1423: Enough With the “Corruption” Allegations

Cracked published an article today that pissed a lot of people off. (I’m not linking to it, but here’s a Pastebin of the relevant section.)

This is nothing unusual, of course, what with Cracked being renowned for clickbaiting rather than particularly rewarding content, but today it crossed a line from being relatively inoffensive clickbait into perpetuating some bullshit that has been on the rise for a few years now: the assumption, among certain members of the public, that game journalists are inherently corrupt, and that good review scores are frequently “bought” by publishers, particularly those who are advertising on the site in question.

The assumption that this sort of thing is going on probably goes back to “Gerstmanngate” back at Gamespot, when Jeff Gerstmann was let go following a mediocre review of Kane & Lynch from Eidos, and the story runs that Eidos put pressure on Gamespot to let Gerstmann go because they were ploughing a lot of money into the site at that time, paying considerable amounts to “reskin” all of Gamespot with a Kane & Lynch theme. It took several years — and Gamespot purchasing Gerstmann’s new online home Giant Bomb — before the full story came out, and it actually wasn’t all that different to what it appeared to be in the first place, though there were a few other factors at play, too.

The fact is, in this instance, Gerstmann didn’t do anything wrong, and Gamespot’s behaviour in this instance was highly irregular for the rest of the industry — so much so that it’s an incident still talked about today, and one which hasn’t been recreated since. And yet somehow we’re still plagued with the assumption that the big gaming sites — and indeed some of the smaller ones — are in cahoots with the publishers, with stacks of cash regularly changing hands in exchange for good review scores. The Cracked piece’s evidence for this was the disparity between Metacritic critic aggregates and user review scores for a variety of popular titles, including Mass Effect 3, Call of Duty Ghosts and a few others — neglecting to take the commonplace practice of “review bombing” into account, whereby Metacritic users deliberately skew their scores in one direction or the other in an attempt to influence the overall user rating. (This also happens on Amazon.)

I can categorically state that any respectable site worth its salt in today’s modern gaming industry is completely independent from developers and publishers, and has no moral or financial obligation to be nice to people. Reviews of video games are the opinion of one or two people at most, and common practice in the industry sees people who are interested in particular genres being given games of that type to review — it makes sense, since they have the specialist knowledge, and giving a game of a particular type to someone who clearly is not experienced in that genre often attracts accusations of bias in the other direction, so sites can’t really win.

Packets of money do not change hands in exchange for review scores. The most contact your average video game journalist has with a publisher during the review process is a couple of emails back and forth requesting review codes, and perhaps another when it’s all over sending a link to the publisher’s PR representative sharing the review. Review events such as the writer of the Cracked piece describes are relatively unusual, and most outlets deliberately eschew these tightly-controlled environments in favour of giving their reviewers adequate time to spend with the game and get a good feel for it, rather than playing edited highlights with a PR person breathing down their neck. These events do occasionally happen, of course, particularly for big games, and they can be useful — Call of Duty events can be a good opportunity to test out the games’ multiplayer modes before the game goes live on public servers, for example — but for the most part, lavish, PR-funded events tend to be for previews rather than reviews, and again, no money exchanges hands. Because why the hell would it?

The Cracked piece is based on a number of completely unsubstantiated assumptions, and on a number of flat-out inaccuracies. Publishers do not pay either outlets or individual reviewers for the right to quote their words on box art or in trailers, for example; nor do any but the most disreputable publications charge publishers for reviews — look at the recent controversy over Indie Game Mag, for example; they’ve since released the person who was attempting to charge for reviews and ditched his policies, since pretty much any games journalist or outlet with any respectability was genuinely shocked and disapproving of what was going on there.

I’ve worked for a number of different magazines and online outlets over the years — both paid and unpaid — and all have been the absolute picture of honour, respectability, professionalism and ethics. Ironically, the rest of the Cracked piece actually made some fair points about the state of the industry in 2013 — though I disagree fundamentally with its core assertion that the industry is teetering on the brink of a crash — but, J.F. Sargent and Dave Williams, your unsubstantiated allegations about the games press are massively disrespectful to those of us who work our arses off every day to bring people the latest news, views and opinions about what’s hot in gaming, and it’s extremely disappointing to see that even after widespread criticism of the Cracked piece today, it still has not been edited, modified or clarified.

Perhaps this is revenge for all the times people have referred to Cracked as lowest-common-denominator Internet clickbait with absolutely no journalistic integrity; unfortunately, pieces like this one today only go to prove that there’s more than an element of truth to those allegations.

1422: Zero Bossu

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned Virtue’s Last Reward or its predecessor Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors or Some Other Combination Thereof (aka 999) on these pages to date, so I thought now might be a good time to talk about them, with particular (and spoiler-free) regard to the latter.

The two games, collectively known as Zero Escape, are a combination of visual novel and room escape adventure games. The former you’ve heard me talk about extensively on these very pages; the latter is a peculiarly Japanese offshoot of the adventure game genre in which you’re regularly thrown into self-contained puzzles in which you must escape from a room, and everything you need in order to do so is in the room with you.

You actually spend the vast majority of your time in both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward reading non-interactive visual novel segments rather than solving puzzles, but that doesn’t make the room escape sequences any less satisfying. In fact, given that the room escape sequences in Virtue’s Last Reward in particular are pretty damn challenging, they’re incredibly satisfying to successfully solve.

The puzzles strike that perfect balance between bewildering and making you feel smart, you see. At no point will you be thrown into a situation where the answer is so obtuse you’ll never work it out without an FAQ at your side, but at the same time, those initial moments as you wander around the room, looking at everything and hoping to find some clues, are magical in how daunting they feel.

How on Earth am I going to get out of here? you’ll think. What am I even supposed to do?

Fortunately, those feelings rarely last all that long; after a little careful and methodical investigation, you’ll generally uncover one or more “big tasks” that you’ll need to complete in order to solve the room, and your job then becomes prioritising these tasks into an appropriate order, figuring out how to complete them and then, well, completing them.

There’s a good mix of puzzle types in there, too, though not as much diversity as Level-5’s Professor Layton series. For my money, though, I think I prefer Zero Escape’s approach because there’s at least some attempt to integrate the puzzles into the game’s narrative and setting; that said, I’m basing my entire opinion of Professor Layton on the first game in the series, so that may be something that improves in the future — I do own all of them so I fully intend to find out.

Anyway, I digress; Virtue’s Last Reward’s puzzles in particular are enormously satisfying because they make you feel clever. It’s pretty rare you’ll find a puzzle in which the solution is just blind trial and error until something good happens — though I still hate slidey-block puzles — instead, for the most part, puzzles are reliant on a keen sense of observation, and a willingness to trawl through the various documents in the in-game archives to figure out various pieces of information’s relevance to the situation at hand.

Virtue’s Last Reward goes one little extra step beyond this, though; you can solve the room and get out without too much difficulty in most cases, but all rooms have more than one solution, one of which opens the exit and the other of which unlocks supplementary reading material in the in-game archives. It can be just as challenging — if not more so — to figure out what the conditions for unlocking this bonus content are as it can be to just escape the room successfully. And the supplementary material is always worth a read, too; while much of it is revealed in the game, it often delves deeper into the real-life concepts and experiments explored through the narrative, such as the “Chinese Room” experiment and all manner of other things.

Despite reaching the “end” of a number of narrative paths in Virtue’s Last Reward, I’m yet to actually get a definitive “ending”. I’ve had two bad endings, a narrative path which I need to go back to when I have more information, an ending that “locked” itself until I figured something out in one of the other narrative paths, and I’m currently working on another branch. All in all, there are supposedly 24 different conclusions, including “bad ends”, and you’re damn right I’m going to see every one of them.

In fact, let’s go work on that right now. Bye-bye.

1421: APPLAUSE

One of the things I find quite interesting when watching my favourite comedy shows from over the years — something I like to do over dinner, or when I just want to switch off my brain and zone out for a bit — is how the role of the “audience” has evolved. Specifically, how we’ve gone from prominent canned laughter, applause and other reactions to, in many cases, the complete opposite — the total absence of audience noise.

I say this because it took me nearly eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother to notice that that show has a laugh track in the background, albeit a very quiet one. It’s nowhere near as pronounced as in, say, Friends, which, in turn, was less pronounced than shows that were very proud of the fact that they were filmed in front of a live studio audience such as The Cosby Show. (I’m probably dating myself somewhat there, but eh. Whatever. The Cosby Show gave us the word “zurbit” to describe the act of blowing a raspberry on someone’s stomach, so it clearly had an important impact on culture at large.)

I remember back when I still lived at home and we started to get the first wave of new comedy shows that didn’t have laugh tracks in the background. They were often described as “comedy dramas” rather than sitcoms, and initially they made somewhat uncomfortable viewing because it was never quite obvious whether or not you were “supposed” to be laughing. I remember the first time I saw Spaced on TV, for example; it may be one of my favourite shows of all time now, but when it was first on TV and there was no easily recognisable prompt that you should laugh here, here and here, it was a little confusing.

This may sound strange to those of you reading this who have never known anything but shows without an audience track in the background, but it’s true. Nowadays, I’ve adjusted to the norm of there not being a laugh track — so much so that it’s jarring when you do notice it in shows like How I Met Your Mother.

That said, while the absence of a “live” audience has worked well for sitcoms and “comedy dramas,” it doesn’t work universally well. Game shows that unfold without a live studio audience are a curiously lifeless experience, for example, as anyone who has ever watched Eggheads or Only Connect will tell you. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the format of either of these shows (though the combination of smarmy presenter and the titular “eggheads” on Eggheads infuriates me beyond belief) — they just feel a bit “wrong” without, say, applause at the end of a round, or people laughing when someone cracks a joke.

I remember for a while some video games experimented with having a laugh track. The strangest one I remember was the N64 version of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which was extremely Japanese and rather poorly translated, which meant the moments when the canned laughter kicked in were often… bizarre, to say the least. (Still, it was a great game; I recall enjoying it more than Zelda at the time.) It’s not something that ever really took off, though, and now that laugh tracks are the exception rather than the rule in other forms of media, it’s something I don’t really see games going back to any time soon — unless they’re specifically trying to capture the feeling of ’80s or early ’90s sitcoms.

Anyway. I didn’t really have a point to make with all this. I just thought it was mildly interesting.

1420: Ploot-chan

I’ve mentioned Hyperdimension Neptunia and its two sequels numerous times on these pages, but I thought today I’d focus particularly on a character who appears for the first time in the third game, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory.

Plutia — named, much like Neptune, after an abandoned Sega console; in this case, the unreleased second model of the Saturn — is Planeptune’s goddess (or “CPU”, in Neptunia parlance) in the alternate dimension Neptune finds herself dragged into towards the outset of the game. Much like Neptune, she’s largely incompetent at her job, prone to slacking off and being lazy, but it’s a different kind of incompetence to Neptune; while Neptune in her human form is an energetic, dizzy young girl, Plutia is rather slothful in many ways; she’s habitually clad in slippers and housecoat rather than something a little more appropriate for a goddess, and she speaks very, very slowly and deliberately (in Japanese, anyway) — like a child who doesn’t seem to have quite grasped communicating just yet.

Plutia’s seeming innocence extends to how she’s depicted in battle, too. Initiating a battle with Plutia will often see her exclaiming konnichiwa! (“hello!”) or yoroshiku onegaishimasu! (in this context, “nice to meet you!”) to the party of enemies, while her turn coming up in the order of action will see her mumbling eto… eto… doushiyou… (“umm… umm… what should I do?”) or e… watashi? (“eh? …me?”) as if she’s perpetually slightly unsure of what’s going on around her.

Plutia’s not innocent, though. Far from it. Much like Neptune’s personality (not to mention cup size) undergoes a significant change when she switches from human form to “HDD” goddess form, Plutia too goes through some changes. While Neptune is all business in HDD form, though, Plutia unleashes her inner desires and becomes a sadistic dominatrix (whom Neptune in particular takes to calling “Sadie”) and whom a number of the other characters become rather afraid of.

Plutia in HDD form is actually quite a refreshing character to come across, because she has absolutely no shame in who she is and what she likes. And what she likes more than anything is indulging her sadistic desires — whether that’s on her enemies or, in a pinch, her friends.

She’s overtly sexualised — arguably more so than most of the rest of the cast, most of whom would put your eye out if they turned around too quickly while in HDD form — but she uses this to her advantage on numerous occasions.

She knows that she scares and disturbs people with her sexuality, so often all it takes is a knowing comment that she’s “starting to get angry” to get people to do what she wants them to. This backfires on a few occasions — for example, her early encounter with a young alternate-dimension IF traumatises the latter to such a degree that one of the strongest, spunkiest characters in the other two Neptunia games is relegated considerably more often to the role of “cowering in the background” than she would be normally. A shame, since IF is one of my favourite characters, but the focus on the main cast in Victory certainly works for me, too.

Plutia’s sexual preferences are sometimes played for laughs, but more often than not they’re played relatively straight, with her castmates alternating between acknowledging her tastes and desires, and trying to hold her back from going too far. Anything… inappropriate that Plutia does is kept completely off-screen, but all that achieves is getting the imagination working even harder. Exactly what did she do to those people who, upon meeting her subsequently, are utterly terrified?

I have not yet finished Victory, though I am, after a long run, on the path to the “true” ending, I think. I’ll be interested to see if Plutia is explored any further in the rest of the game; up until now, she’s been rather refreshing to spend time with. Terrifying too, yes, but one of the more interesting characters I’ve seen in a candy-coloured moe RPG in recent memory.

1419: Endgame

I can’t remember if I mentioned it on here, but I reached level 50 — the level cap — with my Black Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV a short while ago, which means that I’m now into what MMO players refer to as “endgame content”.

I’ve only ever reached the level cap in one other MMO to date — World of Warcraft — and in that instance I didn’t really explore a lot of what the endgame had to offer. In fact, I think I stopped playing not long after getting that far; I tried to return after a break when Blizzard offered a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion back and a free boost to the slightly-higher level cap of 85 that they introduced then, but the magic was gone, and I’ve felt no inclination to go back since.

You see, as I mentioned in that post I linked to above, for me, a key part of the appeal of MMOs — and indeed RPGs in general — is that journey you make from, quite literally, zero to hero. The road to the level cap is paved with a variety of new skills and things to learn, and by the time you reach your “pinnacle” you’re well-equipped with everything you need to survive… and continue onwards.

You see, once you hit level whatever-the-cap-is-in-your-game-of-choice, it stops being about gaining XP, and it starts being about doing other stuff. It starts being about running dungeons, acquiring new gear, taking on new challenges with friends. For those who played through most of the game solo, now is probably the time to jump off the train, because most endgame content is reliant on playing together with others, whether that’s running small-scale dungeons to get gear, or taking on raids that require larger parties.

It’s also often where the story grinds to something of a halt. In Final Fantasy’s case, “endgame” is where you’ve beaten the final boss of the main scenario quests, so the main story is indeed over. But there’s plenty of things still to do, most of which have some sort of narrative context, and if the impressive recent trailer for the upcoming patch 2.1 is anything to go by, the main scenario quests will continue to be added to with each new update every three months, which is nice.

What I’ve found interesting in the endgame stuff I played this evening, is that it lets you concentrate on the game mechanics a lot more than if you’re trying to pay attention to the story. Some MMO players play through the whole game this way, skipping cutscenes and not reading any text, but I can’t help but feel in Final Fantasy XIV’s case that this is missing the point somewhat.

Regardless, once you reach endgame you’re probably going to be running a lot of the same dungeons and other content over and over again, often with different groups of people each time. And while this might sound boring, there’s a few things to bear in mind: firstly, some people plough hundreds or even thousands of hours into games like League of Legends and Dota, and those have very few maps, and secondly the appeal isn’t necessarily in seeing new and unique content; it’s in seeing new and unique people.

I braved Final Fantasy XIV’s Duty Finder system for two runs into the “so you’ve just reached level 50, what now?” dungeon the Wanderer’s Palace this evening. My two runs were markedly different from one another, despite the monsters being in the same place and me playing exactly the same character class.

In the first case, the party was well-organised, careful and methodical. We didn’t talk much because it was clear from our behaviour that we’d all done this before, and we all knew what we were doing. Consequently, we got through the whole thing without any serious mistakes — and, more importantly, no-one dying.

Compare and contrast with the second party, in which the de facto leader — usually the “tank” class, who runs ahead to get pummelled by enemies while everyone else hangs back and throws fireballs at them — was seemingly trying to race through the dungeon as quickly as possible, and causing issues in the process. Speedruns of dungeons aren’t particularly unusual, particularly in the case of places like Wanderer’s Palace that provide a good source of material for acquiring high-level gear, but in order to be successful at them you need a well-oiled party that communicates well.

Our poor old tank wasn’t very good at speedrunning, you see, and ended up getting him — and the rest of us — into situations that it was difficult to survive. Wanderer’s Palace is particularly harsh due to the presence of an unkillable “Tonberry Stalker” enemy who runs up to you and stabs you in the throat if you enter his field of vision; on more than one occasion, the tank attracted so many enemies that we weren’t able to defeat them all before someone got throat-stabbed.

This was interesting to me. It wasn’t frustrating or annoying because everyone took it in good humour and no-one was a dick about it — a constant risk with online games — but was instead fascinating to see. I have a feeling there’s some intriguing psychological observations to be made about the different ways in which people play — and how people like me respond differently to different types of people — but I’m not sure I’m altogether qualified to make those observations.

It was also an interesting experiment for me in that throughout most of the game, I’ve played with people that I’m at least casually acquainted with. These two runs were attempts to test the water and see what it’s like playing with random strangers; you often hear horror stories of people getting together with a bunch of jerks in the Duty Finder but, aside from the tank’s clumsiness, there was nothing untoward going on, and so it’s something I’d feel comfortable doing again.

Fortunate, really, because I need one hell of a lot of Tomestones if I want to upgrade my equipment to a suitable level to be able to take on the later dungeons and boss fights…

1418: Eight and Thirteen

Final Fantasy, once one of the biggest names in gaming, is now something of a laughingstock to many people.

To a lot of these detractors, it was the Final Fantasy XIII sub-series that triggered this feeling. (Many of said detractors have not played Final Fantasy XIV, incidentally, refusing to even try it because it’s an MMO. Fair enough, but it’s also the best Final Fantasy in years.)

To others, though, Final Fantasy VIII is an object of ridicule — and the recent rerelease of the game on Steam has caused all these people to come out of the woodwork once again.

It will undoubtedly prove somewhat unsurprising to you to hear that I played and enjoyed both, and feel that they both get an undeservedly bad rap.

Let’s start with Final Fantasy VIII. After my friends and I discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII and promptly played it through a good seven or eight times, Final Fantasy VIII shot straight to the top of our most-anticipated lists. And it looked amazing; gone were Final Fantasy VII’s weird super-deformed polygonal models, to be replaced with much more realistically-proportioned character models along the lines of what we now recognise as the “Final Fantasy look” today. Gone was the “magical disaster threatening to destroy the planet” plotline, to be replaced with something that was, above all else, a love story.

Final Fantasy VIII did a bunch of weird, unconventional things, and I loved it for it. Its character-driven story was much more intimate and personal than my limited experience with the genre at the time — hell, it was much more intimate and personal than a lot of games I’d played up until that point, period. It was one of the few times I’d encountered a convincing love story in the context of a video game; Squall and Rinoa were both interesting, flawed characters and I felt myself rooting for them throughout the game.

The battle system was enjoyable, too. The Junction system was really, really odd, but made sense once you got your head around its extremely abstract nature. The reflex-based actions, where you had to pull the trigger on Squall’s gunblade for additional damage, or hammer in button combinations while performing Limit Breaks, or repeatedly bash the Square button while summoning a “Guardian Force”, gave the battles a feeling of “action game” intensity when they were essentially still sort-of turn-based.

And the final boss? Easily one of the most spectacular final confrontations of the PS1 era, even if the plot in the immediate run-up to it started veering into seriously odd plot-related territory. “Time kompression” was a bit weird, yeah, but it certainly didn’t undo all the good work for the many hours beforehand, and damn, those last battles were genuinely exciting.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years (I’d work it out, but I can’t be arsed right now) and we have Final Fantasy XIII. Again — I’ve covered this before — this did things markedly differently to past Final Fantasies, replacing the open-world MMO-style gameplay of Final Fantasy XII with more linear progression that opened up into an interesting, enjoyable open world towards the end.

People hated Final Fantasy XIII for its linearity, but in practice it really wasn’t all that much more linear than previous Final Fantasies — it was just more obvious about it. Previous Final Fantasies had provided the illusion of freedom through their world maps, you see, but your progression was still railroaded by being unable to cross certain types of terrain until the story dictated that you got your hands on a particular vehicle. And, like Final Fantasy XIII, these games would tend to open up towards the end, giving you freedom to explore.

There’s always been a reason for that linearity in Final Fantasy games, however, and that’s to push the story along. Because you didn’t get a lot of opportunity to stray from the path set out in front of you, the story was kept pacy and snappy, and maintained its momentum — something which many more open RPGs, and not just those of the J-variety, really struggle with. By the time you reached the more open part, you had an extremely firm grounding in the game’s mechanics — more than enough to take on some of the extremely tough challenges that said open world presented you with.

As for the characters? I liked them a lot. Sazh was an interesting character in that he was an older, black character who didn’t resort to Mr. T stereotypes like Barret in FFVII. Vanille was cute and adorable. Fang was badass. Lightning was enigmatic, intriguing and all-business; Snow was her perfect foil with his laid-back attitude. And Hope, whom many people accuse of being “whiny”, watched his parents die towards the beginning of the game. I think being a little emotional is perhaps understandable in this instance, no?

Ultimately I know that if you’ve made up your mind about Final Fantasy VIII and XIII I’m probably not going to change your mind, and that’s fine; this post simply outlines what I feel about these much-maligned installments in the long-running series. The thing that annoys me, I think, is how people feel the need to declare them unequivocally “crap” when what they really mean is that they didn’t personally like them.

But then this is nothing new to the games biz, and I’ve spent the best part of the last couple of years playing and adoring games that many people think are “crap” if you believe Metacritic scores and the like. Each to their own, I say, and if you can eke out enjoyment from something that isn’t popular, I say good on you. And if you can’t, maybe try not to make other people feel bad about liking it?

1417: Roll the Credits!

Nelson Mandela died today, apparently. He was 95. Rather than pretend to know anything in-depth about him, his life or his work, I’ll simply say I’m sorry to hear that he’s dead, and that for someone who spent his life fighting for peace to die at home surrounded by his family at the age of 95 is surely a fitting end to a complicated and eventful life.

Anyway, just thought I’d acknowledge that because it seemed significant, but I have literally nothing else to say on the matter so I’m certainly not going to devote an entire post to pontificating about a subject I know very little about. (Although it wouldn’t be the first time I had done that.)

Instead, I thought I’d burble on about something ultimately insignificant but which has been on my mind recently; a phenomenon I’m encountering with my entertainment choices at present. It’s analysis paralysis when it comes to what I “should” spend my free time enjoying.

I like to enjoy things in their entirety, you see, particularly when there’s a story involved, and to leave something half-finished and then pick it up again later is something I don’t like to do — more often than not because the actual “pick it up again later” part often doesn’t roll around for a considerable period of time, which usually means by the time I return to the thing in question, I want to start it from the beginning again. (I say “thing” rather than “game” because this phenomenon also applies to things like TV shows in many cases.)

At present, I have three “big games” on the go in my free time, plus a few things I have to review and a couple of smaller things. The smaller things are less of an issue; one of the review games is something I really want to play anyway, but I know that it’s going to eat into the three big games I have on the go that, in a couple of cases, I’ve been playing for months.

The three big games in question are Final Fantasy XIV, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and Virtue’s Last Reward. Of the three, I’ve been playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory the longest and kind of don’t want it to end because I’m in love with all the characters like the sad otaku I am. Final Fantasy XIV I have now finished the main story of, at least, so I can now enjoy that as a pure mechanics-focused game rather than a narrative experience, and Virtue’s Last Reward is on Vita so it’s a game I can play on the toilet and/or in bed.

Here’s the issue: free time rolls around, and I find myself wondering what I “should” play.

Should I try and beat Neptunia? Probably, but then that means it’ll end, which I don’t really want it to. Although when it does end, I’ll be able to start playing new stuff without guilt, which will be nice.

Should I play Final Fantasy XIV and work towards getting my awesome level 50 gear for my black mage? Possibly, but that’s reliant on other people and time-consuming, so probably best saved for late nights and/or the weekend.

Should I play Virtue’s Last Reward, a story-centric game that is more rewarding if you play through as much as possible as quickly as possible while it’s fresh in your mind? Probably.

Or should I get stuck into the games I have to review? This is, of course, the correct answer, but in doing this for previous games I’ve already stretched Neptunia in particular out over the course of way more months than I thought it was going to take. (To be fair, though, the games that pushed it aside temporarily, Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia, were both lengthy games in their own right that I enjoyed a great deal, so it’s not exactly a loss there.)

My analysis paralysis over this also makes me feel a bit guilty about starting up more open-ended experiences such as strategy games or story-light action RPGs. It’s my own fault for developing completionist tendencies and wanting to enjoy things as fully as possible before moving on to something else — I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who juggle lots of games simultaneously and happily flit back and forth between them, and I can certainly do this with TV shows, so why not games?

Anyway, ultimately it’s hardly the worst problem in the world to have so I certainly can’t complain — and indeed I’m not complaining, merely observing — so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go and play Virtue’s Last Reward in bed. Or maybe some Final Fantasy. Or maybe…

1416: Rooted

I haven’t embraced the next generation of video games consoles as yet — except for Wii U, which people keep insisting doesn’t count — and, barring something absolutely astonishing coming out on Xbox One (still a fucking stupid name) or PlayStation 4, I have very little intention of doing so until I absolutely have to for professional purposes.

Launch lineups are rarely much cop anyway, but it’s not just a weak selection of games that’s putting me off this time around; no, it’s more the fact that neither of the two boxes really offer anything I particularly want out of my gaming time at present. That may well all change when they both have some decent exclusives — not to mention the variety of indie games we’ve been promised on both — but at present, they’re two shiny black boxes that do a bunch of things I don’t give a toss about and occasionally, if you ask them nicely, play games.

Let’s take Xbox One first, because this is by far the least appealing of the two systems. Xbox One is a sprawling mess of “entertainment apps,” rolled together into an OS that has seemingly been designed by someone who had no idea what things actually worked about the Xbox 360’s already imperfect OS. Gone is the facility for cross-game party chat; gone is the ability to pop up the guide and quickly check your friends list in game; gone is the ability to see how much fucking hard drive space you have left — and instead we have “Snap” functionality, that allows you to do two things at once.

I do not want to do two things at once with my console. I barely even care about the limited social functionality already built into the PS3 and Xbox 360. I certainly don’t want to make a Skype call while I’m trying to immerse myself in a game, and I definitely don’t want to watch television at the same time as I’m playing a game. When I play a game, I devote my full attention to it; anything less is, to me, disrespectful to the people who worked hard on it. I won’t turn off the soundtrack and listen to my own music — except in racing games, where the soundtrack is usually generic bland-o-rock anyway — and I certainly won’t listen to podcasts or watch videos while I’m playing. I don’t play games as idle wastes of time or just “something to do” — it’s my chosen means of entertaining myself and consuming cultural content, so it deserves me showing it that much respect, and Xbox One doesn’t appear to be built with that in mind.

PlayStation 4 is less offensive to me in this regard but it’s still stuffed full of features I’ll never use. I seriously doubt I’ll ever use the video recording facility, for example, and I still do not see the appeal of streaming as either a broadcaster or a viewer — particularly if every bastard person in the world is doing it. The system is, at least, on the whole, seemingly designed more as a games console than an entertainment megabox, so there’s that, but without any compelling games — save perhaps Resogun, which I’m certainly not buying a new console for — there is precisely zero reason to pick one up just yet.

I’m not convinced either of these systems have been designed with players like me — people who have grown up with the video games medium almost since its inception — in mind. I know for a fact Xbox One certainly hasn’t been — it’s trying desperately to replace the “family friendly box” reputation that the Wii had and the Wii U has, so far, failed to replicate, and in the process has decided to vomit a bunch of features only useful to those with chronic attention deficit disorder all over itself. Balls to that shit. Also, Microsoft’s “experiments” with microtransactions can go eat a thousand dicks.

I will almost inevitably get both systems at some point in the future, either for work purposes or if some particularly compelling exclusive emerges — something from any of my favourite Japanese devs appearing on PS4, for example — but at present I’m more than happy working through my substantial PlayStation 3 backlog, dipping occasionally into a few Xbox 360 titles I’m yet to play and spending the majority of my gaming time on PC. Not to get all master racey, but PC still beats the pants off both consoles in terms of both performance and flexibility.

1415: Return to Normality

Whew. There we go. That was, as I previously mentioned, a bit of an ordeal to write. Perhaps not my best piece of creative writing, but certainly one of the more therapeutic ones. Now I can get back to posting about random crap only I care about. Something something Hyperdimension Neptunia.

So, what to write about this evening? It is late in the day but I’m not all that tired just yet, thanks largely to the vast amounts of coffee I inevitably consume whenever I go over to my friend Tim’s for a board game evening. And this evening I went over to my friend Tim’s for a board game evening.

My local friends and I have been playing board games together for quite some time now, and our tastes have gradually evolved over time. Our tastes haven’t always necessarily evolved in the same directions, however, which isn’t always easy to deal with, but we’re currently trialling a new system whereby we 1) get to play regularly rather than semi-regularly and 2) pick games in such a way that no-one is ever waiting for too many sessions before they get to play something that would be high up on their list of personal preferences.

One of the issues we have is that two of our number (two out of five) are big into fairly hardcore strategy games that require a degree of mathematical, analytical thinking that, as a largely creative, artistic person, I’m ill-equipped to deal with as well as them. I would love to get better at this sort of game, but I’m just not very good at being able to look several moves ahead or have contingency plans if the things I want to do suddenly become unavailable. Perhaps I should start playing with a notepad to hand so I can scribble things down and work them out as I go. (Actually, that’s not a terrible idea. I may try that at some point in the near future.)

Another two out of our group — including me — tend to prefer cooperative games, particularly those that enjoy either dungeon crawling or battling eldritch horrors from beyond time and space. These games tend to have a longer run time, be more heavily thematic and, in many cases, have a stronger element of luck involved. I love them, at least in part due to the fact that they have a much stronger sense of “narrative” than the often drier world of Euro-style strategy games.

Ultimately I just like the opportunity to get some boards, cards and chits onto the table, really, so I don’t mind all that much what I play despite my regular protestations against Agricola. I’m grateful to have a group of friends I can share that with on a regular basis, and if you’re looking for something fun, enjoyable and highly social to do with your friends, I can’t recommend the wonderful world of board gaming enough.

1414: Epilogue

Things weren’t perfect, but she was happier.

Christmas had come and gone, and she’d gone back to the doctor in the new year to review her situation, but found herself in tears before she’d even started speaking. Taking this as a sign that she wasn’t ready to go back to the classroom, Dr. James had no qualms about signing her off for a longer period. When she got home, she’d immediately drafted her resignation, and gone back and forth between a simple, to the point letter and a lengthy one explaining in great detail why she was leaving.

Eventually she settled on the latter, and when she received an email from Thompson on the same day explaining that he completely understood how she felt and certainly didn’t begrudge her wanting to get out and do something that didn’t have such a negative impact on her mental health, she felt like she’d done the right thing.

Time passed. Her sick note had signed her off until the end of her notice period, so she took some time to rest, recuperate and recover, and gradually began the process of looking for work. It was hard going; her specialist qualifications made her overqualified for a lot of entry-level positions, but the only job they would really help her jump into would be another teaching job, which was the last thing she wanted to do.

The business with Mark resolved, Kristina had been using her new-found freedom to hang out with Maxine much more than she had been able to in the past. Maxine, meanwhile, was doing her best to find Kristina a position in her office; it took some time, but she eventually managed to convince her bosses to bring her on for a probationary period.

Kristina took to the work quickly, and began picking up new skills easily. The work was deathly dull, but it paid reasonably well and, most importantly, she could just leave it behind at the end of the day and not have to think about it again until she got into the office. In comparison to the nights of anxiety and nightmares, it was heaven.

Winter changed to spring, and the days got longer and hotter as summer arrived.

Kristina hadn’t seen much of Sian for about a month, since her young friend had been busily preparing for her exams. An occasional text message revealed that she was getting on well, though, and had even managed to repair the rift between herself and her friends. She didn’t mention Edward though; Kristina found herself wondering how he was doing.

* * * *

“Hi, you made it!” Sian exclaimed, running up to Kristina and throwing her arms around her. “Sorry I haven’t been around much. Busy, you know!”

“It’s okay,” said Kristina. “Thanks for inviting me. Are you ready?”

Sian glanced down at the envelope in her hands.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I think so. But hold on a minute. Wait there. I’ll be right back.”

She disappeared inside the school for a moment. Kristina looked around at the other Year 11 students milling around, talking to one another. Some looked ecstatic; others less so. One girl over there was in tears; another was comforting her and clearly trying not to grin too broadly.

School’s a boiling, simmering pot of emotions and hormones, thought Kristina. It’s no wonder it was difficult to deal with. Everything’s so intense; everyone’s forced together to work on things they might not want to do; emotions run high. For these kids, it must feel like they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. They have, I guess.

She sighed at the thought. Oh, to be young again.

Sian came back out pulling a familiar figure with her.

“Hello,” said Edward, smiling. There was no trace of the anger and resentment Kristina had seen in his eyes the last time she’d seen him. “How are you, Miss?”

“You don’t have to call me that any more, Edward,” said Kristina with a laugh. “Just Kristina or Kris is fine.”

Edward looked her in the eye and his smile broadened, then he looked over at Sian.

“You ready?” Sian asked, holding up her envelope.

“Ready,” he said, holding up his own, identical envelope.

“Then… go!” she cried, tearing into it before she’d finished speaking. She withdrew several sheets of paper and made an exaggerated show of reading them. Edward, meanwhile, tore the envelope open more methodically, withdrew the papers and glanced them over.

“Well?” said Kristina. “Don’t keep me in suspense any more. How did you do?”

“Take a look,” said both Edward and Sian together, offering their respective pieces of paper to Kristina. She looked down at the sheets.

A moment later, a spot of water plopped onto the top page on Edward’s stack. Kristina handed them back and turned away from her former students.

“Congratulations,” she said. “I’m really happy for you both.”

She felt an arm around her waist from her right, then another from her left. As she blinked away the tears that had sprung suddenly to her eyes, she looked down either side of herself and realised that both Edward and Sian were hugging her.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” Sian said.

“Thank you,” said Edward. “Thank you.”