1614: Remastered

One thing I’m growing to quite dislike about the new generation of games consoles is the number of times it seems they’re going to try and sell us the same games we’ve already played under the pretense that it’ll somehow be a new experience to see them in slightly higher resolution and at a better framerate. (Pro-Tip: if you played them on PC — obviously impossible for exclusives, but for everything else, a viable option — then you have already had this “new” experience.) It’s already happened with Tomb Raider, it’s happening soon with The Last of Us, Halo and numerous others.

There’s a sound argument for these releases, of course: some people might be coming to video games with the new generation and thus may have never had the opportunity to play things from the PS3/360 era — so why shouldn’t they be able to play these games in their “definitive edition”, as Tomb Raider called it? In the case of Halo, the upcoming Master Chief Collection will bring together games from two generations of consoles on one platform and allow players to jump straight to favourite moments rather than having to play all the way through four games. (It also misses out the two games widely regarded to be among the strongest installments in the series — ODST and Reach — but never mind, eh.)

I do find myself resenting the idea of a game that didn’t come out all that long ago — The Last of Us — getting a “remastered” release, though. As I say, I understand the reasons for it, it just feels a little… I don’t know, cheap. Particularly given that most of the truly exciting, original titles for PS4 and Xbox One aren’t coming until next year at the earliest — this leaves 2014 as, as one of my soon-to-be-former colleagues put it, The Year of the Remaster.

Twist: At least, I thought I resented the idea of a remaster. Until I purchased a copy of Atelier Rorona Plus recently — a remake of a game that didn’t come out all that long ago that hasn’t even jumped generation: it’s being released on the same platform it was originally released on!

Atelier Rorona Plus is, as the name suggests, a rerelease of Atelier Rorona, the alchemy-themed RPG/strategy game from Gust that I started playing a while back then had to stop due to review commitments. But this is far from a straight remaster — there would be little point rereleasing it on the same platform otherwise. No, Atelier Rorona Plus instead rebuilds pretty much the whole game in a number of ways.

Visually, it’s had an overhaul. While the environments and 2D art are mostly the same, the 3D polygonal characters have been totally revamped to be more in line with their 2D counterparts — in the original, the polygonal characters looked far too young in comparison to the hand-drawn art and, while it wasn’t a dealbreaker by any means, it was a little distracting. The new character models look gorgeous, and bring the game much more in line with its more recent sequels.

But, notably, it’s not just the visuals that have had an overhaul. The gameplay has been tweaked and adjusted, too, with a whole ton of nice little features that make the whole experience more streamlined and smooth to play without sacrificing any of its depth. The battle system has been redone, the crafting system around which the game revolves has been revamped, the quest system is clearer, there’s less aimless running around… basically everything that needed fixing has, so far as I can make out, been fixed.

Now that’s how you do a remake. Full review coming soon as one of my last pieces on USgamer.

1613: A Distinct Lack of National Pride

It’s that time again, that time that comes around every few years, when I’m supposed to care about football. The World Cup.

I do not care about football. I would go so far as to say that I actively despise football. There was a brief moment in my childhood where I sort of liked it — I played for my Cub Scout pack team, who were legendarily awful (worst result, 20-0 to them; best result, 1-1) and I used to talk about playing football with my erstwhile penpal Joanna (a former classmate who moved away and, unusually for the late ’80s, a girl who liked football) — but once I got to secondary school and we started to be obliged to play football in P.E. lessons, my hatred of it started to grow.

And it is hatred. Irrational, burning hatred. I’m not quite sure of the exact source of my irrational, burning hatred for “the beautiful game”, but it sure is there, and despite several attempts over the years to overcome said irrational, burning hatred I just cannot get over it at all. I hate football. I hate everything about it.

Perhaps it was the fact that football lessons in school were an opportunity for the “cool” kids to shine and be praised, whereas it made me feel utterly useless. Whereas — and I don’t wish to sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but I’m aware I sort of am — I was fairly academically gifted compared to my peers at my secondary school, I was not at all gifted in any way when it came to any form of physical activity. Clumsiness and inaccuracy — a hangover from my childhood, where I had such difficulty with a number of things I had to have various forms of therapy and support to get over it — meant that I was a hindrance to any team I ended up on, which meant I was pretty much always the proverbial (and indeed literal) last one to get picked for teams. It was humiliating.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that when I’m around hardcore football fans — the ones who drink beer by the gallon, shout at the TV and raise the roof of whatever drinking establishment they’re frequenting any time something either good or bad happens on the pitch — I feel physically threatened. Nothing has ever actually happened to me — largely because I try and keep myself out of such situations as much as possible — but whenever I’m anywhere near a group of rowdy football fans I feel worried for my own safety. I even feel worried and scared when I hear, from my own home, drunkards staggering back from the pub late at night, singing football songs as they pass by.

Or perhaps it’s just because I resent being obliged to show an interest in something that I despise so. It’s assumed by almost everyone that you’ll be following the World Cup — it was even an informal question at a job interview I had last week (though to the asker’s credit, she did then joke that “the job is yours!” after I said that I don’t really like football; sadly, I don’t think she meant it) — and if you say that you’re not following it, or that you’re not interested, or that you think anyone who doesn’t put a comma in the statement “Come on, England!” is a barely-literate idiot (okay, perhaps that last one is a tad inflammatory, but it’s not wrong, is it?) you get a funny look of confusion at best, disgust at worst.

Either way, fuck the World Cup. I haven’t been following it at all — aside from the unavoidable, endless posts on social media during a match (I usually go and do something else at this point) — but if I understand correctly, the England team (I refuse to say “we”) is at risk of being knocked out shortly, at which point I will breathe a sigh of relief.

Why? Because there are very few things out there that make me feel more like an outsider than the inevitable national hysteria over the national team’s performance. I hate it. I despise it. And now I’m going to go and do something else to forget about it.

1612: “Box Set” Implies Boxes Are Involved

If you’ll indulge me a moment, I need to complain about something. It’s not anything particularly important or relevant to the world at large, but it has been bugging me recently.

I’ll preface this by saying that I accept that language is in a constant state of flux, as much as many of us may not like the way it is changing on a seemingly daily basis thanks to the fast-moving nature of Internet culture. I accept that words and phrases change their meaning as time goes on — there are probably hundreds of words and phrases we all use on a daily basis that would have meant something completely different fifty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. That’s fine.

What I’m not so cool with is when there’s an obvious attempt by someone (or a group of people) to change the meaning of a word or phrase to something that really doesn’t make sense in the slightest. There are a number of examples of this in modern parlance, but the one that is bugging me in this instance is the use of the term “box set”.

What does that term mean to you? To me, it means a box of something — usually some form of “complete collection”. In the case of DVDs and Blu-Rays, a box set would include multiple discs and encompass either a complete season or a complete run of a TV show, or perhaps a movie and discs of special features. In the case of music CDs, a box set might collect together a band’s singles or albums, or, again, provide a collection of tracks that you might not be able to get in another way. Even books can come in box sets — I used to have a box set of The Lord of the Rings that, rather than splitting the whole story into three volumes, split it down further into its smaller constituent novel-size books, making it seemingly much more digestible. (I still never made it all the way through, but I made it further than I probably would have if I were trying to plough through three volumes of several hundred pages apiece.)

The key thing all of those have in common is that a box is involved. They’re a physical object. They’re a box, containing a set of things. A box set. Do you see how that works? Pretty straightforward, no?

And, then, do you see how utterly stupid it is for digital TV services to refer to both video-on-demand and channels broadcasting a show’s complete run back-to-back as “box sets”? There is no box involved. There is no physical object involved. It is not something you can collect and own; it is not something you can keep. They are not even the same thing. They are, respectively, a complete series available for video streaming, and a complete series being broadcast back-to-back on live television. Granted, the term “box set” is much more concise and people probably know what it means. But that doesn’t stop it just being bloody wrong, all right?

I get the feeling this is the work of some marketer who thought it would be a jolly smashing idea to attempt to rebrand the term “box sets” from its increasingly irrelevant meaning with regard to physical media. After all, if physical media is on the way out, why not take a term that’s becoming obsolete and try to use it differently?

Because it’s dumb. Stop it.

1611: Look in the Middle

I was pointed in the direction of this post earlier by a retweet on Twitter, and while I agree with some of its points — the games press needs to embrace the ever-growing diversity continually exhibited by the development sector — I feel like it’s not quite got its priorities right.

The angle on display in the piece is that press should pay more attention to the sort of things that were exhibited at IndiE3, an alternative presentation put on by the independent developer community during E3 — which is, as you may know, the busiest time of the year for both the mainstream games press and mainstream games publishers.

The games on display at IndiE3, judging by the description in the article linked above, were all highly unusual, creative games — often lumped together as “art games” — and, for sure, their existence is worth exploring and celebrating. They’re often very personal works put together by small teams — even individuals in some cases — and, in many ways, they’re probably the closest we have to true “works of art” in the medium in the traditional sense.

But I kind of have to disagree with the assertion that they’re the ones suffering the most from the mainstream press’ obsession with whatever the Top Three Triple-A Titles Right Now are at any given moment. In recent years, we’ve started to see the phenomenon of the “indie darling”, for example, whereby mainstream press and gamers alike suddenly all jump aboard the same small-scale title and champion it until they’re blue in the face. Not only that, but we’ve seen a significant growth in indie-specialist sites in the last couple of years; whether or not those sites make any money or not is another matter altogether, but they exist, and those are the places that are celebrating these highly creative, original and often very affecting titles — far better than the broad brush-strokes of the mainstream outlets can.

No; the field that is suffering the most from the mainstream press’ attention deficit disorder is that of mid-tier games. Barely acknowledged at the best of times and sort of waved away with a dismissive air of “this doesn’t really need to be explored in detail” at others, mid-tier games are often where the most interesting, accessible work is going on in the video games business. In contrast to the often self-consciously “arty” world of the aforementioned indie games — a style of development that makes them less accessible to those who prefer somewhat more “conventional” (for want of a better word) titles — mid-tier games often make use of recognisable gameplay tropes and conventions and marry them to subject matter that is more creative, inventive and risk-taking than that seen by big publishers. It’s mid-tier games that gave us titles like Deadly Premonition, the Twin Peaks game that never was. It’s mid-tier games that gave us series like Atelier, an unconventional take on role-playing games that requires a different way of thinking and which is still, to date, something of a trailblazer in its prominent use of female protagonists. It’s mid-tier games that gave us titles like Murdered: Soul Suspect, a game that was actually a whole lot more compelling and interesting than its mediocre reviews made out. I could go on all day.

These are the games that the mainstream press is truly neglecting. But with the ever-increasing focus on clickbait and ad revenue — both GameTrailers and Polygon, both high-profile online outlets, let a number of people go in the last couple of weeks, not to mention my own redundancy a short while back — this is a situation that’s only going to continue to get worse, until all big-scale games sites are going to be identikit news feeds with slightly different CSS.

That’s not an acceptable means of celebrating a medium with as much diversity as video games. That’s not an acceptable way to treat the talent in the industry, both on the development and press sides. That’s not a sustainable way for the business to continue to operate, surely. Surely?

1610: Titan Falls

Just wanted to share my enthusiasm for what I felt was a significant (gaming) achievement this evening: finally successfully toppling Titan’s Hard Mode incarnation in Final Fantasy XIV without dying, without being blown up by bombs, without getting hit by Weight of the Land (too many times) and without doing anything stupid. The secret? Zoom out the camera.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame, Titan Hard Mode was formerly one of the hardest encounters in the game, taking the form of an 8-player variation on one of the main story’s 4-player bosses. Mastering (or at least clearing) the fight is an important part of endgame play, since acquiring your class’s “Relic” weapon requires you to beat him along with the other two Hard Mode primal fights and two original bosses Dhorme Chimera and Hydra.

The actual battle against Titan bears some resemblance to its story mode counterpart in that Titan makes use of many of the same abilities throughout. The main difference is that the fight is overall a lot longer and incorporates a few new mechanics — most notably the addition of “Bomb Boulders” that drop down from the sky in set patterns and then explode in sequence, requiring the party to quickly and carefully manoeuvre from position to position in order to avoid damage — and while avoiding Titan’s other abilities such as Landslide, which can knock you off the arena and out of the fight completely if you’re not sharp enough.

Like the other Hard and Extreme mode Primal fights in Final Fantasy XIV, Titan Hard is quite a “choreographed” fight that requires the party be in the right place at the right time, and respond quickly to prompts on the screen. Titan always uses the same abilities in the same order, so there’s very much a sequence and timing you can learn, though there will be slight variations on exactly what you need to do each time you play owing to people standing in different places.

It may sound odd to say, but it’s a strangely beautiful sight to see a party pulling off a fight like Titan Hard efficiently and effectively. The group moving as one from place to place in response to the incoming threats is a very satisfying thing to watch, particularly when you’re part of it. It’s a hard thing to convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced it for themselves, but in many ways it’s like pulling off an impressive “dance” as a group — eight people working as one (for the most part… there’s usually at least one person who falls off remarkably quickly, and up until tonight it’s usually been me) to achieve a common goal.

I must confess to feeling pumped up and happy about my victory this evening — and, now, much more willing to jump into the Trials Roulette mode of the Duty Finder, which I’d previously been extremely hesitant about making use of despite the helpful rewards on offer. The Extreme Mode primals may still be a while off before I can confidently tackle them — same for Twintania, the notorious boss that guards the end of the first super-tough endgame dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut — but for now, I feel I have conquered Titan Hard and can move on to stiffer challenges.

Oh, and I should give a shout-out to Andie, too, who has been playing Final Fantasy XIV and has just got her first character to level 50, putting my friend James — who has been playing a lot longer — to shame. Nice job, W’khebica (an authentic Miqo’te name, apparently) — I look forward to enduring the endless Myth grind with you at my side.

1609: In Custody

Finished Murdered: Soul Suspect this evening. It’s not a long game, which may cause consternation among some people wondering whether to splash their hard-earned cash on it, but I found it didn’t outstay its welcome, and it was an eminently satisfying experience. (I am also of the age when I remember paying £30-40 for titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which are about 2-3 hours long apiece, so I don’t mind too much when something clocks in at 10 hours or less. In fact, given the number of absolute behemoths I play on a regular basis, it can be quite refreshing to play something short.)

I won’t spoil the story here, but I was pleased to see that it didn’t end up being quite as predictable as I initially believed it would be. Those with a better mind for this sort of thing than I — I’m thinking mainly of my friend Lynette here, who can spot a plot twist coming a mile off, however well the author might have obfuscated it — may still find it to be predictable, but I found that there were a few interesting surprises along the way, and the conclusion was satisfying and, well, conclusive.

I stand very much by my feeling that it had the atmosphere of a 1990s PC game, and I’ve been trying to figure out quite what I mean by that. It’s a combination of things, I think: the use of “real world” settings with various obstacles in the way so they don’t end up having to render the entire interior of a building; the way that NPCs sort of mill around and occasionally have conversations with one another that occasionally give you little hints about the plot; collectible bits and pieces that help flesh out the world; and gameplay that is less concerned about being overly “cinematic” or based on spectacle than it is about using its mechanics to make the player feel involved in what is going on.

It is not a hard game, and since the protagonist is already dead at the outset, there are relatively few situations in which you find yourself in peril, making it a mostly fairly cerebral experience. Even the few instances in which you find yourself threatened by angry spirits (known in the game as demons) are more environmental puzzles than fast-action combat — you don’t actually “fight” the demons as such; instead, the only way to defeat them is to sneak up behind them and “execute” them. Alternatively, in pretty much any situation where you’re threatened by them, you can just sneak past, too, which is nice.

This latter aspect of the game called to mind a slightly more recent game: Silent Hill: Shatered Memories, a retelling of the first Silent Hill game that replaced the PS1-era “survival horror” gameplay with something a bit different, a bit more modern, and entirely combat-free. In Shattered Memories, the most you can do with the monsters that inhabit the dark world of Silent Hill is to block their path with something heavy — for the most part, you’re simply fleeing from them, attempting to make your way back to the exit as quickly as possible. Murdered: Soul Suspect isn’t quite that non-violent — you can defeat the demons through the aforementioned sneak attacks, after all — but playing a game that doesn’t have a straight “attack” button that causes you to flail wildly at enemies is always a pleasant surprise.

It may sound contradictory to compare Murdered: Soul Suspect to late-’90s PC games and Shattered Memories, a title I described above as being “modern”, but there are certainly elements of both in there — the atmosphere and structure of a ’90s game; the unconventional approach to gameplay of Shattered Memories.

Ultimately, the whole thing ended up being a game that I’m very glad I played, and one which I have absolutely no hesitation recommending to anyone who enjoys a good ghost story, a good detective story or a bit of both. It’s an enjoyable tale told well, and a worthwhile investment of 10 hours or so of your life.

1608: Soul Suspect

I’ve been playing a game called Murdered: Soul Suspect today. It’s a game that immediately intrigued me back at the Eurogamer Expo last year when I attended a hands-off gameplay demo and developer talk about it.

For the uninitiated, the premise is this: You play the role of Detective Ronan O’Connor, a sharp-eyed investigator in the traditional sense, complete with perpetual smoking habit and the dress sense of someone from the 1940s. Ronan is investigating a murder. Nothing unusual for a detective, you might think, until you discover that the murder he’s investigating is his own. He’s dead, you see, and not altogether happy about the situation in which he finds himself. And, in traditional ghost story fashion, he can’t fully shuffle off this mortal coil until he unravels the mystery keeping him chained to existence.

Murdered: Soul Suspect has received rather poor reviews to date, with its Metacritic rating varying anywhere between the low 60s and the 40s depending on which platform you look at. And yet, as I’ve found in so many cases recently, these numbers do not paint an at all accurate picture of what the experience of playing the game is like.

It’s enormously enjoyable. It’s engrossing, well-written, well-acted and intriguing. Its blend of noir-style detective fiction and ghost stories is excellently handled, and the main storyline is backed up by some truly excellent supporting material, ranging from an exploration of setting Salem’s history to some entertaining, authentically “campfire-style” ghost stories that you can unlock by discovering collectibles around the various environments in which you find yourself.

Gameplay-wise, it’s rather simplistic: you wander around, you uncover clues — occasionally using your ghostly abilities to do so — and every so often you’re quizzed on what you’ve discovered in order to progress. These quizzes may involve putting a sequence of events in the right order, deciding on the right piece of information to use to get a witness to do something, or simply making deductions based on the evidence you’ve found. Some of the questions and answers throughout are a little obtuse — and some are deceptively obvious — but the game never feels like it’s punishing you for picking the wrong choice. Story is king here, and in this sort of game that’s exactly how it should be.

In many ways, the game feels like a late ’90s PC game, with its open, non-linear environments, lack of minimap and objective markers and… I don’t know, there’s just something about the general atmosphere of the whole thing that calls to mind titles like the original Deus Ex, Kingpin, Thief and any number of other titles from that similar era. It feels like a game out of its own time — and I kind of like that. (Oh, the PC version is also a tad buggy, too; I had to tweak an .ini file to get it running above 30 frames per second, and it works better with keyboard and mouse than it does with gamepad, but neither of these issues are something that has particularly hampered my enjoyment.)

There’s an interesting cast of characters to explore, and some enjoyable banter between Ronan and Joy, a young medium who becomes his “sidekick” and pair of physical hands as his investigation progresses. The story itself — which I’m yet to finish — is looking like it might end up being fairly predictable overall, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of hardboiled and noir fiction is, in itself, predictable and formulaic, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Murdered: Soul Suspect has been unjustly lambasted by much of the press. I’m not entirely sure what people were expecting from it going in to it; I’m really enjoying it so far, and its simplistic gameplay certainly doesn’t detract from the fact that it tells an enjoyable, interesting and unusual story. And that’s what I want; I don’t need fast action sequences, sprawling open worlds or a story that drags itself out unnecessarily over the course of 40+ hours. With Murdered: Soul Suspect what I’ve got is a good, concise, enjoyable interactive story that doesn’t overcomplicate itself with unnecessary mechanics and irrelevant content.

It’s a game worth playing, in other words, and another nail in the coffin for the usefulness of most modern reviews, so far as I’m concerned.

1607: Future Unwritten

I had a job interview today. I feel like I should talk about that a bit, but then I’ve not been mentioning it much on social media — largely due to superstition about “jinxing” it — and so I won’t talk about it in detail for now. (I hear whether I have another interview next week; I may say something more then.)

What I do want to talk about is the fact that said job isn’t involved in the games press, or indeed anywhere in the games industry. It is in something completely unrelated that just happens to use my skills at using content management systems for editing digital content in a productive manner. It’s for a large company and would involve me working at the site for said company rather than at home, so all around it will be a fairly significant change to how my life and career have been unfolding for the past four or five years.

So why am I leaving the games press behind, when those of you who know me well will know it’s something I wanted to do for most of my life? Well, the chief reason is that the games press of 2014 is not the same as the games press I initially gazed at with admiration back in the ’80s and ’90s. The industry has moved almost entirely to the Internet, for one thing — a few magazines do still exist, but their relevance is declining — and, as such, so has the way of working.

The rise of the Internet has led to an explosion of games press outlets. Because it’s so easy to get a website up and running, pretty much anyone can open a games site if they want to; whether or not it will become successful is another matter entirely, but the sheer volume of people writing about games on the Internet is ridiculous.

And yet I don’t feel like there’s anything near the diversity of character that the old magazines had. When I think back to the edgy humour of Atari ST magazine Zero; the informative multi-format coverage of Advanced Computer Entertainment; the distinctly “British-feeling” PC Zone, I don’t feel like we have anything quite like that in the modern games press. There are individual personalities who people like to follow around the Internet, for sure, but when was the last time you read something like Charlie Brooker’s contributions to PC Zone, one notable example of which was an entire preview written in third-person perspective Franglais? (Fade to Black, as I recall.) When was the last time you read a boxout on a site about the fact they don’t have Teletext in America? (Found on an Alpha Centauri preview, if I remember correctly.) If Half-Life 3 came out tomorrow, how many sites would devote a few words to a boxout listing “other famous Gordons” as PC Zone did with its review of the original?

I feel a lot of that character has been lost. The modern games press is probably more “professional” (for want of a better word) but it’s also become a whole lot more boring and predictable. The big sites, these days, are all but interchangeable in terms of what games get covered when; thanks to press embargoes on previews and reviews, everyone publishes their thoughts on particular games at the same time, meaning there’s often relatively little reason to look at more than one place, whereas seeing different magazines’ approaches to games coverage used to be a real joy.

The chief reason I’m in no hurry to go back, though, is the volatility of the industry. Over the course of the past four years, I’ve worked for a number of different outlets, some of which you may have heard of, some of which you might not have — Kombo, Daily Joypad, Good Old Games, IGN, GamePro, Inside Network and, most recently, USgamer. In each of those positions there wasn’t a whole lot of progression or advancement opportunities; games press positions are like gold dust, so a lot of people tend to stay where they are for as long as possible unless a significantly better offer comes along, which leads to a lot of positions stagnating somewhat. On top of all that, the aforementioned volatility of the industry meant that sometimes you come downstairs to start work only to discover an email announcing that the site you’ve been working on is to close, and that you’ll be out of a job — or that you’re surplus to requirements and no longer needed. (Yes, I am speaking from personal experience on both counts.)

This has happened several times throughout my career, each time through no fault of my own — and I really mean that; I’m a hard, dedicated worker, and any of my past employers would happily back me up on that. Every time it’s happened it’s meant that I’ve effectively had to start again from scratch — because I held one position for some time at the previous post, that’s what I’d end up doing at the next, and so the whole lack of progression thing perpetuated itself somewhat, because by the time I thought I should be advancing — and probably would have been advancing in a “normal” (i.e. stable) job — I was, instead, scouring the Help Wanted ads for where I’d be going next.

I’ve been speaking selfishly so far, but I’m far from the only one affected by this sort of thing. Just today, for example, the day after E3 — the biggest event in the games industry calendar — GameTrailers, one of the biggest video game video sites in the world, laid off a whole bunch of staff. How is that happening in an industry that, in money terms, is taking on movies and winning? How is it that one of the biggest creative mediums in the world right now can’t provide job security for anyone involved in it — whether you’re a member of the press, a developer, an artist or anyone else?

I’m tired of it, to be perfectly blunt. I’ve bought a house with Andie, and I want to be able to live my life without having to worry about whether I’ll still have a pay packet at the end of each month. I want to be able to have a job that I can build into a career; a position where I can learn new things, advance, take on new responsibilities and, most importantly, come home at the end of the day and forget all about until I go back the next day. Video games, as much as I love them and as big a part of my life as they will always be, are not providing that right now, so it is time for me to look elsewhere.

I worry that these feelings are coming too late. At 33 years of age, I’m no longer a fresh-out-of-university graduate, and I worry that prospective employers will see my fragmented work history and wonder what I’ve been playing at for the past 10+ years. Still, you can’t turn back the clock, so all I can do is try my best and see where life takes me next.

1606: A Little Pleasantness Goes a Long Way

I partied up with, I think, the absolute worst party I have ever played with in Final Fantasy XIV earlier — skills-wise, I mean; there wasn’t much in the way of ego on display, thankfully — but despite this, it was actually pretty fun.

I was running Haukke Manor’s normal mode as part of the daily “Low-Level Roulette” system, whereby you’re randomly thrown into one of the pre-level 50 dungeons with three random strangers and, depending on whether you’re still earning experience points or at endgame, earn big bonuses that are of benefit to you regardless of what level you actually are. There’s also an “Adventurer in Need” bonus for classes there are a shortage of at any given time — given that there’s about 4,500 gil on offer for jumping in to the requested class, it’s worth doing if you have the classes available.

Anyway, jump in as a healer (the Adventurer in Need) I did, and Haukke Manor began. It quickly became apparent that the tank, a level 28 Gladiator who hadn’t yet upgraded to the advanced job Paladin, hadn’t been there before, as there were enemies that he didn’t know to watch out for. He was also being very cautious, taking great care to mark enemies with thoroughness — an admirable enough trait, but he didn’t need to be quite so thorough — and taking his time working his way through.

I snuck a peek at his gear and some of his equipment was a little low-level for the dungeon we were challenging — a fact further emphasised by the fact that I, the healer in the party (typically the “weakest” player in terms of attack and defense power) had more hit points than him. Still, we pressed on, and as the healer I made sure he didn’t die as much as I possibly could.

I noticed after a little while that he didn’t appear to be using the skill Shield Lob, a useful trick in the Gladiator/Paladin’s arsenal and the typical way most battles begin. The Gladiator/Paladin flings their shield at an enemy, which attracts their attention onto the Gladiator/Paladin, and starts the fight off right, with the enemy in question attacking the tank. This is then, usually, followed up by a couple of Flashes, which attract the attention of nearby enemies. Once this is done, the enemies’ attention is usually pretty firmly on the tank, which then allows everyone else to go hog wild killing them.

Our tank in this group wasn’t using Shield Lob because he didn’t have it. He was level 28; you get Shield Lob at level 15 by completing the appropriate Gladiator class quest at that point, meaning he hadn’t done that. To be fair to him, the first time I tried tanking in a dungeon I forgot to pick up Shield Lob first, but that was a little different in that I was still level 15 at the time. Tanky boy here was nearly double that level, and still didn’t have it. Whoops.

When you spot something like this happening in an MMO, you’re always faced with a choice. Do you press on and hope the rest of the group is strong enough to make up for the weak link’s shortcomings? Or do you quietly slip away, leaving them to fend for themselves? Being an altogether decent sort of person, I chose to stick around and offer the struggling tank some helpful, non-aggressive advice. (One of my partymates was less understanding, his only utterances throughout the whole dungeon being “lol”, “omfg” and “wtf”. Great communication there, chap.) As a result, we eventually — very carefully — managed to make it through the entire dungeon intact. I was genuinely pleased to see the tank make it through in one piece and pick up some good new equipment along the way, and I hope he felt the same way.

I can’t entirely blame the “lol omfg wtf” guy for his attitude, because it’s easy to get into that mindset when you’ve been playing for a while. It’s easy to assume that everyone is as skilled at the game as you are, and that everyone has the same knowledge of the game’s mechanics and systems as you are. This is what leads to feelings of anxiety about living up to people’s expectations — feelings that even people like me, who have been playing for hundreds of hours by now, still feel regularly.

The reality is, in fact, somewhat different. People make mistakes. Some people don’t know the game well. Some people might not even really know what “tanking” actually is, thinking the “dude with sword and shield” character class is more of a hack-and-slash affair rather than the important defensive role they play. Some people might not know that you have to do your class quests every 5 levels to get all your abilities — though to be fair, the game is pretty explicit about this at the outset.

In a game like Final Fantasy XIV, it’s everyone’s responsibility to help make the game a pleasant, friendly place for everyone to enjoy. It’s everyone’s responsibility to help out those who are struggling, or who don’t understand. It’s easy to laugh and point fingers at “noobs” or “bads”, but it’s much more beneficial in the long run to help educate them so they know how to play the game better.

After all, what’s better: people leaving the game in droves because of elitist attitudes, or the gradual growth of the available base of players who understand the game mechanics and are able to take on its toughest challenges? It’s not a stumper, really, is it?

1605: Let’s Have Another Word About Vita

I got a bit annoyed earlier, prompted primarily by a tweet from Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo depicting a “neglected” (his words) Vita stand in Sony’s booth at E3. Indeed, in his photograph, no-one was playing the Vitas in the picture — one of which was proudly displaying the excellent upcoming rhythm game Hatsune Miku Project Diva f 2nd — but that’s not really the point: the point is that his wasn’t the only tweet I saw like this today, and all of them had something in common.

None of them appeared to be making any effort to rectify the situation.

Vita has been a self-fulfilling prophecy for some time now so far as the games press is concerned. It’s an astonishingly good games system with backwards compatibility for PSP titles — enhanced backwards compatibility, more to the point, due to the fact you can map the right stick and touchscreen to PSP functions, allowing you more control flexibility than the original games offered — as well as a ton of its own interesting exclusives, ranging from the engaging and unusual 3D action-adventure Gravity Rush to the fantastic cartoonish golf game Everybody’s Golf (aka Hot Shots Golf in the States) and a ton of Japanese role-playing games like Demon Gaze, Conception II, Persona 4 Golden and numerous others. On top of all that, it’s rapidly becoming the de facto handheld for independent developers to deploy handheld versions of their games, so we’re starting to see portable versions of indie classics previously confined to PC and TV-connected console: titles like Spelunky, Fez, Thomas Was Alone and, again, numerous others.

Still it goes without coverage. Still the narrative continues that Vita is “doomed” — or, in some cases, the system is ignored altogether. Is it any surprise that it’s not selling particularly well if none of the tastemakers in the industry — and, like it or not, games journos, that’s what you are — are celebrating the things it’s doing well, or even acknowledging its existence in some cases?

Sony could be doing a better job, of course. Vita didn’t get a lot of stage time at the company’s E3 press conference, Japan’s Vita TV has been rebranded PlayStation TV for the West and it’s rare to see the Vita in promotional artwork by itself — it’s more commonly depicted as a GamePad-like accessory for the PlayStation 4 — but at least they’re trying, and representatives such as Shahid Ahmad are doing their best to keep the profile of the system high and solicit regular feedback from the people who do own it.

But I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the press here, who initially set unrealistic expectations for the platform — do you really want to play a triple-A experience on a small, handheld device? I certainly don’t — and then followed this up with the aforementioned dismissal or lack of acknowledgement mentioned above. It’s a sorry state of affairs, to be sure, made all the more tragic by the fact that Vita has a genuinely great library of games.

The situation mirrors Nintendo’s struggles with Wii U somewhat, where the narrative has again been that the system is “dying” which has, in turn, made people more hesitant to pick it up. There’s a slight difference with Wii U this time around, however, because Nintendo wisely chose to focus on Wii U with its E3 presentation. This year, 3DS — a system which is doing just fine — was hardly touched on in Nintendo’s main presentation, while the bulk of the company’s livestream was focused on Wii U and its upcoming games. It was a successful decision; people came away from Nintendo’s presentation excited about the future of Wii U, even though a significant number of the games shown wouldn’t be with us until next year.

I don’t know what the answer is for Vita, or even if there is one. But what I would like to see, as my days in the games press draw to a close, is journalists taking a stab at not following the herd, at not perpetuating the established narrative, and instead attempting to explore what makes this wonderful little machine tick — and why it makes people like me so happy.

Will it happen? No idea. Regardless of whether people start giving Vita a fair chance, I’m extremely happy with it — and if you’re at all interested in any of the types of games I mentioned above, I strongly recommend grabbing one as soon as you can.