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.