Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

Last Week's Games: Atari Anthology, New Super Mario Bros U, Theme Hospital

I started this week by playing the Atari Anthology on the PlayStation 2. This is a compilation of 85 games that were a mixture of the Atari 2600 console and Arcade games, and with my borderline OCD method of decision-making, I tried some of them in alphabetical order. I had a go on a 2600 years ago which my friend Richard inherited off his Dad, and even with my age in single digits, I knew that games had come on a long way since then. Most people who collect and play these games now do so because they have some nostalgic investment in it; I don’t have this but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. The games showcased by this compilation “Started a Revolution,” and from what I understand about the 2600, it needed this shortlist! Many of the games released for it weren’t very good, and contributed to the over-saturation of the market that cause it to crash in the 1980s. Video games were in their infancy at that point, and a lot of what makes them fun for me – an end goal, an engaging plot, a challenging process and a satisfying resolution – just wasn’t there.

I like how the art for the early video
 games looked significantly better than
 the actual game...

Due to the limitations of the hardware, and that the entire concept of video games was still in development, the better games concentrated on their playability. I had a lot of fun with 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, a game played over a 4x4x4 cube. There is definite strategy involved, but if you mirror the computer’s moves, you’ll reach a draw. It took a while to beat but I managed it in the end.

Air and Sea Battle was reminiscent of early shooters, in which you play a gun turret shooting planes and helicopters out of the sky. Set up correctly, you have two minutes to score more points than the gun on the opposite side. As a single-player experience it’s over quite quickly; I’d imagine it would be better with two players, but most things are!

When I needed a few moments to wind down, I had a go with New Super Mario Bros U on the WiiU. I find that, with such wide gaps between playing this game, I forget about some of the newer techniques and power-ups and have to remember what they do before I can use them in any meaningful way. But it’s a nice fun game that I don’t have to think too hard about, which is exactly what I need at eleven o’clock at night!

Last Friday I beat Theme Hospital. I’ll put out a Backlog Beatdown review next Friday, but developing the points I made last week: The Epidemics and the Earthquakes are difficult to deal with, need to be included. In the later levels, there comes a point where everything needed to beat the level is basically done, and all you’re doing is waiting for the money to roll in so you can progress to the next one. The Epidemics, which gamble some money and reputation on being able to cure a certain number of patients in a certain time and none of them going outside, and Earthquakes, which damage your machines, appear at random and add some challenge to the game when everything is done. It’s a harsh way to extend the game, but they needed to exist.

Oh dear, that doesn't look too good...

Also the last level was deceptively simple to beat. I’d researched all the cures, built all the rooms and trained all my doctors to be as efficient as possible. While the criteria for beating the level is quite high, I was waiting for a curveball I didn’t think was going to come. It arrived right at the end: Most of the levels end on the next quarter of a year. With the last one, it only ends at the end of the year – and you have to maintain the standards until then. It took me longer than it should have to clear it, as just before the year ended, an earthquake that destroyed a few of my machines, a couple of doctors working on them – and my reputation. It took a long time to pull it back, but I did, and finished the game I originally bought in 1998!

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)

No Game New Year part 11: Fallout Brotherood of Steel and Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

I think I’m going to have to admit defeat and call it a day with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t even want to put my PS2 on for thought of having to deal with that asinine game, and I found myself thinking: Time to move on. Play something else. And get rid of that game.

(If and when I get rid of my games that I don’t play anymore, it will probably be all at the same time. In the UK there is a service called Music Magpie that will take some old games and CDs etc off your hands for a relatively small amount of money – but they will take them, and if there’s more than 20 items, the delivery is free. That’s how I’ll probably sell my games when the time comes. That’s also why I’ll hang on to the game long enough for me to give it another go if the mood takes me.)

So here are just a few things that are wrong with it:

The biggest problem I’ve had so far has been with the health recovery system. You either use Stim Packs, which will restore roughly ¼ of your health, or you can stand still for about 5 minutes and your health will recover automatically. The former is by far the quicker option, but if you do this, you will burn though your health packs very quickly and they need to be saved for the bosses. The latter sounds great until you start doing it after every 5 enemies or so. They drain a lot of your health if they hit you, which of course they will. I spent ages standing around waiting for my health to recover, and it would have been incredibly boring had I not had my laptop on at the same time and spent the downtime watching videos on Youtube. What I did before Youtube I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to play this game and have nothing else to do!

Also, some of the set-pieces are very lazy. Quite early on in the game you have to escape from a cave that is crumbling around you and rocks are falling down on to you from overhead. The idea is to get you to hurry up while you’re leaving, which you do, until you realise that not a single one of these rock falls – which occur once every six seconds or so with EXACTLY THE SAME ANIMATION – has even the remotest chance of hitting you. All it’s actually doing is getting in the way of your field of view. Granted, given the size of the level, having any of them hit you would have made escape almost impossible, but it could and should have been handled a lot better than this.

Aside from this, the game is just outright dull. Other than the main questline, the quests are absolutely ridiculous (I can’t imagine that a prostitute in post-apocalyptic America is going to be too worried about the whereabouts of her cat, even if it is called Mr Pussy,) the characters aren’t likeable by any stretch of the imagination and the combat is repetitive and boring. I imagine the game would be more fun played in 2-player co-op,[1] but what isn’t? I bought it on the strength of the Fallout games – which up until then had been very good – but in hindsight; I’d have done better leaving this one alone.

 

Time for some fun...

 

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

This is a collection of games I’ve got on an Xbox360 disc of about 40 games for the Sega Mega Drive, better known in the rest of the world as the Sega Genesis. I owned a Mega Drive years ago – and some of these games - , from when I was eight up until about nineteen, when I traded it in for an Xbox. (This was 2005 and retro gaming was HUGE in the UK at this point.) I figured, in the spirit of the challenge, that it would be a good idea to play through some of these.

Now, some of these old Mega Drive games are very hard to complete. On at least one of them, it actually can’t be done (because it is a Tetris-style puzzle game and will carry on indefinitely until you lose.) Some of them are astonishingly difficult to manage. And some of them are simply better games than others. While I like enough of the games to want to keep the actual disk, in some cases all I will be looking for is the Achievement Points for it.

Here are the games I’ve won achievement points on so far, and what I had to do to get them:

• Alex Kidd: Collect 1,000 in currency
• Altered Beast: Collect 100,000 points or higher on the first level
• Bonanza Brothers: Reach 40,000 points on the first level
• Columns: Get 20,000 on Easy mode
• Comix Zone: Complete the first episode
• Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine: Complete the game
• Ecco: Talk to another dolphin
• Fatal Labyrinth: Progress to the 5^th level of the labyrinth
• Golden Axe: Collect 20 magic power-ups
• Kid Chameleon: Collect Maniaxe
• Shinobi III: Complete the 1^st level without using continues
• Sonic Spinball: Get 10,000,000 points on the first level
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Obtain a Chaos Emerald
• Streets of Rage: Complete 1^st level using all 3 characters.
• Super Thunder Blade: Score over 1,500,000 points on the first level

So, without further ado, here are the games I’ve been playing and how I managed with them:

 

Streets of Rage

I’d actually already got the achievement for this, as playing through the first level with all three characters isn’t actually all that hard. However, as far as brawlers are concerned, the Streets of Rage series was as good as they ever were or ever would be. In fact the second game is my favourite game of all time. I hadn’t completed it though, (at least, not on normal difficulty) and I’ve got this thing where I have to play through all the games in the series in order, so I thought I’d start with this one.

Streets of Rage, while not superbly balanced, includes a surprising amount of strategy for a brawler. But I guess that’s what games were like back in the early 90s. In order for it to be a challenge, the game was designed in such a way that you couldn’t just button-mash. You had to think about what you were doing, and how you’d tackle the various different enemies, particularly the bosses.

For example, at the end of level 2, you come across a guy with Wolverine-style claws. The way to deal with him is NEVER to jump, because as soon as you do he rushes at you with a slash and knocks you out of the air. Instead, approach him from above if you can, and get him in a hold. To maximise the damage output, flip over him while holding him, do the first couple of moves of the hold combo then throw him.

To deal with the big fat guy who breathes fire on level 4, you have to make sure you’re at the opposite height of the screen to where he is (i.e. if he’s low, be at the high end,) intercept him from behind as he’s breathing fire and do the hold combo. But whatever you do, don’t try to throw him or he’ll fall on top of you and you’ll damage yourself.

By far the hardest enemy in the game is Mona and Lisa, two fighters who in this version are re-skins of the playable character Blaze. If these two hit you, it will hurt – more than a third of your health bar will disappear – and the only way to hit them is to use your back attack. If you try to attack them head on, they will simply jump away from you. This requires a lot of skill to manage, and a character with a good back attack.

And then there are the characters themselves: Adam, Axel and Blaze, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game purports to help you out with this on the selection screen; Adam is strong and has a good jump attack but is not very quick, Axel is strong and quick but doesn’t have very good jump attacks, and Blaze is quick and has jump attacks but is not very strong. But they all have different things about them that you can only discover through playing the game yourself – or reading a wiki. In my case it was a mixture of the two.

My favourite character is Adam, but I think this has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn’t appear as a playable character in Streets of Rage 2 which I owned years ago. I always enjoyed playing the different character. He’s good enough to take out most of the enemies in the game, but sadly not quite quick enough to get out of their way when they’re doing their fast attacks, and I tend to die before I get to the end of the game.

Axel is quite average and was great in the second game but in this one he’s lacking in ranged attacks. He has to be right up close before he can do any significant amount of damage, and this is the case for his jump attack and back attack as well, making him almost useless for some of the later bosses. It’s kind of ironic that the character that was the face of the game was also the least useful.

I actually finished the game with Blaze, in the end. She’s quick enough to dodge most attacks and she’s got good jump and back attacks as well. Her regular attacks are less powerful but this is a small price to pay because you just need to do more of them. Also – and this is where some balance issues come in to it – she has the best throws out of the three of them as well. So she’s fast; useful; and if you get close enough she can do a huge amount of damage. She’s actually therefore the best character in the game.

The game also lets you choose a ‘Bad’ ending. The idea of different endings wasn’t unknown for the time, and you’d usually have to do something extra to get the good one – play on a higher difficulty level, collect all the Chaos Emeralds and such – but in Streets of Rage, you actually have to work harder for the bad one. At the end of the game, you have to choose whether you want to become Mr X’s right hand man, and if you decide that you do, he drops you down and you have to play the last I think three levels again. You then have to beat the last boss anyway, which is surprisingly easy. I’ve seen both endings; I completed the game years ago and got the bad ending on Easy mode, but for this play-through I wanted to play it on normal and get the good ending. It was satisfying to beat it again after so long!

 

Bonanza Brothers

This game appears to be about two brothers who steal things from various guarded locations, and what has to be one of the first games with a ‘Stealth’ mechanic. You could hide from your enemies, or shoot them, which in actual fact would stun them for around 5 seconds. The levels were timed and there would be a bonus in your score for beating the level quickly. Time-based scoring like this was quite common in those days, I think.

I never owned this game on the Mega Drive and to be honest, I’m not enjoying it too much now. The controls are quite clunky and the theme is something I’m struggling to care about. I might give it another go at some point, but now that I’ve got the achievement for it, it won’t be any time soon.

 

Alien Storm

Another brawler. Don’t be fooled by the fact that all the characters have guns; they are short ranged energy blasters that don’t go more than a few feet. The idea behind the game is that aliens have descended on to earth and are disguising themselves as bins and post boxes, and you have to kill them all with your weapons. Or, as is commonly the case with Mega Drive games, mash the B button. The A button does the usual super-attack, but the C button is what sets this one apart from regular brawlers. Rather than jumping up, this one actually makes jump forward, which you can combine into a quick attack in the form of a forward roll. It’s useful, provided you understand where you’ll end up and make sure there are no enemies there, and quite a bit different from the usual jump attacks. But you do find yourself missing the notion of a jump keeping you out of harms way for a valuable second while you decide what to do next. The game also has ‘first person’ sections, where you control a crosshair to aim at various different aliens coming at you and shoot crates to get power-ups.

 

This game is OK but not as good as Streets of Rage. For one thing, the things that are supposed hide alien life – bins, etc – are things that in any other game you’d smash to get an item; trying to do so in this game almost always results in an alien appearing out of it, taking away any element of surprise. You also need to collect energy for your guns, which is a peculiar thing to put in a brawler because that potentially means you could derail the whole game by running out of ammo. It is also very hard. I can’t actually get the achievement – I have to make it to the end of the third level without dying even once. Something always manages to kill me, either by ganging up on me to the point where I can do nothing but use a super-attack to deal with it, or by being a horribly hard boss fight.

But, for a game that was obviously designed for arcade, this is not too bad at all. It is fun, if a little frustrating, and it’s nice to have a slightly different take on what you would normally expect from a brawler. I’ll keep going at it until I get that achievement, but whether I’ll make it to the end I don’t know.

 

Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine

This is an absurd but surprisingly fun game using characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. (For those of you who don’t know, Dr Eggman was originally called Dr Robotnik. I don’t know why it was changed for the later games!) In fact, some of the characters who appear in the game were also from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog TV series, which I used to love when I was about 8 or 9 and for quite a long time afterwards! It is a tetris-like puzzle game, where you have to group four or more ‘Beans’ of the same colour in order to ‘free’ them.

What makes this game different is the adversarial nature of the game. The Scenario Mode pits you against a ladder of 12 different robots that are also playing the game, and the idea is to make them fill their playing field before they do. As soon as that happens, it’s game over, but there’s a twist: Each time you free a group of coloured beans, it creates a group of colourless “refugee” beans that drops on your opponent. These cannot be grouped in the usual way, and the only way to get rid of them is if they are next to a group that they are freeing. The more beans you get rid of in one shot – or the higher your combo – the more refugees are dropped on your opponent. Drop enough of them and you can knock them out straight away, though more likely you’ll be very disruptive to the combos they were planning. Of course, they can do the same to you, and trust me, they will…

The robots you fight are a colourful bunch, and feature Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog amongst others. All the robots say something to you in a text-based format before their level begins, and I can’t help but wonder if the script-writer ever actually watched the show; most of the characters that feature here are devoid of their usual personalities in the game. They are all supposed to have different strategies and tactics in order to make life difficult for you, but to be honest, the only ones that gave me any significant amount of trouble were Dynamight (Level 7,) and Spike (Level 9.) The rest of them… well it wasn’t exactly easy, but when I won, I felt it was more to do with luck of the draw than skill. I actually beat Dr Robotnik on my first go.

The game also features a 2-player versus mode, which caused some horrific rows between me, my brother and some of my friends in my younger days! (Dropping a load of refugees on each other was never taken in good grace, and even now seems something of a ‘dick’ move.) I guess that can be fun if played in the spirit it was intended. There is also a training, or ‘free’ mode, which can be one or two players and does not feature refugees. I guess that could be fun too, but with Columns on the same disk, there’s not much point…

I had a lot of fun with this, but now that I’ve got the achievement (Complete the game,) I doubt I’ll be coming back to it any time soon.

---

[1] The only person who’d play this sort of thing with me is my sister, who doesn’t live with me anymore so we don’t see much of each other. If she is around, we’ve got much better games than this to play together.

No Game New Year Week 9: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and the history of the PS2

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

This Playstation 2 game is to the Fallout franchise kind of like the embarrassing relative that nobody talks about. It took a rich intellectual property like Fallout and did not do it justice with the version that came out on Console. Now, while not awful, this game is going to take me a LONG time to play all the way through, so this week’s entry will be more about the context of the game than the actual game.

So, when people talk about the Fallout franchise, they’ll think of one of two things:

• If they’ve been playing games for a while they might talk about the brilliant isometric role-playing game from Black Isle Studios, first released on PC in 1997 and a sequel released in 1998. Games like this weren’t exactly unknown but this game pushed a lot of boundaries in terms of its setting, combat and morally ambiguous content.
• Younger fans, or people who have been following the franchise for a while and have recognised its developments, would be more likely to talk about Fallout 3 and its sequel Fallout New Vegas. Bethesda created a game that was a massive departure from its predecessors in terms of its game play, but did a lot to bring sci-fi role-playing games into what is at the moment the current generation of gaming. It was also a fantastic game, and incidentally one of the few Xbox360 games I own that I’ve actually completed.

What they wouldn’t talk about is a top-down dungeon-crawling action game with the Fallout setting released on the PS2 and the Xbox in 2004, which is basically all Brotherhood of Steel was. At best, it was one of two spinoffs from the main series (the other being Fallout: Tactics, which I never played.) At worst, it was a cheap cash-in of a successful franchise to make a game that was shallow, flawed and if I’m honest, actually quite dull.

Which begs the question: Why wasn’t this game a role-playing game? Why such a drastic move away from the style of the previous games?

We may never know, but here’s my theory: I think it had a lot to do with the hardware limitations of the Playstation 2. And this is going to take a while to explain, so bear with me. And also bear in mind that I’m talking about what happened in the UK; the position might be a little different in America and the rest of the world:

Believe it or not, not everything about the PS2 went to plan. If you spool time back to 2001, you might remember that the old PS2s were massive and had an expansion bay in the back. It was supposed to be used for a Hard Disk Drive and an Online Adapter, and was a well-intentioned attempt to take console gaming online. Unfortunately for Sony, this was one of the few times they launched a product before the world was ready for it, and both the Hard Disk Drive and the Online Adapter fell flat on their faces in the UK when they were first released.

Let’s start with the Network Adapter. Why did that fail? Well, a lot of it was to do with the availability of Broadband in the UK at that time. The European version of the Online Adapter came with an Ethernet adapter to connect it to a broadband connection. It didn’t come with an option to connect it with a dial-up connection, (I understand the US model did,) and rightly so because the kind of data that would have to have been processed in order to make a PS2 game work on line would almost certainly have needed a broadband connection.

Unfortunately for a great many PS2 gamers in the UK, very few people actually had broadband at this point, and most internet users used a dial-up connection. This worked by using modems to convert the message from the computer into a telephone signal, sending it across to its destination modem. This would convert the telephone signal back into a computer message, the effect of which would then be displayed on the computer. No wonder connections were slow!

Broadband was no more clever than this. It basically cut out the ‘middle-man’ and connecting computers directly to each other using dedicated internet cables. This allowed the internet to work without all that tedious mucking about with phone lines,[1] but it also meant that a lot of work had to be done to create the infrastructure to allow it to do so. The technology existed and was available, but digging up every street in the UK in order to connect every home to broadband was no small task. We’re still in 2001 here, don’t forget. I don’t think Broadband was used domestically to any major extent until 2002, and I didn’t get it until 2003.

So when the online adapter was first built, it flopped in the UK simply because we didn’t have the infrastructure to make it work. Up until the Slimline PS2 was released in 2004 (which had an Ethernet adapter built in to it,) the only game I can think of that supported online games was Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, also released in 2001 – and the online functionality didn’t work for obvious reasons. But what about the Hard Disk Drive?

Every console from the original Xbox now has a hard disk drive (HDD) built in to it. This was not the case with the PS2. The HDD was an optional extra that could, in theory, be bought separately and used with the PS2’s expansion bay. I don’t actually know whether this was ever released in the UK or not. It was talked about at the gaming shows, E3 being one of them. But I never heard anything about it being used in any games I read about in magazines, not least because one of its flaws was that no one seemed particularly sure what it was supposed to do.

We know what it does now, of course. Turn on your Xbox One or 360 and the interface you see, and everything you’re getting from Xbox Live, is all part of the infrastructure of the hard disk built in to the console. All your online content goes on to the HDD, and if you’re in to downloading games, they can go on the HDD as well. And there’s all sorts going on with the Next-Gen consoles that I haven’t got the faintest idea about yet.

However, it wasn’t all that clear to console gamers early last decade. Things like additional content and streaming were talked about, but all that made it sound like was a giant memory card. The HDD worked by streaming data from the game disk onto the hard drive. The idea behind it was that the PS2 could access data more quickly from a disk built into its infrastructure than from the disk. It could also be used in online play to download new content, and also have a substantial amount of memory to cope with the data coming in for online games.

It all sounded good in a ‘We’ll see what all that means when we get one’ kind of way, but at that time there were only two games that supported the HDD: Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 11.

FF11 was probably the first in what we now recognise as MMORPGs, and the first game that I was aware of that was exclusively online. So, if you didn’t have an internet connection, you couldn’t play it – and at that time, nobody did, because nobody in the UK had a broadband connection that would support online play with the PS2.

Final Fantasy 10 was not an online game, it was a large but somewhat linear RPG. It had a lot of data to access, and took advantage of streaming data from the game disk on to the HDD, where it could be read more quickly. What was the effect of this? Well, loading times decreased by about a second… and that was it.

So all in all, the situation with the HDD didn’t paint a picture of a piece of hardware you’d want to drop a couple of hundred pounds on.[2] Nobody bought it, and I think by the time the PS2 reached the end of its iteration, there were only 35 games that supported it. It was difficult, if not impossible, to attach it to the Slimline PS2, and its usefulness was overshadowed by the Xbox and the following generation of consoles.

What’s this got to do with Fallout? Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this…

Given the vast complexities of the requirements needed to create a sandbox/non-linear role-playing game, which is what people would have expected from Fallout, a hard disk drive would definitely be preferable, if not a requirement of a game like that. Any game with a morality-based system has to take into account all actions of the character in order to implement the effect of the world at large. It would also require a metric tonne of voice acting to account for all the possible conversations, and a whole host of other things I have not the technical savvy to describe right now. This kind of thing was possible on the 6^th-gen consoles; Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and Morrowind were all released on the Xbox, which had a HDD built in to it.

Put simply, it would have been impossible to put a role-playing game as complex as Fallout would have to have been on the PS2; the machine just didn’t have the hardware to deal with it. So Interplay had to come up with a different game entirely, and what they came up with was a dungeon-crawler: A functional action game with role-playing elements, but none of the depth or exploration that might have been expected for a game from the Fallout franchise.

So why did Interplay make a PS2 game at all? Why not put a proper role-playing game on the Xbox, which had the system capabilities to do it? I would imagine the decision came somewhere between the following two reasons:

• They had done more or less the same thing for Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance in 2001, which pre-dates the Xbox. They’d taken a well-loved and deep intellectual property, and made it into a dungeon-crawler game. Few fans of the series thanked them for it, but the PS2 gamers now had a version of Baldur’s Gate they could play – and Interplay now had a workable engine they could use for games that followed, including Dark Alliance 2 and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. This could be cynically viewed as a lazy re-use of assets, when a new game would have been preferable, but it also meant they could produce the game reasonably quickly.
• Part of the reason for the PS2’s success is that it had a lot of developers and publishers contracted to make games for them. This was partly due to the Playstation being the first console to get CD-based gaming right, which is a different story altogether but a lot of those deals would have been made around that time, and partly because for about 6 months developers and publishers had little choice in the matter. Between Sega calling it a day with the Dreamcast, and Microsoft releasing the Xbox, there was no choice but to make console games on the PS2. Unless Microsoft bought those contracts out when the Xbox was released, (and in some cases they did,) it was very unlikely that a development contract would extend to being able to make a game for the Xbox but not the PS2.

Or to put it simply, Interplay had to make the game for both the PS2 and the Xbox, and with an engine already in place, there was no reason to put any more effort into designing a completely new game.

So that, I think, is how we ended up with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. I hope you’ve enjoyed my musings into the history of video games circa early 00’s. Next week I might actually start talking about the game; that would be good, wouldn’t it?

See you next time.

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[1] Anyone remember having an extendable phone line that you had to reel around the house to wherever your computer was in order to plug the internet cables in? We laugh about it now, but I wonder how many people actually tripped up over those wires and broke their necks, as my Mom was convinced she would do. She never did…

[2] Or however much it was. I never saw one for sale so I don’t know.