The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 15th

The past and future of video games

Today’s advent calendar window is a window upon Xmas past. It returns us to the days of LAN parties and dial-up, of demo discs and Fileplanet – a more innocent era, before multiplayer shooters fell under the spell of progression. Not that innocent, maybe. There were plenty of arseholes back then. Some of them now run very large software companies. But at least there was no grinding to ruin your bunnyhopping.

But of course, it’s... Straftat!

Edwin: Here’s a holiday project for you: install the base free edition of Straftat, find a sympathetic and comparably dextrous like mind, and try to play all 70 randomised maps in one go. It’s a game I can only describe by way of combinations: both arty-farty and a twitchy fragfest that hinges on mind-reading and listening out for footsteps. Both a wonderful duelling game based around on-map pick-ups, and an absorbing montage of gloomy aesthetics torn from elder Source Engine shooters, Soviet carparks and entertainment mythology at large.

The layouts are somehow both exquisite and disposable: you can burn through them all like popcorn, leaning into their borderline-gimmicky sightlines, or chew one of them over slowly, enjoying the ambience as you would the scenery in the developers’ previous single player exploration game Babbdi. The guns are irresistible, lending themselves to obvious playstyles. One map gives you a bunch of single-shot rifles and teleportation doors perched on exposed gantries. Another is a small maze of dour Backroom wallpaper abundant in laser mines, with a broadsword tucked away in a crawlspace. The 1v1 format creates a degree of intimacy that feels exotic today, more fighting game than FPS. People are going to cuss you out in the chatbox, but it’s sort of fun. Cosy, even!

Astonishingly, it’s all free, but you can show your appreciation by buying the Weapons, Maps and Hats DLC, which adds another 70 maps to the game. Plus some weapons and hats. I can’t wait to see what brothers Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre get up to for their third project. Maybe a town builder next? Or a single city block detective game.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Lemaitre Bros

Image credit: Lemaitre Bros

Brendy: Cussed out in the chatbox? Not me! I played Straftat for 20 minutes one evening and faced off against a polite killer who uzi'd me to pieces many many times between frequent pauses to chit-chat about the game. I felt like I had been flung back in time to playing multiplayer Soldier Of Fortune on semi-abandoned servers via a questionable modem connection. But yes, Edwin is right. There is something pure and beautiful about these tiny maps. It was enough to make me go back and finally play Babbdi. Which itself took 40 minutes. That's two amazing games scarfed down in a single hour. AND THEY'RE BOTH FREE. It is absolutely bonkers. What the hell are these fraternal fraggers drinking?

Graham: My favourite part of Quake, its sequels and its offshoots, Half-Life included, was not the games themselves but the culture that developed around them. As a teenager, I hunkered down on dedicated servers, IRC rooms, and messageboards, chatting with strangers and eagerly downloading the folk art these communities produced. That mostly meant user-made levels, and mostly crude, gimmicky, throwaway levels at that.

In fairness, the games themselves usually contained more than a few such levels, anyway. Crossfire, in Half-Life deathmatch, which featured a button that when pressed would nuke everyone on the map who failed to run inside a bunker before the door closed, for example, or Facing Worlds and 2Fort, which inevitably devolved into stalemate sniping battles, or the mirrored islands of Quake 3's The Very End Of You. All of these maps were hopelessly imbalanced or borderline unfair, producing repetitive and occasionally frustrating experiences. They were also thrilling, dramatic, and often especially wonderful in one-on-one fights.

The trend of shipping a multiplayer game with a big jumble of levels and leaving the community to pick their favourites is long over. Today, developers favour providing either a single level as balanced as a football pitch, or they prefer to choose the level-of-the-moment themselves, turning modes and maps off and on to railroad the playerbase this way or that. Should anything imbalanced slip through the developers' own testing, it's quickly sanded down or sent to the attic to appease the sharpest edge of the playerbase.

Then there's Straftat, which takes the pick 'n' mix to maximalist extremes by shipping with 70 maps and then letting you buy 70 more. These maps are all designed for one-on-one fights lasting just a few minutes at most, and so gimmicks, exploitable sightlines, and imbalanced killzones never have a chance to frustrate. They simply push the experience, one round at a time, into greater heights of panic and laughter.

As with all folk art, there's something more honest about Straftat for its rough edges, in a way you don't find in the heavily tested, metric-based design of modern live service shooters. It's an ugly Trillian skin in a world of Apple white design. It's a Napster download of blur_-_woohoo.mp3 in a world of monthly subscription streaming services. It's a Glasgow teen producing happy hardcore tracks in a world of celebrity DJs. It's a beige Compaq family PC in the corner of a carpeted upstairs landing, a Gamespy server browser, a dial-up modem connection, a download link sent to you by a Swedish man over QuakeNet. It's pure nostalgia and completely forward-thinking. It's Straftat.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!