2243: Issue 2 of the Digitally Downloaded Magazine is Now Available

0243_001

Hello! I’m rather pleased to announce that, as the header says, the second edition of the Digitally Downloaded magazine, put together by me and Mr Matt Sainsbury (from the site of the same name), is now available. You can read it here, or hopefully it will embed correctly below.

The topic is “fanservice”, but we’re not limiting ourselves to the tits and ass variety of fanservice; no, we take on fanservice in all its forms, including life and hometown as a deliberate aesthetic choice, continuity fanservice, plain ol’ titillation and fanservice as characterisation.

The specific games we cover in the magazine range from Senran Kagura to Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F via Final Fantasy XIV and Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed — quite an eclectic mix of games to cover, I think you’ll agree. There’s also an interesting interview with some Aussie developers who are making their own take on the Zero Escape/Danganronpa formula and deliberately incorporating fanservice for an authentically Japanese-style feel, plus some lovely pictures of Digitally Downloaded mascot Danica “DeeDee” Dee.

I’m really pleased with how this project is coming together, and response to the magazine so far has been good. With each issue, we’ll try something new, and hopefully we’ll be able to make this a long-running feature. I’m certainly having a blast doing games writing the way it used to be done… or rather, a distinctly 21st century take on print format games writing.

Next issue we’ll be covering the thorny topic of “not-games” — those experiences that critics are quick to (often unreasonably) brand “not a game” for not falling into neat genre categories, or perhaps not incorporating traditional “gameplay” in the way you might expect. Yes, we’ll be exploring the walking simulators, software toys, visual novels and other interesting interactive entertainment experiences of the world in an attempt to figure out why these titles “not being games” bothers some people quite so much.

Matt and I hope you enjoy the magazine; please share it around and let people know about it! If you like what you see, please consider throwing us a few quid via Patreon; you can find Matt’s page here, and mine here.

2242: Another Frustrating Way Clickbait Ruins the Internet

0242_001

Earlier today, I was browsing around the Internet looking for some tips and tricks on how to better play Dungeon Travelers 2. I tried GameFAQs, and the content there was disappointingly light, though there is a good character guide at least. Then I resorted to Google, and I was reminded of something that’s been bugging me for a while.

Here’s my Google results for “dungeon travelers 2 walkthrough”:

Dungeon Googlers 2.png

“Oh,” I thought, skipping past the GameFAQs entry because I’d already checked it out. “There’s some more walkthroughs out there. IGN have got one, huh? Well, that should be decent enough.”

As anyone who has ever attempted to look at one of IGN’s walkthroughs — or indeed one on the “GameWise” site above it — will know… no. This is emphatically not the case. Here is IGN’s walkthrough for Dungeon Travelers 2:

IGN DT2.png

That’s right! There’s absolutely fuck all there besides the most basic database information for the game itself. And if you thought GameWise might be any better, being higher ranked on Google? Nope.

GameWise DT2.png

GameWise takes considerably more words to say that it doesn’t have any content for the guide, and outright lies to the reader by saying its “team of contributors will help you work through the game via a step-by-step tutorial” and that it will “take you all the way through the game to 100% completion including unlockable quests and items”. It’s boilerplate text, of course, but it’s complete bollocks and, more to the point, it’s evidence of a particularly dishonest practice that goes on alarmingly frequently these days: sites that put up “landing pages” for things that people might be searching for, then don’t populate them with content right away (or sometimes, as we can see here, at all) so that they can get some of that sweet, sweet ad revenue by someone who doesn’t know any better clicking on them without having to put any actual work in.

This is actively making the Internet less useful, particularly as both IGN and GameWise have clearly made the effort to get themselves highly ranked on Google as a “trustworthy” source. And indeed both of these sites may well have helpful walkthroughs and guides for more mainstream, popular games, and in that instance, them showing up on Google is absolutely fine. But to list a “false positive” result like this is extremely dishonest and incredibly frustrating for the reader.

I’m reminded of the evolution of my time at USgamer. When the site launched, each of us on the team were specifically given pretty much free reign to cover what we wanted in our own personal style: the thinking was very much along the lines of 1up.com back in the glory days, when there would be distinct “personalities”, each with their own specialisms, building up their own communities of readers. It was great; it was fun to write, and the community appreciated this honest style of writing.

Unfortunately, it didn’t satisfy the suits as it wasn’t raking in enough ad revenue. So out went the freedom and in came a more strict regime. Whereas once I took the approach that I had once taken so successfully on GamePro — look out for things that looked interesting that other sites hadn’t covered in detail, then cover them in detail — I was reduced to having to seek approval for every news story I posted, and this led USgamer’s news section to start looking more and more like every other gaming news site out there, covering the same old stories in the same old way.

This only got worse once I got laid off and was working out my notice; the site started to post guide content for recently released games, partly through the site’s partnership with Prima Games, whose website was also part of the Gamer Network umbrella. I had to split guides into parts so they could be published across several days and rake in more clicks than they would have done if posted all in one lump; worse, I didn’t have the creativity to write my own stuff, since all the content was already done and I was pretty much reduced to being a data entry person, editing and tidying up the raw copy so it looked good on the site. And, of course, even worse than that, the hours that I was tied up pissing around with these stupid guides were hours that I couldn’t spend writing more interesting things or telling people about games they might not have heard of before. (I am 100% sure that this was deliberate.)

Guide content has its place, but it should be on a dedicated site that specialises in it — such as GameFAQs — not used as insultingly transparent bait to get people to visit your site and cross your fingers that they might read something else you’ve written while they’re there. (They won’t.) And it absolutely, definitely should not be used in the way IGN and GameWise use it, which is to hook people in without actually providing any content at all.

It’s not just guide content, of course — IGN in particular has been caught playing the SEO game with articles about games and tricking Google into thinking they are “reviews” when they’re nothing of the sort — but guide content represents by far the most egregious examples of this bullshit going on.

If you are engaging in this, you are making the Internet a less useful place to find information. Stop being a cunt and write something helpful to go with your beautifully optimised search engine bullshit, or don’t list the page at all.

2241: The Best Thing About Dungeon Crawlers is Dungeon Design

0241_001

If I say the word “dungeon” to you — assuming I’m talking about games; leave any thoughts of leather-clad masochists chained to the ceiling beams while straddling a wooden horse for the moment — what springs to mind?

The term “dungeon” can mean lots of different things, even within the RPG genre.

In traditional top-down RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, the term “dungeon” is used to distinguish specific locations from the overworld map, and to further distinguish those locations as being dangerous rather than safe havens where you can buy things and heal up. Usually they’re semi-linear in nature, with a clear start and end point, usually with a boss monster right at the end, followed by a story event and, if the designers are feeling nice, a teleport back to the surface.

In modern massively multiplayer RPGs, meanwhile, the term “dungeon” is used to describe instanced content that is completely separate from the game’s main open world, and which is designed to be played through by a specific number of players. They are usually completely linear in nature, given the unpredictability of humans when brought together in a group and the impracticality of exploration when combat requires everyone to be present in the same place, and usually make their encounters the focal point of the experience, with boss encounters challenging players to understand and react appropriately to various mechanics.

In action-adventure RPGs such as the Legend of Zelda series and its imitators, the term “dungeon” is used in a similar way to in traditional top-down RPGs: it’s a dangerous location separate from the main overworld. In Zelda-likes, though, dungeons tend to be less linear — or at least have the appearance of being so — and much more puzzle-based, requiring exploration and creative use of items to progress instead of just pure combat skills.

In dungeon crawlers, meanwhile, dungeons are incredibly complicated beasts that present as much of a challenge — if not more so — than the often frequent combat in the games. And, given that dungeoneering is the focal point of these titles, that’s a very good thing indeed; while linear dungeons with predictable encounters may work well for more narrative-heavy experiences, dungeon crawlers tend to be heavy on the mechanics and restrict narrative for the most part to being a reward for progressing.

Let’s take Dungeon Travelers 2, which I’m currently playing, as an example. Here’s a screenshot showing the map of just one of the floors of the Mostar Catacombs, a mid-game dungeon that seems to give a fair few people online a bit of grief. (Credit to xChaosLokix on GameFAQs for the pic.)

Dungeon Travelers 2

Mostar in particular seems to confuse people quite a bit because it is about as far from linear progression as you can get. You don’t clear the first floor and then go on to the second one; navigating Mostar is a complicated affair that constantly sends you back and forth between its two floors using ladders, pit traps and teleporters. On top of that, you also have to deal with Dark Zones, where the visibility is lower and you can’t look at your map, along with traps, hidden doors, one-way passageways and all manner of other goodies.

Likewise, the other dungeon crawler that I’ve previously invested time into, Demon Gaze, had some marvelously fiendish mazes to navigate, with hazards ranging from water currents that drag you uncontrollably from one place to another — very frustrating when you can see that where you want to be is just over there — to floor tiles that deal damage or do unpleasant things to your party, but which are the only way through a particular passageway.

I absolutely love this. One of my favourite things to do in this type of game is to explore, and dungeon crawlers reward thoroughness with a wonderful feeling of satisfaction: the knowledge that not only have you bested the monsters in the dungeon, but you’ve bested the dungeon itself. This isn’t an exaggeration, either; in both Demon Gaze and Dungeon Travelers 2 — and I don’t doubt this happens in other dungeon crawlers too, though my knowledge on the subject is more limited than I’d like it to be — there are times when you’ll find your progress stymied not by the power level of the enemies you face in battle, but by the very design of the dungeon confounding your sense of direction or hiding its secrets behind illusionary walls or on the other side of deadly traps.

You just don’t get this level of dungeon design in other types of RPG, and that’s fine — if the Final Fantasy series plopped you into a dungeon that took 6 hours to navigate in between every major plot point, I doubt people would have the patience to see their stories through to their conclusions — but it gives dungeon crawlers a very distinct identity, even within the RPG genre. And I really like that a whole lot.

While many RPGs are worth playing for the story and characterisation — areas in which neither Dungeon Travelers 2 nor Demon Gaze slouch, it has to be said — the real highlight of dungeon crawlers is in exploring these weird and wonderful mazes that someone came up with, and feeling either the frustration and terror of becoming completely lost, or the jubilant sense of triumph that comes with finally locating the stairs up to the next floor, or unlocking that door that has been taunting you ever since you came into the area for the first time.

I’m 36 hours into Dungeon Travelers 2 at the moment and I get the impression I still have a very long way to go. I’m looking forward to the continued journey if what I’ve experienced so far is any indication of the bare minimum I can expect to be challenged with later in the game!

2240: Ten Great Ladies of Games

0240_001

It is, apparently, International Women’s Day, or at least it was up until an hour ago as I appear to have stayed up rather late playing Dungeon Travelers 2. Whoops. Oh well.

In the interests of respecting International Women’s Day, I thought I’d do one of those list post thingies, because those are nice and easy to put together and my brain is starting to dribble out of my ears.

So here, then, in no particular order:

1. Sophia Hapgood (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis)

Pretty sure Sophia Hapgood was my first “waifu”, or to put it another way, my first crush on a fictional character. It surprised me at the time, because she wasn’t what I would have considered to be my “type” — she’s outspoken, assertive, sometimes aggressive, and very strongly spiritual, with some rather… interesting beliefs. None of those things are a bad thing in a woman, of course, but at the time I played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for the first time — I was in my teens, still at school — the prospect of a woman like that was a little intimidating.

But there was something special about Sophia. Perhaps it was the fact that she could take care of herself, and had almost as important a role to play in the story as Indy. Perhaps it was her nice arse, which was lovingly rendered in 320x200x256 colours and wiggled when she walked away from the “camera”. Perhaps it was the fact that she was a fiery redhead — though, again, at the time, I hadn’t yet discovered my penchant for fiery redheads. I don’t know what it was, but she was — and is — awesome.

2. Kai Tana (Velocity series)

The narrative in Futurlab’s rather wonderful shoot ’em up/puzzle game hybrid Velocity is rather easy to ignore, but pay attention and you’ll find an enjoyable plot to follow, presented by some rather lovely stylised still images. The protagonist of the series — which wasn’t immediately obvious in the first game, making for a nice Metroid-style realisation — is Lt. Kai Tana, a likeable leading lady who actually has some personality beyond being “generic badass woman in space”.

Kai is intelligent, quick-thinking and immensely capable. She’s also pretty cute, even with that bonkers haircut: noteworthy in that it gives her a very distinctive look that is immediately recognisable.

3. Claire Redfield (Resident Evil series)

Claire was one of the first bona fide female protagonists I had the opportunity to play as in video games, making her debut in Resident Evil 2, which was actually the first Resident Evil game I played. I found her noteworthy for subverting the horror movie trope of “screaming woman” and instead being one of the most competent characters in the entire game, more than capable of taking on the zombie hordes — and worse — singlehandedly. There was also an interesting narrative hook with her pursuing her brother Chris, who was one of the protagonists from the first game.

Claire got an even greater focus in Resident Evil: Code Veronica, which was a headline title for Sega’s doomed Dreamcast system, and was subsequently rereleased on a number of other platforms. Once again, she proved herself more than capable of handling the zombie threat by herself, and in fact was portrayed for most of the game as a considerably stronger, more willful character than one of the other main male characters, Steve Burnside. Although that was at least partly up to your actions as the player; forget to pick up the grenade launcher before the boss fight at the end of the first disc and you’ll be in a world of shit. Poor Claire.

4. Dawn (Lands of Lore series)

Eh, showing my retro knowledge here, aren’t I? Yes indeedy. Dawn made her first appearance in Westwood Studios’ dungeon crawler Lands of Lore, which came out in 1993. She’s a powerful sorceress, and a major character in the overarching plot of both the first game and its 1997 follow-up, in which she was rendered in full, glorious FMV-o-vision.

To be honest, I don’t remember a huge amount about Dawn in the first Lands of Lore game, but I do remember her being one of your main points of contact for the unfolding plot in Guardians of Destiny, the second game; as a powerful sorceress, she was ideally equipped to help protagonist Luther with his unfortunate curse, which unpredictably (and sometimes predictably) turned him into either a teeny-tiny lizard or a big hulking slobbering beast. In one of the endings you got to shag her, too.

5. Nepgear (Hyperdimension Neptunia series)

You didn’t think I’d let this post slip without at least one Neptunia character, would you? Of course not.

Nepgear is my favourite of the series large cast. For a while, I thought it was Noire, and for sure Lastation’s goddess has her considerable tsundere charms (plus some amazing curves that her HDD one-piece show off marvelously) but I just like Nepgear a whole lot more. Nepgear is someone I’d want to hang out with. Nepgear is someone I can kind of relate to a bit. Nepgear is someone I feel a great deal of sympathy for, as one of the most sensible characters in the series, constantly dragged along in the wake of chaos that her energetic sister Neptune inevitably leaves behind her.

Nepgear also gets some of the most interesting character development in the whole series. Over the course of mk2/Re;Birth2, we see her grow from a scared child who doesn’t believe in herself to a confident young woman who, while she still sometimes seeks the approval of her peers, her sister and people she looks up to, understands that her thoroughly pleasant nature draws people to her in a very similar way to Neptune’s infectious energy.

In recent installment Megadimension Neptunia VII, she gets further development, exploring her relationship with some of the other characters in a bit more depth, and all but confirming that Neptunia as a series registers very high up the yuri scale.

6. Estelle Bright (Trails in the Sky)

Trails in the Sky is a fantastic RPG, and everyone should play it — even if you’re not normally a fan of the more provocative side of JRPGs. As a release by Falcom, it errs more on the “serious” side of things rather than being filled with boob jokes and fanservice, but it has some immensely strong characterisation helped enormously by an excellent localisation.

Protagonist Estelle is a highlight of the experience. A spunky teenage girl who doesn’t take shit from anyone — particularly those who judge her for being a pretty young girl sporting twintails, albeit with a somewhat tomboyish bearing and demeanour — she’s very much a character in her own right rather than a self-insert avatar for the player. Her relationship with leading man Joshua is believable and enjoyable to witness, and her interactions with other characters are just as joyful.

The best thing about Trails in the Sky is that it takes a fairly cliched anime and RPG trope — young kids come of age, go on epic quest — and makes a very distinctive, well-written experience out of it. I must confess I’m yet to play the Second Chapter follow-up to the first game, but I absolutely adored the original release — and Estelle in particular.

7. Erica Reed (Cognition)

The work of Phoenix Online Studios working in collaboration with Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen, Erica Reed is a wonderful character with depth and intrigue. She acts as an excellent focal point for the four-part episodic series that makes up Cognition, growing into and becoming more comfortable with her unusual mental powers over the course of the four cases you lead her through.

Cognition is a well-written thriller series that has more than a little in common with the TV series Fringe: it’s a female-led series where said protagonist is a special agent who comes to discover strange and wonderful abilities that help her to crack some gruesome cases. Erica herself has plenty of skeletons in her closet, and learning more about her over the complete overarching narrative of the series is a real highlight of the Cognition experience.

8. Ysayle (Final Fantasy XIV)

Ysayle is one of the most interesting characters in Final Fantasy XIV in that she was introduced late in the A Realm Reborn storyline as a villain of sorts — though nothing is that black-and-white in the lands of Eorzea, it must be said — but through a complicated series of circumstances, found herself in the Warrior of Light’s entourage for the majority of Heavensward, despite said Warrior of Light having kicked the shit out of her at least once (twice if you did the Shiva Extreme fight) in the relatively recent past.

I shan’t spoil the details, but suffice it to say that Ysayle has a long and interesting history of why she became the person she did — and throughout Heavensward we see her following a most intriguing journey of personal growth and understanding as she learns more about the things she has been fighting for and against. She gets a particularly spectacular moment of redemption towards the climax of the base Heavensward story.

9. Haruka (Senran Kagura)

It’s easy to write Haruka off as fetish-bait, given that she’s the most obviously “sexual” member of Senran Kagura’s cast. Her Shinobi outfit is pretty much just a basque, panties and stockings, she’s very obviously into sadomasochism and she’s one of the only characters to seemingly express pleasure rather than embarrassment during the clothing destruction scenes in combat.

In each Senran Kagura game, though, she gets plenty of development that shows she’s more than just fap material. In Burst, her interactions with Hibari during the latter’s crisis of confidence show her to have a good understanding of other people and a strong sense of empathy. In Shinovi Versus, her bonding with the masochistic Ryouna is a delight to watch; it’s clear she’s found someone who understands her more than pretty much anyone else in the rest of the cast, most of whom you get the impression sort of try not to think too much about what she gets up to in her free time. And despite her sadistic tendencies, it’s clear she has a sensible head on her shoulders, often acting as the “big sister” of the Crimson Squad group.

10. Prometh (Demon Gaze)

Demon Gaze has some great characters in it — unusual for a dungeon crawler in which you create your own party, but Demon Gaze gets around that particular issue by populating the inn which you call your base with a variety of colourful characters, one of whom is Prometh.

Prometh is the inn’s mortician, because times are dangerous and of course the inn needs a mortician. She collects skulls, often sleeps in a coffin and speaks in an endearingly sleepy quasi-kuudere style. She’s also habitually half-dressed, usually clad in little more than a hoodie and some ill-matching long socks. Occasionally she just shows up in scenes wearing nothing more than her undies; no explanation is ever really given for this, but once you’ve got to know Prometh a bit, it just doesn’t seem all that unusual.

You see a lot of Prometh, both when you resurrect fallen party members and when you deliver her one of the game’s main collectables: the skulls she likes so much. With each visit, you get to know this unusual woman a little better, and by the end of Demon Gaze I was finding myself greatly enjoying every trip down into her basement. So to speak.

2239: Now’s a Great Time to Buy PS3, 360 and Wii Games

0239_001

It’s a new generation of console hardware, and has been for a while! Woohoo!

However, more than ever with this generational changeover in particular, the previous generation of consoles are far from irrelevant, and in fact if you’re a thrifty gamer now is a very good time to start building out your PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii libraries.

Why? Because it’s damn cheap to do so… for the most part, anyway. Thanks to stores that specialise in preowned games and the dropping prices of new, factory-sealed games due to perceived “irrelevance”, you can now pick up formerly £40 games for considerably less than their launch price — often even single-digit prices, which I find enormously entertaining as someone who remembers buying budget, cassette-only releases for 8-bit computers in the ’80s and ’90s.

I say this having bought a few games at CEX earlier today: I managed to score copies of Lollipop Chainsaw, Bayonetta 2, Xenosaga Episode II, Kingdom Hearts II HD and Enchanted Arms for considerably less than their original asking price. All of them are in good condition — I think all of them even have their manuals, which is reasonably rare when it comes to preowned games.

Right now, then, is the ideal time to invest in games that you’ve always meant to add to your 360, PS3 and Wii collections, but never got around to. We’re at that time when the games are declining in value because the hardware is still readily available and people are still trading them in, but we’re not yet at the point where the games are no longer being made and certain titles are becoming more and more rare. In other words, this means it’s pretty rare to find games retailing for more than their original asking price, though as the new generation of hardware continues and the old guard fall more and more out of favour, this situation will start to arise more and more, particularly for niche-interest, limited run titles such as Japanese role-playing games.

So if you still have a 360, PS3 or Wii knocking around — and if not, why not? They’re all still great systems! — do be sure to take a trip down to your local used game store and see what they have to offer. And if you see something you’ve always meant to have a go at, but have never gotten around to, it’s well worth taking that chance now, because with each passing year, that game you never got around to playing will be getting rarer and rarer, until eventually your only choice if you want to play it will be to pay overinflated eBay and Amazon seller prices. And you don’t want to do that, do you? (Although I must admit paying well over the odds for a rare game does make for a good collector’s “war story”; some of my most treasured games include Space Channel 5 Part 2 on PS2, which had a ridiculously limited run here in Europe, and Fire Emblem Whatever The One on the Gamecube Was Called, which is likewise apparently rather hard to find these days.)

I anticipate, having recently realised all this myself, that my 360 and PS3 collections are going to grow quite considerably in the next few months…

2238: Mobile Games Aren’t Always Shit: Mister Smith Edition

A lot of mobile games are shit. Some are just a little bit shit. Some are really shit. The upside of this unfortunate situation is that when something enjoyable and fun comes along, it’s all the more noteworthy as it becomes as a sparkling diamond, floating majestically atop the sea of shit that is the mobile games marketplace in 2016.

The trouble with a lot of mobile games is that they try to be something they’re not: they try to be big-budget, triple-A experiences — inevitably using the term “console quality” somewhere in their description — but then more often than not ruin the experience in two major ways: firstly, by hobbling the player experience by making it free-to-play and consequently limiting their enjoyment unless they repeatedly pay up (or, in some cases, grind until they want to kill themselves), and secondly, by using god-awful touchscreen approximations of joypad controls, which never, ever work because touchscreens don’t have buttons you can feel and consequently you can’t do the “muscle memory” thing you can do with an actual controller in your hand.

No indeed, the best mobile games out there make the best use of the platform that they’re on and the context in which people use them. Mobile phones these days are used 1) when you don’t want to talk to people around you, 2) when you’re on the toilet, 3) when you’re waiting for some form of public transport and/or friends to arrive and 4) when you can’t sleep. As such, the ideal mobile gaming experience is something that you can do during any of these activities without having to think too much, display any sort of manual dexterity beyond tapping a few clearly indicated things with your fat, greasy fingers or commit yourself to any sort of lengthy play session — that train might turn up any minute, after all, despite the automated announcement assuring you that it is “very sorry” for the delay to this service.

Anyway. I found a good mobile game the other evening while I couldn’t sleep. It’s called Mister Smith and His Adventures, it’s published by Ayopa Games and penned by Scotland-based comedy writer Steven McDade whose work, in his own words, “hasn’t quite crossed the line to allow for fame, fortune, adulation or comedy legend status”. Based on Mister Smith, however, McDade should have a bright future ahead of him, as his breezy, conversational writing style is immediately appealing, and an excellent fit for a game such as Mister Smith and His Adventures.

But what is Mister Smith and His Adventures? Put simply, it’s a very straightforward interactive novel with quizzes. Telling the story of Mr Mister Smith [sic], it unfolds over the course of several distinct stories, during which you have the opportunity to make a number of choices to determine how things unfold, and how farcical the outcome of Mister Smith’s various adventures will be. Along the way, based on your choices, you’ll be presented with a number of quiz questions in various categories, which will ultimately score you in the fields of Knowledge, Bravery, Friendship and Love and present you with a final score for the story based on how many questions you got correct and how quickly you answered.

To be honest, the quizzes seem a little forced at times, but McDade recognises this and lampshades them effectively during the narrative, and given the light-hearted, silly tone to the narration, it’s not a big problem; it gives the game a degree of replay value, after all, particularly as it’s riddled with achievements for making different choices and answering certain particularly challenging questions correctly. For those who particularly enjoy the quizzes, there are some “stories” that focus exclusively on the quiz aspect, though these are still written in McDade’s distinctive authorial voice, which makes them a lot more entertaining than other, drier quiz apps on the App Store and Google Play.

McDade’s business model for the game is a good one: you can download it for free, and play the tutorial and first story without paying a penny, after which you have a few choices. You can unlock new stories by repeatedly playing the ones you’ve already done to earn “Smiths”, which can be spent on the new stories and quiz packs currently available. You can purchase bundles of Smiths to selectively purchase stories without grinding. Or you can slip McDade a couple of quid to unlock the game completely, remove all advertising (mostly for itself) and gain immediate access to all new stories as McDade writes and publishes them into the game through automatic updates.

After playing the first two stories, I was more than happy to take the latter option; McDade’s writing is very readable (although there are a couple of typos here and there), the game presents it in short, easily digestible sections with endearing stylised illustrations, and each story is enjoyable and self-contained while helping us to build up a more complete picture of who Mister Smith (and Paul) really is as a person.

It’s an extremely simple idea, and one that works very effectively. It’s a well put together, well-presented game that uses the mobile format well, and I hope to see a lot more of in the coming months; I sincerely hope that McDade finds some success with it, and that it helps him to kickstart his comedy career.

You can download Mister Smith and His Adventures for iOS here, or Android here.

2237: The Insufferable Frame-Rate Obsessives May Have a Point

0237_001

I upgraded the processor on my PC yesterday. It was the last bit that needed upgrading to make it decently up-to-date, and I’d been meaning to do it for a while. It was also a good excuse to wipe everything, reinstall Windows and have a nice fresh, clean system that wasn’t clogged up with all manner of crap. For a little while, anyway.

PC gaming, for many people, is the relentless pursuit of ever more impressive frame rates, preferably at ever more impressive resolutions. I’ve never felt particularly strongly about either, given that my PC is hooked up to my TV and thus is limited to a maximum of 60 frames per second at 1920×1080 resolution; in other words, anything above 60 simply wouldn’t benefit what was on screen at all, and in fact would often result in unsightly “screen tearing”, where different parts of the screen update at different times. Consequently, I habitually play everything with VSync on, which limits the frame rates to 60 and completely eliminates any tearing. It’s kind of deliberately hobbling performance to look better.

That said, even with a theoretical maximum frame rate of 60, my old processor couldn’t quite keep up with some of the more modern games. I have a decent graphics card, so nothing was actually unplayable, but I knew that I could probably get more out of said graphics card with better base hardware. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, ran perfectly well at anywhere between about 30 and 60 frames per second depending on how much was going on at the time — it would be pretty damn smooth in the relative peace and quiet of instanced dungeons, while the frame rate would drop a fair bit in densely populated areas or busy battle scenes with lots of players. I’m not someone that these frame rate disparities bothered a great deal, but they were noticeable.

So with some degree of curiosity, after assembling the new bits and pieces and putting my computer back together, I fired up Final Fantasy XIV to investigate if the performance was any better. After a little fiddling with settings — previously, it ran better in “borderless windowed” mode, while now it runs better in dedicated full-screen mode — I was very pleased to discover that it was now running at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second, constantly, regardless of what was happening on the screen at the time. It didn’t make a massive difference to the visual fidelity of the game, but it was nice.

Then I jumped into a dungeon, and the true nature of the improvements better hardware brought on became apparent. While the graphics had never really struggled much in dungeons — except with the bizarre bug in the old DirectX 9 version of the game where facing certain directions would cause your frame rate to tank, presumably because the game was trying to render more “out of sight” stuff at once — what really became obvious as I was running with my new hardware was how much more responsive everything was. While the background graphics never really struggled much on my old rig, you could occasionally see things like the interface elements juddering a bit, particularly the damage numbers and status messages that scroll up and down the screen during combat, keeping you informed of what’s happening.

Now, those messages are just as smooth as the animations and effects. More importantly, the controls are significantly more responsive, because there aren’t any “dead frames”, for want of a better word, where the game doesn’t register a button input for whatever reason. It was a minor issue before; now it’s completely absent, which is lovely. I hadn’t anticipated quite how lovely it would be, but it really is; knowing that my performance can no longer be hampered by the complexity of the visuals on screen or how much is happening at the same time around me is a thoroughly pleasant feeling, and, surprisingly, makes the game more enjoyable.

So okay, I’ll admit it; frame rate does make a difference. Sometimes. I maintain that “cinematic”-style experiences such as adventure games and their ilk don’t particularly benefit from 60fps visuals — they can look nice, but if you’re going with realistic imagery, 30fps can sometimes look more “natural” as it’s closer to the frame rate of film and TV — but in games where precision and split-second timing are important — fighting games, shoot ’em ups, arcade games, MMOs such as Final Fantasy XIV — smoother hardware performance leads to smoother player performance. Which is kinda cool.

Oh, and no, I haven’t tried Crysis yet.

2236: Games You Probably Haven’t Tried But Should: Croixleur Sigma

0236_001

I’m a big fan of the Japanese doujin (indie) scene’s work and have been ever since I first came across the rather wonderful Recettear by EasyGameStation and its equally wonderful localisation by Carpe Fulgur. Much like the Western indie scene, the Japanese doujin scene is the home of the type of games that men in suits decide “won’t provide a good ROI or conversion ratio” or whatever shit they talk about in boardrooms these days.

Unlike the Western indie scene, however, which has a strong tendency to err on the side of “art games” — works that make use of gaming conventions in the service of telling a story or delivering some sort of message to the audience — the Japanese doujin scene has a strong tendency to make very “pure” gaming experiences that, while they sometimes have strong narratives, are primarily concerned with being fun to play and feeling like classic console and arcade titles from the PS1 and Dreamcast eras.

Croixleur Sigma by Souvenir Circ is one such example. I’ve had the pleasure of following Croixleur’s development since it was first released as a rather simplistic, albeit enjoyable, arena-based brawler a good few years ago now, and over time it’s blossomed into a genuinely excellent arcade-style game with a surprising amount of depth. With its recent PlayStation 4 release by publisher Playism, we finally have what is probably the definitive version of Croixleur, and it’s well worth your time and £11.

As previously mentioned, Croixleur is an arena-based brawler specifically designed to channel Devil May Cry’s Bloody Palace mode, in which the protagonist fights their way through increasingly challenging waves of enemies with a mind to completing the challenge 1) as quickly as possible 2) without dying and 3) scoring as many points as possible. In Croixleur’s case, you take on the role of one of four charming young weapon-wielding ladies and hack and slash your way through various types of monsters, hopefully before the 15-minute timer or your two arcade-style continues run out.

Croixleur initially seems disappointingly simple. Tapping the attack button unleashes a basic combo, but this isn’t altered by moving directions or changing weapons or anything. You can jump and do the same combo, or you can dash.

You can probably make it through the game just mashing the attack button, but it would be very tedious. Thankfully, that isn’t all there is to Croixleur, not by a long shot. No, Croixleur is very much based around being as fluid and elegant as possible; every action is possible to “cancel” into another — in other words, while one animation is going off, you can hit the button combination to do something else and that thing happen a lot sooner than it would have if you’d let the animation finish and set it off from a standing start. Effective fighting in Croixleur, then, becomes a combination of hitting weak enemies with your basic attack, dashing to other enemies to get into position, and using the unique special attacks each of the collectible weapons offer in order to best deal with the situations in which you find yourself. There’s also a “smart bomb”-like ability that has a limited number of uses; this is particularly useful against the stronger, larger enemies that less frequently show up.

There are only three basic enemy types in Croixleur: a goblin thing, a goblin wizard thing and a flying eyeball bat thing. While you might think this would cause the game to lack variety, things are mixed up a bit by a couple of palette variations of each: brown ones are weakest, blue ones take more hits and are more aggressive, red ones are strongest and most dangerous. The advantage of there only being three basic types of enemy is that you can learn their attack patterns and “tells” in their animations and be able to deftly avoid their attacks in order to keep up your own assault; in order to get the best scores — and indeed to survive, full stop — you’ll need to avoid taking damage as much as possible.

Alongside the basic three enemies are a few larger types, too: there’s a big monster thing, a gold knight, a silver knight and a fuck-off massive dragon as the final boss. Having significantly more HP — and usually being accompanied by a horde of the basic enemies — means that you have to deal with these powerful foes is somewhat different ways, zipping in and chipping away at their health before they can wind up a powerful attack, or using a special move to pelt them with magic from afar.

Further variation to the game is added through the weapons that you collect as you progress. You can equip up to four of these when you start a new game, effectively allowing you to customise your heroine’s choice of special moves according to how you like to play. There are also a variety of entertaining visual accessories you can purchase with the coins you collect by defeating enemies, and these all have various benefits to gameplay. Plus they look fun.

Croixleur is not a complicated or long game, but it’s surprising how much depth it has. It’s very much an arcade game, and wouldn’t feel out of place on the Dreamcast, with its large, Sega-style countdown timer, ludicrous scores to attain and wonderfully fluid, 60fps action. Plus there’s a ton of unlockable stuff to uncover as well as the ever-present challenge of besting your own high scores — and those of your friends, too, of course.

Give it a try!

2235: Give Flame Over a Go with This Month’s PlayStation Plus Games

0235_001

Idiots, as we all know, love complaining. And some of the loudest, most complain-happy idiots are those who whinge about the monthly games on offer via Sony’s subscription service PlayStation Plus.

For those unfamiliar, PlayStation Plus is a service you pay a monthly fee to for, among other things, the privilege of playing multiplayer games on the PlayStation 4 platform. Unless you’re a die-hard multiplayer gamer, though, the far more attractive things that PlayStation Plus gets you is discounted prices on PlayStation Store digital downloads, and “free” games every month — I put “free” in inverted commas since you only get to keep them for as long as you keep paying the subscription; they deactivate if you stop paying, though you can get them back again by resubscribing.

In recent months, the aforementioned complain-happy idiots have been very keen to point out that the monthly games on offer have tended to err on the side of smaller-scale, independently developed titles rather than triple-A games, the latter of which were originally positioned as a selling point for the service. However, I actually prefer things this way around, since it gives me the opportunity to give games a go that I’ve perhaps liked the look of, but not enough to want to drop £10-£15 on them at the time.

Enter Flame Over from Laughing Jackal, a firefighting roguelike that I’ve had my eye on for a while, but somehow never got around to picking up. This month, it’s one of the PlayStation Plus games, so now I don’t need to agonise over whether or not it will be a worthwhile purchase for me: I just have a copy for as long as I’m a PlayStation Plus member, and since it’s a digital download-only game, it’s not a game I feel obliged to pick up a physical copy of — I do love my physical copies, as regular readers will know — because a physical copy doesn’t exist.

As it turns out, Flame Over is a very good game indeed and I should have picked it up sooner, but oh well; I have it now.

Flame Over casts you in the role of a firefighter with no visible eyes, a big helmet and an impressive moustache. It’s your job to enter a 16-floor building with your trusty hose and extinguisher, put out all the fires and rescue as many people and cats as possible before… well, dying. It is a roguelike of sorts, after all, so yes, despite the cartoonish, slapstick visual humour, the overall tone is oddly bleak, if truthful: fire doesn’t care who you are, and it will kill you if you don’t respect it.

Gameplay is simple and reminiscent of a classic computer or console game from the 8-bit era. You have a ticking clock, you have a maze-like level to negotiate — randomly generated, hence the “roguelike” descriptor — and you have high scores to beat, here represented as money that you can subsequently spend on powerups and permanent improvements to make your future runs a bit easier.

Putting out fires is a simple case of squirting them with your hose or extinguisher. The hose has a longer range and makes things wet so fire is less likely to spread, while the extinguisher covers a wider area and is the only way to put out electrical fires, which are prone to flaring up again after you’ve put them out once. You can also completely negate electrical fires by finding the fusebox on each floor, but this will inevitably be beyond a room that has come to resemble one of the lower circles of Hell, so you’ll need to clear a pathway through first.

The interesting thing about Flame Over is that it makes things deliberately just a little bit awkward for the player to keep things interesting. The camera angle isn’t quite top-down, which means that things on the “bottom” wall on-screen can often be hidden, necessitating rotation of the camera in order to make sure you haven’t missed anything. This is an additional thing to think about in the heat (no pun intended) of the moment, and with flames flaring up all around you, it contributes considerably to the rather wonderful growing sense of panic that the game creates.

That timer is a distinctly old-school touch, too; you can extend it by rescuing people, and when it runs out it’s not immediately the end of the game: rather, in a manner somewhat similar to seriously old-school games like Spelunker and Bubble Bobble, running out of time triggers the appearance of a difficult to avoid (but absolutely avoidable) enemy who will immediately end your game if you come into contact with him. In this case, said unavoidable enemy is Death himself, further driving home the game’s point about mortality.

Oh my goodness me is it an addictive little bugger, though. It’s simple to play, repetitive, sometimes awkward and regularly frustrating — but it’s fun. It’s a “pure” game, designed not to tell a meaningful story or make bold, sweeping sociopolitical statements; it’s a game designed to test your skills and patience, and as someone who grew up with games when they were nothing but tests of your skills and patience, Flame Over feels like a rather wonderful callback to those good old days; a game that, were it not for its 60fps 1080p polygonal graphics, would probably have been eminently at home on the Atari 8-bit computers or Commodore 64. And that is absolutely a compliment.

So anyway. Next time you’re disappointed that PlayStation Plus isn’t giving you a free copy of Call of Duty or some other such shit, take a moment to check out the things you might not have heard of: you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised by the charming games on offer, and discover some new favourites in the process.

2234: Is VR Really Going to Take Off?

0234_001

I have, believe it or not, a friend. I have several, in fact, but this friend’s name is Tom. Tom primarily spends his money on bits and pieces for his PC, and is extremely excited about the impending virtual reality revolution — so much so that he’s bought an incredible “gaming chair” with attached steering wheel, pedals and HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) control scheme, ready to play everything from Elite: Dangerous to a variety of racing games in glorious, stereoscopic, head-tracking 3D.

Me, I’m yet to be convinced by the value of VR. I know that theoretically it should be enormously exciting, but at present, there are two big things that put me off: firstly, the cost, which, for however much HTC and Oculus might try to argue that they’re making VR more mainstream, is well out of the budget of most people; and secondly the fact that there’s still a fundamental disconnect between yourself and the virtual reality into which you’re trying to immerse yourself.

There’s not a lot to say about the cost, really — it’s a lot, I can’t afford it, because I’d have to upgrade my PC as well as buy all the hardware, that’s about it — so I’ll focus on the latter aspect, because that’s what bothers me about the technology long-term.

There are certain applications for which VR seems ideally suited. Something like Elite: Dangerous, for example, will likely be very good indeed, because the entire Elite experience is based on you sitting in a chair in your spaceship cockpit, flipping switches and jiggling joysticks in order to fly around and do spacey things. Likewise, driving games will also be very good, since again, the experience is based around you sitting in a chair holding on to a steering wheel for dear life. In other words, the experiences that my friend Tom is already pretty much set up for will probably be pretty good, though I do still find myself wondering how you’ll find the right buttons to press with a bloody great helmet attached to your face — particularly if you’re not using a fancy-pants HOTAS setup.

It’s when we get into other types of experience that I feel the disconnect between the real and the virtual will be somewhat more jarring. Anything first-person would theoretically be excellent in VR, were it not for the fact that you’re not actually going anywhere; the lack of physicality to motion through the world seems like something that would be very disconcerting indeed. There are companies that are attempting to get around this very issue, most notably with a big-ass treadmill-like thing that allows you to actually physically walk in order to control your motion through the game world, but at this point you’re escalating the already substantial costs of VR even further just to get the feeling of immersion that VR is theoretically supposed to provide.

I don’t know. I think my issue is that I’m yet to see a true “killer app” for VR; something which, without a doubt, shows that VR is the absolute only way to do this. Until that killer app comes along — or technology improves to allow things like true haptic feedback and a true feeling of physically inhabiting “another world” — then I shall remain both cautious and skeptical about the whole thing, and very surprised if it takes off with anyone but the most dedicated enthusiasts of expensive lumps of plastic wired up to their computer.