think you’re in the US the price is $US50-60. That’s right, we’re paying almost double for NOTHING. They don’t ship anything here, they don’t have any increased costs, the Australian distributor is not involved – so what the hell is the justification for robbing us blind? They’re even charging MORE than in the shops, for less – no packaging, no distribution, no middle men costs, but prices at retail level Australian dollar figures with the currency changed to the more expensive US dollars.

And whether we just blame the publishers for being discriminatory parasites, or assign some blame to Valve for giving them the tools to do it, the situation is both offensive and absurd.

Do they REALLY think we’re going to cop it? Do they REALLY think we’re going to pay double for no reason? Do they REALLY think that people who are considering handing over money are going to just bend over and take being ripped off so outrageously? There’s a reason Australia is known for high levels of piracy, and THIS SORT OF GARBAGE IS IT.

Screw you, Steam. Screw you, Valve. Most importantly – Screw you, publishers. If you’re going to treat your paying customers like this you deserve to lose sales to piracy.

If you have an IP product and you

• refuse to sell it to people in certain countries;

• refuse to sell it for particular periods;
• refuse to sell it in particular formats;
• insist on adding anti-consumer garbage like DRM that limits paying customers’ access to the content for which they’ve paid;
• charge some customers more than others;
• charge unreasonable amounts for content

I will NEVER buy a download game (such as via Steam) at a higher price than they’ll sell it to an American customer. NEVER. I may try to work around the restriction by using a US paying account and a US proxy, but if that doesn’t work I will not buy it at all. THEY WILL GET NONE OF MY MONEY. There is ZERO chance of me paying them more for less.

Get stuffed, you discriminatory arseholes.

ELSEWHERE: What a publisher that’s thinking straight does about “piracy”.

Now, this phrase, versatile as it is, can be used to mean a wide variety of different things – from “It appears that the killer is still alive,” to “I have been shot, please call for an ambulance as soon as possible,” and even the all-time classic, ”I admit to experiencing surprise and frustration at learning that you have, in fact, forgotten to bring the hummus.”

For this reason, I decided to recount a top-five list of these “Oh, Shit!” moments from my own personal gaming experiences, complete with imagery.

Number Five: Discovering Christopher and Inamo the Gargoyle’s corpse… Ultima VII

It’s not so much that you discover his corpse that provokes the “Oh, Shit!” It’s not even, really, the horrific state of the bodies. (Christopher has been quartered and Inamo has been impaled with a pitch-fork)

It’s really a matter of context. What context am I referring to?  Few games up to this point had included such unpleasant imagery (excluding maybe the Alone in the Dark or Ecstatica series’), nor had you directly deal with the emotional aftermath – from flustered officials to distraught children.

But that’s not the only reason.

The most important thing that made your skin crawl and prompted you to the utterance that this article about was this: The Guardian laughs at you. And there’s just simply nothing as scary as somebody laughing when you’re not in on the joke.

Number Four: When the lights go out, in a corridor, on the downed prison vessel Vortex Rikers… Unreal

Being the only surviving human on a crashed prison ship is bad enough. But what makes it worse is when it’s on an alien planet. And that, despite being the only remaining human aboard the ship – you are quickly made aware that you are certainly not the only living creature on the ship.

And so, after a number of well-done moments letting you just see or hear things out of the corner of your eye, you finally find yourself doing what we’d all be doing in this situation: creeping down a well-lit and perfectly safe corridor toward what you hope will be a weapon.

At the dead end, you turn around. Boy, this’d be kinda scary if it weren’t for these helpful ceiling lights.

There’s a THUD, and the first one, at the end of the corridor goes out.

That’s not good.

THUD. The second one goes out.

Hrm. That’s not good.

THUD. The third one.

This continues.

“Oh, Shit…”

Welcome to your first meeting with a Skaarj warrior.

Sure, these sorts of sequences have been done better in many games since then – Half-life, Bioshock… but back then, when this sequence will always hold a special place of bowel-evacuating terror for me.

Number Three: When your friend gets split off the group, and finds a monkey… System Shock 2

It’s a tragedy that rarely do the right games get full co-op support. The ones that tend to are often waffly, generic shooters with little to really make you benefit from true team-work.

System Shock 2 was not like that. The experience, a fantastic one in single-player, was brought to a new level of awesome when you had two friends playing with you. One marine, one hacker and one OSA psyker – the game became an all-immersing world of pain, fear and monkeys (much like the end of Monkey Island 2).

I’ve heard people say that the fear factor is reduced when you introduce a second player to a horror/survival game, but I’d argue that System Shock 2 serves to prove that this isn’t always true.

But it’s not the running, the screaming, the hacking and the running out of ammunition that made us utter, ‘Oh Shit’ almost in literal unison.

During a LAN: Two of us, the hacker and the psyker, are sorting through a walk-in storage cupboard, figuring out what chemicals and such are going to be useful for us. We had both played the game before. Our third player, the marine, was ‘exploring’ against our recommendation.

He heard a noise.

“What’s that?” he called out. Then he saw it. “Oh, hey! Look! It’s a monkey!”

We stared at each other. “Does he know what they… do?”

A head-shake. A pause. And in unison: ”Oh, Shit.”

Then came the screaming.

Number Two: When you know He’s Coming in a deserted hotel… Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Scary situations are not that hard to engineer, in theory. Just strip a player of weapons and/or ammunition, limit his spatial awareness and ta-da! Instant fear factor increase. But an important factor is fear in a game is the sense of control that having weapons and strength give you.

So, in Alone in the Dark, Edward Carnby walking around with just two rounds left in his revolver when any number of horrible creatures are lurking in shadows? That’s scary.

But what if you are the creature from the shadows? In Bloodlines you’re a vampire – and seemingly, an abnormally powerful one for a neonate. So by every definition I’d seen, things shouldn’t be that scary. I mean, you can tear most things apart with your fangs and hands alone, should it come to that. Shit, most of the time you don’t even bother carrying a fire-arm in the game.

When you’re paid to walk through a haunted house and find a simple object – no killing, no rescuing… it should be a piece of piss. And really, it is. By no measure is it a difficult assignment. Hell, it’s even explained at the beginning that it’s just a poltergeist. You know – grumpy, non-corporeal being that likes throwing shit around just generally being a nuisance. No threat to an undead creature like you.

Despite these things, one thing’s for sure, after ten minutes of crawling around this broken, ruined hotel and seeing things move of their own accord, you’re about ready to say it.

But wait – at least until you hear a little girl whisper in your ear, “He’s coming!”

Then it’s okay to say, “Oh, Shit…” and let your friends call you Mr Brown Pants from now on.

Number One: Duke, with a Pipe Bomb, in an adult cinema’s rest-room… Duke Nukem 3D

It’s not just scary situations that cause for the phrase, “Oh, Shit!”

After getting used to the generally-static mostly-serious worlds of the first-person shooters that came before, there was a very early experience in the first level of Duke Nukem 3D that, to me, was truly worthy of a nice utterance.

Killing pig-cops and jet-pack-using, teleporting monsters is pretty fun in Duke3D. But as fun as trip-mines, rocket launchers and a simple boot to the face can be, very little beats this experience:

You walk into a restroom. You clear the room of its single occupant and start exploring the room, from hidden weapons to witty comments painted on the mirror.

Then you hear it: the toilet flushes.

An enemy is taking a dump on one of the feral, crusty porcelain domes that pass for toilets in this place.

There’s nothing for it.

You toss a pipe-bomb over the stall door and detonate.

Blood splats on the ceiling above the stall.

“Awww, shit yeah!”

So, those are five of my notable “Oh, Shit!” moments.

What about your favourite scary or awesome gaming moments? Anything will do – as long as it’s worthy of a good expletive.