Star Trek taught us that Engineers can save everything, always, even if the vital Keepusalivemotron has been smashed with a sledgehammer(motron). While this has the handy effect of resolving 45 minutes of tense drama by just shouting at someone with a space-PhD until they break the laws of physics, it isn’t very useful in gaming. I mean, Starfleet give warnings before shooting people. They clearly know nothing about modern gaming.

Which is why we’re looking at Engies who really know how to solve problems.

1. Brink

Brink servers don’t so much have “Engineers” as “Interns who spent a few weekends putting up flowerboxes with a wrench.” In most games the point of the Engineer is to build a gun to shoot for them instead of getting their own firearms dirty, but a Brink server’s sentry gun is less a fearsome turret of automated death as a noisy motion detector. Because when it explodes, you know the enemy arrived at that point about a second before that.

A Brink turret in its rare “firing, not destroyed” state

The landmines are equally ineffective, merely damaging your enemy. And since the release of Halo just “damaging” an enemy is a slap on the wrist, making them hide behind cover to think about what they’ve done (and regenerate their health.) The upside is that even the programmers realise that the engineer’s tools are rubbish, and we removed the capital E there quite purposefully, so his main weapons are just as powerful as everyone else’s. Meaning you can team up with your own sentry gun to take out enemies in gaming’s first cyborg buddy-comedy.

With a kickass sidekick if you count your own gun as another character, and in Brink we do.

So it’s not that you don’t get good engineering weapons. It’s that you get great guns, and then another gun which can fire itself, and then fire both at your enemies.

2. Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 has four classes, and one of the is Engineer because when you’re making a class-combat game you either include Engineer or didn’t understand the word “class.”

On Battlefield 3 servers Engineers aren’t mere functionaries, they’re the Gods of Machinery - bringing health or death down on the steel beasts rampaging around the conflict. BF3 shows off Engineers for the heroes they truly are, players who understand that it’s a team game and are prepared to sacrifice individual score for real victory. Dashing between wounded tanks with a welding torch enables others to fire main tank cannons at people, and the way they can rain ruination down on enemy vehicles with rocket launchers and mines is only a side effect. This is a guy who sees incoming enemy armor and thinks “I’ll do something about that.”

Even with modern scoring systems Engineers earn less points than expert sniping Recon players. Also unlike Recons, they actually help win the game.

3. Team Fortress 2

The king.

The Engineer is the king of defense on Team Fortress 2 servers. Also offense - if the attacking team moves past the halfway point, aka “is halfway competent.” The sentry guns shred opposition, dispensers bolster whichever way your preferred primary color of the moment is moving, but teleporters are absolute gamechangers.

It’s very simple: if you’re defending and don’t have an Engineer, you’re going to lose. If you’re attacking past the first point and don’t have Engineer, you’re all idiots, because anyone - anyone - would be better served switching and building that Level 3 teleporter.

So grab your wrench, start planning instead of sniping, and make a real difference to your team’s chances of winning. And your enemies’ chances of moving without being minigunned to death.

Capcom have returned to their old ways with Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, which might as well be Dead Rising 2: Turbo. The same game with a few extra art resources, a bit of extra writing, and we can control a ‘new’ character we’ve already seen.

And we’re still going to buy it on Day One and play constantly until we’ve beaten it at least twice because Dead Rising kicks ass.

It also chops them in twain four at at ime.

Capcom are infamous for iterating things to make extra cash, like a videogame mint, but differ from EA’s sports photocopier in how they do make improvements beyond “updating the player names” with each title. But these are always baby steps instead of the bold strides we’d expect from a true sequel. Which is why we want Dead Rising 3, and why we’re going to tell you what we want from it. Because at least 5% of our brain has been constantly adventuring with Frank West and Chuck Greene since 2006, and they’re still the only reason we can tolerate being in a mall for longer than thirty minutes.

By mentally doing this once a minute

A City

Dead Rising is more focused on location than an ICBM, and kicks far more ass when it gets there. The choice of mall made Dead Rising as a series: you got to run around the shopping center with more ridiculous weaponry than a MacGuyver/Jackie Chan buddy movie (Hollywood: get started.) And unlike those Dawn of the Dead assholes, you don’t sit around whining. You load up on orange juice and adrenaline before exterminating the horde with a giant lipstick.

The brilliant bit is, technology no longer limits Dead Rising to carefully controlled interiors. Fortune City’s plaza showed that the game could handle streets just fine. The time has come for Zombie City. GTA IV had simultaneously the most detailed and least used city in gaming history. It was massive, complete, and all it ever achieved was letting your character aim terribly and be annoyed by the phone in beautiful new locations.

This looks like a wonderful place to have my hole annoyed right off by fictional people

Imagine Dead Rising with heavy gear in an industrial district, experimental labs in a university campus, office blocks full of literal white-collar zombies, and of course a shopping district which might as well be called “Retro zone, god this game is great.”

Completing certain missions could restore the phone or subway systems, deposit boxes and the postal service. This would extend the distinctive “Start powerless, earn kickass” Dead Rising vibe to the entire environment, brazenly using videogame logic the way the series always has. (Urinals don’t usually record a complete copy of you, unless you’re peeing in an advanced cloning laboratory.)

And the city feeds in to our next suggestion:

New Skills

Dead Rising introduced the funnest, most awesome game mechanics since Pong invented that concept. The original’s photography was ridiculously enjoyable, and to this day is the only thing which would make us put down the baseball bat when a lunatic with an axe is charging at us. The sequel’s “Duct Tape Does Everything” was even more fun, with the sheer sense of achievement when you discovered a new combination. Every unlikely item triggered Bond villain levels of maniacal laughter at your own genius, especially when you got the combo card and could trigger the Strong attack. Which usually murdered physics as well as the target zombies. The Tesla Ball is still the greatest videogame device outside of the Portal gun.

Cole McGrath is a pansy. And it’s raining in Greece because  Zeus just pissed himself.

So what new skills could we add?

Useful Civilians
Dead Rising wasn’t jut the simple joy of murdering the already dead, it was an Escherian Inversion of evenything we knew about fun. Escort missions are as enjoyable as medieval dentistry, but Dead Rising was a massive multiple time-limited save-limited escort mission and it was one of the greatest things ever made.

My favorite part are how she prevents me from running, jumping, or using items, and could still die at any moment!

Even Capcom realised this, and one upside of their iterative approach is how it let them fix it. In Case West everyone you rescue instantly and courteously teleports out of the facility instead of following you like a suicidal duckling. Except for Frank West, who is instead programmed to fight and have infinite health. That’s the greatest breakthrough from stupid waste to brilliance since Alexander Graham bell asked “How about we connect these useless phones together?”

In Dead Rising City you could rescue medical staff, carpenters, police, subway conductors, all kinds of things and dispatch them to do something useful. Civilians could have classes like medical, combat, building. Soldiers could be used to provide backup, or establish barricades to reduce the zombie flow in certain sections of the city. Medical staff could give you health kits, set up in combat zones as a dispenser, or be sent back to a home base to improve the condition of all your people. Building up a home base for research while establishing forward posts for combat could turn Dead Rising into the first person ass-kicking with minor Real Time Strategy elements Brutal Legend was meant to be.

We’re just assuming there’ll be an army base to unlock.

Again, Case West points the way: some civilians demanded items before moving away from the relentless hordes of the undead, which seems a little fussy, but even fetch quests are a million times better than escort missions. In a city strategy environment, people could require certain weapons or materials to build forward bases or upgrade your weapons - and discovering which items work with who would be a whole new mechanic. Rescuing key staff could restore networks like the subway (teleport between zones), the postal service (request items from bases established in other districts) and more.

Necromancer

If you can control the living, what does that leave? Oh yes. Pretty much the only thing you don’t use against zombies in the previous games is other zombies, except when you picked them up and windmilled them through crowds while cackling in sheer joy (the last part is non-optional and automatic.)

How about playing as a rogue Phenotrans employee? Frank West was the investigative hero, while Chuck Greene played the desperate victim - we can round out a trilogy by playing an employee of evil, framed and left to take the fall by a sinister corporation. She or he would know all about the zombies, and could develop items to control certain zombies (or at least redirect some of them.) It would be the ultimate payback, commanding hordes to do your bidding.

Dead Rising is the most fun you can have killing enemies outside of a multiplayer server. Games like Counter-Strike offer sheer competition but no imagination: you can’t mess around with weapons on a multiplayer server. If you’re playing Counter-Strike you either have an AWP, a deagle, or a hole in your head where the thought “It’d be fun to try something else” used to be. Left 4 Dead levels have fun asides and little areas, but running off on your own to have a look will leave you alone, and dead, very quickly. Single player is simply better at certain things, and Dead Rising does them.

What would you want to see?

Space Marine has been accused of copying Gears of War, which is like accusing a shark of copying a children’s swim team. Gears’ core tactic is “cowering”: hiding behind reassuring bits of scenery while you wait for the bad men to go away. Space Marine is so much about attack that you can you swing hammers at people firing laser cannons at you, and exists in a universe so badass that’s actually a valid plan. And it isn’t just for Warhammer fan. What could have been unmitigated fanservice is actually a different style of shooter, and in a market overrun by Modern Warfare clones that makes it better than good. It makes it priceless.

Jetpacking into enemy snipers with a chainsaw that has spiked knuckles may also contribute.

Nine foot slabs of meat wrapped in tanks is the last place you’d expect agility, but the greatest breakthrough the truly 3D nature of the game. Space Marine succeeds at the dream of Brink servers, truly vertical combat where you can trade strength for agility. The Assault/Tactical/Devastator classes replacelight/medium/heavy body type, and replace “vulnerably scrambling over obstacles”with “a jetpack which lets you ram people from the sky.” This is what we call progress.

More importantly, the levels are designed to truly take advantage of vertical motion. Instead of almost useless shortcuts (which anyone can take, making them a standard path instead of a class advantage), huge staircases, multiple levels and raised plateus mean each class sees a very different map. After years of 2D, the most extreme example being the Pac-man style Shipment on Modern Warfare servers, people very quickly learn to look up.

Or die.

The combat is incredibly solid, enjoying a real feeling of smashing strength and huge moves without becoming a button masher. Experienced shooter players will need to learn the new technique of “swivel-aim”: not aiming a gun like a sniper, but aiming the screen in the direction of the enemy very quickly. Console players are experts in this art, but they suffer under its application to guns instead of real mouse aim. But it makes sense in melee combat: fast, brutal fights where fast reactions trump precise aim.

You can’t take cover, because Space Marines aren’t pansies, but that doesn’t mean charging face-first into neemy fire. The levels are well equipped with obstacles and multiple paths, and the difference between capturing a point and a lascannoned hole where your head used to be is as simple as breaking their line of sight.

There was another guy capping the point just to the left. Note the use of past tense.

These same maps mean that the most lethal phrase in the game isn’t “AWP” or “Asshole with the Martyr perk”, but “flanking.”

Multiplayer doesn’t have the same “execute enemies for health” mechanic as the glorious singleplayer, because they don’t really want to turn the best players into immortal Space Marine super-soldiers dominating all who dare come before them. The game uses a similar shield-and-health mechanic to Halo servers, but far elevated by real melee combat. It turns out actually having to fight to kill someone is far tougher than the “I touched him once and now he’s dead” seen in every other shooter (and several unsuccessful legal defenses.)

The most important (and unlikely) aspect of the multiplayer is the noob-friendliness. While the original model-based Warhammer 40k game is infamously inaccessible (you’d have an easier time getting into a game of “steal the gold!” at Fort Knox), Space Marine makes sure new players don’t feel totally stomped upon with two cunning features.

One is how the first multiplayer mode on the list is Seize Ground, not Annihilation. That’s brilliant. Capturing control points means your individual K/D ratio doesn’t matter, with capture points marked on your HUD you always know what you have to do, and even rushing forward to collect enemy plasma shots with your corpse is a useful contribution. Unlike arriving on Modern Warfare servers, where simply clicking into the first game after installing it defaults to “Free-for-all pro players will murder you twice before you blink” mode, or a new arrival on a Counter-Strike server, who drops dead both instantly and repeatedly.

The second is the “Copy Loadout” ability. After death you can burrow your killer’s equipment and perks. You won’t be any good with them, obviously, but it massively reduces the victimized feeling of being vaporized by people with Level 40 gear you’ll never see (because you’re being vaporized by it). If you get disintigrated by a perked-up melta gun expert, you get to run around melting as well. And when you utterly fail at that you’ll understand how to avoid the same fate next time. (In this case, because the melta has a range measured in millimeters.)

It’s the cream of Warhammer 40,000 in videogame form. They’ve taken the gloriously grim far future setting, the superhuman warriors locked in eternally doomed struggle, and most importantly, you can paint your models! Which turns out to be a lot more fun when you don’t have to spend hours and hundreds of dollars! As well as new wargear and perks, completing challenges unlocks new pieces of armor for your player. Most importantly you can paint it with your own color scheme. And while cowards and traitors might paint themselves all black (with dark grey highlights) in an attempt to hide, real men want the enemy to see death coming.

Victory in pink

The most important thing about the struggle between Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 is that it’s the Emperor’s New War: you only see it if you’re an idiot taken in by the hype. While thousands of rabid fan boys hammer their exclamation mark keys into spittle-flecked oblivion, the rest of look forward to playing new installments of two of the biggest shooters ever made. Preferring one to the other is like preferring chocolate over strawberry ice-cream - understandable, but having both is even better, and swearing about the issue is insane.

Which hasn’t stopped some people going completely insane.

Who knew this game could inspire aggression?

The funniest part of the fight was the Modernwarfare3.com controversy. An astonishing failure on the part of Activision, who really act like they’re new to this “online technology” thing sometimes, the makers of Modern Warfare 3 didn’t own the website. A Battlefield fan did. And while months of MW-bashing didn’t bother Activision (they make a very popular game and are therefore usually hated by a lot of people online, most of them their own players), when the site started forwarding visitors to Battlefield3.com they took action. $2,600 worth of it, the legal kind, and pretty soon they’d bought the website for far, far more than if they’d paid for it in the first place.

The second sign of Modern Warfare love is more love than litigation: a terrifyingly detailed analysis of the loadout from then bog standard “Soldier walking out of the box right at you, too tired to even raise his gun.” Every line of this image applies more thought than the people who designed the original.

The rest of the people taking potshots at Activision do it all day, every day, and in public, but since they’re Battlefield 3 employees that’s sort of their job. The most pointed attack is the announcement of a free social portal for anyone on a BF3 server. Yes, exactly like the subscription-based “Call of Duty Elite” service which Activision want people to pay for. After paying for the game. And for access to Xbox live (for console players), which provides all the same services. You know, services they were getting for free before an executive had this idea.

The most brilliant thing? Battlefield 3 knows it’s going to lose the money battle. That’s not even the aim. They frankly admit that they’re only aiming to reduce Call of Duty’s market share. Which is a fair enough target, because CoD’s market share currently looks an awful lot like “the entire market” with a small slice marked “other.” For all its glorious graphical upgrades, the new Frostbite engine’s only function is to widen that crack. Even though “the frostbite engine” sounds like something Dr Freeze would use to murder an entire city.

The end result? Well, if you’re not being paid by Activision or EA (in either money or a blind, slavering fanboy-substitute for a reason for living), both sides are making things better for you. More games is always an improvement: whether you prefer the brutal close quarters of Modern Warfare 3 servers or the sprawling wars of Battlefield 3 servers, you’ll see us on both. And enjoy them.

Battlefield 3 comes out on October 25th, and you’re either looking forward to it or the sort of psychopath who thinks a game can be terrible just because another game exists. But we’re not talking about gaming’s World War of 3 (Battlefield versus Modern Warfare): we’re here to talk about how Battlefield 3 will be the embodiment of PC shooting and the biggest multiplayer shooter ever to exist.

We mean that quite literally. BF3 servers will support 64 players on the PC compared to a puny 24 on consoles, and that’s not just a bigger game. It’s a different game. Many war shooters have tried to convey the titanic scope of battlefield combat but all it’s done is let us stomp on ants. As our character runs through a huge set piece, we know that those little dots in the distance are automated background - they’re not lethal threats, they’re window dressing. But on a 64-player server we’ll combine the giant scene with real competition, squads scrambling across a vast battle where every single peon in the distance is real, armed, and might just notice you. Which makes them that much more enjoyable to shoot. Every war shooter ever made has put you behind an emplaced machine gun and told you to mow down the enemy, but because that’s exactly what those (suddenly very stupid and charging directly forward) enemies were for it wasn’t very satisfying.

Well, apart from that bit in World at War where you depressed an anti-air cannon at point-blank range.

That kicked ass.

There hasn’t been so much excitement over a 64 in videogaming since Mario, 15 years ago, and it’s not just the old computer-competition of bigger numbers. A number hasn’t revealed more about true meanings since 42. 64 players means DICE is embracing the PC as the core platform. We know this because they’ve also gone on record to say “people talked about ‘the decline of PC gaming.’ Or ‘the death of PC gaming.’ These kind of words were thrown around and, honestly, that’s bullshit.”

Words are cheap, but programming is expensive (that’s why Battlefield 2: Bad Company almost ignored the PC platform) and that programming is saying one thing: PCs are better. Better at multiplayer, because we’ll have forty more players, better at graphics, because we can buy the best gear as it happens, and better at playing because we use mice instead of underevolved thumbstick clumsiness of the regenerating-shield console monkeys.

For the last few years PC gaming has suffered under consolification. The Club’s mouse response was so screwed they had to include a “Quick 180 Turn” button, and that’s like including an emergency SCUBA kit with a submarine. Bulletstorm outright destroyed aiming with mouse smoothing, and that’s a game about aiming with a mouse. Duke Nukem Forever servers are hilarious fun, but they’re limited to eight players. Eight. Counter-Strike servers support more than that, and they were coded in 1999, and they were a modification for a game written in 1998. Texas Hold ‘Em supports more players than that and it’s printed on dead tree.

The second aspect of this embodiment of Personal Computing is the graphics. Though calling Battlefield 3’s visions “graphics” would be like calling choirs of angels trumpeting the Second Coming “sound effects.” They are stupidly, ridiculously good, and far better on PC than console if you have the hardware to support them. And that qualification is a good thing, not a complaint. PC players have always been able to buy their way to higher quality. DICE have gone on record explaining that of course the PC’s graphics are better than consoles because anything else would be stupid. The rendering architect of the game flat-out asked:

It turns out that PCs and consoles are different machines. Who knew? No-one in the last few years of cross-platform shooters, that’s who. Of course there are some downsides to such PC specificity. System requirements and ridiculous flaws are a trademark of PC gaming. The first, and probably most painful, is the how DICE looked at the “include older equipment or look good” choice and shoved it so far into looking good it’s now technically part of the Sistine Chapel. The game requires Windows 7, and that’s even more expensive than upgrading a graphics in terms of time - you have to re-install everything.

There’s also the traditional “how on Earth could they screw that up?” flaw, with the news that the PC won’t have a server browser. Even though consoles (for the first time) will!

It doesn’t matter how fast it starts, it would need to be tachyonic and travel back in time to before we had to close it to be as good as every other game on the system. Though, if we’re lucky, this painfully pointless problem will at least dissuade ragequitters. We’ll have to wait and see.

You know, when we’re playing on BF3 servers more than twice as big as any other multiplayer game in action.