SquadCast: Persona 3

It’s the first of our irregular special side-mission podcasts today as we explore the world of teenagers pointing guns at their heads, the tarot and giant penises riding chariots. Yes, you read that correctly. Persona 3 is an incredibly long game – too long, perhaps, for a Squad main mission, so those of us who have played, finished (or “almost” finished) it decided to get together for a chat and a chin-stroke.

This podcast also features Beige and Pishu’s report from PAX 08, our regular Personal Piles of Shame section and selections from the soundtrack of the game.

Featuring: Chris “RocGaude” Whittington, Mark “Beige” Whiting, Chris “Papapishu” Person and Pete “Angry_Jedi” Davison.

Subscribe using one of the links below:

M4A Enhanced version via iTunes
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MP3 Standard version via iTunes
MP3 Standard version via RSS

Spore: My Take

Okay. Let’s get one depressingly inevitable thing out of the way first.

Massive Cock Monster — O HAI OMG AI CAN HAZ SPORN YA?

Now that’s done, we can begin.

There’s been a whole lot of ranting about Spore’s DRM recently (not least from myself, albeit I seem to be coming from the opposite direction to 99% of the rest of the Internet) but I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m actually going to talk a bit about the game, having spent some time with it and played it from start to “finish” with one of my creatures and started again with another.

I’ll start by saying that Spore is enjoyable and plain FUN. Many developers these days are dead set on either creating a movie, or creating something that’s self-consciously “hardcore” or something equally unappealing to a cynical old bastard such as myself. Spore eschews all of that by providing an experience that is pleasantly “light” to play yet has something that may not be “depth” but is certainly an addictive quality that keeps me wanting to return to it.

Part of the appeal is, of course, the user-generated content. The fact that, once my little single-celled creature evolves sufficiently to crawl out of the primordial soup and onto land, he/she/it will encounter creatures created by my friends, family and colleagues… well, that’s just awesome. Already I’ve had discussions with several people with amusing stories about my creatures turning up in others’ games, and even my spacefaring race’s starship turning up and suddenly abducting creatures from their game! (Disappointingly, the above-pictured “Massive Cock Monster”, produced by myself and a colleague from work upon his first discovery of the Creature Creator, hasn’t appeared in my galaxy as yet but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.)

This is the great thing about replaying Spore. The first time I played it, I didn’t notice any of this stuff – I was concentrating on actually playing the game and understanding the mechanics. Fortunately, the mechanics themselves are very simple to pick up and build in complexity at an almost perfect pace – starting with simple directional controls in the Cell stage, adding an MMO-style “hotbar” in the Creature phase for using attacks and social abilities, adding a simple RTS interface in the Tribal phase, refining and increasing the depth of this in the Civilisation phase… before combining everything you’ve learned throughout the last few hours into the much more lengthy Space phase. And the great thing about the Space phase is that in your travels to the various planets around the galaxy, you can drop down onto a planet and see a computer-controlled species/tribe/civilisation going through exactly what you’ve been through – you can either sit back and watch it or do your damnedest to interfere with it through various means. Once you’ve been through the Space phase and experienced this a few times, going back to a previous phase means that you suddenly notice a whole lot of weird shit going on… like a sudden stampede of creatures running away from a now gigantic-appearing spaceship which is lasering them to death, or abducting them, or dropping meteors on the planet.

So that’s a lot of fun, and to me one of the best things about the game – the fact that it FEELS like a coherent universe where not only do you go through all these stages, but “everyone else” has to as well – and that “everyone else”, despite being computer-controlled, feels like it’s controlled by other people thanks to the fact that they were all DESIGNED by other people.

Vaguely related to this is the thing I like most about the aesthetic of the game – the constantly changing sense of scale. Right from the very beginning, Spore is a game about growth. Eat enough primordial goo as a wobbly cell thing and you get bigger, until you can eat the things that used to be screen-sized. Wander around as a creature and everything seems very large. The world is a big place, any invading spaceships seem huge and threatening and it’s a scary place to be part of. Become a tribe and you feel like you’ve taken a step back. What was once a single screen-filling creature has become a group of creatures that appear smaller individually but exhibit a greater influence on their environment. Become a Civ and you barely see your creatures at all, as they spend all their time in buildings and vehicles – but their influence spreads and grows until they have dominated the world. Reach the Space stage and, while your spaceship of your own design is undoubtedly cool, it’s presented as quite a small object on screen, making you feel suitably insignificant when surrounded by the thousands of stars that make up the Spore galaxy, until you start conquering or buying out star systems and you see the tangled web of your empire spreading across the galaxy map, growing bigger and bigger with each new conquest.

Other little things tickle my happy places in nice ways. The community side is dealt with well, though I wish there was some notification when someone comments on your creations as at present you have to check your page to see if any comments have come in. There’s Achievements too, a clear nod to both Xbox Live and Steam’s successful integration of this feature – and they’re an interesting mix of achievements too, with a combination of simple “play this game for 40 hours” style ones along with more complex “Win the Civilisation Stage by launching nuclear missiles”-type ones that encourage replaying the game in different styles – plus the fact that playing the game in different styles actually makes a difference. My first race was an aggressive species of carnivore, which meant they spent a lot of their time fighting. (Plus their voice ended up sounding like Brian Blessed, a fact which I was immensely pleased about.) My new species is completely different. They are non-aggressive, social herbivores, which has meant that the strategies required to survive the various stages (they’re currently up to the Civ stage) are rather different, focusing on defence or negotiation rather than outright killfests.

So is Spore the masterpiece the hype makes it out to suggest? Who knows. What I do feel, though, is that different people will take different things from it. I will certainly enjoy revisiting it with different creatures with different personalities and abilities and attempting to play the game in different ways. Others may tire of it quickly due to its relatively simple gameplay – simple compared to a more in-depth strategy game, at least. Others may spend most of their time in the Creators and enjoy adding more and more content to both their and other peoples’ games. It’s certainly a game with a broad appeal and, if we have to use that over-used term “casual” game, it’s a good example of a game that is easily accessible by both people who have been gaming for years and those who are relatively new or not as obsessively interested in the hobby as some of us.

(Oh, and the fact that they incorporated the music from M.U.L.E. into the trading screens in the Space phase is enough to make me want to have Maxis’ babies… though the purist Atari geek in me wishes they’d used the Atari version instead of the inferior C64 tune. My new creature, Gollumer, is a homage to that game.)

Check out my profile on the Sporepedia and feel free to add me if you’ve got the game and haven’t added me already – the name is, of course, “angryjedi”.

An Open Question

Okay. So I set up a site at Tumblr – here it is – and you’ll also notice it’s now sitting happily in the RSS feeds in your sidebar to the right.

Someone with some Internet savvy about them explain to me the difference between a Tumblog and this monstrosity you’re reading right now? So far as I can make out, I can use Twitter to post random short crap or snarky comments about people in ill-taste, ill-fitting T-shirts, Tumblr to post links, videos and slightly longer “minute-by-minute” crap and this place to post long, pretentious ranty crap.

All in all, it’s a lot of crap. And yet for some inexplicable reason, people keep reading it. And for that, I thank you heartily. 🙂

That sound about right?

Fuck the Internet

Okay… the irony of saying “fuck the Internet” on a blog post isn’t lost on me, but bear with me. There’s a rant and a half coming your way right about now about, paradoxically enough, people moaning. However, I feel rather more justified in my meta-moaning than the whiny little sods I will be discussing throughout the next few paragraphs.

But first, a little history lesson, if you’ll indulge me for a sec.

My family had been online junkies since before the Internet was a widespread global phenomenon. An irregular “treat” for us was to be able to use our Atari with its mighty 300bps modem to dial up to a local bulletin board system, read some messages and maybe download some BASIC games to play. At the time, I thought this was incredily cool. Looking back, at the time, it was incredibly cool. I mean, being able to use your telephone line to dial into someone else’s computer and do stuff with it? Neat.

A few years later came CompuServe, which was a step closer to the “real” Internet, at the time still very much in its infancy for consumers. CompuServe offered a service that was essentially hundreds of these bulletin board services, called “forums” along with news, entertainment and real-time chat services. Again, it was something of a “treat” to be able to go online and look at stuff and to actually be able to communicate with other people. As a matter of fact, as a result of a message exchange between myself and another chap on the CompuServe Gamers’ Forum, ten levels that I had created for Wolfenstein 3D made their way onto the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for Wolf3D, netting me a cool $200. I still have a (now very faded) photocopy of the cheque as I thought that was so awesome.

A while into the “CompuServe Age”, I read an article in PC Format magazine discussing this new and interesting-sounding thing called the Internet. The article was awash with buzzwords like “telnet”, “FTP” and curious sounding things with lots of dots and coms in them. But it was still quite some time before CompuServe actually offered full Internet access.

Now here we are, some ten-to-fifteen years later. Web 2.0 in all its self-publishing, self-expressing, lower-case logo glory is upon us offering anyone with a pulse the opportunity to spill their guts on the Internet and share their innermost thoughts and feelings on a whole variety of topics.

This, on the surface, is a great thing. Never before have people had such an opportunity to self-publish anything they like – be it creative writing, academic research, odes to the fit girl in class 3B or simply waffly old bollocks like this place. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to use this great medium to batter down anything around them?

I have two recent examples of this, though these are by no means isolated examples. They are merely the most recent things where this issue has cropped up. Firstly, we have the “new Facebook”. Secondly, we have EA’s new game Spore. Let’s take these two things in turn.

First up is Facebook. Facebook is such a global phenomenon that I heard on the news this week (on the radio, how old-school of me) that they’re planning on making a movie (presumably of the docu-drama variety) on the site’s rise to success.

For the unfamiliar… actually, balls to that, even my Mum has a Facebook account. You all know what Facebook is. Let’s not forget that it’s a free service supported almost entirely by ads that anyone can sign up for and use and never have to pay a penny. It’s a social tool that’s allowed millions of people across the world to connect with one another and rediscover old friendships after many years, in some cases. In short, it’s a pretty marvellous thing that both Facebook themselves and numerous third parties keep adding new features to.

So recently Facebook redesigned their site, changing the way the functionality of the site works and, to me, making it rather more streamlined and clean. It also uses more of the browser window which, when you’re working on a 1920×1200 screen, is most welcome. They’ve obviously worked hard on this site redesign and are still tweaking things even as we speak – each time I log on I see some new little feature that makes navigation and use of the site even easier.

So how does the community at large respond? By creating “OMG 1 MILLION PEOPLE MUST JOIN THIS GROUP AND STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS! NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS!”. You’d think that Facebook had summoned the spirit of Hitler and then allowed it to rape all the world’s children before taking a chainsaw to them, while the shareholders sat in the background wanking and laughing. But no – they’ve done what any good website does every few years, they’ve had a refresh and a redesign – and, compared to many websites’ complete overhauls that I’ve seen over the years, this has been a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things. You can still do everything you used to be able to, and more so in many cases.

So why bitch and moan? It escapes me. Do these people seriously think that getting a million people together in a group that is HOSTED ON THE FUCKING SITE THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT – the site they aren’t paying a penny to support yet are happily cluttering up bandwidth with their photos and videos – is going to achieve jack shit? Why bother? Fuck the Internet.

Why bother complaining about the complainers? It makes me feel better. One may argue that all these people are doing is “making themselves feel better” also, but the fact is, it is Facebook’s prerogative to change their site as and when they want to – whether it is from the perspective of improving the users’ experience (they must be sitting around thinking “Those ungrateful bastards” right now) or from the perspective of increasing advertising revenue (which for a site that doesn’t make much money from its users is perfectly reasonable).

Next rant. Spore.

Spore’s a great game that came out this week. From Will Wright, creator of the Sim games (and the The Sims games, natch) it allows you to… again, I’m sure you all know about Spore already, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Spore ships with some security software by Sony called SecuROM. SecuROM is a system that is designed to protect discs against being copied and installed by hundreds of people… i.e. piracy. As such, it limits a purchaser of a copy of Spore to installing it on three separate machines. That’s not, as many people have assumed, three installations and then it’s all over… that’s three machines.

Who has three machines? How many people, apart from people with more money than sense, buy a new PC gaming rig often enough to make this an issue? I buy a computer roughly once every five to seven years and it serves me fine in that time, unless I want to run something like Crysis – which fortunately I have no interest in whatsoever.

EA released a statement quoting usage and activation statistics from the Spore Creature Creator, released some months prior to the full game. While Creature Creator’s stats may not necessarily reflect exactly the same userbase as Spore, the figures were telling. Most users activated the product on one computer. A few did it on two. And about 1% tried to activate on more than three. I’m often loathe to believe company hyperbole, but in this case those figures certainly seem a reasonable assumption in my experience at least. I don’t think I know anyone who has more than one computer for gaming purposes. Sure, I know some guys who have PCs for gaming and Macs for professional/creative work, but even then, that’s still only two computers.

The nonsense with Spore went way overboard. Amazon.com was bombarded with over 1700 one-star reviews of the game, very few of which commented on the game at all. Several users bandied the word “draconian” around and many promising to go and pirate the game rather than purchase it – indeed, the main argument that many people were throwing around was the fact that somehow Spore had been leaked, cracked and torrented even before the game’s street date, thereby, to these people, making the DRM pointless.

The fact is, were there not such wanton levels of piracy on the Internet today, these measures wouldn’t be necessary – and the people on Amazon who claimed that pirating the game was “making a stand” are simply adding to the problem, not making a point. EA’s a big company and they have to be seen to be doing something more than plugging their fingers in their ears and going “lalalala” on the subject of piracy. While DRM clearly doesn’t work as it should at present, at least it represents a symbolic gesture on EA’s part to help tackle the problem.

The fact is that Spore’s actually a great game, but all this nonsense has put lots of people off playing it, for completely unjustified and ill-informed reasons. It’d be lovely if just, for once, people on the Internet could sit down, appreciate what someone else has done for them, pay for it if it’s a paid-for service (like Spore) and appreciate it being free if it’s a free service (like Facebook) without bitching and moaning any time some tiny little change to the “norm” comes along. I’m sure there’s something Orwellian in there somewhere…

Anyway. Rant over. Assuming no-one else pisses me off my next few posts will be about Spore and other games I’m playing at the moment!