1362: Caged Animal

I like David Cage’s stuff, and I’m not ashamed to say that.

I shouldn’t have to point that out, really, but it seems it’s become rather fashionable to bash Cage’s work in journalist/critic circles recently and frankly I’m not altogether sure why — it seems to be one of those things that has just become accepted without much argument. Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and now Beyond: Two Souls all have their flaws, sure, but they’re also some of the most genuinely impressive interactive stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through. (I haven’t finished Beyond yet, but given that it’s had me absolutely glued to the screen for the last several hours, I feel I can say that with some confidence.)

Let’s talk about Beyond, because it’s had enormously mixed reviews.

Beyond is the spiritual successor to both Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit in that it combines Heavy Rain’s realistic appearance with the more supernatural aspects of Fahrenheit’s narrative. It’s got a peculiar structure in that it jumps back and forth in time rather than unfolding chronologically like Heavy Rain, but there is at least a narrative framing device in place to justify it. (Whether or not you think it’s a good narrative framing device is a matter of opinion, but I have no objections to it.)

Like its predecessors, Beyond is an interactive movie above all else. That is, this is largely David Cage’s story, and you have the opportunity to influence it along the way with your action or inaction rather than having complete freedom. In this sense, it is more like a fully animated visual novel than a traditional “game” per se, and the experience is crammed full of contextual actions and quick-time events. These are, much like the interactive movie style as a whole, very much a matter of taste.

One of the most common complaints levelled at Cage’s work is that he might as well be making movies. He might, since he’s clearly a talented director and cinematographer, even if — arguably — his writing skills don’t quite match. However, I’ve still found all his works considerably more interesting, enjoyable and engaging than a traditional movie for the simple fact that even the relatively limited interaction offered by contextual actions and quick-time events means that you’re involved in the game. You’re physically doing things to participate in the game; perhaps you’re not controlling the character with complete freedom, but that doesn’t matter — you’re determining whether they succeed or fail at something, and you’re making choices that actually have an impact. It’s the same reason a visual novel, where 90% of the “gameplay” is you pressing a button to advance the text, can still be compelling.

This isn’t to put down games with strong emergent narrative or freedom to do as you please, of course — my recent stories about Grand Theft Auto V should be enough to convince you of that — but as a card-carrying narrative junkie, I’d always, always much rather play a game with a strong, pre-composed story and perhaps limited freedom than something where I have the ability to go completely off-piste and run riot.

Short version: if you liked Cage’s past work, you should most definitely pick up a copy of Beyond: Two Souls. More thoughts — both here and at USgamer — when I’ve actually beaten it.

1361: Hajimemashite

A new experience for me tonight as I started an evening class. That’s a symbol of being a “grown-up” isn’t it? Something like that.

I’ve actually been looking to do something like this for a while, as I’ve been missing the experience of learning stuff. And I’m not talking about the interminable tedium of corporate training or the equal horror of teacher training days; I’m instead talking about actually sitting there in a class, learning something that won’t necessarily be directly relevant to your life and/or job immediately, but which will provide some sort of knowledge you can whip out on occasion and impress people with.

Those who know me will be unsurprised to hear that it’s Japanese I’m learning. My choice of this is partly due to my own interest in Japanese culture, but also for the fact that it might genuinely be useful in the future depending on what directions my career goes in. If I can get good enough at Japanese — this is a big “if”, obviously — I’ll be able to talk to Japanese developers more easily, or move into localisation (something I’d actually quite like to do) or any manner of other things. The prospects are quite exciting — a hefty period of concerted study away, sure, but still exciting nonetheless.

I impressed myself with how much of the first session’s content I already knew having picked it up from various places. Anime and games are not always the best place to pick up Japanese since there’s often a lot of dialect and deliberately “wrong” mannerisms used (Squid Girl’s use of “de geso” at the end of every sentence springs to mind, as does Compa’s overuse of “desu” in Hyperdimension Neptunia) that will probably make you look rather foolish if you were to use them in conversation desu.

This evening, we largely focused on things like introducing yourself, giving some basic details like where you’re from, what you do and that sort of thing, and asking questions. A lot of it was stuff I’d already figured out for myself from a combination of my own deductions and occasional Internet searches prompted by an “I wonder if…” thought. I was pleased to discover that a lot of things I’d figured out for myself turned out to be correct, so I can now reasonably confidently introduce myself, say good morning, good day, good evening and good night, and say “excuse me” and “sorry” — both rather important.

I felt a little of my usual social awkwardness when we were required to talk and practice with the other students in the room, but no-one bit my head off, yelled at me or called me a prick, so I guess it was successful. I’m sure everyone — including me — will loosen up in the coming weeks, too; after all, the very nature of an evening class means that everyone there actually wants to be there to learn something, so it’s unlikely anyone there is going to be a cock deliberately.

So a success for now then. I have absolutely no idea how much I’ll learn over the course of the next few months, but I’m interested to find out, and the structure of a class will hopefully spur me on to keep practicing and studying in my own time too.

On that note, oyasumi nasai.

1360: Lord of Spirits

After going back and forth on whether or not I really felt like doing it, I’ve decided to go for a Platinum trophy on Tales of Xillia. As I wrote some time back, I’ve started thinking of trophies (though not so much Achievements, for some reason) as a means of showing my appreciation for a particularly good game. Working on the assumption that developers and publishers are looking at trophies and achievements as some sort of metric as much as they’re intended as a metagame for players, I’m happy to put in a bit of extra effort to show I liked the game enough to devour every bit of content it had to offer.

My hesitation with Tales of Xillia’s trophies is that although the game itself is excellent, the trophy list was rather uninspiring and distinctly grindy. A significant proportion of the trophies consist of “use [x] character’s [y] ability [z] times”, and there’s one frustratingly missable trophy that’s going to require a second playthrough to get. (Fortunately, I was intending on doing that anyway, since Tales of Xillia gives you the option to run through the story as one of two different main characters.)

What I’ve found in the course of going for some of these trophies, though, is that they’re slightly more enjoyable than they might have suggested. The most interesting thing about a lot of them is that they’re seemingly designed to give you a deeper appreciation of the battle system and how it works — sure, you can knock the difficulty down to Easy and basically hack-and-slash your way through, but go for some trophies and you’ll come to understand that each character handles noticeably differently, and has special abilities that are suited to various situations, many of which require actual skill to pull off. Jude, for example, has an ability called “Snap Pivot” where if you block and backstep at the right moment, you’ll zip around behind an enemy for some uninterrupted pummelling for a moment; performing the same move with Leia, meanwhile, causes her staff to extend, giving her a greater reach for a few moments.

The way the trophies help you understand the battle system extends beyond the ones where you have to actively trigger skills, though. Each character has a “link skill” that they perform when you’re not actively controlling them, but you partner them up with your active character. Achieving some of the trophies requires that you understand how, why and when these link skills are triggered: Jude heals you if you get knocked down (assuming he wasn’t knocked down as well); Leia steals from enemies if you knock them down, requiring you to figure out which skills are reliable knockdown providers; Rowen protects you from magic; Alvin breaks guards; and Milla can “bind” enemies.

I’ve still got a way to go yet — including a whole other playthrough, which hopefully shouldn’t take too long, given that I’m cleaning up as many of the time-consuming trophies as possible in the post-game section of my first run — but I’m still enjoying myself, and given how consistently good Xillia has been, I’m happy to show it my appreciation by striving for a Platinum.

1359: Lady of the Wind

I’d been putting it off, but I finally beat the Garuda boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, renowned by some as one of the harder battles in the game’s main story.

The “Primal” fights that you engage in over the course of the main quest’s narrative are genuinely thrilling engagements that reward cooperation, communication and everyone knowing what they’re doing. Sure, the fact that there’s the possibility of instakill moves is frustrating, but with a good party gathered you shouldn’t fall foul of them, particularly if you’ve taken the time to either discuss the fight with more experienced combatants beforehand, or learned from past mistakes.

The thing I’ve been most impressed with by the Primal battles in particular but also a number of other setpiece engagements in the game is how exciting they are. This is something I’m not altogether used to in MMOs, many of which are focused on doing things by rote as efficiently as possible. Final Fantasy XIV’s combat, while not deviating hugely from the template set by World of Warcraft, requires that you stay on your toes, survey your surroundings and move around the battlefield according to what’s going on. In the case of the Garuda fight, there’s a lot of cowering behind pillars (until the horrid harpy destroys them all, anyway) and then ensuring that you don’t get sucked into the increasingly tumultuous storm all around you during the latter stages of the fight.

I played through most of World of Warcraft up through Wrath of the Lich King and I can only think of a few fights I participated in that elicited the same feeling of heart-in-mouth excitement as these Final Fantasy XIV battles. The difference is that in World of Warcraft’s case they were all high-level or endgame content, while Final Fantasy XIV spreads them out over the course of its entire main quest. And then you get to do them all again, but harder, once you hit the level cap. They’re some beautifully designed encounters, and I’m interested to see how Yoshi-P and the team intend to top them in the coming content updates.

It’s that heart-in-mouth feeling that feels most authentically Final Fantasy to me. I can vividly recall the first few times I beat Final Fantasy VII (because I beat it a whole bunch of times in my teenage years) — every single time I reached that final cutscene before the final boss (“And Sephiroth! … To the settling of everything!” — God bless that game’s appalling translation) I would feel real, honest-to-goodness excitement. I’d get a delightful feeling of “butterflies in the stomach” before the screen went all swirly and Birth of a God started playing, and it would continue right through the final fights, even if I was hopelessly overlevelled, which I usually was.

In fact, a good JRPG (hell, game, full stop) these days will still give me that feeling, and if a game makes me feel that way I’ll immediately think considerably more fondly of it than those that don’t. It’ll be a sad day for me when I can’t get fired up by a game’s final confrontation at all — I hope that day never comes, and I shall continue to enjoy that pleasurably anxious feeling for as long as I can in the meantime.

1358: The Bits You Fast-Forward Through

I’m struggling to remember the last time an advert actually had its intended effect on me — that is to say, I can’t really remember the last time I actually bought something or made use of a service based on an advert.

The reason for this is that advertising appears to be getting increasingly infuriating and lazy as time goes on. TV ads these days are actively irritating rather than positive in promoting things, Internet ads are seemingly designed to be as obtrusive and distracting as possible, and print ads barely exist any more.

Consider TV ads, if you will. There seems to be an increasing number of people writing TV ads who seem to think that doing the whole thing as a rhyme is a good idea. No. This is never a good idea, because poetry sounds pretentious and arty-farty even when it’s good; get someone without a literary bone in their body to write some sort of rhyme about yogurt or nappies or haemorrhoid cream or something and the result is just embarrassing, like the sort of shit children come out with for the usually short-lived “poetry” project they inevitably do as part of “literacy” lessons in primary school.

Then there’s the ads that take a well-known song and “hilariously” change the lyrics to something to do with insurance or plasters or credit cards. Inevitably, the songs chosen are the most horrendously overplayed, clichéd shit that everyone is already sick of, and similarly, the ad itself is inevitably edited by someone who has no clue about musical structure or indeed how the original song actually went, leaving the whole thing feeling like a band of year 9 music students who think they’re really good but actually keep forgetting the lines.

Worst of all, I think, are the ones that actively try to “go viral” or become a meme. This is always painful to watch, because it’s something you can’t force. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that anything that has tried to deliberately “go viral” since the dawn of the Internet has spectacularly failed (is anyone following O2’s advice to “be more dog”? Didn’t think so.) while anything which did successfully permeate popular culture (“you’ve been Tango’d”, say) did so largely through word of mouth rather than a group of marketing executives specifically trying to make people say things.

I think my least favourite ads in the world are “interactive” Web ads, though. They’ll start as a postage stamp-sized version of a TV ad, and then those infuriating words “Get ready to interact!” will appear on the screen. Rather arrogantly, the people behind the ad then expect you to indulge in all the fun of, say, hoovering a carpet or wiping a dirty toilet seat, with your reward being the helpful information that you can buy the product you’ve just been “using” at all good supermarkets.

I should probably just use an adblocker if all this infuriates me so much, but unfortunately I’m all too painfully aware how much of the Internet is reliant on these stupid ads, and there’s relatively little I can do about TV ads aside from not watch TV, which I don’t really do that much anyway.

Anyhow. Bollocks, piss and fart. I am grumpy so I am going to bed.

1357: Le Chien Noir

Been having one of those “crisis of confidence” days today, for a variety of reasons. It’s the culmination of a lot of things, really — a stressful week, tiredness, feeling ill for most of the weekend — and it just gave my sense of self-confidence a bit of a beating this evening. I haven’t quite bounced back as yet, so you’ll forgive the maudlin tone of this post.

To be perfectly frank, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my life and the several different directions it’s been going in pretty much ever since I left university. I launched into a PGCE immediately after finishing my degree because it seemed like a logical thing to do with said English and Music degree, plus I’d done some private teaching in the past. Classroom teaching is not, however, the same as private teaching, as I found out to the cost of a considerable proportion of my mental health. I stuck it out for about three years — dealing with being made redundant at the end of my first year, and suffering a complete emotional breakdown at the end of my third — before deciding that continuing on that path would probably do bad things to me.

I followed this up with some work in retail. This went well. I enjoyed the work, and it involved working with computers and tech — which I love — and teaching — which I also enjoy, when it doesn’t involve badly-behaved brats. Unfortunately, it ran into something of a dead end progression-wise, and then I suffered a pretty horrendous amount of workplace bullying that I still haven’t really forgiven the people involved for.

I then went back to teaching for a bit. It was a maternity cover contract, so whatever happened, I’d have a relatively easy “out”. It was also in primary school, so it was more of an attempt to experiment in that field than anything else. Again, I enjoyed the actual teaching side of things, but the dealing with horrible, badly behaved children (who, in many cases, had parents who didn’t give a shit what they did) took its toll on me somewhat.

After that, I did a bit of supply teaching, which was pretty much the most depressing job in the world, and took up an opportunity to start writing for a little, low-paying games site called Kombo. I made some good friends and built up a decent, if small-scale reputation. Kombo eventually folded, sadly, and I was left without work, money or, due to unfortunate circumstances in my personal life at the time, a wife. I moved back home with my parents with great reluctance.

I spent ages looking for jobs, but I have no idea what my real “skills” are besides being knowledgeable about video games, being able to type like the clappers (at least 85 words per minute the last time I tested) and being able to write things very quickly to order. The qualifications I do have are very specialist — my BA is far from being the “good, general degree” I was assured it would be when I was deciding what to do, and my PGCE is pretty much a waste of the paper it’s printed on now — and for the things I do know how to do, I have no real tangible means of proving I can do them. Essentially, I might as well be completely unqualified.

Fortunately, after a long and depressing process of jobhunting, I scored a position on GamePro, a magazine and website my brother had formerly been in charge of. This began as a part-time gig which eventually expanded to full-time after I made a very difficult decision between sticking with it and moving to London for what would have, in retrospect, probably have been a considerably more secure job. (But… London. No thanks.) I stuck with GamePro, as I was enjoying the work.

Again, I worked well, built up a decent body of work and a good — if, again, small-scale — reputation… and again, the site folded. This time around, thankfully, I had another job to jump into, reviewing mobile and social games and apps. It wasn’t a fun job in the slightest and made me never, ever want to work in mobile and social games, but it paid well. Long story short, that site didn’t fold as such, but the majority of the staff left (including me) and I was left without anything to do for a little while… although the possibility of USgamer, my current position, was already starting to bubble.

And, as you know now, I’m working for USgamer. I’m enjoying the work, though it can be challenging at times. On days like today, though, I can’t help but find myself worrying a little about the future. Where do I go from here? What’s the progression? Is this a “real job”? Should I instead be looking for something boring and joyless but stable with good promotion prospects? I’m 32 and I’ve never had the opportunity to say “I got promoted.” Is that a problem?

I don’t have the answers to any of those questions, and I doubt anyone else does, either. I’ll probably feel better by the morning, but for now everything’s just feeling a bit “meh.”

Apologies for the self-indulgent moaning, but it helps to get it out of my head and on to paper sometimes. I’ll try and be more cheerful tomorrow.

1356: Exhaust Port

Wow. More tired than I thought I was. Today hasn’t exactly been strenuous, consisting largely of visiting Andie’s sis and significant other — plus, more importantly, their new kitten — but I am absolutely wiped out. I think a combination of a weirdly stressful week (the details of which I’ll spare you), the lack of a weekend thanks to EGX and overall not feeling all that great since last night have all conspired to make me feel pretty shitty today.

Still, tomorrow should be equally stress-free, beginning with what is supposedly the best breakfast in Wiltshire, and proceeding to what I can only assume (and hope?) will be a lazy afternoon probably consisting of some combination of Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy XIV, Tales of Xillia, Sweet Fuse and/or Velocity.

This is a short one I know but I’m on my phone and consequently can’t judge word counts. Also I am exhausted. So there.

Signing off. See you on Sunday.

1355: Impending Lie-In

Good golly gosh, I’m knackered.

This is at least partly due to the fact that I didn’t really have a weekend last weekend. (Actually, there’s no “really” about it; I flat-out didn’t have a weekend last weekend, since although Eurogamer Expo was enjoyable, I still had to work through it, and also had to overcome my not-inconsiderable social anxiety in order to actually, you know, talk to developers and stuff. I think I did fairly admirably, all things considered.)

Anyway. Consequently, I am looking forward to having a weekend this weekend, and the first thing I shall be doing with said weekend is having a lie-in. I’ve been waking up relatively late each morning this week and desperately wanting a lie-in — in some cases even dropping off until about half an hour before I need to start work (which, fortunately, as you probably know, involves walking from my bed to my study, and I don’t even have to put on pants if I don’t want to) — and not being able to have it. But tomorrow morning, I can have a lie-in, and it will be glorious.

Except going on recent past experience, the opportunity to actually have a lie-in is usually a signal for my body to wake up promptly at 7am and be unable to get back to sleep. This is infuriating when it happens, because any hope of catching up on sleep is then completely ruined. Of course, it’s often quite nice to deliberately wake up early and have considerably more hours available in the day than usual, but come on. It’s the weekend. I want to lie in bed and not move for more hours than I’m normally able to, then get up, have a bacon sandwich (or similarly greasy equivalent) and do nothing of any value for the remainder of the day.

Ah well. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning. Perhaps I’ll play some Sweet Fuse until the early hours and see if that will lull me into a deep sleep filled with bishounen.

(Speaking of Sweet Fuse, I’m still enjoying it a great deal. What a silly game. I’m glad it exists. If you’d have told me ten years ago that one day I’d be playing a game in which I took on the role of Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune’s niece as she wandered around a theme park that had been taken over by a pig-like terrorist, I would have probably laughed in your face. I have since learned, of course, that anything goes in gaming, and when you take into account the possibilities of less interactive genres such as visual novels, you really can tackle pretty much any subject matter as a “game”. But that, as ever, is a discussion for another day, I feel; time to head bedwards for me — Saki Inafune and her harem of gentlemen friends is awaiting me.)

1354: GTA is More Fun with Friends

I’m not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I’m talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can’t ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We’d play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling “the world of work”, though, the only games we’ve really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn’t, well, there’s a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn’t do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we’d set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we’d regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can’t drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several “trip-and-fall” incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven’t laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.

1353: Criminology

I watched my first ever episode of CSI today. Or CSI: Miami, to be exact, since the original CSI isn’t on Netflix as far as I can make out.

I enjoyed it! It reminds me how much I do enjoy police procedurals and crime thrillers — yes, even the cheesy, stupid, unrealistic ones — when I watch them, yet it’s pretty rare I’ll actually seek them out. It’s one of those things that I forget I like, if that makes sense, and I’ll just occasionally stumble across the, and remember all over again.

As with many forms of non-interactive media, I find myself thinking that there should be more procedural games. Trauma Team on Wii was a great example — particularly from the crime scene investigation angle — plus the Ace Attorney series has always provided a neat combination of private detective-style investigation and courtroom drama. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing.

There’s the Police Quest series, of course, which I’m still yet to try, though those have the dubious distinction of being Sierra adventures (i.e. already brutally difficult, and not necessarily in a fair way) that are notoriously finicky about you actually following police procedure to the letter. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course — how many other “police sims” are there out there? — but it doesn’t necessarily push exactly the same buttons as a police procedural drama on TV.

I’m surprised that over the years we haven’t seen more games branching out into popular TV genres. We’ve done sci-fi and fantasy to death, obviously, because both of those are eminently compatible with the most common means through which we interact with a game world: attacking it. We’ve also seen crime drama through the eyes of the criminals a lot thanks to titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But what we haven’t seen a lot of is a game about being a doctor, or a policeman, or a lawyer, or a journalist. I remember having a conversation with fellow Squadron of Shame members a while back about how cool it would be to play a war-themed game in which you weren’t one of the American soldiers on the scene, but instead an embedded war reporter tasked with covering the conflict from the front lines. Plenty of scope for interesting storytelling there, plus gameplay that doesn’t involve shooting people with a different skin colour to your character.

We could even expand that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy games don’t have to be about killing, either; how about a sci-fi “future police” game? Or a “future medicine” game? (I guess that’s Trauma Center, but still.) Or a game where you play a member of the Watch in a typical fantasy city? Plenty of scope for interesting things, and yet — at least in the mainstream — we still rely on the same old stuff.

Ah well. The times are a-changin’, and we are starting to get more and more interesting thematic content in our games that isn’t just about stabbing and shooting. I just wish there was a bit more.