1270: Black Cloud

Been struggling a bit with depression again recently. It is my own fault for not proactively doing anything about it, but once it sets in there’s really not a lot you can do about it save for just riding it out and hoping it passes.

Some people describe their experiences with depression as being strangely comforting; those negative feelings acting as a sort of blanket that surrounds them and cuts them off from the outside world. I can sort of empathise with that, but at the same time it’s frustrating.

Here’s what dealing with depression is like for me.

I’ll wake up in the morning, usually after a semi-to-very vivid dream that leaves itself half-finished. At this point I have a choice; go back to sleep and finish the dream, or get up and start the day. If I choose the former option, I’ll find it very hard to get up for several hours, regardless of how many alarms I set. If I choose the latter option — which is often quite difficult to do — I’ll generally start the day in a more positive manner.

The day will then proceed as normal, so long as I keep myself occupied with something or other that stimulates my brain — whether that’s work, watching something on TV or playing a game. If I stop doing things, I’ll find myself staring into space, and that same feeling I have when I’m trying to get up sets in; I just don’t want to move. I feel myself being tugged in different directions: the depression wants me to just stare into space and feel sorry for myself, dwelling on all the things that I don’t want to dwell on, or that are completely unnecessary to dwell on; the rational part of my brain tells me that I’d feel better if I just reached over and grabbed the PS3 controller, or stood up and got a glass of juice, or put my shoes on and went outside for a bit. Sometimes the depression wins; sometimes the rational part of my brain wins. The rational part usually wins the war, as I am still able to function and do the things I need to do each day, but depression often scores a few victories in skirmishes along the way.

By the end of the day, I’m often left feeling mentally exhausted from having to keep the depression at bay. Sometimes, despite feeling tired, I don’t feel I can go to bed until an ungodly hour because I know I’ll just spend hours unable to sleep, my mind awhirl with conflicting emotions and anxieties. Sometimes, I’ll try and exhaust myself before collapsing into bed; other times, I’ll just pray for the best, lie down and hope that sleep claims me before too long.

Being depressed is frustrating, because there is often no particular cause for it. “What’s wrong?” people will ask. “Nothing in particular,” I’ll reply, because it’s true; there is nothing wrong, but that just feeds into the whole cycle. I start to feel guilty about feeling down about, well, nothing at all, and then I feel bad about feeling guilty; if you’ve been there, you know what it’s like.

I’ll get over it. I always do. Just needed to vent a little today.

1269: In Sickness and In Health

So, now I’ve written my review for USgamer, I can talk a little about Time and Eternity, the game I’ve been playing recently.

For those too lazy to click through and read my review, the gist: Time and Eternity is an anime-inspired JRPG that makes use of hand-drawn, hand-animated anime cels instead of polygonal characters. Its story is based around two people — one of whom is actually two different people in a single body, so it’s actually three people, I guess — who are trying to get married but find their wedding interrupted by assassins. Naturally, the thing to do when this happens is to travel back in time and get to the bottom of what is going on.

I won’t go on too much about the game itself, because my review covers that territory in more detail. What I did want to talk about is how much I appreciate the fact this game exists, and how it highlights some issues with conventional criticism.

Time and Eternity has been mostly panned since its release, leading to severely negative preconceptions about it, even among the hardcore JRPG-lovin’ community. I personally enjoyed it a lot — I’ve finished it once, and am contemplating going back for a New Game Plus run to get the “special ending” — but at the same time acknowledge the fact that it most certainly isn’t a game that has universal appeal.

However, just because it doesn’t have universal appeal is not to say that it doesn’t have any appeal whatsoever. This is the thing that a lot of reviews I’ve seen seem to be missing to a certain extent; this is a game aimed at a specific, niche audience, which means by definition that it won’t appeal to everyone. Should it be punished for this fact? Absolutely not; in fact, it should be celebrated.

To qualify that statement, let me explain. One of the most common criticisms of modern gaming — modern mainstream gaming, I should say — is the dumbing down of popular franchises to appeal to a mass market. The idea that a new entry in a popular series needs to sell literally millions of copies to have been worth making in the first place. All too many times recently, we’ve seen high-quality games fail to reach the overambitious expectations set by their publishers and be declared a failure, despite the fact that something like Time and Eternity would kill for those numbers.

Meanwhile, however, titles like Time and Eternity from niche-focused publishers like NIS America bob along under the radar, only to be occasionally noticed by reviewers who aren’t really into the niche they’re aiming for, and thus get woefully, woefully misunderstood. Consequently, they get treated unnecessarily harshly.

This isn’t me being defensive about a game I enjoyed that everyone else didn’t; this is something that I feel is going to become a bigger issue as time goes on. Not every critic bears in mind the potential target audience for something; very few outlets have the “specialists” on staff to be able to handle all titles in an appropriate manner, and I’ve mentioned before how frustrating it is to read a criticism of something from someone who obviously hasn’t given it the amount of time it deserves, or who isn’t “well-read” enough in the genre to be able to make informed comments. I am under no illusions that I am able to handle every type of game out there, but I know what I’m interested in, and I know the things that I know well. I wouldn’t take on a review project for a genre I didn’t know well or didn’t have experience of; it wouldn’t happen in any other medium.

So anyway. If you’ve read my Time and Eternity review you’ll know that I quite liked it, but wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. There are only a select few people in my circle of friends that I would specifically recommend it to, in fact, but I have a feeling those people would enjoy it. Everyone else will probably not. And that’s fine. Not every game is for everyone, and the sooner we figure that out the better.

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times’ sake.

Specifically, as I’ve probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It’s nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It’s also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn’t; which supposedly “big games” ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn’t as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn’t have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether “2D” or “3D” is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is “2D”, but that’s a topic for another day, I think.) “Lara is a collection of pixels,” runs the slightly flawed argument, “and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her.” Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let’s not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They’re also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.

1267: Strange and Horrible Day

What a strange and horrible day today was.

Most of it went well enough. I went down to Brighton to work in the Eurogamer offices as I said I was going to, and that was thoroughly pleasant — particularly getting to meet some of the people I’ve only known as names and Twitter avatars up until now.

It was after my working day ended that things got strange and horrible though.

First up, I heard the news that Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb has died. I didn’t know him personally — and in fact my only real awareness of him was he and the GiantBomb team mocking USgamer’s name when we launched — but it’s been clear from the outpouring of grief on Twitter today that he was a beloved character in the gamer community. The poor guy had just got married, too; my heart really goes out to his friends, family, fans and colleagues. I can’t really say any more than that — other people who actually know him have said it much better than I can.

The fact that Davis had clearly touched so many lives and brightened them up made the subsequent event all the more difficult to stomach. Polar opposites, if you will; Davis as an apparent force for good; what I’m about to talk about as a clear force for shitty awful rubbishness.

I caught the train to Brighton today because Brighton is not very good with parking spaces, and also because the train fare was surprisingly cheap. In fact, it was so cheap that I paid just a couple of quid extra and got a First Class ticket for shits and giggles — Southern Trains’ First Class compartment is more of a small cupboard with eight seats in it rather than any kind of luxurious accommodation, but it was nice to be away from the noise and irriatingness of my fellow passengers.

The trip to Brighton went without incident. I played some Animal Crossing and some Velocity Ultra and was thoroughly ready to settle in for a workday by the time I got to the Gamer Network offices. It was the way back that was a little less pleasant.

The train I caught back to Southampton was rammed solid, so I was glad to be in the First Class compartment — it pretty much guaranteed me a seat. Moments after I sat down and settled in, though, another guy came in.

I will freely admit that I judged him as soon as I saw him. He was wearing tatty jogging bottoms and a tracksuit jacket, carrying a plastic bag and nursing a can of some cheap and awful-looking lager. He sat down, put his feet on the table and almost immediately started playing music incredibly loudly from his phone. My immediate prejudice against him was, it seems, entirely correct.

It became very apparent that he was deliberately trying to annoy me. I took off the headphones I was wearing to play Animal Crossing, because the combination of the 3DS woefully quiet sound output and my cheap headphones was not blocking out his shitty music. I turned to him and asked him politely if he’d turn down his music, please. He told me to “fuck off” and “stop being such a fat cunt”. I clearly wasn’t going to get any reason out of him, so I grit my teeth, put my headphones on and tried my best to ignore him, even when he was on the phone to one of his shitbag friends and was openly mocking me over the phone, knowing full well that I could hear him.

I won’t lie; I was somewhat afraid. I didn’t want to confront him over the way he was acting again, because he clearly wouldn’t listen to any sort of reason or a reasonable request. I didn’t know what to do, and I certainly wasn’t going to just walk out of the compartment and abandon the seat I’d paid for.

Eventually, the conductor showed up and discovered that — surprise! — this asshole didn’t have a ticket. I wanted to tell the conductor that he’d been being abusive and that I feared for my safety, but I utterly choked; it had taken all the confidence I had (which isn’t much) to ask him to turn his music down in the first place, and his aggressive response had destroyed any hope of me being able to be any more assertive. I just had to grit my teeth and continue to try and ignore him. Thankfully he got off the train a few stops later, so I didn’t have to suffer the entire two-hour train journey fearing for my safety and sanity.

The conductor came back after he got off and apologised to me; apparently this lout was a regular on that service, and there was really very little they could do about it. Fines wouldn’t work because his bank card inevitably wouldn’t work; they just had to grin and bear it.

Which is shit, really, isn’t it? To relate this to the earlier part of this post, there is really no justice in this world. Someone like Ryan Davis, who touched a significant number of people’s lives in a very positive manner from the look of things, is taken from the world at the age of 34 while utter wastes of space like this shitbag on the train this evening continue to survive and pollute the gene pool with their fetid stench.

1266: Hotness

It’s still massively warm, but at least our Internet is back. (It came back briefly shortly after I wrote last night’s post, actually, but by then it was too late.)

Our flat is like a fricking oven at the moment. All the hot air in the whole building rises, making our place on the top floor unbearably warm, even with all the windows open and fans running. You can feel it as you come up the stairs; pass by our first floor neighbours and ascend the stairs to the second floor (third if you’re American) and you can feel yourself pass through a wall of heat. It’s really quite unpleasant.

It’s times like this that I wish air conditioning — or indeed any form of cooling — was more commonplace here in the UK. Heating is fine — the heaters in our flat are great when it’s cold — but when it gets too warm? There’s really very little that you can do save for sit around in your pants and drink lots of cold drinks. We have been plying the poor rats with bowls of iced water, which they seem to appreciate; Lara, our slightly older rat, particularly seems to be suffering somewhat in the heat. Poor girl.

I’m heading down to Brighton tomorrow to work in the Eurogamer office for a change. It’s nice to have the option to work in an actual office with other people — this is something I’ve not had the luxury of doing in previous games writing gigs, so I intend to take advantage of it every so often, if only to break the monotony of working from home. (Also, hopefully the EG offices have air conditioning, which will save me gasping for breath in this oven of a flat. Also, I owe Chris Donlan a sandwich.)

One thing I’m actually quite looking forward to about the trip to Brighton is having a commute where I don’t have to drive. Finally — finally — I have a commute long enough to play some handheld games on. There will be some Animal Crossing, Velocity Ultra and possibly some Persona 4.

For now, though, there will be a large glass of something cold and wet in an attempt to cool off a bit, then sleep. Or, alternatively and more likely, very little sleep and instead a lot of sweaty tossing and turning as I attempt to get comfortable in an environment which is not in the slightest bit comfortable.

Moan moan moan, I know. At least Andy Murray won the tennis earlier. Supposedly that’s important or something.

1265: Warmness

It is extremely hot here at the moment. Judging by Twitter this evening, this particular climatic condition is not isolated solely to Southampton, but this doesn’t make me feel that much better.

I’m currently writing this post on my phone because for some frustrating reason our Internet has gone down. I’ve rebooted the router several times and it’s still not playing with us. I’m not entirely sure why I’m telling you this, but writing a post on my phone like this tends to put me in “stream of consciousness” mode more than anything else. (The WordPress app still doesn’t have a word count facility, either, so I just keep banging on until it “feels” about the right length.)

Family Guy is currently on BBC3. I do quite like Family Guy, but the frustrating way about its being broadcast on BBC3 is that whatever dribbling idiot is in charge of the scheduling for that otherwise atrocious station clearly has no idea how to broadcast something in chronological order and without repeating the same episode at least twice a week, sometimes more. These are all repeats anyway, so there’s really no need for this repetition, particularly when iPlayer is a thing that exists.

I say I quite like Family Guy, but there is one exception: that fucking episode with Surfin’ Bird. It was doubly annoying when it was on recently, because, as mentioned above, it was on twice in one week. I wasn’t even watching it and it irritated me. I know that episode is supposed to be irritating, but it just goes much too far in its irritation factor.

Anyway, my concentration is shot right now due to the combination of typing this on my phone, Family Guy on the TV, Andie playing Animal Crossing next to me and the rats playing in their cage at the end of the bed. (We brought them into the bedroom so they could have some company, and also because it’s slightly cooler in here; they don’t seem to like the heat all that much!)

As such, I’m going to call that a night there. Hopefully our Internetz will be back tomorrow, which will allow me to type something on a proper computer rather than using just my thumbs!

1264: Smash the World’s Shell

I finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena at last today.

Honestly, I’m really not sure what to make of it. I don’t mean I didn’t like it — I did — but rather, I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream and don’t really know how to parse what I watched.

As anyone who has watched Utena will tell you, of course, this is part of the attraction of the show. It is a show that prides itself in its surrealism, symbolism and deeply metaphorical nature. There’s a sense throughout that nothing is quite as it seems, and that you probably shouldn’t be taking some of the things that happen over the course of the 39 episodes too literally — not least because none of the characters appear to. They seem to shake off the frankly utterly baffling things going on with alarming rapidity, which leads you as the viewer to question whether those things were really happening at all, or whether they were merely representative of something else.

One of the best yet most frustrating things about Utena is that there are no definitive answers, though. The show’s creator, I’m told, enjoys taunting fans and deliberately misleading them, and pointedly won’t say what the definitive explanation for it all is. This might be because there isn’t a definitive explanation for it all; or it might simply be an attempt to get people to figure it out for themselves, come to their own conclusions and take whatever they want from the show as a whole.

In some respects, the whole thing reminded me somewhat of Silent Hill, of all things. Obviously the two series are very different from one another despite having a common heritage — Silent Hill is Japanese psychological horror, while Utena is colourful Japanese anime — but both actually have a surprising amount in common, not least of which is the fact that both are pretty open to a hefty degree of interpretation.

Both are riddled with psychosexual imagery, too. Neither are outright explicit with it — though Silent Hill 2 does feature a scene where Pyramid Head, that game’s iconic recurring monster, is raping a tailor’s mannequin — but both feature a very strong sense that sex and sexuality are a core theme. In Silent Hill’s case — particularly Silent Hill 2 — there’s a sense of guilt and shame attached to sexual desires for a variety of reasons; Utena, meanwhile, is rife with both phallic and… uh… whatever the word for the vaginal equivalent of phallic is… imagery. (Just “vaginal”, I guess, but that doesn’t seem to fit quite right.) There’s a strong sense of Utena’s characters reaching sexual maturity and coming to terms with that in different ways, much as James had to come to terms with aspects of his own sexual desires in Silent Hill 2.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’m intelligent enough to be able to do a particularly deep reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena without spending a significant amount of time researching, but suffice to say I enjoyed it and very much respected what it was doing, even if I didn’t always understand it fully. As I say, though, that was probably sort of the point all along.

If you’re curious, I’ll share a super-interesting essay I read earlier immediately after finishing the series. It doesn’t claim to be a definitive interpretation of the show, but it’s certainly a plausible reading of it, and definite food for thought. Check it out here.

1263: Lifestream

Final Fantasy VII came out on Steam today, a full year after its “new” PC port hit Square Enix’s store with new achievements, cloud saves and an option to make the whole thing insultingly easy for yourself.

Final Fantasy VII holds a very special place in my heart for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it was the first ever JRPG I played and understood.

I’d played role-playing games beforehand, largely on home computers, but didn’t really understand the concept. I’d tried games like Temple of Apshai, Alternate Reality and Origin’s dreadful Times of Lore, but didn’t really get my head around the concept of numbers affecting your performance in the game. When I first started playing Final Fantasy VII, I still didn’t quite get it, but all the core concepts gradually started to come to me: turn-based combat, abstract representations of game elements, characters distinguishing themselves with unique special abilities.

It wasn’t the mechanics that attracted me to Final Fantasy VII, though; it was the story. I’d never experienced a video game with a story 1) that long and 2) that emotionally engaging. Of course, both Final Fantasy VII’s length and emotional engagement value are both somewhat laughable today, but remember, this is 1997 we’re talking about here, and also I had never played a previous installment in the Final Fantasy series. Largely because quite a few of them never made it to Europe.

I’ll tell you the one reason I picked up Final Fantasy VII in the first place: my brother explaining to me that it was the first video game he knew of that had made people cry. I don’t remember if he was one of them or not, but certainly someone he associated with had wept openly at That One Scene That Everyone Knows by Now But Which I Won’t Spoil on the Off-Chance You Still Haven’t Played FFVII and Were Thinking About Picking it Up on Steam.

That idea was fascinating to me. Up until that point, computer and video games had been an important form of entertainment in my life, but very few had engaged my emotions in such a manner as to have a physical effect. In fact, none had. There had been story-based games, sure, and there were a number of these which contained characters I thought rather fondly of — I still fancy Sophia Hapgood from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis — but none which had really made me feel something.

By the time I reached the end of disc 1 on Final Fantasy VII, I was thoroughly invested in the story and characters. By the time that disc actually ended — you know the bit I’m talking about — I had to put the controller down, sit back and dry my eyes. It felt a bit odd tearing up at “just a game”, but it marked the beginning of my lifelong fascination with interactive storytelling — particularly those works that grab you by the heartstrings and tug, tug, tug.

I don’t know yet if I’ll pick up Final Fantasy VII on Steam. I have a perfectly serviceable physical copy on PS1, after all, and aside from the hi-res graphics on the PC version (which aren’t all that great) the PS1 version is The Way to Play. But that game will always have a very special place in my heart. It may not be the best entry in the Final Fantasy series; it may not be my favourite game of all time any longer, but it will always be special.

1262: Review of Reviews

I’ve been pondering an interesting question with regard to reviews — primarily in the video games medium, but I imagine it also applies to other media too.

That question is the one of who you are writing a review for.

When it comes to an obviously mainstream piece of entertainment, it’s obvious: the review is for everyone, or at the very least the significant majority of people who enjoy mainstream entertainment. When a new Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed hits the market, that review is aimed at everyone because the game is aimed at everyone. Theoretically, anyway — there’s plenty of room for debate there, but that’s something for another day.

But let’s take something that is obviously more niche interest; something that will obviously only appeal to a very specific set of people. Something that will appeal very strongly to that specific set of people, but which anyone from outside that group of people will not appreciate, for whatever reason. I’m hesitant to give specific examples because I’ve just started playing a game for review that very much falls into this category, and I will likely address this point in said review.

Here’s how I feel I should probably approach this situation, though: I would preface the review with a preamble that explains the things people from outside its target audience may appreciate and/or dislike, and the fact that the remainder of the review is primarily intended for people who do fall into the game/movie/book/whatever’s target audience. This step is unnecessary if you’re writing the review on a site that is specifically aimed at the media’s target audience, since it’s a given; if, however, you’re writing for a more “general audience” site, it’s worth noting, I feel.

The reason I feel it’s worth making this distinction is because of the subjective nature of opinions, and the fact that a “general audience” isn’t a homogenous bunch of people. Rather, said general audience can be subdivided into various smaller groups, each of which has their own interests. Should something be panned just because it’s not universally appealing? Of course it shouldn’t — unless it’s objectively actually broken in some way, it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt and looked at through the eyes of someone who it’s theoretically “for”. It’s not particularly fair, otherwise; you wouldn’t review a saxophone case and give it one star for your clarinet not fitting in it, for example. Not precisely the same thing, I know; perhaps a more apt comparison would be a classical music magazine giving a dubstep album a low mark for not being classical enough.

This highlights a peculiarity of the games press, though: we’re short on “specialist” outlets. We may have specialist writers working on a single outlet, of course, but with the exception of a few, mostly enthusiast-driven rather than commercial sites, however, a significant proportion of game sites try and cover as much of “everything” as possible. This probably does a lot of games a disservice, to be perfectly honest: games have a perceived level of “importance” that is usually directly proportional to their marketing budget and/or likely sales figures. This can, in some cases, lead to games of “lesser” importance not being given the time and attention they deserve; the most prominent example I can think of this happening is Cavia’s Nier, which received middling-to-low review scores from pretty much every big outlet around, but which is absolutely beloved by people who have played it through from start to finish and engaged with it.

Why the discrepancy? Reviewers are busy; they might not have the time to delve into all of Nier’s sidequests and look at it from the perspective of someone who has the luxury of time to immerse themselves in the world and story. It’s a simplistic explanation, but it’s entirely plausible; in the rush to get that Nier review done before whatever big triple-A title hit that week, it’s entirely believable that some reviewers may not have given it the time and attention it deserved.

I understand. It sucks, but I understand.

Hopefully over at USgamer, since our focus is more on editorial pieces than traditional reviews/previews and the like, we can give these “lesser” games an appropriate degree of care, and subject them to an appropriate degree of criticism rather than making snap judgements. And, to me anyway, that criticism should take into account the game’s target audience; if it’s a game obviously designed for a very specific group of people, how successful it is at reaching that audience — possibly to the exclusion of others — should absolutely form part of its evaluation.

Anyway. I’ve waffled on enough. It’s nearly 1am. I should sleep. Farewell for now.

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I’m not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once “shareware” titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I’m not even sure it’s still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured “registered version” if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn’t explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let’s take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad’s shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the “full” version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad’s spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete “episodes”, with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I’m thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no “just download it from Steam”, and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn’t really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It’s a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It’s $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)