Christmas!

So christmas is nearly upon us, and I'm away for a break. There will be large hills, possibly mountains and hopefully snow. I'll be back in the new year.

In the meantime there is much to do, including DS multiplayer over Christmas with the family, getting past Bayonetta's annoying hypersexualisation, and ludicrously over the top cutscenes to find the clearly great game that's hiding behind it all and compiling a best of the last year, since everyone else seems to be doing it.

I'm the sort that tends to be late to the game, so a lot of my best of will probably wind up being games years old. I'm not going to apologize for that and I'm not even going to try to make it 2012 releases only. The plan is, if I played it in the past year and it was memorable in any way it's going in. I'm going to slip in an early  honorable mention to Star Wars Racer on the N64 for reminding me that Star Wars isn't all bad and also that splitscreen after beer rocks. After that you probably already know to expect to see some oldies.

So, a Merry Christmas to one and all. I hope you all get exactly what you wish for. Thanks for helping my blog take off and soar. Here's hoping for greater heights in the year to come!

A guest post! About a not quite shambling corpse.

Today sees the blog’s first guest post. One by a friend of mine. He’s offering up an alternative view on The Walking Dead, and while it differs with the correct perspective one should have upon such things (ie, my own) I'm going to serve it up in the spirit of balance, and also, because he's my mate.

So, here it is:

You know what really grinds my gears (of war)? People whose opinion was subconsciously swayed by the last 10 minutes of The Walking Dead and now think it’s the best game ever.

An old photo of myself and my guest blogger.

So, a little about myself, the guy who has now made himself about as popular as the perpetrators of the ending of Mass Effect 3 with that comment. I’m a frenemy of our resident blogger and have known him since we were kids. We’re something like Sonic and Knuckles circa Sonic 3, before the countless annoying allies multiplied out of all control, like how I imagine Cream's offspring would. Yeah. Anyhow, I’m here to provide an alternate (better) opinion to that of our resident blogger.

Things start off well in The Walking Dead. I would go as far to say that episodes 2 and 3 provide some of gaming’s greatest moments. The decisions you were forced to make were compellingly horrifying, enhanced by the believable reactions from a group of fellow travellers that you could never ever fully trust.

So it’s such a shame that it goes downhill from then on. Episode 4 introduces some rather bland characters to replace those that we bonded with from the first 3 episodes. Is it possible that Telltale Games realised this and thus overcompensated with too many action sequences? This ended up with several zombies being annihilated with ease and thus losing the feel of earlier episodes which generated enormous fear when you were faced with even one of these vile creatures. Did Telltale Games forget that it was the harrowing outcomes from your impossible decisions which provided a psychological onslaught on your soul? Because if not, then why did we have to sit through overly laboured scenes like that burial? 

To be fair, the end of episode 4 did leave a superb cliff hanger which left me willing to forgive the discretions of that episode. That was until I played episode 5.

Episode 5 was always going to be a difficult feat to pull off. However, I feel that Telltale Games dropped the ball here. Episode 4 was too long thanks to those action sequences and felt more bloated than a Boomer from Left 4 Dead.  Episode 5 overcorrected that by being far too short. The kidnapping cliff hanger was a huge disappointment and merely served to give you a dull summary of some of the decisions you made earlier on. There was also a lack of tough moral choices to make and the complete lack of robust gameplay in the series was especially highlighted in this episode, a sin which escaped scrutiny in previous episodes.  However, the most frustrating aspect of the episode was the feeling that the majority of those decisions you made over the last 15 hours or so were never meant to have the sort of impact you dreamt it would have on the story. It’s certainly not as unforgivable as Mass Effect 3 (Marauder Shields, we will NEVER forget you!) but given the compellingly amoral nature of the game, I had hoped for much better.

With all that said, I still really enjoyed The Walking Dead, especially the earlier episodes. The voice acting was of a high quality and the script had some truly powerful moments, some of which our resident blogger has already highlighted. The relationship between Lee and Clementine will go down as one of the greatest in video gaming history. Our resident blogger doesn’t have a heart of stone – Princess Peach is more of a man than he is. I, however, do possess a heart of stone, and I’m not afraid to admit to the tear that rolled down my cheek in those final 10 minutes of episode 5. Upon reflection on writing this blog, maybe that ending was incredible enough for me to forgive all the mistakes Telltale Games made in episodes 4 and 5.  Maybe.

All I can say is roll on Season 2.

An Honorable Mention

I did something amazing the other day, I finished a game less than six months old. I’m usually way behind with playing the latest releases, simply because it’s hard to find the time to play them all, but I saw Dishonored at half price, and well, you can’t pass up an offer like that can you?

I have to say I’m really, really impressed with Dishonored, both with the game itself and the developers for taking a chance on an ambitious new IP like this. It’s that rarest of beasts, a single player only adventure and a new name on the shelf. And while Dishonored is not quite a masterpiece, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute I spent in the whalerpunk city of Dunwall. After Fable’s Albion, Dunwall is the most English feeling fantasy world I’ve ever set foot in, game, book or movie. It feels like a hyper industrialised Dickensian London, complete with rats, dingy alleys, an uncaring aristocracy and English accents throughout. A fact made even more astounding when you discover that Dunwall’s creators, Arkane Studios, are French.

I say all the time that a great setting helps to make a great game, and it seems that Arkane agree with me. Advertisements for refined whale oil and whiskey are posted to the sides of houses. Propaganda booms over the loudspeakers. Notices about tax and the rat plague appear on street corners, and there is art everywhere. Landscapes of Dunwall, images of whaling ships, portraits of the great and good of the aristocracy pepper abandoned and flooded mansions, and in the Golden Cat , a ‘bathhouse’, portraits of women of ill repute dominate the walls. The art is universally fantastic too. I found myself stopping to get a closer look at many of the paintings I passed on my way through the game. Also scattered around the city are notes and books that help flesh out the history and culture of Dunwall. They can range from the lyrics of “What shall we do with the Drunken Whaler,” to excerpts from plays, to notes on the occult, to Bioshock style audiologs. You can see all the thought and all the work that has gone into giving the game a sense of place. It all serves to make Dunwall feel less like a construction of polygons and textures and more like a lived in, and dying, city.

I get the feeling that Bioshock was quite the influence on Dishonored as it developed. From its first person viewpoint and watery setting, to a couple of pivotal game mechanics. Like Bioshock, the left and right triggers control your left and right hands. In your right hand is a fairly conventional sword. You swing it about in the conventional manner, stabbing people in the conventional way. To me, first person sword combat often never feels like much more than swinging your virtual arm around, hoping to hit something. In Dishonored, the sword combat is slightly better than that. Enemies react to where you hit them, and Corvo, the game’s lead, will often grab his assailants and execute them in a satisfyingly gruesome manner. The left hand is where the Bioshock influence comes. Corvo has supernatural powers, gained from collecting runes, and can augment his abilities with bone charms. Switch Runes for Adam, Bone charms for Gene Tonics and Powers for Plasmids and you will understand everything you need to know about what the left trigger controls. Even the health and mana bars in Dishonoured are the same colours as Bioshock’s health and Eve bars.

The powers aren’t a straight rip off though. Where Bioshock’s plasmids were mostly offensive, Dishonored’s powers are more neutral. They tend to be aimed at helping you traverse Dunwall as quickly and as silently as possible. Key abilities such as the short range teleport, time manipulation and the (brilliantly fun to unleash) Rat Swarm can be chained with offensive moves to create some really interesting and fun combat options. Personally, one of the reasons I’ll be replaying the game will be to experiment more with them.

I had a few minor gripes, the main one being that the game actively encourages a quicksave and retry style of play that might work fine on the PC but is a bit of a pain to do on my Xbox. Frequently flicking in and out of menus to save after a particularly difficult section really breaks the flow of the game and the it breaks the immersion too. I also would like to have been told that my style of play would affect how the game ended after I had finished the game. Being told this in the loading screens meant that I automatically held back on the carnage to make sure I got the good ending. After all, who doesn't like a good ending? I would have preferred to have been surprised. Really though, they are minor things and didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game so much as to ruin the experience. My main issue with Dishonored isn’t a gameplay issue at all. I found my immersion in the world Arkane have created was slightly broken by the wooden animation of the NPCs, particularly the facial animation. Okay, it's leagues better than the typical Bethesda dead from the jaw upwards work, and in freeze frame it can look quite good but it isn’t great, especially when you compare it to the stellar animation in games like Uncharted 3, Enslaved or Final Fantasy XIII. Hell, Portal 2’s personality cores were more expressionate than any character in Dishonored, and personality cores don’t even have faces.

Also, while I’m ranting. Why on earth is Corvo a silent protagonist? He clearly has a personality. You only have to look at the way he treats Emily to see that. He even has lines of dialogue, to a degree, in the options that flash up on screen when you interact with somebody. I would have felt more for Corvo, if he had a voice and a personality, if I understood his motivations and his relationships with the other members of the cast. Denying him a voice seems to be missing a trick. That said, the rest of the cast, and the excellent voice work provided for them, help to deliver a very enjoyable story. It’s simple, yet effective, with a satisfyingly organic and human final act. You can understand why the antagonist has done what he has.

All in all, despite the rant, Dishonored is a fabulous game. My issues may not necessarily be a problem for you, and in the grand scheme of things they aren't a problem for me either. I enjoyed every moment I spent in Dunwall and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who plays games. I’ll be playing it again, and I think I’d like to see a sequel too, if only to visit Dunwall again and see if Arkane have given Corvo a voice. 

Now, I'm finally going to get round to starting Bayonetta. I've only had it for six months...

You had me at WipeOut

Those who know me know I like WipeOut. I mean I really like WipeOut. I love the graphics, the handling, the sleek, minimalist aesthetic, the consistently fantastic and bang on trend soundtracks, the lot.

It’s responsible for a lot of snap decisions to buy a console that in the past have wound up being pretty fruitful. I decided on a Playstation when I first played WipeOut 2097 at a school friend's house and it’s a decision I feel I will never regret. Mainly because Wip3Out came out two years later and glued itself into my disc tray. To a lesser extent, the same goes for WipeOut Fusion for the PS2, which I never really mastered, and WipeOut HD on the PS3, which I most certainly have mastered.

Recently I tried WipeOut HD in 3D and I was sold instantly. After years of scepticism over 3D cinema, suddenly it made sense. Somehow there wasn’t even any of the ghosting which puts me off seeing a 3D film at the cinema. It was smooth as silk. Vineta K looked beautiful as it stretched into the distance, and watching my quake disruptor disappear into the screen was just incredible Admittedly one race at Rapier Class did completely fry my retinas and melt my brain, but I was so blown away, I told myself I could get used to it. I probably couldn’t, and I'm yet to try a Zone race, but I can't help myself. I get such a buzz out of WipeOut that it just makes my mind susceptible to a dumb idea or two.

WipeOut suckered me into buying a PSP. And while I love WipeOuts Pure and Pulse, a lot of the games on that system never really did it justice, even though I built up a fairly decent sized library of games. On release of the PS Vita, Sony nearly got me again. My local Game store had a demo unit running Wipeout 2048. It was beautiful. It was awesome. And holding the Vita gave me cramp, but I still wanted a Vita there and then, and I very nearly bought one, but I'm an adult now and I can be objective when that amount of money is going to fly away from my bank account. I took a step back and had a look at what other games the system had to offer, and with the exception of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the answer was none.

There was next to nothing on the Vita on release that screamed, “BUY ME,” apart from those two games, and even now, it feels like most of the games on it are home console conversions. Don’t get me wrong, conversions are nice, but I already have them to play on my big screen at home, where games like that belong. With the exception of Gravity Rush, there is still nothing on the Vita that makes me want to own one, and I can’t abandon my sanity and spend that much on one to play three games. I made that mistake with the PSP. I don’t need another slab of plastic gathering dust on my games shelf.

I know it’s been said already, but this is an issue Sony really needs to address. A system lives and dies on the standard of its games, and it seems that everyone, publishers, developers, consumers, everyone, is ignoring the Vita. Without the games, the Vita will go the way of the 3DO. And even if we do see some unmissable content arrive for Vita, with the way its life has started, it could go the way of the Dreamcast instead. Loved by the few, ignored by the many.

So this goes out to Sony. I want a Vita, I really do, but I can’t justify buying one yet. Not until you give us games that only Vita can do. Games like Tearaway. If there were more like that, I’d buy one tomorrow.

Another Wipeout might help too.

After the multiplayer rant, time for some multiplayer love.

After last week's rant about not wanting to pay for tacked on multiplayer I got thinking. Online multiplayer just isn’t as personal as it was before the advent of the internet. It brought on a reflection on my gaming past.

Multiplayer for a few means one thing now. Howling obscenities through the headset while playing this week’s Call of Battlefield. Something about the relative anonymity of gamertags just seems to bring out the worst of people online. Angry teens spray out the kind of stuff that would land you in hospital if it were overheard in a pub.

Remember when a multiplayer session was you and three mates huddled round your fourteen inch tv playing Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96 on the Megadrive? That is of course unless you had a friend with really accommodating parents who let you hook up to the twenty-eight in the living room. I had a session like that the other day. We sat around my mates fifty-two inch LCD, playing an eighteen year old Megadrive whose graphics looked a whole lot less like ass than we had any right to expect and had time comparable in greatness to any I have experienced in the twenty years I have owned a console. Seriously, it was mental. And while bullshit was called on many occasions, once by myself after one of my own unjustified wins, not once did the banter degenerate into the kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic filth that gets streamed through my headset from the mouth of the last person who beat me down in Halo. Something about having the person you’ve just beaten sat next to you puts paid to that kind of thing, you know?

But really, this isn’t a rant about the state of online gaming. This is a love letter to what the young ‘uns call ‘local multiplayer’.  It wasn’t just eight hours of Micro Machines and its infamous Sponge track though. In that same session we played Powerstone 2, Sonic Adventure 2 match races, the insane Chu Chu Rocket and Virtua Tennis 2 on the Dreamcast. After all that, the PS1 was busted out for a round of Crash Bash. The only thing that stopped the whole thing slipping into endless races on Circuit Breakers and Crash Team Racing was time.

It really slammed home how much fun games that are ten, twelve and in some cases up to sixteen years old are in comparison to what is about today. Part of it I suppose is all the old rivalries that we were carrying between ourselves on those games. There was the same old rush for Tommy Haas and Tim Henman on Virtua Tennis and the same endless wars on the sponge in Micro Machines.

Helpfully, since the openly hostile attitude of online multiplayer was nowhere to be seen I was also able to manage the realisation of something of an age old gaming dream: To bring my significant other into the fold, and miraculously, she had as good a time as the rest of us. It helped to show up how the most accessible games are the most fun. You are instantly good at Virtua Tennis as soon as you return a shot. Chu Chu Rocket’s barely contained insanity bought the laughs and howls of despair at having a cat dropped in your rocket seconds before the lead was translated into victory. Sonic Adventure 2 is admittedly less than accessible, but since we only played that to settle a simmering old rivalry from the last time we had the Dreamcast out, it’s a moot point.

The high point of the session was undoubtedly Crash Bash. Its collection of quickly understood yet downright silly mini games just clicked with my girlfriend for some reason. She beat three seasoned vets of Crash Bash hands down in Polar Push, Pogo Pandemonium, Crate Crush and Ballistix. We all had a laugh and she left feeling great, having her first multiplayer victories under her belt. I doubt I’ve ever seen that online.

It left me thinking that the only one of the big three that gives local multiplayer a look in now is Nintendo. Think about it, the 360 can connect to up to four controllers, the PS3 can take seven or eight, but can you remember the last time that actually happened? If you own one of the more ‘hardcore’ consoles, multiplayer all but confirms the stereotype of the lone gamer sat in the dark in his bedroom. And that seems like a step backwards.

In positioning the Wii as a family friendly machine, Nintendo found a ton of local multiplayer games forthcoming. But for every light hearted game like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros, it seemed like there were a dozen lightweight mini game collections that got it all wrong. There’s a difference between the two. The lightweight stuff doesn’t need much in the way of thinking and the gameplay boils mostly down to the Wii Waggle. There’s no satisfaction in victory from that. The best multiplayer games are light hearted and accessible to the n00b, yet still need you to think. The thrill of a good multiplayer game comes from the feeling of outsmarting your opponents, not waving your arms in the air. Supersonic games understood this when they made Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96. That’s why they included the sponge track. You can joust on it.

There was another feature of Micro Machines that made it a great multiplayer game. Pad sharing. Eight people sharing four pads and eight cars on track at once, with all the mayhem that came with it. It’s a feature that seems to have disappeared altogether, now that multiplayer seems to have lost its sense of fun and gotten serious.

And fun is really what multiplayer should be all about. It really is worth tracking down some of the multiplayer Greats for a session at a mate’s house. Those who have played Bishi Bashi, Crash Bash, Crash Team Racing, Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines, Smash Bros, Goldeneye, Mario Kart (even though it’s an irrational personal pet hate of mine, don’t ask why because I couldn’t possibly tell you), Mario Party (better without the boardgame element), Micro Machines, Tekken, Street Fighter, Timesplitters, Dancing Stage and Rock Band will tell you that competing together, in the same room, is the best part of gaming as a whole.  

I’ve probably missed one or two there, but with a few mates and a few drinks they make an amazing night in. I have a feeling there is a yawning gap in the market for games like these that isn’t being filled. Ok, we get the odd release like the recent Sonic and Sega All-Stars, but a lot of the time, multiplayer in a new release boils down to a tacked-on online mode. I might be right, or I might be horribly wrong on that statement, but split screen games bring people together in the best possible way. Online is at its best when you’re in a closed party with people you know. And in that case, why not get everyone together in one room?

There might be beers.

I only seem to be playing half of what I'm paying for.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with online multiplayer. I do play online on occasion, yet I rarely touch the multiplayer component of most of the games I’ve gotten in this generation.

There. I’ve said it.

If I do go online I often find myself surrounded by idiots. A reason in itself to play in a closed party, but not the reason I don’t often mess with multiplayer. It’s because I find the multiplayer portion of most games to be entirely superfluous to the experience that I like to gain from singleplayer. Fair enough some games are built around their online component. For all my bitching about Call of Duty or Battlefield, the multiplayer portions are pretty damn good and are rightly lauded. I’m just turned off by some of the people who play it. Gears of War is fabulous online, as are Forza, PGR, Tekken and Left4Dead. But sometimes there is a multiplayer component added for seemingly no reason, except that the board of directors wanted it.

For instance, Bioshock.

I know this is just one example, but it’s the one that floats closest to the front of my mind. The first game was a wonderfully self contained experience, with a strong focus on narrative and on how you approach taking down your enemies. In short, my favourite kind of shooter. Best of all it was defiantly singleplayer. Why then, does Bioshock 2 have a multiplayer segment, complete with a half hearted attempt to meld it into the world by way of making it a Plasmid test? I bought Bioshock 2 to take another journey through Rapture. The thought of shooting other people online in that city at the bottom of the sea never once crossed my mind. I had visions of the nuance being sucked out of the game and consequently never went near it. I don’t know anybody who has played Bioshock 2 who has.

The thing is, Digital Extremes, the people behind the Bioshock 2 multiplayer, have pedigree. They had a hand in Unreal Tournament, but I can’t help thinking that their talents couldn’t have been better spent on a project more given to a multiplayer setting. If you’ve played Bioshock 2 multiplayer, I’d like very much to know if it was worth your time.

Thankfully, I’ve just found out that Bioshock Infinite will have no multiplayer. It’s made me quite a happy man. Multiplayer in Bioshock 2 smacked of a decision from the publishers. Props to Ken Levine for resisting any pressure there might have been to include it in Infinite.

In a roundabout way this brings me to my point. Games are expensive. This is something that we all know. They are a considerable investment in both time and money. It is getting better though. I remember back in the deep dark hole in time that was the mid nineties when Sonic 3 came out, it cost something in the region of seventy five pounds in the Kayes catalogue we used to get when I was a kid. That’s an awfully large amount of money now, let alone in 1994. Especially when most of the people who would be playing it would have been around ten, like I was. And it was only half a game. It took the additional purchase of Sonic and Knuckles to play the what was technically the 'whole' of Sonic 3, sort of prescient in a way, what with this generation’s obsession with DLC and all.

Incidentally, Sonic 3's two player match races were fantastic.

Maybe Sega were onto something with this half a game thing though. Like I said, I don’t play multiplayer much. Conversely I work with quite a few people who buy the yearly Call of Duty and never look at the singleplayer. They live for the thrill of multiplayer and if it’s their thing then that’s cool.

 

So how about this? Why don’t publishers release the single and multiplayer portions of a game separately? That way you only pay for the kind of game you like to play. It also removes the major barrier to entry, cost. Think about it, would a game be an impulse buy at forty quid? Probably not, but personally, if I saw a new game out at twenty, I probably would pick it up. And if after playing it, the idea of multiplayer excited me, I could probably be tempted to splash a bit more for the multiplayer component.

Everybody wins. Loners like me don’t have to pay multiplayer portion they’ll never use, and gregarious types can save money by not buying the singleplayer segment of this year’s multiplayer hit, which, if the reviews for Battlefield 3 are to be believed, can be pretty inferior as singleplayer games go anyway.

Ok, maybe one or two publishers would attempt to cash in on this model by making the combined price for both halves greater than if they were just released as a combined whole, but on the flipside it might make them think twice about grafting on an un-needed multiplayer mode if there’s a chance nobody would buy it. 

And I think that could be a win for everyone.

Are we waiting too long for flashy new consoles?

There's a bit been said about this console generation being a bit long, and that it's stifling the industry as a whole.

But you know what? I don't mind. Frankly it's been nice not to have to shell out over three hundred quid on a new bit of all singing all dancing hardware. My 360 is doing very nicely thank-you-very-much. The games are mostly good, and it's pumping out visuals that comparable to a lot of CG animated movies of just a few years ago. If you don't believe me, compare the looks of some of the very latest releases against movies of the same vintage as the first Ice Age film.

Yes this generation is seven years old. That should mean that developers don't have to worry about how they work within the architecture they have (they can already manipulate the hardware to the best of it's capabilities), so they should be able to focus the spared effort on getting really creative. But instead we have some of the major developers and publishers saying they need new hardware to encourage them to take risks.

The indie developers don't seem to be having that problem. If you look at any of the download services, Steam, XBLA, or SEN for instance, there's a plethora of fun and imaginative titles to chose from, yet a lot of what we get from the major Triple A publishers are macho dude-bro sequels. Now I like a good sequel as much as the next gamer, but what I like more is a new IP, and there doesn't seem to be many people out there willing to take that risk anymore.

Thankfully there are is smattering of all new stuff coming through. Even at this late point in the console cycle. Dishonored, Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us being shining examples of this. There's even a couple of exciting reboots of established names in the new Tomb Raider and DMC games on the way. And even though they're not entirely new IPs, they're taking risks with our preconceptions of what those two games should be. Reading the previews, it's looking increasingly like those risks have been entirely justified.

Here's a thought.

Technically the last generation is still soldiering on. When the Wii came out, it was derided for using last-gen hardware, and yet, discounting the shovelware, some of the best, most fun and most innovative games of the last few years have been released upon its decidedly low powered circuit boards. Games like Madworld, Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword and No More Heroes showed that you didn't need massive power to make awesome games. Yes, you can say that the Wii remotes add a new dimension to the way the system works, but it's still running on last-gen tech. The Kinect isn't. And it's rubbish. The Wii sets a great example of what can be done with old tech if you stop moaning about how underpowered it is and concentrate on making games that are fun and innovative instead.

We shouldn't need shiny new hardware to encourage developers to be imaginative, it should come naturally. It's just a shame everybody seems to be so risk averse these days.

At the end of The Walking Dead. (Possible Spoilers)

I finished the last episode of The Walking Dead last night. So eager was I to see how it ended, that even after an evening out, I downloaded it as soon as I walked in the front door. It was so good it inspired a rare late night gaming session in me. Then it inspired loss of sleep while I turned the whole thing over in my mind and tried to digest all that happened.

The Walking Dead is fiction of the highest order. Less a game, more a graphic novel whose plot and conversations you direct. Things only went downhill. There was never any reason to feel like a zombie slaying badass, like you do in Left4Dead. The Walking Dead never let you forget that the walkers used to be people, and I felt a pang of guilt with each one I bought down. The situation is never anything but dire in the Walking Dead. The oppressive atmosphere hung over every decision I made. And it was never as simple as good or bad. There was only bad or bad. Terrible or terrible. Every decision I made wound up being tempered by wanting to do right by Clementine.

Never before, have I felt so attached or protective over a videogame character. Clementine is a masterstroke. I saw and did monstrous things over the course of those five episodes. I stole food, murdered a man in anger and willingly dropped another to his death. These were my decisions, none of them were foisted upon me by the game. I ignored the alternatives and Lee and I had to live with the consequences. But seeing the look on Clementine’s face, each time she found out about these things really cut deep. You know what you're doing is wrong. Sometimes the things you do are even necessary, but seeing how Clementine reacts to them is really wrenching.

There was room for compassion in this crazy mixed up world. Lee and Kenny bonded, which is to say, Kenny and I bonded. I liked him, and when the time came, I couldn’t let him do a thing that no man should have to. So I shouldered the guilt and did it for him. We had each other’s backs for the whole game and despite disagreeing with him at some points, we were friends right to the end of the game.

The Walking Dead was an emotional rollercoaster. Actually, no, it wasn’t. There are highs and lows on a rollercoaster. The Walking Dead was an emotional cliff. Forever tumbling downwards, with no let up until the episode ended. There were moments of sudden and explosive violence between other characters that were so shocking that at one point I put the controller down and just said holy shit for five minutes while the scene played out. I wanted justice for what happened and did something pretty awful to make sure I got it.

If you have not played episode five, read no further. There are spoilers ahead.

The fifth episode in particular was one emotional low after another.  Seeing Lee slowly killing himself to get to Clementine was heart rending. Saving her did nothing to stop the sink ever downwards, because I knew what had to come next. If I didn’t have a heart of stone, I would have cried at that moment. Seeing Clementine in that state wasn’t part of the plan. All Lee wanted, all I wanted, was to make sure she was safe.

I worry for her future.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Have you played Curiosity yet?

If you have an Android or iDevice I really must insist that you do. Now that the servers have settled down it’s become something really quite special.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, Curiosity is the first title from 22cans, the studio that Peter Molyneux founded after he left Lionhead. That should tell you something in itself. It is part social experiment in cooperation and compulsion, part experiment in game mechanics. There’s a cube. There’s something inside it. Everyone can see the cube and everyone can chip away at it, but only one person sees what’s inside. And what’s inside is something secret, yet something that is supposed to be incredible. Will the person who gets to the centre of the cube keep it for his or herself, or will they share it with the rest of the world? Will we ever get to the centre of the cube? It’s a massive job. Maybe the experiment is a way to find out how long something will hold the world’s attention before the world gives up. You can keep guessing about what the real experiment is and what’s in the centre. The only man who knows for sure is Peter Molyneux and he’s not telling.

What is certain about Curiosity is that it’s bloody addictive. You can easily sit there tapping away for hours and not notice the time pass. You find yourself making patterns as you painstakingly expose the surface below, trying to piece together the image underneath the layer that may or may not be an image at all, or seeing how quickly you can clear a screen or even just switching off and tapping mindlessly away. Everyone I know who has played it gets something slightly different out of it for themselves. They’ve been drawing pictures, writing messages along the cube’s surfaces and even censoring some of the more lewd ones out there.

During my reverie, I’ve noticed that Curiosity is just about the purest game I have ever played. Look at it like this. Almost every game from the dawn of the electronic age, from Space Invaders to Tetris to Mario 64 right up to Call of Duty essentially boils down to one thing. Making stuff go away. Clicking on things until they disappear. Shoot the aliens or the terrorists, sling Bowser into the lava or clear those blocks. Make the things go away to keep playing.

Curiosity is the ultimate distillation of that line of play. It strips away the distracting graphics, giving you nothing but a cube. It takes away the peril, and gives you peace to work in. It takes away the enemies and gives you surfaces to clear. It takes away the weapons, rather than blowing shit up, you’re left with nothing but your finger to tap cubelets and make them disappear. Rather than move, you spin the cube and zoom in and out. The score becomes coins found under the surface. They’re there to be spent almost exclusively on clearing cubelets from the layer the world is currently working on. You get the feeling that the soothing music is only playing because there’s such a thing as going too far.

What you are left with is the cube, a goal and a simple means to attain said goal. And amazingly, that’s enough. I’m happy to spend time clearing the cube knowing that my chance of seeing inside is miniscule. I’ll do my bit and hope to high heaven that the person who does is the generous type. Perhaps one of the kind of people that share their whole life over the social media.

Here’s hoping.

Maybe that statement says something about me. Maybe it’s what Mr Molyneux wants all along. Maybe the cube is intended as a mirror from which we learn something about ourselves. Maybe I’m just talking pretentious rubbish. There has been a lot of reaction to Curiosity, and amongst all the variation, quite a significant number of articles contain a phrase along the lines of, “you must play this.”

And doesn’t that make you a little bit curious?

Please don't remake Final Fantasy VII! You might ruin it.

Love Final Fantasy VII? If you’re a gamer of a certain age then of course you do. You probably want to see it remade as well right? Well it’d be nice, but it wouldn’t be FFVII if it was.

I finished FFVII for about the fifth time a few months ago and came out of it with the absolute conviction that it is perfect exactly as it is. For all its cube shaped hands, its midi music and curious little translation gaffes, I couldn’t see it being any better if it was remade.

Would seeing it with flashy HD graphics actually make the same impact as it did all those years ago when Cloud stepped off the train and blew up the reactor with a foul mouthed dude called Barrett? Probably not. If it was released like that today, it would just be an antique with some admittedly really nice graphics.

Besides, can anybody remember when a remake of anything was actually better than the original? Something that stood on its own merit, bringing new ideas and a competent reimagining in its own right. Something that made you look at the original in a new way and made you appreciate it slightly more for what it was, when what the original did was so far ahead of its time that it warranted a fresh attempt with technology that could keep up.  How about if we narrow that down to just games? Sure, it might run in 1080p and have smoother textures, but was the game actually better than the original? I can think of one. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and that was mainly down to the huge step up in power between the PS1 and the Gamecube. Okay, the step between a PS1 and a PS3 is as wide as the English channel, but Final Fantasy doesn’t need first person aiming and lip syncing to make it any better.

Take a look at today’s remakes. Is Shadow of the Colossus HD actually any better than the PS2 version? No, but it looks how your rose tinted spectacles make you remember it. How about the impact it made? Again, back when it was released, Colossus made a huge splash. It didn’t sell well, and shame on you if you didn’t buy it first time round, but the sense of scale and desolation of it just blew people away at the time. Fast forward to today, and nobody really bats an eyelid at any of that. It’s been seen before. The same goes for most remakes of last gen games. A lick of HD paint doesn’t cover up the fact that they are effectively still exactly the same game as what they were when they were first released.

Final Fantasy VII is its own thing. Everything about it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Change any part and it wouldn’t be FFVII anymore. Could you imagine what would happen if Square tried bringing it up to date? Would you like to see the battle system changed? What about the overall look? What if they decided certain parts of the game didn’t need to be there and cut them? What if hardware limitations meant that they had to run it through an FFXIII style tunnel? Worse still, what if they replaced FFVII Cloud, who may not have been the perkiest of guys but was at least relatable, with the silent, sullen non character he became in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts?

The final nail in the coffin would be voice acting. Square voice acting ranges from mostly excellent (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X) to godawful (Vanille and Hope in Final Fantasy XIII). I have a genuine fear that any voices added to FFVII would degenerate into the anime clichés that plagued the voice work of FFXIII. Yuffie would clearly be voiced in the same terribly annoying style of FFXIII’s Vanille. This logic states that as the sorta-kinda comic relief, Barret, like FFXIII’s Sazh will inadvertently receive an amazing actor and become the one redeeming feature of the whole sorry affair. FFVII is gaming’s Metropolis. It’s silent and the silence is integral to the experience. You read the script and this wonderful thing known as imagination lets you hear the characters, despite the lack of voice. Nobody would dare desecrate a work like Metropolis, why do the same to Final Fantasy VII?

These things happen when something is remade and the people making it decide to bring it into line with what they think modern audiences expect. We only have to look at the movie world to see this. Whilst there are undoubtedly some good movie remakes out there, there is a whole litany of poor ones. From pointless exercises like the Italian Job, Get Carter, Poseidon, and any American version of a J-horror flick to just plain bad ones like The Pink Panther, and Clash of the Titans. And Hollywood just keeps going with them. Look at the forthcoming remakes of Robocop and Starship Troopers. Remakes show laziness and a dearth of creative imagination at the studio that is making them. Two accusations I’d rather not see levelled at Square-Enix, one of my favourite developers.

Besides, modern audiences are the people who buy the yearly Call of Battlefield and hurl abuse at each other over multiplayer through teh interwebz. Do you really want FFVII to be remade to satisfy the tastes of that lot? I didn’t think you would. Luckily it was recently documented by IGN that Square CEO Yoichi Wada has said that there won’t be a remake until they make a game that “exceeds the quality” of FFVII.

Good luck there guys.

Final Fantasy is Oldskool. It should remain that way. And if someone who comes to it today can’t appreciate the merits of it just because it’s old, well screw them. It’s their loss. One day, they’ll see the light.

Is Sega living too deeply in it's past?

I spotted an intriguing thing the other day. Virtua Fighter 2 running on the 360.

Cool.

Sega is releasing a collection of model2 arcade remasters onto the XBLA and SEN, and it’s a nice touch. I never did get to play Fighting Vipers the first time around. Maybe while they’re at it we’ll get versions of Sega Rally and Sega Touring Car too. Maybe even Manx TT. The thing is, that might be cool and all, and we all know that Sega’s business model at the moment is based around a few strong franchises and a digitally distributed back catalogue, but I can’t help thinking that Sega are going about this in entirely the wrong way.

Sega have a rich history to mine, and since I never had a Saturn it is nice to see some of the stuff I never got to play as a kid coming back. I downloaded Nights into Dreams on release day, and for a game released way back in the mid nineties it’s way better and much more unique than it has any right to be. But here’s a thought, instead of just re-releasing old games from beloved franchises, why can’t those same franchises be resurrected and given new games? Sure it’s a risk, but if it’s done right there’s a chance of a big reward. Sega already have form with this with Sonic Generations.

Generations was applauded as one of the best Sonic games in years. And rightly so. Personally I played it to the (literal) death of my old white Xbox, but the sections I played most were the classic Sonic levels. Sega had finally nailed Sonic in 3D, but at the same time they reminded us about what was so awesome about Sonic in 2D in the first place. So how about Sonic 5, made with the Generations engine, in 2.5D?

Part of what made Generations work with modern 3D Sonic was the occasional shift to 2D. Why not flip it round and have the action of Sonic 5 mostly in 2D but with the camera panning mid level to really show off a setpiece or two. So when something happens like the orca chase, riding rockets, swinging on the vines or hitting the tunnels of springboards in the two Sonic Adventures, we get a camera pan and have Sonic move into the screen for a few glorious, level defining seconds. It might just work. It’s just a shame Sega have said we’ll never see chubby classic Sonic again.

And that makes me sad.

What cheers me up is the thought of other classic franchises treated the same way. How about a new Ristar for instance? It’s still got a gameplay element that’s pretty much unique among platformers, and all those exotic planets would look great run through the 2D half of the Sonic Generations engine.  As a boxed game it would be a lost cause, but as a digital release it could stand a chance.

But why stop there? Why not commission Platinum games to make a new Streets of Rage, or better yet, Shinobi? Why not bring back Toejam and Earl? A new F355 challenge? I’d certainly play that. Brand new Jet Set Radio, Nights, Outrun? Crazy Taxi set in London with sooped up drop-top black cabs and monumentally mouthy cabbies? How about grabbing Playground games (a group of veterans fresh from Forza Horizon who come from several famed racing studios including Bizarre Creations) and setting them to work on a new MSR? Sega do own the IP after all. Could Harmonix make a new Space Channel 5 based on the tech powering Dance Central? You’re damn right they can. Could you imagine how beautiful Ecco the dolphin would be on a current gen machine? Why not team up with EA and Critereon and bring back Road Rash? A new Skies of Arkadia perhaps? I’m stretching it here, but Thunder Blade deserves a comeback, and who wouldn’t play a modern day Quackshot? Think Duck Tales (remember that?) crossed with Uncharted, but with a lower body count and coloured plungers as ammo. Would you like to see Donald Duck battle through Pirate Pete’s sinking ship to rescue Huey, Dewey and Lewie as it pitches and rolls on a dynamic ocean? I’d pay to see that. Yes it’s Disney, but so what?

And then the holy Sega grail. Panzer Dragoon. New Panzer Dragoon shooters would be great, but what we really want is a conversion of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Yes, I know I’ve just ranted about re releasing old games, but Saga is Special. The original source code is lost, so the game is supposed to be un-remake-able. But that might not be the case anymore! Bluepoint games used a reverse engineered game disc as their source for God of War HD. The logic being that the code was in release condition and as free of bugs as possible. If they can do that with a recent PS2 game then maybe it might not be totally impossible that the same could be done with a release copy of Saga?

Just saying. And it would be pretty cool if they could.

Sega can trade off their past easily. They have a raft of great IPs that they can revisit at any time. I’d just like to see a bit of the old Sega imagination, fun and daring in that strategy. Bring back old names by all means, but it would be nice to see those old names given great new games.

And for the love of Christ, would someone please put Yu Suzuki to work finishing Shenmue?

The firstest post

Amongst other things, I’m a gamer. I’m also edging inexorably towards thirty, which unfortunately, makes me something of a grownup gamer, and while that’s not exactly unusual it sometimes feels like it. It also means I’m sometimes given to venting opinions and the odd rant.

Sometimes they’re even valid. And if they’re not then at least they might be entertaining. So I’ve decided to put them here for posterity. They’ll likely be pretty much all gaming related, but I’m a man of many tastes, so I’m making no excuses if I go off topic on occasion.

So it’ll be gaming current affairs, rants, the odd paean to the past and hastily formed opinions. Updates as often as I can.

Enjoy.