#oneaday Day 843: This World Ain’t Big Enough…

Ever get the feeling that the world just isn’t quite built for you?

It’s a feeling I’ve been getting quite a bit as I’ve got older. I suspect such a feeling is largely age-related, as it centres around the fact that certain things quite simply don’t appeal, because they’re not aimed at me.

It just seems a little odd that “popular culture” is often taken to mean “people under the age of 25 who aren’t that bright”.

Let’s take Britain’s Got Talent, for example, which Andie’s been watching recently — primarily to get annoyed at, lest you judge her harshly for it. Any time I’ve watched Britain’s Got Talent, I’ve got annoyed too, but I don’t find the experience of getting annoyed at it particularly fulfilling or fun. If anything, I just get inordinately frustrated about… well, everything about it. Simon Cowell is a douche, the judges’ comments are vapid nonsense that don’t mean anything, the acts are cringeworthy and the audience is made up of the very worst kind of braying moron who thinks that constructive criticism is a personal attack and thus must be booed.

Take gaming, too. I have zilcho, zippo, nada interest in the upcoming “big” games that are bearing down on us like multi-million dollar juggernauts. I don’t want to play Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4 or anything like that. (I did recently play Binary Domain, which certainly was a an impressive experience, but one destined for obscurity)

Or the Internet at large. Everything must be social these days, it seems. And long-time experience has taught me that if you make something social, you will generally attract illiterate, ill-informed, angry morons. Just look at the comments section of any website ever. (I often find myself wondering why the most notorious cesspits don’t just close comments forever. It’s rare that any meaningful discussion takes place on them. Obviously I’m excluding my own blog from this because I have a small group of intelligent people who sporadically comment here and are willing to engage in actual conversation, as opposed to a vast community of pillocks.)

Fortunately, any time I start to get frustrated by any of the experiences I describe above, a moment’s reflection simply reminds me that they are not the only experiences out there — just the most visible. And while that can in itself be frustrating in that you have to look a little harder to find people with whom you have things in common, we’re certainly not beyond hope just yet.

On TV, I don’t have to watch Britain’s Got Talent. I can watch Community. My Little Pony. And a whole host of other stuff thanks to the magic of streaming video, giving me access to a whole ton of quality entertainment that doesn’t make me want to throw bricks at my TV. I haven’t seriously watched live TV for ages, a couple of episodes of The Apprentice aside. Instead, I can binge on Star Trek thanks to Netflix, or dig up obscure Channel 4 shows on YouTube.

In the gaming world, I can play everything from Binary Domain to Pandora’s Tower and A Valley Without Wind to escape from the blockbuster insanity. Gaming is now so big that you literally can’t play everything that comes out.

On the Internet, there are mature communities. I have the Squadron of Shame. You lovely people who comment on this blog. Twitter (at least the people I’ve trimmed my “following” list to, anyway). Gamers With Jobs. Fitocracy.

While the world may not be built with me in mind any more, I certainly don’t have a problem living in it for the moment.

Unless you make me watch Britain’s Got Talent. Then we might have a problem.

#oneaday Day 842: The Captain’s Chair

I’ve started playing Star Trek Online again. It’s been a good couple of years since I last tried this game, as I played in the beta and subsequently for about 40-50 hours or so immediately after launch. I liked it a great deal back then, but wasn’t playing it enough to justify the monthly subscription fee so, like many other MMOs I’ve left in my wake, I set it aside, saying to myself that I might check it out again were it ever to go free-to-play.

The astute among you will be aware that Star Trek Online has, in fact, been free-to-play for some time now. I, too, am aware of this and have had the thing installed for quite a while but never got around to picking it up again. Until now.

It’s been so long since I last played I ditched my old character and recreated it to play from the start again. I was originally doing pretty well, but I can’t remember what the hell I was doing, so I figured it better to start again and re-learn the game mechanics — along with discovering what’s been added since I last played. (Quite a lot, as it happens.)

For those groaning at the prospect of yet another MMO with a hotbar, hold it right there. Star Trek Online is worthy of note for several reasons. Yes, it has a hotbar, but no it most certainly isn’t World of Warcraft in space. I remember thinking on its original release that, slightly rough edges aside, it’s the Star Trek game that I always wanted to play. And my opinion stands today — arguably even more so.

For the uninitiated, Star Trek Online starts with a bang. The Borg are attacking, and the player, a new Ensign serving aboard a fairly pathetic little ship, is tasked with helping out. This process conveniently introduces all the basics of play, including running around inside places, shooting things, talking to things and interacting with things. The player subsequently gets to join a bunch of other Federation vessels in taking down a crippled Borg ship and eventually, thanks to the rest of the crew ending up dead, gets a promotion to Lieutenant and the chance to take command of aforementioned pathetic little ship. Thus begins their grand adventure in the stars.

Once the player is out of the introductory tutorial series of missions, they’re able to explore the galaxy and take on a wide variety of missions, ranging from story-heavy “episodes” to exploration missions where uncharted sectors have to be, well, charted. Along the way, they’ll engage in space combat, beam down to places and investigate mysterious goings-on, reconfigure the tachyon pulse emitters to scramble the grub-nuts frequencies and generally do all the things that Star Trek people do.

It’s a deep game that has only grown and changed for the better since launch. There is always something for the player to do, be that pursuing a mission, participating in a multiplayer “Fleet Action” cooperative event, taking on the Klingon Empire in PvP combat, taking part in any of the nightly special events, exploring the stars looking for research material which may be used to develop better equipment or simply chilling out in some recognisable Trek locales like Deep Space Nine or Starfleet Academy.

The space combat is worthy of special note. It’s often said that the space combat genre is all but dead, but it’s most certainly alive and well in Star Trek Online, though X-Wing this ain’t. Since pretty much all the ships in Star Trek are what other games would refer to as “capital ships”, combat unfolds rather more like a naval skirmish than a fast-paced dogfight. It’s all about manoeuvring around your opponent, flying alongside them, then letting rip with a broadside of phaser fire from both arrays, punching a hole in their shields and filling them with hot torpedo death.

If it were just a basic space shooter, it would be quite fun, but there’s plenty of depth there, too. You can tweak the power systems to prioritise attack, defense, speed or whatever, rebalance the shields to provide more protection in a particular direction, use your three bridge officers’ special abilities to aid yourself or hamper the enemy, and use your character’s own personal specialisms to turn the tide of the battle in your favour. At times it’s like being in the middle of a battle from something like Homeworld, particularly when taking part in the cooperative “Fleet Action” events or flying with some companions.

As you progress through the game, you get new ships and equipment with which to customise them, including some recognisable models from the Trek series. Yes, you can essentially fly Voyager, Defiant or the Enterprise if you want to. A bunch of alternative ships are available for real-money purchases, including some absolutely hulking behemoths that look very impressive — particularly when you’re still in the pathetic little starting ship.

And this isn’t even getting into the flourishing user-generated content community. Star Trek Online features the ability for players to create their own missions using a tool called The Foundry (that will also be seen in Cryptic’s upcoming D&D MMO Neverwinter) and then publish them for the community to play at any time. I haven’t yet delved into this side of things, but it’s a big part of what drew me back in. The Architect facility in City of Heroes was a source of considerable entertainment for me, so I’m looking forward to something similar here.

Above all, Star Trek Online is a great example of how to get a free-to-play MMO right — and a truly excellent sci-fi game to boot. You can have a completely satisfying experience right up to the level cap without paying a single cent if you want to, or you can pick and choose how you want to customise your experience. So far as I can tell, none of it unbalances the game — always a big concern in titles like this — and is primarily there for bragging rights or visual customisation.

Check it out on Steam. No, there’s no Mac version. (Boo!)

#oneaday Day 841: Badass Teacher

I know I’ve said many, many times on this blog that I’d never go back to teaching (and for the sake of my own mental health it’s probably for the best that I don’t) but I still, at times, find myself idly wondering how I’d manage The Perfect Classroom. By that I mean at a school that wasn’t struggling to keep its head above water, that was adequately staffed, that was populated by children of a decent range of ability levels but whom weren’t misbehaving little shitbags. A non-existent school, then, but a good starting point for a dream nonetheless.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument this Perfect Classroom is at a primary school, because that generally means sticking with the same class the whole time and building up a good relationship with them. On balance, I think I slightly preferred that to the constant coming and going of secondary education in which it was very difficult to learn names even after several months of teaching the same children.

Organisation is the key to a successful classroom, so I’d have some sort of technological solution — ideally portable — in place to keep things organise. I’m thinking an iPad, tooled up with a specialised app such as TeacherPal or a more generalised database like Bento. Within said technological solution I’d keep detailed, ongoing records on my students and also include a photograph to help prevent forgotten names. Using said technological solution I’d be able to quickly call up information on a particular student’s work and progress when required, be that for report-writing season or a parents’ evening.

Said portable device would also, ideally, be hooked up to the interactive whiteboards that are present in most classrooms (essentially giant touchscreens with a projector) in order to allow presentation of material on the screen while remaining “mobile”. (The inspectors love it when you don’t stay at the front of the room all the time.)

Technology can also play a good role in home-school communication, and certainly none of the schools I worked at in the past took advantage of this. Statistically speaking, it’s highly likely that a good proportion of the parents of the children in the class would have social media accounts, so why not take advantage of that? My class would have a Twitter and Facebook presence maintained (and carefully moderated) by me. The pages would provide regular updates on what the class has been up to and, crucially, publicly note any and all homework that had been set. Homework is a thorny issue, particularly in primary education, but having it spelled out in black and white on an “official” social media page would certainly allow me and the parents of my students to keep on top of things.

The social media page wouldn’t just be a glorified homework diary, of course. It would also be a great place for celebrating achievements, which is something that pretty much every school is big on. This could range from sharing the names of who won things like attendance certificates to pictures of good work. (Obviously care would have to be taken with photos, names and other details that end up in the public domain lest the Thought Police swoop in and decry you as some sort of kiddie porn-peddling pervert.)

In the classroom’s day-to-day life, I’d make an effort to use gamification theories to encourage students to progress. I’d allow them to earn rewards of some description — perhaps some form of “experience points” system, with tangible rewards given on every “level up”, or perhaps some sort of “achievement” system, again with tangible rewards on offer for significant achievements. These wouldn’t have to be big things — a congratulatory letter home, a sticker, some crappy pound shop toy — but they’d help motivate the kids to do their best. (I know, you shouldn’t have to “bribe” children to do good work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to make them feel good about their achievements.)

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? Pity it will probably never happen.

#oneaday Day 840: Adventures on Environ

[Explanatory note: One of my favourite things about procedurally-generated games like roguelikes, Minecraft and indeed A Valley Without Wind is the sense of emergent narrative they generate. While light on explicit narrative, the story of the player’s own journey through the game becomes compelling in its own right. It’s a big part of what makes story-light titles such as Demon’s Souls so entertaining, too, if you’re willing to invest in them.

What follows is the story of my first forays into the world of Environ via A Valley Without Wind. Some artistic license has been taken for brevity’s sake but this is more or less how my early play sessions have unfolded.

Additional note: All names in this piece are exactly as they appeared in the game thanks to its glorious random name generator.]

Yan Sadovski awoke with a start in a snowfield. Spitting out the wet slush as it melted on his face, he unsteadily pulled himself to his feet and surveyed his surroundings.

Snow and ice as far as the eye could see.

This was nothing unusual, of course, for the world had been enveloped in a new ice age certainly for as long as he could remember. But something didn’t seem quite right. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but something was very much amiss, and he had a strange feeling that something terrible had happened. If only he could remember what.

Flexing his fingers within his snowsuit which had been keeping him warm for however long he had been unconscious outdoors, he experimentally cast the “fire touch” spell that momentarily set his hand ablaze — one of the first spells his people learned, but a useful one.

Good, he thought. That’s still fine.

It was then he felt the strange presence behind him — a floating, glowing object depicting strange symbols.

Glyphbearer, said a resonant voice inside his head.

“What?” said Yan aloud, feeling immediately foolish, for there was no-one to speak to.

Wherever he turned, the glyph seemed to float behind him, meaning he couldn’t get a good look at it. He shrugged and started trudging onwards through the snow in what he hoped was the right direction to get back to civilisation.

Gravestones littered the path here and there, marking the spots where previous Glyphbearers had fallen. Inscribed upon them were warnings and advice — “don’t forget your wooden platforms”, “don’t jump into big holes unaware of what lies ahead”, “don’t forget a light source”. He didn’t know who had left the gravestones, but he felt it wise to follow their instructions, particularly as they always seemed peculiarly relevant to the situations in which he found himself.

Before long, he came upon the mouth of a cave. Curiosity getting the better of him, he walked inside and began to investigate.

The cavern was filled with strange mushrooms, lumps of rock and solid veins of purest gemstone. Greedily running his hands over the veins and letting the energy of elemental fire flow through his fingers, he gathered up the gemstones only to discover the strange glyph sucking them inside itself. He had no idea where the tiny, strange, floating object was putting them, but he had little doubt that they were safe.

Making a note of where the entrance was in his mind, Yan proceeded deeper into the caverns. Before long, he came upon what looked like a long-abandoned spellgem workbench — and it still held a selection of gems. He picked them up, the glyph “pocketing” them once again, and felt a rush of mystical energy flowing through him. Concentrating intently, he summoned forth a boulder of solid rock, flinging it into the air. Then a fireball, scorching the chill air as it passed. Then a ball of lightning, electricity cracking and fizzling around him as he chuckled to himself.

Satisfied with his haul, he picked his way through the caverns, back in the direction of the entrance. But he was no longer alone; the robots had come. The endless mechanical hordes had been blighting humanity throughout this new ice age, and now they were here, too. Grimacing, Yan fired off a bolt of lightning at the approaching mech, watching satisfied as it exploded into pieces. But still they came, in greater numbers.

Before long, he was surrounded. White metal robots jabbed him with their spears, while their red brethren — superiors? he thought — assaulted him with flaming masses.

He could feel his life slipping away as the machines continued their relentless assault. He was in pain, and he knew at that instant that he was never going to find out what disaster had befallen the lands.

Blackness.

Nothingness.

Anger.

Taquesha Garrett opened her eyes and found herself standing in a snowfield. She had no idea how she had got here, and no idea what the strange floating object behind her was. She sensed great power emanating from it, however, and sensed it wanted to accompany her.

She started walking through the snowfield in what she hoped was the right direction. Passing a small cave entrance, she hesitated for a moment, feeling an inexplicable sense of dread and rage emanating from within, before picking up the pace and moving on a little faster.

Before long, she came to an open area. A loud “thumping” noise was disturbing the peace, and it wasn’t hard to see the source — a giant robot roaming the landscape. Figuring it was too strong to challenge by herself, she carefully and stealthily found a route past it without attracting its attention, and shortly afterwards found herself in a sorry-looking village.

A long-haired man staggered up to her. “What have we done?” he cried. “We must put our trust in the Ilari!”

Taquesha frowned, and followed the man’s frantic gesturing to what passed for the village square, where three enormous crystals stood, glowing softly in the moonlight. She walked up to them and immediately felt a sense of warmth, concern and trust emanating from them.

Glyphbearer, they said in her mind. You have come.

She said nothing — she had no idea what she might be able to converse with these mysterious entities about — but in a flash, she understood her mission, if not the circumstances which had led to it.

The Overlord would fall. And these shattered lands would know peace.

She didn’t know what the words that had burned themselves into her brain knew until she left the village for the first time, only to discover a strange sight. In one direction, lush green unspoiled forest. Behind her, the glacial fields she had grown up with. To the north, barren desert. And to the south, what looked like a junkyard.

Her studies of magic had given her a good working knowledge of how to craft her own spellgems, so she resolved to equip herself with some stronger magics before taking on this mysterious “Overlord”, wherever he might be.

For the next few days, she explored the local area, poking her head into long-abandoned buildings and looting them of any valuables within. There was no sign of any human life anywhere save for the sole survivor she had seen back at the village. What had happened here?

In the distance, violent wind and rainstorms buffeted the landscape. She knew that if only she were able to push the winds further away from the settlement, she’d be able to better judge her surroundings and her eventual goal.

The Ilari, she thought. Maybe they can help.

She returned to the village and rested, then asked the strange crystal ones if they could help her with the wind.

Seek the wisdom of an Aquaurgist, they replied. Taquesha frowned in response. The other survivor in the village didn’t seem to be much for working with water — he was more of a wood specialist, judging by the number of logs he’d chopped since she’d been there. But where to find an honest-to-goodness Aquaurgist in this strange, shattered land?

It took time, but she eventually discovered a survivor holed up in an abandoned town. Promising to protect the frightened, bearded man from the monsters that terrified him so, she led him back to the village, where he began work with the Ilari immediately on summoning the materials needed for the construction of a wind shelter.

A short time later, Taquesha had braved the howling winds and acidic rain and successfully constructed the shelter. Its vast blades span majestically through the air, and the storm, as if frightened, backed away from it, far towards the horizon.

For a time, life was good. Taquesha spent her days gathering materials for the good of the village and to assist her with her spellgem research, but one day cruel Fate decided that her time was up.

She’d snuck into a run-down warehouse, feeling confident that she’d be able to find a stash of unspoiled supplies within. Inside, it was dark, and the air was thick with tension. She knew that she’d have to be very careful here, or the strange creatures lurking in the darkness would surely destroy her.

She tensely picked her way through the first few rooms of the building safely, but before long she’d attracted the attention of a strange, fiery beast. Its roaring, in turn, brought others like it running, and as her body was wracked with pain from the burning embers striking her skin, she found herself melancholy.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way, she thought. I was supposed to defeat the Overlord and save these lands. I’ve done so much for them already, and this is how–

Darkness.

Silence.

Rage.

Phlegethon Gogola suddenly awoke in an unfamiliar village, his long, unkempt beard and hair blowing in the chill wind of the disconcerting icy surroundings. Behind him floated a strange, unfamiliar object that unnerved him somewhat. But at the same time, he suddenly found himself with a sense of purpose.

Glyphbearer, came a voice in his head. It is time for you to begin your adventure.

Phlegethon grunted to himself. Adventure was all very well and good, but he was damned cold. He wouldn’t be going far unless he could find some way to protect himself from the elements…

#oneaday Day 839: So Binary Domain is Kind of Awesome

I got a few games for my birthday this year from generous people taking pity on my advancing years. I’ve waxed lyrical about A Valley Without Wind for quite some time now and I haven’t yet got to Legend of Grimrock (oh, but I most certainly will) so that leaves Binary Domain to talk about.

Binary Domain is a third-person shooter from Sega. Created by Toshihiro Nagoshi, the producer of the excellent Yakuza series, it spins an interesting sci-fi tale about “Hollow Children” — robots designed to look like humans and programmed to believe they are human. Taking on the role of one Dan Marshall (not, sadly, the British developer of point-and-click adventure funfests Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please!), it’s up to the player to kick lots of robot bottom on the way to tracking down the supposed creator of these illegal, ethically questionable droids.

Binary Domain could so easily have been shit. It’s a game about futuristic soldiers shooting robots — you can’t get much more cliched than that, after all. And yet it has a huge amount of charm coupled with an addictive quality that keeps you playing just to see what happens next.

Technically speaking, Binary Domain is a squad-and-cover-based third-person shooter, which probably makes it sound very much like Gears of War, a series which I loathe and detest. (Well, to be fair to it, I only loathe and detest the first one, but that put me off ever playing the other two.) But in execution it manages to be so much more than the thick necks and testosterone of Epic’s title, and in the process it highlights the differences between Japanese and Western development. It’s also helping further cement the feeling I’ve been having recently that Japanese games are, for the most part at least, preferable to Western — for me, anyway.

But what sets it apart from Marcus Fenix’s opus of “eat shit and die”? Quite simply, characterisation. Dan begins the game as a bit of a dick, but in an endearing way rather than as an unlikeable, bland macho asshole. He’s accompanied through the introductory mission by “Big Bo”, a walking tank of a man who has a bit of an attitude himself. When the two are together, they crack jokes and make irreverent comments just like they’re a pair of best friends in a bar together. They have a relationship beyond “Cover me!”, in short, and that makes them interesting to hang out with, even if they’re both quite sexist, a bit racist and generally loutish in their attitudes.

A short way into the game, Dan and Bo meet up with the rest of their team, which includes the businesslike ex-MI6 dude Charlie (who doesn’t know who James Bond is); the strong, silent Brit woman Rachael; and the sexy Chinese girl Faye. These disparate characters’ personalities all clash a little with one another, which again makes their interactions extremely entertaining to witness.

“Hmm, she reminds me of someone,” says Bo to Dan upon meeting Faye for the first time. “A movie star or something.”

“C’mon, Bo, you and I both know the only movies you watch are porn,” chuckles Dan, who promptly receives a sharp dig in the ribs from his friend. “Oh… OH. Right.”

Once the team is assembled, Dan is regularly invited to take two of them with him, and each have their own unique conversations with each other and our hero. Again, these exchanges are a real highlight of the experience, and show what a massive difference it makes when you bother to spend some time on your characters. If you’re going to be battling giant spider robots with people, it’s better they be people that you actually like, right?

There’s an interesting twist, too — when characters speak, Dan can respond to them either by using a simple multiple-choice system or by actually speaking his response into a gimmicky voice-recognition system which I switched off almost immediately. (When your voice-recognition system picks up gunfire from the game and thinks you’re saying the word “fuck”, you have a problem, as entertaining as that might sound.) Dan’s responses will affect the other characters’ “trust level” with him, with them being more likely to successfully follow his orders if they trust him more. I’m guessing there will be some sort of story payoff for high trust levels, too, though I’m not far enough into the game to say with certainty yet.

As the different characters all clash somewhat, though, certain responses might piss one off while pleasing another. Crack a joke with Bo about getting crabs from a hooker and Faye might get sniffy. Tell Charlie to go fuck himself with his overly-serious military-speak and he’ll get annoyed, but Bo will laugh. Your performance in combat affects these trust ratings, too — clip your teammate with a bullet and they’ll get angry, but save them from certain death or pull off a particularly impressive feat and they’ll give you the credit you deserve.

In this sense, Binary Domain sometimes feels like it’s a role-playing game very vaguely following the Mass Effect mould. This feeling is further compounded by the ability to equip characters with stat-boosting nanomachines and upgrade weapons as well as the inclusion of “social” areas that are just about walking around talking to people, but when it comes down to it, the game is unashamedly a linear, Japanese, third-person shooter. While not quite as insanely frenetic as Sega’s previous shooter title Vanquish, Binary Domain has its fair share of ridiculousness, usually in the form of giant robots which must be defeated by dropping heavy things on them, blowing bits off them, leaping onto their back Shadow of the Colossus-style or all manner of other shenanigans. It’s a spectacle, as thrilling to watch as it is to play, and I’m having a blast with it so far.

Binary Domain received middling reviews on its original release, with the PC version (which I’m playing) catching particular flak for including most of the PC-specific visual and control options in a separate program rather than in the game itself. I feel that this has been focused on rather too much, frankly, as it’s an issue players will encounter precisely once, before they even start playing. Once the game is set up to your liking, it looks great, sounds great and runs smoothly, which is all I ask for.

These middling reviews, however, are likely to see the game relegated to obscurity before very long. Already people are saying that they’ll wait for it to become a “bargain bin title” before picking it up, purely based on reviewers’ comments. And herein lies the problem: people criticise the increasing “blockbuster culture” of video games, pointing to titles like Call of Duty and Halo as symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the industry, but as soon as something that provides a different take on an established formula comes along, like Binary Domain does, no-one is willing to buy it new and take a chance on it. Thus these great games get pushed to the back of the community’s consciousness, while those with the biggest marketing budgets continue to dominate year after year.

From my couple of hours’ experience with it this evening, I can happily say that Binary Domain is well worth picking up now, since it’s a fun, entertaining, spectacular and satisfying game that, sadly, looks set to join Vanquish and Alpha Protocol in the box marked “Sega Games That Were Actually Brilliant That No-One Played”.

Make a difference. Vote with your wallet. Support awesome new games that aren’t “blockbusters”. Please?

#oneaday Day 838: Still No Wind Here

As promised, here are a few further thoughts on A Valley Without Wind, given that I’ve inadvertently spent most of today playing it.

First up, having read a few reviews around the Web which focused heavily on the visual side of things, I direct you to this post. Get over it. Not everyone has the budget to make something that looks like Final Fantasy XIII, and it’s not as if AVWW’s visuals are bad per se, they just look like something out of a PC game from the 1990s, shortly after we discovered Super VGA. If “8-bit” can be an acceptable aesthetic (and I shan’t get into a rant on the misuse of that term here) then why not “mid-90s PC game” if the graphics don’t actually hurt the experience?

Secondly, the music. You will, as the cliche goes, love it or hate it. Here’s a simple test. Do you like chiptunes and electronica? You will like the music. If you do not like chiptunes and electronica, you will probably want to switch it off and listen to something else. (I love chiptunes and electronica.)

Those two glaringly obvious points which most reviews seem to focus on aside, let’s discuss the gameplay a little more.

Following an initial tutorial which introduces key gameplay concepts to the player with various gravestones sarcastically describing how various predecessors could have avoided their fate, the player reaches a settlement. This is a sorry affair to begin with, with only a single, bedraggled-looking survivor staggering around it, but a selection of basic buildings already constructed and ready to go. Three of the giant crystalline “Ilari” life-forms are here, and later in the game they’ll provide a means to purchase items, build things and cast far-reaching spells. To begin with, their most important function is to restore your hit points.

Leave the settlement and you’ll be taken onto a grid-based randomly generated world map. Each tile has a particular terrain type which controls the type of enemies that will spawn there, the items you’ll discover and, if you’re lucky, the survivors you might come across. Each region comes from a specific time period — the game’s story centres around the concept of the world being “shattered” both geographically and temporally — and this comes into play with some of the missions later.

When exploring a region, you’ll come across buildings. You can enter every single one of them. Most of them are sprawling mini-Metroidvania adventures in their own right, but for the most part you’ll be seeking out the “stash” rooms that contain plenty of treasure. These are conveniently marked on the graph-like abstract dungeon map in the corner of the screen, which shows the connections between rooms but not their exact layout. A key part of gameplay is “scouting” buildings, which means delving in just far enough to reveal the rest of the map — rooms that are within two “connections” of the one you’re in appear without you having to go to them — and then weighing up whether it’s worth exploring further.

The buildings are rather abstractly designed (not to mention having TARDIS-like properties), and call to mind retro classics such as Jet Set Willy, where a “real world environment” was simply a room with obstacles in it and various graphics representing toilets and televisions scattered around the place. They’re far from “believable” environments, but it doesn’t matter — you’re playing a side-on platform game, so there’s a limit to how realistically these structures can be designed anyhow. I’d rather have something that is interesting to explore than something where every building is the same.

Missions play a key role in progression. You’ll come across missions either on the world map or tucked away inside buildings. These whisk the player off to a unique, special area and challenge them with a specific task. Sometimes you might be climbing a linear tower and bashing bosses on the way up. Another time you might be defending storage silos from incoming meteors like a Missile Command platformer. Another time you might be tasked with removing the “anachronisms” from an area, which involves figuring out which monsters don’t “belong” in the region you’re in and eliminating them. Destroying all the correct monsters concludes the mission. Destroying an incorrect monster spawns two more, either, both or neither of which may also be an anachronism. Yet another time you might be challenged with getting through a “one shot, one kill” dungeon where either you or the enemy grazing their knee results in instant death.

As you progress through the game, death becomes an increasingly frequent occurrence. When a character dies, they’re gone for good, leaving behind a tough-to-defeat vengeful ghost at the location where they shuffled off the mortal coil. Fortunately, you don’t lose all the stuff you’ve spent hours accumulating — you simply lose any upgrades you might have applied to that character’s health, attack power and mana pool and have to pick a new playable character. As you rescue survivors from different time periods, you gain access to a range of characters with varying abilities — those from an “ice age” era, for example, are resistant to the cold, while those who are not will require special equipment to explore cold environments effectively.

The eventual goal is to storm into the local Overlord’s lair and kick him squarely in the balls. Said Overlord has a bunch of lieutenants, too, who can either be knocked off individually before taking on the Overlord or battled at the same time as the big boss man. You can theoretically walk straight into the Overlord’s lair from the beginning of the game, but you’ll be ill-equipped to deal with the challenges therein. Instead, it’s advisable to complete a bunch of missions to raise the continent’s “civilisation level” (thus affecting both the strength of the enemies and the potential rewards on offer) while also collecting the raw materials required to buff up your character’s spells. And rescue survivors. And build buildings. And construct wind shelters to push back the wind storms that buffet the region, making exploration difficult. And track down “mystery rooms” to find clues describing exactly what the hell happened to the world to get it in this state. And… you get the idea. There is a shitload of things to do, and completing the first continent then invites you to do it all again in a more diverse array of environments.

The sheer amount of things that there are to do can make the game seem like a daunting prospect. The game often draws comparisons to other open-world freeform adventures such as Minecraft and Terraria and that feeling of being alone in a vast, terrifying world is very much present and correct here. Focus on completing a few simple tasks, though — the game is good enough to suggest some to you — and things will gradually start to fall into place.

A Valley Without Wind is an ambitious title that tries very hard and while it’s true there are elements of the experience that could do with a little refinement, it’s a very memorable, compelling and addictive game that produces some excellent emergent narrative. Best of all, though, is the fact that the developers are still working on it, meaning the game experience will grow, change and evolve as time goes on. If it’s this intriguing now, I can’t wait to see what the game looks like in a few months or years.

#oneaday Day 837: No Wind Here

My fine friend Alex picked me up a copy of the unusual A Valley Without Wind for my birthday — thank you, good sir! — and I had a brief foray into its strange world this evening. Obviously I haven’t spent that much time playing yet, but it’s certainly been enough for me to determine it’s a game I look forward to exploring further.

AVWW is a procedurally-generated Metroidish platformer with spellcasting, building, collecting and resource management. The concept sees the player taking the role of one of several random (and disposable) characters and exploring a vast 2D world in an effort to take down “The Overlord”.

In order to accomplish this, the player must explore the overworld, find their way into abandoned buildings that are remnants of the “old world” to recover supplies, delve into caves to find gems and other resources, and ultimately build up a settlement and their own power.

As you progress through the game, you acquire new “spell gems” which allow you to cast various magics. You can also upgrade your abilities with various materials and take on missions to provide a sense of “structure”, but otherwise the game is very open and free, and the developers claim that it’s both impossible and impractical to explore every nook and cranny of the randomly-generated world.

The game takes place on a series of 2D maps, with different “rooms” (actually scrolling regions) connected to one another by doorways and cave entrances. Exploring these rooms and the way they’re connected to each other is a key part of the experience. A helpful minimap system helps you figure out where to aim for, where resources are located and where strong boss enemies can be found.

Interesting things come about when the player dies. The game features permadeath of sorts, but the game isn’t over when a character bites it. Instead, the world lives on but the player starts a new character. There’s even the chance to come across the ghost of your old character.

Then there’s a multiplayer option, which I haven’t investigated as yet, but the prospect is intriguing in a Minecraft sort of way — a procedurally generated world with multiple players running around finding resources and killing enemies? Sounds awesome.

There’s an element of the “roguelike” genre about the game, and as regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of that sort of thing. The fact the game has a convincing sense of structure while still being put together almost completely at random is an impressive achievement, and I look forward to seeing if the game manages to maintain a sense of pace and direction throughout. It’s obviously designed to be replayed, too, as there are a wide array of difficulty settings for both the combat and the platforming sections separately.

Further thoughts to follow when I’ve spent a bit more time with the game! (And you can expect more on Nier shortly, too — though this may well be in the form of a Squadron of Shame SquadCast.)

#oneaday Day 836: Brandwatch

So, at the time of writing, the No. 1 free iPad app and No. 2 free iPhone app is this game. A quiz. About logos.

This seems to be something of a craze at the moment, as it’s far from the only title like this available in the App Store, and doubtless there are similar offerings on Android that I can’t be arsed to look up right now.

This is what we’re reduced to for entertainment now? Seeing how deep the brainwashing of advertising has burrowed into our skulls? I’d argue that scoring highly on one of these quizzes is not anything that we should particularly be proud of, as all it simply proves is that advertising has successfully drilled its way into your subconscious.

The same goes for anyone who uses the word “simples”, describes anyone as being “so Money Supermarket” non-ironically or sings that bloody “Go Compare” advert. (If you do the latter, I will likely punch you in the face. If you do the “so Money Supermarket” one, whether or not you get punched in the face will depend entirely on how good your Patrick Stewart impression is.)

The counter-argument to this, of course, is that many of these brands, logos and slogans have transcended their original meanings and become pop culture phenomenons or memes in their own right. And to an extent that’s true, but I can’t shake off the feeling that these things have been forced into the public consciousness, while true phenomena and memes should grow organically, naturally and without marketing spend. In many cases, they do, of course — look at the Know Your Meme page for Katawa Shoujo or the astonishing popularity of My Little Pony among people that it wasn’t originally intended for, for example. But I think we can all agree that anyone who takes an opportunity to sing the Go Compare song is a grade-A arsehole of the highest order.

Perhaps I’m just being grouchy. Or perhaps I’m just fed up with feeling like I can’t escape advertising any more. It seems to encroach on my time more and more. It’s all over the Internet. I get text messages from lawyers inviting me to seek compensation for the accident I supposedly had (funny, I don’t remember it). I get phone calls from twats trying to sell me shit even though I’m registered with the TPS. (Note: this is the main reason I never answer my landline. Call my mobile if you need to speak with me.) I get people knocking on my door trying to sell me double glazing or get me to switch energy suppliers. It’s plastered over certain games. It’s smeared all over Facebook like festering shit. It encroaches on Twitter occasionally in the form of “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Users” — though these are, thankfully, easy to ignore. I even had to remove a Chrome extension yesterday because it was inserting an ad at the bottom of every page I viewed.

Ads allow things to be put out there for free, of course, and without them we’d be having to pay a lot more money for the things that we do, so I guess we should sort of be grateful for them. That said, it doesn’t excuse the sleaziness of some ads, particularly on the Internet — take the large “Download” links on software sites, for example, or the “You Have 1 New Message/Virus/Picture” banners you get on mobile apps. Or indeed the “lose 3 tons of belly fat with one weird old tip” thing. (Spoilers: you probably won’t, otherwise the world would be talking about it.)

You know what? Thinking about it, I’d actually be happy to pay for more things and have them advertising-free. I pay for Spotify premium and don’t have ads. I’ll happily pay to remove ads in iOS games I intend to play for more than five minutes. I pay for Netflix and get movies and TV shows without ad breaks. I’d even happily hand over some money to WordPress if it became a premium-only service, such is the excellent use I’ve got out of it for free over the years.

In short, provide me with a quality product and the means to not be battered around the face with people trying to sell me shit I don’t want, and I’ll happily hand over some money. Yell “Buy! Buy! Buy!” repeatedly at me with no means of respite and I will, yes, punch you in the face.

#oneaday Day 835: I Finished Nier

As the heading says, I have indeed finished Nier… once, anyway. I’m going to hold off on doing a “review” as such for the moment, however, for several reasons. Firstly, a full understanding of the game is only attained following several playthroughs. And secondly, Nier is a fine example of how the “reviewing” system we use most of the time is, at times, flawed.

Nier enjoyed mediocre review scores on its original release, netting a Metacritic average of 68. As people who care about such things will tell you, 68 is not “bad” if you’re taking 50 to be “average”, but unfortunately no-one does. The assumption is made by most people that anything under 80 is not really worth bothering with, and anything 90 or higher is an essential purchase.

But in my experience, it’s often in these slightly lower areas that you get the most interesting games. They may be rough around the edges, they may not be perfect, but by golly they have soul.

If you were judging Nier purely mechanically, it’s easy to see why it attained the mediocre review scores it did. There are a very limited number of environments to explore which you spend a lot of time backtracking through. The environments are pleasant enough, but not that interesting. The enemies are repetitive. Combat can be a bit clunky. Most of the magic spells are fairly useless. The AI partners you pick up over the course of the game are completely useless. Most of the game’s quests involve either killing things or fetching things. Choices you make don’t matter. And the “real-time” mechanic for growing crops is just ridiculous.

The thing is, though, play Nier and become invested in its story, and absolutely all of these factors cease to matter completely. Nier tells an interesting, mature, emotional tale, and it tells it well with a small cast of well-defined, unique (and bizarre) characters — and a much larger supporting cast who make the bleak, far-future world of the game seem all the more believable. It piles on the darkness but knows how to lighten the mood with a pithy comment or two at just the right moment. It constantly does things you don’t expect — with the story, with the characters, with the style of gameplay, even with the camera angles. It encourages the player to get inside the head of this unyielding, determined protagonist and almost “method act” their way through the game as he toils and struggles to save his daughter.

Do Nier’s occasionally-clunky mechanics and sometimes-repetitive gameplay make it a “bad” title? Absolutely not. They may, however, put off the less patient players out there — and that’s fine. Those who stick with it will find themselves enjoying a surprisingly creative adventure, while those who chose to forgo the game’s hidden charms and depths for whatever reason doubtless have plenty of other things they’d like to spend their time playing.

The sad thing, though, is that the mediocre review scores were probably enough to put a lot of people off even trying the game in the first place. Why bother buying and playing a “68” when you could play a “90”? This problem becomes compounded when you take into account the fact that a lot of publishers make strategic decisions about what franchises they want to explore further — and in extreme cases, which development studios get to keep taking home their paycheques — based on Metacritic scores. Do you think we’ll ever get another Nier (or at least a game like it)? Probably not. Why? Because it’s too risky. Nier has its fans, sure, but they number relatively few, and aren’t necessarily going to be enough to let the game make a profit.

I’m glad Nier exists, though. It’s evidence that all hope is not lost for creativity, maturity and a desire to do something a little bit different, even in these days of budgets spiralling out of control and a growing desire to create games that are “services” rather than “creative works”.

Nier most certainly is a creative work, a labour of love, and it should be applauded for that.

#oneaday Day 834: RUMOUR: Rumours ‘Rumoured’, Says Rumour-Monger

If you’ve ever started a conversation with “I heard that…” and then gone on to explain exactly how you heard somewhere/from some guy in the pub/from “The Internet” that something awesome/awful is going to happen, then I urge you to think before you speak in future. Because if you continue with that sentence, you’re simply feeding the rumour mill, and the rumour mill doesn’t produce good things and help us make the Bread of Truth. It produces garbage and poo, and then squishes it all out into the world’s most unpleasant pâté.

Tortured (and gross) metaphors aside, it’s a fact that I wish more people — particularly in the press — would cotton on to.

Today, for example, saw news that Liberty X “might be” reforming for a new album and a tour. Firstly, I don’t think anyone wants that, and secondly, the only evidence that such a reunion “might be” happening is the fact that they were photographed together outside the ITV studios and — get this — they were smiling. Stop the fucking presses.

There are a ton of journalism sectors that are particularly prone to this. Showbiz columns report who might be sleeping with whom. Sports columns report who might be moving to some other club for a disproportionately enormous amount of money. Music and arts columns report who might be working on what. And then, of course, there are the tech-related industries.

Anything related to Apple is accompanied by an inordinately huge amount of rumourmongering, for example. In the run-up to the company’s announcement of the third-generation iPad, all sorts of nonsense was flying around. This ranged from suggestions that it might not have a Home button to the frankly astonishing assertion that the reason iOS apps had started having textures like leather and the like in the background was because the new iPad would have a haptic display — i.e. one where you could feel textures as well as see them.

The video games industry is far from immune, either. Rarely a week goes by without one outlet reporting on some rumour from a mysterious, anonymous source and the “story” then being picked up by every other news site on the Web as if it were fact. This particular rumour mill goes into overdrive as a hardware generation starts to wind down and people start wondering what the next generation of consoles might look like. Inevitably, the vast majority of stories turn out to be absolute bollocks, and on the rare occasions when an outlet or reporter writes something that turns out to be true, there’s at least a day’s worth of smug, self-satisfied cries of “Called it.”

No you didn’t. You were throwing darts blindfolded, and you happened to hit a lucky bulls-eye. Your other fifteen darts are embedded in the barman’s testicles, the barmaid’s left boob, the right ear of that hard-looking dude who drinks absinthe by the pint and the TV that was showing the Bolton v Wigan match. (Everyone is angry. I’d run, if I were you.)

So why do we persist on reporting on these festering sores on the very arse of journalism? Because they attract attention, particularly if they’re controversial. If one site prints a story that Liberty X is reforming, or that the next Xbox will feature a system to prevent used games from working on it, or that the iPhone 5 really, totally, absolutely positively is coming out this time, then that will attract commenters like flies around shit. And that means page hits, advertising revenue and the little graphs that make the men in suits happy moving in an upward direction. Who cares if it’s absolute nonsense dreamed up by someone who cleans the toilets at Microsoft? Print it!

I make a point of not reading any stories that start with the prefix “RUMOUR:” now. And should I ever find myself back on the news desk for a popular gaming website, I will most certainly do everything in my power to avoid reporting on such nonsense — unless some actual investigation turns up something interesting, of course. But blindly parroting another site’s “anonymous source”? No. Just no.

So, then, I reiterate: think before you speak/write/publish. Because rumours are rarely helpful. Remember that time it spread around the whole school year that you’d shat your pants when in fact you’d just sat in some mud?

Yeah. That.