1584: Seriously, Hire Movers

I am writing this from my new bed in my new house. Downstairs is a partially unpacked living room, a not-at-all unpacked study and a mostly done kitchen. I am pleasantly, satisfyingly tired, and not feeling stressed out about the house or the things in it. Moving Day has, in short, been a Big Success.

And a significant part of this can be attributed to one thing: the fact we hired a removals company. Not a man with a van, not some friends who offered to help, a professional removals company.

They weren’t cheap, mind, though thankfully they weren’t one of the companies that wanted to charge us over a thousand pounds to move our stuff less than two miles down the road. (We get the impression that the companies who quoted us particularly stupid prices simply didn’t want to do the job — fair enough, since it involved lugging a shit-ton of stuff down from a second-floor flat, but it would have perhaps been nice if they’d just said that rather than arguably attempting to take advantage of us.)

But no, the company we used — Robinsons, if you’re curious — were great. They showed up promptly at the agreed time with a big truck that was more than capable of fitting all our stuff in — I’ve proven on more than one occasion that I have too much stuff for a Transit van by myself, let alone with Andie’s stuff in there too — and then proceeded to lug everything down the stairs for us while we alternated between twiddling our thumbs, making cups of tea for them and playing games on our phones, the only entertainment devices that were still within easy reach.

Then they drove the truck to our new place, unloaded everything and were gone before 4pm. If we’d been doing this ourselves, we’d still be shifting things well into the night, probably taking multiple trips and getting increasingly irritable.

But nope; the additional expense was well worth it for the peace of mind and lack of stress it brought. Tomorrow we can wake up refreshed and tackle the rooms that still need working on. We can buy and fit a dishwasher. And then we can flop down on the sofa — the sofa which wouldn’t fit up the stairs to our previous flat and which we consequently haven’t had the chance to sit on for a year and a half — to watch some television, safe in the knowledge that holy shit, this house actually belongs to us. Pretty neat, no?

Now it may be a ridiculously lame hour but I’m off to get some sleep. Photos will undoubtedly follow at some point in the near future once the place is a little more presentable!

1583: Imminent New Digs

So, this time tomorrow we should be officially moved in to our new house. We almost certainly won’t have everything unpacked by then — though I guess you never know! — but we will be in there. Which will be nice.

This all seems to have rolled around rather quickly and surprisingly smoothly. You hear all sorts of horror stories about people buying houses (particularly their first house) that are full of stupid words like “gazumping” and this has just been… well, pretty straightforward, really, and we haven’t had to do nearly as much faffing around as I thought we’d have to. It was pretty much a case of going in to the estate agents, saying “we want to buy this house”, answering a few questions and then, a couple of months later, taking possession of our new house.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, though not by much; the people we were buying the place from didn’t dick around, and even the lawyers didn’t seem to spend too much time arguing with one another, though there was a little of that. The process was so smooth and straightforward that the act of handing over a not-insignificant amount of money for the deposit felt no more “serious” than just paying a bill or something. And now here we are; one sleep away from moving in.

While I was working last week, Andie and her mother spent a lot of time doing the new place up — painting, hanging curtains, cleaning, that sort of thing. I helped with a bit of the painting, but I stayed out of the way for most of it largely because I was busy, but also because I don’t trust myself an inch with DIY. As a homeowner I’m supposed to start caring about this stuff now, I think, but I’ve never been particularly fussy about what colour my walls are or if they match the ceiling; generally speaking, so long as I have walls around me and a roof that doesn’t leak above me, I’m fine. (Oh, and it should preferably be a comfortable temperature, too; warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s hot outside.)

I’m interested to see what it will look like with our stuff in it. It’s been a little hard to picture so far, but I’m sure it’s going to look good. I’m looking forward to having my own downstairs study for working — though with my current employment situation, it remains to be seen how much use it will be getting on a professional basis — and having an actual spare bedroom. We have a brand new bed, too, which I’m hoping is going to be significantly more comfortable than our current one.

There are still acquisitions to make before it will feel “finished” — though I’m aware once you own a house it’s never truly “finished”. We need a big-ass dining table for our extension out the back — big enough to fit sprawling board games, specifically — and we’re getting a dishwasher and tumble dryer, too. The dishwasher in particular is something I’m looking forward to; there are few chores I hate more than washing up. I’m not sure why, but my mind has always somehow equated dirty plates with being utterly disgusting — even if you’ve only just finished eating off them — and thus sticking my hands into a bowl of water with them has never been especially appealing. If you can get a magic box to wash them for you, then great; having our own place gives us the freedom to do just that which you just don’t get in most rental properties.

Oh, and we’re probably going to get a dog, too. We both quite wanted a cat, but we feel that would probably be foolish while we still have the rats Clover and Socks. Neither of them are big fans of coming out of the cage — except to climb up it and get into their Lego house that we usually put on top of it — so it probably wouldn’t be a problem, but I still feel it’s probably best not to risk having them in the house with an animal that might want to eat them. A dog, I feel, is less likely to want to munch on them — plus it’s a good excuse to go out and about and get some exercise by giving it walks every day.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical for now, but it’s not long until it becomes reality. Pretty exciting — though to be perfectly honest I’m looking forward to the “exciting” bit being over and just being able to get down to some serious and much-needed relaxation.

1582: My Phone’s Not Called “Mate”

So, an update on how I’m doing with my new phone after several days of fiddling around with it. (Said new phone, if you missed my post from the other day, is an HTC One M8 — my first Android phone, though not my first Android device.)

I’m really liking it! Like, way more than I thought I would. There are flaws, certainly — the phone has frozen and rebooted itself while I was in the middle of doing something rather more times than I would have preferred it to in the last few days — but on the whole, it’s been a great experience so far and I dare say that I am actually starting to prefer it to iOS.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to suddenly become an Android fanboy, largely because I find Android fanboys to be some of the most insufferable fanboys on the entire Internet. Nor do I feel that iOS is now “bad” because of the time I’ve spent with Android. But there are clear and discrete markets for both, and they both do their own thing extremely well.

iOS, like most of Apple’s other products these days, is designed to be accessible, simple and straightforward. I hesitate to say “designed for stupid people” but it’s certainly designed in such a manner that stupid people can’t break it easily. It doesn’t blind you with unnecessary information — if there’s something it can do quietly in the background without telling you what’s going on, it will. This is great for people who panic when they see technical messages they don’t understand; however, on the flip side, it’s less than ideal for computer-literate people who like to know what their device is up to — and if it’s up to something it shouldn’t be (or not up to something it should be).

There are two features on iOS where this is painfully apparent, and as I count myself in the more “computer literate” camp they’d been becoming increasingly frustrating to me.

First up is Photo Stream, a feature whereby you take a photo with the phone’s camera and it gets automatically backed up to your iCloud account and synced to any other devices you’ve also logged into iCloud with. This is, in theory at least, extremely useful for backing up images and just for transferring them from one device to another — from phone to computer, say — without having to faff around with long-winded sync processes or additional hardware. And, a good 90% of the time, it was great. The trouble was, for that remaining 10% of the time it would just not work, and it certainly wasn’t going to tell you why. I eventually managed to figure out that if Photo Stream wasn’t syncing it was generally for one of two reasons (the battery being below 20% or you not being connected to Wi-Fi) but the phone certainly didn’t tell me that.

iTunes Match, the service that allows you “cloud” access to your full iTunes music library from any device, is the same way. A few weeks back, my iPhone simply started refusing to download certain iTunes tracks to itself, which made loading it up with tunes to take on a long trip to be troublesome at best, completely impossible at worst. Again, there was no means of getting feedback on what was going wrong and why some tracks would download but others wouldn’t; it simply wouldn’t do it. Infuriating. But I can sort of understand why Apple chose not to put frightening error messages in there — so as not to scare off the casual, less computer-literate people.

Android’s big selling point is its customisability, and to be fair I haven’t explored that a great deal with my new device just yet — I’ve been largely happy with the stock options so far. It comes preloaded with a standard app launcher and a special “car mode” with big buttons and quick access to music, navigation and other useful features you might need while driving, but I know the option is there for further customisation. I also like how you can have things installed on the device but not visible on the home screen.

What I’ve really liked so far is the notifications system. I can clear all my notifications with a simple tap on a button, or I can also take action on a lot of them right from the notifications feed — reply to a tweet, archive an email, all manner of other things. It took a little adjusting to the fact that the phone doesn’t display messages on the home screen like the iPhone does, but having used it for a few days now, it’s actually quite nice to have the peace and be able to review notifications at your leisure rather than when your phone thinks you should.

Plus there’s the sound. I’m not normally a fan of playing music out of a mobile phone, but the M8 has some surprisingly competent speakers. They’re never going to rival a proper setup, of course, but they’re loud, reasonably beefy considering their size, and they make listening to music or podcasts without headphones while doing other things — housework, for example, or, more relevantly to now, packing — eminently practical. Combine with Google Music’s much better, more stable implementation of “cloud music” than iTunes Match offers along with the ability to put an extra SD card in there for storage and you have a device that is a kick-ass media player as well as a solid communication device, too.

So I’m liking it a lot so far, and I’m certainly not missing my iPhone, which I gave to O2 for recycling in exchange for a little over a hundred quid — not to be sniffed at for minimum effort. Whether or not I’ll stick with Android in the long term remains to be seen, but frankly it’s looking quite positive right now.

1581: Two Days

I’m tired, hot and stressed out. We’re moving on Wednesday, which means we have two more days to pack up all our stuff and be ready. I’m sure we’ll manage it, but right now my own feelings of exhaustion — brought on at least partly by the incredibly hot, humid weather we’ve had today — are making that “motivation” thing somewhat troublesome.

I’m sure it’s not as bad as it looks. I hope it’s not as bad as it looks. There is still a lot of stuff to pack into boxes, but at least we had a pretty ruthless clearout of books today, meaning there are a lot fewer of those to move than there once were. It was a little odd to throw out a number of books that have followed me around from house to house since before I went to university, but there’s really no point in carrying a lot of them around any more. All the fiction books I own that I’m going to read I have already read, and if I want a new book I’m more inclined to buy a digital book to read on the go rather than a physical one these days. (A curious inversion of my attitude to video games, where I prefer to have a physical disc.) The reference books I own are outdated and have been made largely obsolete by the Internet anyway. And I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I am never, ever going to read The Lord of the Rings. And so off for recycling they all go.

The last time I was so ruthless with my possessions was a few years back when I ditched the large cardboard outer boxes for the older PC games I still own. There are occasional times when I regret doing that, but my available shelf space thanks me. To be perfectly honest, I could probably stand to throw out some of those old PC games, too, given that a significant proportion of them almost certainly won’t run on a modern Windows 7 machine, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw some of them out. At least I haven’t been able to to date; perhaps I’ll have a closer look at what’s there tomorrow and actually chuck out the games that won’t work on a modern system and which have modernised digital equivalents available from somewhere like GOG.com or Steam.

It’s easy to get attached to possessions and fall into a habit of hoarding. I’ve done that to a certain degree over the years, but in a lot of cases the things that I’ve kept are conversation pieces. Someone sees I have an original copy of Wing Commander III on my shelf and it’s all “oh, cool! I remember that!” That’s also one of the big reasons I keep a big physical collection of console games from the PS1 era onwards — they look cool, they sometimes spark conversations and, frankly, I just like it. (One day I might return to collecting cartridges for older systems, but to be honest I’m much more inclined to return to a PS1 game than an N64 game. Sorry, Nintendo fans.)

Anyway, as the rambling nature of this post will attest, I am far too tired to be able to do anything particularly productive for the rest of this evening, so I think it’s time for me to get into bed. Tomorrow I am getting a haircut — it may sound ridiculous, but I’m convinced part of my tiredness at the moment is coming from the mane I’m currently sporting making my head far too hot — and then coming back to do some packing, packing, packing. Then it’s my final Japanese class for the academic year in the evening, and then probably some more packing, packing, packing.

I’m really looking forward to being in the new house. I just wish all the other stuff wasn’t between me and being able to snuggle down in our lovely brand-new bed.

1580: No, Not the Boxes

Well, we’re nearly there. We own a house, Andie has spent most of this week redecorating it (and done a great job) while I’ve been working, and we have the movers booked for Wednesday.

All that remains to do is to pack everything u–

Shit.

I really, really hate packing to move house. I also hate unpacking at the other end, but that’s marginally better because you get to find new homes for things and figure out aesthetically pleasing arrangements for things like video games and board games and other stuff you might want to display.

But before you can do that, you have to put everything into boxes. And inevitably you don’t have quite enough boxes, or you can’t quite fit everything in one “category” neatly into one box, meaning you end up dumping things in semi-randomly as you get more and more tired and annoyed at the whole hideous process, until eventually you simply resort to grabbing handfuls of possibly related things, throwing them into a box in a disorganised heap, then taping the box up, writing “STUFF” or “MISC” on it and ensuring it’s the very, very last thing you unpack. (In the process, you’ll almost certainly realise that something you really, really need is in there, but you just won’t be able to face digging through the mountains of crap that are almost certainly piled on top of it.)

In other words, yes, I am really not looking forward to packing everything up. I’m thinking I might take the opportunity to ditch some stuff — primarily books that are likely never going to be read again and clothes that haven’t been worn for years in some cases — and minimise the packing of unnecessary crap. I know it’s still going to be a massive pain, but at least we don’t have to actually pick up and carry stuff ourselves this time. I hate that even more than putting things in boxes, particularly as the weather seems to have suddenly got hot and humid lately, so I’m more than happy to pay people money to carry heavy things for me.

Mostly I just want the tedious side of moving to be over and done with and this (our old) place to be clean so I can settle down, relax a bit and look forward to — hopefully — a significant number of years in the same place. Outside of living back with my parents, I’ve never stayed in the same place for longer than about two years, tops, and the prospect of getting to stay somewhere for a significant amount of time — a place where I don’t have to feel guilty about hammering nails or picture-hooks into the walls — is, frankly, extremely appealing. The fact it’s big enough to have guests over — we have a spare bedroom for the first time in my life — is something I’m particularly happy about, and I’m looking forward to actually inviting people over to stay at some point.

So it’s nice to look forward to what the eventual goal is. But I’m conscious that we’re moving in a few days and there are a lot of things to put into boxes. So I supposed we’d better start soon, huh?

1579: “Android?”

I took a bold step and did something very brave today. I… I…

I switched from iOS to Android.

Okay, “very brave” might be understatement of the century, but despite being curious about Google’s mobile OS, I’ve resisted the temptation to ditch the iPhone series to date, largely because I felt that I was too invested in the iOS ecosystem to make breaking free practical.

I pondered this recently, though, and realised that I actually wasn’t all that dependent on the iOS ecosystem at all. I run my mail, contacts and calendars through Google, I socialise through Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I take notes in Evernote and… well, that’s about it, to be frank; I’m not an especially adventurous mobile user these days, largely because I feel that 95% of apps released these days are superfluous, pointless crap that no-one needs.

And so it is that I find myself with an HTC One “Don’t Call Me Mate” M8 Android handset. It’s a rather larger handset than the iPhone 4S I was using before, and it’s larger than Andie’s iPhone 5S, too. I once thought that large phones were worthy of mockery, but having been using the HTC for a day I’m already feeling the benefit of the larger screen size. It’s not a huge amount bigger than an iPhone, but it’s a significant enough difference that things don’t feel nearly as cramped.

Bringing mail, contacts and calendars across was straightforward and easy because I was using Google. The one thing I was a little concerned about was being able to manage my music — something that I have, to date, relied on iTunes for. It turns out that Google’s Google Music service has seemingly been designed for this exact situation, allowing you the ability to upload up to 20,000 tracks directly from your iTunes library to then be available for streaming or caching from anywhere. You can listen to them via the Chrome-based web player, or on your Android phone. There’s even an optional Spotify-like subscription service where you can stream music you don’t own, so as of today I’ve cancelled my Spotify Premium account and gone with Google instead.

There are things to adjust with on the new phone. Not having notifications on the lock screen is very odd having had them for several generations of iOS hardware, but this is more than made up for by the fact you can dismiss all notifications at once from the notification centre. I haven’t delved particularly into the customisation side of things yet, but I understand with a bit of fiddling and tweaking it’s possible to rectify this behaviour if it really bothers me.

There are a few things I really like. The fact that if you download an app and discover it’s shit, you can delete it and automatically receive a refund if you do so within 15 minutes of purchasing. The way apps work together, sharing information much more easily than on iOS. The way the on-screen keyboard does a fake “haptic feedback” thing where it vibrates very slightly every time you press a key. The camera on this particular device is supposed to be very good, too, but I haven’t really tried it as yet.

So far I’m very happy with the new device so far, particularly as the tariff I’ve moved to post-upgrade is, for once, actually a better deal than the one I was on previously. I’m paying the same and getting more cellular data allowance plus “4G” speeds where they’re available, so the overall experience should be superior. I’m looking forward to exploring what it’s capable of further; it’s a pleasant and fun change, and wasn’t riddled with nearly as many difficulties as I was expecting.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to become one of those douchebags who comments on every article about a new iOS app/game and just says “Android?” like a brainwashed parrot. iOS is still great at what it does, and if you claim to be a lover of tech, you should be interested and curious in all the alternatives out there rather than swearing blind corporate allegiance to one company purely because they make the handset you currently own.

But that’s probably a discussion for another day. I’m going to go and lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a bit now. Or possibly just play Nanaca Crash on it.

1578: Games Journalism is Broken

And I’m not going to fix it. I’m not sure anyone can.

I mention this amid the news that Future, one of the biggest publishing companies in the UK that has been around for as long as I can remember, is having severe difficulties. Difficulties that are serious enough to see it considering the closure of CVG (aka Computer and Video Games), one of the longest-running brands in the games press. Future’s woes aren’t solely to do with the games press side of its operation, of course — indeed, it is apparently intending to keep PC Gamer, Gamesradar and the new (somewhat redundant) Kotaku UK up and running regardless of what else happens — but the company’s situation, particularly with regard to the games press, is not at all unusual. I was let go from my position at USgamer recently, as you’ll know if you’ve been keeping up to date with this blog, and I believe Destructoid also lost some people recently, too.

It’s getting beyond a joke now. The video games industry is one of the most lively, vibrant and exciting creative sectors right now; a business that nowadays regularly puts the amount of money thrown about in movies and music to shame. Over the course of the last 30+ years, it’s grown from something that nerds do alone in their bedroom — an activity to be ashamed of — to something that absolutely anyone can engage with on one level or another. Thanks to the rise of smartphones and tablets, there are more “gamers” out there than ever before, but even not taking this rapidly growing market into account, computers, consoles and handhelds are providing more diverse, more interesting, more creative experiences than at any other time in the history of interactive entertainment.

So why is the games press a business that seemingly finds it impossible to remain stable for more than a year or two at a time? Why is the games press such a volatile sector that hard-working individuals (like me, the CVG lot whose jobs are at risk, and any number of other people who have lost their jobs recently) regularly have to effectively start their career over again time after time? How are people who have given up a lot to be a part of this business that they feel so strongly about supposed to build a career and progress?

Part of the reason is the very nature of the Web. People aren’t accustomed to paying for content, so they won’t pay for it. This means that sites have to rely on lowest-common-denominator ad-based revenue, which in turn leads to a decline in the overall quality of content as producing work that shows up high in the search engine rankings or which provides answers to the most vapid of questions becomes a priority for sites. There are rare exceptions — a well-written piece from an established writer can attract a goodly degree of traffic and, consequently, revenue, as can something controversial or which exploits the hot-button topics of the day — but they’re just that: exceptions. For the most part, it’s all about the daily churn: getting as much content as possible out as quickly as possible; a far cry, to be sure, from the magazine model of the pre-Internet days.

And you know what? I’m getting to the stage where I feel like I’m done. I love writing about games. Love it. But it doesn’t feel like it’s possible to make it into a career any more, and it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s possible to make a career out of writing about the most interesting niches of the industry. I’ve been doing the same thing in the business for four years now, largely because I’ve had to reboot my career and start over several times. I’m 33 years old; I can’t keep doing that, and I can’t go back to begging for scraps on a freelance basis, no disrespect intended to anyone who does successfully manage to draw a living wage through that way of working.

And so, I find myself increasingly wondering whether or not if, should a fantastic-sounding job offer for a video games site find itself in my inbox tonight or tomorrow, I would take it. At this exact moment — 22:42 on a Thursday night in May 2014 — I’m erring towards “no”. It would be wonderful to have the guarantee of a new job in this sector that I love, but I’d constantly be wondering if, a year or two down the line, I’d be in the exact same position I am now: never advancing; never progressing; never learning anything new.

A career in video games sounds like a dream come true to most people who grew up with them. But I can tell you, it’s not everything you might hope. In fact, there are a lot of times when it really, really sucks, and it seems like the spring of 2014 is one of those times.

My best wishes to everyone who, like me, is going through a tough time right now. May we all land on our feet and find ourselves doing something where our skills are truly valued and appropriately compensated.

1577: Resolutiongate

The absolute most tedious thing about the new generation of games consoles is the endless parade of news stories with the headline “[game name] runs at [resolution] and [frame rate] on [platform]”.

This has happened before, of course, back when the PS3 and Xbox 360 first came out. Billed as “HD” consoles, people were quick to jump on any games that didn’t run at the full, promised 1080p resolution — usually for performance reasons. It was tedious and pointless fanboy baiting back then; it is tedious and pointless fanboy baiting now. And yet still it goes on and on and on, because, well, it’s fanboy baiting that attracts clicks and comments.

I do get the arguments why resolution and frame rate are important. 1080p resolution is noticeably crisper on a large screen, and particularly useful for games where you need to perceive fine details like first-person shooters where you do a lot of fighting from a long distance, or strategy games where you need to be able to parse a lot of information at once. Likewise, 60 frames per second looks lovely and slick — it’s almost impossible to physically perceive anything higher than 60 — and is particularly suited to games in which precision timing is important like, say, manic shooters, music games and driving games.

These two things are not the most important or interesting things about games, though. There are any number of interesting things you could say about upcoming games for Xbox One and PlayStation, and yet it always comes down to this, with the most recent example being Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs — a game which, embarrassingly, Sony bragged about running at 1080p and 60fps “only on PlayStation 4” only for Ubisoft to subsequently go “aaaaactually, it’s 900p and 30fps…” As the team behind The Witcher commented the other day, these numbers are little more than marketing figures, as Sony’s ill-advised use of them clearly demonstrates; I seriously doubt that Watch Dogs will be an inferior experience for running at a lower resolution and half the frame rate.

In fact, sometimes these things are almost irrelevant, or at least of significantly lesser importance than the universal “EVERYTHING MUST BE 1080p 60FPS” attitude that is starting to take hold these days. Take something like the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, for example, which I’ve been digging up screenshots for to post in articles over on MoeGamer. Katawa Shoujo runs at 800×600 — yes, the 4:3 resolution that your old 386 used to run Windows 3.1 in — and looks beautiful due to its gorgeous art style. Likewise, from a frame-rate perspective, heavily cinematic-inspired games such as Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls actually benefit from lower frame rates closer to the 30 mark because it makes them look more like — you guessed it — film, which has historically run at around 24fps. In these cases, bumping up to 60fps may look smooth and slick, but also looks very artificial and unnatural.

In other words, looking good is less a matter of technical proficiency and more a matter of art style and direction — picking the appropriate means of presenting your title, in other words. Like so much else in gaming, this isn’t a “one size fits all” situation, and I look forward to the day where the industry collectively stops assigning such importance to arbitrary numbers and focuses on the important things.

1576: Angel Beats: Gone Before Your Time

Looking back on recent entries, it occurs to me that I never summed up my final thoughts on the anime Angel Beats!, so let’s rectify that right now, shall we?

Angel Beats! was an excellent show, tragically cut short by a not-insignificant degree: about 7 episodes, to be exact. What ended up as a 13-episode show was originally intended to be explored more fully across a larger number of episodes, but it never got the opportunity; there is supporting material in other forms of media, apparently, but the anime itself leaves a significant number of unanswered questions and rushes through its latter half at a disappointingly rapid clip.

Despite this aspect, however, it’s still a great show, and shouldn’t be passed up on just because it has stuff “missing”. On the contrary, it has the feel of a great, unfinished work of art about it, and one can’t help but wonder if, on a different worldline, the world was ever graced with a full 20-episode run of Angel Beats!

But enough about what the show doesn’t have; what it does have is a whole lot of personality. Like Clannad, which a lot of the same people worked on, Angel Beats! features a combination of light-hearted humour and tearjerking scenes that will put your heart through a wringer. The juxtaposition of the two elements is, I feel, even more considerably pronounced than it was in Clannad; while Clannad had a few silly characters — Fuuko and, at times, Kotomi being probably the most obvious examples from the main cast — Angel Beats! has a lot more in the way of self-consciously silly, slapstick scenes. There’s a beautiful sequence in one episode, for example, that sees the main cast attempting to create a distraction in class — a distraction that is achieved by, of all things, several cast members’ chairs being equipped with small rocket engines that send them blasting off into the ceiling. The sheer unexpectedness of this sequence coupled with its deliberately melodramatic presentation — when they’re blasting off, they do so in slow motion, accompanied by the heartfelt, tearjerking main ending theme to the series — makes it genuinely hilarious.

But then, often within the same episode where something ridiculous happened, there’ll be at least one moment that will have all but the strongest souls in tears. These moments normally revolve around the series’ central concept of the afterlife’s inhabitants being “obliterated” and reborn as soon as they find true peace; rather than presenting a character’s obliteration as the dramatic, over-the-top moment suggested by the word “obliterate”, some excellent direction tends to mean that they just disappear — they’re there in one frame, then the moment the camera angle changes, they’re gone. Simple, beautiful — and often heartbreaking.

I know that some people aren’t a big fan of how the whole series ends and while I agree to a certain extent — the last few episodes are very rushed, and the show both introduces and shows an antagonist the door with alarming rapidity — I found the actual finale to be a wonderful way to wrap up the whole series. Despite the obviously missing content — most notably, a number of main cast members lacking backstories — there was a satisfying sense of closure to the final scenes, and I was both impressed and surprised to note that the show didn’t exactly end up in the place where I thought it was going to go when I first started watching.

And that’s a real strength of the show as a whole. Most things about it start out as a mystery, and you’re given a gradual drip-feed of information as the series progresses. By the end, you feel like you have a good understanding of at least the cast members positioned as the “main” characters; it’s a shame that distinctive secondary characters such as TK (a blonde guy who speaks entirely in Engrish bastardisations of American clichés) remain completely unexplored, however.

I’d love to see a “director’s cut” one day that features the “missing” episodes. I’m not sure it’ll ever happen, even with the show’s good reception and popularity, but it’s certainly a nice possibility.

1575: Crowdarchival

Since I finished both Steins;Gate and Saya no Uta recently (the latter was a whole lot shorter) I was pondering what visual novel I should read next this evening, and my thoughts were drawn to a disc I picked up from JAST a while back called the JAST Memorial Collection. This disc included several old JAST titles updated to run on modern machines, plus two additional games called May Club and Nocturnal Illusion. I recalled that a friend of mine had said that Nocturnal Illusion was particularly interesting and worth playing, so I decided I’d check it out.

Except it fell at the first hurdle. Being a super-old game, it does not like modern operating systems. It particularly doesn’t like 64-bit Windows 7 and outright refused to start up at all.

It’s been a while since I’ve encountered something that simply doesn’t run at all, but my reaction to it is the same as it was back in the days of MS-DOS and EMM386.EXE: the insatiable feeling of “I MUST GET THIS GAME WORKING NOW IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO.” It doesn’t matter if it ends up being crap; the fact that my computer is actively preventing me from exploring something flips a switch in my brain and causes me to go into full-on research mode.

In attempting to determine whether there was any way of getting Nocturnal Illusion to run under 64-bit Windows 7, I came across a project designed to do just that, known as ViLE. This seemingly abandoned project was designed to be a “virtual machine” for older visual novel titles, and specifically supports Nocturnal Illusion and May Club as well as a third title called Dividead. A bit of tinkering around and ensuring various pieces of game content were in the right place, and I eventually had Nocturnal Illusion up and running on my TV; not only that, but with the enhanced graphics of the untranslated Japanese remake, too. Neat!

I can’t speak much to the content of Nocturnal Illusion as yet as I only gave it a cursory look to see if it was actually working. What I did think was interesting, though, was how the community on the Internet is a lot more willing to archive the past of video games — even obscure, incredibly niche titles like Nocturnal Illusion — than the big companies who, you’d think, would have the resources to be able to do so.

And this is great, because as an art form, video games are, to a certain degree, more difficult to archive than other forms of media. They’re a lot more tied to technology than other art forms; a piece of music is timeless regardless of the media it’s stored on, whereas a video game is inherently tied to a piece of hardware. You can’t cram a Mario Kart cartridge into a Wii, for example.

And this is where the archivists of the medium come in. In many cases continuing to (illegally) redistribute games long after they’ve gone out of print, the archivists of the Internet are dedicated to ensuring that even modern audiences can enjoy titles that are theoretically completely incompatible with modern systems, be it through emulators or clever pieces of software trickery like ViLE.

I hope this never changes. While the legality of a lot of it is somewhat questionable, in some cases delving into the seedy underbelly of the Internet is the only way to be able to rediscover (or perhaps even discover) certain titles, even with the best efforts of high-profile retro specialists like GOG.com and Night Dive Studios. I don’t see companies like GOG rushing to bring titles like Nocturnal Illusion up to date to run on modern machines — largely because of their adult content — and thus it is up to these amateur archivists, these heroes of digital preservation, to ensure that we can always celebrate the history of this rich and diverse medium of artistic expression — and of play.