Insert creative Vampire related article title

And now for something completely different. Wait, I'm sorry, I'm being informed that I already used that opener and that I'm contractually obligated to wait at least one calender year before I start recycling material. Well, OK, anyhow today's article is an examination of a PC gaming fossil in 'Vampire:The Masquerade Bloodlines', an action RPG with vampires. There are two reasons why I even played this game. The first was that I started seeing the title crop up on various gaming forums in topics along the lines of “Name your favorite under appreciated game” and then over the Halloween weekend Valve's digital distribution service Steam had the game on sale for five dollars. Figuring this was a pretty low risk investment I picked it up. Now, before I go any further I will say that the game was most certainly worth the five dollars that I paid for it and that it would also be worth it at the non-sale price of twenty dollars. There are just a few minor issues with the game but that's why we're here.

The first thing you'll likely notice once you install the game is that it likely doesn't work. There are, according to the support forums, any number of reasons why this could be but I'm going to go with computer voodoo as the reason why my copy didn't work. So you're going to need to download the patch for the game. But which one? Well as best as I can tell downloading both the developers patch and the fan made one should get things working for most people. Amusingly you might notice that the version history is a hell of a lot longer for the fan made patch than the developers one. The reason for this being as best as I've been able to tell is that the developers went out of business shortly after the game was “finished” and essentially shipped a product that was somewhere between non and barely functional whereas the fan support for this game (especially given its age) has been nothing short of heroic.

On to the gameplay side of things it would seem that for the sake of realism that 'Bloodlines' was trying to be a trendsetter in 2004 by not including a true map function in the game. In city and (most) sewer areas there are maps of the region posted that the player can consult to get an overhead view of the region. Everywhere else, eh not so much. Now this has actually become the somewhat in thing to do as there are a few recently released games that have either a pared down or non-existent map function. This is fine as long as you're dealing with small-ish and/or very distinctive environments and/or an incredibly linear game. You might be able to deduce from this being mentioned that 'Bloodlines' doesn't really meet any of those criteria and that it's somewhat easy to get lost (especially is non-mapped sewer areas). The funny thing is that the lack of a map wouldn't be an issue (outside of the sewer areas) if the game didn't automatically close doors after you. That is to say you open a door, go into the room and a few second later the door closes on its own with this same process repeating upon exiting the room. The reason that this is an issue is that without a map function it's hard to know where you've already been. Leaving the doors open to rooms you've already checked would've been an easy way to fix that.

This last issue is a minor one and may in fact be a function of my computer hardware but I found myself too often reloading from a previous save because I had wasted money on an item that I didn't want. What would happen was that I would highlight an item to examine it and in the process one too many clicks finds its way into the system and now I've bought the item. Given that many sales are final (you can sell the item back to the store at a loss) and that money isn't that easy to come by in the game this was certainly a source of irritation for me and as the game progressed (shinier/more expensive stuff to buy) I found myself having to quicksave before every merchant interaction.

So that's it. Those where the only real issues I had with 'Bloodlines'. Seriously, I was surprised at how solid a game it was and it's certainly a shame that the developers are out of the game. Pick it up for five dollars, twenty dollars or whatever. See you all next week.