Dead In Seconds 5: Death To Spies

Whilst my favourite sort of computer gaming is strategy games, as regular readers will know I also enjoy first/third person shooting games such as 'BloodRayne', 'Deus Ex', XIII' and 'No-One Lives Forever' as an alternative.  However, as I have noted before, the gameplay balance is terrible in some of these games, leaving you with a frustrating experience as despite all your efforts, using all the skills you are supposed to develop you can be faced with massively overwhelming odds with little idea how to battle the opponents unless you read walkthroughs or you are eliminated in a very arbitrary manner which has nothing to do with any ability you might have in the game.

Browsing through a computer games shop recently I came across 'Death To Spies Gold' this provides 'Death To Spies' (2007) and 'Death To Spies: Moment Of Truth' (2009) in one package and it was selling for £4.99.  The game has you playing as a Captain in the 4th Directorate of the USSR's Smersh organisation in 1943.  Given the moral ambivalence of playing a Soviet agent, I guess they felt they had to have you primarily attacking Nazi soldiers and agents rather than dissidents against Stalin's government.  Controversially the game 'Stalin Subway' (2008) featured you as an agent in Moscow in the early 1950s rooting out opposition to Stalin and even being decorated by him.  The game was developed by Russian software house Buka Entertainment and in Russian is named 'Metro 2' after the supposed secret underground railways system alleged to have existed during Stalin's period.  In 2008, Buka Entertainment was bought up by 1C Company, which produces 'Death To Spies'.  Interestingly, the wikipedia page about 'Stalin Subway' has been deleted, on the grounds it was more advertising than information, but I believe it owes more to how much the game has upset people who suffered under the Soviet system.  There is an attraction for playing the 'other', characters which have a different moral code to our own or an amoral approach, hence the popularity of games in which the player is an assassin or a vampire.

Anyway, it was on this basis that I approached 'Death To Spies Gold'.  I was disappointed by the dreary downloading screen, but was soon on the training mission of the game, in the role of Captain Semion Strogor, in a well-equipped training base, presumably somewhere deep in European Russia or pehaps over the Urals in western Siberia.  Usually training scenarios in games are simply to familiarise you with the controls of the game.  However, in this game, it is something much harder.  Sure you learn how to run, jump, crawl, fire guns and drive lorries.  However, trying to pitch a grenade through an open window on the first floor (second floor for American readers) and ensuring it explodes just at the right time is a challenge.  Creeping around is part of many first/third person games.  However, I have never encountered one as hard as this and I have got through the early stages of dodging robots in 'Deus Ex' (2000) and nudging through crowds carrying pots in 'Assassin's Creed' (2007).  After three hours of play I was only two-thirds of the way through the training mission.  I realised if it was this hard at that early stage, there was in fact no point in continuing to play the game and I was glad I had spent no more than £4.99 on it.

What game designers seem to forget is that players can be incredibly skilful but always remain limited by what their interface with the game permits.  Anyone who has played a shooting game on a PlayStation 2 knows the frustration when you try to turn your character to precisely the right angle and find they click to the left and then to the right of the line you need.  There are only so many settings that the system allows.  Newer consoles may have more subtlety, but I would hate to have to try to aim a pistol using a Wii controller.  Most people who play games are not marksmen/women, we are ordinary people with an average eye for these things and reasonable co-ordination.  In 'Death To Spies' the game mimics the wavering of your hand and the arc of things thrown, which means you have to line up the tiny (you can make it larger but it does not help), very pale grey (you cannot make it darker) sight on a pillar or a target to make the precise hit.  It is realistic, yes, but unlike in real life, I can not shuffle so quietly and so precisely pressing on keys in the way the game demands.  I know game designers always try to make a game realistic and the arbitrariness of your death in 'Death To Spies' is probably a reflection of reality.  However, in games as in movies, there needs to be at least some suspension of reality, otherwise John McClane in 'Die Hard' (1988) would have collapsed of exhaustion or blood loss or fallen down a lift shaft long before the end of the movie.

Remember too, that a keyboard or a mouse or even a console controller, is an imprecise tool, it is not a laser-guided control in the way a factory machine would be run.  Consequently the gameplay needs to reflect this distance between what you want from the player and what the player is able to do using the tools to hand.  A classic example of this was in 'BloodRayne 2' (2004).  You could cope with the masses of opponents able to disable you with a blow, but having to catch them on a chain then release a whole number of their corpses in precisely the right direction to jam a machine and then do this in a time limit, was unfeasible.  If a game cannot be completed when you are playing with a 'God mode' cheat, then you have to know something is wrong with it.

I am disappointed not to have been able to get out of training on 'Death To Spies'.  I know many macho gamers like tough games, but there are also a lot of people like me, who like a challenge, but also want to progress a little further than the training mission.  It is interesting to see what 1C Company does next.  In the past there has been comment on the US military using computer games to communicate its values, but Buka and its successor seem to be doing some revisionism on the Stalinist era with their games, fascinating but also something perhaps to be wary of.  I do wonder what will be next, a game in which you play an agent of Mao Zedong, 'properly' eliminating landlord elements and foreign counter-revolutionaries across 1950s villages and cities of Red China?  Perhaps an agent of Pol Pot sent to wipe out villagers unwilling to comply with the Year Zero plans?


P.P. 08/03/2011
At my girlfriend's urging, I returned to 'Death To Spies'.  This time, I managed to make it out of training.  I clambered into the watchtower repeatedly until by random, one time the guard did not turn round before I was able to attack him.  I had no idea how I achieved it, it just seemed to be luck.  I managed to complete the final task by locating some cutlery I had previously missed and using it to distract the guard and reach the final target.

I was glad that I was able to get the training mission out of the way and get into the game proper.  It revealed more about 1C Company's take on Soviet history.  The first cut-away movie shows the character you are playing, Captain Semion Strogor, not in 1943 but in 1951, by which time he has been decorated twice and promoted to major.  However, we see him being interrogated in the Lubyanka Prison, the headquarters of the MGB (ended up in 1954 as the KGB) about his superior and his activities during the Second World War.  Towards the end of his life in 1953, Stalin was planning more purges.  One notable thing about the Soviet Union under Stalin was how 'heroes' were often in line for elimination by the paranoid dictator.  It seems rare that a game has the character you play shown, not being showered in glory for his/her achievements, but, despite all that they have done successfully, being questioned on suspicion of being a traitor.

1C Company's view of history is interesting.  In the game swastikas do not appear though Nazi posters and portraits are featured.  Instead you simply get a black cross.  In German the swastika (itself an Indian word) was known as the 'hooked cross'.  Similarly there is no mention of the SS, posters for the Waffen SS say 'Waffen II' instead and the insignia on the SS collars is similarly just 'II' rather than the lightning.  This is different in 'Death To Spies: Moment of Truth' which, from what I have seen, like most wartime set games, swastikas appear.

In the fourth mission you are sent to a hotel somewhere in the USSR perhaps Moscow, though in 1944 I doubt its hotels were back to the condition it is shown in the game.  You have to assassinate a traitor who is passing secrets to a British diplomat staying at the hotel.  You also have to substitute the information the diplomat has with false information.  There is also mention of numerous British 'sleepers' inside the Soviet system.  I guess that reflects the paranoia of Stalin's era.  What is interesting is the fact that in 1944, Britain had been the USSR's ally for over two years.  I suppose the game is reflecting Realpolitik and in this differs from many other Second World War set games. 

Later you are sent to assassinate SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Andreas Meyer-Mader who was a genuine commander of 1. Ostmuslemanische SS-Regiment, literally '1st East Muslim SS-Regiment'.  Meyer-Mader was an Austrian who had served with Chiang Kai-Shek's forces and risen to the rank of major in the German army commanding a battalion of Turkestani volunteers in the 444th Sicherungs [Security] Division before becoming a lieutenant-colonel in the SS, commanding this regiment of Azeris.

Of course, the Germans used paramilitaries and soldiers drawn from regions collaborating with them and specialist SS units were set up.  This was one reason why Stalin felt the need to relocate millions of people, for example, away from the Crimea, farther East so they could not link up with advancing German forces.  Hitler hoped to conquer the oil-rich areas of the Caucasus and to bring neutral Turkey into the war on his side.  In part these were the reasons for creating the Turkestanisch Legion of the standard German army consisting of Muslim volunteers from Central Asia, including Karakalpaks  Kazakhs, Kirghizs, Tadjiks, Turkomans and Uzbeks which I guess is what is meant in this game or perhaps the Wolgatatarische Legion of Muslim Tatars.  There was also the Kaukasisch-Mohammedan Legion made up of Muslim volunteers from the Caucasian region such as Azeris, Chechens, Daghestans, Ingushes and Lezghins.  This is a neglected area of Second World War history, but being assigned to assassinate someone collaborating with the Nazis in this way adds an aspect to the game beyond securing more secret files.

In the ninth mission you are sent to locate Raoul Wallenberg (1912-47), who unlike the other characters featured, was a real man.  He was a Swede who worked in Budapest in 1944-5 to save hundreds of Hungarian Jews from extermination by making them Swedish citizens and thus members of a neutral company.  Hungary, despite being an ally of Germany and having passed anti-Semitic legislation itself as early as 1938, was one of the last countries in Nazi-controlled Europe to give up its Jews for extermination.  With the Soviet Army two days from Budapest, Wallenberg managed to persuade the Germans not to force the remaining Jews on a 'death march' to Germany the way that other Jews were compelled to do as the Soviets advanced through land the Germans had held.  Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 and taken back to the USSR despite being a neutral citizen. The Soviets accused him of being a US spy.  Wallenberg disappeared into the Soviet detention system and it was not until February 1957 that the Soviets released information about his death, saying he had died of a heart attack on 17th July 1947.  A Soviet investigation in 1989 revealed that in fact Wallenberg had been executed in the Lubyanka prison. 

In 'Death To Spies' it is stated that Wallenberg is an agent of the Americans and British and had, in fact been in contact with Brigadefuhrer Walter Schellenberg of the foreign intelligence service of the SS; there is no evidence he was ever in contact with Nazi agents though he negotiated with army officers, for example over not carrying out the death march.  In the game you have to locate Wallenberg in the German 'death camp' of Moosburg.  In reality this was a 'Stalag', a prisoner-of-war camp for ranking soldiers, not officers.  Wallenberg was never detained by the Germans in any camp.  The game does say correctly that Wallenberg was executed in July 1947 and Strogor sees that as ridding the Soviets of a troublesome man.  I guess this reflects the genuine sentiments of a Soviet agent of the time, but again shows how the perspective of the war from the Russian side differs.  Wallenberg has been commemorated around the world, including in the UK, Germany, Israel and Argentina; he was made a honorary citizen of Canada, the USA and Hungary and now even in Russia there is a statue to him and an educational institute named after him.  It seems odd that the game designers selected such a character for this game, portraying him in a negative light when easily they could have stuck to fictional ones.  Perhaps this is part of a revisionist, pro-Stalinist perspective that seems to be an undercurrent in these games.

The images in the game, such as documents are in Russian, but the voices of the Soviet characters have been re-dubbed into very American voices which means that the words do not synchronise with the movement of their mouths, making scenes resemble martial arts movies of the 1970s.  However, the attention to detail in terms of settings, furniture, clothing, weapons, etc. is very good.  The German characters you encounter speak German, though someone will have to advise me whether an interrogator would use the familiar form of address 'Du' when questioning a prisoner. 

I was able to get on with the missions, taking Strogor back to 1943/4 on the Belarussian front, infiltrating mainly German bases.  In many ways this is typical of many other Second World War games.  The graphics are impressive.  The first mission takes place in Summer 1943 and you walk through sun-dappled woodlands, with grass swaying in the wind and light coming through the trees, bird song plays soon to be disrupted by fighting.  Things like the 'rise' of your gun as you fire it, are well done too; the lock-picking system is the best I have seen in any shooting game.

There are many challenges in playing 'Death To Spies'.  Interestingly, I have not been able to find a single walkthrough for the game, and I think that shows how tough it is.  I think games designers of shooting games envisage players planning how to go through them and proceeding only occasionally being halted when they are killed or doing something wrong.  Typical play in all such games is, in fact, incremental, sometimes playing for some seconds in game time to test a move, even down to whether you can open a door without being shot and then saving.  At least 'Death To Spies' allows constant saves. A key problem for 'XIII' (2003) was the fact you could only save at the end of the section so the increments of play were far longer and much more tedious. 

Interestingly, you find as the missions progress, that rather than being able to choose your way of completing a mission as the game packaging suggests, you end up learning the routines of your opponents down to a scale of a matter of seconds, primarily because opening a door a second too early or passing in front of an open doorway for a few seconds, or taking a second too long to knock someone out, means you are dead.  There is absolutely no leeway and this means you have to be able to press precisely the right button at the correct moment or you are dead.  I think this is why the game is seen as hard.  It is this element that also makes it seem highly unrealistic as you stand there watching the precise angle at which the triangles representing guards are pointing then try to move without making even a small amount of noise or being seen for a second by the wrong person.

Some of the problems with 'Death To Spies' are problems in such games going back as far as 'Hidden and Dangerous' (1999), a pretty similar game featuring Commonwealth troops (and some other nations, I remember a Czech and a Spanish Republican).  There is an imbalance between the damage you can inflict and what your opponents can inflict is an old problem.  I shot one German soldier three times in the chest with a Luger pistol (at least 7.65mm calibre rounds, perhaps even 9mm) at less than 3 metres and he proceeded not only to run around and fire at me, but also to raise the alarm.  Of course, your opponents, if they have a clear line of fire, will always hit you, no matter how far away you are from them.  They will also always spot you if you cross their line of sight (a big part of this game as many missions involve dodging numerous guards).  Having only human faculties and not computer generated ones, I can never be that good. 

Another problem is that drawing certain weapons, notably a silenced pistol, a garotte or a dagger rather than German Army issue weapons, is 'suspicious' and can lead guards to raise the alarm.  This is feasible if you are in plain sight of an opponent.  However, their alarm also extends to you drawing a silenced pistol when in a different building or behind a closed door.  It is clear that German soldiers are literally able to smell suspicious weapons and, on the basis of this, alert the whole contingent in the neighbourhood.  The people seeking you, find you instantly no matter how well hidden you are.  I suppose this shows you that the weapon you have pulled out has to be the wrong one for the current element of the mission or that you are using it in the wrong location.  However, it hardly makes the game feel realistic and so detracts from the positive points.

Commentators on the game have noted how often your opponents throw grenades.  In the open this would be quite likely.  However, of course, they get the grenade to land right on you, just at the correct moment for them to detonate.  In return, you toss a grenade, and because it has a delay typical for grenades of the 1940s, something like 7 seconds, you find the opponents have simply run away from it before it explodes.  As with 'Hidden and Dangerous' often the grenade does far more damage to you than it does to your opponent.  In fact they can throw them into a small room and stand and watch the explosion unharmed while it kills or severely wounds you.  These are problems that I have not seen worked out in more than a decade of gaming, though I imagine that on something like 'Rainbow Six' (1998-2011) series or 'Medal of Honor' (1998-2010) they have worked out the logistics of this better, I hope so, I have not played any of these series to find out.

The artificial intelligence of the opponents is sensible.  This does cause problems as you are liable to have a whole company of soldiers respond to gunshots, coming in from all over the map.  The opponents respond to noises and suspicious activities they see.  This makes for exciting game play.  As the game emphasises, sneaking around is much more of an element of this game that charging in with guns blazing, though on some occasions this does happen.  It is a pity that for the two silenced weapons you can select, you get so little ammunition and with no chance of replenishing it whilst on mission.

Another factor that makes gameplay so hard is another technical issue and this is where 'Death To Spies' falls down, even when compared to the highly bugged 'Hidden and Dangerous'.  If a guard turns or someone walks into a room and catches you, in many games you hit them in the face with a pistol butt or stab them or punch them with your fist.  In 'Death To Spies' you are generally powerless.  You find your gun does not fire and 'stun' attacks, generally a karate blow to the neck, are not even available at that time.  Consequently, discovery means instant death as the opponent fires round after round into you with precise accuracy and then chucks in a grenade even though he is standing in the blast radius.

Like many shooting games, 'Death To Spies' suffers from the 'unique weapon' problem.  Despite what it says on the box about selecting your own way to complete a mission, you often find there is only one weapon that will do the job.  The worst game for this is 'Gun' (2005) in which after battling through various stages and completing side missions, I faced the final boss to find that the only thing that could kill him was a bow-and-arrow firing dynamite, something I had discarded way back in favour of proper guns.  It was only when I reached the end that I found this was the one piece of equipment needed to allow me to finish, naturally I gave up rather than play through all the levels again.

In 'Death To Spies' you have a pretty wide selection of weapons from the era and you think that allows you to select your equipment to match your tastes.  I tend to select German weapons like Walther pistols and MP40 sub-machine guns as I know going into German bases I can acquire additional ammunition far more easily than if I take a Soviet weapon.  In addition, in this game, you often have to disguise yourself as the opposition and guards spot if you are carrying a foreign weapon.  This is fine until you find that the only way to assassinate a particular target, without bringing a company of guards down on you, is to use the silenced Nagant revolver. I have seen movies with silenced Lugers, is it too much to ask that one be available in the game?  Perhaps you could put the silencer on and then remove it so as not to appear suspicious.

You have weapons like a garotte and a dagger but often find that, with particular opponents, the function to use these is disabled.  You can strangle one opponent but are not allowed to strangle the next one.  In addition, some modes of attack make it impossible to continue.  A classic example is in the first mission in which you have to kill an officer to get his uniform.  If you stab him, you cannot put the uniform, you have to strangle him to allow that to happen.  I wish they had actually given you a freer hand in how to carry out the assassinations.

As I played on, I found that booby-trapping corpses and doors with grenades was an effective way of proceeding.  It means you get a lower score, because of the penalty you receive for making noise.  However, when faced with so many opponents as you are in many of the missions, it is a way to eliminate some and be far away from the other opponents this attracts and so not be riddled with bullets the moment the alarm goes off.  I find putting a booby-trapped corpse in the path of a patrol is one good technique.  Sometimes you will want to disarm a trap, and it is important to remember that you must have the weight allowance remaining to allow you to take the grenade back off the body or the door.  If not, then you cannot disable the trap and it remains live.  Because you do not see the option to disable the trap you might think it has been detonated or is not in the location you had thought, a costly mistake when you trigger it.

The way to approach such games is not as if they are about combat, rather that they are puzzles.  You have to work out by how the landscape is laid out and how the opponents move around in it, what the puzzle is and what kind of solution the game designer would have thought fitted. Now this may not be a necessarily 'logical' or even 'rational' approach.  One classic example happens on the fourth mission of 'Death To Spies' in which to get a bodyguard to move away from the door of the diplomat's room you have to get into in a hotel, you have to walk halfway down the stairs and throw cups and plates to the bottom of the stairs.  Throwing the cups and plates when too high up or too low down the stairs or in the corridor, does not work.  Lots of practice on similar games really helps as I see things happening that I had seen on 'Hidden and Dangerous' just with better graphics.  The game needs lateral thinking and perhaps that is not really how it should be for a game which is really simply about shooting and stabbing people.

There are some minor, but irritating flaws.  Before a mission you can pick very carefully what guns, grenades and other equipment you select to take with you.  As I say, I tend to pick German guns.  However, the only backpacks on offer are of Soviet design, something immediately apparent to German guards.  This means that you have to abandon the backpack almost immediately, at best leaving it on the edge of the area with equipment in it you can return to.  Fortunately, in 'Death To Spies: Moment of Truth' (2009), they supply German backpacks too, meaning you do not have to abandon your explosives and spare ammunition early on. 

Many of these difficulties would have appeared if some proper play testing had gone on.  I think too many companies rush out games and while, these days at least, they check that all the coding works, they spend too little time actually testing the games on people who are coming to them afresh.  The weakness of your pistot shots, the grenade issue, the paralysation when faced with an opponent and the backpack issue would all have been spotted within minutes of that kind of testing.

So far I have managed to complete the first four missions of the game and am well advanced on the fifth.  This is not the place for a walkthrough, but for the benefit of anyone, who, like me, has recently picked up the Gold edition of the game and is struggling to progress, I lay out some little bits of useful information I have found out.

Mission 1: Rural Transport Camp
This is mainly outside and in the early stages you have a free hand to take out opponents as you choose.  Leave your backpack somewhere in the countryside and proceed to get the uniform of the driver in the small underground bunker.  When driving the lorry realise that most soldiers will not get out of your way and if you bump into them or run any over then the whole camp will start shooting at you.  When you reach the base, drive briskly (not speeding) to somewhere secluded where you can park the lorry.  If you linger in it too long in the more public areas this raises suspicion and the shooting starts.

I knocked out my target in a garage that he occasionally goes into. I was able to leave him there until I had completed the activity in the main building then back up a lorry to the doors and dump his stunned body (he can only be stunned not killed) into the back and then drive out with it.  It helps to have the lorry backed up to the door as guards patrol and the lorry blocks their lines of sight.

Whilst the game does not tell you this fact, you need to get the uniform of an officer if you are to gain access to the first floor (maps in the game have the floors in the German designation, i.e. Erdgeschoss, literally 'ground floor', is, however, translated in the American way as 1st floor; the British 1st floor is shown as 2nd floor as it is in American and German usage).  The easiest uniform to get is that of an officer in an office mid-way down the corridor on the ground floor.  You chloroform his secretary in the outer office then creep in and kill the officer, but not with the dagger as that will prevent you from taking the uniform. With this uniform, dodging the relevant guards you can go upstairs to the office and complete the mission, then go out to a lorry and drive briskly but not recklessly round to the garage

Mission 2: Wintry Belarussian Town 
This is set in the winter of 1943.  You travel to a bombed out town in Belarus.  There are four stages to the mission.  The first element ends up being pretty violent as the only way to get into the building is to adopt a Thermopylae approach in the alley behind the building.  Stand in the alley with your MP40 ready.  Once the first soldiers have come out to investigate and you shoot them, others will investigate their corpses and so on, ultimately exposing the whole unit.  They are trapped as, the moment they step through the door, they can only come towards you and you gun them down.  Eventually the officer comes out and you shoot him and take his uniform.  You end up killing most of a platoon.  You need to react fast so that they do not toss grenades at you.  Do not try throwing grenades at them, as unlike your opponents, you are not immune to the blast in the confined space of the alley.

Meeting up with the old woman who tells you the courier has been taken prisoner is just a question of timing your navigation through the buildings to avoid being spotted.  Killing the courier's guards is harder.  The garotte and the dagger will not work.  You have to used the silenced Nagant; any other firearm or trying to stun the guards will bring the might of the German Army down on you.  The final element of the mission is to take papers from an officer.  I tried everything to get into his office to no avail.  Then I realised I was adopting the entirely wrong approach and began to think of it as a puzzle rather than as combat.  The officer comes out of the office and walks in the street close to the railway at regular intervals.  I then thought, as in 'Hidden and Dangerous', using a sniper's rifle can often be the safest way.  Then I found a sniper up in a derelict building at the end of the street, close to where I had killed the platoon.  One shot with my silenced pistol and he dropped his rifle to me.  I clambered up the building, took the shot and killed the officer.  There was alarm and guards running around, but I was far away from them, watching at a distance, and after a while they calmed down.  Then, still dressed as a German officer, I walked to the body of the man I had just shot, paying my last respects I looted the body of the documents I needed.

Mission 3: Prison
In this mission you emerge in a cellar of a prison and have to move immediately or you will be detected instantly.  The best bet is to run forwards and hide against the wall, so you are beside the guard when he looks into the cellar and out of his line of sight.  You can make a lot of noise killing people in the cellar, but do not be tempted to use grenades.  Your opponents can use them on you with impunity, but if you try to do the same against them, they will run clear and the blast will kill you anyway.

This mission needs lots of very carefully timed walking around corridors.  Secure a room as your base for hiding.  The one I used was the one with an officer in black with documents you need to gain access to the cells.  He has two guards, but weirdly, you can go into the bedroom attached to the office and lure them in there, one by one, or they may simply walk in and out.  Bump them off then the officer.  His uniform will be useful later.  Then you need to make your way to the small museum where there is a guard and the only prison warden around (the one in the brown shirt).  You can creep around and bump them off one after the other, getting the brown shirt uniform you need to access most of the building.  Using the garotte is the best option for most of the hits you have to do against opponents when in their offices.  Later, to escape, you need to get into an officer's uniform and the man with the documents that you killed earlier is a handy source.

Now, there is an officer with documents which would allow you to take the prisoner out.  He is in a room by the fireplace with a colleague and a guard.  The guard looks towards the door the bulk of the time and will shoot you the moment you step through the door.  I have tried everything to get into that room, including creeping, setting off smoke in the corridor, eliminating as many guards around the room as possible first and putting myself in a strong position and shooting anyone who comes through the door.  This worked despite the carnage, until, of course, guards started lobbing grenades in.  I would love to know how you get into that room and live.  I think it may involve a fire alarm or a disguise that I was unable to find, but have no proof of that.  If anyone can tell me, I would be very pleased.  In the end, not securing the release papers I had to take the lesser option and kill the prisoner in his cell.  Doing this even quietly led to five guards rushing in, but I just stepped passed them and shot them down in the cell like the proverbial fish in a barrel.  Unsurprisingly down in the cells, no-one can hear you scream or open up with an MP40.  Make sure you actually shoot the prisoner, not simply knock him out otherwise you will find when you reach the exit, you cannot leave and have to go back to finish him off.

Mission 4: Metropol Hotel
This is set in the Metropol Hotel, which I imagine is meant to be in the USSR but has a feel of an American hotel.  The diplomat looks far more American than British and the guards carry M1911 automatic pistols, the standard issue to US forces 1911-45.  This is the least violent of the missions as shooting anyone will bring numerous guards down on you. If you have to kill someone there is a guard and his girlfriend (they can be determined by seeing the two triangles tip-to-tip on the map) and eliminating them opens up a room where you can dump the traitor's body.

The main thing is to get a staff uniform.  I did this in two stages, first taking out a chef when he went into a larder in the kitchen, then, wearing his outfit got to the steward who is your prime target, he is down the corridor from the kitchen, beyond the other chef who you have to avoid as he knows you are not genuine.  The steward can be knocked out when in store room.  Vitally he has the keys that allow you into the room across the corridor to intercept the traitor's weapons and to get upstairs to the corridor which has the suite where the British diplomat is staying in order to substitute the papers in his safe.

The challenging part is to get the guards away from the diplomat's room and the method is as noted above.  Get crockery from locations in the kitchen and nearby corridors and by throwing this down the stairs from the mid-way point you distract all three guards and can sneak into the room while the very stubborn guard who stands by the door has his back turned.

Mission 5: Lakeside Village
This mission is like a one-man guerilla war.  You are tasked with assassinating three targets billeted in a small Belarussian town in the spring of 1944.  The town has tens of guards and to get close to your targets you need to dodge between the various buildings, wonderfully rendered in detail, in order to pick off the various guards.  This takes a long time and a lot of patience as the patrols, and, importantly, their lines of sight overlap.  You have to work at it like an onion, taking out the guards patrolling the perimeter and then working inwards, though being cautious of guards in other sectors that are able to run to where you are.  You run out of bullets for silenced weapons pretty quickly, especially given that it can take 3-4 rounds fired from your Nagant at close range to kill an opponent.  So, you literally end up doing 'hit and run', blasting at a lone guard with your MP40 (there will soon be numerous magazines for it that you can use) and then running as fast as you can to the edge of the town.  An alternative is to duck into a building.  There are numerous houses, storerooms and even cowsheds you can go into, made easier if you have already opened the door before you made your hit.  If you slip into one while not in the red zone of any pursuer's line of sight and lie on the floor you are generally safe and can wait there until it all calms down.

Guards pursue you quickly and fire when they can.  They will often come in large numbers.  It is best to have an escape route worked out for every hit, one that you can get you away without having to mount fences and waste time, and yet, which takes you past numerous buildings and haystacks to break up your pursuers' lines of sight.  When they lose sight of you they begin to be less certain.  Stumbling across a corpse you have left from earlier slows them down, though it raises the alarm level.  Of course, you can booby-trap some of them with grenades and this may take out one or two curious pursuers.  It is a good idea not to run too far, because, as you get away from the town, the perimeter your pursuers have to check is far wider and they begin to spread pretty thinly.  This allows you to pick off one or two pursuers while they are out of the town.  This tactic is especially useful if you have been pursued by two or more guards whose regular patrols overlap as it is difficult to get close to one of them without the others spotting you; away from their regular routes (which they return to once the alarm has calmed down) they are far more vulnerable.

Being outside you can use grenades with relative safety and your opponents will chuck them around a great deal.  The most effective usage is with two or more guards who are patrolling a confined area, such as round a house, where their escape route is hemmed in by fences or other obstacles.  Once the guards are eliminated, killing your targets is very easy.  I assassinated them in reverse order.  Number 3 I killed by putting a timed dynamite bomb in the doorway to the room he was in.  Interestingly even the interior walls of cheap houses are sufficient to protect your opponents from the blast of a bundle of dynamite, though, of course, not you.  You must at least leave the dynamite in an open doorway for it to have any affect on a person in the small room beyond.  Number 2 and his personal guard, I simply opened the door to their building and waited them to step in turn into the corridor where I gunned them down.

The prime target, Number 1, Meyer-Mader, is, in fact, the easiest.  Once you have taken the uniform of the sleeping officer from the house in the middle of the village you can walk into the final headquarters.  There are some guards you have to dodge.  There is no point attacking your target in his bedroom, rather get to the radio room at the other end of the building, fuse the radio and then, when your target walks into the radio room and bends over the broken radio you can garotte him.  Then carefully walk out, get a lorry from the car park and drive out. 

Completing this mission I got a low score because of the time I took and all the noisy firing I did.  I think that to score higher, you need to do the targets in order, and getting the uniform, though difficult to reach, will make it easier with subsequent guards.  In addition, if you select the sniper rifle at the start then you can pick off more guards around the edge of the town without arousing too much alarm.  However, given how little silenced pistol and sniper rifle ammunition you can take, it is likely that, given the number of patrolling guards especially around where your three targets are located, you will end up adopting the same sort of approach as me, though perhaps taking less time and with some less noise than me.

P.P. 11/03/2011
Mission 6: Los Alamos
This is another interesting reversal of history as we tend to see it in the UK and USA.  You are assigned to steal secrets from Los Alamos one of the locations of the development of the atomic bomb.  Interestingly the infamous Cambridge spy ring is referred to in a positive light, which is I imagine the Soviets saw it for all the information it supplied.  Kim Philby, the so-called 'third man' of the ring was decorated as Hero of the Soviet Union and commemorated on a stamp issued in 1990, two years after his death.  Of course, at the time the USA, like the the UK, was an ally of the USSR, so the spying in the USA is on an ally.

Again you have to move fast at the start, dodging into the room immediately to your left and taking the scientist's clothes.  This allows access to the rooms where you have to photograph the plans.  Stand as far back from the diagrams as you can yet still being able to selection the photograph option.  If you are closer you only get part of the diagram and that does not count.  You soon discover that to progress further you need an army uniform.  You get a corporal's uniform from the man shaving in the bathroom.

By this stage, if you adopt the puzzle solving approach, the moment you reach the areas reserved for officers you know you need an officer's uniform to get into the next sections of the base.  This leads to some of the most tortuous game play I have engaged with.  You have to collect the single cup which you can pick up in the entire base from one of the scientist's offices.  He lets you take it without complaint.  Then you have to head to the entrance to the Cyclotron area.  By throwing the cup a short way into the shower room, you get the guard to walk away from the door in the opposite direction.  This is important as if you kill him where he stands you are witnessed by the other guard through the window from beyond the red steam room.  Once the guard has moved you can stun him and carry him into the shower room.  Do not put on his clothes.

Linger in the shower room until the officer with the long patrol between the Cyclotron room and the guard room (the red triangle man) comes by.  Timing this right is incredibly hard as opening the door too early alerts the officer and he turns and shoots, he also turns just as he opens the door to the stairs.  You need to stun him between him leaving the corridor to the Cyclotron and getting to the stairs.  You cannot use any other weapon on him except a stunning blow otherwise you will not be able to put on his uniform.  Once you have, you can walk into the Cyclotron room, dodge around the other officers, which involves quite a lot of tedious waiting as the officer at the foot of the gantry stairs only moves away occasionally allowing you to sneak up the steps and get to the scientist.  The other officer often comes by at an inconvenient time and you are trapped with no escape.  Once you have stolen the key from the scientist you cannot go back the way you have come.  Go back to the outer ring gantry of the Cyclotron and vault over the railings.  Surprisingly this causes no alarm, in sharp contrast to trying to retrace your steps.  Now you can go to the scientist's office and get the documents from his safe.

For the final stage it is a good idea to go to the colonel's office first, kill the guard outside and stash his body in the office behind the door and leave the door open.  Then go to where the colonel is.  He goes through four stages: talking with a scientist, watching a soldier kicking some machinery, walking in the corridor beyond the glass and then finally, alone with his back to the door.  Go in and chloroform him and take his keys.  Do not change into his clothes.  Now, how long it takes for his body to be found varies considerably.  Sometimes it is only a matter of seconds, sometimes you can saunter out of the base without it being detected.  Even if it is detected, this time you often get away with just a 3-minute lockdown being sounded rather than being shot to pieces as usual.  This is more than enough time to run back to the colonel's office and get the documents from the safe, especially if you have prepared the ground earlier.

The next mission is in Krakow but you have very little room for manoeuvre, no ability to go down parallel streets and you faced squads of soldiers patrolling.  This seems like another guerilla war mission, but I am trying something more subtle, though without much luck.  There are no empty buildings to duck into and you have no chance to use a sniper's rifle, the way I would have started this kind of mission on other games, just to thin out the sheer number of patrols there are.

P.P. 13/03/2011
Mission 7: Krakow
This one is set in Krakow, but you are strictly limited to how far you can move around the city, which seems in remarkable condition for 1944.  There are numerous overlapping patrols and I found that, as with Mission 5, I got a low score for shooting up these to allow myself to move around without bringing a whole Wehrmacht battalion on my head.  I do not know how you get in through the front or rear door entrances as they are so heavily guarded, I went for the secret passage from the post office.  I took out guards using the silenced Sten III, which is an excellent weapon that it is a pity you cannot use in other missions as it really allows you to take out opponents surrepticiously in the way the game designers are keen to encourage.  It takes about four rounds from the Sten to kill an opponent.  I crawled through the streets on my belly until I was out of Sten rounds and had to revert to mowing them down with an MP40.

You can change into the uniform of the guard on the North-West street corner of the crossroads.  Across the road from him on the North-East side (assuming the orientation of the map when you start the mission is North-South) is a building you can go into (once you have eliminated its guard) and literally lie low as soldiers run around outside.  Them finding some corpses can break up the 4-5 man patrols making them easier to pick off later in pairs.  I guess you are supposed to sneak past these but it is very hard.  Once in the post office, I found killing a guard drew in a platoon.  However, you can Thermopylae these if you base yourself on the 2nd floor landing (3rd floor if you are American), shoot the 1st floor (2nd floor US) guard from there then kill all the others who charge in afterwards, firing over the bannisters.  There might be a more subtle way but do not waste the rounds from your silenced Nagant here as you need them later.

You can clear through the tunnel pretty easily.  However, you need a silent way to kill the guard in the final room as otherwise the whole school will pile down the stairs blasting at you.  To progress inside you need first an officer's uniform, so as usual you need to locate an officer alone in his office.  The easiest one is left when you come up from the basement.  His guard goes into the storeroom next to the office for a smoke.  Kill him in there then you can take out the officer without difficulty.

There is loads of waiting in rooms until guards have passed.  Getting the first batch of documents on the ground floor is very hard even by the standards of this game.  You must kill the officer while his back is turned (which it is only briefly) and while his secretary is out of the room (as she is very briefly).  You must kill him fast, chloroform is too slow as the secretary returns as you are still using it, so it has to be a thrown dagger for him and then her shot with silenced pistol.  The 1st floor documents are a bit easier as one of the two officers regularly goes to the toilet where you kill him as if you were in 'Firefox' and then creep up on his colleague.  Be prepared though as the guard then decides to join in too.

I found the first assasination target, number 3 in the mission list, dead easy.  He spends a lot of time surrounded by people, but the guard outside his door is very neglectful.  I simply attached a trap to the locked door of his office and walked away.  This killed him whilst I was beyond suspicion.  The final target, number 4, is an utter nightmare.  He has no regular pattern of movement.  Watching him and the guards around him is like watching Brownian motion of particles through a microscope.  If you reload a save and start again from the same point you will find they all do something different to last time.  If you are lucky you can booby trap his briefing room door or that of the empty classroom next door though there is no guarantee when or if he will enter.  The only things you can really affect is to tell the class close to the wide landing that there is a fire alarm and all the students leave (though they come back later, be careful of this).  You can kill the teacher and lure the guard outside in to also bump him off.  Then you just have to hope that the deputy head comes into that room without too much of an entourage.  There is a loaded sniper's rifle in that room which is incredibly frustrating as that is precisely what you needed when outside.  Once this is done get out briskly and go back through the tunnel.  I have parked a nice 1930s car outside the post office so I can drive off to complete the mission in style.

P.P. 13/03/2011
Mission 8: Bridge over the Vistula
This is rather like Mission 5 in that it is outside and with loads of overlapping patrols which make it incredibly difficult to move without 6-10 guards machine gunning you.  It is an interesting mission.  You have to eliminate the eight snipers on towers overlooking a substantial railway bridge, then plant dynamite on the bridge and blow it up.  I adopted the onion approach, eliminating patrols around the periphery and working into the target area without fear of being caught from behind when a patrol turned a corner.  This meant I made a lot of noise as the best way to eliminate the 2- and 3-man patrols is using grenades.  It you throw them at a high angle then the patrols tend not to see them until the last moment so one grenade can eliminate a set of troops in one go.

You can get a German uniform from one of the men who is in or walks into the waiting room.  Later you can change into a sniper's uniform which opens up more access especially to the West side of the bridge without you being shot at immediately.  However, there is a black uniformed patrol on the eastern walkway of the bridge who are not fooled by this outfit.

There is also a lot of sniping to be done in this game.  I took the Soviet SVT rifle, unsilenced.  Though it is noisy you can carry more ammunition and I was concerned that I was going to need more than 1-2 shots to pick off snipers on rooftops.  I had not taken into consideration that I could loot German sniper rifles from their bodies, and to some degree you should not rely on that because it can be quite difficult reaching the rooftops.  There are eight towers.  The bridge runs North to South, the river West to East so I will be designating the towers as 1 West and 1 East, 2 West and 2 East, and so on.  Having cleared patrols I worked my way through the waiting room and small barracks eliminating the guards with the silenced pistol and boobytraps.  The first sniper is the one in the 1 East tower as you can target him from the ground.  There are fortunately only two other soldiers in that tower, so you can get to the top and take out the sniper in 1 West, if you are patient, because he moves around.  1 East and 1 West are connected by an underground tunnel.  1 West has more troops in.  You cannot get the snipers in 2 West and 2 East as these towers are higher.  Having killed a dozen guards who tried to take me out in 1 East, using the technique learnt from Clint Eastwood's character in 'Where Eagles Dare' standing at the top of the stairs and wiping them out with an MP40, I was able to get into 2 East and kill the sniper and then shoot the one in 2 West from there.  Getting up these towers is difficult as they have spiral staircases which are difficult to navigate and these stairways are very dark.  Guards tend not to come up these higher towers, so if, once you have fired you lie down you can usually be safe until the furore had quietened down.  Be careful as guards will fire up at you and snipers from the 3 West and 3 East will fire at you.

Bare in mind that there are different levels to the bridge.  1 East and 1 West have doors out at ground level (1st floor American) to the river bank and the 1st floor (2nd floor American) on to the bridge itself.  There is also a gantry level beneath the railway track level of the bridge which can be accessed from the river bank or down ladders on the side of the bridge.  This explains why you see guards on your map that you cannot see from where you are standing because they are in fact on a level below you.

You can kill the snipers in 3 West and 3 East from 2 West and 2 East respectively.  Then you can kill the final two snipers in 4 West and 4 East from 3 West and 3 East easily as these towers are higher than 4 West and 4 East which are on the North bank.  I also took out loads of other soldiers by sitting on 3 East and shooting anyone who came in range.  Typically once you down a soldier, another goes to investigate and stoops over the body.  I ended up with a gruesome pile of six corpses this way.  Once you have eliminated the eight snipers (and in my case, every soldier on the bridge, after I triggered another stampede of soldiers trying to get me on top of 3 West), you can plant the dynamite.  You can get spare from 3 East and 2 West towers.  You find you have to plant on top of the bridge.  There is a ladder from the middle of the bridge up to it.

Planting the dynamite can be difficult due to controlling Strogor getting off and on the various beams of the bridge.  If you get stuck making your way out to the beams on to which you have to set the explosives, try crouching before trying to clamber on to the beam.  Simiarly if there are difficulties when you reach the location where the dynamite is supposed to go, then crouch down.  Once the dynamite is in place you have 2 minutes 30 seconds to vacate.  If you did it the way I did then that should be no problem.  I got back to the car on the South river bank and drove off, then you get a cut scene showing the explosion.  You cannot driver the armoured reconnaissance vehicle, so the VW jeep is probably the best bet for a quick escape.

As with Mission 5, I do not see how you are supposed to do this mission subtly.  You soon run out of ammunition for your silenced weapons and even the guards coming across one corpse can lead to a mass of them storming your location.  The only way to hold them off is by using a sub-machine gun.  I killed 14 soldiers defending myself in 2 East and another 6 in 3 West.  I had eliminated 5 guards on the eastern walkway, 3 on the gantry level, 8 on the western walkway and then 6 down on the North bank.  Others were killed with the boobytraps.  I had already eliminated three 3-man patrols and two 2-man patrols and 3 soldiers by the car and the lone man by the reconnaissance vehicle, let alone the group of 5 you stumble across when the mission starts which I despatched with a single grenade.  I killed 4 soldiers near or in the waiting room and another 3 at the small barracks.  Of course there were the 8 snipers as well.  I have probably forgotten some, but I think this shows the number of troops you are expected to sneak passed or kill silently and dispose of their bodies before you are noticed by another patrol.  You can dump bodies off the bridge into the river and rather eerily see them through the water on the river bed.  It is one way to hide the bodies if you get time which generally you do not. 

This is a problem with this game, they emphasise the need to sneak and yet every centimetre is scoured by patrols.  I had to dodge and sneak and hide even to survive to plant the explosives even with the carnage I inflicted.  Sniping I got a kill with a single shot in every case.  My accuracy for the mission was 76% and that includes the use of the grenades and MP40 when the stampedes came.  Trying to do it with fewer casualties or silently is impossible.

P.P. 31/03/2011
Perhaps I had become complacent.  Having managed to battle my way through eight missions I imagined that I had the measure of this game.  I guessed that breaking into the Moosburg camp would be difficult.  The added hazard was that if you triggered the alarm at any stage, as had happened on previous missions, then prisoners would be shot.  The sheer number of guards with overlapping lines of sight was going to make it very hard.  I guessed correctly that I need to get a uniform to get inside.  After having shot three patrolling soldiers with my silenced Sten III and blown up a further five using land mines, without triggering off the alarm, I realised I was wasting my time.  Killing them in this way yielded no uniform.

I finally managed to persuade one patrolling guard to stray a little further into the woods using a smoke cannister.  The problem was that his ability to spot me was far greater than his ability to notice a pillar of smoke.  It was hard to be far enough away to throw it safely and then to reach him before he became disinterested in it.  On many occasions he simply ignored the smoke and went about his patrol.  On many others he spotted me rather than the smoke, though I was some distance away, and lying down in shadow and thick grass.  Finally I was able to stun him and take his uniform.  I still found it easier even dressed in the uniform to cut the fence to get into the camp because almost all the gates had red triangle guards who shoot you on sight.

The trouble was, in contrast to other missions, getting a uniform did not advance more than a tiny amount.  I could get into numerous buildings but not the one which the mission said I had to enter, reserved for offices.  So, as before I sought out a lone officer to bump off, or at least one whose guard left him alone for some time.  I could not find one.  I was regularly informed that the doctor who was one of the second targets anyway, was permitted to walk wherever he chose and have prisoners released to him.  So I went to the hospital and found it full of people willing to shoot me whenever I did anything suspicious.  I could not get the doctor alone or even in a room with fewer than four people, who at a pinch, I may have shot down.  Attacking the doctor led to his patients springing from their beds and shooting me with handy pistols.

I presume somewhere there is some officer I can bump off to get his uniform, but having now circumnavigated the camp, I cannot find one, who even if I approach cautiously, does not lead to the alarm being raised.  Perhaps it is like Mission 3 and there is in fact no way to complete it without 'collateral' deaths.  Similarly with eight people surrounding the doctor, I cannot see how I can ever disable him without being shot in seconds.

As the comedian and presented, Dara O'Briain notes, computer games are the only cultural ouput which permits you from seeing the end of the story.  No book, movie, piece of music, says 'no, you aren't skilled enough to see the end of the story'.  Whilst 'Death To Spies' seems to be increasingly morally dubious, I am frustrated to see how it pans out.  I am also annoyed that the games designers fell into so many of the flaws that previous makers of such games did and also seem to have done no game testing.  Perhaps the game is realistic, but it is also supposed to be entertaining.  There is no fun if I spend a whole evening repeatedly trying to throw a smoke cannister to the correct milimetre to get a man to move to it so I can reach him in time to knock him out and ninteen times out of twenty to be spotted before then or be unable to run fast enough to knock him out.  Even if I had the controls necessary to make such fine movements, something that hard (and I am on Easy level) is a chore not fun.  I have tried cheats simply to see the story unfold, but perhaps because I have the Gold edition, these do not work.

If the designers wanted a game with sneaking and silent attacks as from their scoring system it is clear they did, then they needed to make that feasible.  You need more silenced weaponry and appropriate ammunition, you need to be able to stab an opponent face on, you need to able to move around without the risk of dying instantly because one guard turned this way rather than the other like last time, you need to be able to equip yourself properly in advance.  Why, given that on previous missions I have killed Germans in every kind of uniform that the Wehrmacht and the SS provided can I not start a mission actually wearing one of them?  Whilst 'Hidden and Dangerous' was filled with technical bugs, these game play issues were far better tackled than this game, which eight years on, may have improved graphically but marks a step backwards in providing entertainment.

My Favourite Computer Games

I have no idea how many games have been produced for playing on the average home computer and here I mean something with a keyboard and a screen, I am leaving aside games consoles with which I have had only passing contact.  I have tens of games, many of which I have never even played as I used to use the purchase of them as a form of 'retail therapy' enjoying the browsing and purchasing and the reading of the little booklet on the train ride home even more than actually uploading the game, especially when I had a computer that only had sufficient memory to hold about ten decent games at a time.  Anyway, I have lost track of the number of computer games I have played down the years, but thought it would be worthwhile to share memories of the favourites.  Of course, since 1999 a great deal of my game playing (and this is a hobby which has ousted watching television and writing fiction from my most common leisure activities) has been with the 'Total War' series of computer games, but I think they warrant a whole posting of their own.  I have realised that aside from that kind of wargame the prime type of game I play is third-person shooting games.  I am certainly not a person for racing games or flight simulators, I think in part I like the stories that such third-person games have as background and in contrast to the very involved mental activity and planning in playing a wargame, with a shooting game there is a satisfactory visceral destructiveness which is good for relieving tensions, though, as I have noted in previous postings, feeling I am being treated unfairly by the game certainly raises my tension.  Anyway, in no particular order are my favourites of this genre.

I might say some that did not make it into this list.  One is 'Gun' (2005).  I enjoyed elements of this game.  It was controversial because of you having to gun down Apaches at one stage.  I made a mistake on sticking with guns rather than bows in the latter phases, making it impossible for me to win, but that reminded me I should check walk-throughs sooner.  The settings in Montana, Kansas and New Mexico in 1880 were well rendered and there were interesting side missions as well as the ongoing story about the hero, a former Confederate officer and gold in a reasonably worked out story.  I suppose why this has not become one of my favourites is partly the US setting and the bittiness of it.  If you are into Westerns then I do recommend it.  Just remember to enter the final stage with a bow that can fire dynamite.  Another was 'James Bond 007: Nightfire' (2002).  Again this has some good elements, I especially like creeping around the traditional Japanese house near the beginning, spotting people with X-ray glasses and shooting them through the paper walls.  However, as the game progresses you get ridiculously powerful weapons that take the edge off the fighting.  There are some very tedious sections like one where you have to jump up ledge after ledge in a vertical metal tunnel and one slip means you fall all the way back to the beginning, really boring.  I have played 'From Russia With Love' (2005) on the Playstation 2.  Like 'Nightfire' it raided a number of different Bond movies, but this time very much from the mid-1960s and that era gives a real flavour to the game.  The story is excellent in building on things such as Kerim Bey from the movie of 'From Russia With Love' (1963) but gave depth to the settings of the movie and giving tasks that seemed logical though very different from the story in the movie.  I would actually like to read a novel based on this game.  Sean Connery voicing Bond was an excellent touch.  It is a pity this game never made it to the personal computer.

No One Lives Forever (2000) and No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy In H.A.R.M.'s Way (2002)
I suppose mentioning spy games is a good lead in to two computer games that owe a lot to the spy craze of the 1960s.  The clothing, the rather sexist 1960s attitudes, the music all combine to create a story which is immersive. These two games are first-person shooters featuring Cate Archer, a Scottish cat burglar turned spy who is kitted out very much in the Cathy Gale - Emma Peel - Modesty Blaise style, though the appearance and voicing makes her distinct of all of these.  There are disapproving and avuncular bosses too, working for the good guys, U.N.I.T.Y.  The stories combine interesting action with tongue-in-cheek action such as a deadly German opera singer, a crotchety Scottish sergeant and in the second game, a series of murderous mimes.  You get fascinating and sometimes unreliable equipment such as explosive lipsticks, helpful robot parrots and distracting robot poodles. 

You have to explore a range of different environments in order to defeat H.A.R.M. a sinister, though sometimes ineffectual, even comic, organisation.  Of course, there is creeping around (and noise attracts opponents in a pretty sophisticated way given the age of these games) and shooting and blowing up things, underground bases and even falling from an aircraft (move as far as you can 'away' from you as gamer, right to the edge of the screen to survive that part).  These games were pitched at the right level, a challenge without the feeling that any moment you would be killed arbitrarily and with no chance to avoid your fate.  The styling and approach was wonderfully done, the stories interesting and successfully combining humour and drama.  A lot of gamers could learn from these two games.  It is no surprise that 'No One Lives Forever' was Game of the Year in 2001.

Hidden & Dangerous (1999)
Thinking about immersive games, brings me to an even older one that I played for ages.  This was 'Hidden and Dangerous' a game that allowed you to switch between first and third person on each of your characters.  This involved you recruiting a team of four specialists in the SAS in the Second World War to carry out various missions in locations across Europe including France, Norway, Hungary and what was at the time the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.  You had to rescue people, recover objects and assassinate people.  These days it would seem incredibly unsophisticated and it was riddled with horrible bugs which would leave your characters jammed down dead ends or being killed by the engine of the boat they were supposed to be riding in.  However, the tension as you crawled along the ground in pouring rain to line up with your rifle to take out a guard or creeping in disguise through a town or infiltrating a chateau or using the tactical screen co-ordinating the actions of your four men to overpower particular units and then leaping in a car and driving off, was really a thrill.  Again, in its favour, it was tough but not impossible, even allowing for the bugs. 

I liked the stories behind each mission and also the fact that each of the characters you could build your team from had a back story and expertise as a result.  You could have a very multinational team mixing in a Pole, a Czech, a Briton, a New Zealander, a Frenchman even a Spanish Republican.  There was an expansion pack 'Hidden & Dangerous: Fight For Freedom' (2001) which interestingly had a mission in which you fought against Communist partisans during the Greek Civil War 1944-8, even though they had been opposing the Germans in Greece.  In 2004 'Hidden & Dangerous 2' was released, but by then, the clunky graphics and bugs were unforgivable.  The atmosphere and functionality of 'Hidden & Dangerous' were excellent.  It is just a pity that more work was not put into ironing out the bugs as this could have been the basis of a very successful franchise.  Its legacy is in many squad battle games, but as yet, I do not feel any has matched the engaging portrayal of wartime Europe that this game did.

BloodRayne (2002)
This one inspired two movies and a series of comic books.  Again it is based on a strong story, in this case about a half-vampire (termed a Dhampir) working for the mysterious Brimstone Society in the 1930s to prevent a special group of Nazis the Gegen-Geist Gruppe from using elements from a demon to make their forces superhuman.  This game is really gory and reminds me of the fear in the 1980s when there was a fear that 'video nasties' would spill over into the gaming world.  Back then the graphics were not capable of reproducing anything that looked alarming, these days it is very different.  Rayne runs around both feeding on people to sustain her strength and dismembering Nazi forces and various mutants and demons she encounters with long blades fitted to her arms.  Her attacks are often balletic and there is a real delight to be had in spinning through the air in slow motion to go on the attack.  Whilst as in many shooting (and this case stabbing) games there are numerous nameless opponents, a lot of the GGG personalities are detailed.  Some are cyborgs, some priests, some well-armed or psychotic soldiers, but they look and behave differently and there is a large team of them to eliminate in Argentina and Germany.  Mad Nazi machinery including two-legged tanks also get a look in.  All of this creates a fantastical but engaging atmosphere. 

Another interesting aspect is that the GGG often unleashes things it cannot control and you can end up in three-sided battles with the Nazi forces Rayne is targeting fighting off demons and mutants who will also attack Rayne.  Though Rayne gains numerous powers, some of her weaknesses, such as water effectively being a strong acid to her.  Towards the end when Rayne is battling huge demons who can kill her with a single swipe it becomes far too hard and I could not complete it without using cheats.  However, I did want to find out what happened in the end and I think that was a winning element of the game.  The fact that it has inspired such a following I think bears witness to this success.  The sequel, 'BloodRayne 2' is set in the near future in a world that vampires are trying to alter to be more conducive to them.  This is very stylish with Rayne starting in an elegant dress in a German mansion and goes on to street fighting.  However, it is far too difficult to be enjoyable.  You can be killed with a single blow at any stage and Rayne does not gain much better weaponry (though the blood-powered dragon guns look neat) as she progresses.  The fact that there is a facility from the start to enter cheat codes, I believe shows the producers knew it was too touch to survive through normal play.  It is a shame as it looks good and has an interesting story.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption (2000)
I have mentioned this game before.  It features a 12th century crusader who is turned into a vampire while in Prague and goes on missions in medieval Prague and Vienna and then modern day London and New York.  Though there are some anachronisms, the attention to detail of the medieval cities and the equipment and armour you can get, combined with a wide range of skills and spells you can develop, plus the squad approach of operating up to four team members in co-ordination, make this a very engaging game.  Again, it is not easy, but there is not that sense of futility that you get with, say, 'BloodRayne 2' that you will never progress beyond a certain stage.  That was a problem which I encountered with the sort of sequel, 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' (2004) which was cursed with scores of bugs and needed stacks of patches to work.  One strength of 'Redemption' is that it is based on the paper-based role-playing game, 'Vampire: The Masquerade' which means that it came with a developed world of different warring vampire clans and weapons and spells already worked out.  There is a real enjoyment in this game when a co-ordinated plan comes together or you cast a spell to defeat your opponents, I especially like conjuring up a golem to assist me.  The story, again though fantastical, has more than two-dimensional characters and a story that you can really enter and to some degree get through differently depending on the specialisations you pick for each character.  I just love walking around medieval Prague.

Assassin's Creed (2007)
I have realised that a lot of my favourite games date back to the start of the 2000s.  I wonder why this is.  Maybe the good ideas have been exhausted and we have ended up with variations on themes rather than innovative approaches.  However, one more recent game which certainly allows me to indulge in wandering medieval cities to the full is 'Assassin's Creed'.  This is set in Palestine/Lebanon/Syria in July or August 1191 (Jaffa has not yet fallen to the Crusaders which it did on 10th September 1191).  Well, your character Desmond Miles, is from 2012 and is sent back into the body of one of his ancestors in the 12th century to find out various secrets connected with the Templars for the benefit of the sinister Abstergo Industries which had kidnapped him.  His ancestor known as Altaïr ibn La-Ahad is a member of the Assassins, a genuine body in medieval Lebanon.  Their role in this game was to bring about some kind of end to the conflict between the Crusaders and the Saracen forces.  This was the time of the Third Crusade, with King Richard I of England battling Salah ad-Din.  Altair embarrasses himself at the start of the game and has to restore his standing among the Assassins by carrying out missions in the cities of Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem.  What is stunning about this game is how wonderfully rendered the cities are.  You can walk among the crowds, and being an assassin, scale the walls of buildings and leap across rooftops.  The building details, even the shadows you cast are beautiful to watch.  Great attention has been paid to the historical setting.  Acre, a Christian city at the time, still shows war damage; Damascus is clearly a Muslim city and Jerusalem (including the Dome of the Rock which rather sacriligeously you can clamber on) is a mixture showing its current Muslim occupation and yet with the legacy of years of Christian control.  I have always found the Crusader States fascinating and this game gives you the chance to charge or creep around them.

The one down side is that many of the missions are similar and more variety in what you had to do, would have been of benefit.  Of course, you can go about each mission and the side missions in a different way.  You can simply, if you like leap from rooftop to rooftop sneaking up on guards and pushing them from the roof.  I would like to be able to go into the shops and sit in a cafe, but I suppose exploring the markets and bases of various opponents will suffice.  Have I said, it looks stunning.  You can stand on a high building and simply look out over the city with smoke and pollen and dust blowing around and gaze up to the surrounding hills.  I am so glad that they picked on such a different setting.  I am really looking forward to 'Assassin's Creed II' coming to the PC.  It allows you to play in 15th century Venice, the screenshots look stunning.  There is speculation about the third in the series.  Personally I would favour Paris during the French Revolution of the late 18th century as the next setting, though rumours say it may be somewhere in Second World War Europe.

Deus Ex (2000)
This is an incredibly successful game which has won a slew of awards and has sold over 1 million copies.  I came across it not in a game review but in an article on the BBC website back in about 2003.  This is partly due to the political messages and the chance to have a variety of outcomes to the game depending on the options you take.  It is described as a cyberpunk setting, as you play JC Denton, a man with his body augmented by nanotech which, depending on which options you pick give you a range of special abilities.  Weaponry can also be augmented so two players can end up pretty quickly with very different JC Dentons in the game with different equipment. The story is set in 2052 and Denton works for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO) whose base is at the bottom of the beheaded Statue of Liberty in New York (remember this was produced before the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001) and in seeming to combat terrorism in the USA, Hong Kong and France he uncovers a conspiracy in which a corporation has manufactured a disease called 'Gray Death' so they can get rich selling the vaccine.  However, a load of organisations come into the story like Majestic 12, the Illuminati and the Triads and fictional terrorist organisations such as the National Secessionist Force and the wonderfully named Silhouette, a French terrorist group.

Throughout you can choose different actions to take which impacts on how others perceive you and information you receive.   My brother played the game very differently to me and in many ways this reflected our different personalities, in the way that games like 'Black and White' (2001) tended to show up your personality traits however you tried to act differently.  Ultimately you can pick one of a number of options for governance of the world. Woven through the game are messages about our own world now, for example the steady reduction in the amount of tax large corporations pay.  A sequel set 70 years later, 'Deus Ex, Invisible War' was released in 2003 but I never played it, mainly as I did not have a DVD drive, which it required, at the time.  The reviews of it have not been as good as for the original, which seems to be still available and I recommend buying.

Dungeon Keeper 2 (1999)
This final game is not a first or third person shooting game, it is a building game.  I could have listed 'Caesar III' (1999) or 'Medieval Lords' (2004) or even the 'Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile' (2004) which has great involvement and graphics (why are there never any good Renaissance city building games? Ancient Rome and then Egypt with the odd medieval village seem to dominate), but I have never really engaged with them, 'Dungeon Keeper 2' was different.  Looking over these games I think I enjoy being able to play the 'alternative', to some degree break rules that I could not break in real life.  This is what attracts me to certain games over others.  'Dungeon Keeper 2' allowed this.  You get to play the evil dungeon master and to construct a lair with traps and devices and populate with trolls and others monsters, sorcerors and even sexy dominatrices and then wait for the good knights to charge in and get wiped out.  Stage by stage you take over the kingdom by expanding into the good guys' areas and attracting them into yours for elimination.  Not only do you get the funding of constructing a dungeon in detail, a part I enjoyed when playing the paper-based 'Dungeons and Dragons' role-playing game in the 1980s, you get to be the bad guy, encouraged along by a sinisterly voiced advisor, excellently performed by actor Richard Ridings (born 1958).  One great function is that you can possess any of the monsters or your minions in the dungeon and get to see everything from their perspective which to me seemed wonderful that you can move from working on the 3D overhead view to seeing it on the ground, also useful if you wanted to carry out specific missions using one of your monsters.


Anyway, this is my list of favourite computer games which have not only kept me entertained over the years, but I now realised have in fact provoked thought.  I do hope there is room out there for games that are willing to take a risk to be different.  Games are now part of our broader culture and if, like too many movies, they simply fall back on the tried and tested and parade things we have seen many times before in front of us, then our broader culture is going to be less rich and for me and, no doubt thousands of others, that little bit less fun.

Dead In Seconds: The Frustrations of Computer Games

Aside from blogging and writing fiction, one thing I enjoy, probably like millions of people, especially men, is to play games on my computer. There are two types of game which I favour from the vast range out there. Not surprisingly given my interest in counter-factual history I have always enjoyed historical strategy games and like trying to turn history on its head. One series I have played more than any other is the 'Total War' series: 'Shogun Total War' (2000) and its 'Mongol Invasion' (2001); 'Rome Total War' (2004), its 'Barbarian Invasion' (2005 - set in the 5th century at the end of the Roman Empire) and its 'Alexander' expansion (2006); 'Medieval Total War' (2002 period from 1066 to 1453) and its expansion 'Viking Invasion' (2003 - set in the 8th-10th centuries just in Scandinavia and British Isles) and its follow-up 'Medieval II Total War' (2006) and its expansion, 'Medieval II Total War: Kingdoms' (2007) which allowed various regional campaigns in the Baltic, the Crusades, British Isles and Central America. Anyway these games allow you to build empires and fight real-time battles to often covering centuries. Aside from all the official expansions there are numerous free downloadable alterations and upgrades, often to make the campaigns more historically accurate or totally alter it so you can fight, for example, in the world of 'The Lord of the Rings'.

I have spent many hours playing these games, but am constantly frustrated in how imbalanced the game is between what you can do as a player and what the computer-run opposition can do. Notable problems are the use of catapults, ballistas, etc. When your crews are inexperienced it is difficult for them to hit anything especially when using them on the battlefield rather than in a siege. It is maddening as shots fall short and then long and then to one side and then the other side, anywhere but on where the enemy is standing. In contrast the opponents' catapults open up hitting you with flaming balls in seconds and keep firing very quickly and accurately no matter how fast your soldiers run around. I think the first mode probably reflects the reality, but clearly the creators of the game (who despite having loads of official online discussion groups are now getting very sensitive to criticism) want 'their' side to be strong. The greatest problems comes with the Mongols. In reality they were tough opponents for medieval soldiers, but in certain circumstances. In the original 'Medieval Total War' they were tough but in 'Medieval II Total War' they became almost invincible. Again a key problem is the accuracy of their weapons. They use rockets, which is historically accurate, but even as late as the Napoleonic Wars, 700 years later, these were difficult to keep on track and certainly did not have the ability to keep sustained fire on a particular target and they were certainly not strong enough to bring down walls as they do in this game. The Mongols themselves did have longer-range bows than the Europeans but they could be brought down by a shower of arrows, their horses were generally not armoured, but in the game they ride right through unscathed and even after the battle you find you have not inflicted as many casualties as it seems in-battle. Another problem is with sea battles. Even in the Second World War with spotter aircraft and radar fleets were often difficult to track down. In this game whilst your fleets have to wander up and down coastlines in the hope of stumbling across an enemy fleet (certainly one that is not blockading a port), in contrast they track you down the length of the Mediterranean and then drive you in the grips of another of their fleets or an allied one, even hundreds of miles away. This imbalance in strength between the player who in these games builds up armies and navies and moves them around carefully only to have them eliminated so easily is incredibly off-putting and you just chuck in the towel. Games should be challenging but you lose heart when all your great efforts are simply wiped out arbitrarily and with no come-back for yourself.

The other thing is with cities. These grow in population and people expected more sophisticated buildings to be constructed which you have to raise revenue for. However, very often even when you have a low rate of tax, cities are in constant unrest and you spend more time fighting your rebellions than moving on with the game. Again this does not reflect history. There were uprisings over religion and I can accept that if as a Christian you invade a Muslim area there is going to be tension, but saying that somewhere like Acre in what is now Syria was held by the Crusaders for almost 300 years without an uprising. In England itself we had the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 and it was very notable for the rarity of these events, similarly, the German Peasants' War 1524-5 is called that, not the Fifteenth German Peasants' War as unrest was uncommon and usually very localised. If you heavily tax a city or there are spies from elsewhere or a bad ruler, yes I can accept there will be unrest, but not as regularly and as virulently (often the rebels are far better equipped especially with heavy troops) than the garrison they have just expelled from a city. Such imbalanced behaviour (and this is on the Easy level) makes the game tedious and you just give up.

I guess my gripes are about not feeling I stand a chance. I am a good general I can pull miracles out of the hat on the battlefield and having read a lot of medieval history know the tricks that different forces can use (fight Mongols in woodland, hedgerow country or city streets) and yet they have no benefit in the game. Tweaking the coding either originally or in the various patches and upgrades would remove that sense that you are going to die whatever you might try and arbitrary death is not fun; losing a hard fought battle may be disappointing but encourages you to try again not give up.

The issue of arbitrary death brings me to the issues I have with the other kind of computer game I play: first/third person shooting games. Like a lot of people I love to work off my frustrations running around firing at things in a safe environment. This is a less celebral activity than the strategy games, but enjoyable in a different way. I also enjoy the background and settings for these games. I have played 'James Bond: Nightfire' (2002), 'Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza' (2002) which had a background of the movie genres, but others from a different background have even more interesting contexts and I would highlight 'No One Lives Forever' (2000) and 'No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.;s Way' (2002) which were set in the slightly tongue-in-cheek spy movies of the mid-to-late 1960s like 'Our Man Flint' (1966) and 'In Like Flint' (1967), 'The Avengers' series and almost all 'The Men From U.N.C.L.E.' movies and TV series. Set in 1967-8, there are over the top Russian spies and even a murderous opera singer and a mime on a unicycle. The heroine Cate Archer has a range of amazing gadgets such as exploding lipsticks, make-up contact communicators and parrot shaped radios as well as guns of the time.

Another very good game in this genre is 'Deus Ex' (2000) which has a fascinating political sub-text that has even been commented on on the BBC webpages. It is set in the near future after a terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty in New York and it seems that the consequences are being manipulated by various US authorities to tighten their control over the country (sound familiar?). It features lots of genetically modified people and creatures and vicious robots. You begin working for the government but increasingly your character comes to change his outlook. It is a shooting game but with a really interesting context and things to uncover. Also, as with the 'No One Lives Forever' series you can develop your characters physical implants and skills and even how others react to him in different directions. My brother played this game too and we went through the same early section. His character came out being seen by others as a quiet, covert clever assassin, whereas me playing the same element was seen by the gung-ho characters as being one of them, a loud man with big guns.

The other game I did in the shooting genre is 'Hidden and Dangerous' (1999) (there was 'Hidden and Dangerous 2' (2002) but I have not played that) which is slightly different as it is a Second World War set commando game in which you run a team of four soldiers you can switch between, so it is first/third person one whichever one you pick. It was fun as it had kind of 'Guns of Navarone' missions behind enemy lines. Despite being buggy, it was challenging without being impossible and there were benefits from co-ordinating your team and sneaking around and sniping, etc. Nicely rendered landscapes too.

Now, the problem I have with some first/third person shooting games is that they become impossible. Being a Goth I naturally enjoy vampire stories in my games and so was very eager to play 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' (2004) which allowed you to be one of seven very different vampire clans located in Los Angeles each with different characteristics. There was a core story but also the opportunity to go off and do other things and all the morality issue of being a vampire and drinking people's (or rats') blood. It was incredibly buggy and needed 23 patches over about two years before it was usable but once it was it was an excellent game, one of the only games I have played that was truly scary and it is very atmospheric all round. However, like many shooter games you reach the stage of no progression, the monster just becomes too hard that no matter what type of equipment you have or strategy you use or skills you develop you can go no further just when you want find out what happens next. You go back and try a whole slew of different strategies, even going back to earlier in the game to find if different choices would help you, but no you just get killed and killed and killed. Of course, then people turn to cheats and usually I go for ones that simply restore your health or give you more defence rather than invulnerability but yet I have to find a cheat code that will let me progress in the game when facing two baddies in different locations neither of which I can inflict more than minimal damage on before dying.

I am now facing the same with 'Bloodrayne' (2002) which has a great setting in that you are a half-vampire woman fighting the Nazis 1935-8 and the various demons they have released, starting in Louisiana then in Argentina and Germany. You fight against the so-called Gegen-Geist Gruppe with a range of interesting personalities from priests to cyborgs to sorcerors and just tough soldiers. You can replenish yourself by draining others' blood. The game allows some of the most elegant moves I have seen in a computer game with you spinning through the air in slow motion firing at enemies. Again very atmospheric with challenging tasks. However, soon you realise no matter how big a gun you get or acrobatic combat attacks you can carry out, you are going to die. From mid-way through I have been unable to progress without a health replenishing cheat and a cheat so that the monsters suffer more damage and yet I turn a corner and I m eaten in seconds without warning. Now even with cheats I cannot progress beyond the walking robot (think the two-legged ones in the movie 'Return of the Jedi' or those in 'Deus Ex' if you have played it) firing rockets and a minigun faster than I can even bring a gun to bear on it. In 'Bloodrayne' whilst your opponents get stronger you do not nor do you get armour and the people you can feed off for health become fewer all the time. As with 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' I am going to bale out and never find out the end of the story. (There is a third example, a very different game, 'Freelancer' (2003 - it took 4 years to develop) in which you are a space trader in the future uncovering a mystery about alien artifacts and despite becoming incredibly wealthy from trading I cannot buy a spaceship that allows me to survive when whole fleets come after me and just blow me apart in seconds, you cannot avoid encountering them in the story).

I accept that I am not the world's best gamer, but I am certainly far from being the worst. I am persistent and I use walkthroughs to help out when I get stuck so I am not blundering into these things. I want a challenge, but I do not want to get three-quarters of a way through a game or even much less and find that no matter what I do (even using cheats in some cases) I cannot progress. I think it comes down to insufficient games testing or the people they use to do it who probably live games and know how to twist their fingers to hit ten keys simultaneously on a PC keyboard to pull these things off. Yes, the opponents should get tougher, but there should never be a sense that they are unbeatable. Yes, they should be able to kill you but not in seconds, there should at least be a chance of fighting back or finding something or developing some skill that allows you to improve your chances. This is where 'Deus Ex' was so good and 'Bloodrayne' so weak. What is the point of developing a complex story and characters if the bulk of buyers of the product are never going to see them. 'Easy' level should mean 'easy', not 'barely completable'. This goes for strategy and first/third person shooters. Allow the player to truly choose the depth of their challenge otherwise they will choose to buy someone else's products.

P.P. I managed to complete 'BloodRayne' but only through using an invulnerability cheat and even then I lost a couple of times because you have to defeat a demon before it grows too large. I found I was closer to the end than I had realised but given that the final battle involves a vast demon who inflicts immense damage with every blow I have no idea how you are supposed to survive without cheating. It was only at the end that I found out how to target anti-tank weapons, something I had not gathered from the training or information up until then. I notice 'BloodRayne 2' addresses some of the difficulties of the first allowing you to send out your spirit to feed on people at a distance and to build up a range of different attacks.