Edge 288 (Sampler) by Future PLC

H i t m a n THE INSIDE STORY OF AGENT 47’s BOLD return to form

#288 J AN UA RY 2016

Knowledge Favourites

My Favourite Game John Famiglietti The Health bassist on expressing the joy of games, being miserable in Demon’s Souls, and soundtracking Max Payne 3

oise rock outfit Health’s brand of proto-industrial punk primitivism has gained it a huge following since its debut album released in 2007. Rockstar Games counts among those fans, and the studio reached out to the band for contributions to the Max Payne 3 soundtrack. That deal ended up going much further, as John Famiglietti tells us. Max Payne 3 was Health’s first soundtrack – how did that come about? It was really crazy. We just got a call saying, ‘Hey, Rockstar games wants to take you guys out for dinner in New York – they’re coming to your show.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? Cool!’ I’m a really big fan of Rockstar.’ And as soon as I heard that, I immediately started daydreaming about the idea of them asking us to score a game. But I figured they’d just take us out for dinner and say, ‘Hey, we’re Rockstar Games; would you let us license a track for GTA? ’But as soon as we started talking they said, ‘We’re doing this game – would you guys like to contribute some of the score music?’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit, man, did I just manifest that or something?’ We were originally brought in just to assist with scoring, but we got really ambitious. They gave us videos of two levels, so we entirely scored both, then gave it to them and said, ‘This is what we see for the game.’ They really liked that and it kept moving, and eventually we took over the game. How did the music develop from there? First and foremost was the narrative. We wanted to follow that. It was about the emotion – is [this scene] more tense, is it

MALADY MAKER Health’s self-titled debut album was released in 2007, followed the next year by Health/Disco, which remixes the tracks from its debut record. The band’s second album, Get Color, came out in 2009 and was again followed by a remix album the next year, this time called Health::Disco2. Max Payne 3 launched in 2012, and Health subsequently recorded a track for Grand Theft Auto V, too. Health’s latest album, Death Magic, was released in August.

as a kid – he loves Mario and Tetris, more scary, y’know? And of course but that’s where it ends. Whereas I read Rockstar had a stem system, and they Kotaku or whatever every day. With wanted particular moods, but what was videogames there’s this weird translation incredible was they really respected us. problem where people who don’t play They told us what they thought it should games either have no interest in them sound like, we created our music, and or it’s too hard to explain. I talk to they let us know what was working and bandmates and people I love about what wasn’t as they tested it. movies, music and art and how it affects We put in musical tones that inspire me, and I want to talk in that way about contemplation. If you’re this person in the games like Bloodborne, you know? But game and you’ve killed 10,000 people there’s no way for me to really relay it. in a row, and it was easy for you to do that, how would that weigh on your mind Are you also a fan of the Souls games? or your conscience? So we wanted to They’re probably my favourite thing in the have these moments where you could past few years. It’s really detach and reflect on “Rockstar had become an obsession for yourself as this incredibly me. It’s the coolest shit damaged, depressed a stem system, ever. I started with Demon’s killing machine that’s able and they wanted Souls, actually, and I was to perceive time slowly. particular moods, really blown away. You’re kind of miserable most of How different was that but they really the time, but then when process compared to you do succeed and get creating albums? respected us” somewhere, it’s really We’d never scored awesome. And I like that the storyline is anything before, but we’re huge fans of built into the game mechanics. You’re in movies; I’m a huge fan of games. With this existential hell because you literally an album, you don’t know if anything’s can’t die. You’re living in a shithole where good, and it’s always stressful: ‘Is this you have to repeat stuff, and the best shitty? Do I suck now?’ But with a game thing you can do is just slightly advance. or a movie, if you put the music against the image and it doesn’t feel right, you And which game is your favourite? know it sucks. It’s very clear. So we could That’s very hard. Because when I go tell immediately if it was working or not. back to my favourite games ever, like Baldur’s Gate II or something, it’s not the Is everyone in Health into games? same. You get used to new stuff. I tried to No, I’m the only one who plays games. play them again recently, and you can’t It’s very separate from most of my social really go back… I feel weird saying it’s circle and definitely my bandmates. Jake my favourite, but Baldur’s Gate was [Duzsik, singer and guitarist] is really into pretty good for me. n the extremely old games that he played

Corbis

“One thing I really like about videogames is that everyone’s looking towards the future,” Famiglietti (right) says. “It’s not like in music or movies where people are like, ‘Man, music sucks now. I wish we could go back to that time’ – just fucking complaining all the time”

Developer Gearbox Software Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release May 3

Battleborn Quickfire character shaping defines Gearbox’s other shooter-looter

Here, Montana uses his Lumberjack Dash against ISIC. Although the vanilla version is powerful, you can add a 50 per cent boost to its range, reduce the cooldown by 25 per cent, and end it with an uppercut

attleborn sees Gearbox carry the cartoony buffoonery of the Borderlands series into a multiplayer shooter, one where growing in power is less tied to pilfering a world of its loot, and more about throwing down in arenas and blitzing through skill trees in 15-minute bursts. If the former progression arc is akin to time-consuming Mr Universe body building, this is the equivalent of Popeye chowing down on spinach for a burst of muscle. Ranking up on the so-called skill helix involves selecting a power from either the left or right strand of each of its ten rungs. As we discover during our first match of Capture, in which teams of five compete to secure three territories, this allows plenty of latitude for experimentation. Four-armed witch Orendi, who gets in opponents’ faces to unleash reckless many-limbed flourishes, can add either a knockback effect to her energy-burst

special ability or give it the power to blind. In MOBA fashion, such progression is about shaping your character for the battle at hand, your ranks resetting after each session. Building around a single technique proves effective for the Meltdown matchtype, in which you attempt to guide AI-controlled minions into a furnace as the other team tries to disrupt you and do the same. Tank man Montana’s powers include Mansformation (a ground pound), Hailstorm (bullets slow targets), and the enemy-ramming Lumberjack Dash. By exclusively developing the latter, we add a 50 per cent boost to its range, reduce its cooldown by a quarter, and add a launching effect onto the end. We’ve gone from jabbing at range with his minigun to charging in to deliver close-up flurries of pain. Levelling is quick enough that it’s difficult not to max out your character by each round’s

Creative director Randy Varnell

LEFT The little red bot is one of the minions in Meltdown. You’ve got to escort a procession of them into a furnace while opponents attempt to do the same. BELOW Capture is the second of three PVP modes. Here, teams compete to hold up to three points on the map

end, which rewards experimentation. There are numerous ways to play each character, yet it’s quick to try approaches and find favourite strategies. Multiply that by a cast of 25, and there’s lots of choice, but especially appealing is that this roster represents Gearbox at its most unhinged. “There were some limits even to the exaggerations in Borderlands,” creative director Randy Varnell tells us. “They’re all basically humanoid, but we wanted to do more than that. We wanted to do characters that were a lot more varied in style and size and form. In the ten [reveals] coming in the next few months, you’ll see more of that wild and weird exploration of form.”

These rules concern a future in which, after all but one star has been drained for energy, assorted weirdos must prevent an evil dimension-hopping foe from extinguishing the last sun, Solus. The campaign mission we try is set on a space station and plays like an accelerated Borderlands, a more directed experience starting with waves of weaker robotic drones and culminating in a boss that requires a unified effort to beat.

Especially appealing is that this roster represents Gearbox at its most unhinged

It’s an enticing promise on the evidence

The action is sometimes hard to keep up with, but since the Battleborn themselves are so distinctive, you’ll never struggle to identify them in the heat of battle

of the madder heroes we’ve already seen, including reality-crashing robot ISIC, birdman Benedict, and a priestess called Ambra, who can conjure a localised sun to scorch enemies. And powers span a wide range too, with some heroes boasting abilities as weird as their form, albeit ordered in a fairly conventional structure. Each has a passive ability (perhaps a double jump or poisonous touch), two actives (ranging from airstrikes to energy blasts to shield domes for teammates) and an ultimate. Ambra’s ultimate, for instance, involves summoning a meteor from space to do huge area-of-effect damage. “Early on, we just let our imaginations go,” Varnell says. “Visually, we started to group characters around factions, so in the fiction, we have these five factions that have identities, but there were vital rules that let us move characters in certain directions.”

While a galaxy’s worth of different characters and upgrades sounds complicated, it helps that the mechanics remain consistent across each mode, be that the five-on-five multiplayer, or the campaign, which you can play with up to four friends or AI buddies. For instance, you can earn loot and take up to three pieces of gear with you into battle, though balance is maintained by their need to be activated with the shards earned in matches. Gear effects stack too, but your loadout can be earned and used in both the campaign and multiplayer modes. The loot cycle here may be more about refinement than sheer power escalation, but it adds a layer beyond the shorter term tradeoffs of the skill helix. Granted, all that gear and a ludicrously diverse cast mean Battleborn may become a balancing nightmare, but then again longterm hooks are exactly what Gearbox’s genre fusion needs if it is to take its immediately satisfying but self-contained core matches and bulk them up into a time sink to rival Pandora’s wilds. n

Balancing act With nearly twodozen characters available at launch and more to come after, how does Varnell’s team go about balancing? “I like to tell my designers that balance is not an event, it’s a discipline,” he says. “It’s a process. You’re never done balancing the game. Especially with a competitive game, it’s important to continue to watch the balance.” In early contact, there are several moments that make us feel overpowered and powerless. Boldur’s slowness, for instance, means he can’t catch up to Ambra, who can pummel him with projectiles while backing off. In certain matchups, some characters are simply better than others. A well-balanced team, however, should be able to find a solution to every problem.

S t e a m Li n k Manufacturer Valve Price £40

The Steam Controller touchpads are concave, adding resistance when your thumb nears the edge. Haptic rumble enhances the effect

he war for the living room, as pundits in thick-rimmed specs are so fond of calling it, is fought with a blitzkrieg of features; manufacturers and platform holders do battle over who can fit the most functionality into the smallest box possible. As we’ve already discovered, that’s a risky approach indeed, and it’s refreshing to unbox a device with a singular purpose. Steam Link streams games from a PC running Steam on a local network. And that’s it. It does so marvellously. It’s tempting to see the option to show debug information in the bottom-left corner of the screen as a symbol of how confident Valve is in Steam Link’s capabilities – and the readout showing one-millisecond stream ping times and rock-solid framerates would give it every reason to be. Instead it’s more likely that Valve just really likes looking at that sort of thing, and expects its users to have the same appetite. It’s a reasonable assumption. When streaming games, whether from a remote or local server, we find ourselves looking for faults first and playing a game second. With Steam Link we can quickly shift our gaze to the corner of the screen, reassure ourselves that all is functioning as it should, and get back to business.

funds and, arguably the highlight of the whole package, a Steam Controller. Even now, weeks after playing this way, our years‑old muscle memory is struggling to make the adjustment to Valve’s vision of the next generation of couch control, but it’s already clear that the company’s effort to make a controller that bridges the decades-old divide between sticks-and-buttons and mouse-and-keyboard controls has been a success. The Steam Controller’s principal innovation is a pair of clickable touchpads that dominate the face of the device, with haptic feedback replicating the sensation of a mouse or scroll wheel moving at speed. By default the left touchpad mimics a D-pad and the right plays the role of a mouse pointer, but every input on the controller can be userdefined, and subsequently shared online. Load up a game, press the Steam button to call up the Big Picture Mode overlay, and you can either customise the control scheme and save it for future use, or search a database of those made by others, including, in many cases, the developers themselves. This is classic Valve – make something cool and let the community work out the finer details – but there’s no

i t m ay h av e t h e bi g g e s t b a r r i e r t o e n t r y o f a n y o f t h e n e w w av e o f s t r e a m i n g b o x e s , b u t i t ’ s a l s o t h e m o s t e f f e c t i v e a n d i n n o vat i v e The advantage Steam Link holds over Shield TV’s GameStream is, first, in compatibility: while Nvidia’s list is small and hand-picked, Valve’s solution supports every single thing in your Steam library. That doesn’t just mean games you’ve bought through Steam itself, either: simply add a shortcut to an external program in Steam, and you can boot it over the network. And while Steam Link automatically switches the remote client to the TV-friendly Big Picture Mode, you can revert to the desktop version with a few button presses, giving you full control over, and access to everything on, your PC. That’s a necessary inclusion, because there are a few wrinkles – this is a seamless streaming service, but there are times when the quirks of Windows get in the way. One User Account Control popup caused a stream to drop entirely, forcing us to scurry upstairs to the desktop PC to dismiss it. And Valve’s desire to make everything fit the living-room screen means that 600-pixel-width launcher menus are blown up to full size. Many of them only respond to mouse input, too, so if you’re playing with a console controller you’ll need to keep a wireless mouse to hand. But only if you’re buying Steam Link on its own, and chances are you won’t. In the UK, Game has the exclusive rights to Steam Link – and as anyone who’s ever tried to buy new hardware from the nation’s biggest high-street retailer will know too well, it’s a company rather fond of only selling hot new gear through bundles. So it proves here, but it’s well worth it: £100 gets you a Link, £20 in Steam Wallet

frustration to be had in this instance at the company’s habit of throwing unfinished ideas into the wild. There are teething problems, of course. Muscle memory will take some time to adjust to how low down, and close to the centre of the controller, the face buttons are. And while developers have been quick to embrace the Steam Controller with their own suggested configurations, there’s a significant difference between simply making a game controllable from a greater distance than it was originally designed for and actually making it playable. Colossal Order’s custom config for Cities: Skylines works beautifully, but the developer hasn’t thought to scale up the UI for pairs of eyes situated ten feet away rather than 24 inches. Until that’s addressed, the city of New Edgeville – work on which began with so much grand ambition – will forever remain a single, unzoned coastal road. Like Nvidia, Valve has a vested interest in making its new hardware a success, since it’s a key part of the company’s long-anticipated assault on the living room with Steam Machines. Yet while its PC hardware effort is a confused tangle of partner manufacturers, unappealing industrial design and wildly fluctuating specs and price points, Steam Link benefits greatly from that narrow, singular focus. Since it requires a beefy gaming PC to function, it may have the biggest barrier to entry of any of the new wave of streaming boxes, but it’s also the cheapest, the most effective and, thanks to the Steam Controller, the most innovative of the lot. n

new ways to play

While Valve recommends you use a wired connection for Steam Link, in our tests its WiFi saw it locate a network from several-hundred metres away

Open windows

ABOVE Despite being around for four years, Big Picture mode is still a clunky old beast. You’ll often quit a game to find it’s reverted itself to the standard desktop client. RIGHT Little references to Valve’s new initiatives pepper the Steam storefront to remind you of their existence. Rocket League, for example, is held up as ideally suited to Steam Controller use

With so many companies intent on taking over the screen in your living room, it’s refreshing to see one looking the other way. With Windows 10, Microsoft has added the ability to stream a game running on the Xbox One under your TV to any Win10 PC in the house. It’s also launched a wireless dongle allowing your Xbox One controllers (including the new Elite model, pictured) to be used on PCs. The frontend’s not the most elegant, with an Xbox app built on the puzzling concept that what PC users most need is a way to keep on top of what their Xbox friends are up to. But there’s no disputing the function itself: even playing over wireless we see minimal loss of visual data, while input latency is almost imperceptible. While Microsoft’s mission to more closely unite PC and Xbox gaming has always felt designed to benefit the company first and the user second, it’s us, not Redmond, that benefits when we can sneak in a bit of Halo when the living-room TV’s been commandeered by Peppa Pig.

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Fallout 4

nless you’ve been interred in an underground bunker yourself, you’ll undoubtedly have heard these bars in recent weeks: “I’m the type of guy who’ll never settle down… I’m never in one place; I roam from town to town.” Dion’s The Wanderer contains quite the alluring promise for a game about picking over the bones of the colossal Commonwealth wasteland, so no wonder it made the trailer. In the best way possible, it is totally the wrong fit for Fallout 4. Trekking across a well-sketched and distinctly American slice of apocalyptica, being endlessly diverted by its pockets of surprise, is still this series’ greatest pleasure, of course. But this isn’t really a game for drifters who float from six-hour campaign to six-hour campaign. More so than any in the series yet, Fallout 4 feels tailored for settling down in over a playthrough that could take anywhere from tens to hundreds of hours. While in many respects it’s an incremental upgrade and uneven sequel to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it’s packed with quality-of-life features offering immediate benefits, such as an upgrade to fluidity and gunfeel (it’s viable to play Fallout as a straight shooter now), and more visibility in the effects of rads. On top of those are asides whose impact only becomes apparent after a day or more of real time spent in its company. Assuming you get there. First you must outlast the traditional Bethesda shelling of compromises for all the scale and ambition. Most are cosmetic. Were it not for a lighting engine that paints the scorched earth in golden hues at sunset and the god rays that stream through wasted tree branches, it would be easy to mistake Fallout 4 for a late 360- or PS3-era game. Many faces are manikin-like, aerial views are foggy and low in detail, while pop-in issues lurk ever on the periphery. The lip sync is awful, more overdubbed multilingual advert than believable phonetic match. Subtitles stick while the conversations continue, the framerate tumbles, and NPCs repeat lines over you, the radio and each other. Rusty patches aside, there are blights to the gameplay itself too, though perhaps fewer than is usual for a Bethesda game at launch – Fallout 4’s never frozen on us, and only one instance caused crashes. Still, the early pacing’s rough, and before you’ve cobbled together decent armour or put points into Endurance, attacks with poorly communicated grenades will often mangle you outright. Plus, there’s the rare Radroach-sized bug: the enemy who clips through a wall and keeps firing, or the companion who simply falls out of the world. Yet even before the modders set to work buffing out these many dings (on PC and Xbox One, at least), Fallout 4 has a certain ravaged charm. The skies have largely cleared, the clouds taking with them the oppressively uniform browns and greens of the Capital Wasteland, and the near-perpetual sepia filter of New Vegas in daylight. Well-saturated colours pick out the stalls in

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Developer/publisher Bethesda Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now

The brightest moments are able to rival the talking trees and sadistic suburban sims of the series’ past

the delightful converted baseball stadium of Diamond City, reds and greens dot the Boston skyline, and even the blasted wilds find a few fresh hues. But cerulean skies alone aren’t what will persuade you to knock together a new home in at least one of Fallout 4’s many settlements (see ‘Gimme shelter’), and its texture work isn’t what generates the pull to expose the Commonwealth’s darker underbelly. That would be the atmosphere, which once again hides ideas of horrific darkness beneath a Bakelite veneer of retro-kitsch quirkiness. Bright sparks of imagination and flashes of brilliant writing make the ‘fight some enemies on the way to a thing’ formula feel fresh over and over again, while strong environmental storytelling delivers a megaton payload of microtales. In short, Fallout 4 has the all-too-rare capacity to surprise, and whether it’s discovering a suit of power armour next to a lake-bed plane wreckage, encountering a legendary enemy lurking in a municipal pond and then piecing together their story, or a brilliant questline that has you adopt the mantle of an old radio star, Bethesda’s mementostrewn world keeps giving you little reasons to scour each corner that go beyond mere looting.

It helps that you can do most of your exploring in company, with a cast of engagingly written travelling companions willing to take your side – so long as you reciprocate in kind. Take Codsworth. This Mr Handy lives up to his model name by bringing a saw limb and flamethrower into combat, but you’ll build a relationship with him by being refined and helping others, and get to enjoy his condensation as you get your hands dirty and hoover up the wasteland’s junk. Other tagalongs prefer more violent or subtle approaches. But whatever they favour, if you reach a certain level of rapport they’ll offer up nuggets of backstory and perhaps a special quest. Again, this is a small refinement on paper, but it’s also one of Fallout 4’s best bits, allowing Bethesda to do away with the cumbersome abstractions of karma in favour of minuteto-minute morality play – and those companion quests contain some true gems. These, along with the many dark twists and daft missions that fill up your Pip-Boy, make up a body of storytelling to luxuriate in, with the game’s brightest moments able to rival the talking trees and sadistic suburban sims of the series’ past. Which is just as well, because the main questline itself is disappointingly thin and predictable. The prewar section is rushed through, and you’ll barely have a chance to get your bearings before the A-bombs hit. Once 200 years have passed and your freshly minted survivor steps out onto the irradiated wastes, your motivation for leaving the Vault has had barely any time to develop – a problem that dogs the rest of the story, pulling its potentially powerful emotional punches.

RIGHT Legendary enemies, identified by a star next to their name, and uniques such as Swan here will have a piece of special loot imbued with a powerful perk about their person. While the mods system is flexible, these relics are a potent lure to try new approaches. BELOW The game isn’t stingy with power armour, and also offers a boggling number of upgrades to improve it. Companions can borrow your rigs on command, and nearby settlers won’t hesitate to climb in vacant suits if they’re under attack. MAIN Yes, Fallout 4 is a buggy game, but not every technical hiccup spoils the fun. This rather impromptu reenactment of O Brother Where Art Thou? by a Brahmin more than makes up for a few Ghouls caught in cement walls

ABOVe VATS no longer halts time, merely slows it, slaying any mid-firefight sag in tension. Meanwhile, tying critical hits to a charging bar and timed button presses adds a layer of resource management to fraught shootouts

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The dialogue roleplaying element itself is also pared down, but this is less blasphemous than it initially seems. Conversations are reduced from a list of writtenout choices to a Telltale-style four broad moods (commonly goody two shoes, sarcastic, antagonistic, and information seeking), with colour-coded persuasion options replacing these as applicable. While truncated text can compromise clarity, Fallout 4 succeeds in presenting a well-voiced lead character but still letting you choose the tone of encounters, and makes it eminently clear when a button press will affect more than merely the dialogue riposte. It’s not a perfect system – the dollop of XP for successful changes of mind and few repercussions can push you to scam others for no good reason, while some NPC volte-faces are jarringly abrupt. As with a Telltale game, the illusion tends to shatter if you go back and repeat choices too. Stick to your gut, however, and it all makes for a convincing way of weaving through each interaction. Likewise, Fallout 4’s greater focus on one absorbing, high-investment playthrough means that it tucks its Power Of The Atom-style points of divergence tens of hours into the game, once you’ve had time to spend with each faction and know them well enough to commit to sticking with one through to the end. Otherwise, each strand is discrete enough that the outcome rarely closes off anything else, and the game will explicitly warn you when you’re about to pass the point of no return – a trend the series has been following since it went 3D, but its lightest touch yet. Again, this will not please every fan of yesteryear’s entries, but in a world so packed with things to do and see, it’s freeing to have the points where the doors slam shut on certain paths so clearly delineated.

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To say Fallout 4 isn’t the prettiest game is an understatement, but it’s more than capable of moments of wonder all the same. Take to the sky or head underground, however, and you’ll rarely see the game at its best

Gimme Shelter

Tangential, inessential and yet thoroughly absorbing, base building is another subtly brilliant addition to the Fallout template. You’ve long been able to own a part of the wasteland, usually using your rooms as skip for all the junk you just can’t bear to leave outside, but settlements let you shape it and give all those hoarded fans and clipboards a purpose. What staggers is the array of depth. Simple bolt-together prefabs cater for dabblers, while power systems, defence emplacements and a host of decoration options and workstations are all here for the committed fixerupper. There are, of course, a few quirks – walls float rather than obey physics, and using the menus near objects can be awkward – but it’s satisfying that you can add to the wastes, not just make them emptier.

Character sculpting and depth instead falls more heavily on the titanic SPECIAL perks chart, allowing you to shape your vault dweller into a light-fingered sneak as easily as a brash gunslinger, but also allowing you to improve your crafting, looting, settlement building, and even traversal moveset. Levelling is slow enough that each early choice has definite meaning, and key perks such as turning rads into health or being able to disappear underwater truly affect how you approach future encounters. One grumble is how far down the columns the perks for armour and gun modifications lie, meaning the first few levels are unable to make you anything better than the wasteland has already provided. But that few points ever feel wasted in a chart of 70 options is the best kind of praise for Fallout 4’s astounding smorgasbord of buffs and powers.

Fallout 4 is as eccentric as they come. It subtly shifts the ethos of postapocalyptic adventuring to suit longterm commitment in your vault dweller and seeing all its world has to offer, but to the detriment of the desire to replay the game from scratch. It refines the core shooting and user interface, but otherwise adds only a clutch of enjoyable yet nonessential extras, such as settlements and armour pieces. And despite feeling like a throwback, it is a potent reminder that Bethesda has made some of the better roleplaying worlds to exist. Mods will polish it, patches may fix it, and drifters still won’t see what the fuss is about. But if you’re of a mind to settle down, there are few more rewarding 8 places to do so than the Commonwealth.

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Post Script A little companionship goes a long way in Fallout 4 (warning: contains spoilers)

trong the super mutant is getting impatient. We’ve only returned to Sanctuary to patch up our power armour, after a Deathclaw worked out how to use the can opener that nature (or at least nature in conjunction with a hearty dose of roentgens) blessed it with. We shouldn’t care; Strong, after all, is a creature who finds our very species abhorrent, and is seeking the secret source of our power, the milk of human kindness, in order to wipe the remnants of humanity from the face of this savage Earth. Still, his disapproval registers and we stop scrolling the mods list. Maybe we should just leave the suit and get back to the thing Strong does best: laying waste to what’s left of the wasteland. It’s a silly moment, just a snippet of dialogue, but one that also demonstrates the power of Fallout 4’s charmable, and largely charming, companions. You see, for all his murderous hatred, it’s tough not to like Strong. He’s gullible, his thinking on the level of a child – a far better ward than the in-game infant we’re supposed to care about but never got a chance to know. He useful, too: anyone whose biceps are as large as a human head is an asset in a land of people and glowing abominations only too willing to kill you. And if we don’t get on his good side, we’ll never get to know more about his backstory or his intriguingly daft quest. But where the kind of behaviour needed to impress Strong would formerly have been out of the question, since it would have wrecked our reputation and disrupted our karma – we’d likely have saved him for a second, ‘bad’ playthrough where we exclusively murdered, stole and scammed our way through old choices – we’re only too happy to play Fallout 4 his way for a while. We all live with a little voice over our shoulder, but it’s rare to have it personified in a game, or be able to let it steer you with such abandon. It’s certainly a different kind of escapism to the skill test of lining up shots and pulling triggers, but of all the things the breakdown of society as we know it should offer, it’s freedom from the strictures of the mundane. And that, in his hulking way, is what Strong represents. The second we dismiss him, we can go back to being a private eye’s partner, or a do-gooding helping hand to impress Minuteman Preston Garvey, a seeker after the truth with ballsy journalist Piper, or myriad other roles besides. So why not let loose with our modded hunting rifle and clean up the darker end of our to-do list while we’re at it?

It really ought to be jarring, all this sticking magnets next to your moral compass. But Fallout 4 is the type of game whose very design is intended to make you feel like the most important person in its universe, given pretty much everything is held in stasis until you step in, so it continuing to revolve around you is just

The writing in Fallout 4 deserves credit for being flexible enough to accommodate shades of angel and bastard

normal service. Plus, the Commonwealth is massive, so why would the time when you wound up a bar full of patrons with an uncharacteristic streak of sarcasm and pickpocketing ever reach the ears of remote settlers in need of a saviour? While being an ambiguous moral slate to every fresh face does grow increasingly strange towards the endgame – you’d think ruling several towns and having put a hundred legendary creatures in the ground would earn a little recognition – it’s certainly less bizarre than the whole world simultaneously coming by the knowledge that you just nuked a town for a fancier apartment (either tacitly or just by reacting to your low standing). Did the rest of the Capital Wasteland have a special meeting, or something? The writing in Fallout 4 deserves credit for being flexible enough to accommodate several shades of angel and bastard, too. That the majority of companions can be found incredibly early in the game means that almost every one of its ideas has to work in the context of being buddied up with a righteous people lover and a callous mass murderer. That’s a tough ask, and it’s also what generates tough decisions for you as a player. Do you cave to peer pressure and solve your problems by pumping the trigger, or will you accept a step back in this relationship to do the ‘right’ thing? The gamification of ethics these companions provide is no less of a videogame abstraction than karma, then, but crucially it is one that serves and rewards you as a player, rather than confines you. Companions are a set of lenses to see the world through, colouring it with their interjections, preferences and captivating backstories. And they’re truly additive to the fiction at large too. We wondered at first why Diamond City tolerated Nick Valentine, given the undercurrent of hatred for synths, but that only made us all the more fond of the place when he sat us down and delivered the tale of his gradual acceptance. Piper’s fear for her sister, meanwhile, made us look at the bogeyman menaces of The Institute as something other than a different kind of humanoid to blow the limbs off of in VATS. But the real payoff with companions exactly mirrors the arc of the game as a whole: they’re at their best when you invest in them to the fullest extent. Perhaps that looks like romance, or dressing Dogmeat up with spiffy armour and a red neckerchief. Perhaps it’s going on a mission that will grant your travelling buddy a little closure or a whole new kind of life in this sick, twisted world. A little creative inventory management can make each one of these characters yours, but subtly, over time, the process works the other way too. Fallout 4 is a road trip, and many of its companions are so good that if you spend enough time with them, it’s hard to imagine wanting to share the road with anyone else. n

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Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam Bros

lphaDream’s Mario & Luigi RPGs have always shown a keen interest in duality. Since 2005’s Partners In Time, the series has thoroughly explored the concept of two interconnected universes, finding new ways to demonstrate how actions in one can have effects on the other. Here, the worlds colliding are the Mushroom Kingdom and its two-dimensional equivalent, and the impact is akin to a violent fenderbender. Paper characters and scenery literally fall from the sky. When more obstacles and enemies are needed, they’re fired from a giant cardboard cannon. Any fears this is a quick cut-and-paste job, crudely stapling assets from Paper Mario: Sticker Star into the world of Dream Team Bros, are unlikely to be allayed by early contact with Paper Jam Bros. At least it’s up front about it. Happily, while its asset reuse is far from elegant, the developer hasn’t used up all its best ideas – and it’s learnt lessons from the lukewarm reception to its previous game. Paper Jam Bros isn’t entirely free of the padding and occasional bagginess of its predecessor, but the pace is much brisker. Its secret is to ensure you’re never pursuing a single objective for very long: any time it begins to settle into a familiar rhythm, there’s some form of disruption. Often this involves retrieving paper AlphaDream’s fondness for bit parts sees it grant Toadette a scene-stealing cameo. As the architect of giant papercraft models, she’s creative and capable – though woe betide all who interrupt her precious thinking time

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Developer AlphaDream Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now

Flat figure

Blank cards either bought or earned in battle can be turned into character cards by scanning compatible Amiibo. The Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Toad and Yoshi figures each have card sets, containing a range of buffs, debuffs and other status effects. These are selected via a roulette, which also randomly offers the chance to pair up two Amiibo for powerful cards. One card per figure per battle can be deployed without spending star points; if you own all six figures, you can make fights far easier.

Toads, which have been scattered across the world, but these brief quests assume a variety of forms. One asks you to corral a particularly twitchy bunch into a safe area, another sees you peeling them off cave walls, and there are stealth interludes and timed pursuits too. Showpiece battles between huge papercraft models are a less successful change of pace, though they’re too short, easy and infrequent to be a serious irritant. Mario might lead the way, but his companions are the stars. AlphaDream’s take on Luigi as a cowardly klutz who wears his heart on his sleeve is still inspired, his overreactions and pratfalls making him a reliable source of laughs. The scriptwriters have raised their game, too, a streak of self-aware humour delivered with a rare lightness of touch: one scene sees Peach pass the Bechdel test with herself. Meanwhile, the plumber’s paper counterpart helps refresh a never-better battle system, with a range of abilities unlocking a string of inventive attacks (a spiralling skydive is the standout) and evasive moves. His presence alone makes dodging more challenging; while battle card items can redress the balance, they’re powered by perfect attacks and avoiding damage, incentivising skilful timing. Asset wear and the odd tear mean the subversive Superstar Saga remains the series’ peak, then. Still, this attempt to fuse two very different Mario worlds 7 is more than the sum of its mismatched parts.

Dispatches Perspective

James Leach

Postcards From The Clipping Plane

hat’s the problem with sidekicks in games? I mean, they’re great in real life, but for some reason they just don’t work for me on the screen. I’m not talking about the animation or graphics. I just don’t bond with them like I know I’m supposed to. Perhaps this says something about me and my ability to form attachments to others… No. That’s not it. I refuse to believe that. My problem is this. Take Knuckles from the Sonic series – he’s loyal, helpful and even has a bit of character. For an echidna. But the thing is, all I could ever do is judge him on his ability to help. Games are all about progression. You’re on a journey, and every step requires skill and effort. Anything or anyone that can aid this is, for me, simply a tool to get you to where you want to be. Little Knuckles, doing his best, is no more than a decent gun or shield. There’s something just too mechanical about it. And it’s not him or his echidna-ness. Take Dogmeat from Fallout. Again, you can rely on him at all times to rip into the people you can’t currently be bothered to engage. But again, you can be grateful for it, but you can also take him for granted, and that doesn’t engender the deep and abiding love which perhaps it should. So what could make it work? How could a sidekick melt my icy heart? Here’s an idea. First, I’d like to acquire the sidekick early, and for it to be in a state where it is incapable of helping me at all. Let’s say that it’s an ocelot called Randy. I find Randy cowering under a burnt-out tank or something. He’s traumatised, and takes some investment to winkle out. Not too much, as there’s a war on and we haven’t got time to muck around coaxing South American big cats from beneath panzers. Perhaps he needs half the food I’m carrying. Is it worth it? I’m going to find out. Randy is small but early on he shows a ferocious streak. With his sharp claws and teeth, he might even take a few hit points off me. But pretty soon there’s a scripted moment. He has a choice – to flee or to follow me into danger. He chooses the latter. He is now my

There’s a war on. We haven’t got time to muck around coaxing South American big cats from beneath panzers responsibility. But he’s still also a liability. As history shows, ocelots played no significant part in any of the big tank battles of the 20th century. Google it if you don’t believe me. At this point, in an ideal world, I’d like to be able to shape Randy into the sidekick he’s destined to be. I’d like to teach him to attack the foe. And more than that, I want to choose when and how he does it. Using the ocelotbiscuits left by fleeing shock-troops, I spend a few minutes teaching him to stealth-attack, to use claws and teeth on multiple enemies. I want him to be wayward and headstrong, but to get it, one training session at a time.

And then there is the moment when Randy does his thing for real. I’m pinned down by a sniper. I’m not quick enough to cover the ground between me and where I think he’s hiding. But Randy can. Ocelots, as we all know, or might find out via the net, can run at speeds of up to 38mph. I lay down a magazine of suppressing fire and unleash my diminutive leopard-like chum. With no thought to his safety, Randy races across the open ground and, just as I taught him, chews off the oesophagus of the highly decorated sniper. He returns, the sniper’s rack of medals hanging rakishly off one ear. If I’m ever going to bond with a sidekick, it’s going to be through something like that. And it’s as I reward him for his action, I realise that the more of my vital food supplies I give him, the stronger, more dangerous and more loyal he gets. He even lies next to me and purrs. Because ocelots, like bobcats, lynxes and mountain lions, can purr, as you know. So now I’m sold on the sidekick thing. But I want more. I’d be keener on Randy if he, at some point, is denied to me. Being captured is too obvious. So there’s a moment where I need to cross a river to achieve my objective. Randy can’t come. Although it’s common knowledge that ocelots are great swimmers, this one is too fast-flowing. Even I have to use a rope to get across and Randy lacks the opposable thumbs which he needs to follow. So I have to leave him. The river-crossing, shooty-on-the-other-side objective is achieved. I can, should I wish, press on, knowing the enemy is on the run. Or I could go back and find my cat. I go back. Randy is where I left him. He’s injured, but surrounding him is a platoon of chomped opposing Special Forces dudes. I need my food, but I give it to him. He needs it more. So I think that what I’m saying is, I want to earn my sidekick, and I want him or her to be excellent because of me. Yeah, we gaming types are a selfish bunch, aren’t we? James Leach is a BAFTA Award-winning freelance writer whose work features in games and on television and radio

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Illustration box-kite-curve.com

Conveniently ignoring the serious side of videogame development

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