Luke Alexander's blog

There’s something very exciting about playing a computer game where the first thing you see is the proud BBC branding.  Today, I did that for the first time with the launch of the first BBC Doctor Who video game for a very long time.

I’m a big believer in the broadcaster, its public service values, and whatnot.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as proud as I did when I reported to TV Centre for my measly six week work experience placement during a university holiday.

But even leaving particular warm fuzzy feeling to one side, the fact that the publicly-funded BBC is taking a solid step into the world of interactive entertainment makes so much sense to me.  In the same way that the organisation can fund and support innovative, lesser-known or niche artists – whether in comedy or music – I would love to see in future a world where the BBC is responsible for finding the UK’s answer to Braid or Portal.

And of course, the idea of a Doctor Who computer game – where I can literally play the Doctor – is something that, at the age of 10, I would never have hoped possible.

So what of the game itself? Or, at least, the twenty minutes I’ve played so far.

Well, the game continues the current series’ feel of slickness and high production values.  Despite a strange crash-to-desktop bug solved by turning my multi-monitor setup off, the game starts well.  As it loads, the heart-lifting Doctor Who theme swells up at the appropriate moment, alongside with a charming animation of the eleventh Doctor and Amy almost falling out of the Tardis with excitement as we reach the main  menu screen – mirroring the childlike excitement I felt as I clicked the button to take me to the first episode – the City of the Daleks.

The Tardis materialises in Trafalgar Square in 1963 – but not as we know it.  We are instantly plunged into the plot as a Dalek appears, chasing what it claims is the last human being on the planet.

The next twenty minutes of gameplay gives us a clue of what to expect in the rest of the game.  And it’s nothing shockingly different from what we’d expect.  It’s a mix of standard action puzzle game, with some mini, Operation-style puzzles thrown in like Bioshock’s hack mechanism for good measure.

This all flows well and feels right, apart from the stealth mechanic, which was already annoying me only 10 minutes in.  If you near a Dalek, you will automatically enter stealth mode.  The area in which a Dalek can see you will light up green, and you have to avoid it.  Occasionally, the Daleks move and you have to hide behind something.

It’s not massively difficult, but it can be a little frustrating, particularly as the game stops you going in certain directions by placing Daleks here and there who can’t be navigated around – meaning that if you misunderstand where the game designer wants you to go, you’ll probably be dead as you realise it.

The dull, slow stealth sections are annoyingly frequent and have the surely unintended side effect of making the Daleks look extremely stupid.  Granted, they’re not the most cunning of foes in the TV show, but believing that we can walk inches away from one (provided we aren’t in the arbitrary green zone) just feels weird.

Speaking of things feeling weird – my second bugbear.  The character animations, particularly the faces, are just plain odd.  I may be spoilt by playing high budget PS3 games and watching new-fangled 3D movies, but the animations in this game feel like such a massive step back.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it were 2001.  But it’s 2010, and I did.

Which is a shame, because it jerks you out of the experience somewhat.  We’re used to watching the every expression of the two talented actors who play the characters on TV, and perhaps then unconsciously expect the same of the game characters.  Similarly, the voice acting is off – partially due to facial expressions and perhaps because the actors are quite simply not used to recording a computer game soundtrack.

So those are my initial thoughts on the game.  I’ve lots still to discover, and I’m happy that much of what I love in the show – some decent dialogue, some fascinating situations, a good dollop of OTT sci-fi jargon – has made it into this game.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I try to avoid commenting publically on work I am doing – this, after all, is a personal forum. And, of course, because a blog such as this should be uncluttered by professional bias, objective in its considerations and subjective in its opinions.

None of which matters for this particular topic, as the game is so good I really don’t have anything but praise to give it.  Of course I’m sure I could find something to nit-pick, but as an entertainment experience, it pretty much ticks all of my boxes.

Last week I went along for part of the Uncharted 2 European Media Tour, with Arne and Justin from Naughty Dog, the developers of the game.

I thought I’d share some things I learned or gleaned during the tour.

1. Playing (or even watching) Uncharted 2 on a full-size cinema screen is AWESOME.  The Naughty Dog guys played through ten minutes of the game and the audience (including myself) was completely awestruck.
2. My girlfriend isn’t the only one to have loved sitting through the entire first game.  It’s such a popular game for onlookers that they’ve even come up with a new ‘very easy’ mode to try to encourage those people to pick up the controller for this outing.
3. The motion capture and voice acting really are taken into consideration all the way through the game – even to the extent that they capture all voice while the actor performs the action the character will perform in the game.  Having played it with this in mind, it’s really obvious, and makes me think of all the times I’ve watched a character half-heartedly soliloquise while sprinting away from an explosion, and what a difference it makes.

I hope we don’t lose the icons of the early days of video gaming.

Once I assumed that these were safely sheltered in the balmy lands of retro, there to live out a gentle and dignified existence on the front of t-shirts.  But the generations of men are like the gently-falling waves of alien invaders, and before too long I think those who think kindly upon Pong, upon Mario, upon the ascii world of Rogue, will have dwindled.

Or perhaps they belong in the past, slightly legendary.  They are good candidates for a new mythology – a digital mythology to populate the distant mist of a digital age.

The punishments set in motion by the Olympian gods of Greece and Rome are nothing, for example, next to the many tasks of Pacman.  Haunted by the ghostly sherbet Eumenides, and consumed by a limitless and ravaging hunger, he can fail to invoke pity in no onlooker.  Like Tantalus, surrounded by sweet water and overhung with succulent fruits which he can never consume, cherries flicker before our semi-circular hero but he is never sated; like Sisyphus his tasks are never complete, but reset as he nears the summit.

I like the bleakness of these myths – they seem to tally with what a myth should be.  And such powerful imagery!  The lone man defending blank nothingness against alien invaders; the futile destruction of ever increasing meteors.