asgaard

Silk Road

Thu, 03 Oct 13 22:23:59 +0000

The Silk Road events are exciting!

Here's a summary for people who don't know much about Silk Road (including me).

Silk Road is a hidden website (only accessible via an anonymous network called Tor) which is kind of like a black market Ebay, and is used primarily (or at least famously) for selling drugs. Exchanges there are done in a digital currency called BitCoin (whose value is now likely to tank, at least temporarily, as SilkRoad was one of relatively few places that you can actually use them). Silk Road was interesting for being a strange little centre of crypto-anarchism. Although the focus was drugs, the people selling were supposedly regular-ish people making them in smallish quantities and selling them to recreational users. Supposedly. Certainly a lot different than buying it on the street from your local crime lord, anyway.

It was run by the Dread Pirate Roberts (~~[SPOILER] aka Westley~~ aka Ross Ulbricht) who has now been arrested. The DPR engaged in a battle of wits with a user called ~~Vizzini~~ FriendlyChemist, who somehow got hold of a large list of SR users and tried to blackmail DPR. DPR tried to hire a hitman to have FriendlyChemist killed for a third of the blackmail price, but did so in a rather blasé way that suggests he might have known that the hitman was in fact FriendlyChemist, and thereby convinced FriendlyChemist to accept a smaller sum of money than originally asked for in exchange for not having a real hitman after him.

(Or maybe DPR didn't know and really did want to kill FriendlyChemist. I have no idea. You have to admire his dedication to his users' privacy, anyway)

According to the documents, it looks like ~~Prince Humperdinck~~ the FBI didn't compromise Tor. It looks like DPR was sloppy and left enough clues lying around to paint his real identity as being an interesting individual. Apparently he ordered some fake IDs which were intercepted at the US border and resulted in a visit from a law enforcement agency, whom he told "Anyone can buy order IDs from Silk Road with Bitcoin". Nothing suspicious there, just an average citizen mysteriously targeted for a batch of fake IDs who also happens to have a surprisingly good knowledge of online black markets. Perfectly normal.

Regardless, relying on Tor is a bad idea, because:

The FBI might have compromised Tor and used this to discover the circumstantial evidence which they then presented as their investigation in an effort to keep their knowledge of Tor quiet
Tor is a relatively small network and a well funded agency could learn a lot about the network simply by putting a lot of the machines on it.

The overall point is: If you've got something to hide, don't get sloppy (hint: you will) and don't use Tor.

Kerbal Space Program Review (sort of)

Tue, 27 Aug 13 12:23:18 +0000

It's hard to describe Kerbal Space Program.

If you look at the overall appearance of the game and the subreddit (r/kerbalspaceprogram), it's both hilarious and ridiculous and consists mainly of sending your small green Kerbals into space on rocket ships.

On the other hand, if you actually try to play the game, yes it's hilarious, but it's also brutally difficult and has a learning curve roughly the same shape as a rocket's ideal launch trajectory. At least, before you start your gravity turn. This is compounded by the game having no obvious objectives - it just gives you some rocket engines and fuel tanks and lets you get on with it. 'It' implicitly means sending Kerbals into space, but it can equally mean flying spaceplanes around the north pole or exploring the space centre on a Mün buggy.

Most of your early rocketry expeditions will be anticlimactic fizzles on the launch-pad. Once you manage to get a rocket off the pad, it'll probably explode shortly afterwards or take a sub optimal 180 degree turn right back towards the planet Kermin.

Then once you finally do get into orbit, you'll find you have not packed enough fuel to get anywhere. So you add more fuel and then you're too heavy to get into orbit. And so on. After a while you start to explore the different parts and tweak the efficiency a bit. Once you finally get to the Mün, you'll realise you have no idea how to safely touch down your lander. Once you do touch down your lander, you'll realise you have too little fuel to get home again. Once you've mastered the art of the Mün landing, there are plenty more planets to explore, as well as additional challenges, like building and landing Mun Buggies and space stations, and docking with other rockets/space stations in orbit. And so it goes on.

Not that the difficulty should discourage you. Even though many of them will be spent baffled, it's very easy to pile a lot of hours into Kerbal without feeling particularly frustrated. While the game gives you no real direction or guidance, it is practically endless and finds a nice balance between being a very deep, very complex, open ended sandbox game while being whimsically entertaining. Yes, it's annoying when Bob messes up an EVA (space-walk) and ends up orbiting the planet in his space-suit, but it's also hilarious, and invites a potentially hilarious/disastrous rescue mission.

KPS is still in alpha and in some places it shows. Stability is generally good but not perfect (some bugs around the pause/unpause feature with certain rockets - on an unmodded installation). There are also some interesting 'features' like the aerodynamic nose cones actually increasing the drag of your rocket (because drag isn't yet calculated sensibly). But most of all, the alpha state shows in terms of completeness. It's easy to envisage that at some point the developers will have a push to make the game's UI much more 'aware' of what's going on, to give you more guidance on your missions, to suggest rescue missions to help your stranded kerbals and to launch fireworks when you return them. For the moment, that side of the game is pretty bare - you can do a lot of things, but the game doesn't seem to care. At the moment, it's more like lego in space.

Tribes Ascend drama on Reddit

Wed, 07 Aug 13 13:00:24 +0000

Not exactly surprising...

It's a real shame, because Tribes (1+2) is such an amazing game. Tribes Ascend (T:A, Hi-Rez's addition) was a bit more like Tribes-lite than proper Tribes, but it still seemed like it could revitalize the series. Hi-Rez (the developer) seemed to squander the opportunity and generally went out of their way to upset the community, not just by implementing a game with some fairly big flaws at higher levels of play and which didn't make much effort to relive the level of detail in its predecessors, but also in their general attitudes and treatment of the community.

They seemed to start turning it around late last year, by which point I'd jumped ship to Planetside anyway and was a bit sceptical, but the (remaining) community was quite hopeful. But no, apparently Hi-Rez couldn't live up to it after all.

It seems strange that Hi-Rez would even want to make r/tribes the official forum - r/tribes pretty much universally hates them, and the Tribes community has historically been of questionable maturity at best. If anything, it seemed to get worse with T:A's focus on trying to attract esportsesportsesports pro types.

Once again, it seems like Tribes is going to spend the next 10 years gathering dust.

Fallout: New Vegas Thoughts

Mon, 29 Jul 13 18:54:10 +0000

I bought Fallout: New Vegas a few weeks ago in the Steam sale, after having played it before (once), but for various reasons I didn't actually own it.

I'm playing with the Project Nevada mod alongside Nevada Skies (the weather mod), on hardcore mode. These three things transform the game from being laughably easy to brutally unforgiving. PN makes it so that getting shot is actually a really big deal, and hardcore mode makes your inevitably crippled limbs a really big deal. The weather mod adds very dark nights and weather effects like sandstorms (which greatly reduce visibility). I'm not really sold on the weather mod because it puts you at a huge disadvantage while the AI doesn't seem to be affected, but the dark nights are nice. The difficulty is a bit frustrating, because the rest of the game was still designed for a virtually invulnerable player character, but oh well.

I much prefer New Vegas to Fallout 3, because NV has a story and a setting, some moral ambiguity and some choices, and is generally much more Fallout than Fallout 3 was. Fallout 3 was cargo-culty in the sense that Bethesda took all the immediately obvious bits of Fallout 1+2 and mashed them together with no apparent understanding of what made Fallout great.

Here's the stuff I don't like at all about New Vegas:

VATS

VATS is still a cheap stand-in for well developed FPS mechanics. Bethesda backed themselves into a corner by making Fallout 3 an FPS, especially in an engine that's simply rubbish at it. New Vegas does improve the situation by adding in iron-sights; the FPS gameplay doesn't feel quite so pathetic, but VATS is still a sort of hack to: 1. cover up the lightweight FPS mechanics, and 2. appeal to the turn based targeted attacks of F1/F2/Tactics.

Fallout 3 was basically a first person shooter in denial. It's very hard to make a first person shooter RPG, because if the player lines up a perfect shot, either you have to give it to them and ignore their character stats, or you have to ignore the player's skill and make the accuracy a dice roll. I think Bethesda actually did something incredibly stupid and ramped up damage based on the player's skill stats.

It's rubbish, but the game assumes you are going to make heavy use of VATS, because the game's foundations are broken.

Voice 'acting'

This is a tired point but the voice acting really is gratingly dire. In some ways, it doesn't help that it's juxtaposed against real actors like Chandler Bing, Felicia Day and Zach Levi, who put on an actual performance and highlight just how terribly most of the NPC lines are delivered. Most of the NPCs seem to have been voiced by people randomly selected from the office.

The Engine

Genuinely, I am mystified that Skyrim is well regarded because the engine is an abomination.

I assume it's a repeatedly souped up version of a very old Morrowind engine because that's how it runs. The graphics are annoying; everything shines and the animations are woeful, the view distance is nice but neutered by the texture and detail pop-in, which leaves the scenery looking a bit silly (especially the line beyond which the water turns flat), but I can live with those things. What I can't live with is the awful input system. It feels like you're controlling an unresponsive lump of lead that slides all over the desert. This is one of the reasons I can't get more than a few hours into Skyrim (the other being that it's boring).

World/Experience Incongruence

"I need you to go and investigate Nipton, we've seen smoke rising from it for days"
"It's a two minute walk away"
"I know but"

Fallout 1 and 2 were unaffected by this because you never wandered through the wasteland - you always fast travelled (and may have had random encounters), so long distances were fine. F:NV gives you a big 3d world for you to explore yourself, which means that hundreds of miles of desert isn't really going to work. It's noticeably jarring that the mighty New California Republic, who have expanded through several states, are defeated by having to travel what appears to be a quarter of a mile, and are somehow holding their own with an average of 5 people per outpost. Again, in 2D games, the cost of adding generic NPCs is low, so this isn't an issue.

Conclusion

It's sad that while games have in some ways pushed forwards and embraced technology to give a better experience, they've also thrown away the bits that they now can't quite get right. World size is a trivial problem when a game is 2D, appalling voice acting is a non-issue when 99% of your characters don't have a voice. It really seems to have harmed RPGs in general. That's not to say these problems can't be solved, NWN, DragonAge and KOTOR1+2 are proof of that.

Total War: Shogun 2 Review

Sat, 29 Jun 13 13:48:59 +0000

Shogun 2 is part of the Total War series which you may or may not know as being a unique real time strategy (RTS) game that focusses more on a vague semblance of realism than on tank rushes. Except it's not just an RTS, it's also a turn based strategy! Most of the game takes place in a Civ-esque world map view, which is turn based. You control cities, tell them what to build/recruit, and they farm resources for you. Gold is the main resource, but you also have to ensure you are producing enough food, and there are various special resources (e.g stone and horses) which if you have access to, allow you to build superior units and buildings. In the world map, you assemble armies and move them around.

When the battles come, however, that's when the game drills down into a real time mode. Battles are fought on the battlefield in standard RTS fashion, but with finite armies that you can't replenish. You have to work with the army available to you at the instant of the battle. It's a subtle but important difference between Total War and most RTSs, and it makes the game much more rewarding.

Armies are composed of platoons of troops, rather than individual units. Battles generally start off organised and neat and then quickly descend into chaos, but through judicious use of the pause button you get much better at keeping track of how things are going. The player's confusion isn't aided by the fact that battles are much deeper than they appear - every unit has an array of stats regarding how they perform in various different battle situations. For example, cavalry, while very very very good at charging into infantry, is a bit rubbish at sticking around after the initial hit. Flank attacks also work very well, but once the enemy gets themselves organised the course might change dramatically.

Perhaps more importantly, every unit also has a morale scale, which greatly affects how the battle goes. Morale is affected by how well the unit perceives its situation. A cavalry charge from behind will generally have a bad effect. An enemy running away has a good effect. Morale means the most effective way to win isn't to kill everyone - it's to focus on making the enemy run away. This often has a cascading effect, where one unit will be weakened by seeing its friends scarper and will be more easily encouraged to follow suit, which is amusing when you're struggling your way through a battle and then the enemy suddenly seems to break and run away.

Overall Shogun 2's RTS gameplay is deep and rewarding. The turn based based side of things is good too. There are cities, tech trees, diplomacy, an economy, trade, religion, town happiness, etc. It's not Civ levels of depth, but it works in the setting.

But Shogun also has problems. Which is a shame, because the good bits really are good. In no particular order:

The turn based GUI is annoying: It continually stacks up modal messages that are difficult to react to properly. During AI turns, the camera angles can change change, so you often have no idea where an enemy army actually is.
The auto-resolve battle function is naive and easily abused. It's not just an automation of a real battle. Which undermines the depth of the RTS part.
The load times are terrible. It gets a bit better if you drop the texture quality, but we're still talking about a minute switching from battles to the world map.
The world map makes my GPU (+ fan) work far harder than it has any need to.
The game would really benefit from a Civ-style random map campaign mode. I know it's Japan, but still...
At a certain point in the campaign you become powerful enough that everyone declares war on you. From this point, diplomacy is basically disabled, and you spend all your time moving your armies around the map, playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole as one of your many enemies lands on your soil every few turns.

Overall: Shogun 2 is a very strong RTS, but not without its frustrations.

4/5

My favourite JavaScript bug

Mon, 27 May 13 18:41:00 +0000

To be clear, this isn't a bug *in* JavaScript, it's a bug in my own code. But one which various properties of JavaScript made it both easy to write and very hard to detect later.

I am currently writing a LOLCODE interpreter in JavaScript. It's not overly complex - it just recursively evaluates an AST directly.

LOLCODE allows for user defined functions:

HOW DUZ I ADD YR NUM1 AN NUM2
  SUM OF NUM1 AN NUM2
OIC

VISIBLE ADD 1 AN 3 MKAY  BTW => prints 4

The AST for the function definition looks something like:

{
    "_name": "FunctionDefinition",
    "name": "ADD",
    "args": [
        "NUM1",
        "NUM2"
    ],
    "body": {
        "_name": "Body",
        "lines": [
            {
                "_name": "FunctionCall",
                "name": "SUM OF",
                "args": {
                    "_name": "ArgList",
                    "values": [
                        {
                            "_name": "Identifier",
                            "name": "NUM1"
                        },
                        {
                            "_name": "Identifier",
                            "name": "NUM2"
                        }
                    ]
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}

The easiest way to evaluate this is not to do anything special to compile that function, but just to use the magic of JS to represent the evaluation of the FunctionDefinition node as an interpreter action in its own right, similarly to how we'd evaluate an identifier or any other construct.

If we can create a function which represents the evaluation of 'ADD', then we have a nice consistency with evaluation of built-in functions, which are implemented natively, like SUM OF, e.g:

lol = function() {
    var self = this;

    this.symbols = {
      'SUM OF': function(a, b) { return a + b; }
    }


    var evalFuncDef = function(node) {
        self.symbols[node.name] = function() {
            return self.evaluate(node.body);
        }
    }

    this.evaluate(node) {
       // delegate to appropriate sub function
       if (node._name === 'FunctionDefinition') {
           return evalFuncDef(node);
       }
    }
}

I've omitted setting up the argument list, figuring out the return value, etc, but the basic point is that both 'SUM OF' (a native function) and 'ADD' (a user supplied LOLCODE function) both exist in the symbol table in the form of an executable JavaScript function.

It's a fairly innocent looking piece of code.

Except for one thing.

The interpreter also has the ability to pause the program and evaluate watch-statements, like what you'd find in Firebug or Chrome's debugger. For various uninteresting reasons¹, the easiest way to do this is to clone the current symbol table and other scope into another interpreter and execute it there.

Something interesting happens here.

In the above code, I've used the this/self idiom to get a reference to the current object into a nested function.

When we clone the symbol table into a different object, the self reference comes across unchanged. What that means is that the second interpreter happily executes any expression you give it correctly, until you supply it with one that tries to invoke a user written function. At this point, the first kicks into action, and continues executing. Imagine how difficult to debug this was - you can trace it all you want, you will see you're always in the right functions. The key is realising you've suddenly switched to the wrong object, which in this case, always has very similar (if not identical) state!

The solution to this is obvious - don't rely on self inside the function we create, instead require it to be called with symbols[node.name].call(this, ...).

But the bug itself is admirable in its subtlety.
____
1. Mostly to do with keeping track of an awkward asynchronous callback. Call it an 'implementation issue'.

RIP Tumblr

Mon, 20 May 13 18:26:04 +0000

Dear Tumblrians!

Take some advice from those of us who used Yahoo products for a while: move to a good platform. Wordress.com is good.

If Yahoo lives up to its past, here is what will happen to Tumblr:

Yahoo will gradually try to their other products into it, or it into their other products somehow. They'll decide that the users want something different to what they chose to use and begin a slow plod towards something nobody wants. It will be buggy and unstable. If you complain loud enough, they'll tell you that Yahoo knows better than its users what its users want.
In nine months they'll realise that have completely failed to gain users or do anything interesting, and will begin to get bored with it. The half implemented changes will stay half implemented.
In 12 to 18 months they'll announce that it wasn't what they wanted to do after all. They'll announce no further development will occur. Bugs will suspiciously start to appear. Reliability will go down the pan. You'll have to refresh your page four times to get to the right content.
In about three years they'll eventually pull the plug. Probably at short term notice, giving nobody adequate chance to export all their content. If you're really unlucky they'll rub salt in the wound by launching a half-hearted alternative that's too rubbish to be useful to anyone.

I'm going to do something with loljs

Sun, 28 Apr 13 22:46:10 +0000

loljs is a pretty rubbish LOLCODE to JavaScript translator I hacked together a few years ago before I really knew JavaScript. It really is rubbish, half the time it will crash on bad input and give absolutely no indication that it has done so. But according to traffic stats, people love it.

It hit the big time (sort of) after a (relatively) popular YouTube channel video used it for a "how to learn programming video".

lolcode is not a sensible way to learn to program. But it strikes me that it is a sensible way to learn some things about programming languages. lolcode has the nice pair of properties that it's powerful enough to express normal programming constructs while being small enough to be able to keep the whole language's structure in your head at once. It's also amusing.

I would like to relaunch loljs as:

A more robust compiler/runtime.
A well featured text editor.
Something to visualise the relationship between the lolcode and the way a compiler sees it.

I have started writing the compiler using Jison, instead of the rubbish and buggy hand-written parser I had before. I am currently working down the route of interpreting the resulting tree instead of translating it to JS, as this gives a bit more runtime control and better error feedback. It's also easier and more fun than messing around with creating strings of JavaScript code and having to worry about how safe they are and how we figure out relaying runtime errors back to the user.

For the text editor I'll probably use CodeMirror and write a custom mode.

The third point needs more thought. I like the idea of being able to hover over blocks of code and see some representation of the syntax tree for that fragment. The first version will probably just show some nicely formatted JSON, but I wonder if something clever could be done with Canvas to display a real, explorable tree.

I am only working on this in my free time, so it might take a while.

Saints Row: The Third Review

Sun, 14 Apr 13 16:56:43 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a game called Grand Theft Auto which offered the player a largely nonsensical sandbox world and a thinly strung together set of missions, which could, if you were generous, be called a story. The series evolved. By Grand Theft Auto III, the developers were showing warning signs that they thought the game wasn't pretentious enough. GTA4 was a dissonant mix of gritty realism and cartoon violence; while Niko Bellic would lament all the violence and mayhem during scripted cut-scenes, and while the characters often felt like real people (if dislikeable ones), Niko would happily accept his next mission to go and kill 30 lifeless copy-and-pasted gang members without batting an eyelid.

In an alternate reality, GTA's transition to 3D kept its zany irreverence, and became Saints Row: The Third. It doesn't seem quite fair to continually compare it to GTA, but GTA basically invented the genre, and there is nothing else of note which is similar. So I'm afraid I have to.

SRIII is undoubtedly a GTA clone. But it's a well made GTA clone. SRIII is well produced and certainly less buggy than GTAIV. It really does, however, borrow its core gameplay, and many details, very liberally from GTA.

But it's not just a GTA clone. It adds its own story, characters, and gameplay details over the top. The world itself doesn't make an awful lot of sense, and the finer details of the story seem to be glossed over slightly, but you get the gist of it, if not the full explanation. The characters mostly have the depth of a small puddle, and all of them are fairly terrible people, but some of them are strangely likeable for the simple reason that SRIII does nothing to make you want to take it seriously. None of this is even supposed to be believable. And it's not.

The game plunges you into a world where you lead The Saints, a street gang which has won everyone's admiration for its general disrespect of the law and common decency. People love it when you cause mayhem. People love it when you rob banks. Even the police have a grudging admiration for you. People look at you and proclaim "Look! it's a real Saint!" and ask for autographs and photos. It's not meant to be taken seriously.

SRIII takes place in a city called Steelport, which is populated by a few different gangs who generally look unfavourably on people causing trouble in their territory. As well as worrying about the police, you also gain notoriety levels with other gangs for acts of crime in their area, who will send hit squads after you. This is an interesting mechanic, and one place SR deserves some praise for originality.

The gameplay is the standard GTA pattern - you spawn in a safe-house and are then encouraged to carjack somebody, and drive around really fast, crash into things, and/or follow the story missions (which you access via a smartphone, which as an interface is not as terrible as it might sound). Unlike GTAIV, the vehicle physics behave more like bumper cars, and encourage you to cause carnage. But like GTA, carnage ensues whether you planned it or not, because the AI all change lanes apparently randomly, without checking their mirrors. This can be frustrating, but perhaps it is consistent with the difficulty of the US driving test.

Steelport offers a lot to do. As well as the obvious sandbox mayhem, the story missions, there are also a set of minigames. Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax has you participating in a reality TV program where the aim is to make it through a course without being either caught in any of the various dangerous traps, or shot by any of the various less dangerous gunmen, while a pair of commentators narrate your brilliance or lack thereof. Insurance Fraud deserves some mention for pure originality; the aim is to hurl your rag-doll into the path of oncoming traffic to rack up insurance money. For reasons entirely unclear, you seem to be largely unaffected by gravity. It is genuinely entertaining to launch your character at speeding vehicles, bouncing off them straight into others. The game rewards you for chaining up multiple 'accidents'.

After exploring Steelport for a while, you might find yourself surprised at some of the attention to detail and overall production quality. The animation is fluid and sublime, and put to far better use than GTAIV's Euphoria engine ever was by the inclusion of various game-play elements like the ability to grab a human shield, and the generous array of highly entertaining wrestling style melee attacks. The detail also shines through in the bewildingly vast wardrobe in which you can clothe your character.

The detail goes far beyond that, with a huge amount of upgrades you can lock via 'respect', which is earned by doing just about anything dangerous. Almost crash? Respect. Drive on the wrong side of the road? Respect. Handbrake turn? Respect. You earn most of it passively, just by playing the game.

SRIII provides the familiar idea of in-car radio stations, and a metal fan I was pleasantly surprised to find it featuring the likes of Amon Amarth, Strapping Young Lad, Opeth, and even Dethklok.

Overall, Saints Row sort of shoots itself in the foot a bit by not trying to engage the player more at a story/character level. Keeping everything whacky and stupid is great, but you never really feel attached to the plot or the characters, and you never get the feeling wanting to find out what happens next. But that's about the only major criticism I can level at it.

Largely nonsensical, irreverent and not taking itself (or anything) seriously, Saints Row: The Third reminds us that computer games don't have to be profound to be fun.

4/5

Metro 2033 Review

Wed, 10 Apr 13 22:16:08 +0000

Nuclear post apocalyptic settings have a strange sort of magic to them. Metro 2033 firmly occupies the 'serious' end of the spectrum, throwing away the humour of Fallout in favour of a pure gritty, depressing reality. Metro is true to this all the way through and does a good job conveying hopelessness; the colour palette ranges from light grey through to medium grey, then all the way to dark grey. Unfortunately it is hard to appreciate the stunning colours because the lighting effects range only from 'quite dark' to 'very dark'. The sound and voices feature a similar level of diversity; the main character, Artyom, is voiced by the only person I've ever heard make the word 'monotone' a generous overestimate. He happily gives his commentary during loading screens, but is fortunately mute throughout the game. Whilst I certainly appreciate authentic Russian accents instead of the cringe-inducing, completely out of place American stuff some games throw at you, the quality isn't really there.

Cheap shots aside, Metro has some truly great elements. The atmosphere is uncompromisingly grim, and there's something fascinating about the stone faced Russian paramilitary types who brave its surface. The game likes to crush you with reality, and this reflects in some mechanics. Having to wear a slightly claustrophobic gas-mask while on the surface, which will become obscured by damage and condensed mist, is a nice touch.

But Metro falls into some traps. It employs gratuitous use of cut-scenes, which is annoying in a first person shooter and makes for a poor experience in any case. This is arguably made worse by the cut-scenes often being smoothly integrated into the game-play; you're never quite sure whether you just did that or whether the game just did that. That's a huge usability issue. The rules change, and the game gives you no real hints where and when it will happen, or if it even did. The end result is occasionally you get yourself killed because you erroneously assumed you were part of another scripted sequence, which is especially unforgivable in a game with save checkpoints.

The story seems superficially interesting, but you miss a lot of it because the voices often become inaudiable or muffled for various reasons, and there's no in-game "WHAAAT?" key. Your current tasks get transcribed to a journal of sorts, which is basically a clipboard with some bullet points on it, but good luck making sense of things from that. Especially when your gas mask is misted up. It's fortunate that Metro subscribes to the standard FPS ideology of "go forth and shoot" to arrive at the place you're meant to be, even if you're not quite sure why you want to be there.

And so when stupid things happen, you sort of just accept it. For me, Metro loaded new level with my weapons disabled. There was no explanation, but given my hazy understanding of events up to that point, I readily assumed it was some misguided stealth level, put on my top quality Sam Fisher goggles, my best Garret robe and set to work holding down control. For reasons entirely outside of my understanding, when I approached enemies from behind, they often dropped dead, which I was able to diagnose as being a likely result of the throwing knife lodged in them. That was lucky. Although quite who threw it was a bit of a mystery, because there's certainly nobody else here... Again, a case of the game changing the rules to suit itself with ultimately illogical scripted sequences.

It turns out it isn't a stealth level, and it's crazily hard to complete with no weapons. It's a bug. And it's relatively common. The only way to fix it is to go back to an earlier save. Again, this is especially unforgivable in a game with save checkpoints. This part also reveals some strange AI behaviour, where the human AI seems to favour opening fire then running away, regardless of whether you fight back... also I'm not really sure why you are shooting me anyway?

The most insightful thing I can say about Metro is that although it has a vivid and well made atmosphere with some pretty good game and shooting mechanics, it has enough annoyances that I probably won't re-load an old checkpoint so I can continue the game.

Metro is a near miss with some great ideas and a great setting, but it is nonetheless a miss.