Manhunt 2 headed to PC

The first Manuhunt was great - I loved it's dark ambiance, tense story, brutal killings with common objects, stealth gameplay, voice acting, almost everything. I liked it so much that I wrote about it once or twice. So when I first heard of the sequel, I was awaiting it eagerly.

Warning: Manhunt 2 does not really contain Pinatas.

Unfortunately, Manhunt 2 turned out rather meh - and it was not the fault of the whole censorship battle that ensued before it was published. I played the unofficial uncensored version on my PSP, so I could see all gory executions, but the gameplay and story were mostly not on par with the first installment. Despite the hardcore violance, the overall impression was rather bland, with a couple of climatic exceptions - visions from the past haunting the main protagonist (similar to Suffering), somewhat unsettling alter ego (as in Fight Club), last level happening in hero's mind with the motive of burying the dead wife and black crows circling around. Okay, I admit, it was not all bad, but nowhere near the quality of the original Manhunt.

The choice of PSP as a platform did not help: levels were broken down into small chunks with lots of loading in-between, graphics were so-so. The game that is all about creepy atmosphere, dark environments and hardcore violence thrown on a portable console - not really a smart decision. The funny part is, I was playing it on the plane, flying from United States to Europe - it freaked the hell out of my neighbours, who, of course, were peeking at the screen. They did give me funny looks later.

Warning: Manhunt 2 does not really contain puppies.

Anyhow, back on topic. Manhunt 2 did not woe me, in fact I was rather disappointed to the point where I didn't even write a review, because I didn't want to waste my time on it. Sorry Rockstar, that's how it was. And now, some two years later I've just learnt that there is a PC port coming.

What?

A port of a two-year old mediocre game that's based on an engine that's seven years old? Made by a company that makes legendarily bad PC ports? Colour me uniterested. I might waste some of my bandwith to download a pirated copy to give it a try if I am particularly bored, but the chances of me actually buying it are very slim. Very slim indeed.

Still, this piece of news was a perfect excuse to write a mini-review of Manhunt 2 I should have done two years ago.

[ Screenshots taken from GeekRising ]

Tower of $insertYourDeityNameHere

Tower of Heaven is a small indie game in 8bit-like Gameboy aesthetic with a lovely chiptune and green colour palette. There's a character who is climbing the tower of some deity. When he (?) gets to the top it's gonna be milk and honey, but the way up is dangerous. So far it seems like a pretty standard fare, but there is a twist that makes this game more interesting (and also much more frustrating).


You see, the aforementioned deity is bored and is amusing itself with imposing additional rules on the poor climbing soul. Each new level adds a new rule: don't touch living things, don't walk left, don't this, don't that. Breaking a rule will be punished with a swift lightning. And with these rules in place, even seemingly innocent places can become very deadly...

This concept reminds me of Terry Pratchett's books, especially "Small Gods" (but not only), where the idea of religious interdictions gets completely ridiculed. This game does deliver the same message, only via a different medium.

It also does stand quite well on its own as a game - it is infuriatingly frustrating later on, but some people like to play it rough. As for me, I quickly became discouraged and didn't even finish the game, but I generally don't like games that punish me too much for my mistakes. Below you can see an excerpt from the early stages of the game that will give you the idea how it looks and plays:

You can download the game here, visit its authors pages here and here. It's well worth couple of minutes of your life (the current speedrun record is at 2m20s, so it is not that long) and if you find it offensive, then you probably had had your sense of humour surgically removed. I am Roman Catholic and I do find this game funny.

[Found via GameSetWatch]

4Kb of Wonder

I liked to watch demos in my 8bit youth, I actually am still doing it sometimes when the nostalgia kicks in. The things that people would squeeze in meager kilobytes of memory... But you know what?

Some still do.

Recently I've found a demo made by coding group RGBA for Breakpoint party. It takes 4Kb (four kilobytes) and it is a thing of beauty. Featuring beautiful procedurally generated mountain landscapes and delicate trancey music somewhat reminding me of early Jean Michel Jarre's works, it is a moment of blissful experience. I have watched it a couple of times already and I find it strangely relaxing. Below you can see embedded Youtube video, but you better follow it to see its HD version:

...or better yet, just go to RGBA site, download the original demo and watch it the way it was intended to be distributed. It weights mere 4Kb (dammit, the images on this page take more!), however, it will decompress to hundreds of megabytes of RAM - so be warned if you are reading this post from a netbook, in which case you'd be better off watching the above video.

[via Slashdot]

Barts Wins Internet Fame

If you have read my post on Battlefield Heroes to the very end (tl;dr), you might remember that I took part in the caption contest. To cut it short, my entry won the fourth place. Quote:

Fourth place goes to Barts for his display of wit using the infamous "I'm with stupid" T-Shirt! This got quite a chuckle out of me personally!

I know it's just a small thing, but the fact that I managed to make somebody laugh is really precious to me. Also, I feel flattered with the "display of wit" fragment.


You can check other winning entries here, and trust me, it's well worth it, some are truly hilarious. You can also have a look at my other attempts at humour here.

Planescape: Torment Megapost

If, like me, you consider Planescape: Torment to be one of the best games ever created - this is a post for you. But first, let me elaborate a bit on why I think it is so great for people that might have missed it.


Planescape: Torment takes advantage of one particular and unique property of games that I consider the most powerful and distinguishing feature of this media - the ability to influence the story via player's choices, ultimately creating one's own version of the tale, culminating in reaching different ending than other person playing the same game.

Unfortunately, I can't name many games that would allow me to fully shape both the story and the protagonist to my liking, which is a shame. Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Arcanum - did I miss anything? To some extent I could also add Silent Hill 1 and 2, since they allowed multiple endings that changed the sense of the story - but there was not much liberty in the games themselves.

Another thing that endeared Planescape: Torment to me was the sheer quantity of text that it contained - over 800,000 words of script (that's eight hundred thousand). Among my grandparents there were two Polish language teachers and one librarian (the fourth of my grandparents was a war hero, more of the action type kind of guy) and I think it shows. I have read thousands of books in my life, my personal library is huge, spanning well over one thousand books (possibly two thousand, but I haven't counted them recently), I still am reading a lot and I love it, I even run a blog on less known forgotten books. I even get twitchy if I don't get my weekly fix of lecture - one of the most annoying things in my travels around the world was the limit of the number of books I could take in my luggage.

Hence, for me the insane amount of text in Planescape: Torment is both a pleasure and an advantage, allowing to experience more of the world and its history, understand protagonists' stories more fully and learn interesting background stories.

Okay, so I think that now you get it - I love Planescape: Torment. I am convinced that it is one of the most brilliant pieces of interactive fiction in games. It is like reading a book that I can truly shape with my choices and push the protagonists towards the actions and places I find interesting. Whether you have already played it before or not, now is the good time to give it a go. Oh, and if the above paragraphs have not convinced you, this retrospective from RockPaperShotgun might.

Now, with that out of the way, there is a couple of interesting things related to Planescape: Torment that I have found some time ago and finally can share with you, gentle reader. Die-hard fans will surely appreciate them more, but they might tip the scales in favour of the game for those that have not experienced it yet.

First come three mods that clean, order, fix and restore a lot of content in Planescape: Torment (yes, it wasn't completely bug-free), bringing it much closer to what it was intended to be. The description from the authors comes below:

The Planescape: Torment Fixpack is a comprehensive WeiDU Fixpack for Black Isle's classic Planescape: Torment CRPG. Fixing literally hundreds of bugs and thousands of typos, thereby restoring a lot of lost and inactive content, the PS:T Fixpack (along with PS:T Unfinished Business and Qwinn's PS:T Tweak Pack) provides a completely new Planescape: Torment experience!

Planescape: Torment Unfinished Business takes the almost-but-not-quite-finished content that shipped with Black Isle's classic Planescape: Torment CRPG and polishes, bugfixes and finishes it so you can see and enjoy the new content in your game! With 18 components it is a must-have for anyone interested in seeing what the developers didn't get time to do--or even if you're just looking for some new content!

Qwinn's Planescape: Torment Tweaks adds a few ease-of-use tweaks to your Planescape: Torment install, as well as one or two must-have components! Including a banter accelerator, ease-of-use tweaks and several content changes, this is an extremely useful mod for any player.

The whole package called Qwinn's Planescape: Torment Mods is available here and frankly, it is such a great enhancement, that it should be treated as an obligatory patch.

After brushing up the content, the next thing to play with is the presentation layer. When Planescape: Torment came out first 1024x768 resolution was good enough, but nowadays it is laughable. The solution to that is Gibberlings 3 Widescreen Mod which enables higher resolutions. One would think that it would just result in having more of the game world visible at once, but as evidenced by this RockPaperShotgun article there's more to it than just that:

Playing PST at 1680×1050 thanks to this mod – the pixels not stretched, but rather the game world expanded, a vast amount more of it now visible at any one time – I’m constantly struck by how beautiful it is. It seems less a thing of pixels now, and more like the vast painting it was created as. [...] I get the sense this is Planescape as it was intended to look. It’s a different game for it, and now I stop to stare at the world as much as I do the elegiac prose.

Sample screenshot is available below, for more pretty pictures please follow the link to the aforementioned article. As for me, I was replaying Planescape: Torment on my 12" Thinkpad at 1024x768 and I was totally comfy with it, but if one owns a bigger screen then I think this mod will make a difference.


If at any time you get lost with all the things you need to install, here's the link to some useful information concerning patches and mods, including the recommended order in which to install them.

Lastly, with content and presentation taken care of, let us have a look behind the scenes. This article on RockPaperShotgun links to the vision statement document for Planescape: Torment dating back to 1997, when it was called Last Rites. On RPGWatch, the site that is hosting the document, there are also other cool things - two character drafts for Ravel (early draft and final version, extremely interesting to compare them), audio file that didn't make it into the final game and interviews with Planescape: Torment designers. It is a fascinating lecture for all fans of the game, but also for anyone interested in making computer and video games, as it offers an in-depth peek into the process of creation of the great game. The files are available here and here.

As for me, I am carrying in my brain a story that I would like to tell via a role-playing game and I really, really, really hope to be able to share it with the world one day. However, these documents make me scared - there is so much to do in order to tell even a simple story via a game that I shiver at the idea of producing that much content myself. Oh well, noone ever said that it would be easy, eh?

So there we are with three extras for Planescape: Torment - enhanced content, enhanced presentation and extremely interesting design documents. They should please the fans of the game, but they also might tempt some new players to dive head first into this great adventure. As for me, I just hope to be able to finish Planescape: Torment this time.

Polcon Announcement

"I'd like to make an announcement" said Dumbledore Barts. This year I will be attending Polcon, the largest science-fiction convention in Poland, this time conveniently located in my hometown of Łódź. Actually, this information is just an excuse to show you the promotional movie inviting all nerds and geeks to come and join it:

This trailer, so to speak, was made by Stanisław Mąderek of the "Stars in Black" fame. Here you can check another movie from two years ago, it's probably way cooler for non-Polish crowd, since it comes with English subtitles.

For me, the video in question is particularly interesting due to the fact that the building shown in it is the office of the headmaster (rector, to be 100% correct) of the Technical University of Łódź where I used to study. During the time of my studies, I would go in there numerous times, be it for negotiations concerning my scholarship or some foreign exchange program. Now you see what I had to go through in order to travel to Japan, ay?

A Peek into Prince of Persia Production

All right, I know that Prince of Persia is soo last year - or soo '89, blame Ubisoft for extremely stupid naming convention, as a result of which the last installment in the series bears the same name as the first one - but I have a tasty bit related to its development.

It started with me reading this post on GameSetWatch. Although usually GameSetWatch is a very good and interesting source of information, this time, well, they were spreading gossip. The movie that accompanies the post shows not "an early draft of the game", but a fake gameplay footage - kind of concept art in motion, so that the developers can see how the game is supposed to look and play.

I have seen this fragment in Ubisoft videos from Game Developers Conference 2009 at Autodesk's site, so I wanted to share it with GameSetWatch audience and post here on Barts News as well. Unfortunately, Autodesk has updated their website and the videos disappeared from it (or at least I can't find them, if you know where they are, let me know through comments). Fortunately, I have cached the movie and saved it for myself and now, in a moment of free time, I have uploaded it on Youtube for your viewing pleasure:

Watch this movie for a lot of very interesting information on game development process and the first visualization of Prince of Persia game. I kinda like the albino Elika (and the griffon!) and the overall, more dark, mood of the game. Pity it didn't get realized in such manner.

As for the fragment from GameSetWatch note, you can see some two minutes into the movie. Also, here are the links to part 2 and part 3. Enjoy!