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.

 

Blasphemy!

If saying you dislike Mario Kart 64 is some kind of gaming blasphemy then I'm going straight to hell. I won't pass go, and I won't collect £200, because it's something I say almost as soon as it's name is mentioned within my earshot, which happens surprisingly often. Mario Kart 64 is just one of those games I never gelled with. I never got used to the handling and I find its selection of tracks frustrating. Consequently, I'm so rarely any good at it that when I miraculously make it to the front of the race only to be blue shelled into last, it makes me think that the game is designed to punish you for being any good at it. It's not of course, and this is the point where the people who love Mario Kart 64, i.e, everyone in the world but me, start shouting that my criticisms are dumb, and that it's one of the best multiplayer racers ever made. Those people are right of course, and I agree with them. What makes my dislike of Mario Kart 64 so weird is that I'll quite happily play, and have fun with every other Mario Kart game ever made, particularly the Wii and GBA versions.

It's probably the most significant example I can find of my seemingly irrational ambivalence towards some titles that many gamers feel are sacred. It crops up so often that sometimes I start worrying that I might be going off the concept of fun. I'm not (hopefully), but it feels that way. There are others too. Concerningly, two of the other series I just cannot get on with feature also Mario in one way or another. Let's start with the Mario Party series, which for me is a collection of genuinely fun mini games that are utterly ruined by both the boardgame segment that needlessly drags the length of the game out, and possibly the worst way of deciding a game's winner ever devised. Of course, I'm referring to the detestable star system that means no matter how many of the damn things you've collected, you're almost guaranteed to be knocked off the top spot when the game arbitrarily awards stars on the results screen to other players for seemingly no other reason than that they've participated. Just thinking about it gets me riled up.

Mario's core platformers also do absolutely nothing for me. I've tried so hard to love him, I really have, but I just can't bring myself to care that I haven't beaten a single Super Mario game. Not one. Not even Super Mario Bros on the NES. In fact I haven't touched a Mario game since Sunshine, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've decided to just stop trying now, even though I know I'm denying myself the opportunity to play Super Mario Galaxies 1 and 2, which are renowned as two of the best and most innovative platformers of recent times. Worst of all, unlike Mario Kart 64 and Mario Party, I'm completely at a loss for a way to explain why I don't 'get' Mario's platformers. The control is always tight, the level design is always clever, the worlds are full of personality and the game mechanics are almost always innovative in one way or another. These are all things that we all look for in a good game, and Mario games are never hailed as merely 'good' games. In fact, the only legitimate criticism I can level at his games is this; the story is a bit naff, and since when has story ever really mattered in a Super Mario game?

The cynics amongst you will dismiss this as just another round of Nintendo bashing, but the thing is, I think most of the stuff they put out is fantastic. I've played every Zelda game since A Link to the Past and I've loved them. I rate the Metroid Prime series as one of the best console FPSs ever made. I've racked up months of play in the three Smash Bros games. I played F-Zeroes X and GX until the cows came home. I caught all 251 Pokemon in Gold and Silver and battled them in Stadium 2 on the N64. While my town thrived in Animal Crossing, I've commanded Pikmin, adventured with Kirby, got hooked on WarioWare. And despite everything I said about Mario above, I've visited and liked Super Mario World 2, with it's cute crayon aesthetic and it's cuddly Yoshis.

So it's not just simple Nintendo Bashing. Besides, I have trouble with some of gaming's other sacred cows too.

Sacred cattle like Metal Gear Solid 4. The more I play it, the more it makes me rant about it. I'm trying so hard to persevere with it because I know about Shadow Moses and I want to wrap up the story I started in the first Metal Gear Solid all those years ago. I know what it is about Metal Gear 4 that turns me off it and I'm trying to work around it. I've loved every other Metal Gear I've ever played, and I'm used to pointlessly long cutscenes and campy plot nonsense. It's part of the fun after all, but I just can't get on with the fourth instalment's wonky pacing. It seems you can't take more than a dozen steps without getting a discourse on PMCs, proxy wars or how war has changed. Then there are the half hour movies between missions aboard the aeroplane. I just want to sneak past soldiers and take down giant robots Hideo-san, why won't you let me? I will finish Metal Gear 4 before this generation is out. I need to find out what happens to Old Snake. I might eventually enjoy it too, but I'm not getting the feeling that I'll find that an easy thing to do.

Then there is the whole Call of Duty/Battlefield/Halo thing. I love first person shooters. I've spent hours gushing about Bioshock, Half Life, Metro and Unreal Tournament but I just can't bring myself to play any of the triumvirate of shooters that dominate the current console landscape. I've played a bit of Halo 3, but not since Bungie took Rocket Race out of it's online mode. I played the first Call of Duty not long after I completed Medal of Honour: Allied Assault on the PC. Call it war game fatigue perhaps, but CoD did nothing for me, and I've ignored them ever since. I know the Modern Warfare series is a thrillride, but most of what I've seen of the single player modes seems to involve holding down the fire button while you strut down a corridor to the next explosive setpiece. Frankly it looks dumb, and it doesn't get any better in multiplayer. I saw ten seconds of the now infamous CoD Rage Montage on youtube and decided that I'd been avoiding these games for a good reason. I don't want to be associated in any way with that kind of gamer. I'm a peaceable kind of guy. This mainly results in me being looked at like I've got some kind of horrible facial disfigurement whenever it comes up in conversation.

Where Halo is concerned, I just find it really reductive, with it's recharging health and two guns only multiplayer. After spending my formative years with Unreal Tournament and Quake III the slower pace and slimmer weapon choice of Halo sucks all the fun away for me. Some of the best moments in UT came from surviving an encounter by the skin of your teeth, then scoring a double kill with a lucky shock combo while you were hanging desperately on to that last sliver of health. Recharging shields have put an end to that. Also, I liked being able to grab the rocket launcher and not have to worry about whether to drop the flak cannon or the shock rifle, because you could carry all the guns. Older multiplayer shooters made me feel like a hero, Halo doesn't. On the single player front, Halo frustrates me because Bungie has created some really, really rich lore for their sci-fi universe, as evidenced in the enjoyable (and much better than they have any right to be) Halo novels. But all that story seems to get pushed into the background when you play it. I can remember a whole lot about the story of Half Life 2, yet I honestly can't remember a single plot detail of Halo 3, such is the poor quality of Halo's storytelling.

All of this makes me sound like some kind of mop topped holier than thou indie gaming hipster, punching this out on my laptop from behind a set of thick rimmed lensless NHS glasses, and I'm really not. I mean, I like Fez as much as the next person, but there's nothing out there that scratches the itch like a really great triple A blockbuster. Indie might be where all the imagination is, but triple A boxed games are where the big thrills lie. I like to think there's room in my life for both. Maybe it's age, my tastes growing more fickle as I edge nearer to thirty. Perhaps there are others out there who have the weird gaming pet hates of their own but all I know is this. I seem to have an irrational disconnect with some of gaming's most respected names, and you can try as hard as you like to convince me to give them a chance, but you probably won't change my mind. If you can't understand why I have these problems with certain games that are supposed to be beyond criticism, don't worry about it, because I'm not so sure of the reasons either.

If I ever work it out, I'll be sure to let you know.

In appreciation of: Phil Fish

Phil Fish seems to be getting a lot of hate at the moment. This was bought to my attention when I spotted a tweet from CliffyB highlighting the fact. For those who don't know the story, here's how it goes.

It seems that Fish has an entourage of haters, a bunch of people who take pleasure in criticism and say stuff about boycotting Fez because they think he's an asshole. To which Phil Fish replied this, "Fez is number one on Steam right now and it's not even out yet. You should boycott harder, nerds." So, giving as good as he gets then. Needless to say there was a bit of forum rage, and people started calling for a boycott again. Frankly the forum trolls need to grow up. Phil Fish is not Activision or EA, two companies whom you have every right to hate. No, he's just a guy, a guy who made a game whom some corners of the internet seem to have a problem with, a guy who isn't a PR mouthpiece. So what if he comes across as a prickly auteur? It's his game, he has every right to be. He's speaking to the trolls in their own language. Of course they're not going to like it.

Phil Fish, however prickly or unpleasant a person he may or may not be, is a personality, and one who can speak like a human rather than a PR robot at that. Gaming needs more personalities. Excluding Phil Fish, I can count the amount of big gaming Names I can reel off from the top of my head on one hand. Miyamoto, Kojima, Cliffy B, Jon Blow, Rhianna Pratchett. So he's a pantomime villain to the trolls? So what? He's an indie dev so he can speak his mind without having to worry what the suits think, and it's fun to watch him spar with his critics. I'd like to see more people like him. Also whatever his personality flaws, Fez is a truly great game, and to stop yourself from playing it, just because you don't like the developer is simply cutting off your nose to spite your face.

To put it another way. Did you boycott Django Unchained after seeing Quentin Tarantino's now famous Channel 4 interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy? Thought not. It doesn't matter if he's a bit of a dick, the fact is Tarantino's movies are great, so you go and see them anyway. The same applies to Clint Eastwood movies, or any number of musicians. Of course, you have to draw the line somewhere. It's not ok to like Roman Polanski movies or the Lostprophets. Save the boycotts for the real assholes, not for the guy who just said something that you've taken umbrage with.

Now stop trolling and go play Fez. You'll thank yourself for it.

M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-MONDAY NIT-RO: An ode to my most played game of the past twelve months.

Ifj you hadn't guessed by the title alone, this piece is about RedLynx's fantastic Trials Evolution, a game I'm given to gushing about at every possible opportunity. I'm hopelessly addicted to it, it's the gaming equivalent of crystal meth. There are few games out there any more that are as relentlessly playable and unapologetically hardcore as Trials Evolution that at the same time, are as inviting to the casual crowd.

In fact, the early part of the game is custom made to hook you in. The first time you boot up the game, you're treated to a blast of dumb, yet fun, cock-rock/rap by a man who clearly loves Trials a little bit too much, which sets the tone for the rest of the game. Once you're into the game proper, you're given a bike, a very short lesson in how to control it, then the game turns you lose on a set of tracks that let you blast through them with the throttle buried and barely a thought of crashing. Basically, this is a stroke of genius. If you're having a ton of fun within moments of starting, you're more likely to persevere when the difficulty starts to ramp up. Thankfully, Trials Evo wants you to learn how to play it. Within a few minutes, you've blitzed through the first few tracks and lo and behold, the game has already given you a new and faster bike. By now the game has it's claws in you and you barely notice the subtle drip feed of slightly more advanced techniques in the next licence test. From here you're on the slippery slope to where I have arrived now.

I both love and hate Trials Evolution in equal measure. Despite only dipping into it when I'm in between games, I've scrambled to the top of it's not inconsiderable difficulty curve, after having spent the best part of forty hours with it. While the game has a sunny disposition and a goofy sense of humour, it's still hard on those people who choose to try and attain it's gold medals. People like me. If you don't care about golds, and want to just finish it's tracks you're fine. You have five hundred faults and half an hour at each location to play with. You can laugh along with the level designer who thinks its funny to put a bottomless pit, a fire, a crusher, or a stack of TNT underneath a particularly difficult obstacle. If you're trying to finish the level under a set time and fault limit, you'll soon be cursing that same level designer to the deepest, darkest and most painful of all the Hells. The thing is, once you do come in under those limits, the sense of achievement that comes with it is unrivalled by pretty much any other game out there. You feel like you've scored a victory over RedLynx themselves.

Mastering the game means mastering a physics system that encourages care, accuracy and practice, practice, practice and rewards silly mistakes with embarrassment at best or a bone crunching accident at worst. While the licences you take when you unlock each bike give you the fundamentals, there's no substitute for experimentation. A lot of the fun I find in Trials is working out just where to wheelie, when to pop the rear suspension, working out when power and speed isn't the best option. I'm by no means amazing at the game, compared to those at the top of the leaderboards, I'm slow, scrappy and barely in control, but I've worked through and got gold on every track in the game bar the extreme levels. The physics mean that no two failures are ever exactly alike, which along with the sometimes punishing difficulty, just adds to the onemorego-ness of it all.

While the game can be punishing, it's never unfair. Is that slope too steep or that gap too wide? Keep practicing. The consistent physics and the unchanging nature of most of the landscape makes you the main variable in the task of getting over that troublesome obstacle. Often, the only reward for all the practice is an entry at the bottom of the leaderboard and the knowledge that you've harpooned your white whale, but amazingly, that really is enough. To use the drug reference again, it's like a tiny little high, and once you've got it, you're already starting the next track, craving another hit of the sweet, sweet sense of victory.

But what happens when there are no more tracks? Cook up some more! And if you can't do that, there's a huge community of really talented people who can do it for you. Trials comes with a really comprehensive level editor, one so deep you can make entirely new games within it. I've not even scratched the surface of what it can do myself, but some of the things that come out of the Trials community are really amazing. Even though there are two fantastic DLC packs with two new areas with an entire game's worth of extra content, including the fabulous Gecko 520 BMX, you could probably play a new community track every hour of every day for the next year and still be able to find content you haven't seen. While I do recommend the DLC, if only for the BMX, you don't need it, thanks to the community, even vanilla Trials Evolution has a depth of content that is almost bottomless.

I really can't say enough good stuff about this game. It's a game you can only get better at, a game that changes as you play it, from straight up racer, to platformer, to puzzle game. Even replaying early tracks on faster bikes creates new challenges. Bumps that wouldn't trouble you on a slow bike suddenly become kickers that upset the fastest bikes as you hit them. The same screen four player mode is an absolute hoot when your mates are together and on top of all that, you can dip in and out of it and play it in bitesize chunks when you have a bit of downtime. You know those leaderboards I mentioned earlier? They track your friends too, and the game shows a ghost of your fastest friend to compete with on the track you're racing on. It's a great carrot-on-a-stick that makes you play and play until you've beat them, and when you do, instantly text them to tell them you've knocked them of the top spot. It was my favourite game of last year, and if it wasn't for Bioshock Infinite, it would probably be my favourite game of this year too.

The most significant testament to Trials Evolution's brilliance and accessibility is this. If I leave the Xbox for more than a minute when I'm gaming with my girlfriend, I can guarantee that she's saved and quit whatever I've been playing and has fired up Trials. Usually, by the time I've returned, she's hard at work chasing my best times and will often have absolutely demolished one or two of them. And if you think I can get her to relinquish the control pad when she's her Trials on, well, it's a funny thing to see me try.

Best of all, a version with all the DLC is now available on Steam, so there's another barrier to entry taken away. If you haven't played it, download the trial of Trials, (hur-hur) and give it a go. Trust me, you'll be hooked by the time you've finished with it.

You may even end up wanting to gush about it to the whole internet, like me.