1148: On the Stage

I happened to be online earlier when a university friend of mine posted a Soundcloud clip of a comedy set he performed recently on Facebook. (That was a clumsy sentence. I apologise profusely. He posted the set on Facebook, he didn’t perform it there.) I had a listen and found it immensely entertaining. Here it is:

At least, there it is if the embed code works correctly.

(EDIT: It did not. Here is a link to it instead.)

Anyway. Listening to Mr Millerick strutting his stuff and yell at British Gas on the stage got me thinking rather nostalgically about the reason I know him, and one of my favourite parts of university, which was my involvement with the university Theatre Group.

The Theatre Group was known at various junctures as Theatre Group, Blow Up and Rattlesnake! (with an exclamation mark) and I cannot for the life of me remember where the latter two names came from. I first joined it in my first year during that period of time when you feel like you should join some sort of club and meet people. I had enjoyed the two productions I’d been involved in at secondary school (The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night, if you’re curious) and so I figured I’d try out for the university’s luvvies society. One of my flatmates was also involved in the group, so I was glad to know there’d be at least one friendly face there.

The first production I was involved in was Macbeth. The Matrix hadn’t long come out, so this marked the beginning of that phase when it was seemingly obligatory for everyone doing Shakespeare to do something Matrix-inspired, particularly if you were a student theatre group. By all accounts our production was pretty spectacular (and massively over budget) — it was a hugely enjoyable experience, though to be honest I didn’t feel I got to know that many people that well at the time. The fun of being on stage was enough to make up for that, though.

Over my time at university, I was involved in several other productions, including a double-bill of French play L’Epreuve (A Test of Character) by Marivaux and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer; Turgenev’s tragic love story A Month in the Country (which we took to the Edinburgh Fringe to modest success); Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden from The Norman Conquests (which we also took to the Edinburgh Fringe to more noticeable success — turns out punters are more interested in relatable, gentle comedy in proper theatres rather than tragic Russian love stories performed in botanical gardens several miles away from the main Festival area); and doubtless some others that have slipped my mind along the way. As time passed, I got to know a lot of the Theatre Group peeps well, and they became close friends.

One of my favourite things that the group did, though, was our Monday night improvisation sessions, where we all showed up, played some theatre games that we normally used for “warmups” in rehearsals for shows, then went out and got really drunk. Although these sessions weren’t particularly structured, everyone got involved (even shy, retiring wallflowers like myself) and everyone was immensely supportive of each other’s efforts. So successful were these events that they eventually spawned a semi-regular event in the Theatre Group’s calendar — Count Rompula’s Showcase. It had a more grand title which I’ve sadly forgotten, but Count Rompula was certainly involved in there somewhere.

Count Rompula brought us a variety of memorable performances, including one known as The Web of Dan. The Web of Dan started as a running joke among the group at Edinburgh, if I recall correctly, in which we figured it would be amusing if we did some sort of experimental theatre that was just Dan (obviously) trapped in a web and saying vaguely profound things. Count Rompula helped make this a reality, and it was glorious — though I do have to wonder what those people who showed up and had no idea what the big in-joke was thought.

Of all the aspects of university, Theatre Group is the thing I miss the most. One day I might actually succeed in getting these people back together for some sort of entertaining improvisation session (or, more likely, a drinking session) but in the meantime, I have very fond memories that I believe will stay with me for many years.

1147: SimCity Limits

So I played an hour or two of the new SimCity earlier, and I have some thoughts. I shall now elaborate on these thoughts for your reading pleasure.

After the game applied a patch (which took a few minutes, though this may be more down to the fact that I hadn’t long started up my computer and it was still doing that inexplicable hard-drive churning Windows does for about half an hour after you turn it on when you’ve had a computer for more than a year or so), I logged straight in and started playing with no hiccups whatsoever. Looks like those server issues are mostly sorted out — though there are plenty marked as “full”. The team at Maxis/EA have bumped up the server number by a significant amount, however, so you should always be able to find one on which you can play. Pleasingly, too, you can play on any server in the world, meaning cross-region play is viable.
Is the “online-only” requirement a form of DRM? Frankly I don’t give a shit, much like I didn’t with Diablo III. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an online game, regardless of the previous games’ single-player status. Thinking of it in that way, regardless of the reasons for it, means considerably less frustration. It’s annoying when you can’t log in, yes, but it’s annoying when you can’t log in to World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, too. Getting irritable doesn’t solve the issues, though. Go and play something else for a bit. There are enough neat things added to the game by it being online that I have no problem with it requiring a connection to play. It should have worked perfectly on launch day, yes, but I am yet to see any online game from any publisher — even those who know what they are doing — not have server issues for the first few days after launch. We should be past that by now, but we’re not; that’s a fact we can do little about.
The actual online component of the game is very cool, giving the game “world” a much greater feeling of life than in any other past SimCity game. I was playing a small two-city region with a friend earlier, and I was constantly kept updated as to what was going on in their city as well as mine. I could set up trade routes, send gifts of products or money or volunteer some of my “spare” emergency services to go and help out in their city, which brought me some money. There’s actually a pretty neat requirement to cooperate here — if your city is manufacturing tons of stuff and has nowhere to sell it, you’d better ask the other people in the region nicely if they wouldn’t mind awfully building some commercial districts so that you can send them your goods. The various city plots also all have various resources that can be tapped using the right specialist buildings, so there’s plenty of scope for collaboration there.
The actual gameplay is simultaneously familiar and probably the biggest change to the series since it went isometric-perspective with SimCity 2000. Gone is the grid-based system, meaning you can build roads in any shape you like, and even make them actually curve. Gone is the rectangular zoning system, replaced with the ability to only zone immediately along roads, with the maximum building size on a road determined by how big the road is. In comes a much deeper use of various buildings like the police station and fire station, all of which can be expanded by bolting extra bits on to them such as new garages, offices, prison cells and other things appropriate to the structure in question. There’s a huge amount of depth, but it’s kept accessible by a simple, logical interface in which clicking on a particular category of items to build also summons relevant overlay information relating to, say, power, water or crime.
The available area for buildings cities is quite small, but again I don’t mind too much. I don’t think I ever played a previous SimCity well enough to fill a full region, so I’m absolutely fine with the small space. When it’s full, I can either work hard to try and optimize it, knock it down and start again, or go and play in another region altogether. The game features a sort of “win condition” if you want one — each region has a space for a “Great Work” that generally requires the collaboration of all the cities in the area to complete, and if you want to say that you’ve “won” when you’ve built one, so be it.
The soundtrack is lovely, being composed by one Mr Chris Tilton of Alias and Fringe fame.
The tutorial is a bit patronising. I’ve played too many Facebook games to tolerate condescending pulsing arrows telling me what I should click on. I couldn’t see a means of skipping it, either, though it did at least have some useful information to impart.
On the whole, it’s pretty good. It scratches that nice “creative” itch that SimCity has always stimulated, and the collaborative aspect opens up some really interesting possibilities. Once the server issues are stabilised and the team at Maxis can start concentrating on doing things like the regular special events and competitions, it’s going to be a really cool experience, I think.

1146: Doing It Wrong

We’ve had a day of board gaming today, including a game of Agricola, a game of Small World and finishing off with a quest and a half worth’s of Descent: Second Edition.

Partway through our Descent session, I looked up something on a whim, and it transpires that we’ve been playing a certain rule completely wrong for the duration of our campaign. It turns out the Stun condition, which we’d been playing as completely eliminating a figure’s go (i.e. the only action they could take that turn is getting rid of Stun status) actually only removes one of a figure’s two actions per turn. Given that one of the hero characters has an ability that automatically inflicts Stun on any monster figure that begins their turn adjacent to them — and, more to the point, has been making extensive use of that ability — this has likely had a significant knock-on effect on our campaign. I knew that ability as we had been playing it felt distinctly unbalanced, and now I know why — the way we were playing it, it was!

Fortunately, Descent 2 is fun enough that even with the hero players being armed to the teeth with a variety of ill-gotten gains through earlier quests that they might not necessarily have won had my Overlord’s forces not spent most of their time staggering around in a daze, it’s still enjoyable to play. I’m still losing pretty much every quest and it’s entirely likely that I will lose the entire campaign as a result of our earlier fuckup, but it doesn’t matter too much. We know now, at least, and from the sound of the conversation around our gaming table this evening it looks highly likely that we’re going to do another run through the campaign once we’re finished, with everyone in different roles.

This is the one tricky thing about board games versus video games. In video games, assuming they have been programmed correctly, there is no way to do that wrong. Had Descent 2 been made as a Fire Emblem-style video game (which would be fantastic, incidentally — I would pay good money for a video game version of it, particularly with multiplayer) then there would have been no ambiguity about the rules. We’d always be using the correct skills, we wouldn’t inadvertently be breaking the rules and there’d be no disputes over what the wording of certain cards meant.

This is actually a common problem with the theme-heavy games that I’m such a fan of. Because theme-heavy games tend to have a lot of rules, many of which only apply to very specific situations (usually tied to happenings in the “narrative” of the play session), it’s very easy to misunderstand, forget or otherwise mutilate the rules in some way. If everyone agrees on a variation, it hurts no-one, but it can be frustrating to have played something for a hefty period of time and discover that you’ve been Doing It Wrong.

Oh well. As I say, I’m not too worried. I’ve had a blast playing through the Descent 2 campaign so far, and we’re coming up on the finale. Once that’s done and dusted, we’ll be able to start a new game — possibly with the recently-released expansion pack — and play it, you know, properly. We have a running joke in our gaming group that if we fuck something up rules-wise and it’s too late to do anything about it, the game in question is a “training game”. When it comes to a multi-session campaign like this, it’s a little harder to justify, but as I say, since we’re highly likely to be playing it again we can chalk our experiences this time around up to learning the ropes, and hopefully do a better job next time around.

If I haven’t made it clear by the several other posts I’ve written on this subject to date, Descent 2 is a really good game. It’s been a big hit with our gaming group due to the fact that it marries genuinely strategic gameplay with theme-heavy shenanigans and lovely-quality components — the miniatures in particular are beautifully-detailed, if rendered in rather bendy plastic — and thus appeals to both the people who enjoy games with “stories” and a lot of theme, and those who enjoy competitive, strategic play. I can highly recommend it for anyone looking for a good, relatively easy to understand (rules for the Stun condition aside) game with a lot of variety and huge replay value.

1145: Metafalica

I’ve been continuing to play Ar Tonelico II and it’s really rather good. One thing I’ve found particularly endearing about it is the fact that just when you think you’ve got a handle on the way it does things, it goes and does something else interesting just to throw you off a bit. And yet even despite all these mechanics that get added over time, it still feels like a coherent experience as a whole.

Let’s take the stage I’ve got up to now — “Phase 2” in game terms. In the first Ar Tonelico, the change from Phase 1 to Phase 2 marked the point where you were out of the “exposition” chapter and into the plot proper. Phase 2 was also the point where you had to choose between the two heroines, and then had two completely separate (but related) storylines to follow along with. The paths then reconverged towards the end of Phase 2 and remained together for the (completely optional) Phase 3, which offered the “true” ending of the game.

Phase 2 in Ar Tonelico II is a bit different. Rather than, like the first one, being set in the same locations and simply branching off in two different directions, Phase 2 of Ar Tonelico II takes place in a completely different area that works completely differently to the environment you’ve spent the previous 12 hours in. The early part of the game is, aside from its many and varied peculiar gameplay systems, relatively conventional — you visit towns and do stuff in them, then you go to dungeons. Then you go back to towns. And so on. The linear plotline is broken up by an optional “hunting” sidequest in which you can track down various “I.P.D.”-infected Reyvateils to add to your “Girl Power” arsenal (I’m not even going to get started explaining that, I’ll be here all day) but for the most part, you’re doing the usual JRPG business.

Phase 2, meanwhile, takes place in an environment that changes according to your choices. Early in the Phase, you’re introduced to a new mechanic known as the Infelsphere. This virtual world works in a similar way to the “cosmospheres” found inside the heroines’ minds, but rather than reflecting their inner turmoil and anxieties, the Infelsphere represents the relationship between the two heroines and how they understand each other. Events unfold in the Infelsphere in which you have to make choices as to how to respond, and the choices you make in the Infelsphere subsequently affect what parts of the “real world” open and close to you. Your eventual goal is to get to a specific location by navigating your way through a maze of these pathways that open and close according to how the Infelsphere events unfold, with each point on the path containing some sort of “trial” to overcome. This might be as simple as defeating a monster, or it might be a challenge such as successfully smuggling biscuits past the penguin-like “Pippen” creatures.

Thematically, in each of these trials, you’re “proving your love” to one of the heroines, which subsequently provides you with keys to unlock new events in the Infelsphere, and so it continues. It’s a really peculiar, really interesting structure that not only offers some unconventional JRPG gameplay in the “real world” sections, but also provides some intriguing insights into the characters and the way they respond to various situations in the Infelsphere component.

You’ll notice I haven’t really mentioned the plot in this description, and that’s deliberate, as discussing the plot surrounding all this would be a massive spoiler, so I’ll spare you that — for now, anyway. What I am finding particularly pleasing about Ar Tonelico II as a whole, though, is that even if it didn’t have a compelling plot and awesome characters — which it does — it would still have rock-solid gameplay with an absolute bucketload of things to do. It is just one of the many, many examples out there that prove JRPGs are far more than the “ATTACK, MAGIC, ITEM”-fests that ill-informed detractors of the genre assume these games still are.

They haven’t been that way for a long time, people. So if you haven’t played a JRPG since Final Fantasy VII I strongly recommend you check out what the genre has done since then — you might just be very pleasantly surprised by what you find.

1144: A Life Without Nerd-Rage

I haven’t even contemplated going back to Twitter yet, but not because I have no desire to run into the scumbuckets who drove me off it in the first place. No, my lack of desire to go back to Twitter stems from my dislike of irrational table-thumping arguments on the most ridiculous of subjects, usually video game-related.

Mr Craig Bamford said it best back in February:

CAN WE PLEASE STOP TRYING TO HAVE SERIOUS DEBATES ON TWITTER OF ALL THINGS?

See title.

No, really. See title. I’m enormously, impossibly tired of how everybody who writes about games seems to think that the best-or-only way to have debates on serious, often wrenchingly-personal issues is on Twitter.

Yes, I’m guilty of this myself. I know. But every single time it happens, I feel like I’ve made a mistake. I’m just reminded of how Twitter is an incredibly dumb way to handle these things. The posts are too short, there’s no proper threading, you can’t follow the discussion properly unless you follow everybody involved, expanding the size of the group makes it even worse, you can barely mention people without drawing them in…

…it’s just a gigantic dog’s breakfast that makes absolutely everybody involved look bad.

Worse, it elevates bad arguments. It seems custom-tailored for dumb appeals to authority/popularity and thrashing of strawmen and misquotation and pretty much everything OTHER than an actual grownup discussion of issues. It’s absolutely one-hundred-percent boosting the arguments that are “simple, straightforward, and wrong”, as the saying goes. That likely has a lot to do with why everybody seems to rush to the most extreme interpretation of arguments and positions. Extreme arguments tend to be straightforward ones.

Sure, there’s worse. Facebook, for example. But every day I’m more and more convinced that Twitter should really be used to link to arguments, instead of make arguments. It’s not working. So, please, stop.

I agree with him entirely. Too many times over the last year in particular have we seen game journalists and critics with disproportionately loud online “voices” telling us what to think. Usually these loudmouths are attempting to address the issues of sexism and misogyny in the industry — a noble goal, for sure, as few can deny that women still get treated like shit at times through no fault of their own — but more often than not they get so embroiled in beating their fists on their desk that they lose all track of their arguments and end up coming across as… well, a bit childish really. Often these rants come about when the full information on a given situation isn’t available, either — they’re a kneejerk response to things which often aren’t the “problem” they appear to be at first glance.

Let’s take the recently-released Tomb Raider reboot as an example. I haven’t played it yet, but I’ve been discussing it with a friend who has this evening. He’s an intelligent sort of chap with a keen critical eye, and he has found himself very impressed with the depiction of the young Lara Croft as a vulnerable young woman caught up in a situation that she isn’t entirely comfortable with, and having to do things that she finds difficult or scary. The tale of Tomb Raider is as much one of Lara overcoming her own difficulties at dealing with particular things as it is about… whatever the overarching plot of the new game is. (I’m intending to “go in blind” when I eventually play it, so I have no idea what the actual story is about.) My friend compared it to the movie The Descent, with which it sounds like it shares many of its themes and much of its tone. This means that Lara is frequently put in various types of danger — from the environment, from wild animals, and from other people. This also means that there are times when the wet-behind-the-ears young Lara is absolutely fucking terrified of what is happening to her, and justifiably so.

Is this sexist? No, not really; it’s a perfectly human response to shit your pants (not literally… I don’t think) at the prospect of having various forms of unpleasantness inflicted upon you, regardless of whether you’re male or female. Likewise, as much as we would like to forget it happens, violence and sexual assaults do happen to women — and men too, for that matter — because there are certain portions of human society who are complete scumbags who have no regard for human life, male or female.

Lara happens to be female, which means that the situations she is put in over the course of Tomb Raider have been under a disproportionately greater amount of scrutiny than if she was a male hero — regardless of whether or not said male hero is a realistically-rendered character (as Lara is intended to be in this reboot) or a muscle-bound caricature. Lara is put into some difficult situations over the course of the game, including at least one scene where she appears to be at risk of sexual assault. Much was made of this scene when it was first revealed — particularly comments from the development team that it would make players “want to protect Lara”. This was immediately interpreted by the aforementioned loudmouths as being misogynistic and in a sense they’re correct to say that — the characters in the game are misogynists who don’t care about Lara’s wellbeing. But — and here’s the thing — this doesn’t mean that the developers share these attitudes just because they put these characters in the game. You have to have conflict and tension for something to be exciting. Did it have to be the implied threat of sexual assault? No, of course it didn’t, but equally that doesn’t mean we should shy away from such subjects in our entertainment — to do so can actually be pretty harmful, as it makes genuine victims of this sort of thing feel like their suffering is something to be ashamed of. It’s also just plain insulting to grown-ups who want their entertainment to acknowledge that Sometimes Bad Shit Happens to Good People.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in Tomb Raider because it’s just one example of this sort of thing going on. I happened to sneak a glance at Twitter earlier out of curiosity and it seemed that the latest controversy to hit the Intertubes related to Sony’s new God of War game, which features an automatically-attained story-related Trophy awarded to the player the moment after the lead character Kratos stomps on the face of a Fury following what, I assume, is one of the series lengthy combat sequences. The trophy is called “Bros Before Hos”, which is arguably somewhat in bad taste, but we’re talking about a series full of a muscle-bound man ripping the eyeballs out of mythological creatures the size of your average Ikea while shouting incoherently, so I think we can agree that subtlety went out of the window a long time ago.

Because a Fury is a woman, this scene (and by extension the Trophy) is now misogynistic. Again, it might well be in the context of the game — I haven’t played any of them so I don’t know what sort of person Kratos is (besides “the angriest man in Greece”) and what his attitudes towards women are — but in the case of the game’s development, God of War is based on established mythology (or an interpretation thereof, anyway) in which the Furies were (are?) female, and not very nice things to encounter to boot. If you had the opportunity and the means, you would probably want to stamp on their face too, and that’s nothing to do with the fact they are women — it is, however, everything to do with the fact that they are infernal goddesses of much unpleasantness. Do we now have to disregard established mythology because of concerns over violence against women? No, that’s ridiculous; that’s wrapping the world in cotton wool, which helps no-one.

Note that in all of these cases I am not advocating for people to be free to promote things that are harmful to society. I would feel deeply uncomfortable playing a game in which you were somehow rewarded for inflicting domestic violence on someone, for example — although if tackled with sensitivity and care (which many triple-A developers lack, but which many smaller-scale or indie developers have proven themselves to possess in abundance) it could be possible to create an interesting, if distressing sort of interactive story about domestic violence. (In fact, it has sort of been done at least once, to an extent anyway: for a fascinating and challenging exploration of an abusive relationship through the use of allegory, play the game Magical Diary — which was written by a woman — and pursue the romance with Damien.)

What I am instead saying is that getting outraged any time a female character (or, for that matter, a non-white, young, elderly, homosexual, trans or other “non-white twentysomething cis male” character) is placed in peril, regardless of the circumstances, is counter-productive. It diminishes the value of the arguments as a whole, and distracts attention from content that genuinely is a problem. After the controversy over the Hitman trailer with all its leather-clad nuns and other assorted ridiculousness dreamed up by the 14-year olds in Square Enix’s marketing department, I confess I found myself blocking most of the people involved in the “discussions” around the issue on Twitter not because I wanted to deny there was a problem, but because I couldn’t deal with the way people were arguing about it. There was no debate, no discussion — nothing but “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” for day after day. And as soon as one controversy subsided, another appeared. And so it continued for month after month after month. It made me stop caring completely, which is the complete opposite of what these people presumably intended.

Rage like this doesn’t even have to be directed at a sociological issue, though; just recently everyone has been getting extremely angry at EA because of SimCity’s online requirement, just like they did with Diablo III. Again, very few people are considering all the facts at play here, which I won’t get into now, and instead resorting to kneejerk rage which, if you disagree with, you’re somehow an asshole. There always has to be something to be angry about. And it’s exhausting.

So, in summary, I am very happy to have now, for the most part, taken a step back from the seething masses — and while said masses are still seething I have very little intention of heading back in a Twitterly direction unless absolutely necessary.

I’ll let Irina sum up how I feel about all this with the Understatement of the Century.

Quite.

1143: Kilo-Commuter

My brother posted a link on Facebook earlier about “mega-commuters” — a relatively small number of Americans (about 600,000) who travel more than 50 miles each way to get to work each day. He’s one of them.

Sounds hellish, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that bad.

I can’t make a claim to be a “mega-commuter” as the longest commute I’ve done on a daily basis was about 35 miles each way — I guess that makes me a kilo-commuter? — but that was plenty to potentially drive me insane. As it happened, it was the job itself I was doing at the time that did a much better job of driving me insane, but I digress; my distaste for the teaching profession and reluctance to return to it ever again is well-documented elsewhere on this blog. (In fact, it was my growing sense of discomfort at an ill-advised return to the profession that spurred me on to start writing on this ‘ere site every day in the first place, so I guess I can’t complain too much.)

No, believe it or not that’s actually sort of relevant, because my daily 70 mile round trip to get to and from work actually became something of a haven of calm amid the chaos of my professional existence. While I was in my car, no-one could “get” me. (Well, technically, I suppose they could; someone could have crashed into me and injured or killed me. But… oh, shush.) It was some time I had to myself to spend as I pleased… sort of, anyway — I mean, obviously I still had to do the driving bit.

Consequently, I found myself spending my commute doing things that I don’t really do any more as a “work from home” person. I listened to the radio. I listened to podcasts. I listened to a lot of music. I sometimes phoned people. (Hands-free, obviously.) I phoned people. Jesus Christ, I never do that now, largely because the telephone tends to fill me with an uncommonly-large amount of dread, but nope, the sheer tedium of driving down the M3 (or sometimes, for variety, the A31) every day was occasionally mitigated by actually talking to someone other than myself. But more often than not it was mitigated by listening to the radio or podcasts. I attribute the fact that I can tolerate (and even enjoy) Chris Moyles’ brand of comedy — something that it appears to be fashionable to hate — to the fact he accompanied me to work and made me laugh every morning through what turned out to be a very difficult period of my life. I’m not sure I would have stuck out a job that eventually pretty much gave me a nervous breakdown had I not had something like that to help me mentally prepare myself each morning. (Obviously ultimately it didn’t really work, but still.)

While it was nice to spend that zombified period of time driving in a straight line for about 50 minutes, the prospect of doing so every day isn’t really the sort of thing that makes you want to get out of bed each morning. You have to really like your job to be able to stick it out for longer than a few months. I somehow managed to convince myself to do it for a total of two and a bit years altogether — eventually I moved closer to the job that eventually saw me escaping the teaching profession, which is probably something I should have done sooner — but that commute was probably one of the contributing factors that made me come over all queer, as a grandmother might say.

Despite that, though, I do sort of miss it. I don’t have my own car at all any more — Andie and I share one, as I have no real need for my own now — and so long drives accompanied by the radio or podcasts are now an increasingly-distant, wistful memory for the most part.

Then I remember that I don’t have to get up before 6am any more and I don’t miss it nearly as much.

1142: Hello

So after publishing last night’s post (which, I’ll be honest, was composed somewhat in haste after a lengthy Ridge Racer Unbounded session prompted it, immediately before my bedtime) I was rather surprised to receive an email from someone named Michelle at WordPress, who informed me that my post was going to be featured in the Freshly Pressed section of WordPress.com. Thank you, Michelle, that was very nice of you, and it was even nicer to receive an email that was clearly from an actual person rather than an automated robot. Big love to all of the WordPress team.

Taking Michelle’s email to heart, though, it’s entirely possible that there might be a few new visitors around here in the immediate future, so I thought I’d take today to (re)introduce myself for the umpteenth time, and explain a little about what this blog is for and why I number all my posts.

So, then. Hello. I’m Pete. I’m a 31-year old bloke from the grey and miserable isle that is Great Britain. I live in Southampton, which is a city that has been the focal point of my life ever since I left home in 1999 to go to university there. Over the years, I’ve flitted around a bit for various reasons (mostly work) but always ended up coming back to Southampton either temporarily (to see friends) or, as happened just before Christmas, permanently. Or as “permanently” as any place I’ve lived since 1999 has been.

I live in a nice flat with my girlfriend Andie. Technically I’m married to someone else, though the circumstances of why the person I’m living with is not the person I’m married to are terribly complicated and not something I feel particularly inclined to go into here. Suffice to say, if you look at blog posts from around May of 2010 you’ll get a general idea of how I was feeling when that all went down, and besides, all of that will be resolved this year. (I will also note that there is no bad blood there — forgive and forget and all that — it’s just something I have found difficult to deal with until quite recently. And no, I don’t want to talk about it further.)

The above sort of brings me onto the subject of this blog, which you may have noticed I update on a daily basis. I actually posted a number of pieces on this site before beginning to post daily, but it was in January of 2010 (the 19th, to be exact) that I started a personal tradition that I still keep to this day: daily blog posts. Originally, these daily posts were part of a Twitter-based movement known as “#oneaday”. This was a group who banded together in an attempt to post something — anything — once per day as a means of continually flexing our collective writing muscles. Many of the original participants — including the person who started the whole thing — dropped out of the running very quickly, but there were a number of us who kept it up all the way through 2010. In 2011, I attempted to coordinate a larger effort to get as many people posting regularly on their blogs and encouraging their readers to donate to charity. It was moderately successful — we raised about £200 or so, I think, which wasn’t too bad considering the number of people involved — but ultimately most writers lost interest. It also became a bit too much work for me to manage by myself, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of organising something along the same lines again in the future.

Anyway, all that aside, I’m still going, and this post you’re reading right now is my 1,142nd daily post in a row. I cover a variety of different topics on this blog according to what I’m thinking about at any given moment and, to a lesser extent, whether or not my girlfriend has complained that I’m being “boring”. My strongest interests are video games (particularly Japanese role-playing games and visual novels, though if you mention TrackMania to me I can go for hours); music (I play the piano, clarinet and saxophone and occasionally compose stuff); board games; and, as 1,141 previous posts will attest, writing. I also use this blog as an “outlet” when I need to get some raw, honest words or thoughts out of my head and onto the page. I suffer with depression and anxiety (personified by the big black cloud “Des” in the header image) and find it helpful to talk about these things.

If this blog and its crudely-drawn stickmen aren’t enough Pete for you, then you can check out my professional work every day at Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, and my “pet project” at Games Are Evil. I also hang out a lot with my video gaming buddies the Squadron of Shame on Google+, and if you either 1) would like to hear my delicious, fruity, full-bodied English accent or 2) are interested in “underappreciated” video games , then I suggest you have a listen to the Squad’s irregularly-occurring podcast, the Squadron of Shame SquadCast. You can find the archives here, and a new episode on the subject of Spec Ops: The Line is coming soon.

1141: Give Me A Reason to Race

Why are there no racing games with stories? No, wait, scratch that, why are there no racing games with good stories? Or at the very least well-told stories?

It is surely not a difficult thing to do. You take the basic game structure from Wing Commander and replace all the space combat with racing cars around tracks and/or city streets. Then you profit. Why has no-one done this?

The few racing games out there that do have storylines of sort are generally half-assed efforts where all the plot is delivered through badly-written text put into the game as an afterthought, or they simply don’t carry their potential through far enough.

I can think of a few recent examples. Motorstorm Apocalypse, though I didn’t play it, reportedly had a plot of sorts, but it fell into the former category above. Motorstorm Apocalypse, lest you’re unfamiliar, had you racing around a city that was blowing up and falling to pieces — surely an ideal situation for a rudimentary Michael Bay-style plot with some characters and shouting. It wouldn’t have to be a complex plot, just something to break up the racing with some motivational scenes that gave it some meaning.

Split/Second had a go, too, with its TV show-style presentation, incredible electro-orchestral cinematic soundtrack and episodic structure. It stopped short of actually giving the game’s antagonists, the “Elite Racers”, any degree of personality (or indeed faces), though it did end on a cliffhanger (which will now never be resolved — thanks a lot, Disney).

Recent Need for Speed games have taken a pop at it too, but tend to lose interest after the introductory sequences. The closest example I’ve seen to what I’m looking for is Need for Speed The Run, but apparently — again, I haven’t played it — neither the racing nor the plot are particularly up to much. (I must say, I am curious to try it, though, purely to see how close they get to what I’m imagining in my head.)

There’s also a Japanese eroge called Moero Downhill Night Blaze that reportedly combines a visual novel with racing action, but judging by its required system specifications, I’m not counting on it being an especially spectacular offering on the racing front. (I do intend to play it, though, as the whole series sounds like fun in story terms, even if the racing ends up sucking.)

And then there’s Midnight Club Los Angeles, which occasionally has Grand Theft Auto-style cutscenes, but not nearly enough to carry a coherent plot.

I’m honestly bewildered as to why no-one has tried this properly yet. We live in an age where video games are more “cinematic” than ever, and yet the racing game genre is still following the same old conventions it’s been using since the PlayStation 1 era — and possibly before. I would pay good money for a racing game with a good, well-written plot — given that I never, ever complete racing games (Split/Second is, to date, the only exception), an unfolding narrative with interesting characters and a degree of overblown drama would be just the incentive I need to up my game and see the experience through to its conclusion.

If I had any clue how to make such a game — or indeed access to a team to make such a game — I would do so in a heartbeat. Sadly, though, I have a sneaking suspicion my desire to see a game like this will remain nothing but a far-off dream.

1140: Another Valley Without Wind

I really liked A Valley Without Wind, even though I never came anywhere near to “finishing” it, for want of a better word. (I say that because once you beat the “Overlord” who was supposed to be your antagonist throughout the game, you simply moved on to another randomly-generated continent that was being threatened by another Overlord.) It was a really interesting, if somewhat flawed game that obviously had a lot of love thrown into it. It was a game clearly put together by people who had a vision of what they wanted to achieve and were willing to experiment in order to realise that vision.

For those who are unaware of A Valley Without Wind, I wrote about it a few times approximately three hundred days ago. Here’s one post, here’s another, and here’s a bit of creative writing inspired by the game’s emergent narrative.

I was intrigued and excited to hear that the developer was putting together a sequel to the game, and that said sequel would be provided free to everyone who owned a copy of the first game. (You don’t see that sort of generosity in the triple-A sector, that’s for sure!) Details were relatively scarce to begin with, but it sounded like the intention was to completely overhaul the game and make it a more focused experience. The reason it was being developed as a sequel and not as another one of the many updates that the first game saw is that it involved a fundamental rethinking of the game structure in particular — rather than being potentially endless and rather freeform like the first game, A Valley Without Wind 2 was to have much clearer victory and loss conditions, making for a game which felt much more like it had a “point”.

I spent a little while playing A Valley Without Wind 2 today and I’m intrigued by what I see so far. Here’s the gist: rather than playing the role of a series of adventurers given magical powers by a “glyph” like in the first one, in this game you play a single character who is immortal thanks to a crystal given to them by the big evil demon overlord dude whose dark forces you’ve infiltrated. This means that you can’t technically die — well, you can, but it’s more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, since you can just come back again afterwards.

You’re thrown into command of a ragtag group of survivors on the planet of Environ as they attempt to scavenge resources, build up their defences and eventually take down the big evil demon overlord dude. The game unfolds in two distinctive components — a turn-based strategy game and a 2D side-scrolling platform game. This is a similar structure to the first game, though the overworld map in the first game didn’t involve much strategy and was more a means of simply exploring rather than anything else.

Each turn, you can move any of the survivors in your group to any of the “purified” squares in your domain. If they’re already in a suitable location, they can perform an action such as working a farm to produce food, working a factory to produce scrap metal or building a new structure. Occasionally, monsters emerge from the overlord’s lair on the map and the survivors must deal with them. Eventually, after 15 turns, the overlord comes out to play and starts stomping around the map, and the survivors must avoid his unwanted attentions as much as possible while you build up your power to a strong enough level to take down His Demonicness.

To end a turn, you move yourself into a space next to your currently-controlled area and begin a 2D platform game mission in which the aim is to get from left to right and destroy a generator to “purify” that square and its surroundings. Beating the level ends the turn, causing time to advance. Each level has a different theme according to its terrain type, and many have special buildings and structures to explore. Within the levels, you’ll find various types of enemy and pieces of equipment, many of which have peculiar randomly-generated special effects — how does a pair of boots that makes you run faster but sets you on fire in the process sound?

Your character is highly customizable, and you can tweak your “loadout” each turn if you want — though not once you’re into a mission. Several different classes are available at the outset of the game, each of which has their own set of four spells. Additional classes become available as you explore, and defeating bosses in special “Level Up” towers unlocks new perks that improve your abilities in various ways. You have to find a good balance between expanding your territory so the survivors have space to run away from the overlord when he comes out to play; finding Level Up towers to improve your own abilities; and ensuring your forces have enough resources to survive. As soon as your last survivor dies, you lose the game, so it’s in your interest to keep expanding and recruiting new members to your forces.

I really like what I’ve seen so far. It’s much more “focused”, though this has come at the expense of the wonderfully complex randomly-generated levels of the original game. One thing I really liked about the first A Valley Without Wind was the sheer amount of stuff there was to do. You could wander into pretty much every building and explore it to try and find cool stuff. You’d never get anywhere if you did that, of course, but the fact it was possible was really cool. By contrast, A Valley Without Wind 2’s levels are much shorter and more linear, and traipses through buildings are linear shortcuts between two parts of the level rather than sprawling, mysterious structures to explore. On the whole, it’s a change for the better — as I say, though, it does make me miss some of the first game’s idiosyncrasies.

One thing I’m not sure how I feel about is the change to the soundtrack. The original game featured a rather wonderful score that had more than a touch of chiptune about it, giving the retro-style gameplay an even greater sense of retro flair. The new game features a number of recognisable themes from the first game, but a much more “realistic” sound to its score. It’s good — but is it as charming as the bleepy chiptunes from the original? I’m not sure. One thing I will say, though; the title screen music is absolutely gobsmacking and well worth just sitting and listening to for a bit.

I’ll be checking this game out a bit more in the coming days, and I’ll be intrigued to see if it can hold my attention. I liked the first game a lot, but the fact I never really felt like I was getting anywhere put me off playing a long way into it. This new version appears to have fixed that particular problem with a much more focused experience, so I’m keen to see how it plays out. Knowing my general abilities in the strategic department, I am anticipating a complete loss at the hands of the overlord within 20 turns, but we’ll just have to wait and see about that, won’t we?

1139: Just Shut Up

I think I’m “over” social media. Allow me to clarify that bold statement, however, as it’s perhaps not entirely accurate as is. I think I am over social media as it exists today — a sprawling, disorganised mess of ill-defined concepts that contribute very little to the people’s understanding of one another, and more often than not is about vanity rather than actual socialisation.

In other words, I yearn for the days when social media was simple and straightforward — when its sole intended purpose was to allow people to stay in touch with each other and perhaps, occasionally, share a photograph or two with them.

Looking back on this blog, I see I have written about this subject at least twice in the past, and my disillusionment with it has only grown over the last year or so — perhaps due in part to the fact that as part of my job I come into contact with some of the most utterly pointless examples of social media that I’ve ever seen.

These days, there are social media apps to share anything you can think of. I mean, there are literally (YES LITERALLY) apps and services that allow you to share anything you can think of. There are also more specialised ones with questionable usefulness to society as a whole. I reviewed one recently where the entire purpose was to share what your current mood was — you couldn’t add any text explaining said mood, only an emoticon — and another where you could share the weather in your local area, then “like” or comment on the weather in other places. Another still allowed you to send a video or photo to someone, but they were only allowed to look at it for ten seconds, after which it locked itself and became useless (I swear I’m not making this up).

The trouble with these things is that despite their pretensions towards being “social media,” they’re not actually all that social at all in terms of the way in which people use them. They’re a means of broadcasting things and seeking approval of other people rather than a means of actually engaging in conversation with anyone. Take a look at the average comments thread on an Instagram picture of a moderately-attractive person (usually a woman) and you’ll see what I mean. No-one’s actually talking to each other — everyone’s just dropping an asinine opinion bomb and then never coming back. The poster of the selfie is seeking approval from commenters telling them how attractive they are; meanwhile, the commenters are seeking approval from the poster and hoping that their specific compliment is the one that will get them some specific attention.

This isn’t the case universally, obviously. There are still some actual conversations that go on on Facebook, for example, but these can easily be lost in the torrent of people resharing crap from pages like “I fucking love science” (do you? Then go do some rather than recycling endless fucking memes) and “LIKE AND SHARE!!” (NO!!). Twitter is a reasonable platform for discussion at times, but conversations are easily derailed and, as has been proven hundreds of times in the past year alone, 140 characters is really not enough to make a coherent argument about a complex issue. It’s also incredibly easy to be taken out of context on Twitter.

Google+ perhaps fares the best out of all of these services in my experience, though even that’s variable. Join a good, small community that has a clear focus and whose moderators keep a tight leash on discussion and you’ll have a good experience chewing the fat with people who may well become good friends. Follow Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton and you might see some interesting content, but the quality of discussion goes out of the window. Follow Google+’s own page and all you get are blithering idiots making ill-informed political rants any time the team behind the page even dare to mention the President.

I think the thing that’s been striking me most heavily recently is “do I really need to share this? Do people really need to know this?” And more often than not, the answer is “no”. I don’t feel the need to collect an arbitrary set of “Likes” with services like CircleMe or GetGlue. I don’t feel the need to “check in” to places with Foursquare. I don’t even really need to use stuff like Raptr to broadcast my gaming activity, but that has, on occasion, sparked some good discussions — as, I’m sure, the other services do in some cases. Just not mine. Not any more. Perhaps once in the past — I met some good friends through Foursquare’s now-defunct competitor Gowalla — but not now.

Consequently, since quitting Twitter a while back (and not really missing it, to be honest — though I do miss some of the people) I’ve been paring back my personal social media use hugely. I’ve closed my Tumblr account — I never really understood the point of that site, and these days all it seems to be used for is white people shouting about how guilty they are about being white and how we should all stop being such racists/misogynists/fedora-wearing perverts — and I’ve unistalled the vast majority of social apps from my phone, including Twitter and Instagram. Facebook made the cut, because as much as I dislike it at times, it’s still a good way of staying in touch with a lot of people, and Google+ also survived, as it’s the new home of the Squadron of Shame and serving our needs well.

Obviously this blog is still going, too (and will be for a long time to come, hopefully!) and I still comment on friends’ blogs — but I don’t really count that as “social media” in the same way, particularly as the discussions had tend to be (for the most part, anyway) wordy and thought-provoking rather than inspiring little more than a knee-jerk “lol”.

Everything else, though? Out the window. And life is much calmer and more pleasant as a result.