1068: Still Waiting for The Answer

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m getting kind of sick of Persona 3.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I still freaking love Persona 3. What I do not love, however, is the “epilogue” sequence The Answer that was added in the “FES” rerelease of the game. The Answer adds 20+ hours of dungeon-crawling in an attempt to resolve some of the story’s loose ends, but in doing so strips out almost all of the things that made the main bit of Persona 3 such an amazingly awesome game.

For those still somehow unfamiliar with Persona 3 in general, allow me to elaborate.

The main part of Persona 3 (known as “The Journey”) is nigh on 100 hours long. You begin the game at the beginning of the Japanese school year in April, and work your way up to the finale nearly a year of in-game time later. With a few exceptions, you “live” every day along the way as a relatively normal Japanese high school student — going to school, dealing with your exams, hanging out with your friends, looking for love. Because of your special Persona-summoning power, however, during the “Dark Hour” that occurs on the stroke of midnight every day, you also get to dungeon-crawl through possibly the biggest single dungeon in any RPG ever — the tower of Tartarus. You have to balance your time effectively between levelling up your “social links” with your friends, which infuse your Personas with power, and levelling up your characters through fighting in Tartarus. It’s a good balance that combines dating sim/visual novel mechanics with more traditional RPG systems to produce something that gives all that fighting a huge sense of “meaning.”

I won’t spoil the ending of The Journey because I maintain that anyone who enjoys RPGs needs to play it, whether that’s on PS2 or PSP. But let’s talk about The Answer.

The Answer unfolds several months after the events of The Journey are concluded. The original protagonist is… indisposed elsewhere, so you are instead placed in the role of robot girl Aigis, a key character in the latter stages of The Journey. The original party (minus the original protagonist, and plus a new member) find themselves trapped in their dormitory, with the same day repeating itself over and over. A mysterious hole opens up in their lounge, and beneath their dormitory they discover “The Desert of Doors,” which leads to “The Abyss of Time” and the answers to all their questions.

As such, the aim of The Answer is to work your way through all the doors in the Desert of Doors and figure out just what the jolly fuck is going on. Behind each door is a dungeon which, like Tartarus, is split into several sections with bosses guarding progress at regular intervals. Unlike exploring Tartarus, you don’t have to manage your fatigue levels — you just keep going for as long as you think you can survive, then head back up for air when you’re running low on items, health or skill points. Then you go back in, perhaps get a little deeper, perhaps beat the boss that’s been giving you difficulty, and then you get a story scene when you reach the very bottom of each door’s dungeon.

This process repeats a number of times over the course of about 20 hours or so, and there is no real break in it. The dungeons are all randomly-generated, and the tiles used to create them are mostly palette-swaps of what you’ve already seen in Tartarus. The enemies are almost all the same as what you’ve seen in Tartarus. And the bosses are all the cheapest, most irritating fucking assholes you will ever encounter, necessitating heavy reliance on either 1) luck or 2) copious amounts of grinding until you are overlevelled.

This is not fun, and it’s starting to test my patience somewhat. Still, now, as a matter of pride I feel I have to get to the end of it for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I actually want to find out what the titular “Answer” is. The Journey’s ending is left nicely ambiguous and open to interpretation, and to be honest I would have been quite happy leaving it as is if The Answer didn’t exist. As it does, however, I find myself really, really wanting to know. And that’s why I’m enduring the suffering of grinding my way through these dungeons in an attempt to discover what’s what.

Don’t get me wrong, Persona 3’s combat system is still great; Shoji Meguro’s music is still J-ghetto fabulous; and the characters are still interesting — there’s just not enough of the things that made The Journey great, and too many of the things that aren’t the reason people play Persona 3 in the first place. I have managed to go this far without having anything spoiled for me relating to The Answer, so I have the joy of discovering what happens at the end still to come.

It had better be worth it!

1067: I Accidentally a Wii U

As the title says, I most certainly did accidentally a Wii U. And no, it’s not dangerous.

Actually, it wasn’t accidental at all; I’d been pondering getting one for a little while, particularly after hearing a number of my friends were having fun with their respective ones, and I saw in Game today that they were doing some quite nice deals. So, after gaining suitable approval from Andie (who is actually quite interested in playing with it too) I appear to find myself with a shiny new black Wii U plus copies of Sonic and whatever Racing Transformed and NintendoLand, which comes with the console.

I can’t comment too much on the system’s capabilities as we don’t have reliable Internet access at our new place as yet — we’re leeching Wi-Fi off our neighbours’ bandwidth at present. (Legally, I might add — service provider BT offers the ability for users to set aside part of their bandwidth for public use, so we’re taking full advantage of the fact that our neighbours have this facility turned on while we wait for our own high-speed line to be installed… which won’t be until January 16. Boo!) However, I can comment a little on the games I have played so far.

Let’s start with Sonic and… ugh, I’m going to have to actually check what the sodding thing’s called, aren’t I? Let’s see… *rummages* Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, commonly shortened to just Sonic Transformed. Right. Yes. Sonic Transformed. It is a kart racing game. As seemingly usually happens, someone else has beaten Nintendo, supposed masters of the kart racing genre, to the kart racing punch on their own system. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s actually rather good.

Sega’s had a few goes at this kart racing lark with previous entries in the Sonic and All-Stars Racing series, and they’ve actually been quite good in my admittedly limited experience — even the iOS version is pretty decent, and it is very easy to fuck up the controls in an iOS racer. (Believe me. I know. I have suffered through a lot of them for the sake of reviewing them.) With Sonic Transformed, though, what they’ve done is channel Diddy Kong Racing, which is something I am very happy about because Diddy Kong Racing was freaking awesome.

For those unfamiliar, Diddy Kong Racing was a kart racer for the Nintendo 64 console, developed by Rare, who were the undisputed masters of development for that platform besides Nintendo. One of many cool things about Diddy Kong Racing was that you weren’t limited to just straight kart racing — you also got to fly planes and race hovercraft over watery courses, too. This gave the game plenty more variety than your average kart racer, and meant that not only did you have to figure out how each character handled, but you also had to get to grips with each of the three vehicles’ idiosyncracies, too.

Sonic Transformed also features karts, hovercrafts and aircraft. Only rather than having races focused around just one of these at a time, a single event in Sonic Transformed will more often than not see you switching back and forth between them at various points, with frequently hilarious results. For example, an After Burner-themed level sees you racing your karts across an aircraft carrier deck as F-14 Tomcats launch either side of you. Drive through the blue gate that signals a transformation, and suddenly you’re flying through the air on the way to the next carrier, surrounded by dogfighting aircraft and other mayhem. Fly through the blue gate on the next carrier and you’re back in your kart again, powersliding around the deck to head back the other way and repeat the whole process.

Sonic Transformed is also fantastic for Sega fanservice. While the characters and settings may not be quite as universally recognised as the old Nintendo favourites seen in the various Mario Kart games, it is absolutely delightful to be reminded of some of Sega’s past masterworks — everything from Jet Set Radio to Panzer Dragoon via Skies of Arcadia, all with wonderful remixes of their iconic music, and all having their own dynamic take on the game’s chaotic, track-shifting racing.

Sonic Transformed is, of course, also available on other platforms and whether or not the Wii U is the “best” platform for it is a matter of debate as I haven’t played it multiplayer yet, though five-player local multiplayer is not to be sniffed at, plus there are a couple of “Party Play” modes that make use of the Gamepad device. When racing in single-player, the Gamepad is used to display a top-down map view — not particularly practical to glance at while racing, but a nice touch nonetheless.

So I’m impressed with Sonic Transformed. How about NintendoLand?

NintendoLand is clearly the Wii Sports/Play equivalent, in that it’s a series of simple little games designed to showcase the system. Unlike Wii Sports and Play, however, the whole experience is fleshed out a little better, with incentives for progress, trophy scores to challenge and achievement-like stickers to collect. The games make good use of the Gamepad’s capabilities, and many of them include nice little touches like displaying your face on screen during play using the Gamepad’s front-facing camera. They’re little more than minigames in most cases, but I can see these being fun at parties, plus the obsessive collector types out there will want to get their hands on as many “prizes” as possible.

In more general terms, I like the feel of the Gamepad a lot — it’s not too heavy, and it’s shaped nicely in the hand, though as with Nintendo’s handhelds having to hold the stylus and use the buttons can sometimes be a little cumbersome. The use of sound is very clever — the Gamepad sound tends to complement what is coming out of your TV/home theatre speakers, giving a really nice “3D” effect as some noises are literally closer to you than others. This is put to interesting effect in NintendoLand, where the “guide” character Monita typically talks to you through the Gamepad, but her voice can also be heard in a muffled, mumbly form through the TV/HT speakers. I anticipate plenty of other games will make intriguing use of this functionality in the future.

So far I’m pretty impressed, then. It seems like a decent system that will only improve over time, and if nothing else it’s likely to continue the Wii’s legacy as the go-to machine for fun, easy to understand local co-op experiences. I’ll be interested to try out the online functionality — particularly MiiVerse — but that will have to wait until we have proper Internet access here!

1066: Doubleplusgood

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don’t like very much. Me, I don’t particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I’m not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, “if the product is free, then you are the product” — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I’d encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you’re one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin’ hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It’s an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a “killer feature” with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome “Circles” system. It’s a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it’s pretty customizable, too — you can change the community’s iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can’t reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the “Pony+” community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one’s work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you’ve got a Google account, give it a shot. And by “give it a shot” I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there’s no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually “follow” some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here’s some links to get you started. Here’s my profile. Here’s the Squadron of Shame Community. Here’s the “Too Old For This” Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here’s the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I’ll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.

1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

“It has been a long day,” he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn’t supposed to “publicise” it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got “proper Internet” back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn’t the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A “high-tech hobo,” he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie’s mother’s house.

“Wait a minute,” he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. “Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?”

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

“I really, really need some sleep,” he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel’s painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.

1064: First Days

It was Andie’s first day at her new job today. I don’t know how it went yet because she’s not back yet as I type this, but I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing her the best, particularly as it was her getting that job that allowed us to move back to Southampton. Woo!

With Andie out of the way, this means that it’s been my first real day on my own in the new flat getting some work done and it’s gone quite well, even with the many boxes that are still behind me, taunting me to unpack them. (I will do it when I get back here on a more permanent basis later this week!)

In other words, I’m feeling pretty good. I took a drive into town earlier on and got the headlamp bulb replaced on my car before I got pulled over for it — there’s going to be a lot of driving in the dark over the next few days so I figured better safe than sorry — and grabbed a coffee. My car’s decided that it doesn’t like the cold again, so is mocking me with its generic “engine warning light” once again just like it did the last time it got really cold. It’s a little unnerving, as when it’s really cold it gets a bit juddery while sitting still, but once it warms up a bit it runs just fine — it just doesn’t like the cold. I mean, who does?

I’m probably going to get rid of my car once I’m settled in this new place. Now I’m in the middle (ish) of a city, I really don’t need it that much. While I was two hours away from my friends? Yes, it was a necessity, even if I didn’t manage to get away to see them quite as often as I would have liked to. Now, though? It’s a fairly long walk, but I can feasibly walk over to my friend Tim, who lives down near the waterfront, and I can very easily walk to the station and catch a train to go and see my friend Sam, who lives in the next town over. I will probably be quite sorry to give up the freedom a car provides, but I will not miss the constant feeling that “I should probably get that [thing that rattles/broken headlamp/light that keeps coming on/brakes that make funny noises] looked at” which inevitably leads to a significant amount of money being extracted from my bank account. I will also not miss paying exorbitant amounts of money for car insurance and tax — instead, I’ll contribute to the running costs of Andie’s car, which I’m insured to drive and is much nicer than my leaky old banger. (Seriously, sometimes you’ll get in after a particularly wet patch and there’s a puddle of water on the floor in the footwell. I’m yet to determine where it’s actually getting in from, because nothing else seems to be wet.)

I’m off to a hotel later this evening so I can sleep in a proper bed ahead of having to spend the day in sunny Swindon tomorrow — as opposed to sleeping on the floor of my empty previous residence. Then there’s things to pack up and load up and pick up to ensure the house is clean and empty and ready for us to give our keys back and everything on Friday. Hopefully my accursed civic duties will be done with by then — if they’re not, I literally have no idea what I’m supposed to do. More nights in a hotel, I guess. That or vagrancy in Swindon town centre.

Anyway, as I’ve said already, once this week is over and done with I can relax. Hopefully. That will be nice. For you lot, too, as it means you won’t have to read me moaning about how stressful these last couple of weeks have been.

1063: Disjointed

I’m aware these posts have been disjointed, dull and a bit crap recently and for that I can only apologise, but, well, if you’ve been paying attention you’ll doubtless appreciate that they are not the thing at the forefront of my mind right now! It’s been nice to have a weekend “off” (sort of) though, however, even if I have been suffering from plague for most of it. Fortunately, I think I am pretty much over the worst now, so hopefully the impending stress of next week won’t cause a relapse or anything.

Next week should — hopefully, anyway — be the last of the stress for the year. Christmas shopping is almost done and dusted, nearly all of the stuff is in the new house and there’s just some boxes to unpack into relevant locations before we’re “finished” and ready to start living properly. (We need to retrieve our pet rats, too. I am looking forward to seeing them again. I hadn’t anticipated quite how much I would miss the little buggers.)

The only real issue we’ve had is that the lovely new sofa we bought a while back won’t go into our flat. Well, it will; it just won’t go up the stairs that lead to it. To be fair, the removal people had a try before giving up, but it was at the end of the day after they had lugged all the rest of our stuff up the stairs, so they probably weren’t much in the mood to attempt to manoeuvre a three-seater sofa around an awkward staircase. Perhaps it will work better with a fresh outlook — any local friends reading this who would like to come and help try at some point in the near future, please get in touch and let me know, otherwise it’s going to be a case of either leaving it in the garage (undesirable) or getting someone to take out a window and hoist it in (probably expensive). Bah! Why are things never easy?

I head back to Wiltshire tomorrow evening to finish up my “civic duty”. I’m really hoping it won’t go on for too long, largely because we’re supposed to be all moved out and checked out of our old house by next Friday, which means if things go on any longer than that I have a very long commute. Or a stay in a hotel. (I’m actually staying in a hotel for a couple of nights this week because it’s infinitely preferable to sleeping on the floor of an almost-empty house with no curtains. A few sleeps on the floor this week probably didn’t help with the plague I’ve been suffering from for the past few days. Blergh.)

Just. Got to. Make it. Through. This. Week. Then everything will be fine and dandy. Christmas will be here, and it will be nice. Then it will be 2013, which will be a good year. I hope.

I feel as if the last few New Years have consisted of me wishing that the impending year was better than the previous one. 2013, despite having a “13” in it, will be a good one, I’m sure. I’m back in the place I want to be, and with any luck things will get nicely “settled” so I can look forward to the future rather than worrying about the past and present.

We’ll see, I guess. For now, I’m going to drug myself up and try to get some sleep.

1062: In Defense of Theatrhythm iOS

It’s not often you’ll read me defending a free-to-play title these days, what with their increasingly-obtrusive business models, but Square Enix’s latest release Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for iOS is not a game that people should be attacking.

Why? Because it’s not exploitative at all. You put as much money into it as you want, and then you stop paying and get to keep everything your money has bought. There’s no consumable energy systems, no gambling to get rare cards, no time-limited premium items… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to back up and explain what the deal is for those who are not familiar with Theatrhythm and its new iOS incarnation.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy was originally released as a Nintendo 3DS game — specifically, a full-price retail game on cartridge. It includes a variety of songs from all the Final Fantasy games from I-XIII (excluding the spin-off X-2 and XIII-2 titles) plus also offers some additional songs for download for a fee. It is a rhythm-based music game — you tap, swipe and hold the touchscreen in time with various pieces of music to trigger various visual effects inspired by past Final Fantasy games. It’s a simple but fun game, as most rhythm games are.

The game itself has several modes, and an obvious sense of progression. You play through all the songs on the easiest difficulty, then on the harder difficulty, all the while collecting an in-game currency called “Rhythmia”. When you’ve collected 10,000 Rhythmia, you’ve basically “finished” the game, though there’s nothing stopping you going back and trying to beat your scores, taking on the various “Challenge” missions or indeed purchasing the additional content.

Now Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is also an iOS game. Only instead of doing a straight port, Square Enix instead decided to revamp the game completely for mobile play. This is wise, because people play games on their mobile phone very differently to how they play on a dedicated games system, whether it’s a handheld or a TV-connected console.

Instead of the sense of progression, you’re presented with all the songs you have available — two in the basic free download, with others available via in-app purchase. You can play any of the songs you own at any time in a one-off session — good for on the toilet — or you can take on the “Quest” mode, which challenges you to make it through a bunch of songs randomly selected from your collection with a single HP bar. Quest mode rewards you with collectible cards and other goodies, so there’s plenty of replay value — meanwhile, those who have less time to spare can just fire it up for a single song, then quit.

The press surrounding the iOS version of Theatrhythm has been placing undue focus on the amount of downloadable content available for the game and how much it costs if you were to buy all of it. Now, I’ll grant to you that if you were to buy all of the songs available for Theatrhythm right now it will cost you a lot of money, and that figure will only increase as Square Enix adds content. But here’s the thing — no-one is saying that you have to buy all of that content. I have bought one pack of content (a bundle of music from Final Fantasy VIII) and I’m happy with that for now — when I tire of it, I can purchase more or put the game aside. There is no obligation for me to buy all of that content, because that’s not how free-to-play works — or not how it’s supposed to work anyway.

Put it this way — if you played Rock Band or Guitar Hero, did you feel obliged to purchase every single piece of DLC? Probably not; and here with Theatrhythm for iOS you don’t have the cost of entry — you simply pay for what you want. (Granted, both Rock Band and Guitar Hero come with a wide selection of songs, but I know very few people who like all of those)

I’d argue that Theatrhythm is actually one of the least-obnoxious implementations of free-to-play I’ve seen for a long time — as I said earlier, there’s no obligation to keep paying over and over again due to energy systems and consumable items — you simply put in as much money as you would like to spend, if any, and then you get to keep that content. The free version is limited in what it offers, but it’s enough for you to tell whether or not you’d like to spend more time with the game — if you decide you don’t like it, no problem, simply delete the app and you’re not out of pocket; if you decide you do like it, however, you can spread out how much content you choose to purchase over time.

Basically, I think what I’m saying is that we should stop trying to see free-to-play as universally evil. There are good and bad implementations, and Theatrhythm is a good one. Don’t believe me? Go play any of the interminable string of shitty card-battle games on the Mobage and GREE platforms to compare and contrast. Then you’ll see.

1061: Hell from Week

Well, that’s the particularly awful week done and dusted. Sort of. I still have more Shit to Do next week, but hopefully things should calm down a bit from here. We’ll see. I am looking forward to a bit of time off at Christmas to just relax and, you know, chill out.

I’ve been somewhat out of the loop today due to the things I’ve been doing, but I did managed to catch the awful news out of the States today — for those who missed it, there’s been a mass shooting at a school in Connecticut. I don’t know all the details so I don’t want to comment on it, but it’s massively sucktastic. I feel somewhat distanced from it being over here in the UK as I am, but I know enough people in the US for it to carry some degree of resonance for me. Facebook and Twitter are full of messages of support and debates about gun control at the moment. The inevitable arguments are ensuing from the usual suspects. I don’t really want to get involved, but it’s pretty clear that something needs to be done.

Anyway, that sounds an awful lot like commenting on it, and many people have doubtless done so far more eloquently than I today, and will doubtless continue to do so over the next few days. (Fox News, of course, have been quick to blame video games, but fuck Fox News). So I will leave that there.

I am still ill. I drove for two hours after a full day of “civic duty” today and am now exhausted, battered and feeling like utter shite. Andie seems to think I’m a day “behind” her in this plague, however, so hopefully I should improve a bit from here. I hope so. Obviously I’m not comparing my own pitiful physical state to a tragedy which has unfolded in the US, but, well, this week has just been one of those ones that you get the impression the entire world would like to erase from existence.

I’d be fine with that. Also with a fast-forward button. The end of next week would be nice. KTHX.

1060: Magical Diary

Still feeling shitty, but you don’t want to read entry after entry about how shitty I feel, so I’ll talk about a game I’ve been playing instead. I’ve had it in my Steam library for probably well over a year now — possibly more — but have only just got around to it. And wouldn’t you know it? It’s great.

The game in question is Magical Diary. This game initially attracted my attention with its promise of combining dating sim-like mechanics with dungeon crawling and puzzle solving. Any combination of “dating sim and…” will immediately get my attention and has done ever since I played Persona 3 for the first time, and here it’s particularly well-implemented.

Here’s the setup: you’re a 16 year old girl (yes you are!) who has recently been inducted into Iris Academy, a Hogwarts-like establishment in New Hampshire that trains witches and wizards in the ways of pentachromatic magic. During your time at the school, you’ll be juggling your time between studying the five colours of magic, each of which unlocks various different types of spells; managing your stress levels (which, naturally, increase with too much studying); and getting to know your fellow students, some of whom are rather more odd than others.

The gameplay is something like ancient eroge (and particular favorite of mine) True Love — at the start of each week, you set up your schedule, choosing which classes to attend (if any) and then letting the week unfold. Depending on your whereabouts at various points in the week along with past choices, numerous events will unfold and you’ll have the opportunity to do things like run for class president, shop for magical accessories (which, pleasingly, appear on your character avatar as well as affecting your various stats) and, of course, go on dates.

Every so often, the school will throw you an “exam”, which involves tossing you into a dungeon and demanding that you find your way out using the spells you’ve managed to learn. Generally there are several ways to solve a dungeon — for example, in one early case, you’re locked in an area with no apparent exits, so you can do several things: methodically search the walls for illusions, cast a spell to stir up the air and indicate where the way out might be, cast a spell to determine if any living creatures passed by recently and so on. As you level up your five colours of magic, you learn a variety of interesting-sounding spells — and this isn’t your usual “fireball, ice bolt” and that sort of thing — no, here you’re dealing with things like empathy spells, manipulating matter, fooling the senses and all sorts of other things. It’s really quite something.

I’m not that far into it yet, but I’m liking what I’ve seen so far. The graphics are good, the music is catchy, the writing is witty and full of character and the gameplay is interesting. It also looks like being a game that will be well worth replaying several times to tackle situations in different ways — I’ll be very interested to do so when the time comes.

Right. Time to dope myself up on drugs and try and get some sleep. Or possibly play some more Magical Diary. One or the other…

1059: High-Tech Hobo

I’m writing this lying on the floor of my now-empty bedroom, covered in a slightly-malodorous duvet and trying not to let the cold of an unfurnished house in to my Secret Kingdom of under-duvet warmth.

Yes, it’s that peculiar part of moving house where it’s not entirely clear where you’re supposed to be sleeping or how, not helped by the fact that my “civic duty” responsibilities in Swindon are preventing me from actually moving in to my new place for the moment.

This is, I’m sure you’ll appreciate, somewhat annoying, and it explains why I’m effectively sleeping rough in what is still technically “my” house. I feel like a tramp, albeit an Internet-connected tramp surrounded by technological gadgets and who doesn’t have to beg for change from anyone passing by. I am getting memories of my university days, when I used to proudly brag that I could happily “sleep anywhere” and normally could, and frequently spent whole weeks sofa-surfing between several of my friends’ houses rather than going home. (Apparently I’ve always had something of an issue with living too far away from my friends to be quite practical to varying degrees.)

I’m also ill, which is making me grumpy. I have some sort of bunged-up head thing and a nasty cough. My head feels constantly like I’m going to faint or something (I haven’t — it’s just stuffed up with crap) and every time I cough I feel like my intestines are going to fly out of my mouth. Trying to hold this in while fulfilling one’s civic duty is not the easiest thing in the world. Much water has been consumed.

I tried to get to sleep a little while back, but at 10 past 9 in the evening, that’s clearly not going to happen just yet. I wish it were possible to just hit a button and shut yourself down — that would be much, much easier than the annoying bollocks the human body normally has to do to get to sleep. I’m not even entirely sure how to make myself fall asleep, but I do know that some people can do it frustratingly easily. As in, you’ll be having a conversation one moment, they’ll be snoring away the next. I’ve known a number of people like this over the years, both male and female.

My head is throbbing so I’m going to leave that there for now. This is a rubbish post but right this second I don’t really give a toss. I have to be up early tomorrow, then I have work to do in the afternoon with no desk. Which will be nice.

Still, I just have to keep an eye on the long-term goal. When all this is done and dusted I’ll be living where I want to be and life will (hopefully) be good. I just wish there was a fast-forward button to jump through this annoying bit.