#oneaday Day 884: Just Write

I have written a veritable bucketload of words today (including this 5,000+ word epic for the Squadron of Shame) so you’ll forgive me for taking “the easy option” and indulging in some freewriting again this evening. (Technically I guess it’s not truly freewriting if I go back and add a link to that sentence I just wrote after the fact, but eh. I’m going to call it freewriting and there’s nothing you can do about it, really.

Today has been a fairly quiet and unremarkable day, as most days tend to be. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; having remarkable days all the time would quickly make them unremarkable and thus boring, and you’d get yourself into a cycle of increasing awesomeness, whereby it would take more and more remarkable things happening on a daily basis to make you determine that you had indeed had a “remarkable” day. So yes. Today was fairly unremarkable, which is fine. Though it did see the arrival of our new, massive, comfy sofa, so that was nice. And I guess that qualifies as something vaguely out of the ordinary, though whether I’d actually call it “remarkable” or not is up for debate somewhat.

Today I reviewed Zynga’s new game Ruby Blast on Facebook. As per usual for Zynga, the game lifts game mechanics from other titles wholesale, though in the case of Ruby Blast the game isn’t a straight clone of Wooga’s Diamond Dash (its primary inspiration) but instead combines it with the “Diamond Mine” mode from Bejeweled 3. It works pretty well, though it does all the things about social games that probably annoy you if you’re not already engaged with that particular part of the market. It has an “energy” system to throttle how much you can play, it continually asks you to share things and invite friends, and there’s something just “off” about the aesthetic that makes you want to strangle the personality-free main character. Objectively, however, it’s not a bad example of a social game — it’s fun, quick to play, likely to earn a fair amount of money and actually encourages people to play together with a weekly leaderboard a la Bejeweled Blitz, which still rules the roost for social puzzle titles as far as I’m concerned.

What else did I do? I wrote up that epic Squadron of Shame article I posted earlier. That was the result of an extended conversation between me and my good friend Mr Alex Connolly, who makes his home all the way over in Japan. It’s pretty awesome that we can have such an in-depth conversation across thousands of miles and then publish the (lengthy) results for all to see. The piece even got a shout-out from the developers of the game we were discussing, which was nice.

I also put my foot down on Facebook and determined that I am not going to put up with the facile social marketing crap that most “brands” tend to indulge in on Facebook. My new policy is that the second a game/company/other brand posts something inane, like “what are you having for dinner tonight” or “I like ________” then I will immediately unlike them. This will have little impact on their user figures, but I’ll feel better about it. This kind of social marketing is apparently A Thing, and me saying it is stupid (it is) is not going to make it go away, sadly, because it’s proven to be effective. Just look at any brand page asking an asinine question about what colour sauce you prefer on your kebabs and you’ll see several thousand “Likes” and at least a few hundred comments, possibly more. Meanwhile we struggle to get people out of the house to vote for things that actually matter. Oh well.

I’m not sure where this rambling is going but I haven’t stopped typing yet so I may as well continue for now. It’s been quite warm today, but the night has become a bit chilly. I have the window open as I type this and the cold breeze is actually quite pleasant. I popped into the bedroom to see Andie before I started typing this and it is incredibly hot in there — way hotter than the rest of the house. I’m not sure why, nor do you, my readership, care. So I will stop talking about this nonsense forthwith.

I have had the song “Winter Wrap-Up” from My Little Pony stuck in my head all day. This is partly due to the fact that the other day I had to review a Facebook “virtual world” where it was possible to choose YouTube videos to put on the walls, and naturally (naturally?) the first thing that sprang to mind was PONIES PONIES PONIES. As such, I haven’t been able to get that earworm of a song out of my head ever since. It’s not a bad song. It’s catchy. It has silly lyrics, but let’s not forget it was part of an episode of My Little Pony, so we can forgive it a bit of silliness I’m sure.

I am closing in on a thousand words so I will be stopping soon. I am going to end this post with an embedded video of Winter Wrap-Up so you can all suffer like I’ve been suffering. It’s just a shame I can’t make it auto-play. Oh God, do you remember Web pages that auto-played MIDI files and other stuff? Thank heavens we moved beyond that. Now, we just have superfluous Flash animations and other crap. But it’s been a very long time since I visited a website that had a background MIDI. I sort of miss it. But at the same time, any website that did do that would doubtless get mercilessly mocked. It would probably be a viral sensation these days, to be honest, but for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway. That’s really nearly a thousand words now so it’s time to stop, and the only thing that remains for me to do is this, as promised:

Yeah. Yeah.

#oneaday Day 883: Freewriting

I have no idea what to write about today. So I’ve decided to just start typing and see what comes out. Doubtless it will be a ridiculous flow of consciousness nonsense post, but eh. What can you do.

I’ve used this technique before, of course. It’s called “freewriting” and it’s a good technique if you’re planning on perfecting your creative writing craft. Well, maybe not perfecting, but it’s a good means of practicing the art of getting ideas out of your head and onto the page as quickly as possible. This is an important thing to do, as ideas, if left unchecked, float around your head for a day or two and then dissipate without warning, often before you’ve had a chance to do anything with them. I find that I can generally hold A Good Idea in my head for up to a week at a time, but if I don’t do anything about it (even if that “anything” is simply “make a note of it to come back to later”) then it is gone forever. Usually. (Sometimes if it’s a particularly powerful Good Idea, then it will be back with greater force. This is usually a sign that I should Do Something About It.)

Talking of creative writing, I downloaded an app for the Mac called Scrivener yesterday, and spent a little bit of time going through its tutorial and fiddling with it. It’s a “writer’s toolbox” sort of application, taking the approach that programming environments do for application development, only for creative projects. You have a “binder” in which you can organise the various bits that make up your work, and when it’s all finished you “compile” it into its finished product, whether that’s a short document or a full-length novel. There are all manner of different handy tools in there, including a corkboard where you can rearrange virtual notecards, the facility to store all your research within the single Scrivener project file and the ability to split your work up however you see fit for later recompilation. It looks pretty good, and I’m going to make use of it. I’m thinking that if I actually organise myself to start writing something, I might be able to finish it. Whether or not that will be sooner rather than later will depend on my own enthusiasm for the project and whether or not I’m able to maintain momentum. I made a start today with a couple of character sketches, so we’ll see where I go from there. No, you’re not getting a sneak peek yet.

And now I’m running out of things to say again. I have broken my freewriting streak by replying to someone on Twitter, which was an error on my part. I shouldn’t leave Twitter open while writing. It is distracting. Everyone knows this. Perhaps I was thinking that it would provide me with inspiration for something to write. I guess it sort of has, now. You’re probably wondering what I tweeted about. Well, it’s all in the context, but I told Aubrey “Chupacaubrey” Norris that she is the “secret boss of PR”. She was lamenting the fact that she wanted to be the Final Boss of something (Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera had been referred to as the “Final Boss of Games Journalism” a few moments earlier) so I said that to be nice. Also she is awesome, and a fine example to the rest of the industry.

Anyway. I think that’s enough for now. Sorry for the lame post (I’m not sorry at all) but it’s very late, I’m tired, I just finished Quest for Glory II at last and now I want to go to bed. Maybe after I’ve sent all my Pocket Planes flights on their merry way.

Night night.

#oneaday Day 882: Microsoft Mysteries

As I type this, Microsoft’s mysterious event at which something may or may not be revealed is about to start. The usual rumours and speculation have been flying around and are just as infuriating as ever, but there’s been something a little different about this event: unlike, say, Apple events, for which we tend to know the vast majority of the content well before it’s announced, there’s been nary a whiff of what this might be all about.

A lot of people seem convinced that the company are going to launch a tablet device, and that would make a good degree of sense what with the impending launch of Windows 8. But then there’s a new Xbox on the cards. And Windows Phone is surely due for a kick up the arse. And then there’s things like Surface, and all the things that Microsoft Research are up to — though let’s not forget that they unleashed the monstrosity that is Songsmith on the world. (And now it’s stuck in my head again. “You sing into a microphone while the drummer plays along…”)

But the truth is that no-one knows. At all. No-one has any idea whatsoever what is going on, and this means that the event has the potential to be exciting. (It also has the potential to be a crushing disappointment, but that’s part of what makes it exciting.)

This is something that to a large extent we have lost in the modern age of PR, leaks and the reporting of every little rumour that sneaks out. Think about it. If you reveal everything about your product months before it actually comes out, you walk a fine line between building anticipation and pissing people off with oversaturated marketing. I feel it all the time with modern high-profile video games, and I’m pretty certain tech enthusiasts feel the same way about new gadgets. I don’t know to what degree it happens in other sectors, but given the way a lot of modern PR seems to work regardless of industry, I can imagine it is the same across a lot of different areas.

I can’t be the only one who prefers to be surprised now and again by something. For all the mindless speculation that goes on around Apple product launches, the company itself is pretty good at keeping things under wraps until the last minute (though they let the cat out of the bag with iOS 6 somewhat). Microsoft has gone one better with this one by not letting even the slightest hint out to the press or the public. It’s had a far greater effect on the public’s anticipation than carefully-orchestrated “leaks” (most of which I doubt are really “leaks” at all) and “official” teasers — and as a result, everyone is on tenterhooks, watching the currently-running announcement (which still hasn’t announced anything as I type this paragraph).

Basically, the lesson to be learned here, I think, is that sometimes it’s okay to shut up and not tell anyone what you’re doing. Because when you tease something and then respond to all questions with “we’re not ready to talk about that yet” or “we do not comment on rumours or speculation” you just come across as a bit of an arse, really.

Ah, and there we go. The big announcement is the Microsoft Surface, though it’s changed a bit since the table-sized device we last saw. The new gizmo is an iPad-like device with an interesting twist: its Smart Cover-like kickstand has a full multitouch keyboard secreted within it. There’s also an optional other case with actual proper, tactile keys.

The fact the Surface is running Windows 8 means that it can run things like Office and the like. There’ll apparently be a scaled-back version for Windows RT, and one with Intel chips for the full Windows PC experience. The latter will also incorporate stylus and “digital ink” input as well as multitouch, and apparently has the power of a full desktop PC — though whether or not it will run Crysis is yet to be seen as I type this…

#oneaday, Day 881: Vita Killed Mobile Gaming for Me

I wanted to expand on a few things I talked about in my Vita post yesterday, specifically with regard to the differences between mobile (i.e. smartphone/tablet) and handheld (i.e. dedicated game-playing system) gaming.

A single day with the Vita has been utterly refreshing. I’ve played a number of games on the system, including Everybody’s Golf, Lumines Electronic Symphony, PS mini Velocity, Frobisher Says! and a couple of augmented-reality titles. Frobisher and the AR titles were free, Velocity was about 3 quid (PS minis are Sony’s “app-tier” games — in fact, many iOS and Android games are ported to the PS minis catalogue) and the other two are “full-price” titles (though Everybody’s Golf currently sells for a very reasonable 8 quid on PSN right now). In every instance, I was able to start up these games and enjoy them without being nagged to buy additional content or “Get More Coins!” even once. There were no exhortations to share things on Facebook or Twitter (though PSN can automatically share Trophies to Facebook) and no demands on the player that detracted unnecessarily from the immersion factor of the games in question.

This was the most striking thing about the whole experience. It’s practically a given that a mobile phone game will have some form of “Pay To Win” button these days, usually in the form of the ability to purchase in-game money, items or even experience points using real currency. These are usually positioned as “timesavers”, preventing players from having to “grind” to earn these things in the first place, though the fact is that the games themselves are very often designed in such a way that grinding (or paying) is necessary to progress. The game is designed to fit the business model, in other words.

Now, let’s look at Everybody’s Golf as a case study here. In Everybody’s Golf, you earn points through play. Skilful shots, sinking the ball under par and winning tournaments nets you varying amounts of these points, which can be used as a cumulative expression of your skill and the currency through which you unlock additional content in the game — characters, costumes, equipment, courses and other bits and bobs. In other words, the better you are at the game, the more quickly you can progress at unlocking stuff. This is a simple “carrot and stick” approach, but it provides a powerful motivation for the player to actually work hard to improve their game — particularly when coming up against an apparently-notorious difficulty spike partway through the single-player component of the game. If the player was simply able to drop a few quid on purchasing additional points (which, thankfully, is not an option), all meaning of the content they acquired using these points would be lost. The unlocked characters, the new costumes, the new equipment — none of it would be a trophy of the player’s achievements any more. Instead, it would simply be something that the player had thrown money at. Not only that, but the player’s cumulative score would cease to be an accurate depiction of their skill and play time. It would simply become just another meaningless currency — one with an exchange rate with real-world money.

This might not sound like a massive issue but the difference is profound. When playing a mobile phone game, the near-constant presence of “shop” buttons or “Get More Coins” interface elements makes it abundantly clear to the player that they are making use of a service rather than enjoying a creative work for art’s sake. That questioning feeling — “am I being screwed while I play for free? Should I pay for some coins?” — is ever-present in the player’s mind. In the most egregious cases, developers even make the “cash shop” option glow or flash on screen to deliberately distract the player and draw their eye to it. (This happens in free-to-play PC titles, too.)

Now, I will point out at this juncture that I am not condemning this business practice as “wrong” necessarily — when you release your game for free or a ridiculously low price on the App Store or Google Play, you need to take steps to ensure that you at very least break even. Rather, I am saying that it has had a significantly negative impact on my personal enjoyment of mobile games of late. I find a game which doesn’t ask me for more money after installing to be a pleasant surprise these days, rather than the norm. It wears you down after a while, particularly when you play as many iOS and Android games as I do — it is, after all, my job — and when I sit down to play a game just for fun, I simply don’t want to be bugged by the “business” side of things.

Everyone plays games for different reasons. Some play games as simple timewasters while they’re in a boring meeting, sitting on the toilet or waiting for a bus. Others use them as a high-tech equivalent of fiddling with a pencil. Others still want to compete against their friends, or express their creativity, or as a social outlet, or… you get the idea. There are probably as many reasons as there are people.

I play games purely for enjoyment and entertainment, usually in substantial, continuous sessions. Games are my primary form of recreation — where some people watch movies or TV, I play games. As such, in most cases, I’m not in it for a few seconds at a time — I’m there for an hour or more at once. During that time, I want to be immersed in the game experience without interruptions, particularly if I’m playing a story-heavy game. I do not want to be reminded that I’m playing a game if at all possible — unless it’s built in to the experience in an entertaining, self-aware sort of way — and I certainly do not want to be reminded that making games is big business. I know this. I read all about it most days. I do not need to be reminded of it during play. Because there is nothing more immersion-breaking for me than exhortations to “Share this with your friends! Buy more coins now! Play again tomorrow for bigger daily rewards! Try our other games!” Even popups demanding that I rate an app 5 stars “now” or “later” have a negative impact on my enjoyment of a title.

This is where the Vita has provided the most pleasant surprises of all for me. Across everything I have played, I have been left alone to simply enjoy the game for what it is. In some cases, where competition is an inherent part of the game (like in Lumines), I am informed of my friends’ high scores, but I’m not invited to brag to them. I’m certainly not confronted with half-finished games sporting interface elements that just say “Coming Soon!” and big flashing buttons to “Add Cash”. It’s been a blessed relief.

Couple that with the fact that the Vita games I’ve played so far are all deeper experiences designed to be played for longer periods at a time rather than five-minute timewasters, and a lot of the anxiety-inducing sense of ADHD that the diversity of mobile gaming offers is gone. I had to give up playing asynchronous iPhone games with friends because I found that keeping up with them was genuinely stressful. It felt like work, and it wasn’t fun any more, so I stopped. I am sorry to any former Draw Something or Hero Academy players, but once something stops being fun, there’s no point dragging it out unnecessarily.

All this may be painting an unnecessarily negative view of mobile gaming, but that’s not the case at all — this is purely a personal response with regard how I want to spend my own free time. These ADHD games have a place and a massive audience — much larger than the audience the Vita currently boasts, as it happens. There’s a lot of money to be made through “cash shops” and “get coins” buttons, so I can’t blame publishers and developers for wanting to capitalise on this, whatever my own personal opinions on the matter.

Alongside this, there are some genuinely good games on iOS and Android that don’t fall into these excessive monetisation traps — though interestingly, even Epic’s Infinity Blade, one of the most impressive and supposedly “hardcore” games on iOS, now boasts the facility to purchase in-game currency with real cash, as do otherwise-excellent titles like Hunters 2. Equally, some free-to-play games — like the excellent Pocket Planes I talked about a couple of days ago — leave the decision of whether or not to pay entirely in the player’s hands, and are generous enough to make the game perfectly playable to those who do wish to play for free.

A single day with the Vita, though, has been enough to convince me that dedicated handheld gaming most certainly still has a place, and I’m more than happy for it to be a part of my life. I can see myself leaving the vast majority of iOS gaming behind — board game adaptations and Pocket Planes (until it gets boring) excepted — in favour of the deeper, more rewarding, less skeezy-feeling experiences that Vita titles offer.

And let’s not even get started on how fucking nice it is to have buttons again. Or how nice it is to have an online store that is not filled with endless regurgitations of the same FarmVille formula with zombies/fantasy kingdoms/monsters/pets attached. Or… I could go on. But I won’t.

#oneaday Day 880: Not Going To Make a “Livin’ La Vita Loca” Joke

I bought a PlayStation Vita today. I’d had my eye on one for a little while, but having successfully paid off my credit card for the purchase of my new Mac, I decided a little treat was in order, so I did a bit of research as to what the fine folks of the Internet thought was good games-wise, and grabbed one today. I was fortunate enough to be able to snare a preowned but unused model from Game in Southampton today, which cut down the price considerably, allowing me to also grab an (overpriced) 32GB memory card along with a copy of Everybody’s Golf to enjoy for about £270 in total.

I’ve only spent one round with the latter so far (but it’s bringing back pleasing memories of Tee Off on the Dreamcast) so I won’t comment on that too much, but I did want to talk a little bit about the system itself, as I believe it’s worthy of note.

The Vita distinguishes itself from its predecessor the PSP immediately with its touchscreen-friendly interface. Featuring an icon-based homescreen somewhat akin to modern smartphones, the Vita invites you to touch, swipe, flick, peel and all manner of other things. You can reorganise your homescreen icons as you see fit, and even set backgrounds for different pages. You can’t organise things into folders, though, which is a bit of a shame, but I can cope with that. PlayStation Network (sorry… Sony Entertainment Network, which still amuses me because its abbreviation is the same as Special Educational Needs) provides plenty of downloadable goodness, ranging from complete games that you could also buy as physical products at retail to smaller, cheaper, download-only titles and even free apps for access to Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Flickr.

The downloadable side of things has, for me, always been a big strength of Sony’s systems from the PSP onwards. The PlayStation Store is a veritable treasure trove of underappreciated and overlooked gems as well as some of the most memorable “art games” (for want of a better term) in the business — games like Flower and Journey, for example. PlayStation Minis, too, provide portable-friendly experiences akin to what you might play on a smartphone, only with dedicated controls to enjoy them with, which is a big boon to anyone sick of poorly-implemented touch controls.

Besides the games themselves, though, Vita has a number of interesting and intriguingly noteworthy features. For starters, the system actually does multitasking considerably better than both iOS and Android. A tap of the PlayStation button freezes whatever you’re doing and takes you immediately back to the “OS”. From here, you can “peel” the app off the screen to close it completely, switch to something else (like, say, the settings app, or Twitter) and then be back into your game without any messing around. This is particularly beneficial when you want to browse the PlayStation Store for addon content, for example — even the PS3 requires a quit out of a running game to access the Store, whereas Vita manages to seamlessly switch to it, let you browse as you see fit, then switch back. This functionality also allows you to effectively do what the Steam Overlay does for PC gamers — while running a game, you can pop open a browser window and, let’s face it, look at GameFAQs.

Vita’s interface is gorgeous, too. The big, high-resolution LED screen makes things look great anyway, but the design of the OS just begs to be played with, too. On the homescreen, flicking between screens causes the icons to wobble like they’re hanging on pegs. Rather than “slide to unlock” if the machine goes into standby, you use the same “peel” motion that is used for closing apps. And the soft keyboard is pretty good, too, with a decent predictive text dictionary built in — though the size of the screen and its position means that “thumb typing” as on a smartphone is next to impossible. Fortunately, as the Vita is primarily a gaming platform, you won’t be doing that much typing on it, so it’s a design flaw I can forgive.

The built-in apps are interesting, too. Near allows you to see other Vita owners in your nearby vicinity, see what they’ve been playing and their responses to them. (I was surprised to see quite a few Vita owners living near me — I was expecting it to be a virtual ghost town around here.) Welcome Park introduces the system’s little quirks — the multitouch screen, the rear touchpanel, the two cameras and the built-in microphone — through a series of simple but surprisingly engaging minigames, all of which have Trophy support for those who care that much. There’s also a pleasing number of free downloads from the PlayStation Store, including a selection of social apps, a simple finger-painting app and even some games, including the hilarious and WarioWare-esque Frobisher Says.

All in all, I’m very pleased with my purchase so far. I’ve become somewhat disillusioned with iOS gaming recently — perhaps due to the fact I get to see some of the very best and worst titles as part of my day job — so I’ve been surprised how good it feels to have a dedicated handheld system again, particularly one that doesn’t possess an app ecosystem that encourages developers to include “Get More Coins!!” options even where they’re not wanted/needed. I shall look forward to many Everybody’s Golf sessions on the toilet in the near future as well as a thorough exploration of the myriad joys the PlayStation Store has to offer me.

#oneaday Day 879: Flying Away

Having gone off on one somewhat about the fetid pile of toss that is Rage of Bahamut yesterday, it’s only fair for balance’s sake to talk about a free-to-play game that is well-designed, player-friendly and actually rather fun.

I am referring to Pocket Planes, the newest game from Nimblebit, developers of the astronomically popular Tiny Tower, a game which made “tap, tap, tap” gamers out of even the most jaded hardcore members of the games industry.

Tiny Tower, as most people realised after varying amounts of time, was little more than a mindless busywork generator, as RedSwirl over the on Squadron of Shame Squawkbox puts it. You built floors, you attracted people, you stocked up your floors with stuff that made money, you went away, you waited for your phone to shout at you that something needed restocking, you tapped on it to restock it and repeated the entire process for more hours than you really should until you either keeled over dead or got bored.

Tiny Tower, then, had very little in the way of strategy and certainly wasn’t a modern-day SimTower, as some referred to it on its original launch. It was an interesting little timewaster with an adorable pixel-art aesthetic, however, and crucially, it allowed the player to make progress without battering them over the head to invite friends, share achievements or purchase things with real money every five minutes. The game featured a premium “hard currency” that allowed you to do things quicker or rapidly acquire more cash, but it was handed out fairly generously just through play, so those who wanted to play for free could.

Pocket Planes builds on this formula and puts a more complex game atop it. There’s still not a huge amount of depth there, but it’s definitely more than simple busywork now.

In Pocket Planes, you run an airline company, and your goal is to own all the airports in the world. (This alone distinguishes the game from Tiny Tower, which had no long-term goal besides “build a fucking huge tower”) You begin the game in one of several regions around the globe with a small fleet of rather crap planes and a desire to make money. Fortunately, there are plenty of jobs waiting for you that want to give you money, so getting started is a simple matter of loading up your planes with passengers, cargo or both (depending on what type of plane it is) and setting them on their merry way.

It’s here that an element of very light strategy comes into play. Sending your planes off costs money, and you don’t receive payments for flights until they’re completed. To be efficient, you might want to try and hit several stops in a single run, but when doing so you need to note whether there’s a big enough profit margin to make it worthwhile. Sometimes leaving passengers behind rather than fully loading is more profitable, and scoring a jackpot of customers who are all going to the same place nets a 25% bonus on the income attained.

That’s it for the basics of gameplay. Beyond that, once you’ve earned enough money you can purchase new airports, which allow your flights to go further afield and also provide you with plane parts which can be subsequently assembled into new members of your fleet, assuming you have space for them. Old, crap planes can be retired to make room if you don’t have the capital to expand your fleet’s maximum size, or you can simply try to get as many aircraft in the air as possible. Plane parts and complete planes can also be purchased through the Market page, which restocks with a random selection of items every few minutes, and parts can also be traded with friends for a small fee.

Like Tiny Tower, a lot of these actions use the game’s “hard currency”, or “Bux” as they are known, but again like its predecessor, Pocket Planes is generous about handing these valuable commodities out through play. If anything, Pocket Planes is more generous than Tiny Tower, rewarding the player with Bux simply for completing certain jobs, levelling up and various other actions. Sometimes they even just float past the planes in flight, to be collected with a simple tap.

Pocket Planes also includes an interesting social mechanic in the form of its “Flight Crew” system. By simply typing in the same crew tag as other airline tycoons, players can team up in an attempt to complete as many jobs in special global events as possible, with flight crews ranked on a worldwide leaderboard and prizes awarded when the time expires. You can also see how you stack up to the rest of your crew and figure out who needs to pull their weight more — though those players who join your crew but aren’t on your Game Center friends list simply show up as anonymous benefactors, which is a shame.

The interesting thing with Pocket Planes’ social mechanics is that it assumes the player already knows how to socialise. There are no screen-filling exhortations to share achievements with friends; no “friend gating”, where progress becomes impossible unless you have a certain number of friends playing; no demands that you “visit” friends and “help” them. In fact, the game’s social mechanics are kept pleasingly minimalist — most screens offer the facility to tweet a screenshot using iOS 5’s built-in Twitter functionality, but in the case of Flight Crews and the like, it’s up to the player to encourage their friends and acquaintances to join in the fun however they see fit rather than spamming them in-game. This is a Good Thing.

Pocket Planes is, at heart, a simplistic game with very little substance, but it offers the same sort of idle satisfaction that Tiny Tower did with a bit more sense of structure. It will undoubtedly be another big success for Nimblebit and fair play to them for that — their recent games are proof that you can adopt a free-to-play business model without being jerks about it. The goodwill that builds will likely encourage many more people who wouldn’t think to purchase virtual goods otherwise to dip into their pockets purely to show the developer their support.

Pocket Planes is out now for iOS. An Android version is following in the near future, but a release date hasn’t been announced yet.

#oneaday Day 878: I’d Tap That for £70 of In-App Purchases

Despite my day job, which is reviewing mobile and social games for the fine folks over at Inside Network, I have to confess that the reason some of these games end up being quite so popular eludes me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m trained to spot a free-to-play game that’s going to be profitable a mile off… I just can’t pin down the reason as to why some of these games resonate with people so much. And no-one seems to want to tell me, either.

(Naturally it probably goes without saying that these are my personal, not professional views. But I’ll say it anyway. Oh, I already did.)

Let’s take a title called Rage of Bahamut as a case study. Rage of Bahamut is a game for iOS and Android devices. Ostensibly it’s a “card battling” game in which you collect (virtual) cards a la Magic: The Gathering and then use said cards to do battle, either against other people or “boss” monsters. There’s also a large number of “quests” that you can take one of the characters represented on your cards on, the ability to organise players into “Orders” and cooperate, trade cards, help each other out on difficult fights and all manner of other stuff.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it’s not. The game features one of the most dreadful user interfaces I’ve ever seen, with most of the game looking like a Web page from the early ’90s, albeit without animated “Under Construction” GIF files. The “quest” feature consists entirely of tapping a button, watching a short animation of a monster dying and observing your stamina bar gradually decrease as your experience and “quest progress” bars increase. Battling another player involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing “Battle” and then doing absolutely nothing. Battling a boss involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing “Battle” and then doing absolutely nothing. Oh, and there’s no sound, either. It wasn’t deemed necessary, it seems. The game’s sole slightly redeeming feature is that the anime-style artwork for the cards is quite nice, but that certainly doesn’t make it any fun to play. At all. Go on, try it. (Android users, go here.)

Despite this crippling lack of entertainment value, somehow the game is presently the third top grossing game on the iPhone — and it has been at the top of that chart in the last few days, too. It’s free to download, meaning that people are enjoying this hateful, monotonous, tedious pile of steaming un-fun crap enough to want to voluntarily hand over money.

Why?!

It’s not the only game of this type which has enjoyed success, it’s just the most recent. Various studies by research companies indicate that the majority of profitable apps on the various app stores of the Internet include in-app purchases in one form or another — and many of these titles are of the free-to-play variety. I have nothing against free-to-play as a concept or business model, but I do question the taste of some people when something as unbelievably lacking in virtue as Rage of Bahamut proves itself to be more profitable than lovingly-crafted paid apps which developers have poured large quantities of time and money into. This depressing tale from Joystiq springs to mind.

I can’t help but feel that the press is partly to blame in all this. Titles like Rage of Bahamut often get great reviews from the press despite their lack of innovation, gameplay, interface design or anything even resembling entertainment, when in fact they should be summarily panned for providing an experience akin to scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet equipped with a macro that requires you to click “OK” every ten seconds.

But then I guess I’ve never seen the appeal of football management games, either…

(Incidentally, if you’re looking for a card-battling game that’s actually good, try Gamevil’s Duel of Fate, Hothead’s Kard Combat or Kyle Poole’s Shadow Era.)

#oneaday Day 877: Far Away

It’s not been a great week to be in my mind. You can’t control how or when or for what reason depression will hit you, but it’s been getting me down somewhat recently for a variety of reasons. The events I outlined yesterday are one contributing factor, but as I said there, they aren’t directly affecting me and thus I have to think that the exaggerated feelings of disappointment and upset I have been feeling may be caused by, rather than be the cause of, depression. Or perhaps there’s a whole mess of contributing factors.

I don’t know. And thinking about it inevitably doesn’t help.

One thing that is getting me down a bit at the moment is how far away I am feeling from all my friends. I live in the middle of nowhere a long way away from pretty much everyone I know, and thousands of miles away from the people I talk to literally every day — friends, coworkers, confidantes. I have Andie in my life, a fact which I am incredibly thankful for every day, but that unfortunately doesn’t stop the occasional feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

It’s partly my fault in some cases, of course. When you have disparate, unconnected friendship groups scattered around the globe, it’s difficult to keep up with all of them. (Hell, it’s difficult to keep up with disparate, unconnected friendship groups in the same city sometimes.) Some necessarily fall by the wayside as a sort of natural atrophy. In many cases, this gradual contraction of your worldwide friendship network is a sign that one or all of you have evolved and changed from the people you were when you first knew each other, and you’re just going in directions too different to stay together. In others, yes, it can simply be laziness, but mental states play a role in all this, too, particularly if you struggle with social anxiety as I do — sometimes even the prospect of hanging out with a longtime friend can be terrifying if you haven’t seen them for ages. What if you have nothing to talk about?

Mostly, though, my daily life, my work and my hobbies have led me to the position I am in now, where the vast majority (though not all) of the people that I would consider my closest friends live many thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, and in some cases even further afield than that. It’s great that I can talk to these people every day thanks to various forms of social media and other online happy funtimes, but sometimes all you want to do is get some people together in the same room, play some couch co-op (or couch competition games like the rather wonderful Hidden in Plain Sight), play some board games, eat some pizza/curry/Chinese/other takeaway goodness and simply, you know chill out together. It happens all too rarely these days.

Ah well. Not a lot I can do about it right now at 1am in the dark in Chippenham, is there? Someday I’ll buy you all a drink. Just probably not all at the same time.

#oneaday Day 876: Gamers, Men, Everybody… Stop Being a Dick

I have mentioned these issues a couple of times over the past few days but I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re actually making me feel a bit depressed. I know that there’s little point in getting depressed or upset over “the way the world is” and there are far bigger problems in the world, etc. etc. but, I mean, wow. Something really needs to be done.

I am referring primarily to the treatment of Anita Sarkeesian, better known on the Interwebz as Feminist Frequency, the author of a number of feminist perspective critiques on popular culture. Sarkeesian recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her newest piece of research and criticism, dubbed simply “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”. The proposed series of videos Sarkeesian is intending to produce will deconstruct the most commonly-seen female character tropes in video games, highlighting recurring patterns and discussing them rather than simply pointing the finger and going “LOOK! THIS IS BAD.”

The response to Sarkeesian’s campaign was both good and bad. On the positive side, the campaign was fully funded in the first 24 hours, and since that time a number of “stretch goals” have been smashed, allowing Sarkeesian to produce a much larger amount of content than initially proposed.

On the negative side, this happened. And this happened.

I really shouldn’t be astonished by things that people say on the Internet any more, given that it is widely regarded as a wretched hive of &c &c despite all the lovely and intelligent people who also populate it. But these incidents really bothered me. They happened quickly and relentlessly… and they were clearly organised — likely by noted Internet cesspits 4chan and 9gag. This fabulous piece by Foz Meadows sums up the key aspect of the problem, I think: in attempting to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture, those who deliberately and maliciously harassed Sarkeesian resorted to, you guessed it, sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture.

Sarkeesian’s suffering isn’t in any way the only time this has happened, of course, though it may have been the most high-profile one in recent weeks. The Hitman: Absolution trailer I mentioned a few posts ago stirred up plenty of controversy, and anyone speaking out against it tended to get shouted down by people who couldn’t see the problem with it in the most abusive manner possible. Disagreements and differences in taste; threatening others and calling them abusive names because of those disagreements is not.

Even princess of geekdom Felicia Day wasn’t immune to this bullshit. Her recent video “Gamer Girl, Country Boy”, released as part of her entertaining “Flog” series on Geek & Sundry, attracted a swarm of completely unprovoked hateful comments. The hornets’ nest had already been stirred up, so another target for their ire was just a happy bonus. Whatever you think of Day’s past work, it should be clear to most people that there’s clearly not a malevolent bone in her whole body, and the whole incident clearly upset her very much. I’m not “white knighting” here, it’s a clear and simple fact. Who wouldn’t be upset by an organised campaign to troll and flame something you’d worked hard on?

All of this is just a bit much to take. I’ve always been someone who likes to try and see the best in people — to a fault, really — but to see that some people hiding behind that ever-present veil of anonymity prove themselves to really be complete and utter cunts doesn’t make me feel great. Obviously my own take on the matter pales in comparison to what Sarkeesian, Day and anyone else who has suffered at the hands of these trolls must be feeling about all this, but it’s genuinely upsetting to know that there are people that vile and disgusting out there — people who supposedly share the same passions and hobbies as I do.

It needs to stop. That will only happen with concerted efforts from everyone involved, and it goes back to what school always told you about handling bullies. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Tell the bully that what they are doing is upsetting and unpleasant. And tell someone else. Don’t be afraid to talk about it. Don’t suffer in silence. Because while someone (or, indeed, a thrown-together Internet lynch mob) being a complete arsehole can utterly ruin your day, week, month, year, it’s infinitely worse if you have no-one to turn to for support.

Let’s stamp this odious attitude out. Freedom of speech is one thing; using said freedom to intimidate, harass and silence others is not its intention. I fully support and endorse Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter campaign, and while I won’t insist that you do so too, I would certainly like to encourage you all to stand up to bullying when (not if, sadly) you see it happening — even if it’s not directly involving you. Good Samaritan and all that.

Above all, don’t be a dick. And if it all gets a bit much, then pay this site a visit.

#oneaday Day 875: Kiryu Kazuma

I’ve been playing a lot of the Yakuza series recently — I’m intending on playing them all back-to-back, and at the time of writing am probably slightly less than halfway through Yakuza 2.

I’d specifically like to talk about Yakuza 2 because the first Yakuza game was covered in a suitably comprehensive level of detail by the Squadron of Shame in this podcast:

The original Yakuza was great. It was another fine example of a “kitchen sink” game — a type of game which incorporates a wide variety of other experiences to produce one surprisingly coherent whole. In the case of Yakuza, it blends JRPG, brawler, dating sim, scavenger hunt and open-world adventure into one of the finest experiences of the PS2 era, marred only by long-ass loading times, a sometimes-clunky fighting engine and the questionable decision to use American voice actors (including some surprisingly big names like Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamill and Michael Madsen) swearing more than your average Tarantino movie to depict the unique idiosyncracies of the Japanese criminal underworld.

Yakuza 2, still on the PS2, fixes almost everything that was flawed about its predecessor. It’s still riddled with loading breaks, but they’re much shorter than in the first game. The American voice acting has been replaced by a much more authentic Japanese voice track — though the subtitles are well-localised and entertainingly written rather than being a literal translation. The fight sequences have been refined to be much more fluid, incorporating far fewer instances of protagonist Kazuma facing the wrong direction and unleashing a devastating combo onto thin air and far more situations where it’s possible to make use of the brutal (and darkly amusing) “heat” actions — smashing people’s faces into walls, battering them over the head with street furniture, sticking a beer crate on their head and then punching them repeatedly in the stomach to name just three.

For the uninitiated, the Yakuza series’ game flow is much more akin to a traditional JRPG than something like Grand Theft Auto, to which it got rather unfairly compared on its first appearance in the West. Kazuma wanders around the extremely well-realised fictional district of Kamurocho (based on Kabukicho in Tokyo) in an attempt to get to the bottom of whatever disaster is befalling him and his buddies in the organised crime world this time. Along the way, he’ll encounter a wide variety of non-essential activities to distract him, many of which are deep, involved quests in their own right, and the pursuit of which causes a game which can be completed in about 12 hours to balloon up to well over 40 hours in length.

By far the best thing about Yakuza is the sheer variety of things to do. It’s an evolution of the Shenmue series’ anal attention to detail, though rather than providing players with the ability to open every drawer in every house for no apparent reason, Yakuza provides players with a well-realised city district in which they can romance hostesses, get into street fights, collect lost locker keys, gamble at an illegal casino, get a “massage” of questionable morality, play slot machines, play a crane game and play baseball. Yakuza 2 adds even more to the mix, including a lengthy sequence where you have to run your own hostess club; another lengthy sequence where Kazuma becomes a host at a club in an attempt to unmask the manipulative, abusive owner; a full Mahjong simulation; a first-person fighting game; golf; “video booths” where Kazuma sometimes learns new abilities; and some other stuff I doubtless haven’t discovered yet. Oh, and Yakuza 2 also includes a whole other district almost as large as Kamurocho again, also packed full of things to do.

None of this stuff really feels like “filler” though, because it is clearly optional — the experience point rewards for completing any of these activities are generally laughable, though sometimes you get some cool items. Rather, the inclusion of all these activities helps the world of Yakuza to feel far more alive than almost any other game world I’ve ever encountered. Not only that, but it gives the player an incredibly strong understanding of Japanese culture, with a particular focus on the seedy underbelly of it — the side that Japan doesn’t like to talk about. It’s a game that draws you in with its interesting story and then encourages you to stay for the hostess bars, gambling dens and men with “FART” written on the back of their hoodies.

Of course, the great thing about the series is that if you do want to rush through them and just see the story, you’re not penalised for doing this in the slightest. I’d already played the first Yakuza back when we recorded the aforementioned podcast, but I just wanted to remind myself of what happened, so I raced through without doing any of the side missions and still had a satisfying experience. (In fact, one could argue that the story is a little more coherent if the game is played in this way, but I wouldn’t trade all the other stuff for anything.)

Yakuza 2, so far, then, is proving to be every bit as good as its predecessor and then some. I have no idea how long it’s going to take me to beat, but I’m enjoying taking my time with it so far. And once it’s done, I get to move into the HD age with Yakuza 3 and 4… and possibly the utterly bizarre Dead Souls after that. It’s quite a ride.