1697: Adjustments

I am very tired. This is a side-effect of my new routine, which necessitates getting up at some point before (or, more commonly just before) 7am, going out, doing some work for a normal working day, then coming home in time for about 6pm, eating dinner, then doing something relaxing and pleasant in the evening.

This may not sound all that tiring to those of you who have happily been holding down nine-to-fives for the last umpteen years, but it’s been something of a culture shock to me.

Actually, that might be a slight exaggeration. But after four years of working from home, often in my pants, there have been a number of adjustments I’ve had to make. And, you know, aside from the whole “getting up early” thing (which I still loathe thanks to my body’s uncanny ability to be extremely tired in the morning regardless of whether I go to bed early, timely…ly or ridiculously late) these adjustment haven’t been all that bad — and I think they’ll have a positive effect overall.

The biggest change is, of course, the fact that I am no longer working from home and consequently have to 1) put clothes on and 2) travel to work. The former’s not really an issue — I joke about working in my pants, but in reality more often than not I did get dressed to do work, because it put me in the right mindset to do useful things.

The latter, however, is a noteworthy change. I have a drive of about 45 minutes or so to my place of work, followed by a 10-15 minute walk from where I park my car to the actual office. This means that I’m getting a bit of very light exercise every day, which is probably a good thing. I can’t say it’s particularly strenuous exercise, given that I tend to walk quite slowly — a trait I have apparently inherited from my mother without noticing at some point — but it is exercise of sorts, and it’s every day.

There’s also actually a gym on site at my new workplace, which I will probably join at some point soon, since it’s a lot cheaper than the one I’m currently a member of. (Plus I walk past it on the way out of work every day, so that makes it a lot more difficult to ignore… and it has the advantage of meaning that if I stay late to do even a short workout, I’m less likely to run into rush-hour traffic on the way home, which will be very nice indeed.)

The fact I’m working in an office rather than in my own house, which, to put the following in context, is approximately 5 minutes’ walk from a Tesco Express, means that I’m less inclined to wander out and purchase various snacks and sugary drinks when I’m feeling hungry, too. Instead, I’m drinking a lot more water, I’ve cut down a fair bit on the lattes — no more than one or two a day, usually just the one to pep me up a bit in the morning — and I’ve almost entirely eliminated fizzy pop from consideration when I think about what I’d like to drink. I take my own lunch when either Andie or I remember to prepare it the night before (because let’s face it, neither of us feel inclined to do so at that ungodly hour in the morning) but even when I don’t, the work canteen is pretty good, with a selection of decent food rather than the usual “chips with everything” situation I typically associate with the word “canteen”.

So on the whole, then, things are going well and I hope they will have a positive impact on both my physical and mental wellbeing. It’s too early to say right now, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on things as I continue to settle in.

1696: Side Effects

One of the side-effects of 1) having a job that doesn’t involve staring glassy-eyed at the Internet all day and 2) being in the middle of a self-enforced social media blackout (it’s going great, by the way) is that your priorities and even interests change.

Oh, don’t worry, I’m not about to stop boring you with tales of obscure video games any time soon, but what I have found is that I’m in no hurry to keep up with the latest news in gaming and related spheres such as technology.

This was really driven home to me today when someone asked what I thought of Apple’s new announcements.

Eh? I thought. I haven’t heard anything about those.

Apparently Apple announced a new iPhone and a smartwatch, whatever the fuck one of those is. And I was surprised to find how little of a shit I gave about either of them. My current phone is a functional workhorse at best, though without Facebook and Twitter demanding my attention every few minutes it stays in my pocket or drawer a lot more than it used to, and is largely being used for a bit of lunchtime Web browsing and playing music in the car. As such, I find it hard to get excited about the latest piece of shiny, pretty and overpriced tech that Apple is coming out with. My honeymoon period with “smartphones” is well and truly over: I’m not interested in playing games on them, I’m rapidly discovering the value of not having social media in your pocket, and for organisation, frankly I’d rather use a paper notebook and calendar. Get off my lawn.

It was the watch that particularly bewildered me, though. Before I left the games press, tech writers were just starting to get excited about “wearables”, and I couldn’t fathom why. I still can’t. It just sounds like an unnecessary step in the process of consuming digital content, and a way for the ever-present menace of notifications to be even more intrusive to your daily life than a constantly beeping phone already is. A little computer on your wrist is something straight out of sci-fi and a few years ago I’d have been all over it, but on reflection, now? That’s not what I want. Not at all.

I’m not writing about this to be one of those smug “well, I don’t care about those things you’re excited about” people — though I’m well aware it may well come across that way. Rather, I’m more surprised at myself; I always had myself pegged as a lifelong gadget junkie, and the trail of defunct-but-useful-at-the-time technology (Hi, Palm!) my life has left in its wake would seem to back that up.

But I guess at some stage there’s a saturation point. You see something, and see no way for it to possibly fit into your life; no reason to own one. I already felt this way about tablets — I barely use our iPad even today — and I certainly feel it about Apple’s new watch. Smartphones still have something of a place in my life — if nothing else, it’s useful and convenient to have things like maps and a means of people contacting you (or indeed contacting others) in your pocket — but their role is much diminished from what it was, and I’m in no hurry to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

It’s another case of, as we discussed the other day, solutions to problems you don’t have. All this technology is great, but it convinces us that our lives would be an absolute chaotic mess without it — when, in fact, it’s entirely possible that the opposite could be true. After all, the human race survived pretty well before we discovered the ability to photograph your dinner and post it on the Internet, didn’t we? While I’m not ready to completely let go of my smartphone — not yet? — I’m certainly nowhere near as reliant on technology as I once was, and I’m certainly not obsessively checking news feeds to find out the latest and greatest news about it.

And you know what? It’s pretty nice and peaceful. I could get used to this.

1695: Goodbye Despair

My copy of Danganronpa 2 showed up today. I haven’t cracked it open yet, because I’m not sure I’m quite awake enough to appreciate its dark charms right at this second — and also because I have several other games on the go right now, too. But it’s a game I’m particularly excited about, largely because the first game was so good. So let’s talk about it.

There may be spoilers ahead. I’ll try and keep them to a minimum, though.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (the first game) came out of nowhere for me. Originally a PSP title, it didn’t get localised into English officially until the new(er) Vita version, courtesy of NIS America. I’m thankful that we did get it eventually — plus somewhat surprised that it’s one of the few Japanese games that made it over to the West that was acknowledged and even celebrated by some critics. Why surprised? Well, because there’s a lot of stuff in Danganronpa that is usually torn apart by Western critics — particularly regarding attitudes to gender — and yet, for whatever reason, this time around, it was celebrated as an excellent game.

But what is it? It’s… well, it’s a little strange, to be honest. It’s sort of a visual novel, but there’s more to it than that. There’s freeform exploration and conversation as you investigate several different murder mysteries, then every so often the game turns into an even more chaotic take on Ace Attorney’s courtroom sequences as you solve puzzles and pick out truths with your metaphorical “truth bullets”.

Trigger Happy Havoc was bold, energetic and striking. Its colourful pop art-style visuals (with a peculiar but effective “2.5D” pop-up book-style aesthetic) were very distinctive and gave the game a unique visual identity, albeit one that wouldn’t look out of place in a Persona game. Its music was catchy, memorable and fit the action well. The voice acting was excellent in both English and Japanese for once. And the writing was truly, truly excellent — with additional credit to NIS America for doing a great job with localising some difficult material in their own distinctive manner.

Danganronpa is a game you play for its story, and it’s a mysterious one that will keep you guessing throughout. Unlike many other murder mystery games, where it’s often obvious “whodunnit” quite quickly, Danganronpa regularly keeps you guessing right up until the truth is finally revealed. And the overarching plot that ties all the cases together follows this pattern, too; you’ll have plenty of theories about what’s going on by the time the “big reveal” comes around, but you might still be surprised by the truth.

Danganronpa is also a game you play for its characters, and they’re a truly interesting bunch. Initially positioned to the player as the “ultimate” in their respective specialisms, they all gradually reveal themselves to be complex individuals with their own goals, motivations and priorities. In other words, they’re not all very nice people on the inside, yet there are numerous occasions where you’ll be forced to ally with even the most objectionable of the bunch in the name of seeking out the truth. The game also isn’t afraid to kill off characters it’s spent ages building up the player’s relationship with, too, so don’t get too attached to anyone you meet; it’s probably safer that way.

Assuming Danganronpa 2 follows the pattern of its predecessor — and there’s nothing to suggest that it doesn’t — I’m in for a treat. If you’re yet to experience the unique joys of these fantastic games, then grab yourself a Vita (if you don’t already have one, of course!) and indulge in some thrilling murder mystery action.

1694: Spinning Some Tunes

When I was growing up, I wasn’t massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn’t like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I’d record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.

At the time, I didn’t feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly “iconic” or defining of the era. I certainly didn’t feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.

Just recently, I’ve been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the ’70s and ’80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it’s led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven’t listened to for literally years now.

I’ve long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I’m able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It’s pretty great.

And I’ve been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more “defining” than I thought. Or perhaps it’s just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy’s Fat of the Land or Mansun’s Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it’s exactly like that, in fact.

I’ve never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it’s been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.

1693: Rieze Maxia-Elympios Relations

Even after spending a week writing in great detail about it over on MoeGamer, I’m still having an absolute blast with Bandai Namco’s (or is it Namco Bandai? I lose track) Tales of Xillia 2, the direct sequel to one of my favourite recent console role-playing games.

Direct sequels are quite rare in the Japanese role-playing game space; long running series like Tales of and Final Fantasy typically take each new installment as a completely new experience, with the only things each have in common being perhaps some story themes, some item and skill names, maybe a few character names or references, and little else.

There’s a fairly good reason that direct sequels are pretty rare in this particular genre, of course: they’re damned difficult to do well, and if you’re not altogether careful you’ll open yourself up to accusations of simply recycling old content. This is a criticism that has been levelled at Xillia 2 and not altogether unjustifiably — the majority of towns, field areas and dungeons you’ll visit in the early part of the game are lifted wholesale from the original Tales of Xillia with very few changes.

It’s what you do with that recycled content that counts, though, and in the relatively few examples of direct sequels in the JRPG space, it’s been handled pretty well. Final Fantasy X-2, for example, eschewed its predecessor’s very linear path around the world in favour of having everywhere open from the outset, and multiple things available for you to work on at any given time. Final Fantasy XIII-2, meanwhile, fragmented its experience into a slightly messy tale of time travel with a non-linear narrative, completely at odds with the much-maligned linearity of its predecessor. And Tales of Xillia 2 effectively starts you at the other end of the world from its predecessor, showing life in the games’ unusual setting from a pleasantly different perspective.

That’s not all, though. While Xillia 1’s world was relatively open to exploration, you still unlocked things in a fairly linear progression and tended not to go places until you were told to. In Xillia 2, meanwhile, you still unlock areas of the world according to your progression through the main story, but on regular occasions you are left to your own devices to explore, take on sidequests — many of which are repeatable or randomly generated — and simply do as you see fit in the world.

In this sense, Xillia 2 actually ends up feeling a lot more like a crossbreed between traditionally Eastern and Western approaches to role-playing games. You have the tight, linear, character-driven narrative of a Japanese role-playing game coupled with the freedom to go and see what’s over that hill, in that cave, through those wood as seen in Western titles like the Elder Scrolls series.

In fact, Xillia 2 also takes some heavy cues from Japanese role-playing games that do things a little differently, too — most notably the latter two Persona games. Like those two classics, Tales of Xillia 2’s protagonist is pretty much silent, though he does have plenty of personality despite not saying all that much. And like those games, your party members have their own unique individual storylines that are ascribed almost as much importance as the main narrative.

One of the strongest things about the original Xillia was the feeling that this was a real group of characters that had their own individual personalities, feelings and opinions on everything. Offhand comments in the field, frequently hilarious post-battle mini-scenes and the Tales series’ trademark Skits all helped contribute to an atmosphere of these characters feeling like real people that you were meant to care about rather than collections of stats. (Mechanically, they’re all very distinct, too, as it happens, but for me it’s the personality of them all that really shines.) Xillia 2 continues this with aplomb, this time giving you somewhat more freedom to make choices as to how the main character responds to things. Certain choices will affect your relationship values with your party members, while other choices will change the outcome of scenes. It’s an interesting change from Xillia 1’s very “hands-off” approach to story, and it works well, particularly in the context of making the sequel feel distinct from its predecessor despite reusing a lot of content.

I’m yet to beat the game — I’m juggling it with the ever-present Final Fantasy XIV at the moment — but I’m looking forward to seeing how it all concludes. If you enjoyed (and beat!) the previous one, I can strongly recommend Xillia 2; as a sequel, it hits all the right notes, and you absolutely will not be disappointed with the opportunity to spend more time with these wonderful characters.

If you never played Xillia 1? Well, get that sorted right now, soldier; you’re missing out.

1692: The Blackout

I’ve decided to go through with a week-long social media blackout. (By “social media” I mean “Twitter and Facebook”, just to clarify; I’m not breaking my own rules by posting here.)

I was originally intending to start it off on Monday, but then yet more nonsense in the whole Zoe Quinn thing kicked off this morning and I just didn’t want anything to do with it whatsoever — either the inevitable abuse she would receive for the things she was posting, or the unbearable smugness of her supporters.

So I started it today, cold turkey. And I’m serious about it. I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I logged out of the sites on all my browsers. I removed the bookmarks from Chrome, the browser I use most frequently. And I haven’t looked at either all day.

While I won’t pretend I haven’t felt a few urges to pop my head in and have a look, I haven’t acted on these urges at all. I haven’t felt the need to. I know that, going by what I saw this morning, something would just irritate and annoy me. And I don’t need that.

I’m not going to cut myself off completely, though. For the week, my online socialisation will be through email, instant messaging (Google Hangouts), comments on this site and the Squadron of Shame forums. All of these are environments where I have much greater control over my socialisation, and which are populated by far smaller groups of people. And they are all people with whom I know I get on and can enjoy conversation with.

One may argue that there’s a danger of creating an echo chamber when you simply surround yourself with people that you’re 100% comfortable with, but in reality it’s actually rather desirable to have a friendship group that understands you. It’s an admirable goal to attempt to understand and ingratiate yourself with groups that you don’t know a lot about, or whom you probably wouldn’t hang out with in “real life”, but eventually it just all starts to feel a bit high school, what with all the cliques, cool kids and groups that end up being the butt of everyone’s jokes — often without justification.

Ponder how your friendships work in real life. Chances are that over your lifespan, you’ve met a significant number of people. Some of these became friends because you had things in common or enjoyed spending time together. As time passes, the number of true friends you likely have has probably dwindled as everyone’s lives start to move in different directions. That’s a bit sad when it means you lose touch with people with whom you used to spend a lot of time, but it’s also part of the natural “filtering process” our real-life social lives go through over time.

With social media, this filtering doesn’t happen automatically, so unless you take the time to actually go through and prune your friend and follower lists every so often, over time the noise just builds and builds and builds, often with disparate groups ending up butting heads with one another in your timeline or news feed. If you stand on the periphery of a few groups that, for whatever reason, end up at each other’s throats, it can put you in a very awkward and undesirable situation, as we’ve seen with the whole “Gamergate” thing over the last week or so. To use my own personal situation, I identify with the games journalists who are undoubtedly frustrated at the constant accusations of “corruption” being levelled at them, but at the same time I also identify with the gamers who are sick of journalists talking down to them as if they’re some sort of superior moral arbiters. Both sides say and do some regrettable things, and even if you’re not directly involved — as I’ve taken care not to be — it can be anxiety-inducing to see what’s going on.

That’s not what the original promise of social media was. I recall signing up for Facebook for the first time and being amazed by the prospect of being able to easily stay in touch with people. Twitter, meanwhile helped me make a ton of new friends and discover people with common interests all over the world. Since I first signed up for both of them, though, their place in society has changed; Facebook has become little more than a link repository for endless “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” clickbait bullshit, while Twitter has become a place where they who shout the loudest get to be “right”, and whoever is right gets to declare anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of awful deviant.

As such, then, we come to my blackout. I feel positive that it will have a good effect on my mental health. And when it comes to next weekend, I’ll make some more permanent decisions about my online existence.

I may have already made up my mind. But we’ll see.

1691: Reborn

I had one of those curious epiphanies on the way home. You know the ones. Or perhaps you don’t.

Anyway, I digress.

My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much “start over” and try again.

Of course, this isn’t strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I’m not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I’m glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don’t intend to squander it.

The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I’ve made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.

And it’s put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.

My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don’t check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.

And it’s blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.

Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn’t be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.

Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you’re left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter’s Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don’t know that one of your friends commented “lol” on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.

This is why I’m enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I’m supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It’s pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I’ve been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.

And this doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don’t have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.

In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I’m still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I’m sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I’m enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.

1690: One Lunchtime with Velocity 2X

As promised, here are some thoughts about FuturLab’s new release Velocity 2X, one of my most anticipated Vita games.

Note that I am no longer a professional games reviewer, nor is this a review, and as such I am going to be thoroughly unprofessional and you are just going to have to deal with it.

Let’s begin.

Squeeeeeeeeeee.

Ahem. Sorry. But I feel it’s somewhat justified, because it’s pretty much the noise my brain made when I started playing Velocity 2X for the first time last night, and continued over lunch at work today. It is immediately striking in many ways — the delicious, sharp-edged, flat-shaded vector graphic-style artwork; the rock-solid 60fps frame rate (it really does make a difference in a game like this); the gloriously colourful lighting effects; the thumping, catchy soundtrack; the subtle little effects like parallax effects “in front of” the main play area; the lovely animation on Kai when she gets out of her ship.

This beautiful presentation is married up to a beautifully designed game, too. Much like its predecessor, Velocity 2X starts very simple and gradually grows in complexity as you progress, layering mechanic on top of mechanic until you have a level 50 that is virtually unrecognisable from level 1.

It’s not just the gradual growth that makes Velocity 2X a delight to play, though — it’s the sheer fluidity of it all. This is something carried over from the original game, in which skilled players could seamlessly chain together short-range teleports, bomb-flinging, shooting, avoiding bullets and collecting shinies to make it look utterly effortless. It’s entirely possible to do this in 2X, but the addition of the new mechanics makes it even more impressive when you can pull it off — particularly in the new side-scrolling segments.

And speaking of the side-scrolling segments, they’re a lot of fun. They require a certain shift in your thinking from the top-down, vertically scrolling nature of the in-ship gameplay, but they’re recognisably consistent, too. Kai’s “Teledash” move is an absolute joy to use, and before long you’ll be firing yourself through walls, flinging yourself high into the air and spraying bullets in a deadly arc around you without breaking a sweat. And, if the previous game is anything to go by, you’ll need the skills you pick up in the deceptively simple early levels much later in the game — only there, you’ll need to combine things together.

The pursuit of perfection is also present and correct in 2X. While it was easy enough to make it through the original Velocity without too much difficulty, scoring a “Perfect” rating on every level by collecting all the collectibles, scoring the maximum possible number of points and doing so was a lot more difficult. And indeed this seems to be the case in 2X as well — with the added twist that there’s a fourth category of things to collect — the “Rekenium Shards” Kai collects while on foot — to add to the mix. It’s challenging and addictive, and it makes you want to punch the air when you pull it off.

The whole thing is wrapped up in a much stronger story than the original game. The first Velocity did have a story, but it was very subtly told and a little too easy to ignore. When it’s possible to go through a whole game and not realise the main character is female, that’s perhaps a sign that you should pay slightly closer attention to the non-gameplay aspects. (Although fans of Metroid might disagree.)

2X strikes a good balance, though. The first time you challenge a level, you get a short bit of dialogue that helps to advance the plot and develop Kai’s character. On subsequent occasions, however, you’re straight into the action — no frustrating skipping over dialogue you’ve already seen. The story is quick, pacy and enjoyable, and supported by a considerable amount of “further reading” background material in the in-game Codex, unlocked through collectibles in the game.

So far I’ve had a great deal of fun with Velocity 2X, but I still have a long way to go. I’ve Perfected the first ten levels so far, and am looking forward to seeing how the game continues to develop. Perhaps most importantly, however, it seems like a great game to play at lunchtime, so you can count on my Vita being a fixture in my work bag for quite some time yet.

1689: Revving Up

Once I’ve finished writing this blog post, I’m going to go and play Velocity 2X on my Vita, a game that I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.

Lest you’re unfamiliar, Velocity 2X is the sequel to Velocity (and its Vita remake Velocity Ultra), the brainchild of a UK-based developer called FuturLab who are some of the nicest people in the industry.

I’ll talk more about Velocity 2X when I’ve had a chance to sit down and play it for a while — I have played an early version, but I haven’t even booted up the final release yet. Today, then, I wanted to talk a little about its predecessor, and why it means I’m excited to play 2X.

Velocity was a curious hybrid of genres, and it drifted and changed through different play styles as you progressed through it. Sometimes it was a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up. Sometimes it was a vertically scrolling racing game in which you had to fly efficiently and carefully in order to survive. Sometimes it was a clever puzzle game in which you had to teleport back and forth throughout the level in order to unlock the path to the exist. And more often than not, it was a beautiful, seamless combination of all these things.

The whole thing was wrapped in a wonderfully distinctive shell, too; an aesthetic that combined sharp-edged, flat-shaded vector graphics with Amiga-style background music to produce something that felt simultaneously retro-inspired but also thoroughly modern. The game regularly brought to mind 16-bit computer titles of my youth such as Goldrunner, but obviously it was quite a bit better than those. The atmosphere was there, though, and the understanding of what makes a truly satisfying, addictive game.

Velocity was a brilliant handheld game, too. Its levels were short, but very replayable in pursuit of the elusive “Perfect” ratings. Its leaderboard functionality perhaps left something to be desired — it wasn’t at all clear how scoring worked, and it was ultimately fairly irrelevant since getting a “Perfect” rating would probably mean you got a very similar score to everyone else with the same rating anyway — but it wasn’t really about competing against other people. Rather, it was you against the game; a series of increasingly fiendish, well-designed challenges that made great use of the game’s simple to understand mechanics amid levels of greater and greater complexity.

Velocity 2X, if you were wondering, takes the basic formula of Velocity and adds an interesting twist to it all: platforming. Rather than being confined to your ship in a top-down perspective throughout the whole game, 2X incorporates side-on platformer segments, too. When I played the early version, these were already implemented well, and I understand they’ve only improved since then. I’m very much looking forward to giving it a try.

So that’s exactly what I’m going to go and do right now. If you have a Vita and/or a PS4, I can say with some confidence that you should probably download Velocity 2X and enjoy it — yes, I say that with some confidence having admitted above that I haven’t played the finished version yet. I have absolute faith in FuturLab bringing an ambitious project to fruition, though, so I wish them every success with their new release.

Further thoughts on the new game tomorrow!

1688: Rebirth

The nice thing about having an uninterrupted hour for a lunch break — something which I have at my new job (yes, I’m going to keep mentioning it while the novelty is still there), and something which I often did not have when I was working in schools, retail and even games journalism — is that it provides the ideal opportunity to get in a bit of handheld gaming time.

I have quite the backlog on both 3DS (well, DS if we’re being completely honest about it) and Vita, and just recently I added another game to the latter’s collection. I couldn’t not, though; if you’re a regular reader you will, of course, know that I couldn’t possibly let a new Hyperdimension Neptunia game pass by without immediately purchasing it — even if I knew I wouldn’t get to it immediately.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, the curiously punctuated remake of the game that started the whole series off. I’ve played a little over an hour so far, and predictably, I’m totally in love with it.

The original Hyperdimension Neptunia was a funny game. I’d be wary of calling it “good” or recommending it even to the most open-minded, fanservice-positive players out there, but despite its many, many flaws I liked it enough to play it all the way through, then move on to its sequels Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. (And the Vita dating sim Hyperdimension Neptunia Producing Perfection, which I’m still yet to beat properly.)

Hyperdimension Neptunia was effectively a visual novel punctuated by repetitive dungeon-crawling sequences that ran at an appalling frame rate and featured a genuinely interesting but somewhat clunky battle system. I actually rather enjoyed this latter aspect a lot more than many other people; I appreciated the puzzle-like nature of setting up custom combos that you could chain endlessly — perhaps swapping back-line characters in and out along the way — and I was fascinated by manipulating the AI-driven in-battle item “crafting” system. This latter aspect was just plain bizarre — you had to set percentage chances that characters would use specific items upon meeting trigger conditions, and there was no means of just manually using an item.

The former aspect — the visual novel-style story sequences — proved to be the real draw for me, though. They were what kept me coming back time and time again, more than happy to endure the dungeon-crawling in the name of advancing the story and seeing what Neptune and her friends were up to next.

Hyperdimension Neptunia’s story wasn’t particularly complex, but one thing the series has been quite consistently throughout its surprisingly short lifespan is clever. Yes, that’s right, clever. On the surface, it might seem like moe anime fluff full of squeaky-voiced girls squeaking at one another. And to a certain extent that’s true. But beneath that candy-coloured exterior lies some clever, well-written satire of the ridiculousness that is gaming. Not the stupidity we’ve seen around gaming in the last few weeks, mind; rather, a series of on-point observations and sidelong glances at the way the different “factions” of the industry have behaved over the years. The way Sony likes to believe it’s the best; the way Microsoft has habitually catered to specific types of gamers; the way Nintendo handles business with ruthless efficiency, even when it doesn’t make any friends while doing so.

Not only that, but the series has been packed with plenty of references to numerous video games — through its dialogue, through its incidental recurring characters and even through the monsters you fight, which include space invaders, Pac-Man ghosts and sentient dating sims. All this added up to a considerable amount of charm that far outweighed its technical and design shortcomings.

Re;Birth1 had a lot to live up to, then. And based on an admittedly short amount of time with it so far, it appears to be living up to expectations. Rather than word-for-word recreating the original with the modernised, much better gameplay systems of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, it instead acknowledges (and frequently lampshades) the fact that it is a remake. Basic story beats have so far been similar, but the specifics of how you get to them are a bit different. And the gameplay has been totally revamped, featuring Victory’s fantastic combat system — now explained far better than it has ever been in any previous installment — plus some interesting new tricks such as the “Remake” system, which allows you to “craft” everything from items to be sold in shops to new gameplay mechanics.

Amusingly, it runs far better on the Vita than it ever did on the more powerful PS3, too, and despite making use of a lot of the same audio-visual assets and even maps from the previous two games, it feels like a pleasantly fresh experience to be able to carry it around in your pocket.

If Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory was anything to go by, I expect Re;Birth1 to keep me busy for a very long time indeed. Now, if only there weren’t a zillion and one other brilliant games out now all vying for my attention, too…