1198: ThreeDeeEss

After some hesitation — and despite owning several games for it — I finally got my own 3DS today. We’ve actually had one in the household since Andie’s last birthday — it belongs to her — but with the combination of Fire Emblem: Awakening and the copy of Luigi’s Mansion 2 my brother got me for my birthday (thanks!) I figured it was probably about time I got my own rather than depriving Andie of the opportunity to play Harvest Moon whenever she pleased.

And, as predicted, just a short period of time with the 3DS has reminded me once again that people who claim traditional handhelds are on the way out and that mobile phone/tablet gaming is the future are talking out of their arse. Yes indeed.

The quality of the experiences on the 3DS and Vita is just in a completely different league to that you get on a smartphone. Completely. It also makes the rapidly-widening schism between free-to-play/”freemium” and traditionally-sold “pay once, play forever” games extremely apparent.

Today, for work (last day! Woo!) I reviewed the new Transformers game for iOS and Android. Said game is the latest in the interminable string of “card battle” games that are available for those two platforms, which means it’s a monotonous, tedious, strategy-and-gameplay-free experience that has only the most tenuous link to its source material. It is, in short, designed as little more than a means of getting people addicted enough to the sight of little bars filling up to want to pay money to “collect” virtual cards that don’t actually exist. “This is a super rare card!” they’ll say, failing to point out that it is data rather than a physical object and is thus only as “rare” as they decide it should be at any given point in time. There’s no joy in playing that game; it’s mindless busywork — something to do for the sake of having something to fiddle with rather than something that actually engages your brain and makes you interested in what’s going on.

The phrase “mindless busywork” describes probably 90% of the new mobile and social games that are released every day. Which is why I have no desire whatsoever to play them in my free time.

Compare and contrast the crap that is Transformers Legends to Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS, then. Ostensibly, the two games are of the same genre: RPG. And yet the difference in quality is apparent from the moment you fire up the game. And it only gets more painful to even contemplate this difference as you go on.

Fire Emblem is a game designed to entertain you and challenge you. It’s not designed to massage your ego through giving you tasks to do that are completely free of any sort of challenge, and then extract money from you while you’re feeling good. It has the means of extracting money from you through its paid (optional) downloadable content, but the experience in and of itself is complete, and it doesn’t nag you at any point to do something that will cost you money. It doesn’t tell you how long you can play before you have to either stop or pay, it doesn’t tease you with “if you pay $5 you might get this awesome hero” nonsense — note, “might” — and it doesn’t thrust gigantic screen-filling adverts in your fucking face every five minutes like most modern mobile games do. Nothing breaks immersion for me more quickly than happily playing a game then suddenly everything stopping and the device on which I’m playing said game asking me if I want to download another, completely unrelated free game. The answer is, without exception, “no, fuck off.”

And if the adverts don’t break immersion, the “user retention” strategies certainly do. “Play the Daily Spin now!” announces a game that is attempting to be a gritty depiction of medieval life, failing to see how completely inappropriate a slot machine is in this context. “Spin the wheel for prizes!” barks Gollum in the official mobile game of The Hobbit. “Get free coins every day!” bellows whatever shitty puzzle game has ripped off Bejeweled and monetized it out the arse this week.

No. So long as mobile phone gaming is the preserve of sleazy chancers who prey on the weak and stupid, traditional handhelds have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Were you an advocate of mobile and tablet gaming, you may well point to the disparity in price between mobile games and 3DS/Vita games and make some sort of non-specific sneering noise at this point. My response to that is very simply “you get what you pay for.”

1197: 32-Bit Power

It’s my birthday today. I am 32. Big fucking whoop.

I still have a somewhat childish outlook on a lot of things, I will freely admit — come on, it’s endearing — and birthdays are one of those things. I still feel that birthdays are special days, that they should be celebrated and enjoyed — and that preferably, nothing unpleasant should happen to you on them. Ideally, you wouldn’t even have to work on your birthday — it would be a guaranteed holiday for each individual person — and you could just spend the day eating cake, reading cards, opening presents and wondering how you’ll spend your birthday money.

Which is why I’m here at just after 10pm in the evening feeling a bit glum. Today has… well, not “sucked” exactly, but it has been nothing but a normal day in which I got a significantly larger number of posts on my Facebook Timeline than usual. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for people taking a moment to wish me happy birthday after Facebook reminded them to do so, but it’s not really the same as, you know, something exciting happening. And absolutely nothing exciting has happened today. At all. It has just been a Monday. Any other Monday.

It doesn’t help that Andie is ill and thus we can’t really do anything exciting and celebratory, though we are going to Canada at the weekend, so I’ll look at that as a slightly-belated birthday celebration. I also had some friends over at the weekend for board and computer games, and had the chance to catch up with some other friends I haven’t seen for ages on Sunday, so that was nice, and I’m grateful for that.

I can’t shake the feeling that today should have been more “special” than it was, though. It just wasn’t. At all. And I know that as you get older, birthdays do get less and less special — largely because you’ve had so many of them, but also because you start to get to a point where you want to forget about them — but, you know, I still like to feel like there’s a day that’s “mine”; a day when I can enjoy myself, when I can be immune from the unpleasantness of the world and just enjoy a bit of selfishness for once.

Today wasn’t that day.

Oh well. There’s always next year.

BALLS

1196: What’s Yours is Mine

My good friend Mark and I played a bunch of Monaco: ~~What’s Mine is Yours~~ What’s Yours is Mine (damn it all to hell, I KEEP getting that the wrong way round) via the wonder that is the Internet this evening. It’s rather fun.

If you haven’t come across this peculiar little game before, it’s essentially a multiplayer stealth game in which you cooperate to complete various heists as efficiently as possible. This isn’t a ludicrously violent first-person shooter-style heist as in Payday: The Heist, however; no, these are missions where you have to sneak, think carefully about what you’re doing and occasionally frantically improvise while being chased by a pack of slathering dogs.

Monaco’s main distinguishing feature over many of its peers is its heavy sense of style. Levels are depicted from a top-down perspective as a black-and-white “blueprint” of the building the team are currently plundering, with only the regions visible to the player’s current position “lit up” and showing their full detail. The rest of the blueprint is marked with various icons showing objects that can be interacted with, treasures to find and the eventual mission goal.

Controlling Monaco is extremely simple. Most actions are performed simply by walking into the object you would like to interact with — walk into a locked door to pick its lock, walk into a computer to hack it, walk into a safe to crack it. Each of the game’s character classes, each of whom are unlocked over the course of the complete campaign, have their own special abilities that can help the team as a whole. The Lookout, for example, displays the locations of all guards and civilians (who alert guards) on the map when she is either standing still or sneaking. The Locksmith, meanwhile, can pick locks and crack safes more quickly, while The Cleaner can knock out guards or civilians that are unaware of his presence. Each level also has certain items that can help out — sometimes there are guns which can be used to kill guards, sometimes smoke bombs to sneak past, sometimes EMP grenades to disrupt electrical systems.

The interesting thing about Monaco is that it doesn’t spoon-feed the player everything. You’re given basic tutorial text through prompts on the floor as information becomes relevant, but the specifics are up to you to determine through experimentation. For example, on the last level Mark and I played this evening, we came across doors marked with a “hand” symbol that appeared to set off alarms if we successfully opened them. We subsequently discovered that these doors and the alarms could be bypassed by either hacking a nearby computer or cutting the power to the area they were in. The game didn’t tell us this — we had to find it out for ourselves. I’m all for this.

This lack of spoon-feeding extends to the visual information provided to the player, too. The top-down display of what’s going on is presented in a rather abstract manner, so you have to use your imagination to picture what’s actually going on. In many ways, it’s quite like a board game — albeit one you play in real-time — as you spend a lot of time looking at abstract representations of things rather than what they actually are. Nice little touches are there to stoke the fires of the imagination, however — the “blueprints” for the buildings are all marked with the names of each room, for example, so you can picture the purpose of each place you visit and why you’re there. Some truly excellent (and easy-to-miss) ambient sound gives a wonderful sense of atmosphere to the whole experience, too. This is a game worth wearing headphones for, as just by using speakers you’ll miss out on a lot of interesting audio cues.

Perhaps most pleasing is the fact that it’s a cooperative game that can be played either online or off. Up to four players can cooperate with one another either all on the same computer, over a LAN or via the Internet. The game can also be played solo — and is a completely different experience when doing so, as you can’t rely on the other players and their characters’ abilities to back you up.

On the whole, it seems to be a really interesting game that I’m looking forward to trying again with friends. It’s noticeably different from the “norm” and a lot of fun to play. It’s also just twelve quid, so grab a copy today.

1195: City of Horror

It’s my birthday on Monday, so we decided that today would be a good day to celebrate it while people were around. As has been the tradition among the more geeky portion of my circle of friends, we decided to mark the occasion with a day of board and computer games, including Surgeon Simulator 2013, a failed attempt at getting Artemis to run due to the iOS versions not matching the PC versions, some NintendoLand (still a firm hit with everyone, and a good reason by itself to own a Wii U and four controllers) and, on the board game front, Descent and City of Horror.

It’s the latter that I’d like to talk about today, as it’s a very interesting game indeed, and quite unlike anything I’ve really played before.

For the uninitiated, City of Horror is a semi-cooperative survival horror game themed around a zombie apocalypse. Each player takes control of several survivors and then, over the course of four turns, moves them around, fends off zombies, makes deals with the other players and tries to end the game with as many points as possible. In order to acquire points, your characters have to be alive, and in order to ensure they are alive at the end of the game, they must have an antidote on hand and not have been devoured by zombies. To gain more points, you can grab food supplies or additional antidotes. Each character is worth a particular number of points at the end of the game, but loses value if they use their special ability, which can only be used once per game unless they “recharge” themselves using special cards or locations.

The gameplay is surprisingly free-for-all once it gets started, and reading the rules doesn’t really make it entirely clear how things are going to unfold until you start playing. Essentially what happens is this: everyone secretly makes a decision as to which of the game’s locations they are going to move one of their characters to this turn, then reveals this plan simultaneously. Then, zombies appear and move, and sometimes supplies in the form of action cards and antidotes are dropped in. Then, characters move in a set order; if there isn’t a space in the location they’re trying to move to, they end up in the streets in the centre of the board.

After this comes the tricky bit. Each location is “resolved” in order. Firstly, each player gets an opportunity to use the location’s special ability, which usually involves discarding a card to get some sort of benefit. This happens in turn order. Next, all players — even those who don’t have a character present in that location — can play action cards, negotiate, lie, cheat and backstab their way into an advantageous position. Action cards allow for the manipulation of stuff that is on the board — some allow you to move or add zombies to particular locations; others let survivors kill zombies; others still have special abilities such as guaranteeing safety from a zombie attack.

Each location has its own criterion for triggering a zombie attack — usually an upper limit of zombies milling around the outside of the building. If this criterion is met, then one of the characters present in the location will die after everyone has finished playing their actions — exactly which one is determined by a simultaneous vote among everyone present. Consequently, there’s a lot of scope for making deals with other players and then stabbing them in the back by siding against them when it comes to the time when someone has to be thrown out through the window into the slobbering hordes.

In many ways, it’s a nasty, horrible little game that is best played among a group of friends who won’t take it personally. If you’re not willing to be a complete asshole to the people you’re playing with, you will not succeed — it’s as simple as that. In many ways it’s rather refreshing — rather than being directly competitive based on skill, random elements or accumulated resources, it’s all about interacting with other people and determining where everyone’s weak points are. There’s a lot of bluffing, a lot of lying and a lot of outright cheating (within the confines of the rules) and I seriously doubt it’s possible to finish a game with everyone still standing.

It’s great fun, in short — just be sure not to play it with anyone who might get upset when you promise not to let them get killed and then promptly let them get killed!

1194: Courting the ‘Core’

Social games, it’s fair to say, have a bad reputation among those who are euphemistically referred to as “core gamers”. This bad reputation isn’t altogether unjustified, of course — social games are, in many cases, derivative, exploitative or just plain boring — but despite the prevalence of Men In Suits (or, probably more accurately, Men In Trendy T-Shirts And/Or Turtleneck Sweaters) who have never played a video game before in their life running the show for the most part, there’s a lot of talent in that particular sector of the industry.

So why the hell doesn’t this part of the industry do more to attract the “core”?

It’s at this point that, if I was talking about this in person with someone directly involved with the industry, that they would point to one of the following facts: 1) Candy Crush Saga having approximately 15 million daily active users; 2) CSR Racing on iOS earning somewhere in the region of $12 million a month when it launched; 3) The Top Grossing chart on iOS being dominated by games that are free to download.

These are all facts, and cannot be ignored. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re good things. As I’ve said many times in the past, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Candy Crush Saga has 15 million daily active users because it nags them via notifications to come back and play; CSR Racing earned $12 million a month by forcing people to pay up for “gas” for their cars if they didn’t want to wait; and don’t even get me started on what I think of the Top Grossing chart on iOS and the awful crap therein.

Aside from these matters, the fact that the social and mobile games sectors aren’t courting the “core” more aggressively is just baffling to me. While those who identify as “core” gamers — i.e. those who will happily sit down in front of a computer or console for several hours at a time to use it as their primary means of entertainment rather than an idle timewaster — do not exist in as vast a number as those who have a Facebook account and who have tried Candy Crush Saga at least once, there are some important things to bear in mind.

Most crucially, of those 15 million daily active users that Candy Crush Saga has, only a tiny fraction of them actually pay anything. Some of them might pay a lot — these people are rather revoltingly referred to as “whales” by people in the industry — but an awful lot of them will either refuse to pay out of principle or just not enjoy the game enough to want to spend money on it.

Here’s the thing: “core” gamers spend a lot of money. “Core” gamers will happily spent £40 on a brand new game without having read a review. “Core” gamers will pay a premium to get pointless cool stuff that they can show off. “Core” gamers are a lucrative source of income, in other words. Much as it pains me to break it down that way — I’d much rather games be seen as creative works than business products — it is, in fact, true.

So, then, I have to question why more of an effort isn’t being made to make “core” gamers take social and mobile games seriously. Because it’s not. “Core” gamers see the majority of social and mobile games as a massive joke — a festering boil on the arse of the industry; a source of interactive entertainment that doesn’t create “proper games” and instead puts out the very worst sort of shovelware.

They’re right, to an extent. So here’s a few things the social and mobile sectors could do to be taken a bit more seriously by potentially one of the most lucrative markets out there.

Stop ripping the same things off all the time.

Seriously. Cut it out. We’ve all played Puzzle Bobble. We’ve all played Bejeweled. Stop trying to make out your puzzle game is new and innovative when, in fact, it is simply either Puzzle Bobble or Bejeweled (or, in a few cases, Jawbreaker).

If you must draw inspiration from past titles, that’s fine; just stop drawing inspiration from such a small pool. Just in the puzzle game genre there are hundreds of great games begging for a social adaptation — Columns, Klax, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Puzzle League, Dr Mario, Baku Baku Animal… I could go on — so why are we constantly subjected to the same “match-3” bollocks over and over?

This isn’t just an issue in the puzzle genre — social RPGs all rip off Mafia Wars; farming sims all rip off FarmVille; citybuilders all rip off CityVille, and none of them were actually that good in the first place.

Stop ripping yourself off.

If you already have a match-3 puzzle game in your portfolio, you don’t need another one. King, currently the biggest social game company in the world thanks to the aforementioned Candy Crush Saga, is terrible for this. Now that Candy Crush Saga is the top performing game on Facebook, they’ve put out another game. What kind of game do you think that is? That’s right; a game where you swap coloured things around to make groups of 3 in horizontal or vertical lines. Only this time they’re fruit and vegetables!

Or how about Kabam, who have now released the exact same game with slightly different graphics and a different name four times (Kingdoms of Camelot, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, Arcane Empires, The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth) and no-one (except me) has called them on it.

The fact that people buy into this is just depressing.

Hire some fucking writers.

Quite a few social games these days are very well presented, with quality graphics and decent sound and music. In many cases, they actually create quite an impressive atmosphere… until the player is asked to read anything and it becomes very apparent that the “plot” of the game, such as it is, was written by a dyslexic Russian 10-year old who had just played Magic: The Gathering for the first time.

Good writing is just as important as the more immediate parts of your game’s presentation. Don’t skimp on it. And even if you’re not going for an epic plot in your game — incidentally, puzzle games do not need plots, so just stop trying to cram one in — at least get someone to proofread the in-game text, fix any typos and glaring grammatical errors… and make sure if you’re releasing it in English-speaking territories that all of the game’s text is actually in fucking English.

A shout-out to 5th Planet Games here, who actually make an effort with this sort of thing, even if the gameplay of the games sometimes isn’t up to much; Legacy of a Thousand Suns may be a Mafia Wars ripoff in terms of gameplay, but at least it has some consistently well-written story text throughout, unlike Mafia Wars, which didn’t even try in this regard.

Stop using outdated tech.

Adobe is winding down Flash support, so it’s time for Web-based games to do the same. Relying on Flash means that you limit yourself to those using a computer that supports Flash, and excludes those on tablets and mobile phones. There are a ton of cross-platform solutions available now that allow you to deploy an app on the Web, mobile platforms and as a standalone PC, Mac or Linux executable, so there’s really very little excuse for not using one.

Not only that, but your average computer these days is more than capable of dealing with some simple 3D graphics — in fact, most are more than capable of handling decent-quality 3D graphics. Unity is a solid option that makes porting between platforms a snap; use it.

Stop using stupid, inappropriate aesthetics.

This is what the artwork for the CSI Miami Facebook game looks like:

This is a screenshot from the official House M.D. Facebook game, developed by the same team:

And this is what a zombie looks like in the Walking Dead social game:

I don’t think I really need to say anything else on that note.

If it doesn’t belong in the game, don’t put it in the game.

You want to keep your players coming back day after day? Don’t shoehorn in a stupid roulette game that makes absolutely no thematic sense whatsoever; instead, simply make a good game that people will want to keep playing.

Stop assuming I’m an idiot.

“Core” gamers have played games before. They don’t need your tutorial to unfold over the course of the first 20 levels of your puzzle game. Make it brief, and make it skippable.

Along the same lines, it’s okay to tell someone to do something and then not put a gigantic flashing arrow over the top of it and simultaneously darken the rest of the screen, just in case they missed the gigantic flashing arrow. Allow the player to experiment and discover things for themselves rather than pointing every single thing out to them. At the same time, provide a detailed Help file and/or tooltip system so that they can look things up if they aren’t clear.

On a slightly different but related note, it’s okay for games to be complex. Again, “core” gamers have played games before and are okay with complex mechanics. Important note: “complex” is not the same as “boring”. Kabam and anyone else making “midcore strategy games”, please learn this.

Make it so fun I want to pay, not so inconvenient I have to pay.

This is the biggie. Monetisation is the biggest challenge in free-to-play gaming in general, and particularly in mobile and social games, which often attract huge audiences but relatively tiny proportions of paying customers.

“Core” gamers do not like feeling nickel and dimed. Look at the negative response to stuff like Dead Space 3, or Real Racing 3 — both of which, not coincidentally, are by EA.

“Core” gamers also do not like having their time wasted. This does not mean that they will pay to bypass wait timers in your game; it means they will simply stop playing.

Provide “core” gamers with stuff they can buy that improves their experience, but which doesn’t break the game. Throw out that stupid energy system — a “core” gamer will stop playing when they’re good and ready, not when you tell them to stop. Throw out that “it takes three hours of real time to harvest your crops” bullshit — if you explicitly send them away, they won’t come back. Instead provide them with cool stuff that they want to show off — new outfits for their character, new paint jobs for their car, new background music or even whole new levels or areas to explore. If you want a good example of how to do it right, look at stuff like DC Universe Online and Perfect World’s free-to-play MMOs — all are satisfying to play for free, but all offer a ton of non-game-breaking benefits to those willing to pony up and buy some premium currency.

Talking of which…

Quit the “pay to win” crap.

“Core” gamers complain. A lot. Particularly when they believe that a game isn’t being fair. They’ll whinge about mages being nerfed, shotguns being OP’d and generally anything else that breaks the game balance. “Core” gamers play a lot of games and are thus very good at spotting when a game is unbalanced to an unfair degree. Do not make your game so that a crap player can buy their way to dominance over a skilled player; make it so the crap player wants to get better at the game. Reward the skilled player with cool stuff and allow the crap player to see all the awesome stuff they could earn if they were just a bit better; but don’t allow them to buy their way to success.

Along the same lines, quit the “Get More Coins” nonsense. Part of the satisfaction of experiences like role-playing games and business sims for “core” gamers is feeling like they’ve struggled against all odds to earn their rewards. The second you allow them to simply purchase all the money in the game world for $50, you devalue those rewards and make them meaningless. You also, again, break the game balance. Instead, pace your game in such a way that the rewards are earned at a good, satisfying rate, and save the paid stuff for purely cosmetic items. If you must use a virtual currency for premium items, make it a completely separate currency that it’s clear can only be acquired through spending money. Keep the “Cash Shop” stuff separate from the normal shop. And for heaven’s sake stop plastering the screen with special offers and other sparkling icons — nothing breaks the atmosphere of your otherwise well-rendered fantasy world quicker than a large flashing icon bellowing about “20% Off Gems!”

____

I accept that many of these things are more difficult to implement than what is being done by many mobile and social games now. But they, among other things that I’ve undoubtedly forgotten — feel free to chime in in the comments — are why “core” gamers do not take mobile and social games seriously.

Court the “core” and you’ll make a lot of money. Continue to alienate them, however, and you’ll always be a big joke to a significant proportion of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on their favourite hobby.

1193: London Calling

I went to London today. I do not like going to London. I do not like London generally, in fact.

Fortunately, my trip to London today meant that I didn’t have to go very far, as in I didn’t have to catch the tube or the train or the bus or anything like that. We got a coach in (which, yes, did require getting up at 5 in the morning, but which was a relatively painless experience) then were able to walk to where we were going (the passport office, if you were curious) and then walk back, catch the bus home and not have to piss about with Londoners and their attitudes towards other people.

For many, living in London appears to be some sort of ultimate goal, some sort of Ultimate Cool Status. It is, of course, certainly true that a lot of industries make their home in the nation’s capital — the UK video games industry barely acknowledges that any other city exists, for example — but I cannot possibly imagine ever living there. It must be hellish. And expensive. Why would you want to pay a fortune to live somewhere that is hellish?

I had a job offer a while back that would have required me to move to London. I’ve thought back on my career path since then, which has been entirely working from home for American companies, and I wonder if I might have been better off taking that one as it was a more inherently “stable” position. The conclusion I inevitably reach is “no”, incidentally, with a large contributing factor to feeling that way being the fact that I don’t have to live in London. (The others being that I wouldn’t, by now, be living back in Southampton near my friends and with Andie, which are all awesome things in my life that I’m happy about.)

I’ll tell you why I don’t like London. Well, some of the reasons, anyway.

The weather is never right. When it’s grey and miserable, it’s really grey and miserable, and the dirty streets and oppressive, cramped way in which all the buildings are crammed together just emphasises how grey and miserable it is. When it’s hot, meanwhile, like it was today, it’s really hot, and humid, and the thickness of the dirty air from the hordes of cars who inexplicably think it’s a good idea to drive around Central London (hint: it’s really not) just makes it all the more unpleasant to immerse yourself in. Particularly when, yes, you’ve been up since five in the morning.

As I said above, thankfully I didn’t really run into my other London bugbears today as we were pretty much “in and out” — or as close to “in and out” as is possible when riding a bus from a couple of hours’ drive away. For the record, though, said bugbears largely revolve around people who have to be wherever they’re going faster than you getting wherever you’re going. This most commonly shows itself on the Underground escalators, where the left lane is the “dickhead” lane of people who think that barging past people who are often carrying large, heavy suitcases and/or bags will get them where they’re going a bit faster. (Hint: it probably doesn’t, given that when you get to the bottom you all have to wait for the same train.) It also shows itself on the street, where if you dare walk anywhere except smooshed up against a wall, some jerkoff in a suit will come charging past you on Important City-Boy Business and make you — just for one, single, blissful, homicidal instant — consider pushing him into the path of the open-top tour bus that is coming around the corner.

As I say, though, thankfully I didn’t encounter any of these issues today, and instead we saw some ducks, geese and other unidentified (well, someone has identified them, obviously) birds in St. James’ Park. Which was quite nice.

I still hate London, though. Even with its “nice bits”.

1192: Take That!

(Because it’s just too obvious to start a post about Ace Attorney with the word “Objection!” these days.)

I’ve started replaying the Ace Attorney series, largely because I recently reacquired the two installments I used to have in my collection that went missing when I loaned them to someone unknown a while back. (The person I thought I loaned them to swears blind he doesn’t have them, and I believe him, sooo…) After finishing Lifesigns in all its Ace Attorney-esque glory, I was keen to revisit Nick, Maya and the rest of the gang for some happy fun times.

And I’m reminded why this is still one of my favourite game series of all time. It pushes all my buttons. Visual novel? Check. Adventure game elements (i.e. puzzles?) Check. Interesting characters? Check. Anime silliness? Check. Overdramatic music? Check.

It’s testament to the quality of this game series that, even remembering most (though not all!) of the solutions to the various puzzles throughout, it’s still a compelling experience I’m happy to sit through again, primarily because of the characters throughout.

Phoenix himself is a good protagonist. He doesn’t enforce his personality on the player too much, but he’s very much his own person rather than a blank slate. His growth from constantly-sweating, nervous rookie lawyer in the first game to confident giantkiller over the course of the entire series is heartwarming to see, and as I recall, taking down the villain in the final case of the third game was an immensely satisfying experience on a par with, say, defeating Sephiroth for the first time in FFVII.

One thing I like about the series is that it manages to successfully involve the player in a sense of “conflict” without ever resorting to violence. Not once does Phoenix draw a gun or any other weapon over the course of the game, yet the courtroom showdowns are as thrilling and exciting as any lengthy RPG battle sequence. This is one thing that actually improves slightly as the game progresses — in the first game, you simply have five “lives” in the courtroom sequences, whereas in later games you have a “health bar” that depletes by various amounts when you make an incorrect answer or accusation. This is a much better solution, as it allows for a storytelling trick that is unique to games — drama through interface. When the judge says that you’d better get your facts straight before you answer and you see that an incorrect response will drain your entire health bar in one go, you think damn carefully about what you’re going to say next.

Ace Attorney is also pretty much the poster child for why it’s a good idea to have a “companion character” with the protagonist — particularly if you’re not going to go full-on visual novel and have them narrate everything they do. The chemistry between Maya and Phoenix — which successfully manages to get a cross a real sense of love between the two of them without ever once getting the slightest bit sexualised — is a real highlight of the series, and again it’s something that grows and changes over the course of the three Wright games. It’s a tradition that’s continued in the fourth game Apollo Justice, too, albeit with a different companion character, and again in Ace Attorney Investigations (again with an all-new companion), which brings the wonderful Miles Edgeworth to the fore and inverts the series’ usual format.

The game looks great on the big screen of the DSi XL, too. I’m rediscovering a bunch of great DS titles on those lovely big screens, and I’m really looking forward to playing the other Ace Attorney games in succession. It’s actually been quite a few years since I last played them, and I don’t think I’ve ever played all five one after another. I’ll be interested to see how “coherent” they end up being. We’ll see!

1191: Social Burnout

I’ve been thinking this for quite a while, as you’ve probably noticed from past posts I’ve made on the subject, but I’m beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.

Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how “way too far” we’ve taken social media these days. Here it is:

“After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook.”

Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?

Pizza Hut aren’t the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you’ve just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.

This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it’s more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going “I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE’S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I’D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT ‘SOMEBODY’ WOULDN’T LIKE IT!” rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.

I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn’t be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren’t really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you’d share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you’d been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a “Note”. No games, no spam, no “I Fucking Love Science” posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn’t have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn’t really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.

Now, though, with the proliferation of “LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS” posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it’s quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we’re on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone’s News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to “promote” it, of course.

Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a “Like”.

Not helpful. At all. You “Like” my question? Great. Do you “Like” it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I’m not so desperate for validation that I count the number of “Likes” a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.

That said, if you want to “Like” my new “K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack” fanart cover photo, feel free.

Sigh. I’m such a hypocrite.

I’ve been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I’m currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I’m beginning to think they’re not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…

1190: Dev Diary 5

I’ve been thinking about interface design today. I told myself that I wouldn’t faff around with the default RPG Maker bits and bobs too much so as not to hold up actually writing the story, but in practice it’s so simple to tweak this stuff that I couldn’t help myself. In doing so, I’ve immediately made a difference to the game that makes it look a little less like a half-arsed default RPG Maker project and has a bit more individuality, despite still largely using stock assets.

As a reminder, here’s a typical shot of how it looked before:

And here’s how a different moment in the game looks as of today:

Not a huge difference, I know, but the astute among you will notice two things: firstly, the colour of the text box has changed to a deep navy blue rather than the default gradient fill, and the main game screen now has a Persona 3-style “clock” in the upper-right corner of the screen, indicating what time of day it is. Presently, this only shows the time of day, but I’m toying with it showing what day it is, too — my hesitation on this note is that which day it is is only relevant for part of the game rather than the whole thing.

Earlier today, the “clock” was much bigger and looked a bit like this:

I actually kind of liked it at the larger size, but it was overlapping the portraits of characters who appeared on the right-hand side of the screen a bit too much for my liking, so I reduced it a bit.

The reason I changed the colour of the text box was because I was experimenting with some scripts that changed the behaviour of the menu. Specifically, they allowed a “wallpaper” image to be applied, so my menu screen now looks like this:

I figured I’d run with the “flat blue” colour scheme, and add a nice silhouette of Ami in the background for a bit of visual interest, and tweak the message box colour to match for consistency’s sake. The silhouette image shows up nicely in the various menu screens without being too obtrusive, as you can see from this shot of the save menu:

In fact, it shows up particularly nicely when choosing to quit or return to the title screen — a happy coincidence of the fact that selecting this option darkens the screen somewhat:

Those of you who know RPG Maker well will also notice I’ve replaced the default font with the nice, simple and clean lines of Verdana. This was primarily to match the default font used in a message box script I’m using, because it was bugging me a bit that the font in my message windows and in the rest of the interface didn’t match.

Oh, God. What is happening to me?

I jest. Fact is, today I’d reached a good natural “stopping point” in terms of composing the story, and it was as good a time as any to fiddle around with the “look” of the game a bit. I’m pleased with the effect it’s had — they’re only subtle little changes, but they’ve had a noticeable effect.

Now it’s time to stop farting about with all this and move the plot onwards. To give you an idea of how things are going, the game is structured in several parts: firstly, there’s a prologue; then there are five in-game days, during which a whole host of different things can happen according to exclusive choices the player makes in each of the morning, afternoon and evening time slots; then there are four unique “second parts” to the game, and one “true ending”. So far, I’ve completely and totally finished the prologue, and I’ve finished the morning of the first day. If you’re actually reading all the text like a normal person and not fast-forwarding it like me when I’m testing (yes, there is a fast-forward function) then there’s probably just under an hour of Stuff to Do and Read so far. After I’ve created various environments once, I can reuse them for other events, which means that development will continue to accelerate as I progress through the story.

Environments like the one seen above are quite complex, and most stuff in the game is “examinable”, so there’s a lot of flavour text in there. Now it’s done, though, if I want Ami to come back here with another character — which I probably do — I don’t have to design that map all over again. Which is nice.

Anyway. I’ll leave that there for now. Just wanted to share how things were going!

1189: Lifesigns Critical

I completed a playthrough of the DS game Lifesigns last night, wrapping up a pleasantly satisfying experience that I enjoyed very much as a whole.

For those who haven’t read my past enthusing on the subject, Lifesigns is an Ace Attorney-style adventure game/visual novel for the DS that happens to be set in a hospital and occasionally involve surgery sequences using the DS’ touchscreen. Unfortunately for the game, on its original release this caused it to be compared unfavourably (and unfairly) to Atlus’ excellent Trauma Center: Under the Knife, and as such it was passed over by many due to some rather middling reviews that missed the point somewhat.

Lifesigns proved to be a great experience for me, though, and it made me think about all the potential genres of gaming we simply don’t get all that often. And when I say “genre”, I’m not referring to whether something is a shooter or a platform game or an adventure — I’m talking about subject matter. Lifesigns is a medical drama, pure and simple, and that’s something we simply don’t get much in the gaming space. Trauma Center approaches it, but then veers off into crazy sci-fi town partway through — though the more recent Trauma Team does a much better job at remaining at least semi-plausible rather than going quite as batshit as its two predecessors. Then there was 1988’s Life and Death and its sequel Life and Death II: The Brain, but both of those were more simulations of the surgical aspects than narrative-centric medical dramas. And don’t even get me started on Surgeon Simulator 2013 — hilarious it may be, but realistic medical drama? No no no.

As you have probably gathered from my past enthusing on the subject, the strange and wonderful land of visual novels is one of the most forward-thinking subdivisions of the games industry in this regard. In visual novels, we have “slice of life” games that are about interpersonal relationships (too many to name); games about suffering with chronic conditions (Private Nurse); games about supporting people with terminal illnesses (Kana Little Sister); games about being a member of a rock band (Kira Kira) and plenty more besides. The freedom to pursue these rather unconventional subjects — unconventional for gaming, anyway — is due to visual novels’ strong focus on narrative over gameplay rather than the other way around.

But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be any of what we’d traditionally call “gameplay” in there — Lifesigns is a great example of how you can keep something narrative-focused and still provide the player with things to do. The player has the option to move between different locations at will rather than being railroaded around the place by a completely linear plot; the player can ask various characters about pieces of information they have gathered; the player occasionally has to convince various characters to do or think things by presenting them with appropriate pieces of information; and, of course, the player has to pick up the scalpel and perform everything from appendectomies to emergency open-heart surgery.

Basically I think what I’m trying to say is that I’d just like to see more games about relatively mundane subject matter — and they don’t have to be visual novels to be that way. I want to see an interactive sitcom in which you play one of the characters and interact with the others, but in which nothing of earth-shattering importance happens. I want to see more interactive medical dramas. I want to see more games like Ace Attorney where the focus in criminal investigations is on the lawyers, not the police or private detectives. I want to see more “slice of life” games like Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. And, should I find myself never having to look down the iron sights of a realistically-rendered machine gun ever again, I most certainly won’t be sorry.

Note that as ever, I’m not saying that massively popular subsections of gaming such as competitive first-person shooters should go away. But I am saying that those of us who prefer something a little more sedate and cerebral should be catered to a bit more, that’s all. We’re getting there, slowly — I’ve certainly found enough to keep me entertained without even looking at the triple-A sector for a very long time — but there’s still some distance to go before the same people who tune in to House every week are picking up a controller to play a new Lifesigns game.