1341: Life in Los Santos

I’m very impressed with Grand Theft Auto V. Much, much more than I was expecting to be — most notably for the fact that it’s actually the story keeping me interested.

Grand Theft Auto has undergone a gradual evolutionary process since its first installment. The first Grand Theft Auto was a fast-action arcade game — you had a score, lives, crazy bonuses and the fact you were driving around being an asshole was largely incidental. Grand Theft Auto II introduced a few additional mechanics, but was still largely a “game” rather than an immersive world and story.

Grand Theft Auto III is where things started to change. Transplanting the action from the top-down maps of earlier installments into a fully three-dimensional city, it was many folks’ first encounter with a “sandbox” game, in which you could do as you pleased. That “freedom” was something of an illusion, though; Grand Theft Auto III still had a very “game-like” progression whereby you couldn’t make it to the next “level” — the next of Liberty City’s three islands — until you had progressed far enough in the structured content. It worked well, though; by the time you finished a region, you knew it really well. That said, if you were booting up the game for the first time on, say, someone else’s console and you just wanted to get the great sports cars and cause havoc, there were arbitrary limitations in place.

Vice City took the basic structure of Grand Theft Auto III and removed those restrictions for the most part. The Miami-inspired setting was split between two islands that you could drive back and forth between at will, and there were plenty of things for you to do besides the story missions — though the story itself was interesting in a Scarface sort of way. This was taken to an extreme in San Andreas, which offered three cities and a whole host of countryside in between, with plenty of side things to do along the way, although the early part of the game did reinstate the arbitrary game-like restrictions on where you were “allowed” to go.

Grand Theft Auto IV was another turning point for the series. Although III onwards had had an actual narrative with a beginning, middle and end, IV placed the emphasis on the story rather than freeform chaos. You still had a lot of choice and freedom in how you went about beating the game, but real efforts had clearly been made to make the protagonist an interesting character. For some, however, this went against the grain of what they felt Grand Theft Auto “should” be about — particularly when you started getting regularly harassed on the phone by virtual in-game girlfriends and friends to go and hang out. I personally quite liked it — though not enough, I might add, to ever actually finish it.

And now we have Grand Theft Auto V, a game which is attracting as much cynicism as it is popularity and commercial success. And I’m a bit sad about the cynicism part, because Grand Theft Auto V is doing some clever things, is written well and is a remarkably effective piece of fiction — both from the perspective of its scripted narrative and in the building of its world that presents a skewed, twisted but eerily accurate view of our own society in 2013. At the same time, the open world chaos is still very much present and correct — it just doesn’t feel as “gamey” as it once did. And that’s good — it shows the series has evolved over time rather than stagnating, because it has.

Grand Theft Auto V has the most seamless transitions between freeform wandering around and scripted narrative that I’ve ever seen. There’s no loading breaks, no fade-outs with mission titles, no “letterboxing” — just one moment you’ll be walking around, the next you come across a couple of people talking, you walk up to them and you’re seamlessly into a cutscene.

Then there’s “the torture scene,” a scene that has caused a considerable amount of hand-wringing from people across the industry. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)

In “the torture mission,” two of the game’s three protagonists become embroiled in a plot involving the in-game equivalent of the FBI. Having “rescued” a hostage from the CIA-equivalent, said hostage is then kidnapped by the FIB (sic) and dragged to an abandoned warehouse for interrogation. Michael, one of the protagonists, is sent out to find a person — supposedly a threat to national security — based on the information the hostage gives. Trevor, another of the protagonists, stays behind to administer torture and get the hostage to talk.

For the mission, your control flips back and forth between Trevor and Michael several times. As Michael, you have to use the information Trevor finds to locate and assassinate the right person; as Trevor, you have the option of using several different implements to administer torture to the hostage, and you have to actively participate in said torture by following on-screen prompts.

The scene is graphic, horrible, disturbing and unpleasant. Taken out of context, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rockstar had finally gone too far with this scene. Take it in context, meanwhile, and it’s entirely appropriate for this scene to be there. It makes sense, and it has something to say. The hostage starts talking almost immediately after the prospect of torture is on the table, and yet as the player we’re still forced to administer torture four times in total, reflecting the fact that both Trevor and Michael are very much under the control of the FIB at this point. Trevor, being a psychopath, takes a certain degree of pleasure from administering the torture but is still aware that not performing it would be worse for both him and the hostage. And when it’s all over and the FIB agents leave Trevor alone with the hostage to “deal with” him, Trevor instead cuts the hostage’s bonds, loads him into his car and drives him to the airport, telling him that his old life is over now and he needs to get as far away from Los Santos as possible.

“Torture is for the torturer,” Trevor says to the hostage on the drive. “And for the person giving orders to the torturer. Sometimes it’s for the torturee, but only if they’re paying well enough. It’s a terrible means of getting information.”

I had no idea of the latter part of the scene’s context from the articles that emerged shortly after the game’s release, and it’s important. It gives it meaning and a message — whether or not you think it’s succeeding in delivering that message is a matter of opinion, of course, but I think it was remarkably effective. One thing I am certain of, though; it’s certainly not in there just to court controversy. Like so many other things in Grand Theft Auto V, it’s a brutal and biting attack on some of the things about modern culture that we might not want to acknowledge or admit.

Should we have been able to skip it? Should it have come with warnings? Those are questions I can’t answer, I’m afraid, but for me, some of the impact of that particular part of the story would have been lost if that scene was not present.

And I’ll be honest, I never expected to be sitting here talking about the impact a Grand Theft Auto’s story had on me, which is just one of many signs of how far the series has come.

1340: Bzzzzz

Think I’ve had too much caffeine today. I sometimes feel like caffeine doesn’t really affect me all that much, but then I drink as much as I apparently have today and I get all jittery and anxious. It’s not an altogether pleasant feeling, but at least I think it’s finally wearing off and I just want to sleep. It’s like that moment in The Sims 3 where your temporary caffeine buzz positive moodlet wears off and is replaced by a caffeine crash negative movement. Actually, it’s not “like” that at all, it just is that.

I should have probably heard the warning signs when I went to work in the coffee shop earlier, and I ordered my usual “first drink of the working day” if I’m working in there — an iced white Americano. I’m pretty sure that up until today, the people there have been making said iced white Americanos wrong, because previously they looked more like iced lattes. (I don’t mind; I like iced lattes. Iced Americanos are marginally less calorific, though.)

“Four shots,” said the girl serving me to her colleague who was preparing my drink. Four shots? So I was essentially drinking four espressos in one go? Hmm.

I thought nothing of it at the time, and it certainly didn’t feel like it had much of a “kick” while I was drinking it, so once I’d got on top of all the work I had to do I had a latte to keep me going through the rest of the afternoon.

That was the tipping point, I think. While it was delicious as usual, once I finished it I started to feel a little queasy. Not to the point of actually wanting to be sick or anything, just… not quite right. And as the day continues to progress, I started to feel more and more anxious and jittery. As I said before, it’s not an altogether pleasant feeling.

There’s probably a lesson to be learned amid all this somewhere. Will I learn it, though? Probably not. I give it a few days before I do this exact same thing to myself again, completely accidentally.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and try and sleep. Or, failing that, I’m going to stare at the ceiling for a few hours while trying very hard not to let all the chattering inside my brain distract me too much. Or, failing that, I’ll go and play some more GTA V, which has hooked me a whole lot more than I thought it would. The police chase I had earlier, which culminated in me driving an open-top sports car up a mountain and then flinging it off the summit at top speed, only to cartwheel several times on the way down and land right way up on the freeway while in the middle of a phone conversation, made it all worthwhile.

Anyway. Sleep. Attempted sleep. Whatever. Bzzzzzzz.

1339: Obligatory GTA Post

So I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto V and, as often happens with overly-hyped games that I’ve started to feel sick of the sight of before they already came out, I’ve found myself genuinely surprised to be enjoying it.

This doesn’t make the “hype” problem any less of a problem, though. I get that people are excited about it and that it’s a relatively “important” game from the perspective of it costing a fucking fortune to make and also being one of the last great “big” games of this hardware generation, but the sheer level of hype is actually having something of a negative impact.

You might think that’s a contradiction — any publicity is good publicity, after all — but in GTA’s case the sheer pressure there is to write something — anything — about this fucking game is leading to what I can’t help but feel is a bit of an unrealistic picture.

The cynicism surrounding the game’s characters, writing and story is probably the worst thing. Going in to GTA V relatively “blind” having deliberately avoided as much of the hype as I possibly could, I’ve been surprised at quite how well-written it is. Michael is a sympathetic character prone to bouts of extravagant rage — often manifesting in some of the game’s more spectacular setpieces — while Franklin is a character who is clearly much too smart for the life he’s been living up until this point.

Trevor, meanwhile, whose missions I finally unlocked this evening, is a genuinely loathsome character, but not in the sense that he stops me wanting to play. On the contrary, his loathsomeness is horrifyingly compelling — particularly as he’s not just a blindly raging psychopath and is instead clearly something of a complex character prone to violent mood swings. He’s cracking genuinely amusing witticisms one moment; screaming bloody murder (literally) the next. He’s certainly memorable.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the game’s overall sense of morality, and I do think that it’s the most graphic, violent GTA we’ve ever seen. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though; if a story told in a medium known for desensitising people to virtual violence still has the capacity to shock and make you feel uncomfortable, it’s doing its job right. Is it necessary? Perhaps not, but this is the story the writers have chosen to tell and the characters they have chosen to create, and in a game so focused on its unfolding plot — and yes, regardless of all the open-world chaos there is on offer, this is very much a game about its plot and characters — I have to respect the writers’ decisions. Also, we are talking about a series called Grand Theft Auto — a series which has long been known for its strong focus on deliberately being a tosser.

Interestingly, one thing I’ve found with GTA is that I want to “method act” the characters. When I’m playing as Michael, I want to play things straight — drive properly and respectfully, not start fights or cause chaos. When I’m Franklin, it’s similar — it feels particularly right, as Franklin, to stop for the people who’ve had their bag snatched, chase down the criminal and then return it to the person who lost it rather than walking off with it. When I’m Trevor, meanwhile, everything goes out of the window; it doesn’t feel “wrong” to take the most direct route possible to a destination, even if that means flattening every fence and lamppost along the way; it doesn’t feel “wrong” to wander down the street punching random pedestrians in the face.

I had my suspicions before I unlocked him, but now I’m all but completely certain that Trevor is in the game primarily for one reason: to address the most common criticism of GTA IV, which was that the story the game was trying to tell and the freedom to cause carnage were at odds with one another. Using the “method acting” analogy again, it simply didn’t feel right to play Niko as a psychopath who randomly attacked people and stood in the middle of the road with a rocket launcher. The simple presence of Trevor in GTA V — plus the ability to give him a massive beard and a ridiculous scraggy mullet just to make him look even more disheveled than he already is — ably addresses this concern while still allowing the rest of the game to unfold its narrative in peace. Well, as much peace as can be expected from a GTA narrative, anyway.

Is GTA V perfect? No, of course not. Does it have issues that could do with resolving? Perhaps, though I’d perhaps argue not to the degree some people are making out. Is it good, though? Absolutely, and if you’ve been debating whether or not to get it… you should at least give it a look. If it does something that turns you off, fair enough; but it’s certainly well worth a look.

1338: Educating Everywhere

I watched an episode of Channel 4’s docusoap/fly on the wall show Educating Yorkshire earlier and, as I could have predicted, I found it most enjoyable.

You see, despite my unpleasant experiences at the chalkface a few years back, I still find myself interested in the world of education. I find schools to be fascinating places, with their collection of hundreds or even thousands of diverse people thrown together and expected to survive without killing each other. They’re a great source of stories, both from the perspective of the teachers and the pupils, and I am constantly fascinated by fiction set in schools. (This explains my love of the following things: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; appalling high school drama movies; slice of life anime; visual novels)

Educating Yorkshire is set up well to tell some of these supposedly real stories, and it tells them well. Over the course of the single episode I watched today, we learned about the school’s headteacher and his ideals; the students’ attitudes towards him; the “back stories” of two persistent troublemakers; and a few other things besides. Although everything that happened was mundane to the max, these stories were presented in a compelling manner that made them interesting.

One image I absolutely could not get out of my head, though, was how much typical disciplinary proceedings at a school resemble a police interrogation — or at least one as depicted in the media. Before long, I was picturing Cole Phelps from L.A. Noire yelling at a kid (“[DOUBT] You did it, didn’t you, you sick son of a bitch!”) and pondering if there might be a market for a video game in which you play a teacher and have to investigate these incredibly mundane transgressions.

Well, I’d play it, even if no-one else would. Though given some of the creative interactive experiences we’re starting to get today, now, I can’t help but feel I might not be alone!

1337: The Value of Comments (Or the Lack Thereof)

Grand Theft Auto V’s reviews came out today — the game itself is out tomorrow.

Unsurprisingly, comments sections the world over erupted into chaos on each individual site’s review (although USgamer’s has, as ever, remained largely very polite and articulate, which is a trend I sincerely hope continues).

Of particular concern is Gamespot’s review, which gave the game 9/10 while still managing to point out the fact that yes, GTA has some issues with women that it really should have probably gotten over by now. My concern isn’t with the review itself, which is an interesting, well-argued read; rather, it’s with the 3,192 comments that are beneath it at the time of writing — a figure that is literally increasing by the second right now.

What is the value in that comments section? Leaving aside the loathsome content of a significant proportion of those individual comments, what possible value is there in allowing people to comment on a review at such a rate that it becomes literally impossible to follow a single conversation? What possible value is there in 3,216 (yep, it’s gone up in just those few words) comments, many of which contain the same ill-informed, bile-spewing opinions? For that matter, even if they didn’t contain said bile, what possible value is there in having 3,230 comments beneath a review? Who is going to read all that shit except, possible, judging by Twitter, for people who have a particular taste for masochism?

It’s not just Gamespot’s review that’s a problem, though it, at the time of writing, appears to feature by far the most objectionable people. Destructoid’s Jim Sterling has been complaining about commenters once again lambasting him for rating [game x] one score and [game y] another score when they have nothing to do with each other. He notes that he doesn’t believe review scores are the problem there, either.

Perhaps they aren’t, either; perhaps the problem is the comments section.

The trouble with proposing something drastic like eradicating all comments sections, however, is that they’re occasionally valuable — though increasingly we’re in a situation where comments sections are only useful and conducive to meaningful discussion on smaller sites such as USgamer, and personal outlets such as this blog. In the case of large-scale sites like IGN and Gamespot, it seems that all comments sections achieve is to give imbeciles a soapbox to stand on and bellow their idiocy from while simultaneously finding like-minded twats to validate their opinions, culminating in the ridiculous sight of people genuinely clamouring for Gamespot to fire the reviewer Carolyn Petit for giving Grand Theft Auto V 9 out of 10 instead of the 10 that they, the people who have not played it yet, think it deserves.

But what can be done? Should IGN and Gamespot just close their comments sections?

Well… Yes, I think they should. They’re clearly not adding any value to the conversation. There’s no sense in trying to make it a “dialogue” between the site and the readers when the comments come at such a pace and in such a volume that it’s impossible for the original writer to engage in discussion with people who actually want to engage in discussion, and in the meantime the braying idiots just get a megaphone with which to bellow their idiotic shit into the void. Shut ’em all off, I say, and leave the discussion to sites with a community small enough to make online interactions actually meaningful; let the big sites become places from which content is just shared and discussed via social media rather than the wretched scum-pits they seem to be becoming today. It’ll put the attention back on the actual writers and the things they’re saying — and it will probably significantly benefit said writers’ mental health, too, because I know I certainly wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the torrents of abuse some people have been getting today.

3,512 comments.

Can we reboot the Internet?

[EDIT, June 7, 2023: 22,164 comments. Just in case you were curious.]

1336: Where’s My Paid-For Version?

Disney released a sequel to its popular iOS game Where’s My Water? recently. Where’s My Water?, if you’re unfamiliar, is supposedly one of the best iOS games out there, and even managed to pick up an Apple Design Award at WWDC in 2012. It’s an extremely popular game that was well received by both press and public alike, and spawned a couple of spin-off games prior to the recently released official sequel.

The official sequel is, inevitably, free-to-play, unlike the 69p original. Said original did have in-app purchases, yes, but they were mostly actual additional content — new levels and so on — plus, until recently, the game was continuously supported with weekly challenges that kept the game relevant over time. (The removal of these weekly challenges in the most recent update has annoyed a bunch of players, incidentally, but surely they can’t expect Disney to continually support a game from 2011 forever.)

Where’s My Water 2 has, unsurprisingly, been torn a new one by App Store reviewers for being free-to-play — and with good reason. Like Plants vs. Zombies 2, there is not one single convincing reason why making it free-to-play is a good thing for anyone except Disney. At least you can play Plants vs. Zombies 2 for as long as you like, however; Where’s My Water 2 adds the ultimate insult of incorporating an energy mechanic into the game, effectively blocking people from continuing to play every few levels unless they pay up.

I hate energy systems. They were a fucking pain in the arse when I had to review mobile and social games because they meant I could only play the game for a certain amount of time before having to leave it for several hours (because I sure as fuck wasn’t paying), and they’re a fucking pain in the arse if I just want to enjoy a mobile game these days. They’re a slap in the face to the player, and effectively a sign that the developer/publisher of the game don’t trust their player base to actually slip them some money if they’re enjoying themselves. It represents the absolute worst of everything about free-to-play, and it needs to stop.

I’m glad that App Store reviewers are starting to speak up against things like energy systems and excessive in-app purchases, because it’s getting out of control. I find myself actually wanting Where’s My Water 2 to fail, because it will teach Disney a lesson. This may sound harsh — I haven’t played Where’s My Water 2, so for all I know it could be a great game, and I’m sure the dev team worked hard on it — but this continuing trend of games that hold their content hostage needs to stop. Rather than it being an incentive to download and try something for myself, I will now actively avoid games on the App Store that are “free”. And since most of the games on the App Store are now “free”, this means I’m simply avoiding most of the stuff on the App Store, which is probably doing a great disservice to the few people out there who are doing great work, and who are treating their players with respect.

You want to see how to do free-to-play right? Go play Card Hunter.

1335: Perrrrssssppp

Hello! We fixed our Internet, no thanks to BT; Andie called ’em up earlier and they wanted to spend several days “testing our line” before calling us back on Tuesday, presumably with an engineer visit to follow after that if necessary — which it probably would be, since it appeared to be our fibre modem that was borked. Thankfully, a past example of BT’s incompetence meant that we did, in fact, actually have two fibre modems, so we tried the old one and it turns out it still works. Win.

Anyway, enough of that. What I want to talk about today is the PSP.

The PSP came out in 2005, some five years after the launch of the PS2 and a year before the PS3. It failed to make a significant impact in the West upon its original launch and has sometimes been considered one of the problem children of Sony’s lineup. There’s a degree of justification for that — its reliance on a proprietary physical media format (UMDs); a laudable but ultimately doomed attempt to jump into the “all-digital” future well before the world was ready for it (PSP Go); a distinct lack of prominent marketing — but in the intervening years since its original launch, the PSP has actually become one of my favourite systems.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is the fact that after eight years, it’s still relevant and doesn’t show any sign of going away any time soon — and it has the Vita to thank for that. Vita is the best way to play PSP games due to its lovely OLED screen and its second thumbstick — which, when playing PSP games, can be assigned to emulate buttons, allowing for a fairly convincing fudging of dual-stick control for games that previously only supported a single stick — and as such has, in many cases, given the surprisingly vast PSP library of games a whole new lease of life.

This isn’t a case of “it’s backward compatible so you can still play old games” either — people are legitimately still making brand new games for the PSP. Just recently we’ve had Sweet Fuse, for example, and JRPG fans were all aflutter recently when it was announced that Xseed and Carpe Fulgur would be bringing the second part of the magnificent Trails in the Sky to English speakers in the near future.

Access to the entire PSP digital library is, for me, a convincing enough reason in itself to own a Vita — as I noted above, PSP games look and play great on Vita, with the only slight issue being that you can’t play physical versions of games due to Vita’s lack of a UMD drive. It’s also something you can point to any time people complain that Vita has no games — a complaint which is getting more and more inaccurate by the day, incidentally.

So although the PSP is very much one of Sony’s more troublesome children, I have to give the company a huge amount of credit for creating a platform that has endured as long as it has. The PSP has some fantastic games, if you’ve never explored them for yourself, and you might just find yourself discovering some new favourites. And with the impending release of Vita TV — which I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see in the West — all those of you who don’t like playing on handhelds for whatever reason will be able to play these great games on your TV, too. Which sounds pretty great to me.

Now I’m going to go sit in bed and play Sweet Fuse.

1334: Blackout

Our Internet has gone down. Proper down, too — there’s not even any signal coming through the magic box on the wall into the modem, though the phone still works.

As such, I’m writing this on the WordPress app on my phone, which means I have no word counter and thus have to roughly judge how much I’ve written. (For those who haven’t been following me for that long, my personal target for these daily posts is at least 500 words apiece, which I usually achieve — it’s a bit harder to judge when writing on the small screen of my phone, though.)

It’s quite fortunate that we have mobile devices with their own Internet connections these days, as it means we don’t have to be completely cut off from the world when something like this happens. But I do always find it interesting to think back to a time pre-broadband when this happens — a time when you had to tell everyone in the house if you were going online, because doing so meant tying up the phone line. There was also no means of illicitly going online in the middle of the night, either, because of the horrendous screechy noises that modems made, and also due to the fact that all your midnight porn browsing would show up on the phone bill at the end of the month.

Sometimes I do think it would be nice to go back to those times, when there wasn’t the pressure on everyone to share stupid photos of pointless shit, six-second videos of someone being a twat or misattributed quotes and unresearched scare stories.

Then I need to look something up and I remember the Internet is an important part of modern life, and that there ain’t no going back now.

1333: Passé

Considering how exciting the iPhone was when it first launched, I’m surprised how unmoved I am by the prospect of the new ones. At present, my 4S is still working just fine, and for the first time in many years of phone upgrades, I’m feeling no particular desire to have the latest and greatest piece of technology in my pocket.

I think part of the reason is what I’ve already said: my 4S is working fine, still — though it remains to be seen whether iOS 7 will kill its performance — and thus I certainly don’t need a new phone. The other part is the fact that smartphone upgrades each year have become so incremental that it’s just not particularly exciting any more — the new iPhone looks much like the old iPhone, and will probably work much like the old iPhone, except perhaps a bit faster, depending on what it is you’re doing.

One reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone, iPad, whatever would be if you’re a big game player on these devices. And I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I’m just not.

This may surprise you, given the amount of waffling on about games that I do on this here blog, but it’s true: I haven’t played an iOS game for probably months now, and every time I look at the App Store, I have very little desire to even try a lot of the stuff that churns its way through the front page and into the abyss beyond, never to be seen again.

There’s the odd exception; I still have something of a soft spot for the various excellent iOS versions of board and card games, but in most cases I’d rather play the real thing. For the most part, though, iOS gaming carries little to no interest for me; it’s not for me any more. It is, instead, for children, or people who aren’t particularly “game-literate”, or people who don’t mind increasingly obtrusive business models. There’s relatively little with any “meat”, though; nothing you can get stuck into for hours at a time, and in fact an awful lot of games are specifically designed to stop you from playing after a short while by causing you to run out of “energy” or “fuel”, or for your car to require “repairing” — and, of course, you can instantly get back into the game if you’d just hand over your credit card details… No, thank you.

I’m probably painting a somewhat unfair picture of the iOS landscape there, since I know there’s a lot of talented developers working on the platform — some out of necessity, some out of choice — but I’m sort of over the idea of mobile gaming, for now at least. There are too many exciting things going on on other platforms — including dedicated gaming handhelds — for me to muster up any enthusiasm for a platform prone to making really, really stupid collective decisions when it comes to the way games should be made.

Perhaps I’ll revisit mobile gaming if it ever emerges from the free-to-play rut it’s currently stuck in, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon.

1332: Sweet Otome

I started playing the PSP game Sweet Fuse: At Your Side after finishing Corpse Party and it’s been an interesting experience, particularly given my gaming background.

Sweet Fuse is what’s known as an “otome game”, you see — in stark contrast to “bishoujo games” that tend to have a male protagonist and a veritable harem of dateable female characters, otome games are the complete opposite: female protagonist, veritable harem of dateable male characters. (There are also yuri variations where the female protagonist can date female characters, much as there are yaoi titles for men, where a male protagonist can date male characters. But let’s not get off the point: Sweet Fuse is an otome game in its purest sense.)

I was somewhat intrigued by the prospect of playing Sweet Fuse since although I’m no stranger to playing female characters in games, where romantic options exist I will still generally pair up my heroine with another woman in preference to anything else — my Dragon Age character made a beeline for Leliana, for example, while my LadyHawke in Dragon Age II went for Merrill, as I recall. Sweet Fuse, being an otome game, was going to make me (or rather, my female protagonist) date a male character and like it. And although I’m fairly open-minded about such things, I confess I did feel somewhat skeptical about whether or not I’d feel the same degree of emotional engagement seeing a relationship grow from the opposite way around to how it’s usually depicted in this sort of game.

Why shouldn’t I, though? In your average dating sim or visual novel, you are not playing as the protagonist; you’re along for the ride and making occasional decisions on their behalf. You see stuff unfold and occasionally get frustrated at the protagonist not doing things exactly as you would have done them — but therein lies a sense of dramatic tension. In practice, the only thing that is different between a bishoujo game and an otome game is the fact that the voices are all female in one and all male in the other; and the same for the on-screen portraits of other characters.

That is a reasonably big difference, to be fair, but the fact is that in both cases, you’re still watching two people who aren’t you get together rather than pretending to get off with some virtual girl/dude from the first person. In that sense, it’s not really any different to reading a novel with a love story, or watching a movie with love scenes. So why should playing as a protagonist of the opposite sex who becomes attracted to people who are the same sex as you make you feel weird?

Answer: it doesn’t. In the admittedly limited time I’ve spent following the adventures of Saki Inafune and her six gentlemen friends as they attempt to defuse the bombs a terrorist who is also a pig secreted in her uncle Keiji Inafune’s theme park — yes, that is indeed the creator of Mega Man — I’ve been surprised to find myself feeling much the same as I do when playing a bishoujo game.

Specifically, I’ve found myself playing “favourites” with the cast of dateable characters. I can’t quite pin down if it’s due to actually finding them attractive, or simply liking their characters, but I’ve naturally found myself gravitating towards one of the characters in my first playthrough, much like I would in a typical bishoujo game. (I tend to “go with my gut” for my first playthrough of this type of game, then go back and systematically pursue the remainder of the cast/endings one at a time in order to see everything the game and its stories have to offer.)

It helps that Sweet Fuse has a cast of male characters easily as diverse — possibly more so, even — than your average bishoujo game. There’s the cold, stern detective; the young boy band idol; the aggressive, overly-compensating male escort (who reminds me of Kanji from Persona 4 to a distracting degree); the world-weary reporter; the shut-in; and the “mystical guy”. The latter, a guy named Urabe, is the one I have my eye on for this first playthrough, but we’ll see where it goes.

I’m only on the second “stage” of my first playthrough so far so there’s probably quite a way to go yet. There’s some interesting mechanics in the game that I’ll talk about a bit more on another occasion. In the meantime, if you have the slightest interest in character-centric, story-focused games — and a PSP or Vita — then you could certainly do far worse than check out Sweet Fuse. Full review coming soon over on USgamer.