This week I was challenged to identify 5 affordable games that are worth buying today:

1. My old PC favourite, The Movies is amazing value at only £1.99. Sure it’s ancient by gaming standards and precise editing is a bit tricky but it’s wrapped up in a nice studio-building classic.
2. Alan Wake is surprisingly cheap given that it’s only been out 2 months. With a Metacritic score of 83 and the fact that everyone was talking about it at the last games event I went to, I would have expected it to stay pricey for longer. Perhaps there aren’t enough explosions? I almost bought it yesterday but I should really finish Fallout 3 first. £19.99 from GAME
3. Batman: Arkham Asylum is a brilliant game with classic boss fights (ok, that part’s no so brilliant, imo), a lovely combat system and incredible atmospheric storytelling. Only £13.99.
4. The whole Uncharted series annoys me – where I find The Prince amusing, Nathan Drake just wants a slapping, IMO. Couple that with my poor combat skills and I lose all sense of fun. However, TheFluffyFist and Brinstar really enjoy the game, so Uncharted 2: Among Thieves on the list. £19.99 from GAME
5. Finally, I heartily recommend Oblivion on the PC. If you buy it from Play.com, not only do you get Bioshock for free, you can take advantage of the many incredible mods that have come out in the past 4 years. I had some serious issues with Oblivion, most notably the console-driven interface. I was also disappointed that much of Cyrodiil felt the same. There was none of that awe-inspiring feeling of traversing a real world that I got travelling between say, Vvardenfell’s utilitarian city Vivec and leafy tree-village of Tel Branora. I have high hopes that the Unique Landscapes mod will fix that. Bioshock/Oblivion pack – £10.99

What top 5 games would you recommend for under £20 (or $30)?

Age Rating:

12 (BBFC)

What is it?

A Bioware RPG witha futuristic space-colony setting and third-person-cover combat

It is fun?

Hell, yes.

Is it worth the money?

(£39.99)

Yes, yes, yes. At £1 per hour, it’s very good value for money.

Why?

I love western-style RPGs. I love sci-fi settings. And I love taking cover during combat. I love Mass Effect. This game is almost made for me :)

There are flaws. I talked about Mass Effect’s dialogue issue back in December. The inventory interface is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever seen, as is the party selection menu. Still, I had so much fun playing the game itself that I don’t really care.

The Good:

• Purpose – You have actual goals throughout the game that aren’t simply “shoot everything in sight”. Sure, that’s generally the means to your end, but at least there’s a purpose behind it.
• Combat – The combat system is great. It’s like Gears of War but less frustrating. Gears feels like you’re wearing a huge chunk of magnetic armour and everything else is made of iron. Mass Effect gives you more control when running and it’s far easier to go around things.
• Breadth – You have a giant world to explore. This isn’t a sandbox game but you can spend hours just exploring the Citadel and pick up lots of side-quests
• A useful journal! Longtime readers will know, I’m a bit fanatic about RPG journals. This one does the job, though could have done with listing the target locations more prominently. Iinstead, you’re forced to open up every single item repeatedly, to find the nearby missions.
• Force powers Biotics – These mysterious powers are great fun. There’s a little something for everyone – healing, direct damage, disabling, shields, sharpshooting… I love it. None of them look quite as spectacular as KOTOR2′s Force Storm, but the combination of Lift and an assault-rifle-wielding teammate looks impressively violent.
• Advancement – I’m not sure if BioWare did a sneaky enemies-level-up-with-you but if they did, it was very subtle and much more satisfying than Oblivion. In Oblivion as you got more powerful, it never felt that way because even the lowliest grass-dwelling bandit mysteriously sprouted glass armour and would kick your sorry ass unless you specialised in combat. In Mass Effect, you can do the majority of the game in any order and it’s always challenging, but you still get the feeling of becoming more powerful.

The Bad:

• The interface and dialogue system. The interface will need a whole post to explain, so I’ll save that for another time. Just trust me, it’s rubbish.
• Uncharted worlds – These are fun to start with. The first time you get dropped on an uncharted world, it’s a breathtakingly beautiful scene. The next hundred and fifty seven times start to grate. Ultimately, the uncharted worlds all feel the same – drive around from way point to way point, drive in circles shooting something, fall off a mountain, find building, kill everyone, search back room (or for variety, upstairs back room), play unlocking mini-game, The End. But it’s the only way to get that level 50 achievement so, for some insane reason, I did them all. There’s no way I’m going for level 60 on another playthrough.
• Repetition – The endless combat in corridors for the main quest does get a little samey after a while.
• Achievements – If you collect gamerpoints compulsively, Mass Effect will swallow you for days. Assuming that you play as efficiently as possible, you’ll have to play the game all the way through twice and the middle four planets at least once more with different allies. Considering it took me around 40 hours to hit level 50 with almost all the sidequests, that’s something in the region of 80-100 hours to get all the gamerpoints. I’d advise you to rent Avatar: The Burning Earth instead, but you probably already did.
• Tower of Hanoi – Has BioWare ever made an RPG that didn’t feature the Tower of Hanoi? I’ve been solving this puzzle for at least 15 years now. I know it was in KOTOR and I’m sure I saw it in another BioWare game. Here’s a compromise; show us the puzzle and have a character ask what it is. If we answer Tower (or Towers) of Hanoi we get a free pass, okay?

In summary:

It’s a brilliant space-shooter RPG. Mass Effect would get my vote for Game of The Year 2007.

Mysteriously HUD-Free Screenshots

I can, however, point any PC gamers among you towards these two player-created mods which have made my Oblivion non-fighter experience a whole lot better.

Mod 1 – Fixing the Interface:

It’s like he looked into my shrivelled, wasting, PC gaming heart and saw that it was good…

Selected highlights:

• Double the inventory items, skills, factions and accomplishments on-screen
• Bigger maps
• A condition bar for your current weapon
• A few extra mapped buttons
• The option to remove those pesky quest markers from the compass. Sometimes they’re useful (e.g. when you’re circling the entrance to a cave but can’t see it coz you’re a midget in 6ft tall grass) but a lot of the time it takes the fun out of hunting for someone when it points right at them, no matter where they are in the city.

The BTMod is here. I would have provided “before” screenshots but I forgot to take some and this mod is not easy to uninstall.

Mod 2 – The Mercenary Mod:

For those of you who, like me, aren’t as into the hacking and slashing as the game would like you to be this handy mod allows you to hire all kinds of mercenaries to help out with fighting, thieving and the like. I’m a sneaky thief. I fight for self-defense until I can get the hell out of there. I don’t like quests where I potter about for days, following and talking and searching and stealing and at the end of it all, I don’t get to complete the quest until I get locked in a room with a fully-armoured warrior and have to fight my way out. So unsatisfying! This mod lets me hire minions to do some of my fighting for me :)

They’re not the most intelligent when it comes to tactics like “Don’t charge headlong into a group of 3 ogres” and “I know you can see that ghost’s arm through the buggy wall but standing there bashing the stone blocks while I endanger myself elsewhere isn’t going to help,” but it goes a long way towards redressing the imbalance. You even get a few commands, like “Wait here”, “Follow me” and “Scout this area.” The only time I asked my merc to scout he wandered up to the nearest person and started gossiping, so I’m not so sure about that one. Maybe it works better when you’re lost in the grass.

The Mercenary Mod is here.

Screenshots (click to view at full size):

Word of warning – before I installed these mods, Oblivion crashed on exit about 70% of the time. Now it’s more like 95%, but I really can’t say whether it’s down to these mods or something else – Windows updates? Could be anything.

I love Oblivion. I’ve been playing it non-stop all weekend. But the interface is truly godawful.

As said, I have more than 101 keys. Can I map any of them to bring up my inventory at the touch of a button? No. How about the map? No. (More on the map later) Can I map any of the keys? No! Bethesda have declared the keys and be damned to anyone who has played Half-Life and thinks that SpaceBar should be Jump and E should be Action. I can map the commands that already exist, but not additional useful ones like World Map, Local Map, Spell list, etc. Still rubbish! Fortunately not quite as bad as I originally thought.

Inventory: I have a monitor that happily runs 1280×1024 pixel resolution. I’m 30 centimetres from the screen. Why can I only look at 6 items at a time? I don’t need letters 2 cm high telling me that I have steel arrows. Make it smaller! Show me more! Use those unique advantages that mean the PC gaming market is still alive, despite the bugginess and ease of piracy. Using a mouse means precision controlling – I can click directly on small things in a collection of small things. I shouldn’t need to tap through a giant menu. Even if you preserve the general design, you should be able to fit at least 10 items in that space.

Let me sort my inventory so I can find my torches instantly instead of scrolling past a hundred raw spell ingredients just to get some light. Give me a paper doll so I can see exactly what I’m holding and wearing instead of making me scroll up and down through my stockpiles of weapons to find out the condition of my equipped sword. The picture of my character is very pretty but am I wearing my enchanted necklace under that giant cuirass? I don’t know. CAN I wear an enchanted necklace under that giant cuirass? I don’t know. How about two necklaces with different enchantments? I Don’t Know!

The in-game map: The in-game map is shite. It doesn’t zoom out, it’s less than half the screen size, I can’t make it bigger and if I want to look north or south around the tiny slice of world that I can see I have to click and drag the top of the tiny map down to the bottom of the tiny map. Repeat ad nauseum. Added to that, (and I realise that this particular part of the rant is entirely my personal preference) it’s not intelligent enough to tell that if I’m pottering about in a city or dungeon I’m a hundred times more likely to want the local area map than the world map and in the countryside I probably want the world map, not the local map. Of course, this feature might be tricky to implement as it stands because for some obscure reason the maps are lumped into the same category as the journal.

Instant travel that progresses game time is nice. I’d like to know beforehand how many days I’m going to lose by using it, but I assume that the game has been designed so that you can’t accidentally miss out on a quest through it, right?

Oh and having the hidden well entrance to the Dark Brotherhood clearly marked on the map as “Dark Brotherhood” when I haven’t touched the well, didn’t know it was openable and certainly didn’t know that it leads to the Dark Brotherhood is just silly.

The journal: Actually, I like the journal. I like being able to choose my active quest and while the marker in the compass is a bit close to dumbing down the exploration and challenge for my liking (particularly with regards to the Thieves’ Guild joining quest), it can be tricky to find things amongst all that grass. Many other developers could learn from this journal. (Deus Ex: Invisible War developers, this means you!) For the current quest we need to know Who wants What and Where to go next. Everything else is optional. Those three are NOT. We also need to know what quests we have already completed because (and I know this is shocking) sometimes we play games through more than once. It’s good to have a reference for what I’ve already completed with this particular character. This journal has everything. Thanks, guys!

Whew, okay. Rant over. I feel much better now :)

[Morrowind paper doll image swiped from this fansite. ]

“This is truly a sandbox game, where every action will result in some sort of reaction. During the demo, our hero accidentally set an innocent villager on fire…”

Looks like it’ll be another beautiful game with the same free gameplay as the previous games in the series – Morrowind on the PC was best RPG I’ve played since Planescape: Torment in 1999! No official UK release date announced but it should be coming out on PC in February this year and Xbox 360 in March.

Have look at the official site’s download section – I love their desktop wallpaper and last year’s E3 videos are worth a look as well.