1136: Thoughts on RPG Maker

I read this piece by Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games earlier. Now, I normally agree with Mr. Werezompire on a lot of things, but I take issue with a few things he says about RPG Maker in this article, which was posted shortly after the latest version RPG Maker VX Ace hit the Steam store a while back.

Boyd is quite right to note that this is the first time a piece of software such as RPG Maker has hit a mainstream digital download storefront for PC — past iterations of the software were sold directly by the publisher via a rather cumbersome e-commerce solution, so to get it on Steam is a big step forward in both accessibility and visibility. Boyd is also right to note that lowering the barrier of entry to creating games through tools such as RPG Maker also encourages everyone to want to have a go — and that this can result in a glut of “incomplete, buggy, generic, or downright awful games”. (It also results in people who are otherwise unable to get their heads around programming becoming empowered to realise their own digital dreams and creativity.)

What I take a certain degree of umbrage to is his assertion that it is a “general RPG maker” and thus ill-suited to producing anything more than the most generic JRPG possible. While it is true that the default art assets and music provided with the game are aimed at people who want to get a fairly generic JRPG up and running quickly, the very nature of the software is that it is completely customisable depending on how much “individuality” you want to give your project. You can have something fairly convincing up and running in a matter of minutes using the default assets… but with a bit of time and artistic talent (or at least creativity), you can completely revamp the default “look” to anything you please. Not only that, but by using its built-in Ruby-based scripting language, you can completely overhaul the way the game works — battle system, menus, method of moving around the game world, anything can be modified or added if you know what you’re doing. And even if you don’t, there’s a lively and active community out there that has put together plenty of free scripts for anyone to make use of.

This isn’t “trying to modify RPG Maker to do things it wasn’t really intended to do,” as Boyd asserts. This is, in fact, using RPG Maker in the manner in which it was intended for power users — and it also aptly demonstrates one of the most admirable things about the application: the fact that it is simple and accessible enough for beginners to use, yet powerful and flexible enough for more advanced users to take complete control of. You only have to look at examples like To The Moon and Cherry Tree High Comedy Club, both of which were created in RPG Maker XP (two versions previous to the current edition) to see what is possible — and to be fair to Boyd, he does at least mention these titles in his post.

Boyd makes some fair points in the article, but what I don’t like much is the underlying tone that “if you’re using RPG Maker rather than programming it yourself, you’re doing it wrong.” While it is undoubtedly more satisfying to program your own engine from scratch and see a complete game come together from literally nothing, not everyone has the time, ability and/or C#-speaking friends to be able to do that. Plus if there’s a perfectly good tool already out there to realise what you want to do… why shouldn’t you use it?

1135: Melody of… The Other Place

As I noted yesterday, I completed Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia. So naturally, having discovered a new RPG series that I like very much, what’s a boy to do but to make an immediate start on the sequel, much to the delight of my Ar Tonelico-adoring friend who convinced me to play the damn things in the first place?

Ar Tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica is a surprisingly different beast to its predecessor in many ways. Its Japanese incarnation came out in the same year as the first Ar Tonelico hit Western shores, but it wouldn’t be until 2009 that North American and European players would get their hands on it. That actually makes it a surprisingly recent game, released in the twilight of the PS2 era. This might explain why I never really paid it much mind first time around (besides being unfamiliar with the prequel, obviously) — everyone (including me) was already well and truly enraptured by “next gen” by that point, though games like Persona 4 (which also came out in 2009 in Europe) had shown me that the previous generation still had plenty to offer.

The whole Ar Tonelico experience has had a complete overhaul in Ar Tonelico 2. Gone are the distinctly PS1-ish isometric-perspective graphics (though I actually sort of miss them now), replaced with hand-drawn backdrops in towns and a pleasing combination of polygons, flat objects and fixed camera angles to create “3D” dungeons. The sprites, too, have had a bit of a change in aesthetic — they have peculiar, stylised proportions now, which frankly has taken a little adjusting to, but the improved amount of emotive animation on them makes up for the fact that everyone has really, really distractingly massive hands.

The biggest change is in the battle system, however. I liked Ar Tonelico’s battle system, as it combined conventional JRPG turn-based battling with an interesting magic system that encouraged you to find creative ways to finish battles “well” rather than quickly. It was a bit repetitive by the end, however, and it was consistently way too easy pretty much all the way through the entire game.

Ar Tonelico 2’s battle system, meanwhile, is a completely different beast. It’s still sort of turn-based, but not in the same way as its predecessor. Instead, the two sides in the conflict each take turns to attack and defend. When it’s your turn to attack, you have a limited amount of time to use your two “vanguard” (front line) characters to attack; when it’s your turn to defend you have to carefully time button presses to protect the back line Reyvateils from taking damage. The Reyvateils make demands on you during battle, too, requesting that you perform specific attack moves by pressing the button for the corresponding front line character and a particular direction. Fulfilling these demands gives you various bonuses that make the battle turn in your favour. It’s interesting, as it means you have to really concentrate on every battle rather than just mashing the “attack” button, but I’m yet to have a significantly challenging battle to show its full potential just yet.

The “Dive” system makes a return, and is almost identical to its predecessor. You get to know the game’s heroines in the real world by talking to them at campsites and inns, then “dive” into their mental “Cosmosphere” world to find out more about their various inner struggles and problems. Overcoming these problems helps them craft new Song Magic which you can then use in battle — plus these are entertaining mini-stories in their own right. Diving is mostly the same, though there are a lot more situations where you’re given a choice of responses to a particular situation and must pick the correct one rather than simply following it through.

In “new, weird gameplay mechanics” news we have the new Dualstall system, which replaces the “Install” mechanic from the previous game (which allowed you to boost a Reyvateil’s abilities by plugging various crystals into her… spells in a rather suggestive manner). Dualstalling essentially means flinging the game’s two heroines into a bath infused with magic crystals, nice-smelling bath oils and bath toys and letting the attached abilities, uh, be absorbed. The heroines will also have a good chat in the bath, so this is a good way of building up their “Sync” gauge, which helps them work together better in battle.

So far I’m about four hours into the new game and enjoying it a lot so far. The change in aesthetic and gameplay style gave me a bit of “culture shock” initially but that thankfully soon faded, and I’m now enjoying the story and characters just as before. It’s interesting to note that the game still feels recognisable as an Ar Tonelico game, yet has a different setting (albeit in the same overall world), different characters and different gameplay mechanics. I’m assuming that the third game (which is where the series made the jump to PS3) will be “similarly different”, too, judging by a quick flick through the manual.

Further reports as events warrant.

1134: Melody of Elemia

I completed Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia this evening. What a fine, fine game that was. I’ll be writing somewhat more “professionally” for want of a better word about it this Wednesday over on Games Are Evil, but for now I just wanted to enthuse a little about the great experience that was that game. There may be some spoilers ahead; be forewarned.

The most immediately striking thing about Ar Tonelico for a new player coming to it for the first time in 2013 is that it looks old. It’s also worth noting that it came out in 2007, so it actually looked pretty old when it first came out. That said, after a few hours of play, the low-resolution isometric-perspective sprite-based graphics cease to matter on a technical level, and the amount of character and personality in them starts to shine through. A friend of mine just noted that the visual style is actually something of a successor to stuff like Secret of Mana and the like and that’s a great comparision — I’m kicking myself for not figuring that out sooner.

Outside of the in-game graphics, Ar Tonelico has some absolutely lovely character designs. Lyner may look fairly “generic JRPG hero” in his stylings, but at least he has some personality about him. The two heroines Aurica and Misha are both attractive and appealing in completely different ways, and a plot twist I won’t go into here sees you interacting with Misha in both her “spunky young girl” and “equally spunky young woman” forms. The third Reyvateil introduced later in the game also proves herself to be an interesting character in her own right, again with her own unique visual style and “appeal elements”.

One of the most interesting things about the game to me — and the thing I’m intending to write about this Wednesday — is the game’s multi-route, multi-ending structure. Now, this could very easily be a recipe for disaster, as multiple endings in lengthy RPGs are often a good method to ensure your players won’t see all of the awesome story content you made. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it’s kind of cool when you can discuss a game with a friend and discover they had a completely different experience to you — but it’s also frustrating to some people who like to know they’ve got everything they can out of a game before moving on.

Ar Tonelico’s multiple endings and routes are handled in a rather peculiar manner. There are three “phases” to the game, each of which is a complete story arc in and of itself, complete with final boss confrontation at the end of each. Early in the second “phase”, you have the opportunity to go with one of the two heroines and experience their story. Aurica’s story gives you an overall view of what is going on in the overarching plot of the game, while Misha’s story gives you a more personal view of what is going on with her and how she is relevant to everything. If you play Misha’s route first, there are a number of scenes you see completely without context that don’t really make sense. If you play Aurica’s route, however, you play an important part in these scenes. The two paths then converge towards the end of the second phase, and the game then apparently ends — the credits roll and everything.

There’s a twist, though. In a post-credits sequence, you get to run around and do all the usual JRPG “our party’s splitting up, say goodbye” business, but once you’ve done all that, you’re presented with another choice: live a happy life with [insert girl you chose here], or refuse to accept that as “the end” and move on. If the latter option is chosen, you find yourself entering a completely optional third phase that is about 20 hours by itself, and which leads to the “true” ending.

Except in that third phase, there are four possible endings, three of which relate to one of the three heroine characters — the latter of whom only becomes a major player in this third phase. The third phase is pretty much identical regardless of which girl you picked earlier, but the very end — if you fulfilled some very precise conditions — allows you to pick between the girl you chose earlier and the new addition. There’s also a “bad” ending relatively early in the third phase that basically says “I can’t be bothered with all this sidequesting, let’s just get this over with”.

So that’s a total of… hang on… (counts) six endings? Fortunately, there’s absolutely no need to play through the game six times to see all of them — instead, you can play through once, save before the “big decision” in phase 2, play one route to either the end of phase 2 or to complete completion in phase 3, then go back and do the other route, stopping wherever you didn’t stop first time around. In my case, I played Aurica’s route through to total completion, then played Misha’s route to the natural end at the conclusion of phase 2. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything, and it only required me to play less than 10 hours over and above what I’d already played anyway. And I feel rewarded for having done so — I have a deeper understanding of the story as a whole, and particularly the characters.

So that’s Ar Tonelico — a really, really excellent JRPG and surprisingly thought-provoking if you can look past the notorious innuendo (of which there isn’t anywhere near as much as people make out). It’s also in possession of I think the best soundtrack I think I’ve ever heard in a JRPG… though I’m about to start Ar Tonelico 2 as I type this, so I may well be revising that statement in the near future!

1133: Board Game List of If Not Wishes, then Certainly Mild-to-Moderate Interest

I really like board games and relish the opportunity to play them with my friends — an opportunity I get much more often now that I live in the same place as them.

One of my favourite things about board gaming as a hobby is getting a new game, punching out all the bits and learning to play it for the first time — though arguably it’s your second or third game where a new title really starts to hit its stride, as you generally know the rules reasonably well by then.

The trouble with getting new games is that often if they don’t prove an immediate “hit” with the group, then they can be relegated to the shelf for quite a long time, with old favourites instead hitting the table much more frequently. Our group is a little prone to this, tending to fall back on stuff like Agricola and Ticket to Ride, though my (relatively) recent acquisition of Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition proved to be pretty popular with everyone thanks to its excellent balance of strategic (“hmm, if I use this ability, then move here, I’ll be able to win in two turns…”) and thematic (“I AM A WIZARD! BOOOOOOOOM!!”) gameplay.

As well as player tastes — our group is split roughly 50/50 on people who prefer strategic/mechanic-focused games and thematic-focused offerings — there’s also things like player count to consider. Some games only work with three or more people — fine if you have a regular group — while some are for two players only. All of these things can conspire to ensure that something doesn’t necessarily hit the table as often as you might like.

With absolutely none of that in mind, here are some board games that have caught my eye recently that I am somewhat interested in acquiring and playing with someone. If any of you, dear readers, happen to have played any of them, please feel free to tell me whether they’re actually any good or not.

In no particular order…

Cadwallon: City of Thieves

(Image credit: BGG user bretteur)

I was unaware of this game prior to today, as it happens, but when I wandered into Forbidden Planet in town and saw it on the shelf, it caught my attention.

From the sound of things, it’s a competitive game between up to four teams of “thieves guilds” vying for control of a small city district. A number of different scenarios challenges the 2-4 players to, in most cases, nick as much stuff as possible while attempting to ensure the other players get royally screwed over. According to reviews on Boardgamegeek, it’s a relatively simple game with an element of strategy to it.

I’m actually fine with it being simple — we have plenty of complex games like Agricola and Power Grid, so it’s nice to bust out something simple once in a while. That certainly explains why stuff like Ticket to Ride hit our table so often. The other nice thing about it being simple is that if everyone can remember the rules, everyone’s likely to want to play it again in the future — especially if it’s a relatively short game, which is sounds like this is.

So chalk this one up as a “very interesting” for me.

RuneWars

(Image credit: BGG user brainst0rm)

I’m primarily interested in this one because it’s from the same team as made Descent, and Descent is a popular choice among our group for reasons already outlined above. Rather than being a small-scale strategy RPG type thing with asymmetrical competitive multiplayer like Descent, however, RuneWars is a larger-scale strategy game between up to four players vying for control of an overall world map. I don’t know a great deal about how the game works but simply from reading descriptions of it, it sounds like it could potentially prove popular with our group for similar reasons to Descent. Tim and I (the players who favour theme-heavy and co-op titles) will be happy going “DRAGONS! ROOOOOAR!” while Sam and Tom (the players who favour more strategic, mechanics-focused experiences) will be happy planning out elaborate strategies to flatten everyone and declare themselves Overlord of Everything.

The only thing stopping me from immediately picking up a copy of this is the fact that a game takes about 3-4 hours, which means it probably wouldn’t hit the table too often. The only other game we have of that length is Arkham Horror, which everyone seems to like, but which everyone is also reluctant to play due to the sheer amount of time it takes to do so.

Carcassonne Expansions

(Image credit: BGG user j0ran)

I like Carcassonne. It’s a nice simple game that anyone can pick up the rules of very quickly. It’s fun, strategic, has plenty of scope for screwing over your opponents and has the potential to be very different every time you play due to its heavily-randomised nature.

One thing I’ve not explored, however, is the wealth of expansions available for it. There are loads of them, and I have no idea which ones are actually any good or not. I think the thing to do will be to just pick up one or two and give them a shot to see how they are.

BattleLore

(Image credit: BGG user jtspecial)

BattleLore itself is apparently out of print now, which means that new copies of it will set you back £80 or more — that’s only about £20 more than it was when it was readily available, but it’s still quite a lot. BattleLore is a two-player skirmish game in which two players face off against one another in an attempt to kick the snot out of each other using their armies. Apparently the game system for this works very well, with a nice combination of luck and strategy making it both accessible and deep.

A new version of BattleLore has been released, based on the Game of Thrones universe. I don’t know the setting well — the limit of my knowledge is playing the surprisingly good Facebook game (seriously, try it — you’ll be pleasantly surprised, especially if you like stuff like King of Dragon Pass) — but it certainly seems like the ideal setting for armies to kick the snot out of each other.

Two things have stopped me picking this up — one, it’s two-player only (though the original BattleLore had an “epic” variant allowing additional players) and two, it apparently involves a bit of faffing around to get all the miniatures sorted out and ready to play. I don’t have anything against that per se, but I’d need to know I’d be able to play it semi-regularly before committing to a campaign of supergluing tiny men to plastic bases.

Various “Living Card Games”

(Image credit: BGG user FortyOne)

There’s a few of these that look interesting — particularly the Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer and Lord of the Rings ones. Again, I don’t know a huge amount about them, but I’m assured that they’re good fun, offering the enjoyment of deckbuilding without having to repeatedly shell out ridiculous amounts of money for booster packs that contain cards you’ve probably already got.

The main thing stopping me checking these out further is that deckbuilding games have had a relatively mixed reception at our gaming table to date — Dominion doesn’t come out that often, though I like it a lot, but Ascension proved to be a lot more popular. Again, I’d need to know I’d be able to play them reasonably regularly before investing in one of these.

Elder Sign

(Image credit: BGG user ckirkman)

I’m a fan of Cthulhu-themed stuff, which partly explains why I enjoy Arkham Horror so much. From what I understand from playing the iOS version, Elder Sign has a fair amount in common with Arkham Horror in thematic terms — it even uses the same characters and artwork — but has much simpler mechanics and a playtime that doesn’t extend into the days. I believe it’s rather more luck-based, though, being primarily based around dice rolls, though Arkham Horror certainly isn’t without its share of dice-based randomness, either.

Perhaps I’ll play the iOS version a few more times before I consider looking into this one.

____

As with so many things in life, there are hundreds of examples of great games that I’d love to try, but not enough time and/or opportunities to do so. If nothing else, though, building up a collection of board games certainly looks impressive — even if it is a pain in the arse to move the bloody things from one house to another!

1132: Stop Calling it “Gen4”

The eighth generation of video games consoles is upon us — yes, despite the fact that EA desperately wants everyone to believe that it’s the fourth generation it is, in fact, the eighth. Don’t believe me? Allow me to prove it before proceeding further.

First generation: Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Tele-Games Pong, Coleco Telstar, Nintendo Color TV Game
Second generation: Magnavox Odyssey2, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision
Third generation: NES, Master System, Atari 7800
Fourth generation: TurboGrafx-16, Mega Drive, Super NES, Neo Geo
Fifth generation: 3DO, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64
Sixth Generation: Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox
Seventh Generation: PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360
Eighth Generation: PlayStation 4, Wii U, something from Microsoft.

See? Proof. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Anyway. My point was not that people are getting the generation number wrong (I KNOW it’s the “fourth generation of 3D consoles” but it’s still stupid, so sod off) but that we are well and truly into the eighth generation now. One of the “big three” game console manufacturers has already released their new console (Nintendo with the Wii U) while a second has announced some skimpy details about what is to come (Sony with the PlayStation 4). We can doubtless expect something from Microsoft very soon.

It’s going to be an interesting generation, I think, because the leaps hardware is taking forward with each subsequent generation are getting smaller. Graphics and performance still have room for improvement, sure, but there’s actually been something of a backlash towards the striving for photorealism that has been the driving force behind most new game-related technological enhancements. Turns out people still like games that look like video games, which explains the popularity of heavily-pixelated titles like Fez as well as the heavily-stylized artwork of a lot of Japanese games. It also explains why people are so cynical about the “brownness” of Western games, though this is actually nothing new — I vividly recall my brother referring to the original Quake as “the brown game” before the turn of the century, so a drab colour palette is something we’ve been enduring for a while yet.

Because the leaps in hardware are getting smaller, though, that means each platform has to distinguish itself in different ways. Nintendo has fired the opening salvo with the use of its Gamepad for asymmetrical multiplayer in titles like Nintendo Land, and it works very well when used appropriately — we just need some more games that make creative use of this second screen. The lack of games isn’t really cause for concern as yet, despite what professional industry doomsayers like Michael Pachter might say, because it also took developers a while to get their head around the two screens of Nintendo’s last handheld the DS, and that ended up being the most popular handheld in the history of ever. There’s no guarantee the Wii U will catch on in the same way, of course, but it’s far too early to declare it a failed experiment as some have.

Besides, Nintendo are doing some other interesting things, too. The integration of the console’s proprietary social network “MiiVerse” into a variety of different games is a really nice idea — complete a challenge in Nintendo Land, for example, and you can see drawings and messages from other people who are playing, and you can interact with these people. In games that are built for playing socially — think of the possibilities in something like Animal Crossing, for example — there’s a lot of potential here, though from a personal perspective I really hope that it’s not something that makes it into all games. Or if it does, I hope you can turn it off. Seeing silly messages after a go on Donkey Kong’s Wild Ride or whatever the minigame in Nintendo Land is called? Fine. Seeing “lol i cant beet dis bossss lol xx” message while I’m playing an epic RPG? Not OK.

This “social” thing seems to be a big deal with the PlayStation 4 too, though I’m yet to review the information about the new console in any great detail. Apparently the controller has a “share” button right there, allowing players to do things like record brag clips and share them with their friends. Perhaps fun for someone 15 years my junior, but I personally don’t really see the point for the most part — we’ll see if it’s used for anything interesting in the long run.

I’m a bit torn about the increased emphasis on “social” aspects of games consoles. On the one hand, it’s quite fun to be able to see what other people are playing and talk to them about it. On the other hand, the vast majority of games that I enjoy are single-player experiences that I don’t want interruptions from. I can’t help feeling that my experience with, for example, the Halo series was tarnished somewhat by continually being frustrated by popup messages from friends inviting me to play multiplayer when all I wanted to do was see if the dreadful story was going anywhere. I could have just gone offline, of course, but it felt a bit “rude” to do that. Irrational and silly, I know. But it’s the way I felt.

As for “sharing”? We’re yet to find a really good balance of that. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 allow you to share Achievements/Trophies to Facebook to brag about cool things you’ve accomplished, but neither are implemented particularly well. Part of the problem is the tendency for modern (younger) Internet denizens to “overshare” and make absolutely everything they do public, which diminishes the meaning of these “brags”. This is a trend which is perpetuated by a large number of mobile and social games, many of which post crap all over social networks without you really wanting them to or, in worse cases, bribing you to do so. It’s a means of marketing the game, yes, but more often than not — among my circle of friends anyway — it’s a turn-off rather than something that makes people want to check out the game in question.

I don’t have much interest in the promise of streaming games to PS4 via Gaikai because 1) my experiences to date with game streaming via OnLive haven’t always been optimal, 2) I like to own my games and 3) I’d rather the quality of experience I get from my games not be reliant on my Internet connection, thank you very much. I hope Sony includes some form of backwards compatibility in the PS4 through a means other than Gaikai, but I won’t be surprised if they don’t. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all made it clear that backwards compatibility is not a particular priority for them, and this is a trend I expect to see continue in the next generation. Consequently, I don’t see myself getting rid of my 360 and my PS3 (or my PS2, for that matter) when the PS4 hits.

In short, I’m yet to be totally won over by the PS4, but yet to be dissuaded entirely either. A number of developers that I like have reportedly pledged their support to the new console, so that’s something, but I’ll have to wait and see if there’s anything I want to play before I’m convinced to pick one up. Triple-A just doesn’t cut it for me any more; I need something that appeals to my specific and peculiar tastes, and if it ain’t there, it ain’t getting my support.

1131: Lavatorial Subconscious

It is, as I have noted a number of times previously on these very pages, during the hours of the morning between waking up for the first time and actually waking up enough to be able to get out of bed that your subconscious works the hardest to show you the most fucked-up shit possible to get you wondering what the hell someone was injecting into you while you slept. These “morning dreams” are also the ones that tend to stick in your memory a lot more than the things your brain dreams up in the main part of your sleep cycle, too.

As you will recall if you’ve been following this blog for a while, I have recounted these peculiar and surreal experiences in the past. And I thought I’d do that today, largely to resist the temptation to write about Ar Tonelico yet again.

This morning’s weird dream was once again somewhat lavatorial in nature, at least in part, so for that I apologise.

I forget the specific circumstances which brought me to the situation, but something had caused me to arrive at a building which looked somewhat like Kazuma’s orphanage from the video game Yakuza 3. There were a few differences, though. For some reason, inside the wooden building there was a large room with windows all around its walls, except for one completely wooden wall, which had a toilet on it.

I had arrived at the building to see someone I knew — I think they were a teacher, but I don’t recall seeing their face clearly. Their class were with them, but ignored me until I stepped into the bizarre “toilet room” and started having a piss, at which point some kid pointed out the fact that I was clearly having a piss, and that everyone should watch closely. Naturally, once I had started, I couldn’t stop — you know how it is when you really need a piss and you release that valve — but I was also very conscious of everyone standing around outside this room, with me on display.

Somehow, I managed to find a way of standing where I knew that no-one would be able to see my knob or the seemingly never-ending stream of piss erupting from me, but the crowd began to become more rowdy. At first it was shouting and laughing, but then it changed to singing — a few scattered voices at first, which eventually became as one, singing a driving, dramatic song that inexplicably developed an orchestral backing after a while despite the fact there was clearly not an orchestra present — at least not one which I could see. As the music built in intensity, volume and tempo, I became aware that I was losing control of my, uh, “flow” and it was going everywhere, and that everyone could see this.

Suddenly the music stopped, and I was done. I flushed, and went to wash my hands at the sink that I’m sure wasn’t there beforehand. The sink was full of paint and the draining board next to it looked rusty and dirty, but clean water came out of the taps, at least. I washed up and left the room, trying to get far away from my “audience”, who thankfully didn’t follow me. I’m not sure how long I ran or to where, but eventually I found myself in a room with Emma Watson, who grabbed me and kissed me rather forcefully.

And then I woke up, disappointingly. Well thank you, subconscious, for keeping me asleep during the bizarre, slightly traumatic part and waking me up just as things were getting interesting.

1130: Pour One Out for 1up.com

The “digital age” brings with it many benefits — most of which relate somehow to the concept of “convenience” — but an unfortunate side-effect of it is that things aren’t as permanent as they once were. Sites grow, change and relaunch, and occasionally die altogether.

Today it emerged that Ziff Davis, former owners of 1up.com until it was sold to IGN, and now the company that owns IGN (and consequently 1up.com again… yes, it’s confusing) would be shuttering three sites, including 1up.com.

This is immensely sad news for a number of reasons. Today I will primarily be outlining my own personal feelings about that site; I’m sure a number of people reading this will have their own opinions and thoughts about the site and the changes it’s gone through over the years, so feel free to share them in the comments.

I first became aware of 1up.com while my brother was working at Ziff Davis on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (I think I’ve got that chronology right). He played an important role in shaping the site and its content, and it became a regular hangout for me not just because of me supporting my bro, but also because I really liked what it was doing. It was my first real contact with what was to become “social networking”, and I found myself really enjoying making use of all the site features — the ability to blog, the forums, the ability for users to create clubs and communities as part of the main site. My 1up blog was one of the first places where I wrote about games regularly, primarily for myself but also in an attempt to keep myself in “practice” should I ever find myself in a situation where I’d be able to do so professionally.

My main reason for thinking so fondly of 1up.com is the Squadron of Shame. I’ve told this story before, but it doesn’t hurt to tell it again.

The Squadron of Shame was a group of people who came together as the result of a fairly throwaway feature on one of 1up’s podcasts. The podcast participants had got talking about their “Pile of Shame” — all the games they owned but had never got around to finishing (or even playing in some cases) — and discussion had turned to Tim Schafer’s cult classic Psychonauts. The intention was for the Pile of Shame to become a regular feature on the podcast as the participants played through the games together and gave their thoughts on more obscure titles that people might have missed out on.

It was a short-lived feature, and quickly abandoned on the show — but a bunch of people on the 1up forums really liked the idea and thus decided to come together and finish the job they’d started. We checked out Psychonauts and had a blast playing through it together. Then we started talking about other games that people might have missed — System Shock 2, Psi Ops, Odin Sphere and all manner of other titles. For each one, we made a thread on the forums for discussion, played through it together and got to know each other a bit better in the process. It was a fantastic experience, and I made a lot of very good friends in the process — friends who I still “talk” to on a daily basis even today.

Trouble was on the horizon, though. The once-sprawling 1up.com forums, which used to be split into a wide variety of distinct sections, were merged into simple “Games” and “Not Games” categories. The Squadron of Shame’s threads used to call the “1up Radio” forum home — this forum primarily related to the site’s podcasts and the features therein, and was generally a home of more mature, respectful discussion than other parts of the forums as a whole. Suddenly, though, our thoughtful threads — which often included long posts with members writing mini-essays on their experiences with the games we were playing — were lumped in with all the “wot iz ur favorit wepon in halo” threads from the hoi polloi of the site. Consequently, on at least one occasion we found ourselves being rather unpleasantly trolled by users who, for some inexplicable reason, took great umbrage to our writing of posts that included more than five words, knew how to use paragraphs and punctuated properly, and discussion wasn’t quite so easy any more.

Around that time, the “club” pages on 1up got an overhaul; there used to be a “communal blog” where individual members could post in a linear fashion, but this was replaced by a dedicated forum just for that club. We made use of that for a while, but further trouble was on the horizon with the event which became known as the Great Upheaval, when a huge proportion of the talent from the site was laid off as part of the transition to new owners UGO. The site wasn’t the same after that, so a lot of people drifted away from the community, mostly to places such as Twitter.

It was around this time that we started producing the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, an irregularly-occurring podcast that continues the Squad’s original mission in earnest. To this day, we still have a small but dedicated following keen to tune in and hear our thoughtful, mature (and lengthy!) discussions on obscure games and gaming-related topics. It’s something I’m really happy to be a part of, and something that still feels me with great pride any time I hear someone from outside my core friendship group talking about — people like Garnett Lee, one of the original 1up podcasters who gave us the idea in the first place.

Today, the Squad primarily lives on Google+, which seems to be a good home for our discussions. You can check out and join our community here. Prior to that, a healthy amount of discussion also took place on the “Squawkbox”, a WordPress site we set up to emulate the old-school “club journal” format from the original 1up.com club, but which is now primarily used as a site linking to the SquadCast’s archives. There have been plans on and off to make a “proper” Squad site for many years now (including a nice-looking mockup), but they’re yet to come to fruition. One day…?

Anyway, I’m drifting off the point somewhat. The main thing I wanted to say is that none of this would have happened without 1up.com. Without 1up.com, I never would have met this disparate group of people from all over the world and made a group of friends with whom I really feel that I can be “myself”. Without 1up.com, I wouldn’t have as solid a “support network” as I feel I do today. Without 1up.com, there’s every chance that I’d be a lot more lonely than I am today. I feel privileged and honoured to have met everyone who came together as a result of the Squad, and am glad that we’re still attracting new members a few at a time every so often, many of whom are fast becoming just as good friends as those who I have known since those early days of the group. I now have a solid group of international friends that I trust and depend on, and without 1up.com I simply wouldn’t have that. (Of course, there’s every chance that I would have made a similar group of friends on a different website, but, you know.)

So it’s for this reason I’m sorry to see 1up.com go. The loss of the articles and writing talent on the site is sad too, of course, but for me it will always be the community side of things that captured my heart and imagination, and showed me that my passion for video games was not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about, but instead celebrated and explored.

So thanks for the memories, 1up. You’ll be sorely missed.

1129: Disc of Memories

For the longest time, I’ve kept a specific CD-R hanging around. Somehow it’s survived all the different house moves I’ve gone through since leaving home and is still intact. I’m more impressed that I haven’t lost it or accidentally thrown it out than by the fact it still works, but I guess that’s pretty cool, too.

The raggedy inlay lists a few bits and pieces on the front, but gives relatively little indication to its contents. “PETE’S STUFF” it proudly announces in green felt-tip pen. “\PIERRE\ (GENERAL), \KNP\ (KLIK GAMES), \FFCOLLECTION\ (FINAL FANT.)” it elaborates, also in green felt-tip pen. The last entry is simply a collection of emulators and ROM files for all the Final Fantasy games up until VI, including a translated Japanese ROM for the NES original version of III. But it’s the other two that are more interesting.

The “Pierre” folder is from my first PC, which was a mighty Pentium 133 that could run Doom and Quake like nobody’s business. It had both a DVD-ROM drive and a CD rewriter, and I also eventually installed a Sound Blaster Audigy into it, which took up another drive bay with a ridiculous front-panel audio interface that looked pretty cool. Said folder contained a wide variety of almost-organised bits and pieces, consisting almost entirely of MIDI files downloaded from CompuServe and the Internet at large — mostly music from Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with a brief break into Wild Arms, Xenogears and Zelda territory — as well as saved walkthroughs from an early incarnation of GameFAQs. This was the age of dial-up networking, you see, and thus it wasn’t possible to simply “quickly” hop onto GameFAQs to check a walkthrough; it was much more efficient to save it. (If you’re wondering, my saved guides included Alundra, Bust-a-Groove, Rival Schools, Wild Arms and Xenogears.)

Also in this folder is an early form of a tabletop roleplaying game system called “The Returners,” based on Final Fantasy, along with original text files for some of my earliest pieces of freelance writing work — a two-part guide to Final Fantasy VII for PC Zone, a 3,000 word Discworld II guide, a Lands of Lore II guide that was an absolute nightmare to put together, and a walkthrough to Turok 2 using the Official Nintendo Magazine’s curious internal system of markup to include special characters and other layout bits and pieces.

Pleasingly, one thing that I have found among all this crap is a folder containing a bunch of half-finished creative writing works from a long time ago. There’s a sci-fi epic I started working on that was loosely based on Sierra’s excellent spacefaring strategy game Alien Legacy (kudos if you remember that, it was awesome) along with a piece I wrote for my A-Level English Language coursework. I liked it so much when I wrote it that I extended it somewhat. It’s also probably my earliest example of writing creative prose in “stream of consciousness” style — we’d not long covered Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea in English Lit class, and the curiously disjointed method of writing had proven to be quite appealing to me, so I experimented with it. It paid off with a good mark, as I recall, though I’m not sure it holds up quite so well to further inspection some fifteen years later. Still, it’s nice to have it.

(Oh, also, there’s a subfolder in the “Pierre” folder just labelled “ANNA KOURNIKOVA IS FIT”, which I think is fairly self-explanatory.)

The “KNP” folder is an interesting one, as it contains a selection of half-finished (yes, I have a habit of half-finishing things) games made with Clickteam’s excellent software Klik and Play, later superseded by The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. This folder contains the earliest ever incarnation of the story “Dreamwalker”, which I still fully intend to get out of my head and into some form of creative medium before I die. The original version of Dreamwalker was more an experiment to see if it was possible to make a Zelda-style action-adventure using the rather limited Klik and Play tools, and indeed it was, with a bit of creativity. Once I’d started making it, though, I found myself getting quite attached to the characters involved, even if I’d borrowed the basic concept (if not the setting and characters) from Alundra on PS1, which I’d played around the same time. I also actually composed some music for Dreamwalker, which I still have the MIDI files for, and which are in dire need of mixing properly. Perhaps that can be a project sometime — the tunes themselves are actually pretty solid, in my humble opinion.

The KNP folder also includes the original version of Pie Eater’s Destiny, one of the only four complete video games that I have ever made. (The other three are London Taxi Chase, London Taxi Chase II and… a remake of Pie Eater’s Destiny) Pie Eater’s Destiny holds a fond place in my heart because it was a collaborative project between me and my two best buds in the late stages of school, and it’s a running joke among us that one day we’ll make a sequel. We’ve started several times, but somehow, well over ten years later, we’re yet to get anywhere. Pleasingly, the data files for Pie Eater’s Destiny also include the original .WAV file recordings of us doing voice acting for the game, including the outtakes which we saved. There are also .WAV files of us experimenting with pitch shifting and other special effects, including several alarmingly-convincing “Jabba the Hutt doing things he was never supposed to be depicted doing” files. JABBAWNK.WAV, indeed.

Anyway, I was happy to rediscover some of the useless crap on this disc when I opened it up on a whim today. It’s missing a few things that I hoped I’d find on there, but I’m glad I found the other stuff. Perhaps when I can be bothered I might share some of it here. Those voice acting outtakes are crying out to be edited into some sort of YouTube clip.

1128: Suddenly Silenced

While I don’t particularly relish the circumstances under which I left Twitter recently — which I won’t go into now as it’s all still a bit “raw” and upsetting, to be honest — it’s sort of been nice to not have the omniscient little blue bird hovering over my shoulder all the time.

Twitter was a big part of my life for a very long time. According to my Twitter archive — which I downloaded before I closed my account — I first posted a tweet on May 8 of 2008, but didn’t really do anything with it until the end of June of that year. It’s fair to say that I — like many other people — didn’t really “get” what it was all about to begin with, largely because it was so ill-defined and hadn’t pervaded popular culture quite as much as it has today. “It’s like Facebook statuses,” I’d say to people when trying to explain it, “but without all the other crap.”

It sort of is like Facebook statuses without all the other crap — those early tweets of mine very much followed the “Pete is… [doing something]” format — but it quickly became a lot more than that. It became one of my primary means of communication with my international friends.

As many of you reading this may know, I have a lot of friends, but disappointingly few of them live in the same place as me. I have at least rectified that a little by moving back to Southampton to be near my university and board game buddies, but many of my other friends are still scattered the world over, all the way from America to Japan and lots of places in between. It’s sort of awesome to have such a global group of friends, though it naturally means that I’ve never actually met an awful lot of them and possibly never will in some cases. It also meant that I needed a good, simple, reliable means of staying in touch with them; Facebook was all right, but as it gradually became more and more cluttered with crap, fewer and fewer people were using it as a serious means of communication. Today, it’s a bloated mess that it’s very difficult to be “heard” on, but it still has a place.

Twitter, meanwhile, was simple, pure and to the point. It was like exchanging text messages with friends, only on a global scale. I made a lot of new friends through Twitter and got to know some a bit better. I got through some tough times, too; the immediacy of the service meant that it was a good outlet for me to talk about the way I was feeling when I was going through my “difficult period” a few years back, and I appreciated the support I got from my friends — and sometimes strangers — during that dark period.

Twitter is addictive, though. It becomes a compulsion. Install it on your phone and you’ll find yourself idly opening the app to see if anyone has said anything interesting in the last two minutes, even if you just stepped away from your computer where you were staring at a Twitter client. You’ll find yourself wanting to step into (or start) conversations at silly hours in the morning, and get relatively little sleep as a result. It’ll worm its way into your life, in short, and start to take over.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing — as I’ve already outlined above, it proved to be a good means of communication for me, and a good means of meeting new people. It allowed me to put myself out there a lot more than I feel comfortable doing in the “real world”, and in many ways helped me to build confidence. And let’s also not forget that I met Andie through Twitter, so that’s pretty cool.

The recent things that happened to me, though, brought the service’s public nature into sharp focus. Sure you can be free to be open and honest about your feelings, your likes and dislikes, but that also means that you can be open to attack, too, without provocation. And once you’re in the sights of one of these obnoxious groups, it’s very difficult to get yourself out of them. Twitter the company aren’t much help, either — after several support messages keeping them apprised of everything that was going on, the only thing I’ve heard from them is a request for a clarification on something. They take great pains in their terms and conditions to say that they don’t mediate personal disputes — though I feel there’s a strong case for what happened to me to be considered a criminal offence, and as such I reported it to the police and intend to keep hounding Twitter until they do something about it.

In some ways, I feel sickened and angry that I was forced off a service that has been a prominent and important part of my life for a long time now. In other ways, it’s actually quite relieving to know that I don’t need to read that feed of inanities any longer, or get frustrated at people trying to have in-depth discussions on tricky issues in 140 characters when what they should really do is pen a 3,000-word blog post. I’m not ruling out a return in the future when the scumbags who drove me away give up and do something else, but for the moment I can certainly live without it — and there’s no way I’m going back to a service which I don’t feel safe using.

1127: The Stench of Manure

There are a few games that our gaming group plays on a regular rotation. One of them is Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride, which is a fantastically accessible game that pretty much anyone can pick up and enjoy. The other is Z-Man Games’ Agricola, which is still relatively easy to understand, but which I find immensely difficult. (And, judging by a few comments I received on Facebook earlier, I’m not alone in that!)

Agricola, for the uninitiated, is a game based on the thrilling world of 16th century German farming. As experienced board gamers will know, however, fairly tedious-sounding themes like this are actually ideal for adaptation into a board game. You have a variety of different tasks to perform and inevitably not quite enough time in which to perform them. You have the opportunity for expansion and building. And you need to think ahead in order to enjoy success.

My trouble with Agricola has always been that I get overwhelmed by all the possible courses of action and end up picking just one, following it to the exclusion of all else. While this is a valid strategy if no-one else is doing the same thing as you, the second someone takes an action that you were planning to do, your whole plan falls apart, since in the cutthroat world of 16th century German farming, only one person may plough a field at any one time.

Such was the difficulty I’ve had with Agricola in the past that I had convinced myself that I don’t like it very much, and found myself generally resisting requests to play it in our group. (I like to play something I can win every so often!) However, in an attempt to better myself and also allow my friends to play the games they want to play a bit more often, I picked up my own copy of Agricola recently in the hopes of getting in a bit of practice and improving my own skills.

The nice thing about Agricola is that it’s eminently suitable for solo play. Sure, it takes a bit of time to set up and it has a tendency to sprawl across the entire table, but as a solitaire game it’s relatively quick and straightforward to play, and the nature of its mechanics mean that there aren’t too many difficult-to-remember rules adaptations for solo players. Consequently, it’s an experience fairly similar to playing with others, only without people getting in your way — and as such, it’s a good means of trying out a few different strategies.

I’ve played a couple of solitaire games so far, and my score improved between the two of them. I’m not sure if I was actually playing better or if I simply had better “luck” the second time around, but I did feel a bit more confident and comfortable with my choice of actions in the second game. Rather than feeling like I was “wasting” certain turns, as I was in my first solo game, I felt like each turn achieved something. In an attempt to study my own way of playing, I even made a note of how each turn unfolded — what I did and how it affected my score. I’m not sure how helpful those notes will be, though I will say that writing things down as I played actually helped me to think a bit harder about what I was doing. It’s not always easy to organise complex, abstract mechanics in your head — let alone plan several moves ahead and take into account the fact that anyone might scupper your plans at any minute.

The net result of me playing a few solo games of Agricola, though — plus introducing Andie to it earlier (she liked it! Yay!) — is that I feel a bit better about the prospect of playing it again in the future. I have no doubt my score will still be demolished by my companions, who have all played it much more than I have and thus know the good strategies and cards to look out for, but at least I’ll feel like I have a bit more of a fighting chance.

We’ll see, I guess. To the farm!