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.