Like, falling asleep at inappropriate moments tired. Well, maybe not quite full-on falling asleep, but I was most certainly at serious risk of it while sitting at my desk earlier.
It was that kind of tired where you think you’ll just close your eyes for a moment and refresh yourself, then “wake up” a couple of seconds later, hoping that no-one noticed you were drifting off.
It’s a frustrating kind of tired because it’s not a kind of tired you can easily get over. A cup of coffee doesn’t shift it, and it always tends to come early in the day when you can’t really get away with a nap… Particularly if you’re at work.
Fortunately I’m now at home, in bed, having watched The Apprentice, and am now ready to go to sleep. And I’m terribly sorry to not write anything more interesting at this point, but as I believe I may have mentioned earlier, I am very tired.
I’m pleased to report that today went somewhat better than yesterday. I feel like I’m still shaking off the aftereffects of the stomach bug I’ve had, but things aren’t quite as bad as they have been, which is nice. I also bought some new headphones (which I promptly forgot to take with me today) and got a new ID card lanyard, which was also nice.
Andie and I got engaged, too.
Hah! That made you look twice, huh. We didn’t really. Well, we sort of did, though not in the traditional sense. Instead, taking full advantage of the new Final Fantasy XIV patch which came out today, we both signed up for the new Eternal Bond ceremony: Eorzea’s take on marriage, with no restrictions on the genders or races of the two people involved. We didn’t actually get “married” in-game today; doing so is more than a simple throwaway thing to do when you feel like it. Instead, it involves a number of different steps, none of which are difficult, but which do demand you demonstrate a certain amount of willingness to help each other out as a couple, which is nice.
First up you have to acquire “Promise Wristlets” by signing up for the ceremony on the game’s website. There are three tiers of ceremony, ranging from the free one (where there’s only limited customisation of the ceremony available) to Platinum tier (where you have the most possible customisation options, a prettier dress and free gifts to offer your guests). Gold and Platinum weddings cost real money, though not very much, and because Andie and I are both idiots, we went for the Platinum ceremony.
After making our intentions clear and being issued with our respective pretty dresses, we were informed that we’d need to prepare our own wedding rings. We worked together to acquire the materials necessary to do so — thankfully the ring itself isn’t difficult to create — and soon enough we were ready to begin our preparations in earnest.
What followed was an enjoyable if straightforward “pilgrimage” quest where we had to visit all the main regions of Eorzea together, find the symbols of the Twelve — the gods of the lands — and pray before them. In doing so, we blessed our respective wedding rings with divine power, ready for the ceremony. We then had the opportunity to talk over what kind of ceremony we wanted and given the ability to customise the chapel to our liking. We had to actually agree on what we wanted, too, otherwise when the big day comes the officials simply pick one of your options and run with it.
That’s all we could do for now; bookings for the actual ceremony — yes, you have to actually book — open on Friday, so we’re going to have to get in when we can and find a suitable time and place to get virtually hitched and invite our virtual friends to come and watch and cheer us on. I’m actually very curious to see how the whole thing goes down; I know a number of massively multiplayer online games in the past have had the ability to get married in them, but I’ve never been in a position where I was actually able to get married to someone, whether “seriously” as Andie and I are doing so, or just to see how it worked with a friend. (I’m a bit of a traditionalist, though; while a virtual marriage isn’t legally binding, of course, I do actually kind of believe it has a certain degree of meaning, and as such I’m glad to be able to do it with Andie; it wouldn’t have felt right even just “trying it out” with anyone else if, say, she wasn’t playing.)
I tell you what, though, even with all the charging past hordes of kobolds on chocoboback on the way to find another pilgrimage stone, getting virtually married is nowhere near as stressful as arranging the real thing!
It was Jim Davis’ comic creation fat cat Garfield that made me aware of the world’s dislike of Mondays during my formative years, but as time has passed I’ve come to appreciate the chubby orange one’s worldview. Particularly when your Monday goes as badly as mine has.
I thought I was over the bum-AIDS I’d been afflicted with for the last few days of last week and part of the weekend, and indeed most of the day passed without incident. On the way home, however, I was in a fair amount of pain and — again, I’m sorry to be sharing such revolting imagery when you may well be having your dinner or midnight snack — had to rush straight to the toilet when I got home for a fairly explosive session.
Of course, the return of bum-AIDS wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; this morning our toilet decided to stop flushing, so even with full knowledge of the fact that I wouldn’t be able to easily dispose of my… product, I was sat there, disgusting myself, not wanting to contemplate the destruction I had left in my wake nor how I was going to set about making things right again. (Our interim solution until we fix the problem — which looks like a problem with the syphon, for any aspiring plumbers out there — is simply to throw buckets of water down the toilet. Retro.)
Of course, the return of bum-AIDS and our toilet failing to do anything resembling flushing normally wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; my headphones broke, too. To be fair, they were only a cheap £10 JVC pair I picked up from Tesco several years ago, but they were comfortable, sounded good and had served me well for quite some time. Inexplicably, they chose to completely break as I removed them from my head as I arrived at work today, however; not just a simple “something popping out of where it should be, easily fixed” break, either — this was a proper big chunk breaking off and promptly disappearing somewhere on the floor, not that it would have done me much good to retrieve it anyway.
Of course, the return of bum-AIDS, our toilet failing to do anything resembling flushing and my headphones breaking wasn’t quite enough to make my Monday a misery. Oh no; the lanyard that holds my work ID card and keys broke, too. I don’t even know how this happened, but again, a bit just fell off, disappeared and was consequently unfixable. (Fortunately, I happened to have a spare.)
Of course, the return of bum-AIDS… are you getting the picture yet? The rubbishness just kept coming and coming and coming until by the time I got home and had finished my business I was left feeling utterly defeated by the day.
Hopefully tomorrow will be better. But right now, I’m not holding my breath. Except when I walk past the toilet.
After an enjoyable online session with one of my Final Fantasy XIV guildies the other night, I sat down to spend a bit more time with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U earlier today.
My hesitance to play that much until now has largely been due to the fact I hadn’t really picked a “main” — that is to say, a character I would generally play in preference to anyone else, given totally free choice. Maining a character involves learning their moves and the best situations in which to do them, and is a bit more effort than just bashing buttons and hoping for the best — a playstyle I’m not quite convinced I’m entirely beyond just yet.
A bit of play with Zero Suit Samus (of Metroid series fame) against my friend the other night as well as today has me thinking that she’ll be a solid choice, however. She’s a speedy character, and I’m a fan of being able to quickly dodge out of the way of trouble, and her moves are all pretty easy to understand. She has a medium-range projectile attack, a slightly shorter range electric whip jobby plus a few satisfying combos, uppercuts and the like. Her dashing regular attack is a powerful kneebutt to the chest (or face for the shorter characters) which is simple enough to understand, and in modes such as Multi-Man Smash, where your opponents are significantly weaker than normal but come in much greater numbers, this is more than enough to send your foes flying into the distance for a satisfying knockout.
I got in some good practice with Zero Suit Samus (distinguished from her fully armoured counterpart) in the Multi-Man Smash modes, which I cleared for the first time with her, as well as the arcade-style All-Star Mode, which sees you fighting your way through Nintendo (and guest) characters from throughout the ages in reverse chronological order, beginning with recent additions to the roster such as Wii Fit Trainer and working all the way back to classic characters like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U really is a somewhat daunting package when you first pick it up, much like its predecessors. The sheer wealth of different ways to play is bewildering and baffling at first, but it won’t take long for you to find your favourite modes — and, pleasingly, there’s no obligation to play the modes you don’t particularly enjoy, since most of the unlockables can be obtained in several different ways ranging from simply playing a certain number of matches to completing specific modes or achievements. Today I unlocked a couple of extra characters, including Mr. Game and Watch — the poorly animated silhouetted figure from Nintendo’s early ’80s LCD game-clocks, complete with bip-bip-boop sound effects — and R.O.B., the ill-fated plastic robot that would supposedly “play” with you on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System on games like Gyromite. (Turns out he’s much better at fighting than he is at wielding a controller.)
I’ve enjoyed the Smash Bros. games over the years, but I wouldn’t say they’ve been absolute favourites. This latest installment, however, is proving to be an addictive little beast, and I’m looking forward to learning more about how to take my game to the next level. Then one day, I might be able to actually beat my friend Tim, who is frustratingly and irritatingly good at it, assuming you let him play as his mains (inevitably, as a Zelda fan, he mains Link and Ganondorf.) In the meantime, however, I’ll be continuing to grapple with Zero Suit Samus until I’ve got that flying knee timing just so.
It was Sony’s PlayStation Experience keynote presentation today. I haven’t yet caught up on all the bits of news that came out of it, but the snippets I have heard so far all confirm something that I’ve been thinking for quite a while now: in the new generation of gaming hardware (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U) Sony is going to be the one to beat. And the other two (well, one; we’ve established Nintendo likes doing its own thing and bugger what the other two are up to) are going to have their work cut out for them.
Sony’s got a pretty comprehensive-looking gaming package at present, and one that covers a number of different markets. Speaking as someone who has not yet jumped into the next generation of hardware wholeheartedly — though I do own a Wii U — the PlayStation 4 is an infinitely more enticing prospect than the Xbox One. It’s still not quite enough to make me want to rush out and buy one just yet — I’m still waiting for that absolute must-have game that I can’t get anywhere else, and bear in mind my definition of “must-have” is somewhat different from the mainstream — but I’m getting closer and closer with every new announcement that comes out of Sony.
Speaking more objectively, though, the PlayStation 4 has a solid lineup of titles. Many of them are available on Xbox One as well, of course, but the PS4 versions are, in most cases, technically superior, running at better resolutions in many cases. As for exclusives, Sony has this pretty much stitched up. The Xbox One lineup of exclusives is a moribund array of unimaginative titles that tend to fit into the neat triple-A pigeonholes of “killing things”, “driving things” or “doing sports with things” — there are a few exceptions, of course, such as SWERY’s intriguing new project — whereas the PS4’s lineup is vibrant, interesting and, importantly, worldwide, with Japanese developers rapidly jumping on board Sony’s train even as they continue to eye Microsoft warily after the Redmond giant’s two abject failures in the Far East.
The PS4 has the mainstream market pretty well stitched up, then, it seems — although with titles like Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory II and its ilk coming to the platform, it looks set to follow in the PS3’s footsteps and provide a great home for more niche titles, too, not to mention the array of excellent independent titles that are making the jump from PC to PS4, too.
And then there’s the Vita. Sony still doesn’t make a big deal about the Vita at events like this, which annoys some people, but really, a big keynote speech isn’t the place to shout about how great the Vita is. The reason? Vita has carved out a rather wonderful little niche for itself as arguably the best place to go for… well, niche games. Highly creative indie titles? Check. Fanservicey Japanese games? Check. Non-fanservicey Japanese games? Check. Access to a staggering back catalogue of brilliant games from the PS1 and PSP eras? Check.
Developers and publishers alike are really starting to get a handle on what makes the Vita tick, and what those who own one like doing with their time. Rather than attempting to continue pushing the frankly dumb “triple-A in your pocket!” angle — the whole point of triple-A is that it’s spectacular, and consequently built for the big screen — Vita devs and publishers are now embracing the fact that Vita is a handheld device whose players like the freedom to play either for a short session over lunch, or for more protracted periods of free time. The best Vita games are built with this in mind: FuturLab’s Velocity 2X, for example, features lightning-fast, short levels that encourage you to replay for the best times and scores; even Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 which I’ve been playing recently is eminently handheld-friendly thanks to its short and snappy dungeons punctuated by clearly signposted event scenes that you move onto when you’re good and ready rather than when you least expect it.
And let’s not forget the PS3 in all this, still managing to remain relevant despite its successor having been on the market for a year now. Today we learned that Sega is bringing the much-requested Yakuza 5 to the West next year, and the new installment in the Persona series is coming to PS3 as well as PS4. On top of that, publishers like NIS America, Xseed Games, Aksys Games and their ilk are continuing to localise a wealth of interesting (and occasionally outlandish) Japanese titles for the Western market, so while those continue to flow in my PS3 won’t be getting put away any time soon.
All this may sound rather fanboyish and perhaps it is, but the fact is, Microsoft has consistently failed to make me want to pay any attention to the Xbox One whatsoever — the first thing that still springs to mind when I think of the Xbox One is the stupid “Snap” functionality, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever felt I wanted from a console — while Sony continually intrigues and excites me with each new announcement they make.
All it’ll take is one great game to get me to grab an Xbox One, though, but at the moment I see that happening on PS4 first, by quite a considerably margin.
I’ve been off work ill for the last three days, and not the fun kind of ill where you can just lie in bed and have people bring you food and drink without really having to “suffer” very much. No, I’ve had a rather unpleasant stomach bug of the — if you’ll pardon the graphic detail for a moment — “I need to go to the toilet roughly every half an hour and now my arse is burning with the fury of a thousand angry suns” variety. And it doesn’t seem to have shifted itself just yet, which means I’m probably in for another rough night if the noises my stomach is currently making are anything to go by.
But I digress somewhat; taking the time off to recover has allowed me to catch up on some handheld gaming, because we all know handheld gaming is the best gaming when you’re ill, because it’s easily portable for those circumstances like, say, when you need to urgently rush to the toilet to fire off another salvo of acidic excrement that would probably make a pretty solid special move in combat were it not for the searing pain it temporarily inflicted on the origin point.
Um. Anyway. Yes. Handheld gaming. Specifically, I took the opportunity to try and beat Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, which I’ve been playing for a while now. Like most Neptunia games, I found myself not really wanting it to end, but I also eventually reached a point where I was running out of things that it was possible to do in a single playthrough, and so I powered on to the ending, beat the final boss, saw the credits (which, in typical Neptunia tradition, are accompanied by a glorious, lovingly rendered pixel-art, game-style synopsis of what you’ve just played) and promptly started a New Game + with a mind to cleaning up the last few Trophies I hadn’t quite finished off. Specifically, I had four characters to recruit — Nepgear, Uni, Rom and Ram, the four “CPU Candidates” who were originally introduced in Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 — and 100 million Credits to acquire via some means, but I decided to take a momentary detour to the game’s optional “Colosseum” mode to fight some tough battles with the promise of various characters’ ultimate weapons as a reward.
And hoo boy. Ultimate is the word. Rather than the gradual creeping up of stats that most weapons provided over the course of the normal game, the various characters’ ultimate weapons boost their stats by a ridiculous degree, making even the toughest bosses melt like butter beneath your relentless onslaught. Couple this with the Celestia Bangle armour that you get for beating the game with the True ending — only one, sadly; if you want more you need to beat it multiple times — and you have a nigh-unstoppable fighting force.
Or so you’d think, anyway; pleasingly, even when geared up with this array of “best in slot” equipment, there are still plenty of stiff challenges throughout the game — challenges that were simply insurmountable when tackled with regular equipment, but which merely become quite difficult when equipped to the max in this manner. In the meantime, it becomes possible to hack and slash through the main story in a couple of hours (assuming you’re skipping dialogue sequences) rather than the 55 hours or so it took me to beat it the first time — with story bosses that once proved a roadblock to progression falling after just one or two attacks in most cases. Eminently satisfying.
This is something that developer Compile Heart is good at, in my experience; while the difficulty curve throughout the game may be more of a pit of spikes of varying height on your first playthrough, breaking through the initial barrier and coming around for a second pass gives you a glorious feeling of power and supremacy over almost everything in the world — though there’s still the odd enemy here and there that is more than willing to knock that cocky smile off your face if you’re getting a bit too confident.
So far my post-game cleanup is going well; I’ve just unlocked Nepgear and almost have enough MB left to unlock either Uni or Rom and Ram (they come as a pair) by the end of this second playthrough. Then the only thing left is a whole lot of fighting one of the toughest foes in the game in the hope of acquiring 100 million credits. After that, I’ll be happy to add Re;Birth1 to my list of “100% completed” (or at least Platinum trophied) games — a sure sign that I’ve had a blast with it.
I wouldn’t say by any means that I’m a die-hard petrolhead, but I do enjoy a good driving game, with the emphasis on game. That is to say, I tend to find the more hardcore driving “simulations” such as Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo to be hard going, slow paced and more difficult than is enjoyable; I’d much rather play something where the “correct” way to play is to fling your car sideways around a corner, not caring if you’re smashing street lights and fencing all over the shop, not worrying about fucking your car’s performance up after a few bumps and scrapes, not having to engage in anything even remotely resembling “sportsmanship” when racing against other cars, be they computer- or player-controlled.
One of the driving game series that I did find myself enjoying a whole lot over the years was Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing series, which actually began with the venerable (and awesome) Metropolis Street Racer on Sega’s ill-fated 128-bit console, the Dreamcast. Project Gotham as a whole occupied a curious middle-ground between serious sim and arcadey racer; on the one hand, you were racing real cars around realistic environments and it wasn’t really a “smash and bash” racer — in fact, Metropolis Street Racer even penalised you if you crashed too much, though this harshness was toned back a little in the later games, since they were already difficult enough — while on the other, you were flinging your car around with gay abandon, swinging its back end out whenever possible, darting between cone gates and playing chicken with upcoming walls as you tried to build up enough speed to actually leave the ground when racing down San Francisco’s hilly streets.
In other words, Project Gotham demanded some genuine driving skill, but also knew that people liked having fun in cars, too — the sort of fun that would quickly get you arrested were you to try it… well, anywhere, really. Project Gotham allowed a safe environment for you to hop into various high-spec sports cars (and a few low-end crap cars towards the beginning) and just have some fun. It was later taken to the next extreme by the rather wonderful commercial flop Blur, which combined Project Gotham’s semi-realistic racing (and real cars) with the stuff of pure fantasy — neon-coloured Mario Kart-inspired weapons that allowed you not only to race aggressively against your opponents, but to fire various explosive devices up their tailpipe, too. How sad that it wasn’t more of a success than it was.
But I digress. Today I’ve been playing The Crew from Ubisoft, a game that I’ve been cautiously curious about ever since I first heard about it a year or two back. Promising a (somewhat scaled-down) recreation of the entirety of the United States of America, a variety of different mission types and a strong focus on working together with actual, real-life other people, it sounded like a natural evolution of the direction racing games had been moving in for a while.
Need for Speed Underground 2 introduced us to the idea of a racing game set in an open world. And boy did it work well. It worked so well that pretty much every Need for Speed game since has had some variation on this formula, with you driving around a vast (and suspiciously geographically diverse) map to discover events, take them on and complete them — or just to drive around for the fun of it. These open worlds didn’t have the same level of detail about them as something like Grand Theft Auto, but they didn’t need to; you only saw them from behind your windshield, and you never left your vehicle, unlike in Rockstar’s classics. They did the job, though, and that was to provide you with an interesting environment in which you could get to know your car and the various roads, then challenge you with various events that would test your knowledge of both these things in a practical sense.
Later racing games played with this formula in different ways: Need for Speed Most Wanted had a strong emphasis on dramatic police chases, for example, while Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (the more recent version) actually allowed the choice of whether you were cops or street racers. Burnout Paradise, meanwhile, took that series’ typically exaggerated crashes and built a whole game mode out of them, where you’d have to crash and then bounce your car along the street for as long as possible, hitting as many things as possible along the way. (Oh, you could race a bit, too.)
The reason why I’m bringing up all these other games is that The Crew, so far, feels like an entertaining mishmash of all of them. It has Burnout’s crashcam, Project Gotham’s driving through gates and beating speed milestones, Need for Speed’s police chases. All of these different strands of DNA are very much apparent as you play, but for some reason it’s Project Gotham I keep thinking of as I play, even though they’re very different games; Project Gotham may have unfolded in realistic environments like The Crew does, but it took place entirely on enclosed courses rather than in open-world environments where it’s possible to find shortcuts and go off-piste.
I think it’s the variety of events which brings this to mind: most open-world racers in the last few years have included some sort of variation on the “race, destroy, time trial” formula, but The Crew adds a number of additional elements to the mix in the form of small, short skill challenges dotted around the various maps. Bringing to mind some of Project Gotham’s short but teeth-gnashingly difficult challenges, the skill tests task you with everything from remaining above 50mph for as long a distance as possible in a time limit to slaloming around posts. And, of course, just completing these tasks isn’t enough; there’s bronze, silver and gold levels of completion to take on, plus online leaderboards.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game, though, is the “co-op” multiplayer, as this adds a strange and welcome twist to the usual online racing formula. Instead of everyone jockeying for first position as usually happens — or, more accurately, the person with the best car screaming off ahead, never to be seen again, as everyone else fights for second — these events just require that someone wins. Everyone else’s job then effectively becomes ensuring that the computer-controlled racers don’t have the opportunity to catch the person who is screaming off ahead, hopefully never to be seen again; it becomes a team effort, and when it works, it seems like a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ve only had the opportunity to try event in this manner so far, but hopefully as more people pick up the game there’ll be more chances to enjoy the game the way it was clearly designed to be played.
The Crew is often described as an “MMO”, though at present that’s not altogether accurate. The execution is somewhat like Test Drive Unlimited, in which you’ll be driving around minding your own business and occasionally see other people in the area. When you reach an event, you have the option to “quick invite” anyone in the vicinity to join you, or you can pre-form a crew of up to four people to tackle challenges in a more organised manner. There don’t seem to really be enough players online as yet — at least not on the PC version — to make this feature shine as it should, but I’m interested to see how — or indeed if — it grows in the coming weeks.
Even if it doesn’t, the single-player offering seems fairly solid, and it has so far made a good start at fulfilling my wish of a racing game with a semi-decent story, so I’m intrigued to see what happens next. I’m also pleased to see the protagonist is a bespectacled, bearded Gordon Freeman lookalike rather than the usual self-consciously cool douchebags that usually populate this sort of game.
First impressions are pretty good then; more will doubtless follow very soon.
Well, if it’s good enough for Sony — they are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their console, after all — it’s good enough for me.
Here are my top three original PlayStation games.
…Shit.
There are too many. There are way too many to choose from that I’ve played over the years. Some of them are incredibly obvious choices. Others are games that I have but a dim memory of playing, but which have stuck in my brain ever since. I can’t choose three. I can’t.
So I won’t. Instead, I’m going to present some fake awards for the games that have stuck in my mind ever since I first played them. In some cases, it may have been 15-20 years since I played them, but they still carry significant meaning to me for one reason or another. In many cases, they may not even be among the best games on the platform, but for whatever reason I have remembered them fondly ever since.
Here we go then. The first one is an obvious one, but I don’t think many people will argue against it.
The “wow, this is better than anything I’ve ever seen before” award
What other game could this go to than the original Ridge Racer?
The word “revolutionary” is thrown around far too much with regard to games these days, but Ridge Racer was genuinely revolutionary. It clearly demonstrated the vast difference in power between the 32-bit PlayStation and the 16-bit Super NES and Mega Drive that had come before.
Its slick 3D graphics and unapologetically arcadey handling — remember this was in the days when we were still using digital control pads rather than analogue sticks — made it an absolute joy to play. And despite a relative lack of content compared to modern games — there really weren’t very many tracks at all, and all of them were based in the exact same environment — it was a game that could keep you occupied for hours as you tried to beat the irritating yellow car and its even more irritating later counterpart, the black car: an adversary so cocky that it often parked on the side of the road in order to allow you to catch up a bit.
A not-particularly-interesting anecdote about Ridge Racer is that it also kind of introduced me to electronic music. Prior to that game, I’d dismissed a lot of electronic music as being just noise — at least partly due to my parents regarding it as such — but over time I came to appreciate the weird and wonderful accompaniments to the racing on the soundtrack, and was much more open to the idea of listening to electronic music outside of games as a result.
The “holy crap, this is on the same system?” award
It would be remiss of me to talk about Ridge Racer and not mention the much later Ridge Racer Type-4, a game which came out much later in the PlayStation’s lifespan but which still plays like a dream today.
Ridge Racer Type-4 was noteworthy not just for being a great game — and a great-looking game with what passed for “photo-realistic” visuals at the time of its release — but also for being beatifully designed, too. Take a look at the video above and tell me that those bright yellow animated menus aren’t immediately distinctive and memorable — and instantly recognisable as being from Ridge Racer Type-4.
Everything about Ridge Racer Type-4 fitted together perfectly. The hour-long Grand Prix campaign gave you several mini-stories to follow through as you challenged various races in various vehicles. The vehicles you unlocked ran the gamut from the relatively sensible to the ridiculous, such as the jet-propelled monstrosity you unlocked later that really, really didn’t like going around corners.
And the music. Oh, the music. At the time Ridge Racer Type-4 came out, my friends and I had discovered a genre of music known as acid jazz — a blend of jazz, funk and hip-hop typified by artists such as the Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai. We would listen to pretty much nothing other than this type of music, and so we were delighted to discover that Ridge Racer Type-4’s soundtrack consisted almost exclusively of music of this ilk — certainly a far cry from the early-’90s electronica of the first game — and even more delighted when we found that Namco had very much made this distinctive sound part of their in-house “style” for a while, as other games such as Anna Kournikova’s Smash Court Tennis (an honourable mention in this list) also had a rather jazz-funk flavour about them.
Racing games have come a long way, but few modern titles provide the same degree of satisfying arcade fun that Ridge Racer Type-4 still does. And now you can download and play it on PSP and Vita. And typing this, I’m very tempted to go and do that after I’m done here.
The “so I like RPGs now” award
Final Fantasy VII. I don’t think I really need to say anything else about this, so here’s the intro — still one of my favourite game openings of all time.
The “inexplicably burned into my memory” award
I played a lot of role-playing games on PlayStation — at least, after I discovered Final Fantasy VII and the genre as a whole — but I actually have a pretty good memory of most of them, and indeed enjoyed most of them, too, even those that were objectively lower-quality and lower-budget than other games available at the time.
One such game that has stuck in my mind for a long time is The Granstream Saga.
I remember only a few very specific details about The Granstream Saga: it had some lovely anime cutscenes; it had a great battle system that was somewhere between a traditional RPG and the real-time combat of games like Zelda; it featured two heroines called Arcia and Laramee (the latter of whom donates her name to my custom characters in games any time “Amarysse” is not available); and that none of the polygonal models had any faces.
I’m not sure why The Granstream Saga has burned itself into my memory quite as much as it has, but of all the RPGs I played on PlayStation, it’s one of the ones I remember most fondly. I’d be interested to replay it sometime and see how it holds up, graphics aside.
The “I like this more than Zelda” award
Yes, I like The Adventures of Alundra more than pretty much any Legend of Zelda game I’ve played to date. (Disclosure: I only played a couple of hours of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, and haven’t played Skyward Sword at all.)
Alundra surprised me, because it came along at a time where, so far as many teenage gamers were concerned — teenage gamers like my school friends and I, for example — it was 3D or nothing. 2D games were things of the past; it was all about the 3D now, and preferably games that came on more than one disc. (My friend Woody believed for many years that it was physically impossible for a game to be as good as FInal Fantasy VII, which came on three discs, if it only came on a single disc. This was despite me pointing out that the three discs of FInal Fantasy VII all included the exact same game data, and the only thing different between them was the prerendered cutscenes. I could never convince him.)
Alundra was staunchly 2D, though. It wasn’t even a little bit 3D — games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which we’ll get onto in a moment) supplemented their beautiful 2D art with 3D backdrops and other scenery elements, whereas Alundra was a pixel-art labour of love, with hand-animated characters, a distinctive and consistent aesthetic and the feel that, aside from the screen resolution, it may well have been possible to recreate on the Super NES.
After I got over my initial culture shock at playing a 2D game, though, I discovered something wonderful: a beautifully designed Zelda-style action RPG with, to date, some of the best-designed puzzles I’ve ever solved without the aid of GameFAQs. Alundra’s puzzles were difficult — more difficult than that which Zelda typically offered — but never insurmountable, and consequently they gave a wonderful feeling of achievement when you successfully solved them.
The plot was pretty cool, too. In fact, it went on to inspire a story that I’ve had half-finished in my head and various word-processing documents ever since. One day I should probably finish that.
The “Hmm, 2D platform games are still relevant” award
2D platformers have had something of a resurgence in recent years thanks to the indie scene, but in the early years of the 32-bit era, developers and players alike were thoroughly enamoured with 3D, with everyone trying to recapture the magic of Super Mario 64.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night proved that 2D still had a place, however. And what a game it was.
The game was immediately striking thanks to its intro, seen in the video above. The beautiful pixel art, the incredible soundtrack — by gosh, I miss old-school Castlevania music — the cringeworthy but memorable voice acting and script… all of it combined to make the second-most badass intro sequence after Final Fantasy VII in my book.
What was perhaps most interesting about the Symphony of the Night intro, however, was the fact that it was actually the last level of the previous game. Only after you beat Dracula — in a fight that you couldn’t lose this time around — did the game proper begin, and then you were in to one of the earliest examples of the “Metroidvania” genre: a type of 2D platformer where you could freely explore a single, huge world split into distinct areas, some of which were blocked off by the requirement for you to unlock specific abilities first.
Symphony of the Night as a whole was so great because it was designed well, played well, treated the player fairly and didn’t outstay its welcome. It was over and done with in about 10 hours — including the “secret” second castle — and by that point you’d had an eminently satisfying experience filled with thrilling boss fights, challenging platforming and, of course, amazing music. It’s no surprise that this Castlevania above all others is the one that keeps getting re-released.
The “this game is broken as hell, but I still love it to pieces” award
Bust-a-Groove took up a considerable proportion of one of our summers. Why? Because it was brilliant.
Bust-a-Groove was one of the earliest examples of “rhythm action” games that I remember playing, and took the unusual approach of being somewhat like a fighting game — it had different characters, each of whom had their own iconic stage, and you worked your way through them to a non-playable final boss. The whole thing was over in the space of about 20 minutes or so — a single playthrough was, anyway — but it was the kind of thing we all enjoyed playing over and over again with different characters.
Why was it broken as hell? Because of its multiplayer mode, and because of the nature of its gameplay. By requiring the player to input specific button sequences in time with the music, it was possible to get a “perfect” score on a level, and if two evenly matched players squared off against one another, it almost always ended in a stalemate. The game’s answer to this was to provide a couple of special attacks that could be triggered in time with the music, but there was also a dodge button and a very obvious cue that these attacks were coming so, again, two evenly matched players would more than likely end in a draw, while two players of different skill levels would be a foregone conclusion.
As dumb as it was, the personality-packed characters, the detailed stages and the incredibly memorable soundtrack made this one of my favourite games of the PlayStation era.
The “I like this more than Zelda, too” award
Here in Europe, we got screwed over on the RPG front for a good few years, with many localised titles not making the hop across the pond from America. Fortunately, I had a modified PlayStation capable of playing imported games, so when I visited my brother in the States on one occasion, I took the opportunity to pick up a selection of games I couldn’t get back home, one of which was Squaresoft’s Brave Fencer Musashi.
Brave Fencer Musashi was a funny game. And I mean that in several senses. It was clearly Japanese through and through, but an excellent job on the localisation filled it with exaggerated Western stereotypes such as the valley girl princess (who calls the protagonist a “little turd” within two minutes of them meeting), the mystic who overdid it on the archaic English and the distinctly camp scribe named Shanky.
Structurally, it was peculiar, too. It had many of the trappings of an RPG — levelling up, HP, MP and the like — but the feel of a 3D platformer, with you exploring a world of gradually increasing size and getting into various setpiece scrapes against bosses and special events. I never got around to beating it, but it was a lot of fun, and I still have a copy on my shelf, so… hmm.
The… hmm.
I’ve gone on for over 2,000 words and I think I could probably continue if I tried. But I’m going to hold it there for now and perhaps revisit some more PS1 classics tomorrow.
The PlayStation is celebrating its 20th birthday in Europe today. What better way of celebrating than with a rather lovely picture of Hyperdimension Neptunia’s Noire, personification of the PlayStation brand and platform, dressed up to the nines and clearly in slightly awkward party spirit?
Hnng, I’m sure you will agree.
Lovely Noire aside, the PlayStation’s 20th anniversary feels like a suitable occasion to share some fond memories of my time with Sony’s platforms over the years, and what PlayStation has meant to me. I realise that by doing this I am, of course, falling into Sony’s cunning marketing trap, but since I’m not a professional games journalist any more I can say whatever the fuck I want, not to mention post pictures such as that seen above.
Anyway.
My first memory of PlayStation is much like my first memory of many consoles from the SNES and Mega Drive era onwards: a unit came home with my brother, courtesy of his work on games magazines, accompanied by a few games, and thus I had the opportunity to try it out well before any of my friends ever did — though I would find myself biting my lip and never being sure whether or not five minutes after the poor chap had arrived was too soon to go rifling through his bags in search of technology and game cases.
The first three games I ever played on PlayStation were Ridge Racer, a pre-release version of Tekken (which had a bug or two here and there) and Raiden Project. Ridge Racer was, of course, absolutely gobsmacking at the time (though I still find it amusing that it upstaged itself with its fourth installment coming bundled with a remake of the original that ran at twice the resolution and twice the framerate) and Tekken was one of the most “physical”-feeling fighting games I’d ever encountered. (That cracking sound Paul Phoenix makes when he throws someone still makes me wince.) Conversely, I was initially unimpressed by Raiden Project owing to the fact that its 2D sprite-based graphics looked like the sort of thing the SNES and Mega Drive had been offering us for years by this point. (I later realised that I was being somewhat blinded by the then-revolutionary 3D graphics of the former two games, and came to enjoy Raiden Project a whole lot.)
Ridge Racer and Tekken were both noteworthy for incorporating something that I haven’t really seen since: games to play while you waited for the main game to load. Ridge Racer offered Galaxian — and unlocked bonuses if you managed to complete it before the main game loaded — while Tekken offered Galaga. Both were impressive, arcade-perfect ports that ran flawlessly while the game loaded in the background, and I’m sad that this concept didn’t take off more, perhaps due to Namco remaining somewhat tight-fisted with the technology. These days the best we get is an interactive loading screen that lets us practice our moves or something, but these tend to only come up once the game has already loaded, not the moment you put the disc in.
Eventually, for some reason, I came into possession of that same (Japanese) PlayStation that had originally come home with my brother. I forget the exact circumstances — I imagine it was due to him getting an official local model — but I was certainly extremely grateful for it. Unfortunately, as still happens with many console games today, the PlayStation was region-locked, meaning that it would only run Japanese games straight out of the box; running European games required you to either install a mod chip (which also enabled piracy, since it effectively bypassed the console’s internal copy-and-region-protection systems) or make use of a somewhat questionable trick involving a piece of Blu-Tac, a pen lid, a Japanese game disc and the European game disc you were actually trying to play.
Oh yes, the disc swap trick: most PlayStation owners of the late ’90s at least tried it at one point or another. Essentially the trick involved allowing the console to read the copy protection and region info from a disc it would normally accept, then quickly swap this disc out for the game you were actually trying to run. It was a somewhat perilous process that required you leave the lid of the console open at all times (propped open by the pen lid, which was also pressing down the button that told the console the lid was closed) and then whip out the first disc the moment it stopped spinning quickly. It often took a few attempts to get right, but my gosh, the first time I got Final Fantasy VII running in this way was an exciting day indeed.
Ah, Final Fantasy VII. I’ve waxed lyrical about this game many times on this blog, so I won’t reiterate that here, but I will say that at the time it was hyped up to me as “a game that will actually make you cry” and it did not disappoint. It introduced me to the wonderful world of roleplaying games, and gave my friends and I many, many hours of entertainment, since we all finished it several times over. In retrospect, I have no idea how we had the time to do this, but I do know that to date, I have played Final Fantasy VII from start to finish at least ten times over.
Even in those early days, I was someone who enjoyed investigating interesting-looking and strange games, particularly those of Japanese origin. I recall spending a whole lot of time playing the wonderful dance-off game Bust-a-Groove as well as cracking RPGs such as Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean: The Second Story and, of course, subsequent installments in the Final Fantasy series. Visiting my brother over in the States also saw me picking up a number of games that, for whatever reason, never made it to the UK’s shores: titles like Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve, Xenogears and Lunar: Silver Star Story.
Have another Noire to break things up a bit.
I was well into university by the time I joined the PlayStation 2 generation. I wasn’t an early adopter, but I was intrigued by this new console and the supposedly immense power it had. But once again when I picked one up, it was not to grab the latest and greatest new titles — the game I chose to purchase my console with was a little-known adventure by Konami known as Shadow of Memories, to date one of the most interesting narrative-based games I think I’ve ever played.
For the uninitiated, Shadow of Memories casts you in the role of Eike, a man who keeps getting murdered and then having the opportunity to go back in time and save himself. The solutions to the situations become increasingly convoluted as you progress through the story, occasionally involving travelling back hundreds of years in order to, say, prevent a tree from being planted and, by extension, removing the place your assailant was hiding. I’d encountered strong stories in games before — particularly through the aforementioned Final Fantasy VII and adventure games on PC — but Shadow of Memories was noteworthy for me in that it was a console game that had taken the bold step of having neither attack nor jump buttons — it was simply about exploring, enjoying the story and working your way to the truth. (To date, I still haven’t seen the game’s true ending; I should probably rectify that at some point.)
Shadow of Memories aside, it took me a while to come around to the PlayStation 2, largely due to the fact that for a little while, there didn’t seem to be that many role-playing games available for it. I later discovered that this was an inaccurate assessment, of course — and in fact am still discovering great RPGs on the platform today, two hardware generations later — but it took me a little while to warm up to it.
Outside of RPGs, though, the PlayStation 2 did play host to some wonderfully memorable games. The Timesplitters series provided some of the best local multiplayer shooting since GoldenEye — largely due to being developed by the same people — while many a drunken evening was spent with my friend Sam post-Poundstretcher (the regular “everything is really, really cheap” evening at the Student Union) playing various incarnations of the Grand Theft Auto series. And some strange things from that era have remained in our collective vernacular ever since; if we’d never played State of Emergency (not Rockstar’s finest hour, but actually a surprisingly fun game) we’d never have come across the phrase “[do something] for BOOOONUS SCOOOOORE!”, which is frequently still used among our friendship group whether we’re cooking, playing a video game or gathered around the tabletop for a board game.
Have some more Noire. And yes, that brooch is supposed to look like the old Sony Computer Entertainment logo.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with the PlayStation 3. Initially, I didn’t quite see the point of it — in fact, I vividly recall doing some podcasts with my friends Edd and Woody where we were fairly merciless about that big ol’ lump of black shiny plastic, but then we were all fairly obnoxious Xbox 360 fanboys at that point, too.
I forget what caused me to pick up one in the first place. I think it was simply a pretty good deal — the console and three games for an eminently reasonable price. The games were Ghostbusters, Fight Night and something else I’ve forgotten. I played about ten minutes of Ghostbusters, booted up Fight Night once and didn’t play it, then quickly found that downloadable games like Flower were much more interesting than many of the retail titles available at the time. My Xbox 360 still got considerably more use — primarily due to the fact that multiplatform titles were often better on 360, and that my friends would typically play multiplayer on 360 — but I always held on to the PS3.
These days, the situation is a complete reversal. I haven’t turned on my Xbox 360 for a very long time now — I don’t think it’s been a whole year, but it’s certainly been a good few months — whereas my PS3 still gets regular use, largely due to the fact that, as has been the PlayStation platform’s wont ever since its inception, it’s still the best place to go for Japanese role-playing games, including titles like the Neptunia series which have since become some of my favourite games of all time. (Yes, really.)
And this isn’t even getting into Sony’s portable platforms the PSP and the Vita, both of which are criminally underrated platforms full to absolute bursting with top-quality entertainment to cater to all tastes and play styles. My Vita is getting more use than any of the other gaming platforms I own right now thanks to games like Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, and there’s plenty more queued up beyond those two titles, on both PS3 and Vita.
As for the now year-old PlayStation 4? Well, I still don’t have one yet, but frankly, with new Neptunia and Senran Kagura games both on the horizon for the new platform, it’s clearly only a matter of time before I cave and grab one, isn’t it? It just remains to be seen how long I can hold out. I’ve been doing all right so far, but it only takes one game — perhaps something unexpected — that I really have to play right now for me to take that plunge. Soon. But perhaps not just yet.
Anyway. Happy birthday, PlayStation. You — and let’s not forget the myriad developers behind all the games I’ve talked about today and more — have brought my life great joy over the years, and you continue to fill my free time with fun and frolics even now, 20 years later. Long may it continue — for another 20 years and beyond, maybe?
I’ve pretty much come to accept by now that I don’t really “do” big social occasions. And by this I mean that I generally don’t have a lot of desire to “go out” in the sense that people tend to use the non-specific phrase “go out” — that is to say, going to a pub, sitting and drinking and not really doing anything interesting or exciting.
It was my work Christmas meal this evening. Andie and I both went along and we had an enjoyable time. The food was very nice, the home-made cakes for dessert were frankly ridiculous in size (the entire cake was literally the size of an average human head, and a single slice offered roughly as much “cake” as you would get in about ten normal-sized slices anywhere else) and the entertainments laid on by two of my colleagues, who had clearly spent a significant amount of time planning the evening together, were fun.
Once all that finished, though, and we were into the “freeform” part of the evening — the part where you’re supposed to lounge around, sip your drink and make small talk with the people around you — I felt absolutely no desire to stick around whatsoever, and neither did Andie, so we made our excuses, headed back home and were safely in our own house with the heating on well before 9pm.
I’ll hasten to add at this point that our lack of desire to stick around for the “freeform socialising” that follows more organised and/or structured fun was nothing to do with the people we were with. On the contrary, I like my colleagues very much: I enjoy working alongside them, I have a decent relationship with them in that we can chat about stuff other than work as well as have a good old complain about whatever has gone wrong with our respective jobs (95% of the time through no fault of our own) to a sympathetic ear, and I do enjoy having the opportunity to go out and socialise with them outside the office, which can, as anyone who has worked in a large corporation will be able to attest, feel somewhat oppressive at times.
No, my desire to scarper after the meal and the activities were done was more to do with the fact that I simply don’t find socialising for socialising’s sake to be very fun or enjoyable. In fact, in most cases, I find it to be the exact opposite of fun and enjoyable: a feeling of anxiety starts to build up in my mind as I subconsciously count the seconds of silence that have elapsed between me and the person standing closest to me, and I start running through potential conversations in my mind before rejecting all of them on the grounds that they might make me sound like I’m “trying too hard”. Ultimately, I tend to just end up sitting in a corner feeling thoroughly miserable and, frankly, why would you voluntarily put yourself through that when the door is right there?
Socialising with a purpose, though? I’m fine. I love a board game evening or an afternoon of Mario Kart with friends. I enjoy a post-performance meal after a show that we’ve all participated in — though it’s been a good few years since one of these now. In other words, I appreciate opportunities to socialise where there are things to do — enjoyable things, that is — in lieu of unmemorable, instantly forgotten small-talk, and likewise I appreciate opportunities to socialise where there are ready-made conversational topics like “how did the show go?” or “we sure showed that giant plant monster who’s boss, huh?”
I’ve come to accept this part of myself over the years. I just worry a bit at times that other people might not be quite so understanding.
