'Total War: Attila' - Tiresome

I have been a fan of the 'Total War' games since the first 'Shogun:Total War' released back in 1999.  Being both interested in history and the possible alternatives, epic games covering decades and even centuries, combining both battlefield and strategic levels have appealed to me.  However, as the years have progress, despite the increased sophistication and the improved graphics, I have become more and more frustrated with basic flaws in the games, despite all the different settings, that never seem to be resolved.  With the advent of 'Total War: Rome II' new problems were introduced which now seem to be adding to the growing list.  See my previous posting about Rome II for what I see as these tedious problems: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/total-war-rome-ii-same-old-problems.html 

I am still excited by a new 'Total War' game and pre-ordered the latest 'Total War: Attila' back in November 2014.  A flaw in downloading meant that until an update in March 2015, despite reporting the problem to Steam, I was unable to run it.  Once it was functioning I was keen to play.  The 'Barbarian Invasion' expansion (2005) to the original 'Rome Total War' (2004) featuring the late Western and Eastern Roman Empires and the migrating barbarian tribes was always a favourite of mine and so I was keen to play this updated version of that expansion for the 'Rome II' approach.

The game is certainly visually stunning.  However, some of this causes problems.  In 'Rome II', the different troop and building types are represented by symbolic images.  This makes it easy to distinguish between them.  With 'Attila' they are represented by my realistic images.  This makes it difficult to tell at a glance between similar units.  It is particularly a difficulty telling between the range of buildings many of which look pretty much the same.  It is important to tell, because unlike with 'Rome II' each province has to have sufficient food rather than this being the case right across your empire.  It also has to have a sufficient level of sanitation.  This can be hard when you only control part of a province because the rest is held by an enemy, an ally or has been made desolate.  Desolation is a new factor cause by barbarian tribes laying waste to a region.  It can be revived by colonisation if you can spare enough money.  

The key problem is that even if you have a good level of food supplies you will typically find one or more provinces starving leading to unrest.  You will also find that disease caused by a lack of baths or reservoirs is far more prevalent than in 'Rome II'.  Thus, as with 'Rome II' you find yourself incessantly fighting uprisings and pumping money into keeping people alive, leaving little for fighting off opponents or developing your empire.  This is one problem of recent Total War games, they end up becoming 'Total Management' because unless you load up modifications provided by amateurs you will find yourself simply struggling not to lose your empire to famine or uprising, even on the Easy setting.  These things did happen, but bear in mind the Byzantine Empire, what had been the Eastern Roman Empire, lasted until 1453CE, a thousand years after this game is set.

Many problems that were seen as early as 'Medieval 2 Total War' (2006) and have never been rectified.  One is catapults that move around the battlefield as fast as heavy infantry and, even in thick fog or when firing into a forest or up a steep hill, are able to hit your soldiers more precisely than laser-guided weapons of today.  In turn, your catapult weapons will miss the opponents despite firing repeatedly even at a static line across flat terrain with perfect visibility.  Ships will always hunt you down when you move at sea, covering hundreds of miles to be in the correct place, again something even challenging with modern technology.  

Another problem which has continued from 'Rome II' is in terms of towers in towns.  In small towns these are typically wooden structures.  The strength of them varies considerable between how they impact on AI (artificial intelligence - i.e. the one controlled by the computer) soldiers and how they impact on yours.  I have lost entire units trying to knock down a single tower because of the incessant arrows which fire into them as they march up and take so long to destroy it.  In contrast, an AI unit can march up to your towers receiving only 1-2 casualties and destroy it rapidly.  Thus it is far easier for the computer faction to take a town than it is for you to take even the same settlement.  Similarly you can only place barricades in largely ridiculous places that do little if nothing to protect your settlement, they simply hamper moving your troops around.  In contrast, when the AI is in charge of the town the barricades prove to be a genuine defence.  You can win, but your casualties will be far higher than for a computer driven faction taking the same place.

Armies even from factions which are not friendly will precisely co-ordinate so your defenders will face wave after wave of attackers.  Even if good at fighting on the defence you are strained when the third army in a row, twice your strength comes down the same road to get you in a single turn.  The AI player never makes mistakes and for some reason while you can not march past its armies and constantly seem to be just that little bit short of catching them, your opponent will always have the precise amount of movement necessary; can march right through your zone of control and in 'Attila' will often even fight you and march off and attack someone else or a different town in the same turn, all things you will be unable to do.  I cannot understand how a barbarian horde, i.e. consisting of the entire population including non-combatants, can march faster and farther than a trained Roman army.  A crucial difference is that, unless you are extremely lucky, your neighbouring armies do not support each other.  In contrast, the AI ones are always in perfect balance and you find some armies supporting more than one offensive, something I have never been able to achieve despite very careful positioning.

The big mistake that was added to these flaws in 'Rome II' was limiting the number of armies.  In 'Medieval 2 Total War' one useful function was that you could strengthen garrisons without need for a general.  Now you are limited to 16 armies and if you are trying to control an empire as large as the two Roman Empires or the Sassanid you find yourself struggling to get from one end of the empire to the other with enough force, exacerbated by the blocking zone of control problems noted above.  City garrisons are utterly pathetic, no matter how much you develop the buildings in a city.  Rebels even revolting slaves turn up with far more experienced soldiers and crucially soldiers equipped with better weapons and more advanced armour than you can even recruit in your empire, despite them coming from that empire.  Thus, some towns are lost almost on a constant basis.  You have to leave armies to garrison in case an opponent by-passes you as they very often can which again means no expansion of your own empire.

Another flaw which came with 'Rome II' and continues with Attila is disappearing units.  I accept there are issues about line of sight on a bumpy or forested terrain.  However, even on flat plains for some reason units disappear even when walking towards you.  The problem is that any soldiers you have sent marching towards them stop dead once the unit fades and do not resume their march if it reappears.  Similarly missile troops and catapults stop firing at it and again simply spectate if it reappears.  Yet, your opponent keeps firing incessantly and with great accuracy.  

Since 'Rome II' the default setting for marching an entire army on the battlefield is that it fans out.  This causes many to set off away from the enemy.  Similarly trying to congregate them back when they have chased off the opponent sees them heading in random directions.  The soldiers have no sense of self-preservation to turn and face an attacker or aid their fellow soldiers right next to them.  Control of units has deteriorated severely since the days of 'Medieval 2 Total War'.

All of these flaws mean that you need to be able to see into the future and amass soldiers in precisely the right location to see off an opponent.  You will incessantly have to be fighting for the smaller towns and villages as their defence is so feeble.  At times it seems that the AI will not let you hold a particular town and even opponents with a few and poor territories are able to field vast, well-equipped armies that outstrip anything your country can produce.  Now, a new element in 'Attila' is that if you start hiring mercenaries their prices rise so it even proves difficult to bring in supplementary forces quickly or put in ones suited to a local environment, especially as all your money is going into building local farms and water supplies rather than recruitment buildings.

The key problem with so many barbarian tribes is that they are incessant and it is easy to find yourself at war with fifteen to twenty factions.  They are not as hard to destroy as they were back in 'Barbarian Invasion', but there are simply so many bent of destroying everything.  As has long been the case, the diplomacy system is largely pointless.  You struggle to find anyone to trade with you let alone ally with you.  Allies simply drag you into more wars and yet rarely assist you.  Trade partners often remain hostile and break off trade at random leading to a sudden drop in income.  I emphasise that these problems are playing at the 'Easy' level by someone with 16 years' experience on these games.

The only improvements with 'Rome II' that are also seen in 'Attila' is with the agents.  These used to be really pathetic in 'Medieval 2 Total War' and could not be kept alive.  Now they stand a decent chance and I have managed to get at least one of each - Spy, Dignitary and Champion up to the top level.  They add to the game and the armies.  Though I note that the Merchant has not made an appearance, they lived such a short time it was simply a waste of cash.

I appreciate the effort that has gone into 'Attila' in terms of getting it looking great and historically accurate.  What is infuriating is the persistence of gameplay flaws which have now been in place for a decade and seem to be worsening.  In many ways, as I have noted before, Sega and Creative Assembly seem to be leaving enhancement up to the amateur developer community rather than actually resolving these themselves.  They have been stubborn in not addressing flaws that mean it can be tiresome playing when hard work and clever strategy is defeated by the great advantages the AI had with its armies.  What is worse is that such situations are anachronistic and it is a shame to find that your wonderful Roman legions are effectively coming up against 21st century armies.

Dead In Seconds 6: Freelancer's Blues

As regular readers of this blog will know, I get a lot of enjoyment from playing computer games, these days on my laptop.  I particularly like games with a good story and an imaginative approach.  The thing that exasperates me most is not being able to progress in these games as I am simply destroyed very quickly.  In particular I hate it when your computer-controlled opponents have advantages that you do not and so the conflict is imbalanced.  I feel that your character or country or tank or whatever should have the same abilities and chance of success as an equally equipped opponent.  This is often not the case.  In addition, too many games seem designed with the target player, even at the Easy setting, being someone incredibly adept at pressing six keys simultaneously, responding faster than a computer can and being able to see into the future.  I have wasted a great deal of money down the years on games in which I am wiped out so quickly that there was no point in buying the game.  Repeated attempts to progress advance me no further and I am left feeling inadequate just when I am seeking escape from constantly being told I am inadequate in real life.

In the past I have wondered about me going on about computer games which may be a decade old, imagining that most readers would at best only have a dim memory of them.  However, with Steam and even more so Good Old Games which Yammerhant introduced me to back in February of this year, much of what I have to say again becomes relevant.  Today's focus is on 'Freelancer'.  This is a game which involves you playing Trent a space trader in the distant future, moving between different planetary systems settled by the Americans, British/Irish, Japanese and Germans.  Such games have a long heritage going back to 'Star Trader' (1984) and of course, the famous 'Elite' (1984) on the ZX Spectrum and slightly more recently 'Wing Commander: Privateer' (1993) available for PCs (you can buy this off GOG.com at the moment).  Like these earlier games 'Freelancer' works on the concept that you get a spaceship, you fly between a range of beautifully imaged planets and space stations buying and selling so that you become richer and can upgrade your ship.  You can also pick up missions from the various bodies in the different systems whether they be police, the military, bounty hunters or big corporations.

The variety of different settings, how the planets are shown even how the stores and bars on each planet look pretty different is a strong point.  A weakness is how few voice actors are used.  You can interact with a range of non-player characters of different nationalities with them all sounding like the US actor David Schwimmer.  There are only a few voices that sound British, German or Japanese.  The styling is quite fascinating especially for the Bretonnian (British) and Liberty (American) police and military with the Bretonnians wearing the red jackets and pith helmets of British forces in Africa or India in the 1860s and the Libertarians looking like members of the 7th Cavalry of the same era.  The Rheinlanders (Germans) resemble 19th century German politicians, only the Kusarians (Japanese) look like they are up with the times, wearing outfits that seem to have come from 'Blade Runner'.  The planets tend to look like these styles though the Liberty planets' cities look like contemporary San Francisco and the Kusarian ones very much like Tokyo or Los Angeles of 'Blade Runner' in contrast the Bretonnian ones are either heavily Gothic in style or look like an archetype of a 19th century mill town in northern England.

There are lots of items to buy and sell and a total of 48 systems to explore.  The prices do not change, so if you find a good deal shipping from one part of the galaxy to the other you can guarantee that you will keep earning.  You can also make money by undertaking the missions, usually capturing or eliminating pirates or revolutionaries.  This not only gets you cash but raises your reputation with the different authorities or corporations.  In addition, destroying the criminals you can use your tractor beam to scoop up cargo or weaponry which you can sell on.  Frustratingly in each nation's region you can only buy one of four ships: two types of light fighter, one type of heavy fighter and one type of freighter.  The craft look great and show the particular weaponry you select to buy on the images.  When damaged the graphics show this, sometimes your craft even on fire.  Whislt you can put on different weaponry and defences, again these are pretty limited by the level you can reach.  You raise through the odd levels through generating a certain level of wealth but you can only progress through the even levels by engaging with the storyline.

Though there is quite a lot of freedom to advance, you keep being dragged back to the linear story about a conspiracy in Liberty space involving the trafficking of alien artifacts and this is where the problems begin.  You start in Liberty space but soon become a renegade dragged into battles by a former commander in the LSF - Liberty Security Force an armed intelligence service.  These battles are ridiculously hard to even survive in.  There is so much crossfire from vessels far more powerful than your own that the only solution is to skulk around the edges; if you are directly targeted your shield and hull is literally stripped away in seconds and you are told you have failed.  If you do the sensible thing and flee then you lose as you are deemed to be a coward.  Even buying the best ship with all the defences I could, I have repeatedly go through these scenes again and again just to find the one occasion when I can survive and get to the next stage of the story.  Between phases of each part of the story you often have no chance to repair your ship or replenish your weaponry so you have to hope you can tractor beam in some shield batteries from the debris in order to stay alive.

I guess you could say that the set-piece battles need to be exciting.  However, having to listen to the cut scenes again and again and again to get a chance to try to survive once more gets very tedious.  However, this is not the only element of  'dead in seconds' found in 'Freelancer'.  The other problem is simply flying around trying to trade.  It is right that if carrying cargo you get held up by pirates trying to snatch this.  In some cases you can outrun them.  However, as you progress they gain cruise disruptor missiles which stop you escaping and your anti-missile flares seem unable to shake them off.  You can battle it out with the pirates and stand a real chance of winning and even scooping up valuable debris.  What is frustrating is that you can be leapt on anywhere.  When out in open space at least you have a chance to fight back, the problem comes when you are about to dock with station or go into one of the in-system trade lanes (these zap you across wide distances within a system a little faster but can be disrupted by pirates) or especially trying to go into inter-system jump gates.  Often you find the gates have some ahead of you and you are stuck in a queue whilst five or six pirates pummel your ship with laser weapons and missiles.  Even worse you emerge from a gate to find yourself under such attack before you can even ascertain the direction you need to head in to reach the next base.  The autosave returns you to emerging out of the gate so you just die and die again.  You must keep saving every time you stop at a base otherwise you will find your plans of making a profit are set back a long way the moment you take off.

'Freelancer' is a really engaging game.  Sometimes flying long distances with a cargo can get tedious, but the visuals help ameliorate that.  The key trouble is how difficult it is to simply get from one base to the next without being wiped out.  It is frustrating that you can become immensely wealthy and yet cannot buy a ship, weaponry or defences that make you even marginally safe among the packs of pirates.  You are limited in how many shield batteries (these repower your shield when it is damaged) and nanobots (these repair you hull if damaged) you can carry.  With the shield batteries even when you move on to a better ship you gain little as each repair uses more batteries the higher the level of the ship.  Thus even at level 10 you can still be eliminated in seconds  just as was the case at level 2.  Any revision of the game should reduce the sheer number of pirates hanging around the gates so at least you can advance a little without being blown apart.  There should also be greater freedom to move onto stronger ships and weaponry and especially defences as soon as you can afford these, so at least you can raise yourself to a level that you can trade without being killed again and again and again on a single flight between two locations.  There will always be an imbalance as you always fly alone and even in the set pieces you are incredibly out-numbered and your allies are pathetic; your opponents always come in groups, never less than two and often of five or six, so the odds will always be difficult even if you were not limited in how you can equip yourself.  Once again poor game play balance has spoilt what otherwise could be a stunning game.

The title of this posting was influenced by the song 'Smuggler's Blues' (1984) by Glen Frey, a song that inspired an episode of the 'Miami Vice' series shown in 1985 and featuring the singer.

'Fall Of The Samurai': Not Worth The Effort

As regular readers of this blog will know I have long been a fan of the 'Total War' series of games which I have been playing since 1999: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/me-and-total-war-series-of-computer.html  While I have been fascinated by the games I have often been exasperated by the game mechanics especially the imbalance between what the troops of you as the player can do in contrast to the greater abilities of your opponents run by the computer: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/dead-in-seconds-frustrations-of.html  I have also been frustrated by the difficulties of accessing the games now that you have to go via the online Steam portal: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/trouble-with-steam.html  The fact that since January I had been unable to access the bulk of the games that I used via Steam meant I went back to playing 'Medieval II Total War' for which you only need the disk.  Being attacked up a mountain slope by catapults firing uphill and being rolled into position so that they could hit my troops on the first shot better than modern day artillery could, reminded me of some of the most grave game imbalances that the series has suffered.


This month I was finally able to access 'Total War: Shogun 2' for the first time in three months; logging on actually let me back into the game rather than crashing while one of the wait screens was displayed.  I was heartened as there was also a major patch from Steam as over Christmas I kept on getting to a stage when the game would simply halt and crash, typically when I was winning.  I was also eager to play 'Fall of the Samurai' a standalone addition to the game covering the period 1864-76 when Japan was effectively at civil war between forces loyal to the Shogun and the eventual victors who wanted to restore the Emperor to the role he had held in the early middle ages.  The two sides had fluctuating relationships with the Americans, British and French.  This meant that modern weaponry came into the country used to a greater or lesser extent by different clans so swords and spears were used alongside rifles and artillery.  The period is reasonably well illustrated by the movie 'The Last Samurai' (2003).


In the new game you can play one of six clans, Aizu, Nagaoka or Jozai supporting the Shogun and Choshu, Satsuma or Tosa supporting the Emperor.  If you pre-ordered as I did you get a neutral seventh clan, the Tsu, to play as well.  The styling of the game with all the maps, buildings, characters, etc. is well done, fitting in with mid-nineteeth century styles.  You can develop a range of buildings and can emphasise traditional or modern forces or even mix the two though this can hamper your overall development.  In theory you should be able to get to the stage with you clan having iron clad battleships and gatling guns mounted in castle towers, if you want that is.  Alternatively you can continue with swords, spears and cavalry.  As in the games since 'Empire Total War' you can follow different paths in development as well.  Thus, in theory you can play the game very differently again and again even if you choose to play the same clan.  You can develop relations with the Americans, British or French or ignore them as you wish.


Overall I was looking forward to a great new gaming experience over the Easter period wargaming in a fascinating slice of history.  However, this hope was soon wrecked.  On my fourth failed attempt trying to escape from my start province, playing on 'Easy' level with a clan that was supposedly 'Easy' to play, I realised I was never going to recruit an iron clad battleship or in fact very many soldiers at all.  In addition, even with a sizeable army, well armed, I was not going to be able to beat even the first of the opponents I had to face.  The game is terribly begrudging.  After winning my first victory with 1000 soldiers surviving compared to my opponent's 19 troops left, I was told this was only a 'close victory'.  Besieging a town proved utterly futile as all my soldiers were cut down before they even got close to the walls, despite me having more than double the number of defenders.  I am used to being defeated but being wiped out so thoroughly within the first few game months of play was utterly disheartening.  As in previous 'Total War' games, when it comes to the tally of the casualties you find you have only killed a fraction of those troops you saw shot dead when in the battle.

As in all previous 'Total War' games, bar perhaps 'Empire Total War', troops armed with guns no matter whether they are one of the more skilled or even elite units you can recruit are underpowered and can be cut through by a levy force armed with spears in a matter of seconds.  There is no point in building up better buildings that allow these more skilled firearm troops as all you need is one group of samurai on horseback to appear and they will be slaughtered.  The game seems heavily weighted to those clans which stick to traditional samurai weapons. 

Another problem brought over from previous 'Total War' games is the fact that long before radar was invented you find your opponent's ships turning up in precisely the right place and precisely the right strength to destroy you.   They seem to have longer range on their guns even when you have equivalent or better ships and they can hit you perfectly even through the thickest fog.  I know you can improve the weapons on your ships but right from the start you will find your opponents are able to hit you spot on immediately and you cannot get the range or the target at all.  This is no different to catapults in 'Medieval II Total War' you found yours always fired short or long over the target whereas your opponent's catapults would hit your troops from the first shot even if your troops and the catapult was moving at the same time.

A particular problem which appeared in 'Total War: Shogun 2' is the imbalance in areas of control between you and your opponents.  In theory each army has an area of control around it which if an enemy army enters a battle must ensue.  This is certainly the case if you advance into an opponent's area of control and both on land and at sea it can be difficult to bring two armies or navies to bear on your opponent as the moment one enters the zone the battle starts before you have brought the other force close enough.  The reverse does not apply to your armies or navies.  As I have noted before, Japan has few routes across the country and is known from historical battles and is actually discussed in the game information there are 'choke points' that can be blocked by an army.  However, in this game that does not work.  An enemy simply walks passed you without triggering a battle and usually wanders around your province with impunity smashing up farms, factories, ports, etc.  This zone of control problem makes it very difficult to defend your developed buildings and facilities.  You find yourself chasing around trying to catch the raiders who even if they have an army of many hundreds of men 'disappear', literally no longer appearing on the map, even when in sight of a town.  If you could do the same it would not be such a problem but there is one rule for the human player and one for the computer.

As for all the wonderful buildings I might liked to have built, there was no chance.  My province at full tax was at best turning in 1000 koku per month compared to 4500 koku I needed to build a castle.  At that level of taxation you cannot continue without uprisings.  Given that in battles where I had 700 more troops than my opponent I was still bound to lose, I had also to spend a lot of money trying to build up armies strong enough to defend my single province.  If this was what I was experiencing at such an early stage on Easy/Easy setting with an Easy clan, how did I stand any chance of anything more challenging.  I guess I would be eliminated within the first turn rather than the first ten.

It took me so long to hold on to my own start province that I realised that there was insufficient time left to conquer the 24 other provinces I need to win, let alone to ensure that in total 50 provinces were supporting the faction I was playing as.  Progress can be slow in 'Total War' games and you sometimes realise you have had to fight so hard and long that you are already running out of time, but in this scenario it is far, far worse and if you get to see anywhere beyond the boundaries of your starting province then you are lucky.  If it is this hard on the Easy setting, how short must the games be on Normal setting, you must just start and be eliminated.  It is very disheartening.


I know there has been much discussion around the debate of the balance between realism and game play in terms of the 'Total War' games, but now it seems that that is the wrong focus.  The game play has always been imbalanced.  The computer always recruits the correct troops and moves them perfectly to where they need to be in a way few humans could ever match.  Thus, further imbalance in terms of how feeble your soldiers are, even when they outnumber their opponents two or three times, makes the game unplayable.  Setting the cost of even starter-level buildings so far above the revenue that you can raise from a province similarly means you are stuck with low level soldiers or better buildings and too few soldiers to defend them; either way you lose the game quickly. 


It is such a pity that so much effort has gone into making an interesting game and then rendering it unplayable.  Given the extended difficulties I have had in using Steam and now the massive disappointment of playing 'Fall of the Samurai', I will have to start breaking my habit of buying 'Total War' games and look to something which is challenging but actually feasible to play.

Reviving Old Computer Games

As regular readers of this blog will know, as I have aged, my dominant hobby has become playing computer games.  These are PC games rather than those on gaming consoles though I occasionally access the Playstation 2 of the 10-year old who lives in my house, mainly as that system was blessed with a range of games with an interesting medieval Japanese setting and even a game modelled on my favourite James Bond movie 'From Russia With Love'.  I have not really been a player of online games, though I keep up a subscription to 'World of Warcraft' due to the unpleasant behaviour of so many players on there I only drop in occasionally.  As I have noted recently even buying games delivered on DVD-ROM often compels you to log into an online facility, often the Steam  system in order to play them.  The key challenge is the erratic nature of internet access.  We had to complain to the telecoms ombudsman in order to break our contract with BT because for large portions of every day even at 05.00 let alone during the peak evening times there was no internet connection available.  I now spend most weekday evenings away from home and these are the times when I need entertainment and playing a computer game can provide that.  However, again the internet provision can be erratic especially in hotels even if you can get the login and password to work. 

The problem with some new PC games is how bugged they can be or there is laziness in the design.  A strong example is 'Stronghold 3' which was long anticipated and yet has completely disappointed fans of the series.  It seems to lack what many of the earlier versions had and the woman in my house has ignored it and dug out the older versions.  Things are rushed out without sufficient game testing, which seems ironic as there are queues of people waiting to do that.  I guess it is poor planning and low budgets.  Ultimately, however, the damage to reputation of a game which is so flawed can wreck a company as Troika Games found out.  The major flaws in 'Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines' (2004) meant it was the last game the company produced.  The story was excellent and one of the only genuinely frightening computer games I have played, but if it breaks down every five minutes you soon abandon it.  Even when the system works gameplay can be weak and not engaging.  PC gamers are very discerning in this regard and will walk away from a game that fails to be stimulating.

Given these challenges, I come back to old games which you can simply run off a disk.  Recently I have been playing 'Deus Ex: Invisible War' (2003).  I tried to load up 'Alias' (2004) but was told it was not compatible with the version of Windows that I run on my laptop.  Despite some challenges like this, I do not seem alone in playing old PC games.  I was pleased when Steam re-released 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' with all the bugs corrected so that you no longer have to download 23 patches in order to play it.  Regular commentator on this blog, Yammerhant, mentioned not only playing 'Portal 2' (2011) but also 'Half Life 2' (2004) both made available via Steam.  These trends have gone further.  I was checking on eBay and Amazon recently for new PC games to try out.  The woman in my house is a big fan of city-building games but these come along rarely and the very low quality of 'Stronghold 3' has made this part of the gaming market pretty sparse.  What I noticed was how many old PC games have been re-released.

Examples of PC games updated for systems such as XP and Windows 7 include the 'Broken Sword Complete' a re-release of the tetralogy of Broken Sword games released between 1996 (!) and 2006.  These are 'point and click' mystery adventures with what look like simple graphics but with engaging stories of uncovering conspiracies and precious items around the world very much the forerunner of 'The Da Vinci Code' (novel 2003; movie 2006) style.  I have the original disks of these four games and only got into the first one, perhaps it is time to return to them. 'The Runaway Trilogy' is a similar style of game with more comic-style graphics and interesting produced from a Spanish company.  These games were produced between 2001 and 2009.  'Commandos Complete' brings together the five Commandos games.  These were a squad real time war mission games released between 1998 and 2006.  I bought the first three but even in 2008 my PC was too new to run them, so I may be tempted to buy these updated versions.  The list of updated and repackaged classics of PC gaming goes on.  I highly recommend 'Deus Ex Complete Edition' bringing together 'Deus Ex' (2001) one of the most interesting and provoking PC games ever and its sequel 'Deus Ex: Invisible War' at a time when the prequel, 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution' (2011) is also out.  Others include 'Thief: The Complete Collection' (three games) and 'Hitman: Ultimate Contract' (four games), you can buy these latter three as a bundle from Amazon.  Maybe the trend dates back to when 'Another World' was re-released in a 15th anniversary edition in 2007.

Whilst this trend is great for those of us who missed out on some of the best games of the past decade, I do wonder what it signals in terms of PC gaming.  Back in 2008 it was noticeable that this area began to occupy less space in branches of 'Game' and the focus of PC games is generally now on fantasy role-play games and Total-War imitators.  I do worry that falling back on past glories suggests that ideas have run out.  I see a new 'Tomb Raider' title is set for release this year, though I can find no details of what this will feature.  This may suggest that yet another rehash of something from the past.  One thing is clear from the trend that the focus of PC gamers is not necessarily on having the latest graphics and in fact they will buy games produced 12+ years ago.  What connects these re-releases is the quality of the plotting, the sustained engagement that I believe appeals far more to PC gamers than it does to console gamers.  I wonder where all the talent of the 'golden age' probably 1996-2007 has gone?  Maybe this cohort of game designers is pouring all its efforts into designing free online games or has got a job developing new monsters for some cave system on 'World of Warcraft'.  I do not know enough about the industry to know the answer.  However, as a gamer looking for new, exciting material I wonder if I have reached the end of the road and I have to go back to material from the past. 

If there are going to be more re-releases, I would love to see 'Dungeon Keeper 2' (1999) re-released simply because it was so refreshing and subversive, as long as they crack the annoying bug: I had completed 19 levels out of 20 but then found it simply looped back and gave me level 19 to do once again.  Another, perhaps by Steam, but, if possible, on DVD-ROM should be 'Vampire - The Masquerade: Redemption' (2000) which I have written enthusiastically before.  Even 'Hidden and Dangerous' (1999) which I felt was better than the similarly-themed 'Commandos' despite being riddled by infuriating bugs which I hope they would correct.  Better still I would like to see energetic releases of engaging, well-functioning games which are well plotted and with interesting characters.  If anyone is short of ideas I can provide a whole list of suggestions as I am sure thousands of other keen PC gamers can do.

The Trouble With Steam

This is not a posting about water above 100oC, it is about the online gaming service called Steam.  Now, living away from home five days per week and lacking the money and the energy to go out at all, my laptop is my prime source of entertainment.  As regular readers know I have long been a fan of the 'Total War' historical computer wargames.  Unfortunately since 'Empire Total War' in 2008, even though you buy a disk to load the game into your computer, you have to subscribe to Steam to play it.  There is no charge to subscribe, but it does inhibit game playing quite a bit and leaves me feeling resentful that many evenings I am unable to play a game that I have paid for.  You can buy games that you download from Steam too and they sell numerous classics at a discount rate, I reconnected with 'Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines' this way and was able to play it without having to download the 23 patches needed to make the disk version work.

I can see why the Steam system was developed.  It allows the company to advertise upgrades and extra content and they encourage you to buy other similar games.  There is also an online community to connect with.  There have long been options to fight battles in the Total War series online.  However, given how unpleasant the bulk of people I have encountered through online gaming are, notably so many players of 'World of Warcraft' I have no desire to play with them.  This blocks many of the unlockable achievements on the Steam system from me.  I hate being compelled to become part of a community.  I used to be a regular contributor to the online fora for Total War run by Sega itself and between being told I was utterly useless because I could not simply storm through each of the games on Very Hard setting by people unable to spell properly and having my comments censored by the company, I got very little joy from there either.

The key problem with Steam, though, is that despite having paid my £35 for the game, unlike in the old days with games like 'Medieval II Total War' or 'Rome Total War' simply having the disk is not enough to play the game.  I have owned a copy of 'Napoleon Total War' since it came out and enjoyed it.  There was a bug which meant that the game crashed about four years into the game time.  However, there was a patch that resolved that.  When I got a new laptop I reinstalled the game, but, of course, with the cyber attacks on Sega they had taken down the patch.  Thus, when I try to play it through the Steam account I am compelled to have, it simply crashes as before.  Steam are no use simply sending me back to Sega and anyone offering the patch now is in fact nothing more than a scam trying to infect your machine.  Thus, through no fault of my own except upgrading my computer, I can no longer play the game.

A new problem has arisen over the Christmas period with simply accessing games.  I have been enjoying the Rise of the Samurai scenario of 'Total War: Shogun 2'.  However, just when I have my strategy planned of how to defeat the tough clan in what is a pretty challenging version of the game, I find that I cannot get into the game.  I get time markers and then am told that the game is unavailable or has crashed.  Repeated tries bring no joy.  Again, I cannot play a game I have paid for.  The £35 only bought me the occasional chance to play the game, not regular access to it.  In addition, every couple of months there is some upgrade, some of them entirely spurious such as the one which made the opening screen which shows a 15th century Japanese castle, suddenly decorated with snowmen out the front of it, one holding a candy cane, something only invented four hundred years or so later, on a different continent.  In addition, the downloads seem to make my computer forget that I have bought the game and it tells me it is unavailable.  Initially the Steam staff again referred me to Sega, but then another told me I had to delete almost all the files and reinstall the game from Steam.  This I do diligently every time.  Again it is clear that paying my £35 has not brought the game to my computer, it has simply allowed me occasional random access.

I understand why, for commercial reasons, a hybrid online-disk system like Steam was created.  However, in terms of customer service it marks a real retrograde step.  If I buy a game I cannot be sure that I will be able to play it more than one or two evenings per week.  In the old days, as long as the disk was not scratched, once I had bought it, I could keep on playing it repeatedly for years to come.  The disk of 'Shogun Total War' that I bought in 1999 still works and I go back to it when I find for whatever reason I am unable to access its sequel. 

This model of only be able occasionally to use something you have paid good money for seems to be the acceptable model.  When I had BT internet they kept charging us month after month even though the internet connection broke down on a daily basis.  Despite a very patchy service they wanted to charge us £120 to break the contract and a further £90 to remove their equipment.  Since when did basic economics state that you have to pay for a service you might actually receive and pay even more to try to get out of that purchase of in fact sometimes nothing?  Will it spread and I will go to the dry cleaners and sometimes find my suit has not been cleaned and then be charged more if I want to have it cleaned at another dry cleaners?  Will I try and buy a burger and be told that they are unavailable at the moment and I have to come back an hour later for my fast food?

P.P. 04/02/2012
Steam has now deteriorated to the extent that I am unable to ever open 'Total War: Shogun 2' any more.  Even before that I was encountering other problems with the games I have via the service.  In the past month playing as different clans on 'Total War: Shogun 2' I have reached a certain date usually a round number like 1200 (if playing the 'Rise of the Samurai' add-on) or 1600 only for the game to crash.  I have gone back to an earlier saved game and tried picking different options to see if that will spare me from the crash only to find it still happens at the set date.

I have also gone back to playing 'Napoleon Total War' and the Peninsular War add-on which looked very interesting.  While I can still get into that game, it crashes the moment I attack someone or someone attacks me.  I have tried finding a patch for this problem on the internet but Sega seems to have stopped all the genuine ones.  The only ones advertised are in fact scams.  So another game which I paid for and used to be able to play is effectively shut off from me and Steam seems to be doing nothing about it.  The only response that I get is that I need to check my computer is suitable for the games.  Clearly it once was, well, up until January, and now for some reason it no longer is, or as I suspect something is going wrong with Steam.

Playing 'Shogun 2'

Back in August last year I outlined my ongoing relationship with the 'Total War' series of computer games which have been released over the past twelve years.  Then I was looking forward to playing 'Total War: Shogun 2' the update of the original Total War game released back in 1999.  As I outlined last year, for many reasons I, and I am sure many other players, still view the original 'Shogun Total War' with affection even though elements of it now appear dated.  The limited parameters of the game confined to the islands of Japan combined with a really evocative style combining graphics and music make a pleasure to play.  Consequently I was both interested and a little concerned to see what the update was like when it was released in March this year.  I had to wait until I got a job and was able to afford to buy a computer with sufficient specification to run it, because, as with all the Total War games they tend to be produced at the top end of the specifications current at the time.

Was 'Shogun 2' worth the wait?  Given that it pushed aside all the other games I have been playing for about a fortnight suggests that it is certainly incredibly engaging.  As before the interface is easy to use which has always been a winning point over rivals to the Total War series.  The game balances complexity with playability.  In addition, unlike some of the titles, notably 'Rome Total War' there has been an adherence to what happened historically.  Far more clans are involved not just the 'big 7': Hojo, Imagawa, Mori, Oda, Shimazu, Takeda and Uesugi that appeared in original game but a whole range of smaller historic clans.  You can play one of nine clans with the Chosokabe, Date and Tokugawa clans added and the Imagawa clan removed.  If you buy the limited edition version you also get the Hattori clan of ninjas and you can buy the Ikko-ikki Buddhist heretic faction as a downloadable update.  However, once you start playing, history can go down interesting paths and you find that in place of the clans we are pretty familiar with less common names, such as the Amato or the Besso or the Yamana, start coming to the fore, building up sizeable realms which makes the game very interesting. 

If you take a clan's last province you can make them a vassal which means they pay you a fee each year, give you one unit and fight for you.  The vassals can often start building a large realm of their own that may lead them to break free of you at some time in the future.  They can be useful, however, for supplementing your armies and pushing back your opponents on different fronts.  It is best not to make one of the nine/ten playable clans one of your vassals as they tend to be very ambitious and will run off creating their own kingdom without you and become hard to manage very quickly.

Each of the starting clans, as in the original, has a particular strength in the type of troops that they can recruit.  However, this is less important as you can choose how your clan develops by specialising in different military and civic skills as the game progresse.  Combined with this you can shape the skills that your daimyo, his brothers and sons, plus your other generals adopt, both to their individual benefit and to the benefit of the clan.  Honour is important for relations with other clans and relations with them are now far more important as they affect trade which can become a vital source of income.  Your daimyo can also make any sons who are not your nominated heir, any brothers he has and any generals, hold various commissioner positions controlling things like supply or military matters to boost actions they carry out and the welfare of the clan as a whole.

 
Further specialisation comes from the buildings you construct and what you can build, in contrast to the original game, is often shaped by the civil or military skills you choose to develop.  In addition, sometime certain materials like stone or incense are required in order to construct certain buildings. In addition some buildings use up food in a way that was never the case with the original game, so you have to balance building up larger castles or markets with ensuring you have sufficiently developed agriculture to feed them.  Even cultural developments such as holding sumo wrestling events which pleases the public, consumes food.  With such variables, you can can easily play the same clan twice and have them developing in different ways.  There are all the familiar troop types with spear, naginata (polearm), katana and no-dachi (sword), bow and matchlock firearm forces with their horseback equivalents, there are the ashigaru (commoner) versions and the tougher samurai versions, plus ninjas, geishas, metsuke (spies) and Buddhist and Christian priests.

In terms of graphics, things have come a long way since 1999 and the seasons are shown very well, with not only rain, sun and snow, but now clouds drifting across the sky.  The attention to detail is immense and it is fun to zoom in pick out individual soldiers as they march through grass wafting in the wind.  The big innovation that came with 'Empire Total War' (2009) is the ability to have proper naval warfare.  It is interesting to see the difference between European and Japanese vessels of the period, the mid to late 16th century.  If you make friends with European traders you can buy European cannon equipped ships but generally you have boxy ships firing arrows and closing so samurai can board.  The portrayal of the battles especially if you are among small islands is very picturesque and dealing with ships and the wind conditions is a very different challenge to fighting on land.

Castles appear on the battlefield in greater complexity as you build them up on the strategic map, reflecting the multi-tiered nature of Japanese castles.  However, there is one disappointment as when there is a  fighting in the open field the terrain is very much geared to where your army has advanced into a region, however all the castles seem to come from a limited number of settings, one on a hill, one on a river island and one by the coast.  They get larger as the castle is developed, but the location is pretty much the same.  This contrasts with what appears to happen in 'Medieval Total War' (2002) and 'Medieval II Total War' (2006) with their European and North African settings.

One frustrating thing on when in battle mode is trying to move large groups of units around.  The facility to widen or narrow the breadth of the units is a lot easier than it has been on some of the Total War games, as is changing the way the unit is pointing.  However, for some reason if you try to move a neat group of different units forward rather than going in a straight line they spread out in a fan shape, utterly breaking up the strong form you have.  If you are not careful not only do you quickly find that your unit is standing side on to your opponents, but that they have wandered off far from where the bulk of your units are, in both cases they simply get cut down.  You have to really send each unit singly, which is not ideal when trying to maintain the coherence of your army.

As has occurred with others in the Total War series, the AI (artificial intelligence) playing your opponent is very precise, never making a mistake which can be difficult to oppose, though the geography of Japan with restricted routes down which armies can go, to a great degree avoids the chance of you going just slightly the wrong way so that your reinforcements do not enter a battle whereas the computer's always do.  Perhaps I should do more online play, but given how unpleasant the online players are I have encountered playing 'World of Warcraft', I am loath to mix with online wargamers.  Anyway, conversely to the AI controlling your opponents, you find that your own soldiers often behave very stupidly.  They seem to have reined in the generals' units from charging up to the enemy, out of your control, simply to be cut down as happened too often in previous games.  However, you do find units standing by, idly watching while their comrades bare metres away are cut down.  You can set units to 'guard' mode, which means they do not move off their designated location to attack, but I have this disabled and yet, often in a castle, especially the large ones like Kyoto, where you have to be jumping from one side to another to cover the multiple attacks, you find one or two units of spearmen or swordsmen have simply stood by while their enemies have scaled the walls and cut all the archers to pieces even though they are only a spear's reach away from where they are standing.  You cannot be everywhere on a battlefield at once and the units lacking any common sense make it hard to keep them alive and your carefully constructed defensive position can simply count for nothing as units let themselves be cut up one-by-one.

Ironically it is far easier to defend a small fort than a major castle and despite the gains in tax raising you can disadvantage yourself by building large castle structures especially in a frontline area.  The length of walls and the distance between points of attack means that you can neither spread your troops effectively nor concentrate them for attack as they get exhausted running around the castle.  This is in contrast to real castle fighting in medieval Japan which less than western castles, depended far more on the soldiers defending it than on the built defences.  The self-sustaining towers are far too few once you build a large castle.  I would rather be defending a three-tier castle in 'Medieval II Total War' and stick to small forts for this game.


Missile troops are far more effective than in 'Shogun Total War'.  In the original game, there was really no point in recruiting matchlock firearm troops as typically a barrage of shots from them would only kill one or two of the attacking unit, if you were lucky.  Now a barrage of shots and, even more, fire from archers really makes an impact on attackers, as it should do, especially aganist densely packed ranks of soldiers marching forwards as is often the case.  The strength of general's units is also much more realistic.  In the past, in most of the Total War games, a single general had no trouble fighting off 200 spearmen jabbing at him and his horse.  Now in such a circumstance he is killed as he would be in reality.  If you select particular development for your generals his strength and that of his bodyguard unit do increase but never to the extent that they become virtually indestructable and can hold up an entire battalion on their own.

 
In terms of the ambiance most of the tunes have been copied over from the original game.  I do miss the zither-like sound effect when you advance a season and the call of the birds when you look at the map of Japan.  However, the Japanese pictures, the various death poems and the animated movies about different units or particular developments or attacks in the game are well done, without being excessive.  I used to like rival daimyo or Spanish or Dutch emissaries bowling into your audience chamber but I know people found these and all the movies around attempted assassinations too much.  I feel the right balance has now been struck.  I am pleased that they have reinstated the movie at the end when you win the game to see a statue of your winning daimyo in a modern day Tokyo square.


There is no distinction between various European emissaries.  In the past you only accepted Christianity if you went with the Portuguese and could simply buy guns of the Dutch.  Now you can adopt Catholicism as a faction or not even if trading with the Europeans.  Religious difference between your clan and the provinces you hold is far more important than in the original game.  The largest benefit contact with the Europeans can bring is cannon-armed ships which have a far superior range than Japanese ships and make a large difference in naval battles.  If you are lucky you can capture the Black Ship and even more heavily armed European vessel, but I have not managed to to this.

In the past in the Total War games there has often not been any point in trying to engage in diplomacy with other factions.  What they want of you, even when you are more powerful of them is usually excessive.  This is most prominent in 'Empire Total War' when even small factions demand all your American colonies or ten different technologies and a large sum of money in exchange for a single simple technology, let alone an alliance.  Throughout the Total War games, if an ally (faction B) of one of your allies (faction A), attacks you, then invariably faction A breaks with you and often a string of others and you can turn in an instant to facing a whole continent of enemies, no matter what you do.  In 'Total War Shogun 2', it is easier to develop trade treaties with even factions which are indifferent to you.  This is in contrast to the previous games and is necessary because, as it is, as in many of the games, you battle to get enough money ever to build any of the interesting buildings or units, even with rebellion-risking tax levels and sustained looting.  However, even your vassals have a negative view towards you, no matter what you do in terms of paying them, supporting them in wars, making sure you have the same religion as them and having a high level of honour for your daimyo.  It is inevitable on this basis that they turn against you.  The long memories of factions makes it difficult for some factions in particular.  The Tokugawa clan begins as a vassal of the Imawaga clan and unless you are lucky you cannot expand and have to wait for them to tire of you.  If you attack first all your subsequent relationships with all clans, even your vassals, will be damaged by you breaking your vassalage.

In 'Total War Shogun 2', you being alone against everyone else is even easier than in the previous games because as you advance you finally attract attention of the Shogun who will then unleash every faction on you. All your allies desert you and soon after all your vassals too.  However, it does not work in reverse.  Once you capture Kyoto and are named Shogun, you find no factions coming over to your camp, in contrast to what happened in history.  This even applies to factions which are down to one province, who you might think might choose to swear fealty to the new Shogun rather than battle on against him.  However, this is not the case.  The loyalty to the Ashikaga Shogunate lingers on even after that faction has been eliminated.  I can imagine some clans would remain hostile, especially the more powerful ones, but in fact the universal coalition against you persists with even new clans appearing, deciding to attack you straight off rather than seek to make a compromise.  In previous games you often had a sudden collapse when everyone turned against you.  It is a pity that with a slightly more sophisticated diplomacy system you cannot have something more subtle.  Even ten years after becoming Shogun you will find the whole country against you and your vassals regularly defecting no matter what you do.  The Tokugawa regime would never have survived if they had faced such conditions.

Overall the game is engaging and the variety of ways you can develop a clan and individual generals means that you can have a very varied game even if you were to play the same faction again and again.  There remain niggles, things around how the AI operates your troops and the other factions, which have not been resolved for them to function in a logical or even worthwhile way.  It was like the merchants in the 'Medieval II Total War' there was no point recruiting them as they are eliminated far too quickly by your opponents; fortunately they do not appear in this game and are replaced with province wide trade.  Similarly, there is no point in 'Total War Shogun 2' trying to form alliances as they quickly crumble.  The game is visually stunning, with most of the atmosphere that made the original such a delight to play.  I certainly anticipate coming back to this game over the next decade. 

Now I wonder what the next Total War game is, and I guess that signals that this one has succeeded in me still wanting more.  There is a lot of online speculation at one set in the late 19th century and as yet as happened with the Napoleonic Wars, as yet no-one has really created the defining strategic wargame of the late colonial era and the Scramble for Africa might be one option, perhaps with the battles for independence in South America as a supplement.  Then we reach the First World War, which is always difficult to replicate as no-one wants a game in which there is minimal action for four years, so it might have to focus on the more fluid Eastern Front.  The Second World War is more feasible, but we come to some very sticky political issues.   Consequently I think scenarios set in India before the arrival of Europeans or China in one of any number of eras from the 3rd century CE right up to the 1918-50 CE would be interesting.  For now, though, I am in 16th century Japan once more.

P.P. 09/01/2012
I have continued playing 'Shogun 2' and have found a few more irritating things.  First that when you are on the top of a hill your archers do minimal damage to your opponents clambering up the hill, often inflicting no casualties despite pouring hundreds of arrows into the air.  In contrast, the opposing archers down the hill slaughter tens of your men even while marching up the hill seems the kind of flaw that you would have found in 'Medieval Total War' and has not been resolved.
Another problem is the zone of control of armies on the strategic map of Japan.  Japan, especially in the medieval period, had strictly limited routes that it was possible to march down so the opportunity to block opposing armies is a valuable one, especially as this game unlike 'Rome Total War' or 'Medieval II Total War' does not allow the construction of forts on the roads.  You find that it pretty difficult to skirt opposing armies without being drawn into a battle with them.  However, the same does not apply to your own armies.  I have had a large army and its reserve standing in a narrow valley in theory blocking the route only to have my opponents walk right past without triggering a battle and then them wandering from farmland to workshop destroying them with impunity as my armies simply stand there as if frozen.  This imbalance between the zones of control of the human and computer characters spoils a lot of plans you may lay and makes it very difficult to defend your economic structures.

Another problem is how easily huge armies disappear.  Even with metsuke or ninja agents out and about in your provinces you find that an army marches into a province and simply disappears from view.  This is particularly an issue in large or oddly-shaped provinces as you can have your army wandering around trying to track down your opponents who then simply pop out of the woods near your castle.  I do not think this reflects reality very well as whilst small units perhaps could proceed unnoticed, unless your villagers were really hostile to you I am sure someone would alert you to the fact that a large hostile army was camped in your province.

The imbalance between you and the computer-run opponents brings me back to a problem that has plagued the total war games right back to 'Rome Total War' this is the ability of enemy fleets to be able to track down your ships right across hundreds of kilometres to arrive at precisely the right time and place with just the right amount of force to attack you.  Even in the Second World War with far more advanced technology, radio communication, aircraft, etc., it proved challenging to track down fleets and certainly was impossible in 16th century Japan.  I accept that given the more limited space around Japan's coast that it is more feasible than in 'Medieval II Total War' and certainly 'Empire Total War', but the fact that your opponents will get you precisely every single time seems unrealistic especially as when you are pursuing their fleets you find suddenly that they disappear from sight.  I find this particularly the case when chasing pirates.  It does not matter how advanced you are in naval skills or how experienced your admirals are.  The pirates are incredibly strong and will easily overcome one of your ships even if it has more troops on board, e.g. a medium bute for a clan has 55 soldiers whereas a pirate ship of the same size has 35, and they are experienced troops.

I have found a bug in the construction of certain castles.  These get more complex in a way which is difficult to handle, especially as your troops have a tendency to walk outside the castle into the spears of your waiting opponents, simply when you want to move them from one part of your castle to the other.  On one castle I found that two gaps appeared, one at either end of the castle.  I assume these are supposed to be gateways, but the structures are missing.  Your troops can easily slide down and clamber up the brown cliff that forms in the gap.  Whilst this is a bug, it makes the castle with this bug easier to defend than other large castles which have been formed properly as your opponents will naturally attack the two gaps and so ride or run right into your waiting spearmen with archers positioned behind them firing over the invaders heads to their comrades waiting below.

I have enjoyed the 'Rise of the Samurai' downloadable upgrade.  Rather than covering the mid- to late 16th century and early 17th century, this scenario covers the period of the Gempei War of the 12th and early 13th centuries.  You play one of two branches of three leading families.  As the name suggests this was an era in which the standard samurai units were being formed so you find quite different units which are interesting to play with, certainly more flexible.  The Foot Samurai decent melee and bow-armed soldiers are very useful.  There is almost a different 'evolutionary path' for units, following the older style and you can concentrate on this line instead if you prefer which enables you to gain Attendant troops and particularly Warrior Monks, always a favourite of mine.  The naval units and the various agents are all different to the standard 'Shogun 2' game.  I found myself enjoying this era more but could not escape a bug which meant the game crashed when I reached the year 1200.  Again, with Sega running shy after cyber attacks on them I do not know how long it will be until there is an appropriate patch to fix this.

The latest product in the 'Shogun 2' stable is a stand-alone scenario is 'Fall of the Samurai' for which you do not need the original game in order to play.  I like the fact that they have taken a bold step and feature the Boshin War which started in 1864 and ultimately led to the overthrow of the Shogunate and the return of the Emperor's power with the Meiji Restoration of 1868; the period featured in the movie 'The Last Samurai' (2003).  You can play one of three clans that supported the Shogun or one of three that supported the Emperor.  Britain, France and the USA also get involved and there is the chance to use the technology of the times in terms of artillery, guns and iron-clad ships alongside the traditional samurai weaponry.  There are railways and battleships can both shell shore-based units and be shelled by them.  Whilst I would liked to have seen the Mongol invasion scenario brought up-to-date for use on 'Shogun 2', this is an interesting step to take and I look forward to playing it.  It may suggest, with late 19th century technology appearing that there may one day be a 'Great War: Total War', certainly on more fluid fronts such as the Eastern Front or in the Ottoman Empire as a game of the stagnation of the Western Front or Italian Front would hardly appeal.  Given Sega have been bold with this latest step, maybe something set in India will be seen as worth the risk, that theatre is an interesting one to play on 'Empire Total War' after all.

P.P. 30/01/2012
Another flaw that I have recognised in previous Total War games but seems even more apparent in 'Shogun 2' is the different impact of running short of funds between you and the computer opponents.  In all of the games if you build large armies without sufficient tax revenue coming in or suddenly find that a trade route is cut or your trade ships sunk, you quickly find you run out of funds, it is possible to go bankrupt in a single term.  Generally you have raise taxes (often not possible given that the citizens in the Total War series, like most computer games, seem hostile to even moderate tax and quickly rebel) or cut back on the size of your armies or fleets or cancel some building projects.  You would anticipate that as you reduced the territory that your opponents controlled that they would face similar difficulties, but that is not the case.  You find that they are able to maintain much larger armies or fleets than you are even though you have many times their number of provinces.  A recent example had my faction with 16 provinces struggling to keep open any trade routes because five large and well equipped fleets kept simply sinking my ships as fast as I produced them.  I could imagine that if I was facing a far larger faction (especially as their ships have that 'radar' tracking) but I was fighting a faction with only two landlocked provinces remaining.  I could imagine that they could keep the armies and fleets sustained for a short time, but after five or six turns they were still there.  The financial implications do not seem to apply to the computer-run factions which is another factor in making the game so imbalanced.

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.