Banjo-Kazooie: Not quite the classic I was led to believe it was.

So, after over twenty hours, numerous obscenities and a little bit of gamer rage over a major instance of arbitrary injustice, I have finally beaten Banjo-Kazooie. The overall impression? If I'm honest, a little bit of disappointment, a little bit of relief. I may have been expecting a bit much. Banjo has been lauded from most corners of games journalism and the internet as a classic, and I'm sorry, but it just isn't. It may have been a shining example of the genre when it first dropped fifteen years ago, but today, not so much.

An admission: I never played Banjo-Kazooie when it first arrived. I was a PlayStation owner for most of the late nineties, and by the time I finally got my paws on an N64, prices for Banjo had gone through the roof. I eventually got the game with a free download code when it was released for XBLA a couple of years ago. But, shamefully, I let it languish in the depths of the hard drive until I began living out of boxes a week or two ago, having packed almost everything I own for a move that has wound up being delayed. So with no physical games to play, I began to plumb said depths of  hard drive and play some of my XBLA backlog.

After polishing off the thoroughly satisfying Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Banjo was next on the list, and I dove into it with gusto. The first two thirds of the game were a lot of fun, but at about the point of Rusty Bucket Bay, the game started to become a slog. Eventually I got to the point where the only reason I was continuing was to not let the hours invested up to that point go to waste. Banjo-Kazooie, for the most part, is a good game but it's held back from greatness by a couple of regrettable flaws.

I liked

The art direction: As I've said before, the quality of a game's art will directly affect how well it ages. Banjo-Kazooie is fifteen years old, and it looks it. But that is not to the game's detriment. It's bold, chunky and colourful, and remains very easy on the eye, despite the well documented texturing problems of its original platform. The game world is coherent and absolutely everything looks like it belongs there.

The personality: Everything has a face. Everything. From the witches broom, to the cauldrons scattered around Grunty's Lair, to the vegetables hopping around spiral mountain. On top of that, each world has it's own unique cast, each with it's own unique voice and personality. It gives the whole game a whimsical, storybook feel that makes it a pleasure to spend time with.

The first two thirds: Banjo-Kazooie began as a very enjoyable game, and was balanced just nicely enough that its flaws didn't get in the way of the fun. Sadly, upon arriving at Rusty Bucket Bay, that all changed. The difficulty suddenly spiked, and the controls, camera and collision detection just couldn't give the accuracy that the higher difficulty required. Where once the game was challenging, now it was needlessly difficult and the fun just drained away.

I disliked

The camera: Let's get this out of the way first. The camera is bloody awful. Yes, the game was developed in the nineties, but it's bad even when compared to other games of that vintage. The main problem is the alarming regularity with which it gets stuck on the scenery. Or it will swap sides at random, inopportune moments, causing poor Banjo to fall to his death. Added to this is the fact that the camera seems to have a minimum amount that it will pan at the touch of the right stick. This meant that I couldn't pan the camera the tiny bit that was needed to make sure the perspective was right for some of the more difficult jumps later in the game.

The loose controls: In and of itself, this wouldn't be a problem. There are plenty of games out there that have loose controls that feel great, and for the most part, Banjo-Kazooie is one of them. However, later levels need a level of precision that the controls just aren't able to give, which makes already difficult levels even harder.

The iffy collision detection: Again, not much of a problem until the later stages of the game. But by then it combines with the bad camera and overly loose controls to infuriating and maddening effect. I lost count of the times Banjo fell to his death because of a deadly combination of a dodgy edge and a slightly less than perfect jump.

The collectibles: One hundred jigsaw pieces, nine hundred musical notes, forty five Jinjoes, red feathers, gold feathers, mumbo tokens, eggs, caterpillars. Need I say more?

Being dumped on the ground floor of Grunty's lair after loading: Would it really have been so hard to just start the game from the last floor I was on? Traipsing through the castle every time I started the game was an exercise in needless frustration.

The quiz at the end: Arbitrary and annoying. It should not take three hours to cross a room that it would take five seconds to cover if there wasn't a boardgame in the way. The idea in itself isn't a bad one. But instant death on certain squares if you get a question wrong is just bad design. After over thirty retries I almost put the game down and deleted it.

Despite all the ranting though, and the fact that the last three levels were the kind drudgery that would make even Sisyphus feel sorry for you, for the most part, I still enjoyed my time with Banjo-Kazooie. It was whimsical and nice, even when it was testing my patience to the very limit. It wasn't the classic game I was looking for, but I'm glad I played it. It's sort of a badge of honour to say you hundred-percented Banjo Kazooie, and now that I know why, I'm proud to wear it.

I shall now be spending a bit of time with Beyond Good and Evil HD before starting Banjo-Tooie. Hopefully Rare will have tightened things up a bit for the sequel.

Call me Ishmael.

Not quite what I'm on about, but it fits the analogy quite nicely.

I've done it! I have harpooned my white whale. Although unlike in the famous novel from which the expression is taken, I have survived to tell the tale.

The gaming Moby-Dick to my Ahab is an incongruous one. A classic MegaCD game, purchased eighteen years ago from a bargain bucket in a ratty Cash Converters. It's hailed as a classic now, and fetches mega money on eBay if it's in good condition. You might know it as Sonic CD.

Over the years, although I cherish owning it, I've come to love and hate Sonic CD in equal measure. It's become a symbol of both my early good taste, and my complete inadequacy at certain kinds of game. I love it for its great soundtrack, its opening cinematic, its time travel mechanic. I even love it for giving us Amy Rose and its retina scorching special stages. I hate it for one infuriating, annoying, impassable level. Stardust Speedway Act 3. Or as those who haven't played Sonic CD know it, the level where you race Metallix.

How on earth is it possible that I became stuck on that one level for eighteen years? I don't know. The difficulty was extreme. The idea is that you race Metallix through the level to Amy, while all the time, you are chased by Robotnik in the Egg-O-Matic who is sweeping the ground behind you with some kind of terrifying beam weapon. Touch it and you die. Lose to Metallix and get shut out of the safe area at the end of the level, you die. Get too far ahead of Metallix and he chases you down with a charge attack. If you get hit by it, you lose not only rings, but valuable momentum. Then you get hit by the beam and die. On top of all of that, there are a whole slew of momentum killing obstacles and spikes, which, surprise surprise, make it really easy for you to die. I've played that level again and again, sometimes losing by just tenths of a second. I bashed my head against it from the time I bought the game until my parents bought me my PlayStation the following Christmas.

Over the following years, nostalgia, and a sense of burning injustice at the state of the universe led to a cycle of me periodically breaking out my MegaCD and trying my luck on Stardust Speedway Act 3. And every time, my patience would slowly get ground away until the only alternative to throwing my MegaCD over a motorway bridge was putting it away and trying my hardest to calm down. The cycle continued until I gave up altogether, and let go of all hope of ever getting to the end of the game sometime around 2008. My MegaCD remains boxed up, with that incomplete save, laughing at me from the top of my wardrobe.

"But," I hear you ask, "how on earth did you finish it, if  your save is still incomplete?" The answer of course is a re-release.

Sonic CD popped up on XBLA, and like an idiot, I downloaded the demo on release day. I liked how they'd updated it, but still kept the game underneath intact. It was widescreen, a couple of slowdown bugs had been fixed but those were really the only differences. Continuing to be an idiot, I bought it, thinking that perhaps the game had been rebalanced, and that this time around, things would be different.

A few hours later I got to Stardust Speedway Act 3. Things were no different. Moby-Sonic breached the waves with alarming aggression, sailed gracefully through the air and crashed down through the rigging of the ship of my hopes and dreams, smashing it to matchwood.

Sonic CD had defeated me again, and went back to being left in the vaults unplayed.

This was a state of affairs that continued until last week. I'd found myself bereft of games after packing everything up ready for my move. All that is left to play is what is inside my 360. And pretty much the only uncompleted full game in it was, you guessed it, Sonic CD. Faced with this unfortunate reality, I resolved that once and for all, that I would beat this goddamned game if it killed me. Cue two hours of furious, swear filled retries of the same two minute level. I lost count of the amount of times I ran out of lives, loaded my save and kept going. Which was something which was impossible on the MegaCD version. If you ran out of lives, your save took you back to the first act of the zone. In the end, after two hours of total, complete and utter failure I got lucky. A mistimed jump became one of those fortunate accidents that eventually become the stuff of legend. The number of pixels between me and my metallic nemesis as I passed the finish line could have been counted on one hand. But it didn't matter. I actually cheered, out loud, as eighteen years worth of failure and anguish poured out of me. I'm not sure it's actually possible to put a measure on the elation of that moment.

I had vanquished my white whale, and went on to complete the game on the same night. The final boss was curiously easy. I beat it at the first attempt. However happy I may have been though, the game still had the last laugh. I didn't have all of the timestones, and had to watch Dr. Robotnik fly away with them in the ending cinematic.

As far as I was concerned though, that didn't matter. The timestones could wait. I'd just beaten a game after eighteen years of trying.

Dreams can come true.

Well, this beats smack talk and shooting.

Another blogpost and another excuse for it being late.

I've been too busy playing games. Specifically one game. Magic the Gathering 2013. In a surprise twist of fate, Magic 2013 has turned out to have been one of the best free downloads I've ever been fortunate enough to come across. Say what you want about the age of the games Microsoft's Games for Gold programme, (and some of the games have been old) this old game was totally worth it. Not for the gameplay though, but for the experience of playing it with some of the friends for whom it happens have moved to abodes that are far from my own.

We took up Magic just after we finished college in 2002. It suddenly strikes me that that was ten years ago, but I digress. We played as often as we could whilst various members of the group worked rubbish jobs or slogged their way through university and enjoyed the whole thing an awful lot. We even went as far as holding a booster party, and at one point I spent upwards of fifty pounds in a futile attempt to build an unbeatable deck of the Bringers of the Five Dawns. Eventually though, people got better jobs, or finished university and moved away. The cards went back in the Half Life 2 Limited Edition tin and were broken out once in a blue moon out of nostalgia.

That all changed about six months ago with a random Magic based post on Facebook from a far flung friend with whom I had effectively lost contact. I commented on her post and eventually we wound up playing Magic over Skype while having a right old catch up at the same time. I lost miserably, but the experience was fantastic. I'd not only renewed a dormant friendship, but had also sparked my long dormant interest in Magic back to life. After then I played a few games more locally with friends and the spark remained. We weren't playing obsessively, but it was good fun all the same.

Then September rolled around and Magic 2013 came up as a free download. I contacted some of my old Magic playing friends to attempt to coax them out of card gaming retirement and we all downloaded it out of curiosity to see what it was like.

I have never had a better time playing online with friends as I have playing Magic 2013.

With everybody being apart and doing their own things now, getting us all together in one room can often be something akin to herding cats, but Magic 2013 has given us a way to spend some meaningful time together and just catch up without having to pull everyone into one room. The game itself is almost secondary. Without the high intensity environment of our usual go-to multiplayer games like Project Gotham 4 or Left 4 Dead, we've actually got time to chat with each other like civilised people, rather than calling bullshit on a dodgy overtake every five seconds. One session was enough to convince us that this was the best thing online since the invention of the mute button and we just kept playing. We're up to two nights a week now and have gotten to the point that we're considering spending money on expansion sets to switch things up a bit. The conversation is great, and the competition helps to add a little bit of spice to the sauce.

I even managed to convince my Skype Magic playing friend to get in on the action. She bought a gold subscription specifically to download the game and on Tuesday we spent the best part of five hours just playing and chatting. It's what online gaming should be all about; getting your mates together and chewing the fat like you were ten years old, sat on the floor in your parents' living room. Which is basically why I got the 360 in the first place. It's become my favourite way of keeping in touch with my friends.

Magic online is absolutely worth the price of entry, even though it's not free anymore. Skype is good, but it's only one to one. If you're a long way from home and you want to spend time with a group of friends without hopping on a train or a plane, there really is no better way of doing that than with an evening session of Magic.

Trust me on this.

What's To Cry About?

This post was supposed to go out last week, but I made the mistake of starting Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot while I was at my girlfriend's house. I played for a few hours but didn't complete it, so my lady wouldn't let me take it home. She was too engrossed in the story and wanted to see how it ended, which, I think, says a lot about Ninja Theory's skill as storytellers. I returned to her house last weekend and together, on the grey Sunday afternoon, we polished off the rest of the game. It was a great shared experience. My girlfriend loves Devil May Cry, but by her own admission, doesn't do well with games of that level of intensity. So I played, she watched and we both got to share and discuss what turned out to be a pretty good coming of age story. It was nice.

But what about the game?

I have a theory. Odd numbered DmC games are the good ones. Even numbered ones less so. DmC 1 was incredible. DmC 2 was, for intangible reasons that I can't quite explain, a bit bland. DmC 3 brought back the swagger and the fun. DmC 4, with it's backtracking and Metal Gear 2 style character switch, was for me personally, a bit of a miss. It felt like the beginnings of a decent into self parody. My hopes weren't high for the fifth and it turns out that neither were those of Capcom, who decided to reboot the series. The news raised the ire of the series' vocal fanboys, who promptly went into meltdown when the mugshot of the new Dante was released. He was young, skinny, had a black eye and horror of horrors, black hair! The internet erupted into cries of 'emo kid'.

The reality is nothing of the sort. Arrogant, unflappable, sardonic and giving absolutely zero shits about what you think about him, the new Dante's personality is every inch the equal to that of the old. What really the sets him off though, is the updated wardrobe and the way he holds himself. He's rougher round the edges than the old Dante and has a sort of predatory swagger about the way he walks. The cumulative effect of all this takes Dante from preening J-Rock idol, to grimy punk rocker. He's a triumph of character writing, design and animation. And he couldn't be further from being an emo kid.

Of course, Ninja Theory are renowned masters of character creation and animation, but with DmC, under the guidance of Capcom, they've taken it to a whole new level. Dante is absolutely believable as a person. He is beautifully animated, from his facial expressions, to his walk, to that little stagger at the end of a 3-hit Rebellion combo that makes the sword look just slightly too heavy for him and gives away his untutored fighting style. But all this nuance isn't just reserved for Dante. Every single member of the main cast is given the same treatment, and have been modelled and animated just as beautifully.

I've got to give out a special mention for Kat too, a rare gaming supporting actress who isn't just there as a glamorous accessory or love interest. While she isn't a fighter, she's a capable guide to limbo, a witch and a hacker, and is instrumental to Dante's growth as a character. While she shows some leg, she's sensibly dressed in shorts and a hoodie, no less than what a typical twenty something would wear in the summer. She's pretty without being eroticised, and that's really refreshing.

The world of Limbo City has been lavished with just as much attention as the game's cast. And it's gorgeous. With so many games having a colour palette that seems to be made of primarily grey and brown, looking at DmC is a revelation. As befits a game so obviously themed around demon slaying, the main colour of Limbo City is red. Lots and lots of red. The whole game is filled with colour, the opening few levels especially. The aforementioned reds dominate, but have to battle hard for screen space with the yellows and oranges. They bathe some of the most imaginative levels I've seen in some time, including, and not limited to, a theme park that tries it's hardest to kill you, the upside down world in the reflection on a river, a place full of 24 hour news channel graphics and a psychedelic Rez inspired nightclub gauntlet. Everywhere you go, the levels deform in real time, they twist and wrench and stretch as death threats project on to walls while Mundus sends his minions to take you out. The whole thing is a visual treat.

Of course all of this would be worth nothing if the combat system wasn't up to scratch, and thankfully it's more than good enough. It's as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Accessible and deep at the same time. It's all based around a few select button inputs, but since you can switch between three different melee weapons and your guns on the fly, even when you're mid combo, it never feels shallow. Different weapons have different moves from the same inputs, and such is the ease of changing, that you'll find yourself pulling off savage multi hit combos using each weapon two or even three times. It's not as complex as Bayonetta, but on the flipside of that, you can create a satisfying amount of carnage without having to learn ten or fifteen different sets of button inputs.

I've loved playing the new DmC. So much so that I'm on my second playthrough. And thankfully, it's proved that my theory on the odd numbered games is right. It's stellar in nearly every aspect. Only the slightly low default difficulty and the occasionally grating hardcore thrash metal and neurofunk soundtrack let it down, and even then, it's not a deal breaker. I ramped the difficulty level up to Nephilim at about the halfway point and soundtrack eventually began to grow on me. DmC is the final piece of this generation's holy trinity of brawlers. It sits proudly alongside Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising as a shining example of the genre. You should play it, even if you're one of the fans who swore to never touch it after the release of the mugshot. Feel free to criticise it, but do it through the lens of having played it first. Otherwise, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're doing yourself a grave disservice by wilfully missing out on a genuinely great game just because of a preconceived notion of what the lead character should look like.

Devil May Cry as a series had started to get stale by the fourth entry, and when a franchise goes stale, it dies. While the concept is timeless, the aesthetic was based on a dated idea of Cool, and it just wasn't anymore. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman. Devil May Cry had to change or die, and Capcom made a decision.

I think they made the right one.

Gotta Catch 'em All

We all know the Wii U isn't doing so well at the moment. Something which is mainly down to Nintendo launching its latest hardware without an entry of any of their major franchises. There have already been a lot of column inches dedicated to that issue, so I'm not going to add to them. What the Wii U needs is a killer app. Something that couldn't be done on any other console. So why not give the fans what they want and start work on the much requested Pokémon MMO? It would be a guaranteed system seller, especially if a copy was bundled in at the point of sale.

The Wii U is uniquely suited as a platform to a console MMO, with the GamePad adding DS functionality to the living room, the touch screen makes not just juggling menus, but in game communication much simpler than it would be on the PS3 for instance. Nintendo are also blessed with ownership of the Pokémon franchise, one of the most successful names in the business, and a set of games whose single player mechanics would translate very easily into an MMO. Combining the two would effectively be a licence to print money. So without further ado, I present my own hypothetical Pokémon Universe design document.

At its most basic level, the Pokémon MMO should contain every one of the regions that have appeared across the series' history, and all 649 Pokémon that would appear in those regions. Some Pokémon would have specific habitats just like real world animals, to encourage worldwide travel to Catch 'em All.

Getting into the game starts with character creation. Pick your gender and assemble your avatar from a variety of options to create a character that looks like you would if you'd stepped through the screen into the Pokémon anime. Obviously there should be a wealth of basic options, with new outfits unlockable as you work through the game as a mark of progression.

Now, we can't all come from Pallet Town because it would cause horrible congestion in the early stages of the game. So while creating a character, one of the options that needs to be picked is that of your hometown. You could choose any town from any region, from Cinnabar Island to Cerulean City in Kanto for instance. Whatever takes your fancy. Once the game begins, you find yourself in your hometown with instructions to get to the nearest post office to collect your Pokédex, freshly delivered from Prof. Oak's Mail Order Pokédex Co.

With your Pokédex in your backpack, the next task would be to take your pick of one of three starters from the local Pokémon centre. Starters depend on the region of the world your hometown is in. Hoenn starters would be different from Johto starters for instance. Once you have your first Pokémon, and a stash of pokeballs helpfully given to you by Nurse Joy to help get you started, you can venture out into the wide world and begin your journey to become a Pokémon master.

Wild Pokémon levels would not be able to steadily climb upwards as you get further away from your hometown like they do in the portable games because of the fact that every town in Pokémon Universe can be somebody's hometown. As a result, out on the field there would be no random battles. Wild Pokémon levels would be widely variable to account for trainers of greatly different strengths being in the area, having travelled from all over the world. You can pick your battles as levels will be shown hovering above any wild Pokémon you see.

Of course, the real meat of any Pokémon game is battling other trainers, and again, this being an MMO, trainer strengths would not be able to steadily increase as the player progresses like they do in the core titles. To help level the playing field, every trainer is assigned to a division based upon the average level of the Pokémon in your squad by the Pokémon League. New trainers start in the lowest division and climb to a higher one each time they defeat a gym leader from the division that they are ranked in. Out in the field, you can offer to battle anybody, but the trainer in the lower division can chose to decline a battle if he or she wants. This should help avoid the new trainers being constantly demolished by old hands.

The aim of the game is still to beat each region's gym leaders and take on the regional elite four, with the goal of defeating each region's elite four to become a world Pokémon champion. Each gym will have a leader for each division, and players can join a monthly divisional tournament to reign as gym leader for a certain division. Since gym leaders only use one type of Pokémon, tournaments will also have a type restriction. Once you have been a gym leader for the lv50+ division, you can enter a monthly elite four tournament. The winner of that tournament is the elite four champion, with the four runners up assigned as the regional elite four. A tournament of elite four champions could be open to determine the champion of champions.

Elsewhere there should be plenty of side quests. You could go fossil hunting and try to resurrect yourself an Aerodactyl. You could choose to join Team Rocket. NPCs in towns would offer story based quests, often based around stories from the Pokémon anime. There would, of course, be trading, breeding, and versions of the many mini games that have appeared throughout the franchise history. There would be a stadium for those players who just wanted to battle or for those who just fancy spectating on a huge rumble. You could go hunting for legendary Pokémon. There would obviously be more than one of each, this being an MMO, but would still be super rare. Perhaps you need a special pokeball to be able to catch them, only available after defeating a regional elite four. A major sidequest would be photography, using the GamePad as a camera a la Pokémon snap, creating pictures that could be shared in a gallery or in the MiiVerse. You could even ride larger Pokémon as mounts, like a less conventional version of the famous Pokémon bicycle. The possibilities are wide and varied.

Obviously there are one or two hurdles that would need to be overcome. Voice chat and moderation would be the biggest of these, especially with Nintendo's obvious need to keep things safe for the kids. Although it's not insurmountable. Perhaps Nintendo could lock voice chat to people who have shared friend codes, with communication with others in the vein of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, through certain text phrases and a set of symbols.

A Pokémon MMO would work, and most importantly, would sell a boatload of Wii Us. We'd all like to see one, and perhaps, if we're lucky, we might even get one. Do it for the fans Nintendo. We'd play the hell out of it. Bring us the Pokémon MMO and wipe away the debt.

PS. Mr Iwata, if you see this and would like to use it. I'd like 1% commission on the profits please!

Wiped Out

It has just come to my attention via Twitter (thanks @AmiNakajima) that it has been a year since the closure of Studio Liverpool and the hopefully impermanent death of WipeOut. I personally think that ending the WipeOut franchise and laying off the staff of Studio Liverpool was one of the worst decisions Sony ever made. However, this post is an excuse for me to get misty eyed, not lambast Sony on a corporate decision.

Wipeout 2097 is, for me at least, the game that started it all. The moment where games ceased to be just toys and became something more. It was January 1997 I was in year 8 at school. I was over at a friend's house for the first time since Christmas. He'd got a  PlayStation and told me that it had arrived with something amazing. It was exciting. We both had MegaDrives and we initially connected over a love of Sonic 2.

I had a MegaCD too. Dad got it just after the PlayStation was first released because he thought it was pretty much the same thing. Up until that point, the most technically advanced game I'd ever played was Thunderhawk, which was and still is awesome and you should play it.

Anyway, back to WipeOut. My friend fired up his new PlayStation and I heard that famous Bwoaaaarr-tinkle for the very first time, then the swoosh-ting of the PlayStation logo. All of a sudden, there was FMV. Full screen FMV! Not in a tiny window like on my MegaCD. There was a weird cat thing, a sweep over a racetrack then BOOM. Two racing ships flew though an explosion and an utterly banging song dropped in. I still remember the size of my grin and how wide my eyes were. This was like nothing I'd seen or heard before. Hitherto unknown synapses were firing in my brain.

That song... It did strange things to my twelve year old mind.

The main menu slammed into the screen to the sound of another explosion. Loops of Fury by the Chemical Brothers played in the background. My friend wasted no time, before I knew it there was a strangely shaped pad in my hands, I was on the startline of Talon's Reach and I could hear the distinctive wailing guitar line of Firestarter by the Prodigy. I was struck by how effortlessly cool this all was, and by how I shouldn't really be listening to what I was listening to. There was a bit of a moral panic surrounding the Prodigy at the time. They were a dangerous band, my mom was up in arms about them, it just made everything feel even cooler.

My first race went badly. I remember it being almost uncontrolably fast. I bounced off walls and got left in the dust by the other ships. At the same time I was still in the throes of that 'this is the most amazing thing in the history of ever' feeling. The speed was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever experienced, the graphics far and away the best I'd ever seen, the ships felt like they really were floating, the weapons hit hard, and the music was incredible.

All this from one race at vector class. I was impressionable and easily amazed at that age.

I was hooked. We passed the pad around for about three hours, right up until the moment my dad came to get me. In time, I gradually began to master the handling and we managed to get up to the heady heights of venom class. Dad bought me home buzzing and I told him I wanted, nay, needed a PlayStation. We weren't that well off when I was a kid. I got a PlayStation with WipeOut 2097 the following Christmas. My parents had been saving for it all year.

There were other games, but none had the effect that WipeOut had on me. My nacent musical taste formed around it, I discovered new artists with each instalment and gained a love of music that I retain to this day. It introduced me to The Designer's Republic and the concept of graphic design, leading to two years at college as a fairly rubbish art student trying and failing to replicate the game's minimalist aesthetic. Zone mode taught me about the buzz that only extreme speed can give, and along with Road Rash, is one of the main reasons I own a sports motorcycle that is far to fast for my own good. Most importantly though, and I've said this earlier, WipeOut showed me that games can be far more than just fancy toys. They have their own culture around them. WipeOut bought my loyalty to the PlayStation brand and shaped the way I play games.

I owned a PS1 because of 2097. I still play Wip3Out sporadically. Even though I never actually got Fusion, I still bought my PS2 because the demo I played of it blew my mind. I bought a PSP because of Pure, then bought Pulse on release day. And even though circumstance meant I got an 360 to stay in touch with my gaming mates more easily when they moved away, I still created a PSN account, got WipeOut HD and Fury on my housemate's PS3, then wound up playing on his console more than he actually did. The only reason I didn't buy a Vita after thirty seconds of 2048 is because I couldn't afford it at that very moment. It made me very sad.

WipeOut is PlayStation. The PS4 will have a huge gap in it's library without it. I'd have a huge gap in my life without it. Maybe I'd even be a slightly different person, such is that one game's influence upon me. Hopefully the WipeOut franchise doesn't stay gone for long.

And now, something a little different.

I return! From a week's holiday on the Jurassic Coast. And I return with an urge to try something a little different. Not too different though, this is a games blog after all, although this post will perhaps stretch the definition a little. Outside of playing games all the time, I'm a big music fan, and I'm beginning to find myself owning a couple of videogame OSTs. Before I started the blog, I'd always wanted to try writing an album review, and here I find myself with an opportunity.

I'm a big fan of Bastion. Its beautiful art style, story, soundtrack and narrator come together to create a game with a unique bluesy atmosphere. An atmosphere that manages to overcome the title's slightly repetitive dungeon crawler gameplay. It's a game that it's just enjoyable to spend time with, whilst you have a story told to you by a man with a voice so smooth, it feels like he's having sex with your ears while wearing a condom made of the finest blue velvet.

The greatest contribution to the feel of Bastion is made by its unique soundtrack. I liked it so much that I asked for the album for Christmas.

Open the beautifully adorned case and slide the CD out of its sleeve, into the stereo and touch Play. The CD spins up and the hollow sound of someone playing the blues on an acoustic guitar in the background spills from the speakers. After a couple of chords, you are greeted by the honeyed tones of Logan Cunninghan as Rucks on Get Used To It. He delivers a short monologue on how 'the folks of Caelondia could really carry a tune' then the strumming drops away and the track cuts to the breathless minute and a bit of strumming, hammer-ons and pull-offs of A Proper Story.

If Get Used To It and A Proper Story serve as the introduction to the album, it is the third track, In Case of Trouble that really sets the tone of the rest of the disc. It begins with a lone guitar playing a mellowed variation of a prominent guitar lick from the previous track. The song begins to build as the sound of a Cello swells in to accompany the guitar, and before you know it, composer Darren Korb has layered in strings and a complex yet sympathetically programmed beat that sounds for everything like it was pounded out on wood blocks.

That wood block beat is an early pointer at the instrumental range of this album. Either Korb is an outrageously talented multi instrumentalist, or he is a fabulously talented synth programmer. I suspect it's actually a combination of both, and while the core of most of the songs is based around guitar, the sheer number of other instruments in use, as well as the various guitar effects and tunings, merits comment. There are hazy opium den sitars over a reverb drenched blues lead, backed by something that sounds for everything like a harpsichord on The Sole Regret. On Slinger's Song a banjo played with a slide teases out a riff over a spaghetti western guitar accompaniment and subtle pulsing bass. Elsewhere, there are furiously played strings, Indian tabla drums, wailing overdriven guitars and something that sounds suspiciously like a harp. And that's just for starters. There are all manner of sounds on here from instruments I couldn't hope to name. It's hard to believe this is all the work of one man recording in his flat.

I would go as far to say that it is this sheer sonic diversity is what makes this album a compelling listen in its own right, not just as a good videogame OST. It's endlessly interesting.

 

Of course, any discussion of the Bastion OST wouldn't be complete without mention of it's twin centrepieces, Build That Wall and Mother, I'm here. A pair of ballads as stripped back as it is possible to be, just a lone voice and a guitar. They are sung from the perspective of two characters in the game, one, a folk song about the differences between the two peoples of Caelondia, the other, the voice of an outcast yearning to return home. The two songs are beautiful, and as good as anything by any mainstream artist.

 

One final mention goes to The Pantheon, a good old fashioned blues number with Logan Cunningham's buttery voiced Rucks on lead vocals. It's a fantastically strong way to close out the album, with Rucks sounding almost like a gravellier Chris Rea.

 

I love this album, and would heartily recommend it to any music fan be they gamer or no. Every track has something different to offer and you notice more and more with repeated listens. Buy the game, play it through and soak in its world. Then buy the album and let its sounds take you back there.

 

Three thumbs up.

Farewell Phil. We'll miss you.

How can you hate a person who created something so awesome?

So that's it then. The trolls have won. Phil Fish has cancelled Fez II and is leaving the industry. All because of a sustained campaign of hate by a vocal minority who for some unknown reason, see fit to call themselves 'gamers'. Why do we allow the worst of our community to have the loudest voices and ruin it for the rest of us? Not only that, why do we allow these people to perpetuate the negative stereotypes of people who would rather partake of something interactive for a couple of hours after work rather than switch off their brains and watch gloom and doom soap operas all night?

I love Fez. It's one of my favourite games of this generation. No title that I have played in the last five years has given me such a wide eyed sense of discovery with every new screen or been as full of genuine whimsy as Fez. Nor has any other game had such a unique central mechanic. I was excited to see where Polytron would take the sequel. I was excited about the prospect of new worlds, new discoveries and evolved play mechanics. Now, thanks to a few self righteous asshats, I'll never have the chance.

Sure, Phil Fish was abrasive. But personally I found him entertaining. He's brusque, forthright, and unfiltered, and he was, up until last night at least, perfectly happy to stand up to his detractors. If you don't like that, then so what? Stay away from his Twitter feed. It's not difficult. I was bought up to just not associate myself with people I don't like, not persistently hound someone anonymously over the internet until you force them to stop doing something they love just so they can escape the constant abuse. We had a word for that at school. Bullying. And just because you're not in school anymore, it doesn't mean the description doesn't apply.

Depending on your perspective, Trolls live under bridges and eat goats, or they're a species made of rock who get a bit thick when it gets hot because their brains are made of silicon. They don't fill the internet with anonymous hate. It's time we stopped associating self righteous, hate filled, abusive assholes with fictional creatures and started calling them what they really are. Bullies.

They're winning and we shouldn't be allowing them to. And now they've forced one of the few genuine innovators out of the games industry because they've taken umbrage over his personality. So here's what I have to say to them.

Thanks for killing a potentially great game. I hope you're real fucking proud of yourselves, wankstains.

Who doesn't like powerslides?

Okay, it's not powersliding, but I love classic Ford Escorts. So the picture stays.

Ever wondered why arcade racers like Project Gotham, Ridge Racer, Sega Rally, Outrun, or Mario Kart are so much more fun than a more realistic racing sim in the vein of Gran Turismo? One word. Powerslides. Long, lustrous, countersteery drifts. Think about it. There are very few feelings in gaming that are more satisfying than the sense of reward garnered from wrestling a pretend car with far too much power around a tight corner in a maelstrom of squealing tyres, protesting engines and tyre smoke.

It makes you feel like a driving god.

As far as I understand, Namco are the people who understood this first. They may not have been, it was more than likely SEGA, given their history of arcade innovation, but Ridge Racer is certainly the first racer that I played where drifting was the central mechanic, and nobody, as far has I am concerned has done drifting better. The feeling of the car pivoting around the front wheels while the rear wheels lose traction is better in Ridge Racer than in any other arcade racer. Only Sega Rally comes close. It may not be realistic, but it sure as hell is a lot of fun.

So why can't that sort of thing translate into a sim?

It's a question I've been asking myself since I worked my way through Gran Turismo 2 and continued asking as I worked my way through Gran Turismo 4 then Forza 3. Like many people, I'd come to think of racing sims as fun yet sterile. All four wheels in line, point the car and press the accelerator, braking occasionally when a turn came up. And worst of all, no big drifts unless you do something really silly. When you do get a drift on, the revs drop and slow you down as the tyres bite or the game hooks in another gear and the car snaps back into line.

Not very exciting really.

Then I bought Forza 4, and disappointed with the experience, I started delving into the menus. I don't actually know how many people have found this out for themselves, probably everyone but me, but it turns out that I'd been missing so much.. Are you having those fun killing problems from revs dropping with a big drift? Turn off the traction control! Game hooks in a new gear when you're spinning up? Turn off the automatic gears. You're not an old dear behind the wheel of a Nissan Micra, you're a twenty something racer behind the wheel of a digital Skyline. Start acting like it. If you've never turned off the driver aids before, you absolutely have to give it a go. It's transformative.

Turn off the driver aids and begin to rely on your skills as a gamer and Forza 4 becomes a whole new game. With the driver aids on, something modest (in gaming terms) like a TVR Tuscan is a relative pussycat. Turn them off and, I'm not exaggerating here, that pussycat of a Tuscan mutates into a fire breathing monster. One that is absolutely intent on killing you. Cornering in a Tuscan with the traction control off is a hair raising experience. It's like four wheeled ballet. Brake to the apex, the weight transfers to the front wheels, turn in and the rear end immediately breaks traction and spins up. The revs climb and there's no TC to back it off, the control is all under your trigger finger. Gas it, let the wheels spin and countersteer. With a bit of practice you can hover at the very edge of control, balancing the car on the throttle over the cavernous precipice of a spin. It's exhilarating, and crucially, it results in beautiful Ridge Racer style powerslides out of the corner.

And as we all know, powerslides are the basis of all racing game fun.

Manual gears are crucial of course. You don't want the game changing gear when the car hits the redline do you? It'll end your glorious powerslide. People worry with manual that they won't know when to change gears. You will. Do you drive a car? Then it's instinctive. Even if you don't and you've just played a lot of racers, you'll know by the sound when to change. You've been listening to games doing it for you for perhaps hundreds of hours, it'll be down in your subconcious somewhere. If you're worried about when to change down when you're braking, think of it like this. If you're on the brakes, change down, it's as simple as that. If you're braking really hard, change down again. You may not be instantly good at it, but with practice, it becomes second nature.

If I haven't said this enough already, turning off the driver aids will transform a racing sim and make it as rewarding and enjoyable as any powersliding arcade racer out there. It takes some practice, but if you've ever finished in first place in any racing game, then it's not beyond you and the payoff for all the practice is so, so worth it. I've found out that racing sims aren't any less fun than arcade racers. I've just been playing them all wrong.

How hard is too hard?

Ever had the Rage? That all consuming wave of anger that makes you tear the Stuntman disc from your PS2 and Frisbee it out of the window? This is a thing that has happened to me. Truth. The same anger made me stomp into the garden to retrieve the offending circle of plastic, roughly dust it off and then shove it back into the PS2 with my fingers crossed, hoping that it would still be readable. Thankfully it was, and I persevered for another two hours, remembering the route, traffic patterns, speeds and instructions that would give me the precision skills to finally beat a level that stretched to five minutes long at most. Two hours.

I learned something important that day, how to channel the rage. There are a lot of unforgivably difficult games out there and I have a bit of a weakness for them. I spend hours with them, getting ever more precise until I finally crack that one section that's giving me grief, before doing the same again on the next. Most infamous among these games at the moment for me is Trials Evolution, but the same thing applies to most of the really difficult games I've played through, from R-Type to Ikaruga, to Shinobi, Stuntman, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Vanquish, Geometry Wars, Comic Jumper or 'Splosion Man. And whilst I now rarely get to disc Frisbeeing levels of anger anymore it can still happen. 'Splosion Man's final boss in particular was so cheap it had me wanting to headbutt my way through a wall. But the rules still applied. Persevere, finish the game and then shout, "YOU LOSE!" at the developers, because that moment is what it's really all about. That moment of triumph where you feel like you've got one over on the twisted minds who have been torturing you for so long with their impossible yet oh so addictive game. There really is no feeling like it.

So in the right circumstances, difficulty is fun, if perhaps for a given value of fun. Or maybe instead, it's what is necessarily endured before you can enjoy the feeling of gratification that sweeps over you when you finally nail the level. If you're a gamer like me, who came up through the 8 and 16-bit eras, a certain amount of difficulty might even be expected, but there are times when the it can become a total turn off. Times when I'm not ashamed at all to say I'm playing on easy or normal modes. Those times are when story gets involved.

I still haven't beaten Final Fantasy X, a game known as one of the hardest in the series. JRPGs tell stories. It's what they are best at. As games, they mostly boil down to clicking through menus, but that's OK, because if you're anything like me, if you're playing a JRPG you aren't really there for the game. I was enjoying FFX to a point. It's a great story, beautifully told, but god is it hard. Being a book nerd, story trumps gameplay for me every time, I may like a challenging game, but I love being told a story. Sadly the difficulty of FFX started to get in the way of me enjoying the story around the point of the Zanarkand Cloister. I'd been trying all night to beat the boss there, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't. I put the game down and sadly, never went back. I know I'm right near the end, and weirdly, after all these years I've still not had the ending spoiled, so I have no clue about what happens next. I should probably pick it up again really.

Anyway, from then on I've consciously dialled down the difficulty of any games I'm playing where story is a major factor. I've just finished Catherine, and at the recommendation of the friend who lent it to me, I played it on easy. I'm not afraid to admit that. The game itself is still pretty difficult though, which makes me wonder about just how hard normal mode is. Crucially though, it's not so difficult as to get in the way of Catherine's downright fantastic story, and that's important. I'd much rather be digesting Catherine's musings on the nature of relationships than wracking my brains over it's complex block puzzles. The same applied to Bioshock Infinite, a game that I'm given to gushing over at every possible opportunity. I've completed it twice now, and even at normal difficulty (the level I played it at) it gets pretty hard pretty quickly. Finishing Bioshock once unlocks 1999 mode, which pretty much equates as, "the way games used to be mode." The thing is, I stayed away from 1999 mode, even though I was on my second playthrough. The reason was simply because there is so much to take in aside from the combat that the extra difficulty would divert my attention away from what I was trying to get out of the game. Namely, making sense of the game's events through the lens of a second playthrough. Now I know the story inside out, I may yet test my mettle against 1999 mode and let Bioshock's story take the back seat for a change.

Persona 4 is another good example of this. The game is continually demolishing me on the last floor of the second dungeon. The difficulty has got in the way of me progressing the plot, so I've stopped enjoying it and have had to put the game down and take a break. I really like where Persona 4 is going though, and that makes me want to see it through to the end, so I'm going to have to pick it back up eventually.

It seems that sometimes, difficulty can make or break a game. Personally I find that the purer and more pared back a game becomes, the more I'm willing to accept punishing difficulty and the more attractive the game becomes to me as a result. But when the game starts to deal with more complex issues, for example, relationships, commitment and oncoming fatherhood in the way that Catherine does, that same punishing difficulty can turn me off. I've spoken to a few gaming mates about this, and they feel the same. It's by no means a definitive study, but it does sort of confirm that I'm not just being fussy.

Not that any of that matters at the moment, because I'm back at the wall of pure and relentlessly difficult games, furiously bashing my forehead against a small, pink segment of bricks labelled Ms Splosion Man. I'm hating it for half of the time I'm spending on it. But I'm loving the other half.

Why on earth do I like doing this to myself?

Welcome To The Grown Up Gamer's Fantasy Arcade

Image borrowed from IGN.com



I've been witnessing a lot of love for arcade games lately. Both among my mates and in various corners of the Internet that I visit. It got me wondering what I'd put in my own fantasy arcade. Soon enough a blog post idea popped up and I started typing. So without further ado; behold! My fantasy arcade!

First of all there needs to be a pinball machine. It has nothing to do with them being the roots from which arcades sprang, although that is nice to know. The presence of a pinball machine is more about the fact that I just love playing them when I can find them. I always have. I even made one for my junior school open day once. Anyway, although I'm a scholar of neither Star Wars or pinball in general, I'd want a Star Wars pinball machine. There may have been a lot of Star Wars pinball machines, I can't be sure, but the one I'd want has a Vader helmet in the top right corner. I have fond memories of whiling away a week of kids entertainment nights while I was on holiday as a spotty teenager one year with the Star Wars pinball machine on the campsite. It ate a month's worth of paper round money.

So, with the pinball machine sitting on the throne in pride of place on the Cool Wall, who comes next? The classics of course! I can't really lay claim to playing many pre 90's arcade games, or pre 90's games in general. I was six when the Mega Drive was released in the UK, and I didn't get my own until I was around ten. But still, like almost everyone, I've been to tiny pubs on holiday as a kid that had a battered Space Invaders or Pac Man cab in the corner of the room with the Pool table in it. Most awesome among those almost forgotten days was the place with the table top system. You know the type. Just a table with a monitor set vertically under a glass top and a joystick on one side. You could put your can of coke on it while you played games! It blew my tiny pre teen mind. So in deference to those rose tinted days, my fantasy arcade is celebrating the arrival of it's modern day progeny. A MAME cocktail table system, and a bunch of barstools to go around it. That way, I can play almost any 2D arcade game I can think of, with a special emphasis on Pac Man, 1942, and Super Puzzle Fighter. It's like retirement accommodation for still sprightly old games who like to get out and get their funk on every now and then. Anything that can't be played on the tabletop MAME will hopefully be covered by the Neo-Geo cab and a whole bunch of interchangeable carts that lives next door to the Pinball machine. Now we have the classics catered for and a place to congregate all in one handy package. Time to get into the real meat of the arcade now.

I'm going to warn you here, the following list of dream purchases is going to have a fairly heavy SEGA bias. Mainly down to the fact that SEGA games seemed to be everywhere when I was going to arcades as a teenager. The games also seem to have been anthropomorphised too.

First into the arcade, handbrake turning into Racer's Corner with a stunning blonde lady in the passenger seat, is Outrun, because it's got a great soundtrack and is endlessly replayable. It's followed closely by SEGA Rally 2, a game that needs no introduction and one of the titles that taught me all about the importance of countersteering. Powersliding in closely behind and parking next door in a haze of tyre smoke is Riiiiidge Raceeerrrr! Namco's rubber burning gift to the arcade world. Taking fourth place on the racing grid is the awesome Manx TT. The proper rig with two leaning bikes so you can race a buddy. Taking fifth is B.D. Joe and the rest of the crew of Crazy Taxi. By preference, I'd go for Crazy Taxi 3, because it has three cities to choose from, and it lets you use the Crazy Hop in it's version of San-Francisco. Yu Suzuki's wonderful three screen F355 Challenge idles on it's grid spot in sixth, confident that the awesome power of it's three NAOMI boards will power it to the front of the pack. Bringing up the rear, on account of it's enormous weight, is a full blown 8 player setup of Daytona USA 2. Finally, showing up despite being disqualified from the grid of Racer's Corner on account of not actually having any wheels, is the frankly ludicrous Star Wars Racer Arcade with the full scale replica of Anakin's Pod. Purely because piloting a Pod Racer is awesome.

With the grid complete, attention turns to the Fighter's Dojo, where seven champion warriors have burst through the door and have begun sparring on the mats. Super Street Fighter IV eyeballs his big sister, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, from across the floor. SFIII takes no notice, as she is in the middle of an explosive throwdown with Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus. Soul Calibur V whirls her swords around in the corner while Tekken Tag 2 and Virtua Fighter 5 chat about their glory days at the forefront of the 3d fighting genre. Watching all of this from the doorway, and silently working out ways to brutally murder them all is Ultimate Mortal Kombat III.

Over at the fun wall, four Player Virtua Tennis 2 has a riotous game of mixed doubles tearing up the Wimbledon lawn. Dance Dance Revolution and Time Crisis are camping it up and wondering why everyone is being so serious. Afterburner buzzes the carrier for the n'th time trying to get the attention of Prop Cycle, but she's not interested. Instead, she leans in and whispers something sarcastic into Bishi Bashi's ear while Point Blank, Jurassic Park: The Lost World and House of the Dead 2 have a gun twirling contest with the safeties off.

Back over on the cool wall the cool-guy shoot em ups huddle protectively around Parodius: Fantastic Journey, the arcade's sunny and boundlessly happy special educational needs kid. Ikaruga and the R-Type brothers say she's one of them, no matter how different she is. Gradius III and Darius are inclined to agree, even though Gradius thinks that Fantastic Journey is actually far more normal than she's letting on and is secretly taking the mickey out of him.

The lights come on, the entrance doors open and the machines settle down into attract mode. Welcome to the Grown Up Gamer's Fantasy Arcade...

Half-Life: The Third

So there's been a new spate of Half-Life 3 conspiracy theories has there? The gaming tinfoil hat brigade is seeing messages in totally unrelated non Valve developed independent games released through Steam you say? You spotted medical records for someone called Gordon Freeman on the receptionist's counter at the speech therapists your child attends?

Please tell me more.

Half-Life, along with it's sequel and their various expansions are great, great games. Games that others are compared unfavourably to. Games that, in the bright future where gaming has ascended into the realms of high culture alongside literature, ballet and opera, will be looked back upon and analysed as the catalyst for gaming's acceptance into the arty farty cultural circles. Games we will tell our grandchildren we bought on release day to impress them, whether we actually did or not. Games whose sequels we will patiently wait for and speculate about until we are old and grey.

Valve notoriously take their time when crafting Half-Life titles from the raw digital firmament. They don't rush. They take their time to get it right and the games appear when they are finished or not at all. It's a mantra that served them famously well with Half-Life 2. We waited ages, heard nothing, but we were given something amazing for our patience. Now Valve are doing it again.

The conspiracy theories show up to fill the vacuum of information. And information, I'm sure, is what any Half-Life fan is craving so long after the cliffhanger ending of Episode 2. We need to know what the grub like Advisors have to do with all this. We need to know what the deal is with that Aperture Science ship. We need to know if there's a version of GlaDOS on said ship. Most of all, we need to know if Alyx will be ok after the death of her Father.

Valve left us with so many questions. They told us the episodes came from the need to shorten the development cycle. They said there would be a third. Then they changed their mind. Valve lied to us, and we told ourselves it would be ok. Half-Life 3 would be here soon. It would answer all our questions. The years have passed, and we're still patiently waiting. If you're anything like me, you'll keep waiting until the day that Valve spring a release date on us.

I sometimes find myself wishing that Valve would continue the story with an ebook release. Something to tide us over whilst we wait for the main event. I applied some proper thought to it today, and realised that it probably wouldn't be much of a read, as so much of what makes Half-Life so effective is down to the level that the player inhabits the game's infamously silent protagonist. Here are a couple of imaginary sample passages to show you what I mean.

She cradled Ely in her arms and looked up at Gordon through her tears. "My father is dead," sobbed Alyx.

Gordon crouched down to her. Gravity gun in hand. He said nothing.
----
"We're approaching the Borealis." called Alyx, "Be careful down there. I heard everyone in Aperture's underground facility was murdered by their psychotic passive-aggressive AI. It released a deadly neurotoxin into the ventilation system and told them that it was doing so because they were all adopted. There might be a copy of the AI on board that ship."

Gordon looked down at the ship. He was silent.
----
The Advisor's voice arrived fully formed in Gordon's mind, "Is this your vengeance? This? You are little more than a puppet, a puppet whose strings are pulled by a being of which you know nothing. And I'm not talking about the G-Man."

Gordon scowled at the Advisor, then fired the gravity gun, impaling it with the iron pipe he'd been carrying. The Advisor's question went unanswered. 
----

It's a bit one sided isn't it. All because of Gordon's silence. There really is no other way to continue the story, other than with another game. It couldn't work with any other medium. I'm starting to think that Gordon Freeman is actually a mute. He doesn't speak because he actually can't speak, rather than because he doesn't want to speak. At the very least, that would explain why all the supporting cast are so comfortable with his silence. They all know about his problem and don't ask questions because they know he physically cannot answer them. If we really think about it, Gordon Freeman is really on of the few famous disabled videogame protagonists. He's a mute particle physicist who doesn't let his inability to speak affect his interpersonal relations or his formidable prowess with a crowbar. It's quite inspiring really.

It'd be a real turn up if eventually Valve release Half-Life 3, and they tell us that Gordon really is a mute particle physicist who doesn't let his inability to speak affect his interpersonal relations or his formidable prowess with a crowbar. The way things are going at the moment, it's plausible. But I suppose we won't find out until Valve reward our patience and grace us with Half Life's third.

P.S It wouldn't surprise me if my mute Gordon ponderings wind up in a Half-Life conspiracy theory further down the line. In fact, I kind of hope they do.

My brief spell as an achievement whore

 

This generation bought about a new term for a certain type of completist gamer. Achievement Whore. It's fairly safe to say that I'm not one. There is a grand total of two games that I have all the achievements for. Bastion and The Walking Dead. Both of which are titles that you sort of 100% by default.

I try and finish every game that comes into my possession, but I don't have to finish them. By which I mean, if I get a game, I'll play it through to the end of the story scenario, perhaps I'll do it twice, but I won't go out of my way to find absolutely every collectible or obtain every achievement. Although I do make an exception for any secret or collectable that further enhances the story or setting of the game I'm playing. A good example being Vincent and Yuffie in Final Fantasy VII, Bioshock audio logs or the evidence in Max Payne 3.

Things might be changing.

If you read my last post, you'll know I'm practically out of games, and I'm delving into my library to find titles to squeeze some extra replay value out of. At the moment, said title is Sonic Generations. Certified 'Bestest Sonic game since Adventure 2'. My girlfriend bought it for me on release, and I played it to death, or at least I though I had. I blitzed through the single player and enjoyed a thrilling rivalry on the leaderboards with my best friend. At one point, we were both ranked in the top 20 on Sky Sanctuary act 1, such was the intensity of our competition. And as the times tumbled, the rivalry intensified until eventually, new games came along and Sonic fell to the wayside. As it happens, when I checked last night, I'm still ranked 46 on Sky Sanctuary. Not bad considering nearly a year has passed since I last ran a time attack there.

But that was before I ran out of current gen games. I fired Generations back up last week and was shocked at how much I had missed. Trivial things like S ranks on the action stages or setting a time on every level over xbox live. I vowed to rectify this, so I did. The S ranks stacked up and an achievement popped up. It sparked an unexpected flash of satisfaction. Eager for more, I rooted around the hub world to see what else I'd missed. There were challenges, and they unlocked cool concept art. Art is a reward in itself, so I spent a couple of nights dispatching the challenge mode. It wasn't as fun as blitzing through the action stages in the flow state that a really hot run of a Sonic stage induces, but still, the challenges were fun in their own way, and there was art coming as a result. ART! Another achievement popped up on completion of the last challenge, and another hit of satisfaction followed. I wanted more. Then came the momentary horror of realising that I'd descended into achievement whoredom. I cast it aside. I didn't care. Doing superfluous stuff was getting me in game rewards. I was hooked.

Gaps remained in my collectible collection, there were songs and art missing. The last things that needed finding in game were the red rings. So I spent last night finding them, reaping the rewards as I did. I get the feeling that the red rings are included as an incentive to slow down for a moment, explore the handiwork of Sonic team and drink in the still impressive graphics and art design. It's been well documented that the sheer speed of a Sonic game demands a lot of work from its developers. Some of the later stages with modern Sonic are something like twenty kilometres long. That's a lot of hard work that just gets ignored if you blast through at top speed, and the need for their effort to be appreciated is the reason that the much derided Warehog sections were included in Sonic Unleashed. The Warehog was a mistake, but the rewards offered by the red rings are a great reason to rein in the speed for a bit. When you do, you can really see just how gorgeous the worlds crafted by Sonic Team really are. It's a win for everyone.

With the red rings collected, I suddenly found myself with three achievements popping up. Three! Cue a wave of satisfaction. Grinning, I checked the achievement list to see how many remained. Imagine my surprise when I found out there was only one left. The thing I like about the way achievements work in Sonic Generations is the way they can be obtained by just playing everything the game has to offer. You don't need to do any of the weird, cryptic tasks that you need to gain achievements like you have to in some the other titles I own. Stuff like that is part of why I am turned off from achievements to start with.

That last achievement, you ask? Beat the final boss without taking a hit. Difficult, but probably not impossible. And you know what? I'm actually going to attempt it. If this was any other game, I wouldn't bother, but I'm not this close to a full achievement list for any other game in my library and I'm genuinely excited about getting 100% completion on a title through my own effort, rather than by default, like I have in Bastion and The Walking Dead. What's happening to me? Will it stay happened if once I do get that last achievement?

When I think about it, going out of my way to get 100% completion on one game doesn't really make me a proper completist. But it has given me an insight into the sense of satisfaction a completist gamer must get when they work their way through a game's achievement list. It's intoxicating, and I suppose it can be addictive. Still, I don't think I'll be going out of my way to finish the achievement lists of any of my other games.

So, I'm more than likely not an achievement whore. Not yet at least. I can be something of a graphics whore though, but that's another blogpost.

Ending the neglect.

The blog has taken a serious ignoring from me of late. It's my own fault really, and I thought that I had better explain myself.

It all started, as these things usually do, with a borrowed game. I'd just come off the back of my second run of Bioshock Infinite, and I was looking for something to play. At the same time, I was getting ranted at by my best mate because I'd had his copy of Catherine for something like six months and hadn't touched it. So I bowed to his will and finally slipped Catherine into my disc tray.

What. A. Game.

If you haven't played it, I urge you to go find a copy and fire it up as soon as you're done with The Last of Us, or any other major new release you're playing. Don't expect high octane thrills though. Catherine is a slow burning and thoroughly grown up game, dealing with adult themes like commitment, infidelity, jealousy, fatherhood, and yes, even a bit of sex. And that's before you get to some of the deep seated psychological traumas experienced by the supporting cast. It's tautly written, beautifully voice acted and looks and animates like a top quality Anime. Best of all, the game has a proper morality system that, if you answer truthfully, can surprisingly accurately gauge the kind of person you are. It's spooky.

If you've heard anything about Catherine at all, you'll know the meat of the game itself is a set of melon twisting block puzzles. They're worked into the narrative more effectively than I first imagined they would be, and even though they're hard (even on easy mode) they're more than worth persevering with because of that fantastic story. If you're the sort that doesn't always need huge explosions and enormous bodycounts to have fun, play the game, then evangelise about it to all of your gamer buddies. It's that good.

Anyway, I decided I liked Catherine so much, it was worth blogging about, but while I was dreaming up a post, I stumbled upon the Twisted Pixel Bundle on XBLA. I paid my 800 points, because I thought it would be a good way of cleansing the gaming palette before I moved onto something a bit more substantial. Before I knew it, I was chomping critters down in The Maw. It was short, but interesting though it's not particularly special, even if there is more than a little something Nintendo 64-ish about it. Then I tried 'Splosion Man. And it chewed me to a pulp. 'Splosion man is old-school hard. The week I spent playing it was basically four days worth of sheer fury, with a half a day's worth of end of level elation weaved through them, and the last half day's worth of time spent humming the Donut Song. It's an earworm. I haven't played many games that demand as much precision or practice as 'Splosion Man, but I enjoyed it immensely, even as it tested my abilities, and my temper, to destruction. I finished it, one rainy Saturday evening at my girlfriend's house and I decided I had a blog post about difficult games that I could put up on Monday.

Monday rolled around and Twisted Pixel struck again with the Comic Jumper. I was only going to give it half an hour to see if it was any good. Two and a half hours of laughter, and one Time Cop reference later, I was hooked into another bastard hard game. Comic Jumper is worth the play, if only for it's hilarious script. Alongside Portal and it's sequel, it counts as one of the few truly laugh out loud games in my library. But good lord was it hard, perhaps more so than 'Splosion Man. It's hybrid platformer/twin stick shooter playstyle really taxes the abilities, but it keeps drawing you back with every line of dialogue. If the Twisted Pixel bundle is still available, get it. These two games alone are well worth the 800 point cost of entry, and I haven't even started Ms 'Splosion Man yet. Tell a lie, I've played three levels of it. It's 'Splosion man but more so. More madcap, more difficulty, more irrational meat love, more Big Science. But I needed a break from relentless difficulty for a while.

So, with Comic Jumper finished, Ms 'Splosion man on ice, and my gaming palette suitably cleansed, I'm ashamed to say that I'd forgotten all about the blog. I decided to fire up the last of the proper current gen games in my backlog. Max Payne 3. I don't know why I waited so long to play it. The first Max Payne was the first game I really played that made an effort to tell a mature story, rather than trying to be mature by interjecting every sentence with an F bomb. It blew sixteen year old me away, and I've held Max in a special place in my gaming heart ever since. The sympathetic update of the decade old gameplay, along with the return of Max's voice actor and a great noir script that was faithful to the spirit of the first two Remedy developed titles meant that Max Payne 3 blew me away all over again. But what really grabbed me, and kept me marvelling, was the level of detail throughout the game. The lines in Max's face, the downright incredible animation, the gloss of the Sao Paulo rich boy's night club, the squalor down in the favelas and the stellar voice acting come together to make Max Payne 3 sparkle like the crown jewels. A special mention is owed to the cutscenes too. If you're a fan of the process of film making in any way, give Max's cutscenes a watch. They're beautifully shot, looking like Man on Fire by way of a South American gangster flick. Whoever the director of those cutscenes was, I need to see more of his work. Hell, I'd even like to see him direct a film. They're that good.

So, now I'm almost out of current gen games. I'm still not feeling the urge to play Ms 'Splosion Man just yet, I've hit a wall in my normal fall back of Trials Evolution and Deadly Premonition is going to take some working up to, so I've gone back to Sonic Generations. It's still just as awesome as I remember it, and it turns out that I've missed loads of collectables. I generally ignore collectables, but blasting through Sonic Generations' celebration of one of my first gaming loves is too much fun to let my aversion to collecting things get in the way. It does mean however, that my gaming is much less compulsive than it used to be, which has opened up time for a post. At last.

And there you have it. The reason I've neglected the games blog is because I've been playing games. Not a bad reason all in all, but no excuse really.

Gaming.

It takes over your life if you let it.

Xbox What?

Well, that was disappointing wasn't it? After weeks of hype over the reveal for the the new Xbox, what we finally got to see was a shiny black breezeblock that is seemingly aimed at American college frat boys. An NFL linkup, EA sports and Call of Duty. Whoopee.

Sure, Xbox One. One box for all your entertainment needs. I get it, but I don't think a Tivo with gaming features that seem to be just tacked on is really what I'm looking for. Where were the games for your games console, Microsoft? Last night's presentation showed us a box of tricks seemingly designed by a committee that has forgotten that it was games that got the Xbox brand to where it is today. Announcements of Forza 5, Call of Duty and new EA sports titles were inevitable. The only gaming surprise of the night was the new Remedy title.

What we got instead was voice control, multitasking and multimedia. Skype integration is admittedly cool and the Halo TV series will whip the franchise fanboys into a big foamy frenzy. There's what looks like a TV tuner, which to my mind is a bit pointless. My TV has a TV tuner in it, and I don't have to run two devices to use it.

There was an announcement that next gen Xbox live will run on 300,000 servers. Impressive, but in the end, it's a number. I don't really care how big the number is, I just want my games to work when I want them to.

Then there was Microsoft's continued flogging of the Kinect dead horse. I really would like to know why MS are persisting with tech that, with the exception of Dance Central, has near completely failed as a method of controlling a game. Yes, Kinect has shipped millions of units, and voice control is cool, but how many of those units are just gathering dust? The tech has evolved however and the body tracking is now supposed to be much more nuanced. In a new and slightly Big Brother-ish twist, Kinect can now detect your heart rate, and will track your mood via facial recognition. What's the bet on the same facial recognition tech being able to identify you personally and feed back data on the media you consume to help target advertising? MS have also stated that the new Xbox won't work without Kinect. I may be slightly paranoid here, but if that is the case, am I right to assume the camera is always on when the console is in use? We don't have to worry about the government putting cameras in our homes anymore. We're paying tech companies to do it for them. Paranoid rants for comic effect aside, if the camera is always on, I'm not sure about how comfortable I am with that.

Questions around always online, second hand games and lending to friends were obtusely answered. According to Edge, a publication whose coverage of all things gaming I trust implicitly, Xbox One apparently requires an Internet connection, but doesn't have to be always on. Is it just me or does that last sentence contradict itself? Also, there may or may not be fees surrounding second hand and lending games out to be played on a console other than your own. Specific scenarios haven't been worked out yet. For me, lending will be a sticking point. Swapping games among friends has been a major part of how I play games since my first Megadrive. Restrictions around that are likely to be a sore point for many others too.

Still, it wasn't all bad. There's finally a re-engineered D-pad on the new controller and Call of Duty has attack dogs now. Happy day! Though in seriousness, the new controller does look like an improvement, and I like the idea of haptic feedback in the triggers.

At the moment, Sony's ideal of a console designed in conjunction with developers and aimed at gamers appeals to me more than what I saw from Microsoft last night. I'm trying to reserve outright judgement until both consoles are on the market and there are reviews on the web. It's a given that my 360 will be replaced at some point, but the question of what I'll replace it with is still up in the air.

Imagination-Land

This post first appeared on readyplayertwo.co.uk.



The right Bioshock Cover

Playing so much Bioshock Infinite of late has led me to a rather surprising conclusion. The level to which I connect with a game is in almost direct correlation to how fantastical or unusual the setting is. Put it like this. What sounds more appealing? Grey first person shooter set in a gritty rendition of modern day northern Waziristan or primary coloured first person shooter set in a sunlight flooded flying city circa 1912. Of course, I'm talking about Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite, and for me, since games are all about escapism, my natural choice would be the game set in the early twentieth century flying city. Let's try another one. A racer featuring real world cars racing on real world tracks or a supersonic hovership racer running on tight rollercoaster tracks set in a bright post scarcity future? Forza or WipeOut. I own and enjoy both, but I only utter the L word about one of those, and it's not the one with the real world cars.
 
Games have an ability, unique in pretty much all media, to immerse you in the impossible. Titles like Fez, WipeOut and Antichamber can even take you to places beyond what a layman like myself would accept to be the normal laws of physics, let alone beyond the average imagination. And while a mega budget 3D movie can show you the impossible, only games can let you experience it.
 

This shot sums up the mess that the Spec Ops
soldiers have gotten themselves in to.

It makes me sad when some games seem to squander the worlds they're built in. Take Gears of War as an example. It's set on what's assumed to be another planet, it's antagonists erupt from the ground and sink entire cities in their wake. Yet despite all this, it's still for the most part a gritty urban shooter in which you're surrounded by burned out cars, lumbering tanks, helicopters, crumbling neo gothic architecture and lots of brown. Take away the locust and it could be a war zone in any European city. All of the Gears games are great and I've enjoyed every one of them, particularly the third, but it says a lot about a series' sci fi setting when it's most memorable moment (at least for me personally) is also practically the only nakedly sci fi set piece of the entire series; the section in which you kill a giant city devouring worm from the inside out. It's easy to forget, during the moments you're not chainsawing Locust, that Gears is set on a different planet at all. Conversely I find, Spec Ops: The Line's gorgeous sun drenched rendering of Dubai really compelling. Spec Ops' developers took the usually mundane idea of a modern day city, drowned it with a sandstorm and then seemingly made every reflective surface out of gold. It's a look and a location that is pretty much unique in gaming at the moment. The result takes what should have been just another brown shooter and polishes the brown to a blinding sheen, which is what gives Spec Ops' realistic setting such a kick.
 
What I'm trying to get at here is that a game can be much more interesting if it's framed in a way that's not often seen. Admittedly, Gears' success did set the formula for the brown shooter, but I've seen so many brown shooters since, that when Spec Ops came along wrapped in sand, bathed in blinding sunlight and drizzled with gold it felt like a breath of fresh air.
 

One of the most iconic shots in Dishonored.

Thankfully, once you've pulled your eyes away from Call of Battlefield, you don't have to look too hard to find game worlds lavished with a wealth of creativity. It goes without saying that if you want to see the most creative and original games available at the moment, then you need to look at the Indies. Titles like Fez, Antichamber, Bastion, Dear Esther, Machinarium, To the Moon, Dust or even Minecraft are unlike almost anything you'll find in a box on the shelf of your local games shop. But even if for some strange reason you only limit yourself to boxed games, there is still a wealth of creativity out there. There's the aforementioned sun drenched turn of the century vintage futurism of Bioshock Infinite, or the deep-as-the-ocean green tinted decopunk of Rapture of that game's progenitors. Don’t want a dystopia in the sky? Then why not tour the bright yet totalitarian city in Mirror’s Edge. If you want to pass on dystopias altogether, then try a post apocalypse. If you think every end-of –the-world is the same, then might I point you in the direction of the criminally under rated, and exceptionally leafy, Enslaved or Naughty Dog's forthcoming The Last of Us. Alternatively if like your post apocalypse a little bit grimmer, yet still crave something that feels fresh, then may I present to you 4A Games' Metro; bleak and dark as the Moscow underground that shelters the last remnants of humanity in all its tunnels. Too dark? Perhaps we can lighten the mood in the collapsing laboratories of Portal 2. Too light, or not escapist enough? How about a visit to the charmingly English land of Albion in Fable, or the icy blue tundra of Skyrim. Too much fantasy? Then why not visit the crumbling, and entirely fictional, yet surprisingly plausible whalerpunk city of Dunwall, the place that accounts for at least seven tenths of what makes Dishonoured so great. If you're feeling more adventurous? If you haven't already, look no further than the Uncharted games, whose fabled lost cities, once they are revealed, dish out the most lavish and awe inspiring vistas of this generation. What if you want the fabled cities but less of the shooting and more of the journey? Obviously you want to visit the golden deserts and the desolately beautiful crumbling lost civilisation of the genuinely moving Journey. I could go on and on.
 
And I haven't even mentioned Final Fantasy yet, whose designers, Square, are the undisputed masters of creating richly imagined worlds. Worlds dense with culture, history and story, that feel lived in and are a pleasure to inhabit. Final Fantasy VII wouldn't have been the worshipped game it has become without that kind of imagination. It takes a special kind of mind to come up with a concept as out there as the Lifestream, but without it there would be no Mako, no Shin-Ra, no Soldier, no Materia, no Cloud, Sephiroth, Avalanche. The Ancients, with whom the Lifestream is intrinsically linked, would not have sprung from the mind of Yoshinori Kitase and with no Ancients, there would be no Aeris. Without the Lifestream, Aeris wouldn't have died, because she would never have existed, and a whole generation of gamers would not have experienced 'that' moment. You all know the one. Square still have that wealth of creativity. Say what you like about Final Fantasy XIII as a game, you can't deny that the twin worlds of Pulse and Cocoon make for one of the most compelling gameworlds of this generation.
 
Games are always better when game designers can let their imaginations run wild. That's why so many indie games are so great. With fewer concerns about shareholders or appealing to the mass market, indie devs can really cut loose. But there could be more of this sort of thing if the publishers were daring enough to indulge the experimentation of developers. Would it not be great if publishers weren't as commercially cautious? I like to think that if they weren't, we would begin to see fewer gritty modern world war games, less dystopian cyberpunk and less stone-faced post apocalypse. Of course, every now and then a game will appear that will turn your expectations on their head. Spec Ops' Dubai proves there is room for maneuver in the modern day shooter and the forthcoming Remember Me's Neo-Paris does some really interesting things with cyberpunk.
 


This is London on wheels, note St Pauls perched at the summit.

Personally, I'd like to see more of the punk suffix flying around. Bioshock-the-first may have been first out of the blocks with decopunk, but there's a lot more that can be done within the realms of 1920's art deco futurism. In fact there's more that can be done with retro futurism all round. For instance, who wouldn't love to see something based around Retropolis? Or how about an adaption of Philip Reeve's far future world of Mortal Engines? Whilst the novels are not strictly steampunk, their vaguely Victorian cast iron and brass aesthetics, rich back story, airships, unstoppable ancient warrior cyborgs and predatory mobile cities (yes, you read that right) could make for a pretty compelling experience. Steampunk has become almost a subculture in itself, and is pretty ubiquitous at a certain kind of real world convention, but I'm yet to see a full blown steampunk game. Dishonoured came close, but it wasn't quite there, which is why I knocked together whalerpunk to describe it instead.
 
If all that seems a bit overused already, then there is also dieselpunk and atompunk to check out too. The best way to describe these would be to tell you to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and check out the Ratchet and Clank series' various robots. Or I could just say that it's futurism that respectively focuses on the aesthetics of the thirties and the fifties. Or you could check out the Wikipedia page here. I'm barely scratching the surface really.
 
Games tend to focus a lot on sci fi and fantasy, and all this punk stuff is just my own narrow vision. There are hundreds of talented game designers out there with incredible imaginations whose ideas are broader than mine will ever be, who can produce out-there concepts that I couldn't dream of. The games that come from that kind of imagination are the kind that I always love most. I’m hoping that the success of Bioshock Infinite can convince the cautious corporate sorts who have the say in the game industry that a triple A game doesn't have to be grey, brown or a combination of the two to be successful. Hopefully they'll begin to allow those designers to set their imaginations free. The results could really be spectacular if they do.