1116: Neptunia Master System mk2

I finally completed the shit out of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 tonight. And by that I mean I did pretty much everything it was possible to do in that game. I feel confident in saying it’s one of the most consistently fun JRPGs I’ve played for quite some time — not necessarily the best, no, but certainly one that most definitely has its heart in the right place.

It was a really interesting game on the whole, and one that clearly knew its (small, niche) audience very well. I found it particularly interesting that instead of making a direct sequel to the first game, which apparently sold pretty well in Japan but bombed over here due to appalling review scores, they instead chose to reboot the setting and characters, creating a game which newcomers could happily start with but which those who played through its predecessor could appreciate on a deeper level. Neptunia mk2 wasn’t a retelling of the first game’s story — it was a completely new tale that pretty much assumed the first game didn’t happen. This was a little jarring at first, as characters showed up whom I thought should know each other having played the first game, and the characters IF and Compa were obviously retconned to be childhood friends. Over time it ceased to matter, though, and it became clear that Neptunia mk2 was intended to be taken on its own merits without the baggage of its predecessor — a sensible choice, I’m inclined to think.

Besides proving to be a good jumping-on point for the series (the physical package’s apparent rarity aside), Neptunia mk2 also dialed back its reliance on rather forced game and anime references for its humour, instead opting to focus on its distinctive and entertaining (if rather archetypal) characters. The one notable exception to this was in the game’s “true ending” path, where there’s a wonderful scene shortly before the final boss that features the “older sister” characters (meant to personify the seventh-generation consoles plus the ditzy Neptune/Sega, who has no idea what she’s doing and is more interested in cookies than ruling the world) arguing over whose console is best, while the “younger sisters” (who are really the main characters of the game, and who personify the current-generation handheld systems… and, err, the Game Gear) sit and play Monster Hunter together while talking about how awesome Shenmue was.

A side-effect of the above is that the game’s endearing sense of humour can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone, regardless of your knowledge of the video games industry as a whole. Those who have been playing for a long time, however, will appreciate the numerous sly nods and winks throughout — an area called Atari Marsh; a city called Sim City; characters called Cave and Falcom; and enemies that resemble everything from Tetris blocks to Dr Kawashima’s freaky floating head from the Brain Age/Brain Training series.

The overall plot, which is essentially an anti-piracy, pro-“reward the creators of the content you enjoy” parable, initially appears to be a bit heavy-handed with its message, but this is nicely subverted by the time the previous game’s protagonist Neptune puts in an appearance and berates the other characters for “sounding a bit preachy and stuff”. It has a good narrative arc, building to a suitably dramatic conclusion and one of seven different endings — including a shockingly dark one that is quite impressive in its brutality. (Though it could possibly have gone even a bit further than it did.)

One of the most interesting things about it is its female-centric nature. While there’s a lot of fanservice in it — within five minutes of starting, there are three quasi-“bondage” scenes; several characters are prone to flashing their panties at every opportunity (and the in-game camera is happy to encourage this); and a number of the “event” pictures feature a childishly amusing “jiggle” feature that… well, you can probably imagine — it’s difficult to look on the game as being particularly anti-women.

In fact, it’s very positive about a lot of things to do with sex and gender. The whole (enormous) party of playable characters is made up of women, for starters, and while many of these use anime archetypes as the basis for their personality, they’re all their own individual characters with their own quirks and ways of interacting with each other rather than being nothing but shallow stereotypes. This team of ass-kicking women doesn’t once rely on a man to help them out throughout the course of the entire story — and in fact, the few faceless appearances that men do make throughout the plot tend to depict them as shallow, image-obsessed borderline sex pests, with the exception of the boss character Brave, who is more of a Transformer than a man anyway. (Any good that Brave does for the male gender’s representation in the game is immediately undone by Trick, however, who it’s not an exaggeration to say is a revolting robotic paedophile, and one of the most delightfully odious characters I’ve had the pleasure of virtually beating up for a long time.)

There are also no unnecessary romantic scenes in the game, though there’s a subtle implication that all the main characters in the story are gay and that there’s nothing wrong with this whatsoever. (Because, you know, there isn’t.) This doesn’t mean lesbian melodrama or anything, either; rather, it’s simply accepted that some of these girls like each other a bit more than others, and this is depicted in the way that they interact with one another with obvious tenderness and care. It’s clear that these characters and their relationships have been written with genuine affection and a desire to make them believable people rather than just tits and arse, and I came away from the experience feeling like I had a good understanding of who they were, who they got along with the best and who they clashed with. It was one of those experiences where the final credits rolled and I felt like I was going to miss the characters, which is always a good sign.

So that’s that. It’s all done. No more Neptunia… at least until March, when the third game in the series arrives and I will inevitably become obsessed all over again.

1115: Twittertwat

Quite a few people I know have quit Twitter in the last year or so. A few of them have also come back again, and some have gone through this process more than once, but a few have gone, never to return, either. Fortunately, in the cases of people I’m actually interested in staying in touch with, I have alternative means of contacting them, and Twitter was only ever a way of easily sending short messages to them — a global texting service, if you will.

I use Twitter a lot, for engaging in conversations, posting links to my work and just generally being part of the global community. But over the past few weeks, I’m starting to understand why increasing numbers of people are jumping ship.

The experience is, of course, as with so much else on the Internet, exactly what you make of it, and I’ve taken fairly ruthless control of my experience by simply blocking people I find objectionable and/or annoying. Not necessarily people who are being abusive — I appear to be a relatively inoffensive tweeter that doesn’t attract trolls compared to some — but people whom I just don’t want to hear from. (If only real life were that simple.)

Even with doing this, though, it’s still increasingly frustrating when the entirety of my timeline is taken up by some sort of snark on one subject or another. Today, there were several subjects — a report by Edge about the next-generation Microsoft console which framed a bunch of rumours as if they were confirmed facts; the ECA announcing that HipHopGamer was going to be their new ambassador; and something about J. J. Abrams and Valve. I’ve only really dipped in and out of Twitter today, and the snark in relation to all of these things was unbearable then, so I can’t imagine how irritating it would have been had I had a client open all day.

This is the thing, though. There’s nothing really fundamentally wrong with having strong opinions on matters such as those mentioned above — which will, of course, mean nothing to people who don’t follow the games industry — but Twitter is not a particularly good place in which to have discussions about those opinions. It’s fine for raising awareness of something — perhaps posting a link to a relevant story — but when people start trying to have “debates” about these things, it all sort of starts to fall apart a bit, really. Any pretext of rational discussion is inclined to quickly go out of the window in favour of short, snappy arguments, and the ease with which a tweet can be posted means that things are often spoken in haste without any real thought. To me, the very benefit of arguing a point using the written word is that you can take your time over it and consider it carefully; not so if you’re in a Twitter argument.

I haven’t been involved in any of these discussions/debates/arguments as I know how they inevitably go. I also know the people to avoid engaging with by now — those who seem to take offense at everything it’s even slightly possible to take offense to. Even though I don’t engage with them, though — and in many cases, as mentioned above, have blocked them — it’s still exhausting to feel that there are certain subjects which just can’t be broached; certain turns of phrase which can’t be used; certain words which are off-limits. (And I’m not talking about anything explicitly offensive like racial epithets or anything like that; I’m talking about words which these people specifically choose to interpret using the worst possible meaning rather than the tone and context in which they were intended.)

I’m rambling a bit, I know, but the gist of the matter is that this week I’ve come closer to quitting Twitter altogether than I have ever done. Twitter has been an important part of my life for a long time, a key way in which I stay in touch with a lot of my international friends and the means through which I first met Andie, but I’m beginning to feel that “honeymoon” period is over. It doesn’t feel like the warm, welcoming, positive community it used to be. Perhaps that’s just the people I follow, and I’m long overdue for a ruthless unfollow-and-block session — or perhaps people really are being more snarky than they were. Either way, the negativity is starting to get to me a bit.

It’s doubtful that I will quit Twitter at any point in the near future — I still have too many friends who use it as their primary means of communication, and it’s still the best way to quickly and easily share things that probably don’t really need to be shared with the world — but I just found it mildly interesting that this is the closest I’ve ever come to actually ditching it.

1114: Amazing Discoveries

Amazing discovery of the day: my Nespresso “Aeroccino” milk frothing device not only heats and froths milk suitable for both lattes and cappuccinos (it’s all to do with how wibbly-wobbly your whisk is, apparently), it also makes a killer milkshake.

I’ve had a pot of Mars milkshake mix lurking in my cupboard for months now — it even moved house with us back in December — but I’ve not had that much of it despite it being yummy because apparently I am crap at mixing powder-based milkshakes by hand. They almost inevitably come out either lumpy or not actually tasting of the thing they’re supposed to taste of, and are thus infinitely more disappointing than a milkshake you’d pay well over the odds for in a single-portion bottle. (I say “single portion” — most of the nutrition info in the side of bottles of things like Mars milkshakes and Frijj seems to imply that a “normal” person would drink no more than half the bottle in one go. Who does that?)

As an experiment, then, I decided to use the Aeroccino, because I knew it had a “cold” mode that does all the stirry-stirry business, but doesn’t do all the heaty-heaty business like it normally does. I plopped in the appropriate amount of milk and a few scoops of the Mars milkshake mix, then pressed and held the button until it went blue rather than the usual red… then sat and hoped that it didn’t blow up. There’s no reason why it should blow up simply from having a bit of powder in it as well as the usual milk, but, well, I was still doing something with it that you’re not really supposed to.

What do you know? It made a perfect, lump-free milkshake that actually tasted like Mars milkshake without being all powdery and horrible. I call that a victory. It didn’t even gum up the stirry thing with goopy half-dissolved milkshake mix, meaning it could just be rinsed out ready for the bajillion cups of coffee I will almost inevitably consume over the course of tomorrow. (I’m having a bit of a caffeine crash as we speak — I’ve largely been drinking strong black “Lungos” today and thus have been a bit wired for most of the evening.)

I find it oddly satisfying to use culinary implements for purposes other than that which they were originally intended. (Get your mind out of the gutter, you filthy pervert.) That and doing weird things with stock foods. Adding hot sauce to reheated bolognese. Layering a slice of beef under the cheese of cheese on toast. (I call this “Deluxe Cheese on Toast”.) Dipping Bovril on toast into tomato soup. (Seriously, try this, it’s delicious. Assuming you like Bovril on toast, obviously.) Making weird sandwiches. (I put a whole roast dinner — well, the leftovers thereof — in a sandwich once, and you really haven’t lived until you’ve had a pie sandwich.)

I have no idea where I’m going with this post, to be perfectly honest. I think it’s probably best that I just stop writing here as it’s nearly 1am and I’m quite tired. I seem to have fallen into habits of staying up quite late again. I should probably try and kick that, because it makes it difficult to get up in the morning. Oh well.

See you tomorrow.

1113: Thin Skin

You know one of the people I admire the most on the whole Internet? Jim Sterling. While I may not always agree with his opinions and the way he argues them, that’s not why I admire him. No, the reason I admire him is how he can say something which may end up being controversial in some way (either due to subject matter or by going against popular opinion) and then not let the subsequent barrage of vitriol flying his way bother him. Or, if he does, he manages to hide it exceedingly well and simply brush it off as part of the job. (I have a sneaking suspicion that if it really did bother him, he wouldn’t still be in this business.)

I last wrote about this topic back on day 795 of this blog, and the things both I and Sterling said back then still ring true. I’m envious of Sterling because of the way in which he can rise above the abuse and not let negative comments get to him, because I am the exact opposite.

Let me explain to you what it’s like to browse a comments section when you suffer from anxiety and depression in various forms. First of all, you find yourself hoping that there are comments there at all. It’s nice to know that something you wrote has resonated enough with someone to compel them to respond. It’s even nicer if said someone comes along and agrees with you. Everyone likes to be agreed with and made to feel like they’re “right”, even in topics where there is no clear “right” or “wrong” answer. It’s particularly pleasing to know you’ve made a connection with someone who is often a complete stranger, and that you’ve been able to bond over the words that came out of your head and onto the page.

Now let’s say there’s a dissenting comment in there, too. It doesn’t have to be a vitriolic or abusive one, just one which disagrees with you in some way. Immediately, all the good work done by the positive comment is undone. Immediately, you feel a knot in your stomach as you start to read the dissenting opinions, and immediately you start to feel like a failure as a human being because your thoughts didn’t coincide with someone else’s. Should you have written that article at all? Should you continue writing at all? Or should you just pack it in altogether, because every time a dissenting opinion comes along, you end up feeling sick to your stomach?

There is, of course, a specific example I’m thinking of in this case. As you may be aware, I write a regular column about visual novels every week for Games Are Evil. I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, just someone with a strong interest in the medium and an urge to tell others about the great experiences I’ve had with them. This week, I decided to write about the treatment of sex in visual novels, which often tend to be very explicit on the erotic content front. The first comment I got was from a regular commenter on the column, and fell into the first category I described above. A subsequent one fell into the second category, telling me that I’d chosen bad examples to back up my points and accusing me of not knowing my subject matter. The comment itself was relatively respectful in tone, now that I’ve had a few hours to stew on it, but I came away from initially reading it feeling pretty shitty about myself. I’d worked hard on that piece and had put myself out there by sharing my opinions, and to have them shot down in that manner and accused of not knowing my stuff was actually quite upsetting.

I am aware that I broke one of the cardinal rules of the Internet by looking at the comments section at all, I am also aware that it’s highly possible that I will never see or hear from that commenter again, and I am also aware that everyone is entitled to their opinion and no-one is obliged to agree with me — but that simple failure to connect made me rather upset and has left me feeling quite glum all evening. It’s a total overreaction, I know, and I should learn from Sterling’s example and grow a thicker skin — or argue my corner better — but, well, that’s the experience of living with anxiety and depression. It only takes a few poorly-chosen words to make someone like me feel like crap, and it’s mostly our fault for being that way and not doing anything about it.

You should, of course, be able to freely express your opinions just as much as me, but just think about the way you’re saying the things you want to say before you hit that “post” button, please?

1112: Freebies

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mobile game which carries the price tag of “free” must be in want of the contents of your wallet.

There are exceptions, of course, but it’s pretty rare to find something that you can download for free that actually is free these days.

It’s even rarer to find one of these games that doesn’t suck, as the market becomes increasingly-flooded with appalling “card battle” games and gameplay-free tap-fests in which you do little more than log in every few hours for a shower of coins.

The last free-to-play mobile games which really captured the public’s imagination came from Nimblebit. Their game Tiny Tower in particular got an alarming number of people hooked, despite the fact that there really wasn’t actually very much gameplay there at all, and there certainly wasn’t enough strategy to call it a successor to Sim Tower, like some people were. Their follow-up Pocket Planes captured people’s interest for a while, too, but by that point a lot of people were starting to get wise to the fact that these games were little more than fairly mindless diversions rather than anything which required something more than the very minimum of brainpower.

It’s been a while since Pocket Planes, and a whole ton of free-to-play mobile games have come and gone since then, many of them bloody awful. So it’s only fair, then, that I pay a bit of attention to some which aren’t complete crap and which are even actually — hush, now, don’t tell anyone — quite good.

Here they are. They’re free, of course, so you can try them out for yourself and see if they’re worth bothering with for more than a single session.

Pixel People

This new title published by Chillingo has more than a little bit in common with Nimblebit’s games. It’s populated by oddly-endearing pixelated people, there is no real hard “goal” as such and the majority of your time is spent making sure your income stream is as efficient as possible. You don’t have any expenses to worry about — it’s just a matter of how quickly you can make your pixelated town earn the spondulicks required to level up and expand your territory.

The basic gameplay in Pixel People revolves around genetic splicing. You’re building a Utopian colony of clones, you see, and in order for it to run smoothly you need clones in appropriate roles. When clones are delivered to your colony — which will happen regularly so long as you have houses available for them — you are able to pick two “jobs” that you already know and splice them together to hopefully make a new one. The interface gives you feedback as to whether or not the combination you’re trying will make a new job, so you won’t waste clones or time, and there are various ways to unlock hints (including, yes, paying up) as you progress through the game.

The thing I like about Pixel People is that as you play through, you’re constantly discovering new neat little things. You’re never doing much more than picking random combinations of jobs and tapping on buildings to keep them producing money, but every so often you’ll discover that tapping on a certain building performs a special function. Tap on the police station, for example, and you’ll find your achievements list — the game doesn’t even log in to Game Center until you’ve discovered this for yourself — and be able to claim rewards for challenges you’ve already completed. Tap on the observatory, and you can change the background of your colony — and also score yourself an achievement. While none of these things vastly affect the way you play the game and certainly don’t give it any “strategy,” they’re a nice touch that keeps you wanting to play without resorting to the usual Skinner Box tricks of using experience points and showers of gold.

By far the best thing about Pixel People, though, is that it just looks like one of those awesome gigantic pixel art town pictures. Despite the fact that the placement of your buildings and roads doesn’t matter in the slightest — and you can move anything around at will, anyway — I’ve found it oddly compelling to just want to arrange my buildings into an aesthetically-pleasing, vaguely “realistic” arrangement rather than just clustering them all together haphazardly like I did when I first started playing. So now my cloning centre has a road running from it with shops and other facilities down it, running around a corner (on which the L-shaped university building sits), past a large park and into a residential district. Beyond the residential area is some natural forest land, which is where the sheriff and his deputy live, next to the Utopium mine.

I’m overthinking it. It’s not that good, really, but if you liked Tiny Tower you’ll probably enjoy Pixel People — and, like Nimblebit’s titles, you never feel like you need to pay up to make satisfying amounts of progress.

Book of Heroes

I remember trying this for the first time a good few months back, and I remember quite liking it then. Book of Heroes is a role-playing game specifically designed to be played in short, bite-sized instalments on your phone. It’s largely text-based, its interface is designed for touchscreens, and it’s not trying to be World of Warcraft or anything.

Since I last tried it, what I believe used to be a single-player experience has gone full-on MMORPG on your ass. Now you can compare your characters with your friends, chat in real time with other people, join guilds and go on “raids” together in an attempt to prove your own supremacy.

Mobile MMORPGs of this type are often utter garbage, usually falling into the “card battle” category and being completely free of any sort of gameplay or strategy whatsoever. Where Book of Heroes differs is in the fact that it actually demands some interaction from its players; rather than following a linear line of quests, you gradually open up a large number of areas in the game world to “explore” (well, fight a string of battles in) and complete various objectives before returning to town to spend all that hard-earned loot.

Combat is the main area where Book of Heroes differs from its rivals. Rather than taking all control away from the player, as happens frustratingly frequently with this sort of game, Book of Heroes allows the player to control their character’s actions in a quasi-turn based format. Each action takes a set amount of real time to perform — we’re talking seconds here, not “pay up to do this quicker” — and while an action is “charging” the enemies are doing the same thing. It becomes a matter of weighing up whether or not it’s worth using the slow-charging super-powerful attack or whether you should try and get some quick hits in before the enemies have a chance to attack. It’s a fairly simplistic system, but it works well in the context of a mobile game.

____

The thing with both of these titles is that they understand how mobile players treat games — as a diversion to dip into for a few minutes at a time, not a massively compelling experience intended to keep them hunched over staring at their tiny screen for hours. They’re both eminently suitable for toilet play, and they’re both simple to pick up but provide plenty of long-term… I hesitate to say “challenge” because neither of them are difficult in the slightest… umm… content, I guess, for players to check out over time. So, in short, they’re at least worth a look.

Grab Pixel People here and Book of Heroes here.

1111: Oneoneoneone

So today is my one thousand and eleventh daily post on this blog, and the… errr, hang on… (*counts*… 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999… 1111) 19th time that all the digits in my post number have been identical, something which, coincidentally, will not happen again for another one thousand one hundred and eleven days.

This feels like it should be significant somehow, but in reality, well, it just isn’t. It’s just another arbitrary post number on a relatively unremarkable day. Regardless, since it feels like it should be something significant, I shall use this post as a permanent (well, as permanent as anything on the Web is) record of exactly what happened today, Saturday the 2nd of February 2013. (Yes, I know the post date probably says February 3rd, but that’s because I played Hyperdimension Neptunia for too long and drifted all the way past midnight… as usual. I’m sure you’re used to it by now.)

This morning I woke up rather late because I’d stayed up rather late the previous night reading my current visual novel fix, a rather compelling (if also rather wordy) tale called Kira Kira. I’ll save any discussion of Kira Kira for another day and instead point you to my “first impressions” post over on Games are Evil if you’re curious, since that’s not relevant to what went on today.

Andie and I eventually got up, had some breakfast (bacon and omelette; Andie added some chilli peppers and onions to hers but branded it ultimately disappointing due to the lack of “kick” that said peppers had; I had a plain one as my digestive tract was already on fire following a spectacularly spicy dhansak at my friend Tim’s on Thursday night) and contemplated what the day would hold.

Andie decided that she was going to look at new cars, as her trusty Nissan Micra “Ratty” had been starting to develop a few flaws and also had an impressive (though purely cosmetic) dent on the rear-left door. (It wasn’t her fault, but it would have cost several hundred quid to fix.) I was going to spend the day editing the much-delayed Squadron of Shame horror-themed podcast, but was requested to come along for moral support on the car hunt, so I agreed. I’ve never bought a car myself before, and Andie hadn’t done it “solo” before, either, so I understood her hesitance to go alone.

We took a drive down to a local used car dealership that was basically a big hangar-type building full of used cars of various descriptions. Andie took a bright red Peugeot 207 and a white VW Polo out for a spin; the Polo was a nicer car but was also several thousand quid more expensive, so that was eliminated from the running after some deliberations. Despite the best attempts of the newbie salesman and his boss double-teaming us and trying to convince us to buy a car there and then, Andie told them firmly that we would be taking a look at some other places before we made a decision. (“Why?” asked the boss guy, clearly only half-jokingly.)

We went and grabbed some lunch at The Crown, a pub I used to frequent as a student at Southampton University. It hasn’t changed at all, though the prices have probably gone up a bit. We both had a “Crown Inn Burger”, which is a burger with two toppings of your choice; Andie went for chili con carne and egg, I went for bacon and cheese. It was tasty — they do good burgers, so if you happen to find yourself in there, I recommend them. (I also recommend the “hill” or “mountain” of nachos, which are super-tasty.)

Following lunch, we went to a strip of car dealerships in the middle of town, opposite Ikea. There was a Hyundai place that looked like it also sold Renaults, a Honda place and a Ford place. Andie was particularly keen to look at the Fords, and I’ve had reasonably good experiences with Fords in the past too. (Apart from the fact that my Fiesta blew up on the way to work one day, and the Escort I subsequently had just flat-out died one day for no apparent reason.)

We took a look in the Hyundai place first, and were immediately accosted by a smug, smarmy salesman who completely ignored everything Andie said (“I’m interested in a used car,” she said. “Here’s a brand new Hyundai,” he said. “Fuck you,” we thought.) who showed us a car that we weren’t really interested in. Then we tried the Ford garage and discovered that it closed at lunchtime on Saturdays, which seemed enormously counter-productive from a “we want to sell lots of cars” perspective, then discovered that this was apparently not an unusual practice, since the Honda place was also closed.

Eliminating both Honda and Ford from our deliberations, we moved on to a dedicated Peugeot dealership on the very far side of the Southampton urban area. I was flagging a bit and getting a bit depressed and frustrated by this point, but we stuck it out. Andie took a diesel-based Peugeot 207 out for a spin and really liked it, so after a bit of pondering we decided that it would make a good new car. Andie did a bit of haggling (and judging by how little they argued, could have probably got away with more, but it was late in the day and we were tired) and we agreed to part-exchange both Andie’s current car and my elderly Peugeot 106 (which I really don’t need any more) against the new vehicle. (The trade-in value on the 106 is considerably better than the cash prices I’ve been quoted for selling it to places like We Buy Any Car and whatnot, so it seemed foolish not to do that, as we’ll both use the new car.)

Then we came home, and I posted the first of two new columns on Games are Evil (the second came later) then settled down for a bit of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. I’m closing in on the end of my second playthrough. I still haven’t decided if I’m actually going to play it through seven times, but it’s seriously tempting, plus it will actually minimise some of the “grinding” required to get certain specific endings, so I might; skipping events I’ve already seen lots of times cuts the total time down considerably, and fights are over in a flash when your main fighters are level 90+ and equipped with beastly weaponry. Man, I love that game.

Then, seeing the time stamp on my save game, I figured I should probably come and write this. So I did. After I click “Publish” I’m going to bed. Good night. Happy oneoneoneone day.

1110: The Collector

Reading this post from Matt Mason earlier made me think somewhat about my own game buying and playing habits and how they have evolved over time. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m becoming something of a “collector”, particularly when it comes to more obscure games that almost inevitably become hard to find if you don’t snag them immediately upon release.

This doesn’t mean that I pay over the odds to get “Collector’s Editions” of games, though, because I tend to think that for the most part those are a waste of time — or perhaps it’s just that I’ve never really had a Collector’s Edition for a game that I felt particularly passionately about. Had I known how much I was going to love Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, for example, I might have seriously considered spending a bit more and picking up the swanky limited edition that came with a soundtrack CD, an art book and some playing cards. (Yeah, I know the cards are a bit lame, but I love soundtrack CDs.)

More often than not, though, the super-expensive limited edition versions are for games I have no interest in, like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim. For sure, these limited editions are often cool, but there’s only so many gigantic statuettes that you can scatter around your house before people start asking questions. (Particularly if one of those statuettes is a gory female torso… but let’s not open that can of worms again.)

I’m actually fine with this, though, because I’ve been tending to find that the games I’m most interested in playing are the ones that maintain their value the best — simply because they’re often not put out in particularly large quantities and thus often become quite hard to find after a little while. As such, I’ve come to accept that taking a chance on a new game like this often involves an outlay of at least £20 and may, in a few isolated cases, require payment of a price considerably inflated from what it would have cost when the game was first released. (I ordered a copy of Fire Emblem for Gamecube recently, for example… I’m pretty sure that’s not what it cost when it first came out.) The fact that I’ve had to hunt for these games and occasionally pay a bit more for them than something of an equivalent age that had a wider release makes them feel somehow more “valuable”, and makes me feel like my growing collection is something that I can be proud of. I know they’re “just” games, but they represent a hobby that I truly love and which inspires me to do other things.

What this “collector’s” attitude has meant in practical terms is that I’m now much more inclined to pick up interesting-sounding titles as soon as I become aware of them, rather than when I know I have time for them. This inevitably leads to an ever-growing backlog, of course, but it also means that I have things to look forward to. It’s also an approach which works for my personal circumstances at present. In other words, I don’t spend a lot of money on other “vices” — I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t buy DVDs (with the exception of anime that can’t be found for streaming online), I don’t tend to travel a lot and, by the end of this month, I won’t have any car expenses either (apart from any contributions I make to help Andie out with hers). This means that I tend to have a fair bit of disposable income that I don’t feel guilty about splurging on my collection, and still have plenty left over for living expenses and to do nice things for Andie.

I like having physical things that I collect. My bulging Steam library also counts as part of my collection, but somehow that big list of games inevitably acquired for a couple of quid during a holiday sale isn’t quite as satisfying as seeing that big shelf full of cases. Downloadable games feel more “disposable” somehow, like they won’t last; I often find myself worrying what will happen to all these games when, say, Steam or PSN or Xbox Live don’t exist any more. How will future generations be able to play awesome stuff like Flower, or Journey, or any of the other titles which everyone raves about now but which are only available via download? (I got around this issue with some of the visual novels I own by burning a copy to disc and printing my own inlay for the DVD case. Sad? Perhaps. But it means I can add them to my shelf with some degree of pride.)

The unfortunate side-effect of collecting physical things, of course, is that you have to find space for all of them, and if you get into full-on “hoarding” mode, where you don’t want to trade anything in, ever, then you need more and more space as time goes on. I’ve currently still got a few shelves free on the other bookcase, but it’s starting to get a little bit tight… and then what? Creative packing time.

If you’re curious, here’s my game shelf as it stands right now. (The fairy lights were Andie’s idea, but they are pretty sweet.) If you click to embiggen and zoom in on the image, you might even be able to see individual titles of at least some of the games. I haven’t played all of these, not by a long shot, but they each — even the array of PS2 SingStar titles — represent something with genuine meaning to me. And that’s pretty neat to think about.

1109: Killachine

Another day, another article declaring the console will be “dead” before we know it. Lots of people — mostly analysts and business-savvy people who work in the mobile and social sectors — have been saying things like this recently, so it must be true, right?

Nah. ‘Tis bollocks, as usual. While it’s impossible to deny the huge impact that mobile devices have had on bringing the concept of playing games to the masses — the actually-not-all-that-good Temple Run 2 recently surpassed a whopping 50 million downloads — to say that they are going to “kill” consoles and/or dedicated gaming handhelds is, frankly, ridiculous.

Why? Because they cater to completely different markets and tastes. Mobile and social games are, for the most part, designed for players to while away a few minutes while something else is going on — perhaps a lengthy dump, a wait for a bus or a particularly boring meeting with a conveniently-placed table to hide what you’re up to — while computer and console games are, for the most part, designed for players to sit down in front of for a more protracted period of time and immerse themselves in the experience. There are exceptions in both cases, of course — hence the “for the most part” disclaimers — but, on the whole, that’s where we stand. And there’s nothing wrong with either aspect of gaming — they both exist, and they will both more than likely continue to exist.

The word “games” isn’t all that useful any more, in fact, because the medium it describes is now too diverse to be covered by a single word. I can say “I like playing games” and that will mean something completely different to what someone else means when they say it. When I say it, I mean that I like relaxing on my couch with a controller in my hand, staring at the TV and immersing myself in a game with depth, an interesting story, or both. When someone else says it, they might mean that they have three-starred all the levels on Angry Birds, or that they fire up FarmVille during quiet periods in the office, or that they have fifteen Words With Friends games on the go at any one time. These are obviously completely different experiences, though there can be a degree of crossover between the two extremes — there’s nothing to stop someone who, say, is big into competitive League of Legends play also enjoying playing Scramble With Friends against their less gaming-savvy friends and family.

Where we start to get problems is when developers and/or publishers from one group start to try and step across the invisible line into the other group. More often than not, this is seen in the form of mobile and social developers promising a mobile or social experience that will appeal to “core gamers” — in other words, the group that, like me, enjoys immersing themselves in an experience for hours at a time rather than as a throwaway diversion. It is, sadly, abundantly clear that a huge number of developers who try and take this route have absolutely no clue whatsoever how to design a game that will appeal to these players. The article I linked above is from the CEO of a company called Kabam, who specialise in developing a variety of almost-identical “strategy” (and I use the term loosely) games that supposedly appeal to “core” players. All of their games are the same (literally — I tested three side-by-side as an experiment once, and the quests the player was expected to follow were completely identical, right down to the wording) albeit with a slightly different visual aesthetic, and all of them are as dull as ditchwater.

The bewildering thing is that someone, somewhere, is playing these games — and, more to the point, spending money on them — enough to let them be considered a “success”. So more and more of them start appearing, each inevitably following the exact same template, making all the same mistakes and pissing off the same people while somehow convincing the same others that reaching for their credit card is a really, really good idea.

Note that I’m not saying here that mobile, social and/or free-to-play games are inherently bad in and of themselves; it’s that in many of these cases — particularly those that are supposed to be designed to appeal to “core” gamers — they are designed by people with an astonishingly strong sense of business savvy, and a complete lack of understanding in what makes a game actually fun or interesting to play. In other words, the fact that something is financially successful should not be the only criteria for it being considered “good” — you just have to look at Mobage/Cygames’ shockingly awful Rage of Bahamut, one of the top-grossing mobile games in the world, to see how this is the case.

No, the problem that we have is that everything new always has to “kill” something else. This flawed logic has been seen with numerous other technologies in the past; laptops would kill desktops, tablets would kill laptops, TV and video would kill the cinema… the list goes on. In very few cases is it actually true. Okay, DVD killed VHS, but that was a simple case of a superior format doing the same thing rather than two vaguely related — but not identical — things battling it out for supremacy. People still use desktops as well as laptops because big screens are nice and more practical in many circumstances. People still use laptops as well as tablets because typing on a touchscreen is still a horrid experience. People still go to the cinema as well as watching TV or DVD/videos because it’s nice to see something on a huge screen with room-shaking sound.

Why does everything have to be reduced to binaries? Why does something new always have to “kill” something else, even if it clearly isn’t performing the same function? Can’t these people just accept that certain parts of the populace are happy with one thing, and others are happy with another?

Ahh, if only.